I Watched My Dad Beat Jimmy Hoffa
A work-in-progress by Marilyn Coffey
Part I: Getting Burnt
Chapter 1 - June and Jimmy
The Bomb Scare
We gathered after supper that September evening in the family’s recently redecorated living room to watch TV. My dad slumped in his recliner, while Mom perched on her favorite now re-upholstered arm chair, crocheting. My sister, Margery, 13, and I, 18, draped ourselves along the supple couch, our knees butting the glass-topped coffee table. The newly transformed room, with its soft roses and greens, soothed me. My classy mother had designed it herself. The couch matched the rose draperies, while the chairs echoed the pale green carpet; leafy patterns spattered the walls. I couldn’t imagine a more harmonious place. None of us had much to say. The Teamsters’ strike at Dad’s Omaha office had escalated that week from picketing to guys smashing the tops of Coffey Transfer Company cabs with rocks dropped off viaducts. No one knew what Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters would do next. In strikes in other cities, they’d employed baseball bats, knives, guns -- even bombs. But the strike seemed far away to me that evening. After all, we were nearly five hours from Omaha, tucked in a vast rural area in south central Nebraska, so far south we were almost in Kansas.We settled in to watch some programs, Dad’s choice, of course. It was his TV, although it had lost some of the splendor that exalted it last year, 1954. Then it was the first set ever seen in our tiny town of Alma, Nebraska, population 1,750. Dad was so proud of it he raced home from work every night to watch the only program then playing: test patterns. When the long-awaited programs arrived, our family rarely viewed them together. In our house, the folks watched prime time, my sister the late night movies, and I mostly ignored the fabulous machine, preferring books. However, this Saturday evening we watched together because I had come home for the weekend from my first semester at Kearney State Teachers College. To disappear to my upstairs room with a novel, as I often did, would be rude.That evening we worked our way through the usual Saturday night assortment of shows, laughing at Jimmy Durante’s gigantic schnozzola, the crazy antics on “The Life of Riley” and the low life depicted in the “Damon Runyon Theater.” Watching Dad laugh felt good. I hadn’t seen much of that this weekend. At 10 p.m., we switched to the news to catch the latest about Ike, whose recent heart seizure had landed him in the Denver hospital. Things were looking up. The doctors hadn’t let the President watch the World Series, but he was no longer in the oxygen tent and could even sign his full name. Then, without a smidgen of warning, we heard a sharp crack. A rock hitting the front porch, I thought, but Dad slammed out of his recliner and barked, “Quick, the lights.” I glanced at him, startled to see fear etch his face.In an instant, the room was dark and Dad was hustling us, like a Shetland herding a flock of ewes, to the back of the house. Silent, we watched him flip on the backyard lights and peer out the kitchen window. Nothing. We listened as he made his way to the front of the house. I heard the snap of the porch light switch and listened to the front door creak open. “He’s so brave,” I thought. “What if it’s a bomb?” His footsteps echoed on the wooden front porch, while in the kitchen, we held our breaths. The night lay around us so quietly I flinched when the refrigerator motor kicked on.Then we heard his call, “All’s clear,” and saw the living room lights go on. We rushed to see him.“It was nothing,” he said. He looked chagrined.“Nothing?” I still felt frightened. “It had to be something: it was so loud and sounded so close. What could it have been?”“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a car backfiring. Or some kids being funny.” Then he and Mom headed for the kitchen, to unplug the perpetual electric coffee pot and grab a late-night snack. I heard Mom say, “You’re sure jumpy tonight, Tom.”“I know,” he replied as they disappeared around the corner. “And I feel like such a fool.”I picked up my novel and headed toward the sanctuary of my bedroom. To get there, I had to step over Margery’s body sprawled on the living room rug, already hooked into a late-night show. Half-way up the staircase, I stopped and glanced back down at the peaceful living room. It seemed smaller, somehow. How vulnerable we are, I thought. What was going on 250 miles away in Omaha already had touched our lives. I didn’t know it then, of course, but Dad’s war with Hoffa’s Teamsters would not just touch our lives. It would transform them – irredeemably. 
