Mumbo Jumbo - Gramps and Mr McMurtry
by Keno.

(Note: The following article was written by me and published by the Crestone Eagle back in 2016. It was the last Mumbo Jumbo column I ever wrote for the newspaper. The Eagle still owns the copyright to it.) 

I’m 90% Caucasian, and 100% Caucasian on my mother’s side of the family, yet if it wasn’t for a black man named Mr. McMurtry, way back in 1929, I may never been born. Guess you could say if my maternal grandparents weren’t hippie-like back in those days, and my grandpa, Pat Giuliano, wasn’t an early believer in, and fighter for civil rights, I also wouldn’t be around today.

My grandpa was a man with a big heart, married to my Grandma Marie, a woman whom I never had the pleasure of meeting. Grandpa was an Italian-American, born in Brooklyn, NY to Italian immigrants in the 1890s. His blond hair and blue eyes made him look like your average Irishman. Back in the days when gramps grew up, all of the neighborhoods in the greater New York area were segregated. You had Italian, Irish, German and Black neighborhoods, etc. People were very uptight back then, so I was told, and you basically stayed in your own part of town. If an Italian boy wandered into the Irish neighborhood, he would be beat up for just being there. Other than this didn’t apply to my grandpa, since he looked like an Irish kid. Grandpa took advantage of this as a teen and made friends with kids all over the place, only to let them know after establishing friendships with them who he really was. He would take this way of being into his adulthood.

Grandpa met his future wife Marie when they both were only 17. She was new to America, having come here from Italy 2 years earlier, and grandpa helped her learn English. They fell in love and married soon after, and by 1929 had 5 children. My mother, Carmela, was their third child, born in 1921.

Grandpa started a trucking business in Queens in the 1920s; taking advantage of what he saw as a new emerging business. All of the trucks that he dealt with were dump trucks, as he was also a builder in the construction business. One day he hired a black man named Mr. McMurtry. His first name is unknown to me, as my mother, who told me many stories about him, never mentioned him to me by anything other than “Mr. McMurtry”.

Grandpa and Mr. McMurtry became best friends, and in 1925, shortly after gramps build a townhouse in Ozone Park, Queens, he invited his best friend and his family to move in next door to his family. A black family living in a white neighborhood was unheard of then, and the white neighbors on the block all protested. But my grandpa didn’t care, he would tell his neighbors that all people needed to live amongst each other and the color of someone’s skin didn’t matter. Several of the neighbors shunned grandpa and his family over this, but the McMurtry’s and Giuliano families all got along great and were the best of friends. As my mother recalled, the two families were like one combined family and often did things together.

Then one day in 1929, karma came around for a visit. Grandma would go to church every morning for mass, telling others that she had to go every day, since her husband was a atheist, so she went daily to mass to make up for his not believing in any god and his never attending church. For some reason she believed her attending mass everyday would save him. She would leave each morning for church, Monday through Saturday, with grandpa and Mr. McMurtry dropping her off there, and then the 2 men would head on to work together. My grandparents would leave their 5 children home alone, still sleeping, with Mrs. McMurtry keeping an eye on the place until grandma got back home a couple of hours later, as after mass grandma made breakfast for the priests in the church rectory. On one morning, as he got to work, grandpa realized he had forgotten some tools he needed at home in the basement by the furnace, so he sent Mr. McMurtry back to the house to retrieve them for him. When Mr. McMurtry got back to the house and went to the basement, he noticed that grandpa, had in his haste, left closed the chute to the coal heater that morning, and carbon monoxide was flooding the house. He ran upstairs screaming for the children to wake up. My mother, who was 8 years old, recalled awaking in bed sick and unable to move. Mr. McMurtry carried each child outside to safety, and along with his wife, got them all breathing again, although 2 of my uncles, the youngest 2, were near death and almost didn’t make it.

My mother always had the nicest stories to tell me about Mr. McMurtry, but none topped this one, as saving the lives of 5 children can’t be beat. I never got to meet Mr. McMurtry, wish I had, but he died just before I was born.

Grandpa died when I was only 5. But there were so many wonderful stories about him and grandma, too (who died young, more than 10 years before my birth); of them being ahead of their time, and them always helping out the poor. When The Great Depression hit in 1929, the long rowhouse that Grandpa built and owned in Queens, was filled with tenants - and all of the adults lost their jobs and became broke (of course, that was common everywhere when this sad event hit). They couldn't pay their rent nor afford to pay for the coal that went into their furnaces. So my grandparents let all of them live rent fee, fed most of them and their families, and also paid for the coal for their heaters. Had the 10 year long Great Depression not hit, Grandpa would have been a very rich man indeed by the mid 1930s, instead, he gave away most of his money during that time and was almost broke himself by the last 2 or 3 years of the depression. But he would tell others that he wasn't going to sit by and put his neighbors out on the streets, or to see them suffer. He was happy to pay their way and take care of them for as long as he could, even if in time by doing this, it made him and his family to become broke, too. I recall at his wake in 1960 (one of my earliest memories that I still remember solidly), the funeral parlor was packed solid with mourners. I asked my mother how so many people could fit in there, and how could all of these so many people, possibly have known my grandpa? My mom simply told me that my grandpa was well loved by many (and years later she also told me that she herself couldn't believe how many showed up in those 3 days for both his wake and funeral). Yes, my grandpa was well loved indeed, not just by his family, but by everyone who knew him.

To this day I'm so proud who my grandparents were and that they were my grandparents, and I know exactly where the hippie in me came from!

The rowhouse that grandpa built!

Above is the Ozone Park, Queens, New York, brick rowhouse (or "townhouse" if you prefer), as it looks today, that my grandpa build in 1924-5. Gramps and his family lived on the left end, the McMurtry’s lived next door on the right. I have very fond memories of this place, as I spent many Sundays there as a child. Funny, it still today looks a lot like it did in the late ‘50s till the early '70s, when I last visited there.