Dad's Stories - Part 2

Since both of my faithful readers enjoyed Dad's Stories - Part 1 I thought I'd follow with part 2. As with last time I make no claims for the actual truth of this story, and only say that it's either true or it ought to be.

When my Dad was a young man (probably a teenager) he lived in Hoboken, NJ and worked in a ship yard there. His foreman was a man by the name of Dave McGillary (I have no idea if I'm spelling his name correctly, I'm spelling as best I can from my memory of how Dad pronounced it). Dave wore a jacket and tie complete with starched collars to work every day. Every morning he'd come in, look up, examine the weather, and proclaim "'T ain't bad out today." It didn't matter what the weather actually was, raining, snowing, cold, hot, foggy, sunny, the weather was classified as "'t aint bad".

One day my Dad and his friends/co-workers were proving the axiom that one boy is half a man while two boys are no man at all, they were amusing themselves by dumping buckets of water from the Hudson river on each other from higher levels of wherever they were working. (I suspect the soakings Dad got from this had a lot to do with his robust immune system later in life.) My Dad knew they were waiting to get him once he went thru a doorway so he went around the other way to get into the shop area he needed to work in without his friends seeing him. His friends dumped the water on the first person to walk thru the door, who happened to be Dave McGillary. Picture a man in jacket and tie getting soaked with filthy Hudson river water, he starched collars curling up as the water soaked in. Dad made himself look "as busy as a cat covering poop on a tin roof" (Dad didn't use the word "poop", but you get the idea.) Dave pointed to him and said "Harold, if you weren't standing right in front of me when I got soaked I'd blame you!" and went off to find the miscreants.