Different Slants

Part 5 

Then very carefully guiding my hand, he tilted it so that all the valuable little critters fell neatly back into their glassine home, where all the inhabitants were equal.  He folded the top of the envelope over, returned the envelope to its appropriate slot on the black tray, surrounded by dozens of other such envelopes, and returned the tray to the yawning black safe behind him.  Buddy then placed his hand flat against the safe’s thick steel door and pushed it until I heard a distinct ‘click’ sound as it locked itself. 

Buddy then showed me a nice-looking platinum ring with all its little prongs standing straight up, as if reaching for a stone to grasp.  They looked like tiny baby birds to me, stretching their necks, waiting to be fed.  I said it would be fine, in my vast experience as a connoisseur of jewelry.  Buddy nodded, and told me to wait there in his office and he would assemble the ring on the spot. 

He placed the diamond I’d selected into the ring, right there in front of me, as I stood next to him at his workbench.  He carefully, skillfully pressed down all of the prongs, as he slowly turned the ring to attend to each one in turn, to firmly hold the diamond in place.  Then he washed the assembled ring in some solution to make it sparkle.  He dried the ring, placed it inside of a little black velvet jeweler’s box and handed it to me.  That…was it. 

He also handed me a certificate of authenticity stating the exact number of carats, or fraction thereof, the diamond’s color and other information my insurance company would need.  Buddy then signed and dated it as I watched him. 

Then, I paid him. 

In cash, of course. 

My Dad’s relationship with Buddy and his presence in Buddy’ office with me that day assured me that everything was kosher, as we say, even about a Lutheran.  But Buddy the Hun was no ordinary Lutheran. 

My Dad’s world was neatly divided into either “them” or “us”—Friend or Foe.  It was a crucial difference and all that mattered.  To him, and now to me, too, Buddy was “us”. 

And also, my Dad told me that I received much more diamond than I could ever have afforded to pay for otherwise, at that time. 

Where did all those diamonds come from? 

(Read on …)

Part 4 

After Buddy was released from ‘The Slammer’, as my Dad always phrased it, his relationship with my Dad resumed like nothing had ever interrupted it, like World War II, for example. 

Buddy the Hun was unavailable to serve his country in that war because he was already serving his sentence in that same government’s Federal Penitentiary.   

When they had their first post-prison reunion in 1951, Buddy was trying to decide how to make a living.  My Dad suggested Buddy try becoming a jeweler like he himself had done, after the war.  My Dad laid it out for him: No heavy lifting, the merchandise would never break down, like say, a washing machine, for instance, and (not a small part of my Dad’s reasoning in this situation of career repair) it was distinctly possible to run a store selling jewelry as a cash business. 

Buddy the Hun thought it over, especially the ‘cash business’ aspect of it.  Because to Buddy’s way of thinking, he wanted nothing further to do with the Federal Government of the United States—including paying any taxes.  He figured he’d already paid them enough in years of his life. 

 Buddy knew he had lines-of-credit waiting for him, and he was also fairly certain he could obtain an ample supply of easy-to-move merchandise like diamonds and watches.  What he didn’t know, like how to convincingly portray himself as an experienced jeweler, he would learn.  And his old pal Izzy would be there to help him, as long as it took. 

So, with old chits to collect for time served, Buddy the Hun became Buddy the Jeweler, by appointment only. 

Time passed. 

Decades. 

Now we’re back in December 1977. 

A week before I made the decision to propose marriage to Joyce, I called my Dad—the former jeweler—and asked him where I should go to buy her a ring, since I knew nothing about jewelry, carats or what something like that should cost.  Being a jeweler wasn’t genetic. 

My Dad told me he knew a guy “who would take good care of me”, and to let him make a phone call to arrange a meeting, first.  I said ok. 

A couple of days later, on December 27^th, my Dad called me and told me to meet him Downtown at 5 North Wabash, under the elevated tracks, or in other words…at the location of his former store from long ago.  He must have thought I had no recollection of his place, but I did. 

He told me he had an old friend there, a guy named Buddy the Hun, who would sell me a ring on December 31^st, the same day I planned to propose. 

I first thought, 

“Buddy the Hun?  Is he serious?” 

(Read on …)

Not your usual love story. 

A Chicago West Side tribal immigrant’s tale, encompassing:  Friendship, Jewelry and Gangsters.

A puzzle with so many pieces, all steadily adding up to Joy’s diamond ring.  

On December 31, 1977, New Year’s Eve, I invited my long-time love, Joyce Esther Bishop, then 27, to dinner at a famous old Chicago steakhouse.  Specifically The Kinzie Steakhouse, but which is now far better known today as Harry Caray’s Steakhouse, after the legendary Chicago radio announcer for the Chicago White Sox baseball team, famously remembered for yelling: “HOLY COW!!” after every home run hit by the home team. 

Aside from Joy’s full-time day job working in the city, she also worked at my original Hyde Park store, Bob’s Newsstand, every weekend.  She was either selling newspapers, stuffing the Sunday newspaper’s weekend components inside each paper or keeping an eye on all the numerous part-time employees and/or the endless stream of customers. 

This was back in the days when Chicago still had four separate daily newspapers and was the last remaining American city to be so blessed.  Now there are only two Chicago newspapers left, both post-bankruptcy, and in their present (2010) shrunken and sensationalized formats, they would have seemed other worldly to either of us.  The then fiercely competitive conservative Chicago Daily Tribune and the more liberal Democratic Chicago Sun-Times, were rich and mighty Midwestern icons of journalism, seemingly able to last forever, just thirty-two years ago.  What happened? 

Joy was certain that I loved her, since I told her so every single day (and still do).  I was also convinced that she loved me too, in the way women get that idea across to the objects of their affection. 

But crowding twenty-eight years of age, Joy seemed to want a further level of commitment from me.   With unmarried women, the status quo is an unacceptable status.  I was conscious of how she felt and I resolved to make her happy.  She wanted to put a collar on me, and a leash, too, I guessed, so that night I decided to ask her if I could be her pet for life.  I already had my shots, too, and she was well aware that I hadn’t been neutered, either. 

(Read on …)

By Rick Munden and Robert M. Katzman

The Situation: Rick and Mary Munden, residents of California for a quarter century, sold their house and car and gave away or disposed of almost everything else they had accumulated during that time so as to condense their life sufficiently to allow them to live their lives on a thirty-one foot sailboat.  Both are now sixty years of age.

Prior to that period, the Mundens lived on another boat in the Caribbean for nine years, leaving the Chicago area via the Mississippi River, learning to operate their sailboat as they went along.  They decided to return to the United States to have a child, who turned out to be Robert Munden.

When they felt Robert was ready to be on his own, and yearning to return to living their prior lives life on water, they bid him farewell, and left the USA in June, 2010, flying to The Netherlands and waited there to collect what few possessions they decided to keep, which they’d shipped from their old West Coast home.

Rick and I, who first met in 1961, on the South Side of Chicago when we were both eleven, will be making periodic reports on the minutia of what it’s like to shrink a shared life to a space smaller than a one-car garage.  Ninety-nine per cent of anyone each of us knows, or doesn’t know, will never live a life like the one they have chosen.  This new series of reports will examine the results of what others may consider to be an unobtainable fantasy.

We will probe, in detail, whom they meet, the problems they encounter—if any—with local governments, the weather, their boat, where they find supplies, the quality and availability of fresh food, how they make repairs, pleasures and frustrations, how they deal with illness if it occurs, how they communicate both locally and with the world, and whatever philosophical musings they, or I, may have about all of the above.  All photos will be supplied by either Rick or Mary.   I have encouraged them to supply many, illuminating as many aspects of their existance as possible.   My personal hope is not to see panoramic vistas, but more of a written and visual diary of everyday life.

This the first report about their new life, as they gradually sail south-east through Europe, with the eventual goal of landing in The Mediterranean Sea before winter sets in later this year.

*****************************************************

Q.
I wonder what you guys do all day.  Do you read, or explore the town or what?

(Read on …)

The Inevitable Postscript…five months later  

In 1963, my immigrant Grandmother, Celia Warman from Poland, gave me a $1,000 United States Savings Bond as my Bar Mitzvah gift, as she did her three grandchildren before me, to help me pay for my tuition to college in five years.  For the Jews, education is more important than gold. 

She couldn’t know, as I myself didn’t know, that I would leave home suddenly the very next year, at fourteen, and have to find a way to support myself.  But the Bond remained in a box, as time ticked by. 

By August 1965, at age fifteen, I opened a newsstand in Chicago’s Hyde Park with a friend, Rick Munden, whom I’d met three years earlier in 6^th grade at Caldwell School on the South Side of Chicago.  It was seven days a week and hard, hard work, especially in Chicago’s terrible winters.  Whatever you may imagine about the “romance’ of running a wooden newsstand when Chicago was the last city in America with four daily newspapers, well, somehow I didn’t see it that way. 

Rick decided to move on in December of 1966 and I stayed there, renaming my little corner of the world “Bob’s Newsstand”.  You may possibly be wondering, what does this have to do with Sarah? 

It’s coming.

And once again, it’s eerie, man.

In 1968, I was accepted at the University of Illinois, when tuition there was $50 a quarter.  I hear it’s somewhat higher now.  At that cost, the newsstand could pay for it, and my grandmother’s Bond slept on in the box.  I entered the school in September, 1968, and was diagnosed with cancer in December, that same year.  The surgery was done on my Christmas vacation, removing the left side of my jaw, and I went right back to school in January 1969.  

I dropped out in September 1969, deciding that I didn’t need college to figure out my future, and instead concentrated on running my still wooden newsstand.  But, on a Saturday night, November 28, 1970, the bone dry structure filled with a thousand Sunday newspapers, burst into flame and was totally consumed in hours.  It lit up the night sky and hundreds watched it burn.  I had been home sleeping for a couple of hours before the midnight shift, and when someone called me, I, too, was one of those watching my future turn to ashes.  There was no insurance for wooden newsstands, which surprised no one. 

The next day, standing in front of the remaining charred floor and a few still upright two by fours, I stood on the corner selling newspapers to shocked customers.  I was numb.  There was no heat and no roof.  My several thousand dollars worth of magazine inventory also burned up in the fire.  I felt bewildered and crushed. 

Then I remembered: The Bar Mitzvah Bond. 

(Read on …)

Part Eight (the final part): 

What went wrong, and then right…at Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah; My undelivered toast and the eerie and unexplainable 1958 incident.   

About a week before Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah party, I asked her to see if she could find a CD she could borrow from the temple’s library that played the traditional Jewish celebratory song, Hava Nagila.  When people have weddings, Bar or Bat Mitzvah’s or any significant Jewish or Israeli celebration or party, this is the song that’s always played, and then the people joyously dance to a folk dance called the Hora. 

The Hora usually involves a large outer circle with everyone holding hands and dancing in a clockwise direction.  Then, inside of that circle is another one, going in the other direction, usually with the married couple or the person being honored in the inner circle.  The music is played loudly and raucously as the circles spin faster and faster, with more and more people joining in as people overcome their shyness.  The song goes on for a long time, or until everyone passes out. 

I’m not much of a dancer, but this is one I never miss.  Or that was until, at my middle daughter Rachel’s wedding in December, 2008, it went on for too long, and too fast, twisting back and forth as the dance requires until my knee blew out and I wore a brace on my leg for about a month after that.  But man…it was a great wedding! 

So, the point is, this extremely frugal Bat Mitzvah had no band and no slick DJ.  I figured we could use the temple’s sound system and existing equipment to play dance music for the kids in general and Hava Nagila for the Hora, in particular.  It mattered to me. 

At this point in the American Jewish Diaspora, there are probably more Christians, and even Moslems, too, that have been to so many family celebrations over the last one hundred years, that there are now collectively more of them who know about this dance, than the total number of Jews in this country. 

(Read on …)