Rosalind Russell 3: “The old men with beautiful manners”

Another excerpt from Rosalind Russell’s Life Is a Banquet. Here she talks about her father.

The age he lived in was right for him; he never should have been in any other. He went to church in the Prince Albert coat, and the tails at Christmas and Easter. He was infinitely patient with children (his library was never safe from invasion; while he sat trying to read the evening paper, we would climb all over him, comb his hair, plaster it down into his eyes, make curls of it — none of this bothered him) and he was infinitely civil with people of any stripe.

His civility used to embarrass me, because he knew everybody in town and he’d stop on his way home to talk to the street cleaner — “How’s the new baby? Well, you’ve got to see to it that that young man goes on to college” — and the whole time the street cleaner would be pushing his broom along the gutter, and I, little snob that I was, would be looking nervously up and down the block, thinking, What if the kids from school see my Dad talking to the street cleaner?

My father wasn’t old then, but when I read the Ezra Pound lines “They will come no more,/The old men with beautiful manners,” I think of him.