Insight into the Mind of George

[John Suburbs]

I stumbled across this on the Citadel page and I'd never heard this story:

Quote

… when I was growing up [in Bayonne, N.J.]. We had no money and we lived in the projects, but my mother came from a family that had had money. An Irish family, Irish American family, the Bradys. They’d been very prosperous in the construction business. Building materials and all of that in the teens and ‘20’s, when she was young. They had a house, a big house, and they built their own dock because they were bringing in so much construction material. So they built this dock, Brady’s Dock it was called, where their ships would come and unload material to their truck. And they lost all that money in the Depression. The business went out of business with financial shenanigans, some of the men died and the wives were cheated by other people. There’s a lot of family mythology about that. But the point of it was, we had no money at all by the time I came along in 1948.

Well, my mother would tell me these stories and the project that I lived in was built right across from Brady’s Dock. Of course, there was no more Brady’s Dock, it was the Municipal Dock, it had been taken over by the city. And I would look out the window of my housing project and say, my family used to own that dock. That used to be our dock.

And then I would walk to school; we lived in First Street, my school was on Fifth Street, I would walk to school and I would pass the house that the Bradys had owned. I would pass it twice a day going and coming from school. This big house my mother had been born in and her family had grown up in, but had lost. And other people lived in what had been our house. And I think it always gave me this, this sense of a lost golden age of, you know, now we were poor and we lived in the projects and we lived in an apartment. We didn’t even have a car, but God we were… once we were royalty! It gave me a certain attraction to those kinds of stories of I don’t know, fallen civilizations and lost empires and all of that.

Just thought I'd share.

[zandru]

Well, this is good timing. George RR was tagged for the PBS genealogy program, "Finding Your Roots" with Dr Henry Louis Gates. I don't think it's aired yet, but he commented in his blog that things he'd always thought were true were not. Have no idea of what this means, as of yet.

Looks as if the episode with GRRM will lead off the new season, maybe as soon as January 2019! Watch your local PBS schedule (or it can be found online).