Remembering Arthur Joseph Muir, My Dad.
On the day my dad was born, I celebrate his life
Arthur Joseph Muir was born in 1933. He was my dad. Before he was my dad, he was a kid growing up in Meriden, Connecticut. His family was not wealthy. He had an older sister. I don't know that I ever met her. His mother drank quite heavily. His father died at the end of a noose when he was five. It's not fair that my five-year-old dad had to help his mom deal with this, logistically. His father died in the basement. This event cast a shadow over his entire life. It would be forgivable if nobody who knew him understood this because he didn't talk about it much.
Arthur Joseph Muir was a decent student but not a great one. He didn't like fighting. He grew up in an era where physical fighting was more common among kids— fisticuffs. The lethality of those fights was significantly less than the school shootings of our day. To not get into fights, he started to work out. He got” ripped” in our modern parlance. He didn't want t…