in class. They ridiculed him because he could not see well, called him “dummy,” and did to him all the nasty things oppressed children can do.
He graduated elementary school, then found work ten to twelve hours a day on the factory floor of the Continental Can Company. But he was rebellious. Finally, Grandpa Max felt it best to leave his obstreperous son with his friend, who was a small-time contractor: “Stay on top of him, because he don’t like to listen.” He did learn to be a painter, but he also learned that his salvation lay in escape: San Francisco, Shanghai, the U.S. Cavalry, the Open Road, and ultimately, himself.
Sam’s “formal education” ended at the eighth grade, but not his education. These are among my strongest boyhood memories of him: He would arrive home from work with the smell of sweat and turpentine about him, paint encrusting his nails and glasses: exhausted, haggard. After eating, he soaked in the bathtub for an hour; he had a tight, muscled body in those days, not the bloated, emphysema-distorted one that many who knew him in later life remember. Then his education began. He would lie in his bed surrounded by books and obscure radical publications piled as high as the mattress. And he would read. Not just political theory. Everything. Night after night, every weekend, each spare moment, he would lie on his back in a haze of cigarette smoke, reading.
He took his learning seriously but not his learned self. Years beyond these childhood memories, in 1971, Angus Cameron, the distinguished editor at Alfred Knopf, prepared to publish Sam’s ground breaking Bakunin on Anarchy. It was—is—a scholarly treatise on the towering nineteenth-century Russian revolutionist. Sam had translated Bakunin’s writings from various languages into English; the manuscript was replete with footnotes and references, which in some respects are the most important part of the book.
“Your credentials?” Cameron asked.
“Doctor of Shmearology, New York University, with a concentration in shit houses and boiler rooms,” Sam answered with mock pomposity, describing what he had painted there. It was the closest he had ever come to a college degree.
Cameron, a man of humor, appreciated the answer. “Bet you never expected to be in this office,” he exclaimed.
“As a matter of fact, I am well acquainted with your office!” Cameron was astonished to learn that by astounding coincidence Sam had painted his office several years earlier.
In fact, Sam’s knowledge of history, social movements, philosophy, psychology, and literature was vast and deep on many fronts. It started when he was a young man, taken under the wing of many leading anarchist and socialist intellectuals of the time. “They were my university,” he said.
He would take no job that required him to hire or fire another worker; he considered it immoral to exercise the power of bread over a fellow human being. Nor would he follow the career path of many an ex-radical and take the cushy jobs in the union bureaucracy he was offered. He wanted no part of union corruption and the betrayal of its members.
“Sam! Sam, it’s great to have you back!” It is Martin Rarback, the all-powerful Secretary Treasurer of the all-powerful District Council 9 of the Painter’s Union. Council 9 had all the large-scale work in Manhattan and the Bronx—basically NYC—tied up. Every office building, apartment project, public space, old and new, had to go through Council 9.
Sam had left the union years earlier when it was under communist domination, preferring to work for peanuts on his own. But now it was the 1950s and he wanted back in. So there he is in the large office of Rarback, who is facing him behind his large desk. He is genuinely delighted to see my father. They remember each other from the old days when Rarback was a burly young rebel who served as Leon Trotsky’s bodyguard during his brief stay in NY—before Trotsky headed to Mexico, where Stalin’s ice-pick awaited him. He eyes my father with a combination of warmth and veiled contempt. But the nostalgia wins out.
“Still at it, eh Sam? The Wobblies, the old days! I know what you think, seeing me here ‘taking Pie.’ Big office, good money, soft.” He grows passionate now, leans forward. “But Sam, let me tell you, I’m the same man. When those barricades go up, you’ll see me there!”
In the course of waiting for those barricades to go up, Martin Rarback came under criminal indictment for being neck deep in corruption. The inexcusable part to Sam was that Trotsky’s former bodyguard, who now lived at a lofty twin towers Central Park West address, took kickbacks for having his men work under substandard, dangerous conditions. He considered him a depraved person.
This is as good a time as any to mention that Sam had guts—a quality of his that I discovered in a strange way when I burst home from school one ordinary day to find him in bed, in fetal position, wrapped in blankets, shivering violently, and Mother draped over him, cradling him in her arms. Sun streamed in through their bedroom windows. It was broad daylight. Sam was never home at this time and never in bed. I was eleven years old.
He had been brought home by two of the men on the job. Seems he had cleaned his arms and neck with a rag soaked in benzene; that is how you removed the oil-based paint. But he had neglected to dry himself thoroughly and lit a cigarette, which ignited his right arm in flames. It was a revolting scene and as his flesh started to roast, some of the men started to gag and vomit from the odor. And in those seconds when he could have burned to death he extended his flaming arm outward—horizontal to the ground—and walked calmly to the other end of the large room, some thirty feet, and thrust it into a pile of sand. The men said they had never seen anything like it.
Sam went into shock; he could not stop shivering. Then he caught the flu and it took him ten days to get back to work. Not once did he mention the incident to us.
Old-fashioned guts: intestinal fortitude. The second time I was surprised to find him home in the afternoon involved high scaffold work—which he was wary of, and took only when there was nothing else to feed us. Far above the pavement, some ten stories up, he discovered the hard way that his partner, a new man, did not know how to tie the security knots. The scaffold turned into a lever, which rotated in a vicious arc, and threw the man off. Desperately, he hung on to the scaffold, torso and feet dangling, rigid with fear. As happens in New York, a crowd materialized in an instant to stare upward at the unfolding horror. Sam was at the pivot point twenty feet or so above the new man. He, too, had been knocked off balance and clung to the vertical cable. Somehow, he got to the new man, spoke to him gently, and holding him firmly, guiding him, managed to slide the two of them down the cable to the ground. The audience clapped, which was nice, then dispersed.
I remember his hands that day. The cables had sheared off a lifetime of calluses, and left them red, smooth, and painful. But the interesting thing to me now, as I write this, was his response: he got on the scaffold the next morning. And he took the new man, a Dominican immigrant, up with him after a stern talking to, and taught him the ropes. The man explained he was desperate for the work and had lied about his experience, thinking he could pick up what to do by watching Sam. All Sam had to hear was that the man was desperate for the work.
I think it is self-evident that Sam’s life strategy was not designed for economic advancement. You can add to that his refusal to take unemployment insurance for many years because he thought it charity from an institution he opposed: the State. Nor would he accept a tip or bonus, which he thought demeaned him. He put food on the table with back-breaking labor. Mostly he painted the decrepit apartments of the crumbling nineteenth-century tenements in our neighborhood. He was a superb old-fashioned craftsman: able, in the age before hi-tech, to match colors perfectly; even those that have faded from exposure over the years. He knew how to plaster, spackle, provide primer coating, and otherwise prepare a wall before actually applying the finishing paint that you see. It was incredible the way he could cover one-quarter of a wall with a single dip of the brush and long seemingly effortless strokes of his right arm—all to the rhythm of a Wobbly tune that he exhaled
