The Pace Boys

The Great Depression caused my grandfather to move his family to southwest Missouri, a remote place. Since my father, the youngest of five children, was about twelve at that time he could never quite explain my grandfather’s reasoning. My father told me, he was struggling in Kansas City and thought rural life favorable, or so he speculated.

This was a rugged place, sparsely populated and primitive. Snow filtered through the ramshackle home often settling on his bed while he slept; pigs ambled under the floors; the outhouse stood 40 yards away. Water was primed by pump and carried into the home.

The Beck’s had never been farmers so it is not surprising that my grandfather chose poor land to farm; the soil in this part of Missouri is dense with trees, rocky, and heavy with clay. They tried their luck with melons, but instead often harvested the thick oak trees, that had thrived for centuries, until they met the axe.

Yet, it was mobster money that paid the bills. Italian mobsters enjoyed dove hunting, and my father was their paid escort. Hunting was as profitable as timber: raccoons and rabbits were plentiful and my father earned money by selling their hides; he was assisted by coon dogs and a .22 rifle. So poor was he that he bought .22 rounds individually, and his aim was dead-on.

Reaching sixteen he left the Filly, Missouri and went to Kansas City. The mobsters took him in; he worked as Western-Union telegram delivery boy. The Western-Union office was a mob operation, the only customers were mobsters; soon he knew all the mafia figures in the city, he was their mailman. Having long acquired their trust he later trucked ‘moonshine’ between Kansas City, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas. But the war intruded and the skills he honed with his .22 rifle proved useful killing the soldiers of imperial Japan.

As he aged he enjoyed traveling back to Filly, Mo. Then in my teens, I too, traveled with him, back into time. I noticed something quite odd about him, something immature and boyish - quite unlike the stoic and reserved father I knew. A particular joy was touring the Pace boy’s homestead. The Pace family had several boys my father befriended, back in those years. The oldest Pace boy, then in his late twenties, had never been more the five miles from his home. Yet, in this remote place, on the old Pace boy’s homestead, the federal government, in the 1970s, built an underground silo to harbor missiles for use against the Soviet Union. My father greatly enjoyed this irony.

The missile silo is still there, but abandoned; the Japanese Empire is gone; the Soviet-Union is gone; Kansas City’s mobsters are gone, their haunts are now frequented by pleasure loving effeminates and foreigners, a playground for rootless cosmopolitans. The last time I checked the effeminates and foreigners remained, for awhile longer.

The doves are gone and so too are the Pace boys.

Posted by leslie on Friday, February 4, 2005 at 02:51 PM in Globalisation
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Posted by Guessedworker on February 04, 2005, 06:24 PM | #

There comes a time in most men’s lives, I think, when a certain perspective on one’s father enters into one’s thinking. Perhaps it’s a product of reaching middle-age, I don’t know. But one gains a view of the man’s life as an organic whole which is nearing its end or, perhaps, has indeed ended. Most importantly, it is no longer a life at the centre of which is oneself. So how one saw the man who occupied that grave and beautiful role of father, that falls away - particularly if he has embarked upon the frailties of old age.

Then, the things that matter are the things he loved, the warmth he received from those that loved him, the places he knew which so often reveal themselves as unexpectedly concrete links to a departed world.

It’s as if one wants to conjure up the humanity of it all, so as to physically replace the father with the man. It’s not wholly practical, of course. There is never quite enough real substance remaining of past lives. They are always just beyond the fingertips, unreachable but maybe, in some small and necessary way, they are not entirely unknowable.

And if there is one, that’s the pay-off, I suppose.

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