Harry

Harry Lazare had such a bad temper that when he kept hitting golf ball after golf ball into this creek running through the golf course, in a complete rage he lifted his entire golf bag full of clubs over his head and threw them into the creek. Then when he realized what he'd just done, he immediately jumped into the creek after them. It was shortly after that episode that he up and moved his family to Texas, never to play golf with my father again.

            Harry was one of my father's best friends, though he drank a lot. My father always stuck to  having just one beer. Harry was a true alcoholic, the same as my father's father, Otto Joseph, Sr.

            I vaguely remember one time when my father took me over to Harry's house, near a woods, and they took me out with a .22 rifle and we all took pot-shots at squirrels in the trees. But Harry's mind began to wander and he started taking pot-shots at just about anything and everything. And I remember my dad grabbing me by the hand and getting the heck out of there before someone got shot. And this wasn't that far from some houses nearby, where Harry lived. In those days you could grab a rifle and just go out into the sparse suburban woods outside Chicago and start shooting your gun. No one seemed concerned.

            Nowadays, this kind of activity probably meant you were about to become a terrorist.