In the beginning, quoth J, was the word, but the word was not recorded in a wordprocessor, and so it had to be written down in longhand, and that's why we have television. No, really, in the beginning, as with everyone, Jay was born. That is, of course, hearsay, but the source for this gossip is Jay's mother, an undisputed authority on the matter. There have been rumors that Jay arrived from some distant planet or appeared here by means such as hatching, but the definitive authority seems to contradict, Roswell, New Mexico notwithstanding.
Birth, that most singular defining event in Jay's life occurred in Aiken, South Carolina, back when Aiken was an even smaller town than it is now, and it's no big deal even today. It was just after the Great War, the Big One, the one during which the Nuclear Age was blasted into existence to the detriment of the Japanese, the one that should have taught us that all war is a bad idea and no one wins at it.
That particular war had William Gross. Jay's father, of Rochester, New York, in it. He trained around Rochester and chillier parts of Canada for the Army's elite ski-borne assault teams. The Army thought they might invade Russia - it was the thing to do at the time - and planned to do so by attacking from the Great Frozen North. So, they were training troops to withstand the legendary Russian winter. If you ever want to do any winterizing of troops, Rochester's a good choice for doing it if Moscow itself isn't available. They hold winter in Rochester every year without fail, and just to make sure everybody remembers, they always hold a humdinger of a winter, usually starting around mid-August and going along till the calendar itself freezes and nobody even knows what month it is anymore. All of which is exactly why Jay was born here in South Carolina, instead of Rochester. And stayed here, too.
Hanging Out at the Cafe
The way it was, was... Jay's parents met while the Paternal Unit was at balmy Fort Jackson, South Carolina, undergoing Basic Training. The fort was then and is now a huge Army training facility a scant twenty miles from beautiful downtown Red Bank. The Capitol didn't fly the flag of hate and injustice in those days, but in those days the Army didn't admit black people as equals to other people, either - though of course they fought hard to squash Herr Adolf's proclivities toward bigotry. Army Basic Training is where they teach you to shoot your weapon, instead of your gun, and hate whatever enemy is fashionable that week, and definitely let go of those hand grenades before the count of ten, definitely after you've launched it away from the hole you're cowering in. The brainwash continues to completion, and after they get done with you you're a fighting machine ready to follow your fellow draftees up any hill into any battlefield and kill, kill, kill, kill. That is, till you get back stateside where you're supposed to resume life as you once knew it, and forget the gore, the killing, and all that.
Until the Seventies sprang upon us, the thousands of basic trainees at Fort Jackson longed to visit downtown Columbia, where they could get rid of their pay by frivolous means, consume non-military food, and hang out in and around the Capitol Cafe, the Wade Hampton Hotel, Cromer's P-Nuts, and other Main Street and downtown traditions, in the hope of catching the eye of an actual person of the female persuasion. Or not, as the case may be - don't ask, okay?.
On some fateful day in the Forties, Jay's Sainted Mother was in fact hanging out at the Capitol Cafe, seated demurely in the shiny vinyl seats near the front window sipping a fountain Coke, which was the most exciting thing there was to do back then besides smile. And in popped Poppa.
Future Poppa. They met, shared milkshakes, Cokes, or whatever, got married, and when training was done, which it pretty much already was when the trainees got to go into town, the newlyweds went home to Rochester, New York, to chill out, so to speak.
Alas, Jay's Sainted Mother, wasn't much for the Rochester - almost worse than the Russian - wintertime. To keep from falling on the ice, she tied cloth around her shoes - always the high fashion ones which in those days meant high, needle-thin heels. She didn't like having to wrap her hairdo to keep her head from freezing. She didn't like spending half an hour bundling up just to go outside to pluck the newspaper out of a snowbank. She basically didn't like the Rochester winter. Her sisters-in-law, Alice Gross, Irma Jermyn, and Mary Gaedt, taught her how to cope with the Rochester winter, but they never taught her to like it.
She did like the work. Mom spent her days making the goods of war in Rochester's many foundries and factories. Goods that her husband and millions like him were supposed to use to protect her from the Germans, Japanese, Ohioans, whatever. War is not hell; hell would be a major improvement over war.
So, on New Year's Eve of the worst winter in modern history, Poppa freshly discharged from the Army, the Japanese sadly still glowing in the dark, along with Nevada, American Jazz completing its invasion of Europe, and Glenn Miller oozing mellifluous chords from every radio, Mom and Pop embraced with the traditional crowd of thousands on Times Square, then repaired to their hotel and figured out That Sex Thing, whereupon the inevitability of Jay was established. They returned to Rochester, packed their stuff and moved to sunny Aiken, South Carolina, where on Jay's Sainted Grandmother's birthday Jay bounced into their lives.