Judy Mayhan

Judy Mayhan

          When I was easing into adolescence I was attracted to all the superficial aspects of the beatnik thing that had managed to filter through to a 13-to-15-year-old in suburban Delaware: Bob Denver as Maynard G. Krebs; pictures of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, if not their music. I knew that beatniks liked jazz, but jazz was hard for me to come by. It certainly wasn’t on the radio.

          I just thought it would be wonderful to be a beatnik. I wanted to wear a beret and sit in dark basement-like places and play the bongos and listen to poetry and jazz that my mother and ninth-grade English teacher couldn’t like. I wanted to drink red wine and smoke pot. Of course, Wilmington’s northern suburbs in 1959-61 was no place for a pre-pubescent-to-pubescent middle-class Jewish boy to have even the foggiest notion about if or how pot might be available. Maybe I would have if I’d kept in touch with Bobby DiGiacomo.

          Delaware! Thelonious Monk got busted for pot just passing through Delaware on Route 40.

          Instead of jazz, what the local beatnik-types were doing commercially in the Very Late 50s was folk music. I think this was partly because folk music was more easily accessible than jazz to middle class punters in search of some night life, but I think it was mostly because folk music is enormously more easy to play than jazz.

          We may not have been up to our eyeballs in beatniks in Delaware, but middle-class artsy-fartsies and left-wingers (called ‘liberals’ in the US) ye have with ye always. Delaware has been a hotbed of Quaker activity, for instance, for hundreds of years. Lefties were close enough to beatniks to count. I tried learning to play the guitar at least a half a dozen times without the slightest success, and settled for beatnik-image bongo drums, which I played with embarrassing ineptness. I bought a beret but couldn’t wear it because I’m allergic to wool.

          In about 1960 I started hearing about a folk-music coffee house somewhere in downtown Wilmington called The Attic. It was upstairs over top of something else. It was supposed to be real beatnik, with acts that came down from Greenwich Village!, but at 14 I had neither the means of transport nor the independence to choose my night-time activities, and I’d heard that it cost more to go there than I could afford, anyway.

          Then, in 1961, I got that summer job from Howard, and by the time school started again I’d built up a little bank account. I got a part-time after-school job for a few months putting stock up on the shelves at Happy Harry’s Discount Drug Store, then a tiny place in a suburban strip centre not too far from where I lived in Green Acres. Then The Attic moved from downtown Wilmington to a place in the next strip centre up the road, less than a hundred yards from Happy Harry’s. I saw the ‘Now Playing:’ board change every week. I saw the people. They were beatniks.

          I went a few times to watch the shows and drink orzata soda, and then during my senior year at Mt Pleasant High I started hanging out there. Eventually they gave me a job as cashier and helper on weekend evenings, ‘they’ being Kalif and Judy Allen. Kalif sometimes went by the name Kalif Baghdad and Judy sang under her maiden name of Judy Mayhan. Kalif was a short, egocentric ectomorph with greasy hair, a little moustache, and a beatnik variation of the short-guy-with-too-much-testosterone syndrome. Judy was a short, round-faced, bespectacled, pregnant Kansan with long, straight, Irish-blonde hair and a soprano voice. She also played the dulcimer.

          Judy’s performances were pretty good, if you liked quiet, sensitive-folk-singer acts. And Judy was nice. She was clearly an adult, and my boss, and pregnant and all, but she talked to me and the girl who worked weekends with me as if we were just people like her. She’d comb her long, straight, Irish-blonde hair forward, put her glasses on over top of it, and make people laugh.

          All sorts of acts playing the East Coast folk circuit came through. My favourites were Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, a guy named Ted Staack, and the Holy Modal Strings, who later became the Holy Modal Rounders. They’d formerly been part of the legendary Village Fugs, and did non-euphemistic satirical material unlikely to be to the taste of my mother or ninth-grade English teacher. Another, small-name act there was Peter Torkelson, later Tork, who later became a TV star. I got to hang out a little sometimes with the performers, although I didn’t intrude and was never offered any of the pot I knew that they and Mike — who had a beard and both worked and slept in the kitchen — and Kalif were smoking out back.

          I went off to college, and The Attic, which was always on the edge of going broke, went out of business. Seven years later, in the autumn of 1970, I was living in LA and going through a period of unemployment. I went to a party at the place of a friend of my friend Alfredo’s, down in the LA Basin somewhere. There were many people at the party I knew a bit through Alfredo. And then I saw Judy Mayhan, happily drinking and toking and chatting away. Strangely, she remembered me, too. How, I don’t know. I mean, a person’s appearance can change between age 17 and 24. And, in addition to growing older and burlier, I’d grown a full beard and longish, bushy hair. But there you are. She was still performing: singing mostly. And her car had been stolen while she’d been doing a gig at the park earlier that day, so she asked me to drive her home.

          Now, home was notably bizarre. She was living in what she told me was WC Fields’s old mansion. It was on the uphill side of Franklin Avenue, which is the northernmost straight-line east-west thoroughfare in Hollywood before the rise of the Hollywood Hills starts getting steep. She invited me in for something to drink, Kalif being apparently then a part of her past. She took me down to the basement, where we got smashed while she played the piano and sang for me. It was lovely. Very romantic. Too bad that we got so stoned that my memory of later on, when we went upstairs to bed, is less clear than I would like it to be.

          The next morning she got a phone call from the cops wanting an inventory of what’d been stolen along with her car: some performer’s gowns, some equipment, and so on. It must have been for insurance purposes. Like most people in LA, she didn’t expect the LAPD actually to do anything about a crime like that. While she was on the phone with them, I had a bit of a gawk at the giant, empty ballroom off the main entry hall. Great rehearsal space, I thought. Then Judy had to go about her business — getting her kids back from her sister? the babysitter? Kalif? — and she made it clear that it’d been trippy and fun, but I really wasn’t in her long-range plans. Cool.

          The punchline is that the next and last time I saw her, which was many months later, she was doing her record-company week at the Troubadour in West Hollywood to mark the release of her album, and her backup band was a group of musicians for whom I’d moved some equipment back when I’d been working. Two of them I’d known slightly from previous bands I’d worked for: Lowell George and Richie Hayward. They were about to become Little Feat. These things happen. Judy didn’t sell tons of records; Little Feat, of course, did.

John Kennedy; Robert B. Colgin

John Kennedy

          With a few exceptions, the people I ended up hanging out with the most in my last two years of high school were the local hoods. More specifically, I shared leisure time with proletarian, mostly Irish- or Polish-Catholic, teen-aged alcoholics who appreciated my ability to slug down the beer. I could go to dances at the union hall (beer out in the car before going in) and have the protection of the likes of big ‘Crazy’ John Kennedy and tough Mike ‘Froggy’ Clough, should anyone consider drunken combat with me. Taking the baton from Bobby DiGiacomo.

          Crazy John Kennedy was an enormous, powerful broth of a lad with dark blonde hair over a pink, open, Irish face that was usually set in a peculiar grin. As I remember it, Crazy John’s grin combined shyness, recklessness, and a suspicion that there was something dirty-sexy hidden everywhere. He pumped iron and played tackle, which is something like lock in rugby, on the high school football team. Oddly, this being 1961-1963, I don’t remember him ever getting much flack over having the same name as the President. We all just figured that John Kennedy is a common Irish name, and so what?

          We used to have a few beers and then go looking for social events. I remember one dance at Brandywine High School, supposedly my high school’s Big Rivals, where an officious student-council type caught us smoking in the boys’ room. This wasn’t a future cop; this was a future auditor, or maybe district attorney. He was short and wiry-looking, neatly dressed in the standard preppie uniform of the day, and wore Buddy Holly glasses.

          “Smoking is not permitted anywhere in the building during this function.” His words were clipped, authoritative.

          Crazy John loomed over him and grinned, “I got your function, Ace!”

          The figure of authority turned and left, and we strolled away to the car before he could muster reinforcements.

          Oh, we were real hoods, all right. Just as much as we were clever, or even attractive. More than fifty years later, and who cares?

          Crazy John would laugh at anything he thought was gross — that was his special word. He’d half-giggle and say, “Ooo, gross!” And he thought lots of stuff was gross. I could leave him laughing and making gross judgements all night long. And sometimes well into the next morning, as was the case one time when four or five of us had driven down to spend a weekend at Rehoboth Beach, which is a resort town at the southern end of Delaware on the Atlantic Ocean. We were all about 16 or 17.

          Anyway, we’d spent the evening engaged in fairly disgraceful behaviour, driving around and getting stupid-drunk. I remember throwing beer cans out the window of the car onto the beach, when I knew better, and thinking profoundly how this was evidence of my fallible humanity. I even half-composed a beatnik poem on the subject in my mind right there. I have vague memories of going to and leaving a party at somebody’s house a few miles inland, but I must admit that now, all these years later, the hours after that particular midnight are more than a little hazy. What I remember is that it was still dark outside the bare room the bunch of us had rented when Crazy John started shaking me.

          “Rich! Rich! Get up!” Crazy John was the only person who called me Rich.

          Anyway, I suppose I made the usual go-away-and-let-me-sleep noises that a 16-year-old who has drunk maybe three six-packs of beer and then crashed less than two hours before might be expected to make.

          “Rich! Come on! Get up! We’re goin’ to Mass! Fishermen’s Mass starts in 15 minutes!”

          “Oh, fuck off, John! I’m Jewish!”

          But he was not to be deterred. He physically lifted me and half-carried me to the church, which, as I recall, wasn’t all that far from our fleabag. I sat there with a major headache while this dude in a costume droned on in a language I didn’t understand (This must have been before Vatican II or III or whichever one it was). It reminded me of going to my grandfather’s shul in Wilmington (Latin, Hebrew — who gives a fuck?), only I never had a still-drunk 4:30 am headache there. It was the last time I’ve ever been to Mass. It was not the last time I ever drank beer, though.

Robert B. Colgin

          During my last year or so of high school Bob Colgin, a tall blonde dude with a big white smile and a square chin, became my main middle-class buddy. He liked a beer or four and had a fine sense of self-mocking satirical humour.

          He’d taken on as his alter ego one Harvey Zooker, a former missionary in India, now a Joe College. Zooker, the character, had a high, nasal, clenched-tooth-smile voice, and an attitude of being overly-friendly, superior, and wanting something from you. His hand was usually extended to shake the hand of whoever was in front of him. Zook. A magnificent creation.

          I think it was also Colgin who came up with the idea of driving people nuts by saying everything twice. Zook figured it was an appropriate response to having to repeat something for somebody. Saying everything twice, saying everything twice, spread like wildfire, spread like wildfire, amongst our circle, amongst our circle, for a time back then, for a time back then. Try it. Try it. It really drives people nuts. It really drives people nuts.

          Colgin and I both went to the University of Delaware in college-town Newark in 1963-64, but we didn’t see each other that often. For some reason he was able to get around the university rules and lived in an off-campus apartment in Wilmington, about 32 km (20 miles) from Newark, and commuted to school in a cool convertible of some sort. He did well with the girls. I didn’t.

          Colgin and I both transferred to George Washington University in DC in 1964. He pledged the snobbiest, Joe-College, BMOC fraternity on campus. I didn’t pledge at all. But we lived in the same dormitory — an old, converted, 1920s-era apartment house at 21st and Eye Streets NW. My room was two floors up from Colgin’s room, but my roommate lived in a different world, and the social life was down on Colgin’s floor. Colgin’s roommate and I got along fairly well, and shared an apartment the following year.

          Colgin and I both got part-time jobs as file clerks at the Civil Service Commission in October, 1966. Talk about the very throbbing heart of the bureaucracy! My job was in the Clerical Examining Section, which processed the applications of people going for government office jobs. Secretaries and stenographers and such. Most of the full-time employees in my section were formidably-sized middle-aged African-American women very much concerned with how smartly they and their friends dressed.

          Sometimes I’d get up from my desk and walk down the hall to the office where Colgin worked with some government form in my hand, and he’d pretend to initial it, and we’d bullshit a bit, and then I’d go back to my desk, and then Colgin would show up with something for me to initial, and we’d bullshit a bit, and then it’d be time for the coffee break. And sometimes I’d actually alphabetise people’s applications by surname.

          Colgin and I kept in touch for a couple of years after we finished at GWU in 1967. On one of the many coast-to-coast drives I engaged in over these years I stopped off at Colgin’s apartment in some high-rise near the interstate in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from D.C. We visited together for maybe an hour or two. Over the next few years I heard from our mutual ex-roommate that he was in the hotel business in San Francisco or some other place in Northern California. Then nothing for a long time.

          When, in 2001, I got on the internet and started looking for old friends, I found Bob’s brother Bill, who, although addicted to the caps Lock key, eventually got me in touch with Bob, who didn’t seem to have email, but sent me a letter, signed “Robbie”. He was living in a “quite lovely penthouse” in the Watergate complex in DC.

          After leaving GWU, he told me, he’d married a girl he met there, and had gone “into the hotel business & publishing”. He went on to tell me he was currently “producing a movie on the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty”. He attributed his attendance at GW to my advice.

          For several years afterwards I received a couple of postcards and one Xmas card from him without any more hard information: he was still working on the post-production of that movie, and moving around from DC to the New England shore to Bethesda, Maryland to Atlanta, Georgia. I got a phone call from an Air New Zealand pilot who’d run into him at a barbecue somewhere in the DC suburbs, if I heard correctly. I was half-asleep when he called. From all this I came out with two different email addresses, but emails to these addresses brought no replies. Then I got an email from one of our mutual high school friends that he’d seen Colgin. I replied but got no reply in return.

          In 2005 I received, forwarded from my previous address, a wedding announcement informing me that he’d married again in Atlanta. I sent a letter with my new contact information to the return address on the announcement. Several months later I got another short letter from him with his new postal address and phone number and little else.

          After that I received one xmas card with a photo of him and his wife and two miniature schnauzers, with a message saying that schnauzers were his new main thing. Not a word since then.

Howard L Robertson Sr; Mike Christine

Howard L. Robertson Sr.

          A couple of years after my father died my mother got a job with New Castle County as executive secretary for the various planning and zoning commissions and boards. Being a megalomaniac herself, she knew how to suck up to politicians.

          At the time New Castle County was being developed faster than any other county east of the Mississippi River, so she had a lot of power. Fat middle-aged guys smelling like cigars were always hanging around, inviting my mother to things. Cases of good liquor appeared on our doorstep at Xmas in 1958 and 1959. I cleaned up at my bar mitzvah, more presents than I’d ever use piling up in our living room.

          Then my mother announced that she was probably going to marry one of the fat middle-aged guys, and then he started coming around the house. Howard.

          Howard was a civil engineer. He had his own company and did most of the subdivision design work for the two biggest suburban development companies in the county. He was short and stout and had thick grey hair, a grey moustache, and a big, Jewish-looking nose, even though his ancestry was entirely Scots.

          Howard was Delaware born-and-bred, but he had a flat, almost Midwestern-sounding accent. Said ‘Missouruh’ instead of ‘Missouri’. I remember one evening early in the piece, with Howard sitting on our living-room couch, and me just standing there, getting acquainted. And he went on at some length about watching Italian terrazzo workers making artistic-looking floors, and how technically ingenious the process was, and how good it came out looking. And what struck me the most, along with bewilderment as to why he was telling me all this, was the way he pronounced terrazzo “tuh-razz-uh”, with a drawn-out flat ‘a’ as in ‘jazz’. It didn’t sound Italian to me.

          Altogether, Howard didn’t make much of an initial impression on me. I pegged him as just another grey Babbitt focused on money, having recently read Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt.

          His first marriage had just crashed on the rocks of his alcoholism and his first wife’s affair with a local bookie. He had four kids, all older than me. He also had a piece of Caribbean property on the Isla de Pinos, which belongs to Cuba. So they got married and flew to Cuba, which was still on speaking terms with the U.S., leaving my brother and me to finish off the petit-fours and what we dared of the liquor left over from the wedding. I remember that bottle of Ballantine’s scotch whisky with great fondness.

          Howard’s youngest son Kenny, who was 21, came to stay in the spare bedroom downstairs while they were gone. Kenny was shortish, dark-blond and very handsome. He was in the last year of some bachelor’s degree programme at Pennsylvania Military Institute, a private military college. He went out a lot, bought us beer, and told curious stories about breaking up with his fiancée, which clearly amused him. I found out within a year or so that he was just starting to get ready to come out of the closet.

          My mother quit her job to avoid conflict of interest too obvious to deny, and within a month or so came down with osteomyelitis in two or three of her lower vertebrae. She was out of commission for almost a year. Tough shit, Howard.

          A couple of months after the wedding, at the end of the school year, we moved across the street to an absurdly large five-level house that had been built some years before, but never lived in. Some bookie had had it built and then got himself busted. Howard had it done up to his liking. He had all the scraggly, native second-growth trees on the lot chopped down, which raised a few hackles in a neighbourhood that equated the forest-esque look with property value, but then planted a few shade and fruit trees that in a few years made the house look like the most tree-graced one on the block. He completely refinished the inside of the big two-car garage, doing all the work himself. This involved building, in addition to a complete workshop for himself, a mezzanine-like storage attic accessible by a wooden staircase that we could raise or lower using a block-and-tackle rig. From his workshop he constructed a built-in bar and sink in the TV room, and so on.

          Howard had a magnificent dog named Jake. Jake was a retriever, a cross between a Labrador and a Chesapeake Bay. He had wavy, rust-coloured hair and an astounding vocabulary of understanding and sensitivity to mood. He went to work with Howard, of course, sleeping under a drawing table in the office and galloping about when Howard went out to view jobs himself.

          I remember once Howard and my mother were sitting in the living room (something that didn’t happen often; maybe they had company), and Howard told Jake to go and bring him his cigarettes. Jake trotted down a flight of steps and disappeared around a corner into the TV room. He emerged a moment later with a pack of cigarettes in his soft retriever mouth, came back up the stairs, and handed them to Howard. Howard looked at them, shook his head, and said, “These are Lillian’s cigarettes! I said to bring my cigarettes.” So Jake went back, returned my mother’s cigarettes to the TV room, and returned with Howard’s brand in his mouth.

          Jake had all the retriever characteristics. He was keen to plunge into any water available, especially to go fetch anything — sticks, balls, or whatever else — that would soar through the air, carry it back in his soft, non-destructive mouth, and deposit it gently on command at a person’s feet. His problem was with ducks. I never went duck-hunting myself, but the story was that he would swim out after a downed duck, but the feathers would tickle his mouth and he would spit them out before reaching land. He finally succeeded, though, and the day he came back from duck-hunting after retrieving ducks all the way back to the blind he seemed to be visibly flush with the canine equivalent of pride.

          Jake stories could go on forever. When Jake died Howard really lost it for a while.

          Although I wasn’t particularly fond of Howard, he was basically shy and we were mostly able to stay out of each other’s way. We had almost no trouble between us. When I was 15, Howard told me that he didn’t believe in giving me an allowance, but he would give me a job as a rodman on one of his survey parties at $1 an hour, which was then the minimum wage, and probably more than I was worth. On the job, as at home, we were distantly cordial — we dealt with matters of mutual concern in a direct and businesslike manner, and mostly left it at that.

          When I was a senior in high school I’d been encouraged to browse the college catalogues, but my mother and Howard decided that they would only pay for me to go to the local state university, the U of Delaware, where Howard had gone, and scholarships had become almost all based on family need. The summer after my high school graduation I worked for Howard again.

          A day or so before the Xmas break when I was at the U of D, I got a phone call from my mother. Howard was on a binge (his binges, when he had them, usually lasted three or four days), and he was drunkenly talking about sending my brother and me to the Virgin Islands for the holidays, and we should hurry up and make arrangements to go before he sobered up. We did.

          I only went to the U of D for one year before transferring to George Washington U in D.C., which my father had attended. For the summer after I went to the U of D, my mother and Howard jacked up a cushy job for me with the county as a land-use enumerator.

          In 1967 my plans to dodge the draft via grad school were endangered when the problem of money reared its ugly head, but for some reason Howard decided to finance the project if none of the schools offered me financial assistance. I got a tuition-plus-stipend fellowship, though, at a place called the Claremont Graduate School in Southern California.

          Then just being in graduate school stopped being a draft deferral and I got a suckaroot number in the draft lottery. I got called up for my draft physical at about my 22nd birthday. Howard’s reaction to this startled me. He had been an army major in the occupation forces in Europe at the end of WWII. He was a life-long Republican and, as noted earlier, a prominent engineer and businessman. He was what people called ‘rock-ribbed’.

          He phoned California to tell me that if I passed my physical he’d set me up in business in Canada. His reasoning, and this is pretty close to word-for-word, was: “Goddamn army was the worst goddamn waste of time in my goddamn life! Had to take a bunch of shit from a bunch of people who were dumber than me and I didn’t make a goddamn cent. And that Eisenhower was biggest idiot of the bunch!” He went on a bit more about Eisenhower.

          A true, rock-ribbed rugged individualist, Howard knew very well that the army was no place for individualists. Howard had once told me that one of the most important things in life for him was being able to tell anybody he felt like telling to go to hell — any time he felt like it. Can’t do that in the army.

          After I failed my draft physical  and quit graduate school I got it into my head to go into business. I wanted to run an artsy-fartsy, college-clientele cafe in Claremont, and I asked Howard if his offer to invest in a small business for me in Canada held now I was 1-Y in Claremont. I sent him a woefully inadequate business plan. He basically told me that if I wanted him to back me in business, I’d have to buy a franchise in some chain and learn from them to start with. He was right, of course. I wasn’t interested.

          The Cuban government had long since confiscated Howard’s vacation home and local bank account in rural Isla de Pinos. He had then got into boats. Cabin cruisers. Big ones: I forget the exact sizes, but the first one was something like 53 feet (16 metres) and the one with which he replaced it was bigger still. He usually docked at a marina and yacht club on the North East River, an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay.

          In 1973 and ’74 I was married to my first wife and working for Howard again in basically the same job I’d had in 1961. Howard had sold the big house in the suburbs when I was still at university and he and my mother and Jake and another dog they named Icky had moved to his old house across the street from his office, which had been occupied in the interim as an office by a property development company with which he was cosy. Now all he had to do to get to his afternoon nap was walk across the shady street.

          My wife and I went down to Howard’s boat on Sunday a couple of times, cruised around the bay for a few hours with Howard — mostly taciturn — at the wheel, and then returned to the yacht club for dinner. The club’s speciality was Chesapeake soft-shell crabs: my favourite thing to eat in the whole world.

          The absurdity of someone in a low-level proletarian position dining on soft-shell crabs at the yacht club impressed itself upon me at the time. I didn’t enjoy the cruises out on the bay that much. I started finding excuses for not accepting invitations to go boating.

          After his Cuban property had been confiscated he’d checked out other retirement spots in the Caribbean, such as St Croix and Montserrat. I thought the Virgin Islands sounded cool. One of Howard’s drinking buddies, Charlie Goodley, a fat, middle-aged, long-retired property developer with a white flat-top, had also lost out in Cuba and had bought a place in the Keys. Howard decided to retire where he had a drinking buddy and bought a condominium in Marathon, in the middle of the Keys at the northeast end of the Seven-Mile Bridge. I didn’t go there to visit until after he died in 1979.

          Howard left me $10,000 in his will. I paid off my credit card, bought an up-market water bed that I sleep in to this day, and bought a giant unabridged dictionary, a big world atlas, and a heap of drugs. I thought Howard the shy alkie would have understood.

Mike Christine

          When Howard gave me that summer job as a rodman when I was 15, the hard-core proletarians who worked on the survey parties for a living each dealt with me being the boss’s schoolboy stepson in his own way. Some obviously resented me. Others thought I was a smartass. Others had more ambivalent attitudes. A few tried to be friends. One of these was a solid old Polish guy named Mike Christine, who was an elegant master of what we called the one-word vocabulary (“I fucken don’t fucken want no fucken supermarket fucken tomatoes!”). He’d come from the Pennsylvania coal fields, but he’d been working for Howard, I think, since the 1930s.

          Mike wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but his shoulders were much wider. He also had a wide slavic face. (“Polocks, Bohunks, Ukreenians — we’re all the fucken same; work like fucken horses all fucken week and get fucken drunk on Friday night.”)

          Mike showed me how to do the job, and didn’t set me up to fail, as some of my other co-workers did. He bought me beer for lunch. He got me into smoking cigars and buying Playboy and placing bets on the nags with him to phone in to his bookie. I remember that soon after I started working there we both lost money on a long-shot called ‘Racing Rick’ because Mike thought the name was a sign or something. He had a slow, strong, plodding way of getting through the day that I tried to copy as best I could.

          About once a month Mike and Howard would get into shouting matches out on the sidewalk in front of the office, which was a converted house. And they’d call each other every vile epithet that white people called each other in those days, and Howard would fire him. And Mike would show up for work the next morning and they’d both go on as if nothing had happened. This had been going on for years, and would continue to go on for years.

          Many years later, while chopping line for the transit operator to see along, Mike’s brush-hook went through the small tree he was clearing away and sank entirely too deeply into his lower leg. Then, as my grandfather would have done, he walked out of the woods and tried to continue work before the party chief insisted on driving him to the hospital. Howard went to visit him there every day. Once he took me. Big Mike was glad to see me.

Bobby DiGiacomo; Freddie Phillipsen

Bobby DiGiacomo

          Elsmere, Delaware had a population of maybe six or seven thousand in the early-to-mid-1950s, and maybe half or more of them were of Neapolitan origins or parentage. It was a fairly urban small town, being located flush up against Wilmington’s southwest city limits.

          When I was in the fourth grade at Oak Grove School in Elsmere, a kid named Bobby DiGiacomo (pronounced Duh-JOCK-omo — what a rock & roll name! It has such a rock rhythm to it.) had achieved a level of local legendhood as the toughest kid in the seventh grade. By the time I got to seventh grade myself, DiGiacomo was still the toughest kid in the seventh grade.

          As I remember, he wore his hair in the classic rock & roll waterfall and had a serious shiny black leather jacket with an absurdly large number of shiny chromium zippers. His friend, who was a D’Antonio (I can’t remember his first name), wore a serious gold leather jacket with the same absurdly large number of shiny chromium zippers. They both wore a kind of heavy black shoe with a snap front called Flagg Flyers.

          I already had serious Elvis fever. I desperately wanted a serious shiny black leather motorcycle jacket with 18 dozen useless chromium zippers, too, but my mother, who listened to Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney on WDEL, rather than Elvis and Bill Haley and Sanford Clark on WAMS, got me a sensible thick dull-black leather jacket with a thick, quilted red lining (good quality!) and no useless chromium zippers at all, which I just about never wore. It was heavy and stiff and hard to move around in, as well as aesthetically and socially just not there.

          In a way, Bobby DiGiacomo adopted me when I got to the seventh grade with him, despite my sartorial inadequacy and me being years younger than he was. Maybe he thought my jokes were funny. Maybe my daddy had done something medically his family was grateful for. I don’t know. But I didn’t have to fight. I was under the protection, the aegis, if you’ll forgive the Greek, of the feared DiGiacomo.

          I remember one time after school a couple of the local bullies, sad creatures from hardass families, probably, accosted me with menace. Completely not of that world in real life, I just stood there like an 11 or 12 year old statue for a moment before DiGiacomo appeared with a loud, “What the fuck you doin’,” or something similar, and then they weren’t there. His reputation wasn’t just reputation, either. I went a few times after school to watch him fight kids who challenged his alpha status. I don’t remember him losing.

          Once, during a snap locker inspection, I was among those DiGiacomo invited into the Boys room to help finish off the pint bottle of Thunderbird wine he’d removed from his locker in the nick of time. I’m not sure, but I think a reefer was smoked then, too, although I didn’t take part in that.

          The last I heard, Bobby and his older brother (“Muh big bruddah Tony”) were involved in some way with the criminal justice system. The world can be cruel.

Freddie Phillipsen

          My best friend when I was 13 and 14 was Freddie Phillipsen, a tall, skinny blonde kid with a flattop, a narrow face, and a wide, toothy smile. Freddie’d just moved to the subdivision north of Wilmington where I’d lived since I was 12, called Green Acres. His family lived in one of Green Acres’ new, less plush places with aluminum siding, on the street that backed up to the railroad tracks. Freddie’s step-father owned Grady’s Fairfax Bowling Center, and Grady and Freddie’s mom were gone most of the time running it. I hung out with Freddie often for a year or two there, mostly at his house, and I don’t recall ever meeting Grady. Which is, of course, why it was cool to hang out at Freddie’s — the lack of adult supervision.

          Freddie liked gambling. He accumulated gambling paraphernalia. He even ran the odd gambling casino in Grady’s basement rec room. Sometimes lots of kids would come over to gamble. I remember one time in Freddie’s basement when we had a roulette wheel going and a craps table and a couple of poker games — there were maybe a dozen kids there — and my brother punched a kid named Andy Minnich for making some anti-semitic remark. Freddie made money those evenings. Freddie was voluptuous in his passion for capitalism, and more specifically for, as he put it, “PRAAH-fit!”

          Freddie also had a catch-phrase that he used often, and that I find useful to this day: “It isn’t lawful, but is it leegal?”

          He also had access to Grady’s antique gun collection. We used to fuck around, to employ the language we used, with Grady’s old guns all the time. One day in the autumn of maybe 1960 or ’61 we’d been into his mother’s dandelion wine, I believe, and had gone out into his back yard to throw a ball around or something. Then a group of ass-holes, maybe a bit older than us, who were walking along the railroad tracks, started taking pot-shots at us with the BB guns they were fucking around with. Maybe they’d been shooting at squirrels. Anyway, they hit Freddie a couple of times on his calf, raising welts, before we twigged to what was going on. And it pissed Freddie off seriously.

          We retreated down to the basement rec room, where Freddie got a flintlock blunderbuss out of Grady’s gun case. The ass-holes — laughing and gloating — were still up on the tracks, which were up a maybe nine-metre (30-foot) bank a discreet distance back from the back yards. Freddie got some powder and loaded the flintlock with everything but shot, and we stuck that fucken thing out one of the roll-up basement windows, and Freddie fired off a round that sounded like a cannon and sent off a flare that  looked like a rocket taking off. We quickly reloaded, but the ass-holes already were coming down the grade from the tracks with their hands in the air. It was wonderful.

          By the time we were 15 or so Freddie had launched himself seriously into golf as a vehicle for his gambling mania — he started calling himself “Fairway Phillipsen” — and we gradually drifted apart. Somewhere along the line he transferred away from Mt. Pleasant High School — I think to a private school — and I hardly noticed. I haven’t been able to locate him on the internet.

Joshua Jesse Selinkoff

Joshua Jesse Selinkoff

          Here’s some stuff — true and false — about my daddy. Joshua Jesse Selinkoff. People close to him called him Jess. You could tell people who didn’t know him well because they pronounced his name Jessie. The Joshua wasn’t in it at all. I think some people may have called him J.J., which is how he usually signed his name.

          He had a round face and head, bald with a fringe on the sides, and sported a closely-trimmed moustache in the style of the times — à la David Niven and that crowd — and wore glasses with round wire-rimmed lenses. He was a big man, about 178 cm (5'-10") and what people always referred to as Heavy-Set. When I was nine, shortly before he died, I couldn’t get my arms all the way around his waist to touch at the other side when I hugged him. Maybe I was little for my age, I don’t know, but he was concerned about his bulk. He set as a goal me being able to touch my hands to each other when hugging. Maybe he was waiting for me to get bigger. Anyway, when I got bigger it was too late.

          These hugs have left a permanently strong memory of the texture of the cotton ribbing of his white undershirts stretching to contain his bulk — and the powerful aroma of tobaccco.

          He liked to eat food high in animal fat, and lots of it. The ethnic diet of Russian-Empire Jews tends to run that way. Fatty beef brisket. Always cream cheese and sour cream. Buttermilk. And then the things he liked that weren’t in the ethnic tradition, such as stuffed pork chops, were also congealed death for people like him. He smoked devotedly. Nearly all the photos in old family albums show him with a cigarette in his hand. Unfiltered, of course. And the arteries to his heart clogged and clogged.

          He was a doctor. Not a flashy specialist or surgeon, but a small-town general practitioner with his office at the front of our big, old house on the main road in Elsmere, Delaware. He was pretty much on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I remember him going out most nights to make house calls, and at least once he told us the next day that it was an old woman afraid of being sick who just wanted someone to sit by the bed and hold her hand, and he seemed to accept without question that that was part of his job. Lots of times he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

          He also played viola in the symphony orchestra in Wilmington, the nearest city. As I recall, he liked Tchaikovsky and Beethoven — bombastic nineteenth-century stuff. For pop music he liked Bing Crosby and that whole stream of 40s schmaltz. He didn’t think highly of doctor dramas on TV.

          He painted oil paintings. They were actually pieces of art. I still have some on the walls of my house. I remember going to his art class with him once or twice. The smell of the paints and oils and such was good, but at seven or eight I couldn’t get into painting still-life. The art teacher was Ed Loper, an African-American artist of some repute despite racist resistance. I have one of his paintings hanging in my house — a large, dark cityscape with a woman carrying a baby past a man hoeing a garden in the foreground. He probably would have done better in the celebrity angle if he’d gone to Europe. He did pay me friendly attention, but then, as Jess’s kid I got friendly attention from lots of people. The pharmacies in Elsmere gave me free milk shakes.

          Daddy was also a member of the Elsmere Volunteer Fire Department. Naturally, as the only MD in Elsmere, he was the public health officer and on other boards and stuff. He wrote articles for medical journals. He and my mother had bridge parties with people whose names she could drop — the editor of the Wilmington Morning News, a Catholic monsignor, and various politicians. And sometimes, when I was lucky, he’d just joke around with me.

          Also, when he was home and not working, he’d sometimes try to stop my mother from psychologically abusing me when he caught her at it. They had a few roaring arguments about this. I sided with him.

          In January 2005, I received a letter from my Aunt Goldie, my mother’s sister, with a more adult view of my daddy: “Jesse was full of himself as a New York Doctor — sophisticated, educated, and above the common folk.” Well, maybe.

          When I was littler, maybe four or five, sometimes I would wander into his office and be cute, even if he was seeing patients. Then, once, when I was four or five, I cut my thumb with a can opener. I cut it opening a beer can. Sometimes, at barbecues or picnics or whatever, my daddy would let me have drinks of his beer, so I thought it was okay to help myself. The cleaner, who we called a maid, and who my mother called a schvartza — which is Yiddish for ‘blackie’ — was in charge of me at the time. She didn’t think a kid as little as I was should help himself to a Miller High Life at ten in the morning, but I had assured her with great confidence that my parents let me, and how was she to know what strange things went on in what must have seemed to her to have been a culture as exotic as ours?

          Anyway, I cut my thumb, and I assumed that when confronted with a medical problem such as that I should go to the nearest doctor. So I walked into my daddy’s office as he was consulting with a patient and announced that I had cut my thumb opening a beer can, and would he put a Band-Aid on it. After that, as I recall, both my visiting the office and my beer-drinking became much more limited.

          At about this time I also liked to sit in my daddy’s waiting room, which had been converted from our front porch, and read the comic books and Dr Suess books he kept out there, along with some Life and Look and Mechanix Illustrated magazines. My favourite Dr Seuss was Scrambled Eggs Super, or something like that (“Scrambled eggs super-de-dooper-de-blooper, special deluxe á la Peter D. Hooper”, is almost how it went for a refrain). I remember a few times junkies would come to the office begging for narcotics. This was back in the early fifties, before junkies had become a major menace. Then my mother or somebody would come and take me back into the house, and afterward my daddy would be in a sad mood.

          He was born in New York City in 1909. His parents, Joe and Ethel, were immigrant Jews from Kiev. Their distaste for Tsarism, illustrated by the family stories of pogroms, probably had a hand in their being staunch if discreet Communists. Joe, as far as I have heard, sold encyclopedias. Their family had been coppersmiths for generations. It was the family of both of them, as they were first cousins.

          That’s my excuse, what’s yours?

          As a pre-teen, Jesse’d had to wear his hair in a page-boy, which I have been told caused him to suffer considerable teasing at school. That and the violin lessons. I think his parents put him into what was then a stereotype nerd role: the precious little jewboy. I don’t think being a top student caused him much social grief back then, though. And, lucky for him, he was big. He played football. In his first year at the university, which he spent commuting from Brooklyn to Columbia, he played center, which is kind of like hooker in rugby, on the varsity football team.

          I have the impression that his parents were dominant, self-confident, argumentative types who had ideas about how their son was supposed to be, and, of course, like most 18 or 19-year-olds, Jesse felt stifled by his parents and needed to break free, at least partially. He moved to Washington, DC and over the next four years earned his Bachelor’s degree and his Doctor of Medicine degree at about the same time from the George Washington University. Since his parents were aggressive atheists as well as communists, he tried to learn about the Jewish religion and half-assedly tried out some of its traditions.

          He had an aunt and uncle who owned a resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City. They were Aunt Rose and Uncle Judah, and it was the White Rose Hotel. I can remember going there once or twice as a little kid. Relatives I didn’t know were all over the place. Their culture, which was almost stereotypically Brooklyn-Jewish, always seemed a bit foreign to me. I must have seemed like a little hick to them. Anyway, I understand that Rose and Judah’s openly nepotistic employment policy had given Jesse the opportunity to spend his summers during his student days working there as a waiter.

          Still staying away from New York City, he did his medical internship at a hospital in Wilmington. Delaware Hospital, I think it was called. It was during this time, if I remember the story correctly, that he met my mother. She was Lillian Weiner then. She lived in Wilmington. I remember in a cloudy sort of way a story about cousins of hers knowing cousins of his in Baltimore, and there it was. She had a pretty face and big tits. Jesse’s parents had in mind the daughter of a well-to-do professional family — this was early in the Great Depression and the money to set up a medical practice would be hard to come by — and didn't approve of the match. Their disapproval, of course, made her more attractive. Furthermore, Jesse’s grandmother, of whom he was particularly fond, is supposed to have taken him aside and advised him, in Yiddish, “Der gelt geht; der punum shteht” (“The money goes; the face stays”). That Lillian was a sociopathic narcissist had not been something that either of them had apparently yet noticed or paid heed to

          Wilmington is much smaller than Baltimore or DC, and puny compared to New York. It has always been overshadowed, in size at least, by the port and city of Philadelphia, about 50 kilometres further up the broad Delaware River. When I was growing up, Wilmington had somewhat more than a hundred thousand people (Philly had over two million). Jesse and Lillian settled there, then moved out to a picturesque crossroads called Hockessin in horse-and-mushroom growing country near the Delaware-Pennsylvania state line. Kennett Square, just across the line in Pennsylvania, claims to be the mushroom capital of the world. Baronial estates belonging to various DuPonts dot the countryside, and the nobs play polo at nearby Toughkenamon. The Pennsylvania Dutch country spreads out to the north and northwest.

          It was the Great Depression. Some of the country folk would pay for medical services with chickens and such-like. Lillian and her family didn’t get along with Jesse’s family. I grew up hearing family stories about enormous arguments.

          Once, as I heard it, Joe and Ethel Selinkoff came down to visit in Hockessin. This was in 1939, long before limited-access highways, so the drive took a long time; maybe they took the train to Wilmington and someone met them to drive out to Hockessin. Anyway, they got into a brouhaha with Jesse and Lillian and Lillian’s family over politics and attitudes. I think this one was at the Jewish New Year, just about the time when War began in Europe, and the Soviet Union (which Joe, Ethel, and Jesse’s sister Alice believed to be the Workers’ Paradise), made an agreement with Hitler to divide Poland, where Lillian’s family came from, and the Brooklyn Selinkoffs loyally backed Stalin as he and Hitler moved in. Joe and Ethel were told to pack up and go home.

          When the US got into the war, Jesse took a commission as an Army medical officer. I don’t know if he volunteered or if the Army conscripted him. They sent him to the Panama Canal Zone to be a Quarantine Officer. From the time I was little-little I knew that my daddy had been a doctor in the Army. From a fairly early age I knew that he’d been called a Quarantine Officer. It was only maybe 30 or 35 years after he died that I found out what that meant: a sexually-transmitted-disease inspector in the red-light districts near the US military bases protecting the canal.

          As far as I can tell, Panama was good for Jesse and Lillian. The US ran a decent tropical-colonial outpost there. Access to the Commissary and the Officers’ Mess meant a privileged position in a world of wartime shortages. Lillian taught shorthand to Navy signalmen and really took to having a Jamaican maid. Jesse did amateur theatre. Still, I’ve heard that the Army, being what it is, irritated him. He is supposed to have had a tendency to insubordination, along the lines of, ‘I’m glad to doctor for you, but I’m not into playing toy soldier.’

          This is also where my brother and I were born, me just about eight-and-a-half months after Hiroshima. I’m not sure whether Jesse left the Army just before or just after I was born, but it was at about that time. Anyway, six weeks after I was born we got on a boat — me in cloth diapers — for Philadelphia, via Guatemala.

          And then it was life in Elsmere. It was a small town, but right next to Wilmington, with a shared town line at Canby Park, where sometimes my daddy took us sledding when it snowed. He did do daddy stuff when he could, what with all his renaissance-man activities, Lillian’s snobby social life, bananas-with-sour-cream-and-suger snacks, and unfiltered cigarettes.

          He was the one who conditioned me into being a sports moron. When we went to doctors’ picnics he went for the softball. We watched baseball together on our first-generation black-and-white TV. Sure we watched other sports, too, but baseball was special. He’d originally been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, having grown up in Brooklyn, but since Wilmington was part of the Philadelphia market, he had become a sophisticated and critical Philadelphia Phillies fan. He still had a thick Brooklyn accent, which meant, among other things, that he dropped his post-vocalic Rs. He loved to refer to Gil Hodges, who played for Brooklyn, as “Hodges of the Dodges.” He thought that was real cute and funny. He also knew a treasury of baseball statistics and such, and gave me books of baseball lore.

          He signed me up for Little League baseball, and came to watch if he had time. My lack of ability at baseball was a great disappointment for us both. I remember one time he showed up after the game started. I guess it was when I was eight, maybe nine. I struck out, as always. Three called strikes. It seemed to me the pitches were too high. I was out in right field, of course, where they always put the worst fielder because most kids hit it to left field, but that summer evening a ball was hit out my way. It was an easy high fly ball. My daddy was watching. I got under it okay, but I dropped it. It landed in my glove harder than I would have thought. Bent my finger back a bit. I used that as my excuse and claimed to be injured. Shit! Eight or nine years old and playing hardball. And I actually thought I should have been able to.

          Once when I was maybe six or seven I fell under the influence of the Classic Comics version of The Song of Hiawatha, and I decided to write my own Indian legend. I thought up a sort of a story, I suppose, centred primarily on the costumes the characters wore, as I remember. I went to the front of the house and found my daddy in his office doing some work outside office hours, and tried to talk him into writing my little fantasy on his typewriter while I dictated it to him, and he agreed. Only he wouldn’t type it exactly as I told it to him, probably because that would have been painfully dull. Instead, as we went along he kept spicing things up with his little jokes, such as giving the Native Americans dialogue in 1920s New-York-Jewish tough-guy slang — Bugsy Siegal stuff. In Hiawatha. I got frustrated and dropped the project rather quickly. Pity.

          I was about the same age when, exploring my parents’ bedroom when everybody else was downstairs, I found a curious object. It was a cylindrical piece of stained wood maybe 30 cm long with several rawhide leather thongs knotted at the ends attached to one end of it. Whichever parent it was who I asked about it told me that it was a cat o’ nine tails — something that pirates used to have. I thought that was odd because it only had five or six tails. After that I kept it with my toys for a while until it disappeared. I wonder now which of them used it on whom.

          I remember one time when my daddy came home from a medical conference or something, and he got into a big argument with my mommy. I imagine it was probably over him getting laid out of town. My mommy packed her bags and went to a hotel. I didn’t understnd, but I really didn’t mind. An hour or two later she came back. Just to get her toothbrush. She’d forgotten her toothbrush. Right. Daddy got us boys to beg mommy to stay, which I at least did reluctantly. She did.

          Every now and then Daddy would have one of his attacks, and spend a few days doing nothing but lounging in a chaise longue in the back yard. I got used to it.

          Then, when I was nine-and-a-half, my daddy died. I was writing a skit for my Cub Scout den, a news interview with a survivor of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, when Daddy came home with one of his attacks. It was November, so he stayed indoors, lying down on the daybed in the back room. Then my mother, who’d been scolding him about something, screamed, and phoned a doctor friend of Daddy’s. Waiting for him to come, I noticed that the electric sign in front announcing his practice wasn’t lighted up, and I flipped the switch, and then the other doctor’s car drew up at the curb. I noticed that it was a luxurious-looking Packard with an outside light on the side between the front and back doors.

          More doctors showed up, and an ambulance with a too-late oxygen tank. When the ambulance showed up I noticed that the sign in front still wasn’t illuminated. The bulb was burned out. He wasn’t going to need it, anyway.

Abraham Weiner

Abraham Weiner

          Abe was my mother’s father. We grandchildren called him Dudi. He had a long, narrow face and a substantial nose. He was fairly short, but he was a strong man, and looked it, even into his old age. A tough old dude. When he was in his eighties he was still the sole charge at a newspaper-and-magazine stand at the corner of the main downtown parking lot in Wilmington, Delaware. He folded each newspaper into a cylinder and popped it tight against his knee before putting it out on the stand. He became a well-known character: The Mayor of Ninth & Shipley.

          Most of what I know about Dudi he told me in stories, or I remember from stories other people in the family told me long ago that he told them, or I remember my mother telling me. My Aunt Goldie provided her recollections in an unpublished memoire she mailed me a few years ago. Dudi liked to talk to me and tell me stories in his thick accent and smell of tobacco. He also taught me card games: casino, and go fish, and eights, and such. A wonder that I can’t even remember how to play most of them. I understand that his favourites were pinochle and klabiash, but he never taught me those successfully.

          He thought Jimmy Durante was wonderful.

          Dudi had a brother, Ellek, or Alec, about whom I know little. He died young. I think Dudi may have had other brothers or sisters, but it was with Ellek that he fled Molidechnya, the village where he was born. Molidechnya was near the city of Bialystok in the Pale, a stretch of flatlands that through history changed frequently back and forth amongst Russia and Poland and Lithuania. Today it’s in Poland, I think. Then it was a part of the Russian Empire. Dudi’s family, the Perchinskys (or Pochinskys), were Polish Jews. Avram (Dudi) grew up learning to speak Polish and Yiddish. I gather that the Jews of Molidechnya held a generally unfavourable opinion of the Russians.

          Dudi was 14 and Ellek 18 when they took off. The way I remember Dudi telling it to me — and he told it to me long ago, back when I was maybe five or six — Ellek had been drafted into the Russian army and, neither being nor speaking Russian, he decided it would be better to run than to show up for basic training. I remember Dudi telling me about running with his brother along a drainage ditch with the Tsarist soldiers standing just over their heads — maybe this was just before crossing a border. I remember Dudi telling me about making it to England and buying a phoney passport, with the last name Weiner on it, to get to America, but my mother and others have from time to time doubted some parts of this. I think Abe and Ellek did have some money to take with them, and relatives in Philadelphia.

          Anyway, the story goes that he got off the boat — maybe from London, maybe from Danzig, maybe from somewhere else — at Philadelphia, and immediately went to a warehouse by the wharf, bought some needles and buttons and suchlike — what is known here as Manchester — wholesale, and went off to the Jewish neighbourhoods to peddle them to housewives door to door. My Aunt Goldie said he looked up a relative first and went to work the next day. This was, I think, in 1889. He once gave me an 1889 US silver dollar to commemorate it. I carried it around in my pants pocket for years, but lost it one night in 1967 when I was sleeping in my clothes.

          I know I don’t have the chronology of the next 30 or 40 years straight at all. What I have is a grab-bag of disconnected stories in no particular order: He got a job as a cigar-roller in Philadelphia and joined the cigar-rollers union, which was led by the soon-to-be-famous union organiser Samuel Gompers. Dudi idolised Samuel Gompers for the rest of his life. He also worked for a while in a bakery and in a furniture store.

          He married Pauline (Peshe in the Old Country) Poznansky, who according to my mother came from a family of Jewish notables in Poznan, Poland. Aunt Goldie says she came from Bialystok. My mother told me that her mishpukha (extended family, whanau) included rabbis and lawyers and functionaries for the Catholic Polish government. There is an ancient photo of Dudi’s grandfather or uncle or some such mishpukha that the family says looks like me. I don’t think it does very much, though. It’s just the beards that are similar.

          Pauline had a skin condition that ended up causing her much pain. She died in the early 1940s. She was a strong-willed woman, from all accounts. Some stories that I vaguely remember suggest that she was occasionally ill-tempered, but I guess with a chronically-painful skin condition that’s to be expected. Looking at photographs of her (one posed alongside Dudi and the other beside my father), I get the impression from her expression that she was a woman accustomed to expressing disapproval.

          Dudi and Pauline were fervently patriotic Americans and quietly fervent socialists. They used to look in the newspaper after elections to see their two votes for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Workers Party (the only ones in the town) at the bottom of the results. I think Dudi thought it was funny that nobody knew who those two damn socialists were.

          Dudi moved his family around, changing jobs and businesses. According to Goldie they lived maybe four times in Philadelphia, three times in Wilmington, Delaware, and once each in Magnolia, New Jersey, Chester, Pennsylvania, and Lynn, Massachusetts. Maybe some other locations.

          In Magnolia, Dudi had a little general store on the Black Horse Pike, a main road running from one of the bridges over the Delaware River at Philadelphia to the beaches of the New Jersey Shore. He placed his chicken coops where speeding drivers often missed a curve in the road, so they’d have to buy the chickens they killed. Dudi himself had a carriage and a timid horse named Teddy who was easily spooked by cars. This was around the end of the first world war. Then he bought a 1918 Chevrolet that could only go uphill in reverse.

          By the late 1920s they were living in somewhat cramped quarters in Wilmington. Dudi had lost money in the furniture business in Philadelphia and had a little store again. I don’t think the Great Depression was kind to the Weiners, but they managed to get by. Dudi made his own butter for home use and used day-old milk to make cottage cheese that he sold in his little store.

          After he sold the store for next to nothing in 1936 he entrepreneured an egg route — driving to a rural egg farm and then selling the eggs door to door in town. He came to include Franklin D. Roosevelt along with Samuel Gompers in his pantheon of heroes. Then he had another little store for a while, and then a successful cousin set him up in the newsstand, where he found his calling.

          I remember once, when I was little, the car in which he was riding as a passenger on his way to work crashed into a stone wall. He got out and finished walking downtown — about five or six km — to get the newsstand open and worked through to 5:30 or six when he closed. He turned out to have a couple of broken ribs. He was 78 or 79 at the time.

          He liked going to the Orthodox Jewish shul, where all the men (women in a separate room) prayed and chanted in sing-song, Yiddish-accented Hebrew at their own pace in an unintelligible-to-me hubbub. As I remember, the place was in a basement in downtown Wilmington in a neighbourhood that was rapidly becoming dominated by African-Americans.

          He didn’t keep kosher away from the place, though: he liked pork chops and steamed clams. Especially cherrystones. I remember one glorious day when I was little that we spent digging clams on the beach at Margate, New Jersey, just south of Atlantic City. I considered digging, steaming, and eating them to be a wonderful experience; it made for a deep sensual-spiritual memory.

          He regularly played The Numbers, the illegal gangster-run lotteries popular with working people before the appearance of the legal, state-run lotteries. He also took obvious relish in telling naughty jokes and stories, which always provoked extravagant displays of embarrassment and disapproval from my mother.

          He lived to be 89, or thereabouts — he was always vague about his true birthday — and remained the most involved codger in his nursing home up to the end. He believed in work, not necessarily for everyone, but for himself. At the Kutz Home, as the place where he ended up was called, he assumed for himself a number of odd chores, which they apparently conceded to him. He was on his way to the flagpole out front to run up the flag in the morning when he had a sudden aneurism and died. And he’d smoked about 40 unfiltered cigarettes a day from about the age of ten.