The sweet, pungent smell of hairspray, cigarette smoke and gasoline greets us as he enters through the back door in the early dark of winter. He kisses my mom first, then I move in for a hug and feel his evening beard scratching my cheek. This nightly ritual defined my childhood.
When I asked Dad about his childhood the answers were always vague, full of empty spaces and a sense of sadness. I know he was born in Chicago in 1915 to a young Irish immigrant and was immediately placed in a Catholic orphanage. The couple who adopted him both died before he was 10 years old. He moved in with his adoptive grandfather, a night watchman. When the church realised he was often left alone, a priest placed him in the home of a wealthy widow where he worked as a houseboy until he was 18.
Dad met my mom on a blind date in 1941. Ready to create his own family, he married her three months later. He'd already worked as a department store stock boy handling piles of fur coats, an usher at Balaban and Katz movie theatre, a medical supply salesman and a truck dispatcher for a stone quarry. When the war started he worked as a tool and die inspector at the Buick Company, where they were making B-57 bombers. After the war, my parents, along with my older sister and brother, moved from Chicago to a suburb of Los Angeles, where I was born.
From 1948 to 1980 my father sold beauty supplies to beauty shops throughout the Los Angeles area. Every morning, he headed off in his Plymouth to call on "his girls". Every evening, he came home late to a warmed-over dinner. On Tuesdays it would be tacos, on Wednesday it might be pork chops with a side of Uncle Ben's Minute Rice topped with a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup.
Growing up in the 1960s and '70s under the aura of second-wave feminism, I had a disdain for the products my father peddled. Samples of lipstick and nail polish cluttered the kitchen table and permanent waves spilled off the back seat of the car. I would use none of it.
In my mind Revlon represented capitalism's oppressive hold on women's self-image. Yet selling Revlon "Ever-So-Lively" made it possible for my father to send his three children to college -- to get the education that he and my mother had not been able to afford.
As I entered the workforce, I wanted to understand the talent and effort required in the art of the sale and decided to take a closer look at my father's job. I could see that the role of the middleman was disappearing, and with it the emotional connection of personal interactions that had been so much a part of commerce. The arrival of warehouse stores, where beauticians could buy their supplies directly from manufacturers, was phasing out his job.
Just before Dad retired in March of 1980, I spent a week driving with him throughout his territory, photographing and tape-recording his sales pitch. He gladly allowed me into his world of flirting and pitching and haggling. I could feel the immense respect he had for the women who depended on him to keep their businesses stocked. I saw how this business offered women economic independence. And though I still questioned the premise of store-bought beauty, I began to understand the feeling of warmth and community beauty shops could provide.
For the next few years, Dad stayed home while Mom continued to drive long hours on crowded Los Angeles freeways to work as an accountant's assistant. He ate Top Ramen noodles for lunch every day and taught himself how to play chess. After multiple heart attacks and a stroke, dementia consumed my father. For five years my mom cared for him until, exhausted, she placed him in a nursing home. Fragile and shaken, he asked if she was sending him back to the orphanage. He died in 1999, just as his first great-grandson was born.