Pulaski Street is a small, unremarkable residential road off Nebraska Avenue - one of the main streets in the old Kuschwantz village in Toledo. The homes that stood there were modest and tidy and filled with Polish Catholic families that were struggling during the Great Depression.
A teenage boy worked a long day ushering after school in a downtown theatre. Tired he boarded a bus and headed home to Pulaski Street. His family was struggling and his meager pay check at the theatre was helping, but not nearly enough he would soon learn. He disembarked from the bus and walked home and stared at his house. Littering the lawn were his families' belongings and strangers were moving in their things. He didn't know where his family was, the bank had foreclosed and no one left a forwarding address. He was alone, confused and bewildered. It wasn't the first or the last home that his family would lose to the bank in an era where many homes and fortunes were. The house at 317 Pulaski Street would be just one of dozens of places that he would call home.
His story was like a lot of others from the day - struggled through the Depression, signed up for the Army at 18 when a recruiter guaranteed him that he would never leave the states, boot camp, shipped off to Africa as a radio signal controller in World War II, honorably discharged and came home to find work in a paper factory in his hometown. He was one of the few that went off to war unmarried and now that he was home his sister was anxious to set him up with a woman she worked with at the glove factory, she would introduce him at a wedding they were all attending that weekend. Marriage was the expected next step in life. Handsome with stunning blue eyes every one of the four woman he asked out the night of that wedding said yes, including the one his sister insisted he ask.
So, that late fall day he set out in a cab on the way to pick up his first date for the night. Little did he know that she looked out the window and asked her mother to lie and say she wasn't home, she didn't want to go on the date she made. Her mother refused, saying he'd spent the money on a cab. So reluctantly she went off on a date to listen to live music and share a drink at Kaycee's. In the course of the night, he excused himself and used a pay phone to cancel his second date he'd scheduled for later in the night.
During the course of the very good first date the couple started sharing stories of all the homes they lived in in the Polish neighborhood. And while they went back and forth in the litany of homes and streets in which they had resided, he mentioned the day he came home to Pulaski Street. "We lived on Pulaski Street too, where?," she asked. And then in unison their words collided as they both said "317." Turns out he happened to be on a date with a woman that was moving in the day he stood on the street and watched another family move into "his" home. And all the time that she'd worked with his sister and shared lunch breaks with her they had never stumbled upon the topic that they had lived in the same home.
Six months later the couple married and 317 was always their "lucky" number.
For nearly 50 years they shared a life not unlike a typical family of their day. She was a homemaker and he worked his way up at the paper factory into an office management job. They had three girls and later four grandchildren. It was a good, but from many standards, an unremarkable marriage.
But throughout the years, 317 remained their lucky number. And, it many times won him modestly large amounts of money in the lottery and in other games of chance.
In March of 1996, three months shy of their 50th anniversary in the midst of planning a big party, he suffered a brief illness and died. That day after the family left the intensive care unit they all made a trek and played 317 in the lottery in his honor, but no one won that day.
And for days and then months and, then just because it became a novelty to see when, years, the family watched the lottery numbers and 317 never, ever appeared. Ten years and the number never showed. He'd taken his number with him.
In 2006, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And as the illness escalated, as is common in terminal illnesses, she told many of the family that she'd be home for the great big birthday party. All knew that she was predicting her death day in a cryptic way, but none of them would put together the puzzle until standing by her bedside on January 10, having just witnessed her last breath one of them said the date - it's grandpa's/dad's/her husband's birthday - she was indeed home with her love for the big party.
And then to break the silence almost an hour later, one member of the family turned on the television just in time to see the number "3 - 1 - 7" flash across screen. And at that point, the love story was complete. A small sign that once again the couple was happy and enjoying the beginning of their endless life together again.
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Happy Birthday, Grandpa! And thank you for encouraging me in your own way years ago to find a way to write your love story, for seeing the writer inside me that I didn't know was there and for giving us your small sign of comfort that night.
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