Are a few observations.
Although he was right handed, he wore his watch on his right hand, which is slightly unusual. Also, he did not take his watch off when he went to bed at night.
Although he was almost completely bald, he got a shave and some sort of scalp treatment every Friday at the barber shop in the railroad station. He did have some hair around the edge of his head, which also got cut.
His tie, with a Windsor knot. I went to a grade school where we wore ties every day so he showed me how to do that knot. Once it was tied, you still had to pinch it. One of the few things I can remember him criticizing me for was if the knot didn’t look right.
Although he did not finish high school and I never saw him read a book, he had an excellent vocabulary. Once when I was about ten years old I said I would say a word and he should try to define it. He agreed. The word was impetus.
Before he went to work one day he gave me some money and asked me to buy a small pack of Perfecto Garcia cigars. I was also about ten years old at that time. That night he asked about the cigars. I said I had forgotten. He quietly but very seriously said that if I asked him to do something, getting it done became the most important thing in his life. That made a huge impression on me. Somehow it was really scary. The next day I got the cigars.
He was at the Jewish Orphans Home in Cleveland until he was 14 years old. When I asked if he ever tried to run away, he seemed surprised. “Never! We played indoor baseball every day.”
This picture was take at his office with a tiny “spy camera” called a Minox or something like that, which was briefly a fad in the 1950s.
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Author: Mitch Sisskind
