MMy father used to express his hopes for me while passing through the doorway between his small store in front and our apartment in the rear. He’d talk to my mother as though I wasn’t standing right there. ‘He’s artistic,’ he’d say. ‘He could become a sign-painter. People always need signs. Pays good money. Tough union to crack, though.’

Then, a week or so later: ‘Meat-cutter. People’re always going to eat meat, for heaven’s sake. Steady work, and he’ll make good money if he can get into the union.’

Later still: ‘I was talking to Hansen, the plumber. Tells me there’s lots of work around. He’d be willing to start him as a helper. If it works out, he’ll help him get a union card. Plumbing, it’s steady.’

These, and half a dozen other careers, were his great expectations for me. It was the early fifties; I was twelve or thirteen.

My father was a small, disappointed man who ran a foundering candy store in Brooklyn. He worked twelve to fourteen hours each day, seven days a week, barely keeping his family above the low tide of subsistence. Naturally, he wanted a better life for me: to him, that meant job security, ‘good’ money and a forty-hour week. In other words, a union job. In our neighbourhood, an entire generation of hard-working fathers wanted the same thing for their sons.