to have the parents I did. You don’t get to choose your parents and sometimes you really don’t appreciate them until after you are an adult, living on your own, and have your own family to take care of. My parents were very, very happily married. My dad was a retired pharmacist and my mom a retired high school counselor with two masters degrees. My dad owned his own pharmacy but was not successful and had to declare bankruptcy. In the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a stigma attached to bankruptcy and my dad felt incredible shame. He worked very long hours, sometimes more than sixty per week, over the next twenty years at other pharmacies, and began paying back his debts, stressing to my sisters and to me that he would pay the smaller companies he owed back first because “they were small and needed it more.” Unlike today when people declare bankruptcy to get out of paying any debts they owe, my dad worked himself to near exhaustion every week so he could pay everyone back that he owed money to. I grew up in a home where devotion and fidelity to one’s spouse was paramount, and where devotion to one’s family was equally so. Times were rough during the early days when my dad went out of business. Every Sunday my folks would take my two sisters and I to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. It was our weekly family outing, something I used to always look forward to but something that had to end when my dad lost his business. I sometimes wonder if the reason I enjoy Chinese food so much and go to Chinese restaurants every week, and sometimes a couple of times a week, is to get back that lost part of my youth and the family dinners we once had that meant so much to me.
Other than not having family vacations or outings to local restaurants any longer my parents did everything they could to make our lives seem as normal as possible. My sisters and I never had to want for a sweater, scarf, coat, mittens or gloves to wear in the winter, and the food on our breakfast and dinner table remained the same as it always had been. Emotionally, losing his business was a very difficult thing for my dad and his lack of success made him feel as though he was a loser, but he was far from being a loser. He was a devoted and loving husband and father and a great friend to those he called his friend. My dad was an only child and more than anything else wanted a big family, and was thrilled to have three children. He was deeply in love with my mom. The sound of her voice would bring a smile to his face, and he used to refer to her as “my Bernice.” Oftentimes I would see my parents sitting on the sofa watching t.v. and holding hands. When I was a teenager and we sat around the family dinner table I accidentally used the word “damn.” Visibly quite angry my father immediately got up from his chair and came towards me. I got up from my chair and ran to the other side of the table and my father reared back to give me a wallop but my mom stepped in the middle and stopped him. My father told me “don’t you ever curse in front of your mother.” It was something I never did again, even when I was well into my fifties.
I was the youngest of three children. All three of us went to the same elementary school but my sisters were always much better behaved than I was and I often heard my mom return home from a parent teachers night after hearing glowing reports about my sisters, upset with what she heard my teachers report about me, and my mom would angrily tell me “just wait until your father gets home and I tell him!” I used to cower in fear under the covers in my bed and hoped I could pretend I was sleeping when my father came home from work and that I would not have him yell at me for misbehaving in school. My folks never used to hit me but they did yell and scream when I did something wrong. It seemed as though my two sisters could never do anything wrong and were never yelled at. We had a traditional home. Even though my mom had graduate degrees and a professional job and my parents did have an egalitarian relationship when it came time to go to college I was expected, as the male, to work and help pay for college whereas my parents paid for my sisters education. In our home I was expected to work and did everything from being a paperboy for the now defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, to working as a stockboy and sales clerk at the local pharmacy. I remember one summer when I had trouble finding work having to endure my parents anger every day for being home. I worked since I was fourteen and had a variety of different jobs. Unlike some other kids in the suburbs that I grew up with I did not have the luxury of spending the summer at the shore in Atlantic City, or visiting other countries. Either I found a summer job or else incurred the daily wrath of my parents. Looking back I’m glad my folks were as insistent as they were about my working and paying for my college education. I learned that once you work and earn your own money you have more of an appreciation for the things you purchase with your own money. While I would borrow my dad’s old car to go on dates in high school, my friends all had brand new cars their parents gave them when they reached sixteen. When I attended the University of Connecticut I had to walk across campus to pick up my dates and go out for a pizza and a movie. I was able to get my first car when I was twenty-three, a used 1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass my parents co-signed a loan for, which I paid back at the rate of $100.00 a month for twenty-four months. I treated it as though it was a Rolls Royce, taking it to the car wash every week, and feeling a sense of pride every time I looked at it. My friends may all have had cars since they were sixteen, but my first car, at the age of twenty three, was a feeling of enormous pride and happiness. My folks never had a lot of money and it always seemed that they had to struggle to make ends meet like most families. I didn’t grow up in a Jewish neighborhood and my neighborhood became mostly African American. When I was growing up racial prejudice was prevalent whether it was the separate drinking fountains and sitting in the back of the bus in the south, or like my neighborhood in Philadelphia where my parents had moved in 1950 when I was born, when after the first black family purchased a home on the block many other white families decided to move and within days “for sale” signs sprouted up all over and it seemed the white neighbors were engaged in a stampede to leave. It was insidious and was racism although northerners loved to criticize the south as being racist while the north supposedly wasn’t but it was in Boston where busses of school children were attacked when black children were bussed to white elementary schools. As Jesse Jackson once famously stated “it’s ain’t the bus, it’s us” and that was true all across the country when I was a growing up. Philadelphia didn’t have the Klan but white neighborhoods all across the city suddenly had white families moving to the suburbs once the first black families began moving into their neighborhoods.
I relished growing up in a neighborhood that was quite mixed. Northeast Philly was the area where most Jewish families resided and my peers went to schools where most of their classmates were Jewish. There was a lot of keeping up with the Joneses in those neighborhoods, but not in mine. I had many black friends in elementary and high school and the first time I went to school where whites were in the majority was when I went away to college in 1970. I attended Germantown High school which was made up of more than fifty percent black students and back in 1968 when I graduated the black and white students ate lunch together, were friends, and had each other over their homes. Despite all the reports about racial progress it was very sad to hear that in many of today’s high schools when you enter the lunch rooms you see the white kids sitting with other white kids and the black kids sitting with other black kids and rarely do you see them mixing. It seemed that we had come so far but yet still have not realized Martin Luther King’s dream of judging someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. We still had and have a long way to go before we can judge our fellow man by the size of his heart rather than his skin pigmentation. I found that growing up with people who were of different races and religions helped broaden my horizons and perspectives on life. Meeting other people was paramount in my growth, and unlike those who grow up in areas where their race, religion or culture was predominant I found that when you are able to see things from a different perspective it most definitely does affect the way you view your fellow human beings. Sometimes when we don’t share the experience of getting to know people who may look or sound different than we do and who may have certain cultural differences than we have we fail to see that in the end we are all very much the same, and want the same for our lives and those we care about. Our goals are not that much different. We live, we learn, and we love, we care, we share, and we laugh and cry and in the end we have many, many more things in common that should bring us together than we have that bring us apart. I’m proud that my parents did not sell their house when the first black family moved in. The black families that moved in were not that much different than my family and the color of their skin was the main difference but the lives they led, the things they wanted for their children, and the dreams they had for their future were
