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FATHER'S DAY 1953
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Through the first 15 chapters of THE MEMOIRS OF GERALD NACHMAN, we've mostly followed the chronological line of his professional career. This week, in observation of Father's Day, we break away from that chronology to begin a four-chapter series that takes us back to his teen years and his relationship with his father on a strange pilgrimage they took together in the summer of 1953. The careeer chronology will resume after this brief return to his youth. |
with a dad he hardly knew
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
One summer. seven
years before his death, my father and I went on a strange coast-to-coast
odyssey. The first I heard of the planned train journey east
was a night in early May when I noticed him at the dining room
table--his downstairs desk--bent over a sheet of graph paper
on which he had written out an “itinerary,” a new word
to me.
Methodically, he had written out the names of all the cities we would visit in his distinctive, neatly squared-off lettering, like the printing on blueprints. Indeed, he wrote with a blue pencil from the store where he worked--E. Bercovich & Sons, the name inscribed on the pencil with an elegant ampersand.
When we rode east that June of 1953, I was 15 and my father was 51, my age when I wrote a first draft of an account of our trip. I doubt if I thought much about how old he was then, much less what it meant to be a man in your early 50s. He seemed to be that same vague age of all parents when you’re a kid. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would ever be 50. I seemed permanently stuck in my mid-teens, and it wasn’t until I stepped off the train six weeks later that I finally felt unstuck, a widely traveled man of the world.
It seemed an unlikely idea that my father and I should go on a long train trip together, for we had spent so little time together--just the occasional Oakland Oaks ball game. Exactly why he devised the trip remains part of the mystery of that six-week trek that threw us together, day and night, through eight cities a long way from our Oakland, California, home: Denver, Chicago, Peoria, Lansing, Niagara Falls, New York City, Washington, D.C., Virginia Beach, then back to Oakland via the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles. The stretch between Virginia Beach, our destination, and the Grand Canyon must have been broken up, but the Southern leg of our journey remains hazy to me.
We went to Virginia Beach to attend a convention of a Jewish fraternal organization called Pi Tau Pi, which had no links to collegiate life. My dad had spent only two years at Bradley University before leaving during the Depression to go to work in my grandfather’s furniture store in Peoria. Why he belonged to Pi Tau Pi I can’t say. Pi Tau Pi was just a group of businessmen whose sole purpose, as far as I could gather, was to whoop it up at annual conventions, sort of like Jewish Shriners.
On the sheet of graph paper (which I still have), he wrote out the cities and the mileage between them, and the days and times of arrival. We were to begin June 15, a week after school let out, and return July 30, a day before my mother’s 41st birthday. We would travel aboard the famous new Southern Pacific “Vista Dome” train, departing from the Oakland “Mole,” the dingy downtown station, with our first stop Denver two days later. I knew nothing of Denver, except that it had an omelet named after it, or in fact of any of the places we were going to see. I’d never been out of the Bay Area--not even to Lake Tahoe or Yosemite, where it seemed everyone in my class went regularly to ski.
Our only family trip was to Los Angeles to visit my Uncle Carlyle, his tall, glamorous second wife Helen, an ex-model with big red Joan Crawford lips, heavy eyebrows and eyelashes, and their bratty adopted son, Ronnie. Uncle Carlyle was my dad’s half brother. Their father had married one of two sisters. When she died, he then married her sisterm having a son by each. Uncle Carlyle fancied himself a “player.” He was full of gifts and laughs, like my dad, but louder and more fun--at least for me. He took us to the famed Sportsman’s Lodge, the home of Jack Benny’s Sportsmen Quartet, where he introduced tus to Ken Carpenter, one of radio’s best-known announcers, who was, like my dad and uncle, a Peoria native. Uncle Carlyle knew everyone.
The main attraction of the Sportsman’s Lodge then was a running brook outside a big rear window, where you could see the fish they caught and cooked for dinner. Wow. L.A. was a magical place, with lots of attractions, including my favorite--the Farmer’s Market, where I watched cakes being frosted with pink elephants in a window. We went to a radio program, “The Gracie Fields Show,” though I had no idea who Gracie Fields was. It was a huge thrill to watch a radio show going out over the air. I was a radio child, so anything at all to do with a live show fascinated me then. (And eventually led to my book, “Raised on Radio.”)
Other than the weeklong Los Angeles family outing, I had never spent much time with my father. So, when he announced our six-week trip to the East Coast, he was sort of a stranger to me and I worried how we would get along, thrown together. At home, we often got into squabbles, all of which he won handily with a combination of wit and sarcasm, his favorite weapon; he never laid a hand on us, but his sardonic tongue could sting.
Just why he decided to bring me along, and not my mother, I can only speculate about. He might have seen it as a kind of male bonding and coming-of-age ritual. (Or maybe he had a girlfriend stashed away in Virginia). I sensed that he fretted about my lack of “social graces” (in his phrase), for he was a very social animal, as I was not then. But who was at 15?
He was a handsome charmer people gravitated to, a guy both men and women just liked being around. My mother’s best friend, Ruby, flirted with him so openly that he once shocked me by vowing that the next time Ruby kissed him hello on the lips he was going to stick his tongue down her throat. My dad wasn’t crude so it was shocking to hear him say something so raw (I had no idea what sort of kiss he was talking about); I’d never heard him say anything remotely sexual before.
A confident, attractive guy, he stood two inches under six-feet but seemed taller because of his outgoing manner, vitality and presence. Dark, square-jawed, engaging and dapper, he moved with the easy grace of an actor--which he was, though he never made a nickel at it.
He earned his living selling furniture but, from his days with the Peoria Players, he had performed in “little theater”--as it was then called, playing acerbic, wisecracking best friends, very much in the George Sanders tradition. When I was growing up in Oakland, he was a regular in groups in Berkeley and the suburban Orinda Dramateurs, always getting good notices for his polished style. While still a young man in Peoria, the critics (in crumbling reviews I found after he died, pressed in an old Theatre Arts magazine), predicted a bright future for him in New York or Hollywood. “We expect much of Leonard Nachman in years to come,” read one review in the Peoria paper.
But any glamorous show biz dreams were dashed during the Depression after he was forced to go to work for his dad and soon settled down. In 1933, at 28, he married my mother; I came along five years later and sister Judy three years after that. When I was 12 or 13, I ran his lines with him as he lay on his bed. I went to all the plays he was in, long-forgotten plays like “The Late George Apley,” “The Wisteria Tree,” “The Guardsman” and “Springtime for Henry.” (I may have been one of a handful to get Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler” reference in “The Producers.”)
While nothing was heard of him in New York or Hollywood, he carved out a niche in Bay Area community theater, a minor star on the East Bay stage circuit where he drew constant good notices. It remains a proud memory for me, and a slightly sad one, for had he been able to continue onto New York or Hollywood, there’s little doubt he could have had a solid career playing comic supporting roles in the manner of Sanders, Gig Young and Tony Randall, and possibly even major dramatic leads.
He never mentioned any such fancy notions, seemingly content to do his best in whatever play he appeared, which brought him plenty of joy and local attention. He may have resented having to work selling end tables and easy chairs to support his family, but I never heard him grumble. To my father, selling was a branch of performing, and he relished the psychological challenges and the art of persuasion. He would have made a terrific attorney--personable, compelling, witty and (in arguments with me) fiercely logical.
My father looked upon selling as an opportunity to study human behavior, of which he considered himself a keen observer, one reason he so loved performing. He was a teacher of little life lessons, seemingly off-hand comments I realize now were meant to instruct me in how to comport myself, often ending with, “Let that be a lesson to you.”
When he wasn’t warning me against acting like a “lunkhead,” he would say, “Don’t be a schmo.” He was very concerned that I not grow up to be a schmo. There was a certain correct way to do everything, whether it was parting his hair, packing a suitcase, making a bed, cracking an egg or sterilizing a safety pin to extract a splinter, one of his specialties. Somehow he seemed to have mastered all of life’s details.
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into the radio-TV family of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. That's son David, arms on the shoulder of little brother Ricky. Peering over Harriet's shoulder is young "Jerry," the Jewish son the Nelsons never took out in public. Gerald admits he probably wanted a friendly dad like the ones on all the radio shows he listened to so avidly, possibly searching for a father "I might feel more at home with..." |
His day job was general manager of “the store,” which loomed large in our lives. While I had no idea exactly what a general manager was, it sounded impressive when I bragged to friends what my dad did. Mainly, he played referee to the battling Bercovich brothers--Al, Harry, and Sam, who owned the upscale furniture store on Franklin Street in downtown Oakland. On one side stood a gym run by a chatty muscle-bound guy named Jack LaLanne, and on the other side was Abe Rose Sporting Goods.
I had never known anyone with names like Al, Harry or Sam--they sounded like a vaudeville team. The idea of naming a baby Harry or Sam struck me as funny. While I never knew them well, they were a constant presence in our life. Al, the oldest and the loudest, was fast-talking and manic. He often stopped by our house on the way home for a drink, probably girding himself for what lie ahead, his fearful wife Belle, to whom he was constantly referring, deferring or apologizing; every phone conversation home was interspersed with a dozen “yes, dears."
The middle brother, Harry, tiny as a jockey, was a gentle soul with a benign, almost doleful, look who spent his time calming the frenetic Al. Sam, the youngest of the trio and by far my favorite, was close to my father--a tall, lanky, good-looking guy who laughed as he spoke. Whenever we would meet, even decades after my father’s death, Sam would always say what a “wonderful man your dad was.”
I liked that Sam liked my father and went out of his way to tell me. “Your dad was so proud of you,” Sam would say, which came as news to me. To some, Sam seemed excessively jovial, laughing at anything even mildly amusing, but to me he seemed genuinely warm and endearing. Beneath all the ebullience I detected a decent guy. I liked being around Sam, everyone did; he made you feel good. Perhaps he and my dad were drawn to each other’s radiance. Even now, with Sam a springy 92, as I edge toward 70, he never fails to say, “There was never a finer man, never a finer friend!”
It was always an occasion when my mother, my sister and I met my father at The Store; it was like going backstage to meet a star. We were treated grandly. The Bercovich boys would come dashing from their offices to greet us, out of respect for my father. “Your dad’s on the floor,” Al would say, i.e., with a customer and could not be disturbed.
While we waited for my father to finish with a customer, I would sit on all the new furniture, trying out every chair and sofa in the store, or wait impatiently in his office, which I found both boring and mysterious, wondering what arcane data might be stored in all those metal filing cabinets and accordion folders. It all looked impressive...and incredibly dull. There was nothing to play with except a metal address book, in the days before Rolodexes, which popped open when you slid a metal arrow down to a letter of the alphabet. Also plenty of blue and red pencils and piles of order books and invoice sheets, whatever an “invoice” was. As a burgeoning cartoonist, I would pocket several blue E. Bercovich & Sons pencils, like the one my father had used to make out our itinerary.
We were not a family that played together, or ever traveled anywhere except that trip to Los Angeles, which made our six-week cross-country journey so out of character for my father. He never took us anywhere except an annual retreat each summer to a resort in Lake County, north of Oakland, dropping us off and returning on weekends. It was as if he and my mother had their own life apart from my mother and their kids.
Siegler’s Resort was full of Jews in what I guess was a sort of Northern California version of the Catksills. It seems odder now than it did then--as a kid you presume that your family life, however bizarre, is normal--but I can’t recall that he ever took us to a circus, or on a picnic, or even to a movie, and only rarely out to eat.
Families rarely ate out then. It was a special occasion when we dined out as a group, maybe twice a year--always at the same place, the Athens Athletic Club, a downtown businessmen’s club to which my father went for an occasional swim and steam room shvitz, where my father once took me in a Jewish rite of passage; I stumbled out after 10 minutes, a wrinkled baked potato.
He also belonged to the semi-exclusive Town Club that met in a mansion in Piedmont that was once the home of Earl Warren. The members were mostly what I took to be well-to-do Jewish families. Were we well-to-do? I never thought about it, but based on the home and neighborhood we lived in, I would guess we were upper middle-class. I once asked my father how much our house cost and he said $20,000, a lavish estate then.
There was a lively but only semi-visible Jewish community in Oakland that my parents were part of. My sister and I went to Sunday school, where my father taught a course in “Jews in American History,” but we only went to synagogue on the high holy days. My father was more observant than my mother, who had been raised in a minimally Jewish home in San Francisco and, indeed, went to high school at the Dominican Convent in San Rafael, across the Golden Gate Bridge, driven to school each day. While she wasn’t very Jewish, she had a private spiritual side I uncovered--a little monthly journal she read, The Forward, full of self-help scriptures from Norman Vincent Peale.
We celebrated Christmas, with a tree, gifts, stockings, but not Chanukah or Passover; my father drew the line at allowing a wreath on the front door. For three summers I went to summer camp at St. Mary’s College in the East Bay, dutifully attending morning mass and sprinkling myself with holy water, kneeling and mouthing the hymns. No one seemed to guess that I was a ringer. I loved the camp because we slept in dorms, played a lot of softball and hiking was not required. They even had a student co-op, with a soda fountain and a jukebox--my idea of summer camp.
I liked the Town Club more than the more austere, darker Athens Club, because it was homier and cheerier and had an actual jukebox, to me the most lavish toy imaginable. A jukebox in a house--and no nickels required--struck me as the height of luxury. All you had to do was push a button and out popped a tune, like “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” which I alternated with three Perry Como hits, “Tzena-Tzena,” “Whoop-De-Do” and “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”; 1953 was a big year for Perry.
It was, as I say, a major outing when we would dress for dinner--me in a coat and tie --to go to one of the clubs where everyone knew my father. The membership seemed comprised of the Friends of Leonard Nachman. My mother, myself and my sister were more like members of his entourage.
He was nothing if not fastidious about his appearance, famous in his circle for how he dressed. My grandmother, not a woman easily impressed, would trill, “Oh, your father--what a dresser he was! He always took such care in how he looked.” He had totally snowed her and my usually gruff grandfather as well. He had me wearing ties very early, one of our periodic arguments--only for me to grow up and be razzed by friends for years as a guy who wore a tie to work even though I didn’t need to. I was never a natty dresser, like my dad, but that was part of the dress code of the 1950s and part of his dapper image as a salesman and a performer. You just always had to look good.
In photographs of him on my wall he is always impeccably dressed. In one rakish photo of him in a tuxedo, cigar in hand, he looks almost Gatsbyesque, or so I romanticize it, standing with my mother against what appears to be a ship’s railing but was more likely a banister; I don’t think they went on any cruises. She looks shy, tentative, but in photos he is always gleaming with vitality and virility. In a snapshot of him in his 20s, he stands with his hands on his hips, hair slicked back, feet apart, in a snappy sweater and crisply creased trousers, all eager and dashing.
I don’t want to overstate his appeal, because he wasn’t flamboyant or a glad-hander, but people (like his immediate family) sought his approval--all the more so because he didn’t court attention. They told him jokes, hoping he’d laugh and bestow one of his own “stories” on them, which he sketched in with rich details, accents, dramatic pacing, turning each tale into a polished one-act play. I could not and still cannot tell a joke, or even remember one. He had a fund of jokes, accumulated in his years on the road, where, like Willie Loman, my father was not just liked, he was “well liked.”
He was much less accessible to me. I was both wary of, and in awe of, him. It seemed such an odd anomaly--the cheeriness he exuded with others and the coolness I felt at home. Perhaps because he was so esteemed by strangers and had such a natural rapport with the world at large, he didn’t require it at home. Maybe he didn’t try as hard with us as he did with strangers, on whom he relied for his livelihood.
Yet he wasn’t a cold man. He was visibly affectionate with my mother, kidding her, and charmed my grandparents, who treated him like a prince. Yet between us there was a silent gulf. When we worked on weekends, in what seemed an endless Sunday ritual of taming our scraggly backyard, I felt almost like his employee.
So whatever would we find to say to each other on a month-long trip--this attractive, easy-going man and his awkward teenage kid with the stutter? I resist blaming my verbally embattled boyhood on my father, but there may be a link. As I’ve mentioned, earlier, I stopped stuttering once I began to find my voice in print. Writing gave me a confidence I needed that my dad’s presence may have stifled. I don’t think it was anything he did, simply how he was, that intimidated me and tied my tongue in knots. There is also this to consider, but is probably too big a reach: he was an actor and very critical and I became a critic of actors--some sort of primitive revenge on my father?
My dad was a last vestige of the classic Victorian-era father--a man who believed that parents ruled and were not pals to their kids, as so warmly depicted in “Life with Father.” In the 1950s, parents fussed much less over their kids. Very often, in fact, my sister and I would eat dinner before my dad came home, leaving my parents to enjoy a quiet dinner together. I can’t recall any family discussions despite my mother’s earnest attempts to get us all to discuss a current event--this was the era of “togetherness,” a slogan fostered by McCall’s or Redbook, on both of which my mother doted. Her efforts to foster togetherness at home met with scant success.
Our most harmonious dinners were not spent hashing over current events but answering questions from “The Giant Quiz Book,” with my mother as genial quizmaster. My father, like me, was a quiz fiend; my sister was totally bored. Starved for knowledge, he hoped to make up for leaving college without graduating by a valiant attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, taking a volume to bed each night as pleasure reading.
In the end, I suspect, my father was as unsure how to be a father as I was uncertain how to be his son. I thought of him as, and, remarkably, even called him, “father.” Now and then, to experiment, I might call him “Dad,” but it felt unnaturally chummy and hollow and never really fit him. He called me “Jer” or “son.”
The success of many sitcoms is largely based on some longing for an idealized surrogate happy family (at home, in an office, even at a saloon) where everyone kids around and bonds at the finale fadeout. I probably wanted a “dad” like Ozzie Nelson, Sam Aldrich on “The Aldrich Family,” or Chester Riley on “The Life of Riley,” the friendly dads on all the radio shows I listened to so avidly, possibly searching for a father I might feel more at home with (if that doesn’t sound too desperate and wistful).
The Fifties was, after all, the era of the “absent father.” Mine was literally away much of the time and emotionally away at home. I was relieved when he went on the road for a week, when life around the house seemed much more relaxed--no hated weekend chores, no lectures about raking the leaves, no more walking on eggshells.
One real life sitcom family was the Millers, a brood of six that included my close friend, Don. The Millers’ easy-going dad, the wry and amusing and ever-tanned Frank, joshed with his four kids; his wife Janice reminded me of Harriet Nelson - pretty, sexy even, with a chuckle in her voice. They were always laughing and had a robust Kennedy-like drive and sense of accomplishment. The Millers were great boosters of each other, and any of their kids’ friends were welcome at backyard barbecues. I loved going to Don’s house for dinner--full of jokes and gentle ribbing and games and revelry, so unlike the quiet severity in my own house. I felt funnier, more accepted, at the Millers’.
My other surrogate family was the Lawrences, whose oldest son Bob was a close friend. They lived in upscale Piedmont in a rambling house, much like the Millers, and, like the Millers, the kids joked with their parents and the house always seemed filled with laughter and joshing. Bob’s mustachioed father looked a little like Groucho Marx so his kids called him Groucho. I spent many a weekend sleepover at the Lawrence’s, watching old Johnny Mack Brown westerns on their big TV set and playing ball at the playground up the street with their wealthy Piedmont pals in their cashmere sweaters. I considered the Lawrences relatives--“Uncle Larry” and “Aunt Vi,” a tall thin woman with mournful eyes whose favorite expression was “Bless your little heart.”
Each of these cozy extended families was where I went to enjoy myself, whereas my house was just where I lived.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The photo of Leonard Nachman is courtesy of the author. The photo of The Nelson Family with their mythical third son combines a youthful photo of the author with a standard publicity photo of the Nelsons. This special extract from a work in progress is published by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted here June 11, 2007.
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