Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 17, 2023: In my 600th OEN article, "Thomas J. Farrell on Walter J. Ong, S.J.," I briefly profiled my favorite scholar, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955):
As a follow up, I now propose to briefly profile myself as an author. I was born in my father's hometown, Ossining, New York (where Sing-Sing Prison is located). But I grew up mostly in my mother's hometown, Kansas City, Kansas. When I was born in a hospital overlooking the Hudson River, my father, James Farrell (1916-2007), was in the U.S. Army, and he was stationed in England - as part of the troop buildup for the Normandy D-Day Invasion in World War II. After he returned from the war, he and my mother, Theadotta Farrell (1918-1983), had another child in 1947, my sister Margaret (who is now widowed and lives in Manhattan, Kansas).
But my father's prospects for employment in Ossining and the surrounding area were not bright. So he and my mother relocated our small family in my mother's hometown - which is where they had met one another years earlier. Several years later, they had another child in 1953, my sister Kathleen (who now lives with her husband in Cumberland, Maryland).
My father was employed as a deliveryman for the Kansas City News Company, a magazine distribution company in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to his five-day-a-week job as a deliveryman for a straight salary, my father eventually also took on an extra Saturday job delivering comics and some monthly magazines to grocery and confectionary stores that were not big enough to receive regular weekly deliveries. For his Saturday work, he was paid on a commission basis.
When I was sixteen, my father, who had taught me how to drive, had a heart attack. As he recuperated, he was unable to work. However, he arranged for my mother to pick up a supply of comics and magazines from the Kansas City News Company each week, and on Saturdays, I would drive our family car to the various places where my father routinely delivered comics and magazines on his Saturday delivery job. I tended to be a responsible and conscientious worker as I carried out that Saturday delivery job - for which my father paid me twenty dollars a week.
In any event, after my father recuperated from his heart attack, the managers of the Kansas City News Company forced him to give up his five-day-a-week job, for which he had been paid a straight salary, and to set out to be an independent sub-contractor who would service accounts that were too small for the company to service weekly. The managers claimed that this new arrangement would allow the company to avoid having its premiums for health coverage for its employees increased. At the time, my father deeply resented being forced out of his regular five-day-a-week job. He would have to provide his own transportation and pay for his own health insurance. However, over time, he came to change his mind about the new arrangement - and said that it was the best thing that had happened to him.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
