Ed Lorenzi, Eden life and personal opinions

What I remember, love, appreciate about my dad and the family homestead at 3158 east Church Street in Eden.

Ed Lorenzi did not have an easy life. Born in 1942, his mother died when he was a child and his own father had to struggle with the coal industry, a corrupt union and the Depression. By the time Ed left for college before the onset of America's engagement in the second world war, he probably saw attending college at Washington and Jefferson to be a great escape, or at least a relief from the dream life of Creighton.

Then came the war, his enlistment, service, mustering out and enrolling at Penn State, where he met Paige and they married in October 1947 and Ed started his thirty year career with Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, New York, on the south side of industrial Buffalo, still a boom town. First son Allen was born in July 1948; nine more children followed by 1963, about the time Ed was named superintendent of all steelmaking at Lackawanna, a massive, world class, but declining steel mill. By 1978, Bethlehem was a deep trouble, Ed retired and took a job with LoneStar steel in Texas. By then, seem of his ten children had left home. After a few years pushing out steel pipeline and casing for the oil industry, Ed retired, later to move first to North Carolina before landing in Sun City Center, Florida around the turn of the century. He had three good years there before passing quickly and unexpectedly, from sepsis complications from pneumonia the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2002.

No surprise that Ed Lorenzi had the most profound male influence on my life. He taught me discipline and personal responsibility. He showed me the importance of getting organized and "the job's not finished until the paper work is done." For those eleven years I lived full-time in Eden, from age seven to eighteen, I developed a work ethic and a sense of urgency that a vineyard, animals, snow removal, and home maintenance required. Quiet moments were rare, as were slow times. Win her meant a lot of snow removal, chopping wood, and keeping ice off the buckets for the animals. Spring meant full effort in the vineyard, from pruning to post pounding. Summer meant almost daily mowing an acre of grass with a simple walk behind mower and upkeep of the grapes. Fall meant back to school, harvest, the AFS pizza sale and preparing for winter.

Ed was a classic conservative, or what at that time was pretty much a rock solid Republican. His irritation that stemmed from union grievances and safety meetings left me with an indelible skepticism of organized labor, which only increased when later in life I learned of how his father, Italo, had been badly mistreated by his own union, at a time when Italo was desperate, poor, and powerless.

Ed also provided a model for engaging in the life of my children at school, just as he did, and joining the school board, just as he did, and serving as president of the school board, just as he did. From him and the nuns I developed a strong sense of responsibility for attending Sunday Mass, even if confession was a rare event after I left Immaculate Conception School in 1963.

The homestead, large, rambling, and poorly heated, was a full time maintenance job. This included ancient cast iron radiators, a huge oil heater in the primitive cellar, a thermostat that veneer seemed to warm the house much in winter, no air conditioning, a shower tapped into the ceiling in the basement (with the drain a simple hole in the concrete to the drain pipe, wood siding that always seemed to need painting, storm windows and screens that needed to be changed spring and fall, a solarium that actually felt warm on cold winter mornings, a fireplace for warmth at the west end of a forty-eight foot living room with a significantly warped floor, and a custom table for twelve to eat together as a family most nights at six o'clock. It was the place where I claim that I grew up, even if I had spent my first seven years in a tiny house in Lackawanna. The house was both an embarrassment and a refuge; were I to have friends to visit, the barn was a better place, for parties and basketball, never inside the house. From Ed, the house and the farm I learned enough 'manly' skills to perform the basics of home ownership today, although my tool skills are nothing like those of brother Doug or Ted.

Ed -- I only called him 'dad,' never 'Ed' -- also taught me the importance of education and the basic values needed to survive and serve well in society, things like thrift and frugality, planning, resilience, "get back up, dust yourself off and try again," basic, strong and traditional "family values,"and more. And in that pursuit of education I further honed my strong sense of personal responsibility and conservative politics and social values. And that also meant the importance of studying and understanding history and mathematics, for a sense of perspective and an ability to analyze. Which leads me to another life lesson, next.

Opinion and fact

Everyone has a right to their own opinion, just not their own facts. Not anymore. You have no right to an opinion unless it is politically correct; if expressed you can be subjected to doxing, cancellation, or gaslighting. And politically correct opinions or rhetoric are treated as facts, by the speech police and the mainstream media.