THE STUPIDEST QUESTION I ever asked in my life was to a man named Tommy Hackett. The question wasn't as stupid as it sounds, but my intentions were. I wanted to show Tommy Hackett up. I wanted to test his knowledge of Philadelphia. Tommy Hackett not only knew everything about Philadelphia, including the names of 1920's-1930's Italian mob brothers named after popes -- Leo, Pius, Ignatius. . . there wasn't an Innocent among the Lanzetti brothers --but he also told me that the difference between a street and an avenue is that avenues bend. You could look it up. Every avenue in Philadelphia has a bend in it somewhere.
Tommy Hackett spoke a shorthand so powerful, so efficient and sincere, I must summon the moment and the man to do each of them justice. He was a champion dart shooter and I once asked his advice about how to shoot. "Hit the target," he said in that impossibly gruff voice of his. Tommy Hackett was not a short man by Irish standards. In a white shirt, tartan plaid vest and knotted dark tie while sitting on a barstool in the middle of the afternoon, Tommy Hackett sometimes seemed too tall by half. He knew everything. And he liked to let you know it. So I devised a question that only a Philadelphian of his generation would be able to answer. What many Philadelphians alive at the time remember about Dec. 7, 1941 was the news of Pearl Harbor followed by the glow in the sky of a huge lumberyard fire in West Philadelphia. So I say to Tommy Hackett, all ready to show him up for his not knowing about the local fire decades ago, "Tommy, where were you on Pearl Harbor day?"
And Tommy Hackett answers, as God as my witness, "Pearl Harbor." Like who don't know that? He was 18 years old in the Navy. And if I hadn't asked the question he never would have told me. Where were you on Pearl Harbor Day? "Pearl Harbor." I didn't know until eight years after my father died that when we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki my dad was on a ship off the coast of Japan awaiting the invasion. He was 36 years old. He'd been away three years. He was my father and I never knew that. Or never thought to ask. Fathers need the questions, so who does the asking? If your father needs a name, tell him Clark wants to know. Because after all these years he still wants to hear his father answer the question, "What was the stupidest thing you ever asked in your life?"
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