South Chicago Stories

transmitting more ancestral memory fragments

Third cousin (or so) John Robbins, the son of Baskin-Robbins founder Irvine, just died. Thoughts of mortality prompt this delayed disorganized attempt to preserve some stories from my ancestors. I’ll start with minor stories related to that fairly distant branch.

John’s grandfather Aaron who started the ice cream business was a relative of my father Sam’s mother Rose, first cousin I guess. Rose wasn’t crazy about Aaron. Grandma had a very low opinion of the kosher rules, which she saw as an excuse for men to boss women around. Still, she wasn’t impressed by Aaron’s answer when someone asked him how they made their special Kosher ice cream: “So we’re tallink them there’s no gelatin in it.” Rose and my father both were fond, however, of Aaron’s brother Jack, the eccentric idealistic founder of the Boys Brotherhood Republic, whose life and work were just recounted in a book by Hendrik Hartog.

Rose’s husband Morris, who died before I was born, did follow the kosher laws, at least within the city limits of Chicago. Since he was a car mechanic, Sunday drives out to the countryside were one of the few family outings. And if there was nothing to eat at some farmhouse but some ham and eggs, letting your family starve was a greater sin.

Morris had come over from Belorussia. His family worked in the lumber business out in the countryside near Vitebsk. Only a few memories from there survived. After a spell of miserable wet weather a neighboring farmer got drunk and fired his blunderbuss up at the sky yelling “You old fool, you don’t know what you’re doing any more.”

A general also lived nearby. He advised Morris to get out of the country since it was going to blow up soon. I think this was just before 1905, so it was good advice. It may not have been purely altruistic, since the general probably suspected that Morris, a good looking young man, was sleeping with his wife. At any rate, Morris was drafted into the Czar’s army. On the first day, some sergeant kicked him hard in the shins and cursed at him. Morris snuck out of the Russian empire hidden under a wagon full of nuts.

Morris somehow ended up for a while in Pocahontas, West Virginia. Something happened there that was so horrible that I’ve almost never told anyone about it and that I will reserve for the end of these stories.

Rose was only a few years old when she came over from Jedwabne, Poland, later to become infamous for massacring all its Jews. When she was very old I asked if she had any memories from there. She remembered only bobbing for apples in a pond and seeing a parade when the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph made a visit.

When she was in her nineties, Rose lived in an old folks home in Los Angeles. I visited my aunt Florence and her family in L.A. on a Thanksgiving when Rose came over for dinner. It must have been a Jewish old folks home because as Rose dug into the dinner ham she cackled “if those yentas could see me now!”

I guess Sam took religion fairly seriously when he was young. His doubts, however, were finally confirmed when at about age 11 he nervously took an electric streetcar to a White Sox game on a Saturday. Not only was the forbidden streetcar not struck by a bolt of lightning but also the Sox won. That settled it.

Religious education was not impressive. There was a notoriously ignorant Hebrew school teacher who the kids teased. “This Middle Sea (in Hebrew), what do you think it was?” The teacher pondered and came up with “Ich denke ist Atlantic Ocean.”

Sam’s maternal grandpa Benjamin appeared in an previous story, warning Sam after Los Alamos that the world wasn’t ready for the bomb. Benjamin loved to tease the religious types. At one point he managed to persuade a bunch of old guys hanging around a synagogue that dentures were eating implements so that using the same ones on milkich and fleschich (not to mention Passover) violated the rules. Purification required burying the impure implements for some period of time. (60 days?) According to the story they were already digging up the yard when the rabbi arrived and straightened things out.

On a more serious note, the claim was that back in the old country Benjamin knew a devout guy who believed that everything written in Hebrew was true. Benjamin scrounged and found a Hebrew version of the New Testament to give him. According to the story, the guy went home and curled up in bed and died after a couple of weeks. (Once they’re written down some of the Benjamin stories look possibly exaggerated.)

Sam’s paternal grandfather Eliezer was a serious rabbi. He was so serious, in fact, that he declined to have a job, letting his sons in the automobile business support him. Eliezer once made a point of not eating Rose’s mushroom omelet because mushrooms contained (non-kosher) worms. Rose denied that her mushrooms had worms. She made a point of tormenting him by always making her best mushroom omelets when he came over.

Oddly, Eliezer and Benjamin got along well. Once Eliezer asked Benjamin how his trip to the zoo had gone. “Not too well. I asked where they kept the chasidische rabbonem [Hasidic rabbis] but they said they didn’t have any.” Eliezer took it in good spirits.

Sam had a bit of memory of WWI from around when he entered school. His uncle Barney (Rose’s brother) was also still in school but wanted to just hang out and read the papers about the war. How to get school canceled? Simple, put limburger cheese on all the radiators so that when the heat went on the smell became unbearable.

After the war the Spanish flu hit. Sam remembered lying feverish in bed listening to the hearses go down the street. Barney was then living in South Bend. Rose had an intuition that he might be sick and went to check. He was sick, and she looked after him, perhaps saving his life.

Sam’s much-loved sister Florence got polio. She recovered but when she was old was severely weakened by post-polio syndrome. Although this is supposed to be just a collection of anecdotes, I can’t resist saying how infuriating it is to see vaccine-rejection appearing as a leading symptom of our civilizational collapse.

The South Chicago school was pretty tough. At the start of one year, kids were supposed to tell what had happened over the summer. One said “My fodder kilt a scab.” The teacher responded “Oh no, surely you don’t mean that.” The kid replied “Sure, trun a brick at his head and kilt him.” Nobody knew if it was true.

One kid (I think his name was Aby Gazenput) was acting up. The teacher said “I’m afraid some of us here have no home training.” Aby asked “Who ain’t got no home training, kid?” I may be mixing people up, but I think he was the same kid who became a fighter pilot ace in WWII and survived.

Morris had started out as a bike mechanic and then moved on to cars, part of a Buick dealership in which his brothers had the more white-collar jobs. By classic hard work and thrift, Morris had saved some money. He put it in a bank. Black Tuesday hit and the bank never opened again. Sam remembered times when the walls were covered with ice because they could not afford heat.

This would have been when Sam was an undergrad at U. Chicago, still living at home. It was as an undergrad that he had the extraordinary privilege of taking classes from the chemist/physicist/mathematician A.C. Lunn, the unsung first formulator of modern quantum mechanics. Sam read the beginning of the key paper, submitted to Physical Review in 1921 but rejected after refereeing by Fulcher. With apologies to non-technical readers, the gist of its opening was that if we are to say (with Planck) E=hf we need to complete the relativistic four-vector, so p=hk/2pi, i.e. the deBroglie equation. Then we need to put those together in a wave equation. Unable to construct a fully relativistic one, Lunn settled on the non-relativistic approximation that we now call the Schroedinger equation. He went on to solve that for the energy eigenvalues of the hydrogen atom.

Jumping to a related story from long after South Chicago days, at some point Sam was telling a colleague what he called an apocryphal story about the other discovery of that equation. A group in Vienna was discussing the ideas of Planck and deBroglie. Peter Debye announced “You’ve got a frequency and a wavelength. Somebody needs to put them together in a wave equation. Schroedinger, you’re not doing anything important, why don’t you do it?” Sam’s story was interrupted by Felix Bloch, who had been in earshot: “What do you mean ‘apocryphal’? I was there. That’s exactly what happened.”

Several cousins had lived with the family at various points. Some of the relatives were ashamed (“Sutz a disgrace!”) and others were proud when one, Lillian, was pictured in the Chicago Tribune chained to the Italian Consulate together with a black friend, protesting Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. I was very fortunate to get to spend a day with Lillian when she was about 100 years old, still living independently in a lakeshore high-rise. She spoke contemptuously of relatives who had moved out to the boring suburbs. She easily kept up with or led several of us walking briskly around the neighborhood in drizzly weather. She wasn’t as proud of the Consulate protest as I had expected, attributing it largely to Communist Party instructions. After spending the day with her, my wife gave me a suspicious, surprised look and said “There seem to be some good genes in your family.”(She corrects this to point out that she must have been joking because she already knew Florence.)

One beautiful warm day when Sam was a grad student (still in Chicago) he was thinking about going over to join the picket line at Republic Steel. But he couldn’t resist heading to the lake instead. That was the day the cops massacred many of the strikers and their supporters. Sam saw the badly mutilated body of the father of one of his friends.

Sam was disgusted afterwards to hear a Communist talk about how the good side of the massacre was that it would help wake up the masses. In retrospect, I think that sort of calculation is routinely made by all political actors, e.g. Churchill. Still, hearing that sort of cynical talk from an alleged idealist had its good side, in providing one of the reasons Sam never had anything to do with the party.

Sam did have an apocryphal story about the cops. They’re beating up on some little guy near a demonstration. He pleads “But I’m an anti-Communist.” They reply “We don’t care what type of communist you are.”

On mainstream Chicago politics, a local candidate who had had some business dealing with Morris came by to ask for his vote. Morris was taken aback: “But you’re a crook!” “Sure, but would you rather vote for the crook you know or the one you don’t know?”

Another quick story of his, I think not apocryphal. A guy runs to catch the streetcar but it pulls away just before he gets there. He shakes his fist at it and yells “anti-semite!”.

Sam briefly dated the daughter of a gangster, I think Al Capone’s treasurer. They went to one event high up in a lakeshore building where guards with submachine guns checked guests through a little slot in the door before letting anyone in. Her father took a liking to my dad’s family. He took them out to the movies, where he was unable to pay because the ticket seller didn’t have change for the large bills he was carrying. But it was ok, he owned the theater. He visited the lab one time when Sam was working with a glassblower to make some elaborate specially designed piece. The gangster was puzzled: “A bottle like that, whyn’t you just buy one?” The girl had a thing for scientists and ended up marrying a nuclear physicist. When the father was ultimately gunned down, the Chicago Tribune headline mentioned something like “nuclear scientist’s kin”.

Bits of the superstitious neighborhood culture spilled into the university. A fellow chemistry grad student had simultaneously been a rabbinical student, but had been expelled. The rabbis told him why: “We saw you coming out of the whorehouse on Saturday. And we know they only take cash.”

I can’t resist including a couple of non-technical stories from Sam’s own Annual Reviews of Physical Chemistry account of his time at the U. of Chicago.

I’ve put off the story of what Morris saw in Pocahontas because it’s hard to focus on anything else once it’s in your mind. It’s tempting to omit it but I guess it’s wrong to keep the history hidden. One of the Pocahontas locals (he was either one of the Hatfields or McCoys but I’ve forgotten which) wanted to show off his new pistol. He did it by shooting a random black man. I don’t know if the man survived or if he had any descendants to tell their own family histories of life and death in West Virginia.