Along with her beloved Encyclopaedia Britannicas, Vera had a subscription to National Geographic dating back to 1941, the year Vera started elementary school. The subscription was a gift from her Uncle Conrad Finley. Uncle Conrad would tell Vera, “You’ll get more out of one National Geographic than all the other textbooks you’ll ever read.”

Now, seventy years later, there were so many Geographics piled up in nice yellow stacks on her bedroom floor that sometimes she couldn’t move around. Occasionally a handyman friend of hers had to come to the house and make passageways to allow Vera to walk to bed at night or to the bathroom when she had to go.

Vera would be the first to admit that even with her Encyclopaedia Britannicas and National Geographicss, not a day went by when she wasn’t deeply discouraged and lonely. The few friends Vera had believed that her inability to get over her husband Norville’s passing was the reason behind Vera’s depression. They begged her over and over again to go out and find a man.

“At my age?” she often replied. “What a thought.”

Vera hadn’t lived with another man in fifty years. Maybe she should have looked for a husband right away like everyone told her to do. She was only twenty-seven back then, still young and good-looking, not all fat and dumpy the way she was now.

Heck, she thought, even in my sixties when I met John, I was still a fine-looking lady.

Daniel Patrick Brady was born in a row house on Stoneway Lane across the Philadelphia city line in a suburb called Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. All the houses on Stoneway Lane had slate roofs, stone sidings, steps of stone, and little windows. Brady attended Bala Grammar School, which went as far as the sixth grade. It was there his schoolmates first called him DP.

In the fall the so-called varsity football team of little Bala Grammar School played St. Matthias Catholic. St. Matt’s was a large, gray building with a massive bell tower over the impressive wooden doors of its main entrance. St. Matt’s went as far as the eighth grade; consequently, the Catholic boys were two years older and much bigger than the Bala school twerps. With this advantage, the parochial school creamed the secular kids every year on the rocky field adjacent to the school. And by embarrassing scores too, like 84–0.

One evening at the dinner table, after a St. Matt’s–Bala football game, a young and bruised DP Brady asked his father whether he could continue his next two years of school at St. Matthias instead of the public junior high school.

“Why?” asked his father, a muscular, short-tempered, unsympathetic man named Flynn Brady. DP’s father owned a small appliance business in West Philadelphia. Flynn Brady wasn’t an easy man to live with. He didn’t involve himself with family problems. Just yelled a lot and drank a lot. “Those Catholic boys beat the shit out of you guys again?” he asked.