Since the coronavirus outbreak, we’ve heard a lot of praise for workers as heroes, which I think is a good thing. It’s why I decided to write the nonfiction bestseller ER Nurses. Our nurses definitely are mega-heroes, real-life ones.
When I was growing up, blue-collar workers weren’t necessarily seen as heroes but there was more respect for them, more respect for the work itself. A lot of people felt lucky just to have a job. Feeding your family was considered noble. It was in our house, anyway.
My grandparents Nan and Pop—my mother’s parents—didn’t have much money, but they somehow managed to buy one of the first color TVs in our part of Newburgh. Color TV turned out to be both a small miracle and a mess.
On Sundays, a dozen or so friends and neighbors would come over and join our family to watch color TV pretty much ruin one of our favorite shows, Bonanza. Suddenly the Cartwright family’s faces were all the same shade of scarlet red; landscapes were streaked lime green and blue. But everybody who was crowded into the living room cheered at the beginning and end of every show. My sisters were all in love with the curly-haired actor Michael Landon, who played “Little Joe” Cartwright. So was my grandmother.
Nan was also a die-hard fan of wrestling and roller derby. She made me and my sister Mary Ellen watch roller derby every Saturday morning. We didn’t much like the derby, but we loved being with Nan.
Nan had a commonsense solution for just about any problem. When my sister Mary Ellen and I worried ourselves sick because our cat got stuck up in a tree, Nan told us, “No need to call the fire department. You ever see a cat skeleton up in a tree?” That was Nan.
Nan’s parents—my great-grandparents the Zelvises—were addicted to TV soap operas. Not long after they got their first TV, we went to visit them at their home on lovely tree-lined Benkard Avenue, which nowadays is the scene of gang wars.
When Great-Grandma Zelvis opened the front door, she was weeping. Inside the house, my great-grandfather Walter Zelvis, who had escaped from Russia to avoid the military draft, was also crying. Suddenly, everybody was hugging everybody else, though my sisters and I had no idea why.
Eventually, Great-Grandma Zelvis was able to regain some of her composure. A tough Lithuanian lady, she told us what had brought on the tears. “Johnny Monte died. Ohhh, ohhh, Johnny Monte is dead. Ohhh, poor Johnny Monte. Poor Johnny!”
We were all still baffled. Who the heck was Johnny Monte? Must be somebody we didn’t know in the building. Oh, well, too bad about poor Johnny Monte. We should say a prayer, light a candle; maybe I’d toast Johnny Monte with a stolen communion wafer.
Turns out, there was no Johnny Monte living on Benkard Avenue or anywhere in Newburgh. Johnny Monte was a character on one of their TV soap operas. My great-grandparents saw him die on TV and didn’t understand that he wasn’t actually dead. So they mourned his loss. They believed everything they heard or saw on TV. Amazingly, that kind of thing is still going on today—and sometimes it still makes you want to cry.