Sarah’s Bat Mitzvah (9):Defeat, Defiance, Triumph and the Undelivered Toast…by Robert M. Katzman
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 6th 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.