show time. The conversations in the auditorium began to die down and the theater became hushed. The set consisted of a simple living room where a boy and girl were playing a husband and wife whose friend had been murdered. They were seated next to each other on a sofa.
I was playing the detective investigating the murder. I stood in the wings, ready to make my entrance. My cue was the boy on stage looking at his watch and saying, ‘The inspector should be here soon.’ But instead of ‘soon,’ he started to say ‘any minute,’ and he caught himself and tried to change ‘minute’ to ‘soon.’ What came out was, ‘The inspector should be here any minsoon.’ He quickly corrected himself, but it was too late. Minsoon? That was the funniest sound I had ever heard. It was so funny, I had to laugh. And I could not stop. The more I thought about it, the louder I laughed.
The boy and girl on the stage were staring at me in the wings, waiting for me to make my entrance. I could not move because I was laughing too hard. I was helpless. The laughing took over completely and I became more and more hysterical.
The play had come to a standstill before it started.
After what seemed an eternity, from the auditorium I heard my teacher’s voice calling, ‘Sidney, come out here.’
I forced myself to leave the shelter of the wings and stumble out to the center of the stage. My teacher was in the middle of the auditorium, on her feet, listening to my frenzied outburst. ‘Stop it,’ she commanded.
But how could I? Minsoon?
The audience began getting up and drifting out of the auditorium and I watched them go, pretending that I was laughing because I wanted to, pretending that what was happening was not important.
Pretending that I did not want to die.
By 1930 the Depression had gotten deeper and was squeezing the economic life out of the country. Bread lines had increased and unemployment was pandemic. There were riots in the streets.
I had graduated from Marshall Field grammar school and had a job at Afremow’s drugstore. Natalie was working as a cashier at a roller derby, a new craze that took place in large rollerdrome arenas with huge circular wooden rinks where intrepid men on roller skates raced around the rink, knocking down their rivals and committing as much mayhem as they could while the audience cheered them on.
Otto, meanwhile, was traveling around the country putting together his hypothetical mega-deals.
Intermittently, he would come home filled with enthusiasm.
‘I have a good feeling about this. I just made a deal that’s going to put us on easy street.’
And we would pack up and move to Hammond, or Dallas, or Kirkland Junction, in Arizona.
‘Kirkland Junction?’
‘You’ll love it there,’ Otto promised. ‘I bought a silver mine.’
Kirkland turned out to be a small town, 104 miles from Phoenix, but that was not our destination. Kirkland Junction was a dilapidated gas station, and we ended up living in the back of it for three miserable months while Otto tried to corner the silver market. It turned out that there was no silver in the mine.
We were saved by a phone call from Uncle Harry.
‘How’s the silver mine?’ Harry asked.
‘Not good,’ Otto said.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’m in Denver. I have a great stock brokerage company going. I want you to join me.’
‘We’re on our way,’ Otto told him. He hung up and turned to Natalie, Richard and me. ‘We’re moving to Denver. I have a good feeling about this.’
Denver turned out to be a delight. It was pristine and beautiful, with cool breezes sweeping down from the snowcapped mountains through the city. I loved it.
Harry and Pauline had found a luxurious, two-story mansion in an elegant section of Denver. The back of their home looked out on an enormous, verdant piece of land called Cheeseman Park. My cousins, Seymour, Howard, Eddie and Steve, were glad to see us, and we were delighted to see them.
Seymour was driving a bright red Pierce Arrow and dating girls older than himself. Eddie had been given a saddle horse for his birthday. Howard was winning junior tennis matches. The moneyed atmosphere in their lives was a far cry from our dreary existence in Chicago.
‘Are we going to live with Harry and Pauline?’ I asked.
‘No.’ They had a surprise for me. ‘We’re going to buy a home here.’
When I saw the house they were going to buy, I could hardly believe it. It was large, with a lovely garden, in a quiet suburb on Marion Street. The rooms were large, beautiful and welcoming. The furniture was fresh and lovely, far different from the musty furniture in the apartments I had lived in all my life. This was more than a house. This was a home. The moment I walked in the front door, I felt that my life had changed, that I finally had roots. There would be no more moving around the country every few months, changing apartments and schools.
Otto is going to buy this house. I’m going to get married here and my children will grow up here…
For the first time in my memory, money was plentiful. Harry’s business was doing so well that he now owned three brokerage firms.
In the fall of 1930, at the age of thirteen, I enrolled at East High School, and it turned out to be a very pleasant experience. The teachers in Denver were friendly and helpful. There was no throwing of inkwells at students. I was starting to make friends at school, and I enjoyed the thought of going home to the beautiful house that was soon to be ours. Natalie and Otto seemed to have settled most of their personal problems, which made life even sweeter.
One day, during a gym class, I slipped, hurt my spine and tore something loose. The pain was excruciating. I lay on the floor, unable to move. They carried me to the school doctor’s office.
When he was through examining me, I asked, ‘Am I going to be crippled?’
‘No,’ he assured me. ‘One of your discs has torn loose and it’s pressing against your spinal cord. That’s what’s causing the pain. The treatment is very simple. All you have to do is lie still in bed for two or three days with hot packs to relax the muscles, and the disc will slip back into place. You’ll be as good as new.’
An ambulance took me home and the paramedics put me to bed. I lay there in pain, but just as the doctor had said, in three days the pain was gone.
I had no idea how deeply this incident was going to affect the rest of my life.
One day I had an out-of-this-world experience. There was an advertisement for a county fair in Denver, where one of the attractions was a ride in an airplane.
‘I’d like to go up,’ I told Otto.
He thought about it. ‘All right.’
The plane was a
