This morning I interviewed my mom for a project, and was shocked to discover that our family history is basically a blueprint for a Tom Waits album

My grandfather had a job “cranking the fan” in a coal mine at age 14, went to fight in WWII as a sharpshooter, took shrapnel to the back of the head; during surgery, the needle broke off and he lived the rest of his life with the needle fragment AND the shrapnel in his skull

He came home and took a new job running a payloader (I think?) at a coal strip-mining operation, working double shifts, and in his FREE TIME he built the house that he, my grandmother, and my mom + her siblings all lived in

My grandmother worked as a parachute inspector during the war, in a factory “a mile long” - she had a motor scooter she used to get from one end of the building to the other

She designed the house that my grandfather built, drew up the blueprints herself, and then bought the adjacent 36 acres from her father for $1

My grandparents cultivated a farm on those acres, ran a family orchard, growing the best peaches I’ll ever taste, plus apples and pears and cherries

My grandmother also allegedly designed the house a few doors down, where she’d previously lived with her first husband who was named FLOYD (statistically, 95% of all ppl named Floyd live in a Tom Waits song)

That house was later occupied at different times by a man named TIP and also a man named (buckle up) SMINK. SMINK!!!!

My grandfather maintained until his death that he had the phone number of someone in the Molly Maguires, should he need anything “taken care of”; my mom casually described the MMs thus: “They made sure coal miners were treated well by employers. And they killed a lot of people.”

Ppl in my family love to recall an item from one Saturday evening edition of local paper The Shamokin Dispatch in which a man who’d been fool enough to cross the Molly Maguires was found impaled on a meat hook (in the most sensitive area one could be impaled on a meat hook)

Also it’s probably worth mentioning, for the Waitsy-ness of it all, that my mom was a pageant queen and national champion baton twirler?