Dad – part 1

He was the best of dads, he was the worst of dads.  It’s an appealing line, but not quite true.  My Dad was, simply, a great dad. His failings were not as a father, but as a husband and as a friend. It isn’t his failings I remember when I think of him, nor are they the parts of his character that influenced my development. I grew up with the best of dads and only learned about the troublesome side of his life much later, when I was already an independent adult.  I know many people who wrestle with their parents’ failings, but since my Dad’s failings had so little impact on my relationship with him when I was a child, I have little wrestling to do, only happy memories and an opportunity to continue to learn.

Bubble Puss

I suppose Bubble Puss is as good a place to start my Dad’s story as any.  Well before Pearl Harbor was bombed and long before he became a father, Dad worked in a factory as a toy stuffer.  I don’t know exactly where the idea came from, but Dad and his younger brother, my uncle Stanley, came up with the idea for an inexpensive toy.  The toy consisted of a balloon with cat ears and a stamped cat face and a cardboard base in the shape of a cat’s crouched body.  You blew up the balloon, held it closed (but not tied off) and inserted the stem of the balloon into a slot in the cat’s body.  Then you set the cat in a bathtub and released the balloon.  As the air flew out of the balloon it propelled the cat around the tub and made bubbles.  Bubble Puss. 

My sister Tamar (who has an amazing memory) adds this: “The key to selling the toys was demonstrating them in tubs of water. Cousin Jerry [Dad’s oldest, very imaginative nephew] wanted to get in on the act, so he started selling as well. But he felt that the toy didn’t live up to its name because there weren’t a lot of bubbles, so he decided to add laundry soap to the water. He had no idea how much to use, so he poured in a whole box. When he put his Bubble Pusses in, they created so many bubbles that it overflowed into the street, distracting drivers, and the cops came to stop him. He was a minor, so he got off with a stern warning.”

Legal troubles notwithstanding, it was Dad’s entrepreneurial spirit and marketing genius that led them to set up a tub on a busy street corner and demonstrate Bubble Puss to passers by, men on their way home from work who wanted to bring the kids an inexpensive toy.  Subway fare was a nickel in those days, and I would guess that’s about what Bubble Puss sold for.  Dad, Uncle Stanley and Cousin Jerry meowed all the way to the bank.

Dad counted Bubble Puss as his first business venture. The war ended that. Dad joined up shortly after Pearl Harbor. After boot camp he went to Tonopah, Nevada for training as a machinist and Mom followed him.  (Tamar still has a sample of his work there.) After a fairly short stint in Nevada Dad was assigned to a post in Alberta, Canada, where he served as a clerk (because he could type, or claimed he could) in an outfit that was shipping airplane parts to our allies, the Russians.  The posting in Canada was exceptionally fortunate.  Not only was he completely safe, but he got overseas pay and was allowed to live off base where Mom could be with him throughout the war.  They lived in a little farmhouse and always spoke of it as one of the happiest times of their lives. .  Dad found a piano teacher and learned to play a bit of Bach.  Mom finished her degree at the University of Alberta.  For a while, Dad’s baby brother,  Uncle Stanley, lived with them, allowing him to get away from the stepmother none of the kids liked.

Dad’s father, Nathan, had remarried not long after his first wife died, Sarah, the mother of his five children. Nathan and Sarah were immigrants from Lithuania, part of the great exodus of Jews from the torments of eastern European pogroms and poverty around the turn of the 20th century.  They settled in New York, in Lower East Side tenement poverty and Sarah gave birth to Murray, Rose (cousin Jerry’s mom), and Lily. Then there was a child who died in a dreadful kitchen accident at home, pulling a pot of unattended boiling water over himself.  After that tragedy came my dad, Louis, Lucky Louie, and then, after a gap, there was Stanley, everybody’s baby, and probably a menopausal surprise. The child who died was a ghostly presence in the family, only ever referred to as “the child who died”. Stanley was the only child still at home when Sarah died and Nathan married the wicked stepmother.

Nathan’s first wife, Sarah, was the driving force in that family, and Dad adored her.  Although they might have been what we now call food insecure during the depression, my dad had no memory of ever going hungry.  They moved frequently during those years, often sneaking out at night with their few belongings just before the rent was due. Sarah ran summer cabins in the Catskills. At home in the city she washed the floor before the Sabbath and laid down newspapers to keep it clean, and she ran a poker game in the kitchen to supplement Nathan’s meager factory wages.  She took my Dad to hear Eugene Debs speak, and she was passionate about unions. I wish I had known her and known more about her life, but her fingerprints were everywhere in the lives of my aunts and uncles, and certainly in my Dad’s life. Sarah raised him with the courage to create Bubble Puss and all his subsequent businesses. She taught him to honor working people, which he continued to do even after he joined the bourgeoisie and became a boss himself.

Dad finished high school and took some college classes at The New School in Manhattan. But earnings were a lot more important than schooling, and he gave his mother most of what he earned. Though Dad had little schooling, he was an educated man.  At some point in his youth he developed two passions, for the music of J.S. Bach, and for the Civil War. By the time I was growing up he had a sizable record collection – mostly Bach, but Teleman, Vivaldi and others too.  And he had a serious collection of books about the Civil War.  I never asked him why he loved Bach (because who doesn’t?) but I did ask him why he specialized in the Civil War.  Dad was born in 1919, so there were still Civil War veterans alive, but it wasn’t the historic proximity of the war that attracted him. Dad believed, as many historians do, that The Civil War defined our country.  Like many first generation children of immigrants Dad wanted to be thoroughly American, and for him, that meant understanding how the Civil War had shaped the country’s evolution. Dad did not believe in any gods.  Lincoln was as close as he came to worship.

My father’s family was Jewish enough to pay lip service to Sabbath customs, to give the kids Hebrew names along with their American names, and to have the boys become bar mitzvah.  We celebrated the major holidays at home, as most Jewish families do.  There may have been a time when Dad fasted for Yom Kippur, but he went to synagogue only for weddings, funerals, and bar and bat mitzvah celebrations – and even then, grudgingly.  He had taken in the lesson that religion was the opiate of the masses, and as far as I know his reverence was limited to Bach and Lincoln. He raised us to believe that faith was the opposite of thinking for yourself, and that the latter was superior. It took me many years to develop a different view of faith – not in opposition to thinking for myself, but in addition to it.