Fathers’ Footsteps
My father was born May 23rd, 1902, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He died November 20th, 1994, at the age of 92, in Columbia, South Carolina, where he had moved in 1991, four years after my mother’s death, to live in the same city I did, given his desire to be as close to me geographically as he was emotionally. He was in exceptional health until age 91, when early dementia attacked one of the most extraordinary minds I have ever known, occasionally confusing and disorienting him. One year later my father died of pneumonia from complications of a broken hip, taking from me one of the finest people I have ever known. In so many ways, his story is my story; his journey mine; his words often my own; his memoir my memoir. His words will tell much of his story.
Five feet, 10 inches tall at the peak of his adult life, my father had shrunk to five feet four inches at the time of his death, the result of curvature of the spine. It disturbed me to watch my hero’s body shrink, making me wonder if I, too, would be similarly diminished physically. His brown hair had turned a white-silver, as my brown hair will apparently do, now already salt and pepper (perhaps more salt than pepper). His eyes were deep brown, as are mine, in both cases portals to our innermost souls.
During his 92 years, my father would be witness to a world even Jules Verne might not have imagined. In 1902, the year of my father’s birth, the first Mercedes was built, and the first large-scale production line of affordable automobiles was developed by Ransom Olds at his Oldsmobile factory. The Wright brothers flew their number three glider over 700 times. The first college football bowl game – the Rose Bowl – was played in Pasadena, California, where it continues to this day.
By 1994, the year of my father’s death, most American families owned more than one car; international aviation was literally an everyday occurrence; space travel was almost routine, Neil Armstrong having set foot on the Moon a quarter of a century earlier, on July 20, 1969; and Major League baseball players went on strike mid-season, canceling the 1994 World Series. An avid life-long baseball fan, my father, even through his dementia, and with less than two months to live, was sorely disappointed.
My father was raised on West Lincoln Drive, in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. His mother Carrie Stein Weyl was the only one of my grandparents I ever knew, and then only until her death in 1957 when I was 12 and my father 55; his father Maurice Nathan Weyl, from whom I get my middle name, died in 1926.
My father lived at home with his parents until 1943, when, at the age of 41, he married my mother Jane Ruth Lavin, who, at 24, was 17 years his junior. She died, however, at age 68, ironically predeceasing my father by seven years. Her death on May 22nd, 1987, came one day short of my father’s 85th birthday, for which my mother had planned a large celebration, which was, of course, cancelled. The date of her death tainted my father’s birthday the rest of his life.
Among the reasons my father gave for marrying so late in life was his determination not to bring children into a world at war – a war which saw 71 million military and civilian deaths, as well as the Holocaust, which, even as a non-practicing Jew, my father feared would have consequences well beyond the war years. I am forever grateful to my mother for changing his mind.
My father graduated from Philadelphia’s Germantown High School in 1919 (the year of my mother’s birth), and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1923 (as did I some 44 years later at Oberlin College in Ohio). His desire was to be a journalist, and he spent two years as a reporter for the now defunct Philadelphia Bulletin.
His parents, however, frowned on this “frivolous” career, and commanded my father to become a doctor or lawyer (apparently the stereotypical Jewish career choices even as early as the 1920’s ). Entering the School of Law at the University of Pennsylvania in 1926, my father received his Juris Doctor in 1928. He practiced law until his retirement in 1977.
My father left me a wonderful gift about which I remembered nothing until after his death, when, among many other treasures, I found carbon copies of over 100 letters my father wrote to me, with few exceptions, every week of my four years at Oberlin, almost always on Sunday. It was my incredibly good fortune to find those. I have not found my letters to him. I do not know whether he kept them; whether I have not yet found them; or whether they were inadvertently discarded during the process of removing his personal property and effects.
The first letter, dated February 23rd, 1964, came in the second semester of my freshman year. While I could attempt to summarize accurately my father’s life journey as expressed in those letters, his words describe his search far better than mine. In so many ways, his words, his story, his journey and his quest for the Holy Grail of knowledge and the nature of knowledge became mine. My story, however, is mine and his, his, and I will ask him to tell his part of the story.
Much of my father’s story is, of course, that of his father, my grandfather, about whom my father wrote: “My father had to leave school at about the age of fourteen because he was the son of a peddler and a member of a large family that sorely needed the two or three dollars a week he could bring home by having a job. He never had any formal education after that. But he had a tremendous thirst of knowledge and a driving desire to express himself in music and in writing. He married at the age of 25 and worked through to the day that he was stricken at his office and died a few hours later in a hospital.
“As a child he learned to play the violoncello poorly. German was the language of his home, so that he could converse in German and read it as a boy. Just about everything else in the way of culture he acquired after marriage – this in spite of a work day which kept him out from 7 A.M. until about 6 P.M., which saw him raise two children and help maintain various other members of his needy family.
“He took up piano at about the age of 30. He was largely, but not wholly, self-taught. He took up harmony, counter-point composition and orchestration. Again, he was largely, but not wholly, self-taught . . . [as he was when he] became fluent in French speech and reading. To a lesser extent, he mastered Italian. At the age of 55, with the aid of a phonograph, he taught himself to read and speak Spanish fluently. By self instruction, he learned much of mathematics, physics, chemistry (he established a laboratory in the basement at Lincoln Drive), history, sociology, etc. He read the Bible, cover to cover, twice. He composed music prolifically for piano, voice, chamber ensembles, choir and orchestra. A little of it was performed, but none of it was ever published.”
In many ways my father emulated his father. In a letter to me written on March 2nd, 1964, my father observed “Like my father, I’ve had many urges pushing from within; unlike him, I have let the tasks of every day blunt their fulfillment. These urges have included further self-education, writing (although not fiction), and, stated crudely, philosophy, religion, and the nature of knowledge.
“I have done considerable self-education since I left school behind, but not comparably to that which [my father] did for himself. My writing has been very little and mostly quite private. My quest of philosophy and the nature of knowledge has dwindled from a grandiloquent plan while I was still in law school to a trickling, inquisitive agnosticism. My quest of religion has followed a long, emotionally weighted course which does not yield itself to brief or easy description.” In that, and so many other ways, I am my father’s son.
My father was 62 when he began to write to me. I am 63. Reading his letters now, as if for the first time, I hear him speaking to me today, almost as if we were conversing. The observations he made in one of his first letters to me could well be mine: “The most noticeable thing about my sixtieth birthday anniversary was, I think, neither physical nor overtly emotional; it was, rather, a shift from predominantly looking ahead to predominantly looking behind. I feel no less vigorous than when I was fifty; to the extent that I am less physically active it is because the rule book tells me that it should be that way. Emotionally, I feel no older that when I was thirty-five. . . . The essential difference is direction: the feeling that the projects which were not undertaken before sixty can scarcely be commenced now; the feeling that the primary thing now is to distill the good from that which has been accomplished and to make a record of it; the feeling that the all important task is to serve others, principally in one’s family, who have the zeal and capacity to move, move, move ahead in accomplishments of the mind and the spirit and especially to apply these accomplishments.
“This, then is the warning that I shall frequently be autobiographical and philosophical in some of the letters to come. I’ll be writing to myself as well as to you. Like most autobiography, it will be inaccurate, subjective, and censored; but it will have these qualities more as a matter of unconscious than conscious self-protection and self-elevation.”
It is my turn now. I want to write to my own grown children so that my memoir may in time become theirs, so they too will come to know their father’s footsteps and the footsteps of the many fathers who preceded me and so much shape the father I am.
