The Loss of Innocence

When did you lose your innocence? When did the reality of death intrude into your idyllic concept of life?

For me, and for most of my Yeshivah of Flatbush high school classmates, it happened the summer after we graduated, when we found out Moe Radinsky had died.

We had known Moe for a scant two years, yet the impression he left on us was that of a figure larger than life. Indeed, he was larger than most of us, no less than 200 pounds, a husky 6’2” or so, with thick, dark, wavy hair, and a gap-toothed smile under horn-rimmed black eyeglasses. He entered our lives at the beginning of our junior year, a transplant to Brooklyn from Seattle. Who knew there were Jews in Seattle?

Whether from nervousness or a sense of confidence, he tried to ingratiate himself by cracking puns whenever possible. They were not good puns. But we grew to love, or at least tolerate, them. More to the point, we grew to love Moe.

Typical of our cloistered upbringing in the 1950s and 1960s, of the 110 students in our graduating year of 1966, only 19 chose a college outside New York City’s borders, and most of those were Ivy League schools. Moe, on the other hand, enrolled at the University of Chicago, the subject of a NY Times article in Saturday’s sports section. Once a powerhouse of college football, the University of Chicago abandoned the sport in 1939. A club football team sprouted up in the late 1950s (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/sports/ncaafootball/at-the-university-of-chicago-football-and-higher-education-mix.html?_r=1&hpw).

A devout fan of the University of Washington Huskies, Moe joined U of C’s club football team. There is no known record of his prowess on the gridiron, but as was related to me during the summer of 1967, he was playing with his young nephew one day when the child kicked him in the shin. Since the pain did not ebb after a few days he sought medical attention. Tests revealed he had bone cancer. He died a few months later.

Teenagers, for that is what we all were at the time, believe they are invincible. Moe’s death shattered that mirage. The Vietnam War raged half a planet away. But that war barely touched us beyond the pictures on the nightly news. We were all draft-deferred. We were safe. Our 2S draft classifications sheltered us from danger.

When the largest oak in the forest tumbles, tremors must run through all the other trees. So it was for many of us. Though grandparents and other relatives had passed away in most of our families, our collective consciousness about mortality and man’s finite existence had not really been challenged. Moe’s sudden passing so far away from all of us brought our innocence to an end.