Wisconsin Street Parlor

I never knew my mother's father. He passed away when my mother was in high school. She was the oldest child and became a father figure for her brother and two younger sisters.

My grandfather Keenan came bag and baggage over from County Cork . He and his brother Joe were stalwarts in the blossoming Irish community of Rochester, New York. Many a down on his luck Irishman found overnight respite and sustenance in the parlor of Thomas Keenan.

He died unexpectedly in St. Mary's hospital.

He was laid out in the parlor of his home on Wisconsin Street. As Wisconsin Street meanders away from East Main, it turns into a curve as it heads towards the town of Irondequoit. Eventually, that curve was given a name. Wyand Crescent. The Wyands were a family that lived on the curve when it was still called Wisconsin Street. Wyand Crescent ended when it entered into Irondequoit where it became Shelford Road. The trolley ran behind Wisconsin and eventually Wyand Crescent and Shelford. When we bought our house on Wyand Crescent next to an RG and E power plant, the trolley was long gone but the tracks were still there. We could take them all the way to Main Street if we turned left behind our house and to Empire Boulevard if we turned right.

My mother spent her entire life on Wisconsin, Wyand Crescent and Shelford Road with a stop at Parsells Avenue in a home that my parents bought from my father's parents and where I lived my early life before moving to the Crez. Behind our house, behind the trolley tracks was the Field. The field is where we hung out and played baseball on land bought by the city from the Wyands. The field had two baseball diamonds, a shanty and a basketball court. If you wanted to get from Merchants Road to our church and school, you could cut through the field which became known as the "short cut". Some parents frowned on their children using the shortcut because of the possibility of "strangers" in the field. In those days, everybody was afraid of strangers as well as polio and atomic bombs. If we took the short cut, we learned to run through the field. Eventually, we lost our fear of strangers as we knew everybody in the neighborhood. Perhaps we were the strangers that some parents worried about, Hmmmm.

Back to my grandfather.

He had quite the wake in his parlor. Most of the Irish community showed up and partied for a couple of days. If my grandfather didn't "wake" up for the party, then for sure it was time to call the undertaker. The main function of the undertaker in those days was to take the body from the parlor and put it under the ground. The parlor, was the main room in the house and was also known as the "dying room."

Eventually, undertakers expanded  services. Before taking the body under, they would display the body in THEIR parlor. Nowadays if you want to go to a parlor, you go to a funeral home or happy ending massage .

Meanwhile, the room in our houses which once were called parlors/dying rooms, got a new name. Since few bodies were laid out in that room post funeral homes, the parlor became known as the "living room." The living room is for celebrating the temporary phenomena of being alive. The living room is the heart of the house and where once the only teevee in the home with all three channels could be found.

My uncle Tommy became friends with a local undertaker. When a person died who didn't have enough survivors to bear his pall, the undertaker would call Tommy and if Tommy needed help with the bearing, he called me. I guess you could say pall bearing was my first paid job when I was eleven.

Tommy and his family, his wife Dorothy and my three cousins, Tommy, Jimmy and Dottie moved down the street from the dying room of his father when they moved from the Wisconsin Street home of their mother after Tommy returned form WW2. Tommy hated the sight of blood so naturally, Uncle Sam made him a medic. He never talked much about his time over in Germany.

My aunt Rose married a cop, Uncle George. At first they lived in my grandfather's home until they also moved down the street and took up residence three doors up from Tommy.

Tommy became a firefighter. He worked at Engine 12. Engine 12 is located up the street from Tommy's residence on Wisconsin. Engine 12 is on the corner of East Main and Wisconsin. Tommy could and did walk to work in five minutes. Tommy's son, Tommy Jr became a cop and eventually a detective. He too bought a house on Wisconsin.

My father also worked at Engine 12, where he eventually became Captain. When he died, he chose to be cremated. We took his ashes to the firehouse before we took them to his burial site in Lima.

He died at home in the arms of my mother on Shelford Road on the other side of the tracks.