‘Deed’ July 25, 2006, Memory of Deed, R 1/20

We just returned from a weekend in Rochester celebrating Deed’s 100th birthday on Saturday, July 22, 2006. We visited the cemetery which contains the family plot, that is, the family plot of our mother's family. Mommy’s are there: Harry Eber, who died in 1954, and her mother Bessie Eber (birth name also Kaplan), who died in 1961, along with a younger brother Samuel, who died in 1979, her older sister Rose Cohen, who died in 1994, and our favorite uncle Less, who died in 2004 and his wife Aunt Bess, who also died in 1994. My father died in 1993 on Christmas weekend, sixty-one years after the Christmas weekend on which my parents were married.

My older brother Stuart, Judy, Wendy and I celebrated his birthday by going to a terrific steak house and having the dinner my father would have whenever we as grownups went out for a big dinner with him: shrimp cocktail, steak, baked potato with sour cream, and fruit pie with vanilla ice cream. Deed of course preceded that with an extra dry Gibson. We didn't follow what my father would normally do with dessert: order black coffee, hot, which would come steaming. As he took the first sip, he would invariably motion for the waiter to take it back because it wasn't hot enough!

That might give you some picture of what Deed was like. He acquired that name because my older brother, as a very young child mispronounced "dad". Our friends of course questioned the use of the name "Deed," to which we always responded, there were many dads in the world, but only one Deed.

Deed was strong and athletic, played semi-pro baseball as a young man in a league around Rochester, where he grew up, having been born and spent the first years of his life in Central Pennsylvania, in the towns of St. Mary's and Jeannette. While one friend from his childhood there came to visit a couple of times, Deed never returned to those towns. Stuart and I regret that we didn't drive down there one weekend with him to have him point out the locations where he was raised. I do recall him telling us that in one town they lived next to a railroad siding.

His parents had come over from Lithuania in the early 1900s, together with his twin sisters who had been born two years before him. His father, Morris, for whom I am named, was a junk dealer in Western Pennsylvania, and I gather that they moved to Rochester when his parents realized there were no other Jewish kids, or very few others, whom the sisters could date as they grew older.

At some point and time in Rochester, Morris went into the Hide and Tallow business, collecting animal products from butcher shops, grocery stores and farms, with five different daily routes, three went out of Rochester, one each going to the towns east as far as Sodus, south as far as Geneseo, and west as far as Batavia. The other two routes were in Rochester. He would collect the products in huge barrels which he then took to Genesee Hide and Tallow Company, the products' end use being in the making of soaps, and I don't know what else.

Deed never finished high school, and according to his younger brother Phil, there was a huge rift in the family because Morris made my father leave high school when attendance was no longer required, at age sixteen, to go to work, learning a trade, that being as an apprentice upholsterer. Jennie, Deed's mother, opposed his leaving school and uncle Phil told me that my father and Morris didn't speak for almost a year. I didn't learn that until visiting with Phil in Phoenix many years later, after Deed's death.

While we regularly visited the cemetery of my mother's family, only rarely did my father drive me or us a few blocks away from the Britten Road Cemetery to visit the graves of his parents at the Stone Road Cemetery. I don't know if he went more frequently than that without us. He never spoke much about them at all, but Deed never discussed his childhood or growing up very much either.

Deed stayed in the upholstering trade until Morris died in 1937, at which point my father took over his hide and tallow business. Deed was not subject to the draft in 1942, perhaps because he was 36 and had two children, but also perhaps because his industry was designated as defense-related. He remained in that business until the prices for such commodities plummeted after the war ended in 1945, at which point he went back into furniture upholstering, probably around 1948 or 49.

When still in the hide and tallow business, Deed would on occasion take Stuart or me out for a day with him during the summer, on the three rural routes to farmers and grocery stores in the small towns around Rochester. Those were exciting, wonderful days for us, riding next to him in the big truck, probably being boosted up to get into it.

We would get up early in the morning, went with him in the car to pick up his truck, go to breakfast at a diner-deli with other working men, where he knew everyone, and had a real breakfast. Then we got back into the truck and started the route. Stuart and I went with my father on a memory trip like that around 1990, going east to the town of Sodus, with stops at the Normandy Inn, no longer as fancy or delightful as it once was, and actually ran into an "Old Timer" in one of the towns. Stuart had stopped to ask him if he knew anything about a certain grocery store that Deed remembered, and it turned out he had worked there, and he and my father knew and remembered each other and talked!

On the few times we went west, we always had lunch towards the end of the day, around 1:00 p.m., at a diner on the Buffalo Road. As I recall, we would always have what I later referred to as "American Fruit Pie" for dessert, sitting at the counter with other working men, feeling very grown up! We would often stop at an old-time antique dealer in Rochester, named Lapidus I believe, as Deed often bought and traded antiques with him.

I do remember my friends Mark Kolko and Shelley Sper being envious of Stuart's and my having the opportunities to know what our father did by going with him for a full day, since they didn't really have the chance to do something as exciting as riding on a big truck, meeting farmers and talking to their cows, walking around their barns, and going in the back doors of the grocery stores to talk to the owners and their workers.

Stuart and I still remember Farmer Webster, whose farm was in the town of Greece, and several times Deed and we would go target shooting on weekends with my father's 22 caliber rifle. While we didn't shoot living things, we would pick targets, aim and shoot. While I’m right-handed, I can close only my left eye; therefore, I would close my right eye, lean way over to line up my left eye through the site to the target, and became quite good at hitting the target. Years later, I took Ben to Disney World and we went target shooting at the amusement park there and I had nine bulls-eyes out of ten---to Ben’s justified amazement..

Deed was great at physical play with us and others, starting with "Flip," played with any small child. Deed would lie on his back on the floor, with his knees bent, one of us would sit on his shoes, and he would lift up his feet and flip us over his head to land on our feet. We could never get enough of it, and he was able to do it even when he reached an age at which Stuart and I wouldn't even try doing it with our own children.

The other was "Stiff", where we would walk up the steps of our home on Berkeley Street, holding our bodies completely stiff at about a 45 degree angle, with Deed pushing us up the steps as we took one step at a time, as we defied gravity – except for him holding us!