I’m 85 years old. But you already know that. I live a lot in the past. I’ve been spending enjoyable time with a wealth of real photographs, my footprints in the past, organized by a loving daughter-in-law and son. Recently, holding in my hands the image of me as a young boy sitting on a plain workhorse of a bike displaying a newspaper bag with the “Philadelphia Bulletin” on it jolted me powerfully into the memory of a day when I was 11.

One morning Father flicked two books on the breakfast table: Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” (about the “way to wealth,” fulfilling the American Dream of economic success through hard work) and “What Every Catholic Young Boy Needs to Know about Sex” (or some such title) by a nun. “Read them,” was all Father said and moved on. This was the closest I ever came to a heart-to-heart, father-son “talk” with that quiet, reserved man. This was my education in “the facts of life.”

I read the Good Sister’s words first. As far as I can remember, the book told me, approaching, but not yet at, the entrance to one of life’s most arduous trails, told me nothing I needed to know about sex. My ignorance in that area, however, was soon to be filled in dramatic color by such older boys at the Highland Avenue playground as Doodles McElroy and Gully Goerlach.

The Conwell book was another story, however. It was a world-famous book in the self-help, rags to riches tradition from Ben Franklin through Horatio Alger. And Alger glamourized newsboy as the launching pad for a life of economic success. So, I lied about my age, and at age 11 and for the next few years I was a newspaper boy, making and managing my own money.

And successfully. A bit later I would find a photo of me in virtually the same posture with a fancy English bike, one meant for speed not work, for riding around town in style, for garnering second looks. And a bit later than that, there I am displaying a ’48 Pontiac convertible, from an era when white-wall tires were fully white, dammit, with a velvety Dynaflow transmission not a grinding, lurching stick-shift, and with a Straight-8 engine with a hood just short of a mile long announcing one’s masculinity.

So my father didn’t do all that much in educating me in the facts of life. I must admit, however, that I don’t think I did anything in that way for our six boys. They were on their own. I did force the top three to get paper routes, however. A story for another time.

Ed Gallagher