My father sends me letters. For the past year or so, he’s been hand writing missives about his childhood and mailing them to me 3,000 miles away. He’s getting up there in his years, and I think he wants to document his youth while he still has lucid memories of it. He’s only in his low 60s and basically healthy, so I consider this a proactive mission, but I feel honored that he has chosen to share with me.

We weren’t always close. I didn’t always think he was a very good father. But, these letters seem to be his way of explaining to me why he was the way he was. In almost every one, there is indeed a moment where I think, “Oh, so that’s why!” I am starting to understand.

Curt grew up in the projects of bleak, depressing Worcester, Mass.

His father ran off when he was seven, and his mother, Peggy, raised ten kids on a secretary’s salary without welfare. Obviously, they were poor. But Curt remembers his childhood fondly as a time fraught with mischief and adventure. He and his brothers and sisters spent most of their time outside because, as he says, Peg “didn’t really want all us kids hanging around the apartment.”

Besides, they didn’t have television, computers, or video games. They made their own fun hunting, fishing, boxing, playing music, shoplifting, and getting into all manner of trouble. They formed makeshift gangs—the Blackhawks and the Jokeretts. In the innocent 50s, devoid of weapons or drugs, they got in rumbles, went to sock hops, and hitchhiked everywhere.

When my brother and I were little in the 70s, we spent weekends with Curt in the small New England town he had moved to after he and Judith split up. 

We weren’t encouraged to spend much time inside, so our childhoods, too, were spent mostly outdoors. My brother was a boy’s boy and naturally inclined to pursue Huck Finn-style adventure on the banks of the nearby river and in the abandoned brick mills. I, on the other hand, was a bookworm and, when kicked out of the house, would simply seek out another warm place to read. Thus began my lifelong attachment to libraries.

As a child, I didn’t understand why my father didn’t want us in the house. Victim to an overly imaginative and naturally suspicious mind, I suspected that he was indulging in all manner of illegal 70s vices behind the closed doors of his bedroom suite. (To some extent, he definitely was. During the period we would stay with him at this house, he was in his late twenties. Imagine!) I assumed that Curt didn’t want us kids around and wondered why he insisted that we spend every weekend in Haydenville, only to kick us out of the house for the duration.

But his recent letters have given me insight into his parenting philosophies. Curt was raised to believe that you kick kids out of the house so they can do their own growing up on the streets. (Or in the library, in my case.)

This is what he says:

“I had one of the happiest childhoods that anyone could ever have asked for and that is why I am a big supporter of children being left alone to engage their own childhood. Their eyes are brand new. Their hearing is brand new. Their brain is brand new — so let them see this life in all its beauty close up before they age.”

This is how it all worked out for Curt and his siblings:

His brother Ormond “looked like Steve McQueen” but got in trouble with the law and was forced to choose between prison and the Marines. He chose the latter, went to Vietnam, and was never quite right in the head after that. David, “tall and good looking,” disappeared to California, sired a bunch of kids with different women, and struggled with alcoholism and homelessness for most of his life. Twins Nancy and Andy were touched with “the bad genes” that run in the Hamilton family: schizophrenia. Andy jumped off a high-rise in his 20s. Liz was a “happy-go-lucky, bright and sensitive girl” who, as an adult, didn't have much of a handle on life and was a struggling artist singlehandedly raising three kids of her own—two of whom were also afflicted with the bad gene. Even the most successful and normal ones—Curt, Al, Jane and Carol—variously endured divorce, alcoholism and perpetual poverty. Only the youngest, Seth (“Mom’s pretty boy”) managed to succeed professionally and, as Curt says, “wasn’t all that touched by the above players.”

But despite any endings, my father’s memories of his childhood in the Worcester projects are told with glowing reverence. Peg was a heroic and fearless mother. Curt and his siblings were scrappy adventurers. The whole thing was one big glorious story to be told later.