Cadillac Man? No, My Father Favored Buicks

Assessing the precarious market position Cadillac finds itself in these days, The New York Times Tuesday described the General Motors car brand as once “the ultimate destination as car owners prospered and moved up from Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Buick to demonstrate their success in life” (https://nyti.ms/2Zygmqk).

My father was a loyal Buick customer. Every five years or so he would buy another Buick. Yet he, too, succumbed for a short while to the siren call of Cadillac (actually, it was more my mother who pined for a Caddy, but more on that later).

The first car of his I remember was a green Buick, probably a 1950 model. It had an elongated, almost torpedo-like sleek shape. I have few memories of driving in it. In 1955, when shortly before I turned six, Dad bought a blue Buick Special with a white top, a four door sedan with air vents along the front fenders, a Buick trademark. As the youngest of three, I was relegated to the middle rear seat, the one over the drive shaft hump. Many an argument over leg and fanny room broke out with my brother and sister. Dad often threatened to pull over to the side of the highway and spank us if we didn’t stop bickering.

It was in that car that our parents informed us that for the summer of 1956 we would be sent to sleepaway camp for the first time instead of vacationing at Takanassee, a Catskills resort in Fleischmanns, NY. Eight weeks away from our parents. We’d be shipped off to Camp Massad Aleph where our father’s friend’s son summered. My brother Bernie, 11, sister Lee, 9, and I, 7, howled our displeasure. To no avail, and eventual pleasure. 

That car provided Lee with an enduring memory of our father that she related in her eulogy of him. She recounted how one Sunday morning when she was in fourth grade she alone had gone to our Hebrew school’s classes as Bernie was sick and I not yet old enough to be required to attend. While she sat through classes, our father went to a Men’s Club meeting.

“At 12:00 we met and walked to the car, a big Buick. At the time that we had parked, there were no other cars on the street. However, when we returned, the car was now boxed in between two cars. My dad was recovering from a (shoulder) bursitis operation and the strength in his arm was still limited. He attempted to maneuver the non-power steering wheeled car out of the spot. For what seemed an excruciating long time he struggled, groaned, cursed and finally collapsed at the wheel. I was horrified and frightened and in my childish way thought that we would never get out. It was then that he turned to me, with a strange grin on his face, and asked me to help him turn the wheel. My first response was, no. What could I do to help him free us from this impasse? He calmly showed me what I needed to do and together we moved the resistant wheel. Our hands, reaching one over the other, worked for what seemed an eternity to move the wheels and reposition the car. When it finally happened we screamed with joy and laughed and laughed. The whole way back to our home we reviewed what had happened, how we had worked together and how funny it was.”

Dad made sure the next car he bought had power steering. It was a 1961 Buick LeSabre, desert fawn in color. In other words, light tan. Bernie learned to drive on that car. In 1965 it made way for a Buick Electra 225, green with an off-white vinyl top. The car was massive, forcing our father to work magic each night he slipped it inside our narrow garage. He would hug as close as he could to the left side of the garage, then he had to slide across the front bench seat to exit the car from the passenger door. 

I was behind the wheel of that huge Electra—18 feet, 8 inches in length—the first time I drove on the highway, along the New England Thruway as my parents and I made our way up to Orange, Mass., to visit the family of Lee’s roommate the first year she studied in Israel. I remember observing the signs prohibiting trucks and buses from using the left lane. It felt safer driving in the left lane, though my father kept telling me to drive faster. 

When it was time to get a new car, Mom prevailed upon then 58-year-old Dad to trade up to a Caddy, a car more fitting his success as an independent businessman. He settled on a 1970 blue Sedan de Ville, an inch longer than the Electra. Dad seemed self-conscious driving a Cadillac in our row house Brooklyn neighborhood. He divested himself of this dubious distinction in 1975 by returning to his roots with a blue Buick Regal, much like a LeSabre. 

Within a month he talked himself into believing the car, at exactly 18 feet, was too small. So he engineered a three way deal: He would give Gilda and me the Regal, we would hand over our 1969 Buick Skylark to Lucy, one of his loyal employees, and Dad would buy a new Electra. We hated the Regal, as well. Too big for us. We ditched it for a Datsun Sentra hatchback. 

Dad had a few more cars until he stopped driving when he was 82 in 1994, explaining that in his new home near Bernie in Rockville, MD, “the roads don’t know me here.” His last car was a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass. He gave it to our son Dan who had recently passed his driving test. Dan didn’t care that it was an old man’s car. It was wheels, freedom. We soon swapped it out for a more sporty Mazda 323. 

Training for Household Chores Began at Sleepaway Camp

Most mornings Gilda makes our bed but that’s mainly because she rises before me; while I am washing up she returns to the bedroom to make the bed. She also believes she does it better than I do. Who am I to dispute such a labor-saving belief?

I tell you this because of a recent New York Times article professing the benefits of starting the day by making one’s bed, along with the best way to do so, as well as a section covering the debate over use of a top sheet (https://nyti.ms/2xFp71l).

The first time I was required to make my bed was my first morning in sleepaway summer camp 61 years ago (prior to that seminal away-from-home event our housekeeper tidied up my sleeping quarters during weekdays. I assume my mother did it on weekends).

When my bunkmates and I arrived at Camp Massad Aleph we found our beds neatly made by our counselors. That was the last time they performed that function. Henceforth, they informed their seven-year-old charges, we would be required to make our own beds during the daily cleanup hour after breakfast. During cleanup we were assigned chores, from sweeping the floors to bringing in dry bathing suits and towels from the outdoor clothes line to cleaning the sinks. Each task rotated daily based on a chore pinwheel posted prominently on a doorjamb leading to the bathroom.

Making a bed that first time required prior knowledge of hospital corners, the de riguer method of securing a taut military look for sheets and blankets. Prior to that morning I had never heard of hospital corners. My one and only sheet at home had been fitted, not flat. Now I had two flat sheets and three navy blue wool (itchy) blankets to secure to a metal frame bed.

A counselor demonstrated the proper technique of folding up a corner of a sheet before tucking it under the mattress. The procedure is repeated for the top sheet and two of the blankets, the third blanket becoming a jellyroll placed at the foot of the bed. When precisely done, a quarter dropped on the finished bed would bounce; a broomstick handle thrust inside a hospital corner would be swallowed up all the way to the straw brush.

These weren’t idle standards. Every day an inspector judged our handiwork. If your bed failed to pass muster, if the clothing in your cubby holes wasn’t stacked perfectly with all folded items forming a straight vertical line, you’d be held back from first activity, except if it was swim instruction (there was no way of getting out of swim instruction—believe me, I tried). 

At the end of each week—sleepaway camp lasted eight weeks back then—the cleanest bunks were awarded prizes such as additional candy privileges from the canteen. 

When I returned home I didn’t have to make my bed again until camp the following summer, but weekend house chores imposed by our mother became part of my routine and that of my brother and sister. We had three basic jobs: setting the dinner table, clearing the dishes after meals and dusting (full disclosure—Bernie and Lee do not recall dusting as a chore but I distinctly do, perhaps because, as the youngest, I was assigned a light task). We also had a daily assignment to pick up fruit and vegetables at Joe’s, the neighborhood produce store, and buy a fresh rye bread at the bakery on Ocean Avenue (our father thought bread made any meal taste better).

Being the youngest had the previously mentioned advantage of a lighter workload until both my brother and sister moved out, leaving me for several years solely responsible for all chores. 

The real beneficiary of my prolonged exposure to housework has been Gilda. Though I don’t often make our bed, I do set and take off the table and clean the pots and pans. I vacuum and do most of the shopping. But I don’t dust. Still, Gilda would probably tell you I don’t do enough around the house. 

Dennis Prager Brings Out Conflicting Emotions

How am I supposed to react when I see a person I went to school with for 16 years be the subject of an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times? And then, before I complete a blog about it, another Times article shows up in the Arts section Wednesday concerning a different controversy involving him. So what am I to feel?

Envy? Pride? Impressed? Depressed?

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens chastised Dennis Prager for recently tweeting the (liberal) media was a more existential threat to America and Western civilization than Russia. Among other things, Prager is dismissive of actions on college campuses that have shut down conservative speakers (https://nyti.ms/2tsxZIU and don’t forget to link to Prager’s online column for Townhall). 

For those who don’t know, Prager is a talk radio host, a prolific writer and co-author with Joseph Telushkin of two books on Judaism. Dennis and I were schoolmates through three different schools during our elementary, high school and college years. As high school freshmen, while our class was studiously trying to master French (ou est la bibliothèque?) at the behest of Mr. Rosenthal, Dennis was peering at a book under his desk teaching himself Russian. 

His intellect was what we would now call “gifted,” though back then, 55 years ago, it was unrecognized. We were in the B class. So was Telushkin. I spent the four years of high school in the same classroom with Joseph, but our ties go back even earlier. We were sleepaway camp bunkmates for four or five summers at Massad Aleph during our pre-teen years. Joe was not the best of athletes, but a fun guy to be around. 

In high school, he, too, never seemed intellectually challenged. One of my memories of Joseph was watching him play desktop golf during class. This was pre computer days. When I refer to desktop golf I mean there was a hole carved into the top of his wooden desk. He would make mini golf balls out of paper scraps, and from different spots on his desk would flick the wads of paper with his finger toward the hole. 

Aside from his dedication to the game, Joseph’s other defining characteristic was a spot of white hair at the front of his otherwise dark locks. He’s balding now so you’d never know it was there.

I’ve known for years, decades actually, that Dennis Prager held and espoused conservative views. Many, too many, of my Brooklyn Hebrew high school classmates do.

But I must say it goes beyond the pale (an intended pun, as the phrase “beyond the pale” comes from the tsar’s restriction on where Jews could settle in Russia) that anyone could equate a free and vibrant press with existential threats. It is widely agreed that democracy, a central platform of Western civilization, is strongest when the press is diverse and unfettered. 

Of course, voices on the left decry press outlets that advocate restrictive voting rights and repressive prejudicial laws while supporting a strong man president unchecked by Congress or the courts.

But let’s not give liberal media and activists a pass. Liberals have their own set of biases playing out in another Prager chapter. 

One of Dennis’ lifelong passions has been classical music. Often he conducts orchestras for charitable causes. He signed on to lead the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra August 16 at the world renowned Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

But his writings and rantings, specifically about LGBTQ issues, offend several members of the volunteer orchestra who refuse to play for him and want his invitation to conduct rescinded (https://nyti.ms/2vdl1OL).

So far Prager and the leaders of the orchestra are standing firm. Good for them. And bravo to those musicians who decline to participate. We should not condone intellectual boycotts no matter how repulsed we are by someone’s political or social stances. No one is forcing anyone to attend the concert or a lecture or watch a cable news station. 

Nor should we condemn individual musicians whose conscience does not allow them to perform. Keep in mind, members of Congress have chosen not to attend presidential addresses. Protest is a right enshrined in the Constitution. 

So, how do I feel? Sad, actually, that our country has devolved into a seemingly non stop pissing match where opponents barely respect their adversaries. Sad, because their antipathy often devolves into disrespect. Sad, because I doubt this condition will change in the foreseeable future.

Memories of a Bible Contest, Russian Vodka and a Ponytail

Every now and then contemporary events reported in the media evoke memories of my past. So it was with last Tuesday’s New York Times article about a Bible quiz of the Tanach, the Jewish Old Testament (BTW, The Times refers to the Jewish Bible as the Tanakh, but I prefer a transliteration of the Hebrew that is more gutteral, hence the “ch” ending  of Tanach with a sound similar to the beginning of the Yiddish word “chutzpah”). 

Anyway, to return to the present and memory at hand, here’s a link to The Times article: https://nyti.ms/2kDSObW.

Fifty-seven summers ago, as an 11-year-old, I competed in the first Bible quiz at Camp Massad Aleph in Tannersville, PA. I was well prepared for this endeavor, having attended six years of intensive Jewish instruction at Yeshiva Rambam in Brooklyn. Of course, all the other contestants my age had similar preparation, though not from Rambam. They came mostly from other Brooklyn Jewish day schools: Yeshivah of Flatbush, or Yeshiva Eitz Chaim, or Yeshiva Bialik, or Shulamith, an all girls school.

Preliminary testing of the 300 or so campers culled the finalists down to three boys from my age group. Years before feminism took hold, camp administrators realized it would be wrong not to have a girl among the finalists. 

She sat next to me on the stage in front of the assembled camp. I can’t remember her name. Nor do I remember any of the questions. I do remember we were the two final contestants and that she answered a question that stumped me. 

For her victory she received a large Bible. As the runner-up, my Bible measured half as large. Same complete text, but in a much smaller font.

Za zdorovje: The Russian toast “for health” is a cruel joke these days, given the outbreak of deaths from tainted vodka. As reported in The Times, a cheap substitute for vodka presumably made from ethanol actually contained methanol which is deadly.

At least 76 unsuspecting drinkers in Irkutsk have died from imbibing the lethal mixture. (https://nyti.ms/2m9doBx)

It is not the first time bad vodka has killed Russians. When Gilda and I took a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow back in 2010 we were told about the time Mikhail Gorbachev tried to cure excessive drunkenness by limiting the sales of vodka in state-run stores to one bottle a month. Thirsty Russians resorted to distilling their own brews. But their vodkas exceeded the safe 40% alcohol levels and many became ill or died.  

Ponytail Down: Two weeks ago during a monthly poker game, Gregg asked aloud if I was still retired. Told I was, he wondered, again aloud, why I didn’t have time to get a haircut. 

Normally a reliable reader of this blog, Gregg had missed or forgotten the December 29 posting in which I wrote I was growing a ponytail to fulfill my wife’s request. Alas, my curly hair becomes a Jewfro which is not, as Gregg diplomatically observed, always appealing. So last week I told Gilda my valiant try at a ponytail would be sheared away. 

While sitting in the haircutter’s chair, I was reminded that about 30 years ago she was set to cut the ponytail that our son Dan had grown during day camp. “Set to cut” because upon further inspection she spotted an all-too-common invasion in any camper’s hair—lice. 

An application of Rit resolved that problem. A week later Rosie clipped off his tail which for many years he kept in a clear plastic storage bag. 

Summer Camp Fights

Sports radio was all talk the last two days about the dust-up in the New York Jets training camp Tuesday that left starting quarterback Geno Smith with a broken jaw that will sideline him anywhere from six to 10 weeks. Smith was hit, some say sucker-punched, by Ikemefuna Enemkpali, a teammate, now an ex-teammate, an egregious infraction of acceptable camp behavior. 

I was particularly amused by Mike Greenberg of ESPN’s Mike and Mike morning show. Greenberg told his sidekick, former NFL defensive lineman Mike Golic, that he had never been in a real fight. I identified with Greenberg’s experience, or lack thereof. Until I harkened back to my fifth year at sleepaway summer camp. That year my annual summer rivalry with Elliot Levine came to a head. 

A little background: I first met Elliot in 1957 when I was eight-years-old, my second year at Camp Massad Aleph in Tannersville, Pa. Though a scrawny (read that, really skinny) kid, I was a pretty good athlete. The prior year I was arguably the best in my division.

So on the first day of my second year at Massad, I was quickly alerted to the prowess of one of our new bunkmates. I was told he could punch a ball all the way up the hill outside our bunk to the flagpole, a truly prodigious feat. With trepidation, I stepped outside to witness what proved to be an accurate accounting of his talent. He also could pitch softball better than I. He was, in short, a better athlete.

Naturally, we sustained a rivalry throughout that summer and the next three that we shared together, culminating in an after-lights-out fight one Friday night when we were 11. The tussle ended after he flipped me against the metal frame of a bed and a counselor mercifully showed up to end the mismatch. Actually, it didn’t quite end there. As we wanted to tangle, the counselor said, let’s do it the old fashioned way, with boxing gloves. Elliot outweighed me by about 30 pounds, but that didn’t matter to anyone except me. I’d like to say I acquitted myself admirably in the ring, but I’m still a little woozy as to the particulars of that encounter.

Our rivalry ended that summer. The following year my brother, sister and I went to a different summer camp. By the time Elliot and I re-engaged in high school, our competition had pretty much ceased. I even turned out to be the pitcher on our school softball team, undefeated our senior year. Elliot played shortstop.

GOP Disses Wal-Mart: Twice last week Republicans disrespected Wal-Mart. Once during the candidates’ debate last Thursday and again the following night on Real Time with Bill Maher, a prominent Republican said Amazon was the largest retailer in the world.

That must have been news to the good people in Bentonville, Ark. After all, Wal-Mart had global sales last year of $473.1 billion compared to Amazon’s $89 billion. 

If anyone should have corrected the Republicans it possibly should have been Hillary Clinton. For several years she served on the retailer’s board of directors.