SAN DIEGO — I grew up in the fifties, through the fits and starts of adolescence, the revealing mysteries of puberty and the inculcation of ambition all Jewish boys are indoctrinated with before leaving home.
Growing up I never thought of my father as handsome or ugly. He was just “Pop.” He was good to me as a kid, but was afflicted with a terrible depression that permeated his personality and behavior and prevented a close relationship between us. His perpetual sadness limited his sharing of his life’s experiences and wisdom gained that might have guided me from making some of the mistakes I made later in life. However, one time he did do something for me, for which I have everlasting gratitude.
I was a sophomore in Brooklyn College and flunked the only course in my school career, Structural Geology. I was quite discouraged and depressed because geology was my major. I had trouble interpreting mathematically how certain layers of rock on the surface in one area would emerge in another outcrop some distance away. In shame and despair, I wanted to quit school for a while and get a job.
Pop feared that once I quit I would be sucked into the vortex of the working world and never return to complete my education. He pleaded with me to stay in school, but it fell on deaf ears. He then asked me to talk to “Red” the house painter in our building. “Red,” square jawed, tough, hard as a rock, and street wise, looked me in the eye and said, “Look shmuck, you want to wind up a painter like me? I never had the opportunity your father and mother are offering you. Don’t blow it, or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
I finally got the message, stayed in school, transferred to New York University and graduated with honors two and a half years later. My parents never told me, but I think graduation day was probably the happiest day I had ever given them, and relief, too.
Everyone in our family, including pop’s brothers and sisters, thought the origin of his depression was psychological. He thought of himself as a failure for blowing the only money he had accumulated in his life. I thought his condition was psychological too, until many years later when my uncle, a successful factory manager, quite suddenly came down with severe depression that lasted the rest of his life.
In graduate school in 1972, I first learned about chemical depression, which is genetic in origin. The body lacks a certain chemical that affects behavior. People diagnosed with this malady take medicine for the rest of their lives to compensate for the deficiency and they can lead normal lives. I suspect this was probably the source of both my father’s and my uncle’s problem. My dad’s two other brothers seemed to exhibit moroseness associated with their personalities as well.
Pop thought he was a failure because he only had a sixth grade education. This was pretty typical of his generation. There was no money in his immigrant parents’ household. He had to get a job to pay his way. He finally made some money after marrying my mother. Uncle Dave and he opened a malt and hop shop during prohibition in Babylon, Long Island. The business flourished, prohibition was still the law of the land, and they did some bootlegging to augment sales. Everything was going fine and the money poured in. Pop bought a fancy, cream convertible car, wore golf knickers, argyle socks, and looked and acted like a “Great Gatsby” dandy, but he never forgot his family. Every Saturday morning, he drove an hour to Brooklyn to pick up Grandma Molly and my two cousins Ethel, and Phyllis, to spend the weekend in Babylon. They lived together with Aunts Shirley and Dotty, five women in one small apartment, with one bathroom, which must have been miserable.
One day, mobsters came to pay the two brothers a visit, warned them about muscling in on the mob’s bootlegging territory, and suggested they quit the business. If they didn’t they were warned, their body parts would be found in selected garbage dumps and polluted waterways throughout the greater New York area. They shut the doors within the hour.
It was 1933, the depths of the Great Depression. There weren’t too many job opportunities for educated men, and certainly less for one who never went beyond the sixth grade and had no particular skills or trade. Additionally, Pop had a wife and child (my sister Beryl,-I was not born yet) to provide for. It must have been scary times. Luckily he found a job as a building superintendent in Brooklyn. This provided the family with an apartment to live in and some money to put food on the table. However, as the euphoria of getting a job faded, the long shadows of time cast a weighty darkness over his self-esteem, that never lifted ‘until the day he died.
Growing up with two depressions, the nation’s and my father’s, did not seem to affect my sister or myself. Pop must have laughed, but I can’t remember when. He never played with me, but I don’t remember my other friends’ fathers sharing those experiences with their kids either. It could be that in those tough times they were too busy trying to put food on the table, and had little energy left for anything else. Fortunately there were lots of school friends and kids who lived on our block for me to play with, and dissipate my exuberant energy in sports.
Family entertainment was visiting my relatives’ homes and they, in turn visited us. I remember only two occasions when my parents took me to the movies. My mother initiated me into this fantasy world at the Rogers Theater. We walked 11 blocks to the movie house and Mom paid the five-cent entrance fee for each of us. I was four years old. The film was “Peck’s Bad Boy at the Circus.” I can still recall in vivid detail the boy character, how his voice sounded, and the bright black and white images on the screen; there were no gray subtleties in those early days. After the show, we walked the 11 blocks back home, as the expensive nickel trolley car ride was out of the question.
When Pop wanted to get away from home for an afternoon, he would take a subway to Manhattan and go to a movie, followed by dinner at the Automat. He would go through the cafeteria line and choose his favorite meal, Salisbury steak with baked beans and macaroni and cheese. One time he allowed me to accompany him on one of these adventures. The movie is long forgotten, but I still salivate thinking about that gourmet delight at the Automat.
My father was good to me. I can only remember one time when he beat me and boy did I deserve it. As building “Super,” he possessed pass-keys to all the apartments in case of emergency or repairs. I must have been about ten years old and I stole a key to the apartment of a couple of kids I knew in the building. I stole $33 I knew they had saved in their dresser drawer, and blew it with a high time at Coney Island on rides, games, and, of course, Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, and whatever else I could stuff in my face. Unbelievably, my clueless crime as a ten- year old was solved, and my father quietly brought me into my bedroom, closed the door, and unmercifully beat the crap out of me. I don’t remember him being mad at me, or yelling and screaming. I think he just believed this was the best way to punish me. I have no recollection of him ever hitting me before or after that memorable event.
Surprisingly I have no permanent scars from the impressionable experience. It ended my career in crime… almost…
I had been elected to the exalted position of president of “The Rebels” by my school buddies. We formed a cellar club. Cellar clubs were a local phenomena in the neighborhood surrounding my high school in East New York. Travel to the school involved a 25 minute walk and a subsequent 30 minute subway ride. Homeowners in this lower middle class neighborhood had “finished” basements they rented to high school kids. These palaces with separate entrances were used as social clubs. The hangouts were for dances, card playing, listening to music, and heavy necking and petting with girl friends on the inevitable broken down furniture that often came with the premises.
My Uncle Henry taught me to drive in his four-door, fluid drive, semiautomatic, DeSoto automobile on Linden Boulevard, a busy four-lane road in front of the red brick government built “project” where he lived. I passed my junior driver’s test that allowed me to drive only with a mature licensed driver sitting besides me (age 21 to drive alone.) This was a law begging to be broken. Our family car was a new four-door sleek black Kaiser, perfect for the “Rebels” to cruise in.
One Saturday night I waited till my parents were asleep, tiptoed quietly into their bedroom and lifted the car keys from my father’s pants, which were draped over the chair to preserve the crease. I then drove the half-hour to a rendezvous with my constituents at our cellar clubhouse.
A carload of us piled in and off we drove to “Nathan’s Famous,” the hot dog stand that never closed in Coney Island, an hour’s drive away. There we gorged on delectable goodies. My personal favorite was Chicken Chow Mein sandwiches on a soft bun, followed by a half dozen Little Neck clams. I had a cast iron stomach in those days, and the figure to prove it. A side show gathering of loud mouth tough guys from other Brooklyn neighborhoods were always at these late night feeding orgies at Nathan’s. We steered a wide, wary path around them, all the while fascinated by their haberdashery. Thug clothes featured very tight pegged, cuffed, pants of vivid electric blue, with white rear pockets shaped like pistols, and a bold white stitch running down the sides of the legs. Other color pantaloons favored by these felons-in-training were chartreuse yellow with black accents, or white with black details. Their favored hairstyle was called a “DA” or “duck’s ass.” This coiffure, a shiny well-greased tall pompadour with slick horizontal combed sides ended in a peak where the two sides met in the rear of the head, thus the inspiration for the name. The hair ended abruptly with a razor sharp horizontal slice immediately below this convergence across the entire width of the head
By the time I returned home, it was almost dawn, but enough time to safely return the car keys to the pocket where they belonged. I was so successful in this late night caper; that I decided to repeat it the following weekend. Late Saturday night, off went the Rebels again with their fearless leader at the wheel. We had a great time and returned with full bellies, belching and farting our way to the clubhouse door, myself included. I soon discovered however that I had locked the keys in the car. Oh boy! On the Subway ride home I had horrible fantasies of terrible things my father could and would lay on me in punishment. There was no possible story I could think of that would work to get me out of this one.
The next morning I confessed my foul deed to the folks at the breakfast table and awaited my doom. My mother said nothing. My father in a calm voice asked me specifically where the car was located. I said I would go with him to get it. He calmly said, “No, he would go by himself.” I still waited for the anvil to fall. He rose from the table without a further word, got a spare set of keys and set off to retrieve the vehicle with the seven block walk to the subway, the half hour train ride, and several blocks’ walk to where the car was parked, and then drove home.
Amazingly, I never heard another word about the incident from either of my folks and I certainly never asked any questions. This finally ended my career in crime.
I was indoctrinated to prejudice at an early age. “Colored people,” or “shvartzes” as Jewish people called them, were always a part of my life. We lived two blocks distant from the notorious Bedford-Stuyvesant slums, which were all Black. My first love in the third grade was a cute mixed-race chick with glasses. I loved walking home with her after school, showing off for her by doing a balancing act on the low brick and stonewall along our path. Our love affair ended when I graduated to another school in the second half of the school year.
The first job in my work career at the age of thirteen was at the C&S meat market. I became a friend with “Ducky,” a giant of a Black teenager who worked there. One Saturday night I invited him home after work to watch a champion boxing match. Our 11-inch round black and white television set sat in the middle of our living room. Ducky’s family, like most Blacks in the “hood” did not yet own a television set. My folks were not home and we enjoyed the slugfest on the screen. Sometime during the match they did come in, said hello to both of us, and retired to their bedroom. When the match was over and Ducky went home, Pop came into my bedroom and quietly said, “Don’t invite colored people into our apartment again, it’s not a good idea.”
His attitude was partly based on fear. Our apartment was robbed several times by desperately poor Black people who dangerously climbed into our windows in snow, and climbed into our bedrooms by lifting up the screens in the warm months when the windows were open
Part of Pop’s job was to rent the apartments. Per the instructions of the owners, there were never any vacancies when a Black person inquired-with one exception. In one apartment lived George, whom I liked, and thought had considerable intuitive wisdom. He was the chauffeur and lover for his white leaseholder roommate.
Reminiscing about Pop always leads me to one of my fondest memories. One Saturday night I stayed home for the evening. I was seventeen. He asked me to go down to the basement to help him lift some heavy object. We were in the elevator, when he said in his normal unemotional depressed voice, “What’s the matter son, don’t you have a date tonight?” “No Pop,” I answered. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” he stated evenly and unsmiling, “When I was your age I had women chasing after me with mattresses on their backs!” I had to hold onto the elevator railing to keep from collapsing on the floor in silent laughter. That was my Pop!
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Ira Spector is a freelance writer based in San Diego.
What a great, insightful story! Thanks so much for sharing this.