October 2003

A History of My Father
In an excerpt from his new memoir Forever Fat, Pittsburgh author Lee Gutkind digs up his troubled past.

About ten years ago, my father decided to write a letter explaining himself. He wrote with a ballpoint pen on lined paper, took it to a local Kinko’s for duplication and the post office for mailing. As soon as I opened the envelope, and I realized what my father had done, I tossed it in a drawer. I did not want to read anything my father had to say about how or why he had raised me; I had invested many years in therapy learning to deal with the trauma from his violent outbursts and learning to get on with my life.

But one day, years after I received the letter, and for no particular reason, I dug it out of the file drawer, poured a cup of coffee, and started reading. Surprisingly, it was in no way traumatizing. The fact that my father had frequently whipped me with a leather belt and imprisoned me in the dark behind a locked basement door as punishment for misbehaviors real and imagined never came up. That his temper traumatized the whole family was also never mentioned. He was telling his own side of the story. He wasn’t looking at life from anyone else’s viewpoint.

My father was born in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, while two older sisters, Hattie and Ethel, were both born in New York. His father, Isadore, was a real estate agent and a tailor, who also owned a dry-goods store. The family lived upstairs. My father’s mother, Leah, my namesake, got sick before his tenth birthday, so my father was frequently kept home from school to help operate the store, the only employee. Neither the store nor the quarters above were equipped with electricity. There were gas mantels for light and a pot-bellied stove for heat in the kitchen. Firing up the boiler was permitted only on days they took baths. “I never had toys or a sled,” my father writes. “But in the winter I used to slide down the Thirty-fifth Street hill in the snow all the way to the railroad tracks on a garbage can lid.” He made a wagon from a buggy he resurrected from a junk pile and a scooter from discarded roller-skate wheels.

Leah’s diseased liver became more critical over the next few years, but on the day she signed my father’s registration for high school, Hebrew Polytechnic, she was sitting up in a wheelchair for the first time in months. When my father returned after school, his mother was dead. It was February 1, 1929, a Friday, and she was buried on a Sunday. As was the custom, most Orthodox Jews did not go to a funeral home, and they did not bury their dead during the Sabbath. So, after sundown on Saturday, Leah’s body was transported home from the hospital. “She was laid out in the living room with candles at her head—no coffin,” my father wrote. “In the morning, a wooden casket was brought in, covered with a black velvet shawl with a Star of David on it. I can’t express my feelings of what that did to me, my mother dead in the living room all night long. Orthodox Jews in heavy black clothing said prayers through the following night. She was buried at Beth David Cemetery, Long Island, New York, on Sunday.” From that point on, the family referred to my father as “the orphan.”

A few months after his mother’s death, my father came home from school. His father was absent, but a cousin directed him to the home of another relative. A wedding had just taken place, and my father arrived in the middle of a celebratory dinner. He was ushered into the room and seated across from a woman he had neither seen nor met before. This was his father’s new wife—my father’s new mother. Soon after, my father left home and restarted life alone.

He worked in a fruit store, as a Western Union boy delivering telegrams, and sold newspapers and peanuts and football souvenirs, which he designed and made himself, with the appropriate school colors. After graduating high school, he worked in a machine shop and as a draftsman. But this was in the height of the Depression and the company soon went bankrupt. For a while, he sold razor blades, then he began reconditioning used automobile spark plugs, purchased for a penny apiece. My father sanded and repainted them, set the gaps, had special boxes made, which said “Guaranteed Recon-ditioned,” then sold them back to the garages for retail sale to customers. One garage owner, who housed private taxicabs and limousines, offered him a job as a night watchman. My father taught himself to drive by zipping around the garage in the taxis in the middle of the night. Beer trucks owned by the mobster Dutch Schultz were also stored here, making deliveries throughout the city from midnight to five in the morning.

Eventually, he decided to hitchhike to Washington, D.C. to start a new life, but no one would give him a ride. He walked for three hundred miles. Late one night, he knocked on the door of a training camp for boxers in the Blue Ridge Mountains—the only light for miles around—and begged for food. I realized by the date of his letter that this could have been Jack Dempsey’s training camp when he was heavyweight champ. I momentarily envisioned my father being taken in by Dempsey’s people, fed and cared for and given some sort of janitorial job because he and the champ shared the same first name. Eventually the two Jacks got together and became buddies, which is how my father learned to box, and he was ringside when Dempsey fought his immortal battle with Tunney.

This was my vision—that my father had had an incredible secret life he might reveal that would redeem or explain him in my eyes—but it wasn’t true. My father was never ringside at any fight, couldn’t fight his way out of a shoe box, and never met anyone famous, except for when Robert Kennedy, on the campaign trail for his brother (another Jack), walked into my father’s store to borrow a ladder to get up on a podium. What happened at the training camp was that my father knocked on the door and was turned away. Nearly freezing to death, he huddled in a space between two outbuildings; the following morning, shivering every step, he journeyed to the nation’s capital.

Peddling his items in Washington wasn’t successful or satisfying. In Pittsburgh, you earned respect for working hard and showing evidence of industriousness. There was a certain pride in honest poverty, but in the nation’s capital, wealthy people of a variety of cultures looked past the down-and-out as if they did not exist. My father went to New York, lived for a while with his sisters, then met up with two cousins and hitchhiked to Chicago to see the World’s Fair. Unfortunately, he can’t tell me much of what he did in Chicago at the Fair—or relate any of his adventures on the road. He doesn’t even mention the experience in his letter.

After the Chicago World’s Fair, my father went to Clarksburg, West Virginia, to work as a clerk in a shoe store. In Pittsburgh for a weekend visit, Jack met Mollie. They were engaged in three months.

One reason for the whirlwind courtship and decision to marry quickly was my father’s 150-mile commute from Clarksburg to Pittsburgh, weekends, to be with my mother.
It is difficult to conceive of the passion that propelled him to bump and swerve six hours in his 1928 Ford on Saturday nights, after work, on half-paved West Virginia roads to see my mother on Sundays and then to turn around and retrace his path to be back Monday morning.

I doubt if my parents slept together before marriage, but they obviously experienced a certain amount of intimacy after marriage because my brothers and I were conceived—and we are most definitely and regrettably, by features and temperament, their children.

But in the eighteen years I lived with them, and during all of my visits for family events thereafter, I can’t remember Mollie and Jack touching one another. I cannot recall a single handhold, not one kiss.

Perhaps their passions were spent on the teeming Sunday afternoons they shared between my father’s mad dashes from Clarksburg to Pittsburgh. Or perhaps I refused to notice their regular physical connection and affection.

I have this tendency to not notice what I don’t want to see and forget what I don’t want to remember.

But if my parents had become better acquainted before marriage, I am certain I wouldn’t be telling this story because, the fact is, I wouldn’t exist. My mother and father had little in common.

In the duplex apartment upstairs from my grandparents, where we lived until I was fourteen, you could stand on a ladder in the bedroom closet behind my father’s suits and find a window-sized door that opened into a tiny attic. In that space were boxes of heavy black phonograph records, thick with dust: recordings of operas by great performers like Caruso, Lanza, and Ezio Pinza. And there were old long-yellowed books about communism, Zionism, political dissent, filled with his faded pencil scrawl—notes, stars, and exclamation points—evidence of engagement and excitement that were completely unfamiliar in the Jack I knew.

Here was the residue of my father’s tragic vulnerability—his compromise with life in order to have the home he was denied by the death of his mother and his father’s choice to remarry in such an insensitive and secretive manner.

I understood and accepted the logic and reality of putting his primary passions—opera and Zionism—on the back burner in order to be part of a family and to no longer feel so orphaned. But giving them up entirely meant giving up a piece of his heart—and denying his sons a valuable legacy.

After I read his letter, I asked him why he had walked away from the intellectual pursuits that intrigued him. It was a mistake to ask—I knew right away. Because, instead of providing information to establish a dialogue, he immediately assumed the role of the consummate martyr who did his best as a husband, father, and family provider, but was never properly understood. His litany went on for quite a while, basically blaming my mother’s lack of interest, as if he had been browbeaten by her ambivalence into silent intellectual submission.

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