As I’ve mentioned before, my father was one of the most distinctive people I knew. Not many children can say that their father wanted to be a bank robber. I can. Fortunately, he never had the nerve to go through with it.
My dad, Jack Solomon, was born in December, 1904, the sixth son and seventh child of Abraham and Sarah Solomon (could they sound more Jewish?) in a ghetto in London’s East End. His father was a tailor and his mother, judging from the fact she had nine kids in all, spent most of her time taking her clothes off. He quit school in the fourth grade to help earn money for the family. In 1922 he traveled to the USA by himself to live with his older brother Dave and Dave’s wife Rae in Pittsburgh. He spent most of his twenties and early thirties traveling throughout the country selling jewelry wholesale to stores. He would regal young farm girls in Kansas with tales of working for Schwartz & Steinberg Jewelers, which, according to him, had a beautiful 42 story building in the heart of Manhattan. The girls were terribly impressed. Of course, Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Steinberg, toiling away in their one room walk up on the lower East Side would have been surprised to find out that they were so successful. In his late 30’s he met and married my mom. Here are examples of what made him different:
1) My dad tried to convince my brother and I when we were little that he attended college at Oberhauser College in Ossawatomie, Kansas. He went there on a bagel cutting scholarship. His roommate was called “Yardsey”…so called because he had three feet. No such college ever existed and we never got to meet Yardsey.
2) Situation: Panhandler comes up to him and me on the streets of NYC one day. Normal responses might be to ignore the gentleman or say sorry. Jack Solomon rises to his full 5’8” and says disdainfully, “Sir, I do not contribute to the Devil’s Brew”.
3) Situation: My dad ran a diaper service. Sometimes the customers would cheat by not returning the plastic can that held the dirty diapers when they cancelled the service. Normal responses might be to ignore it or send a bill for the can. Jack Solomon borrows me and an old school crossing guard badge I had from elementary school. He goes to errant customer’s door and when they open it he says, “ O’Brian, 43rd precint. Man here (pointing to me) says you stole his diaper can. This can go down hard or it can go down easy”.
4) Back in the day when gas was affordable and families did things together on a Sunday, we would go for family drives “in the country”. Inevitably we would find ourselves in some small town with a bank. At that time my father became a Bizarro version of Walter Mitty. He no longer was Jack Solomon, mild-mannered businessman and father of two small boys. He was now “Big Jake”, wanted fugitive and legendary bank robber. My mother was no longer a registered nurse. In his mind she was the moll behind the wheel of the getaway car. Even I, at age eight or so, was transformed into “Mugsy”, his faithful lookout. We would drive around the bank two or three times, or as he called it, “casing the joint”, planning the best way to break in. The fact that he had no idea what the bank set up was during the week when it actually was open did not deter his fantasy. He would then have us stop at a local café so we could plan out the robbery as well as our escape route. I must point out what a good sport my mother was to indulge this behavior. But then again she had her own idiosyncracies…but that’s another story for another day.
No comments:
Post a Comment