Grandpa Ben

By Moshe Parelman

 

My grandfathers presented contrasting examples of grandpahood. When Grandpa Jake, my father’s father, came to see us on Sundays he would perform a magic trick. He often took my sister and I to the zoo. When he and my Bubbie babysat my sister and I, he would dry us off after our baths and tell us a story about the Ginger Bread Man.

Grandpa Ben, my mother’s father, didn’t do magic tricks, frequent the zoo or tell Ginger Bread Man stories. When he would dry us, we would beg him to tell us a story about the Ginger Bread Man. But he’d keep putting us off. Finally, he’d say this: “The Ginger Bread Man was going down the street in the back of a truck. He fell off and got run over by a car.”

The first conversation I remember having with him was when I was six or seven. He and my father and I were watching the 1968 Grammy Awards. The category was Record of the Year, and the nominees were Little Green Apples, Glen Campbell, Mrs. Robinson, Simon and Garfunkel, and Hey Jude, The Beatles. Grandpa Ben said, “Daniel, who do you think’s going to win?”

I took the question as some kind of test of my character. Although I liked Hey Jude and Mrs. Robinson, I did not want my father and grandfather thinking that I approved of the Beatles and their wild musical presentation that we had just watched or even Simon and Garfunkel. I knew my grandfather liked Glen Campbell, so I went with the safe choice: “Little Green Apples.”

“I think Mrs. Robinson’s going to win,” he said, sounding as if he were holding a royal flush.

Now everything was upside-down. I no longer knew who to root for. We waited …

“… and the winner is … Mrs. Robinson, Simon and Garfunkel.”

Enjoyment of music was something my grandfather and I had in common, but we continued to be as out-of-sync with our musical preferences as we were that night.

My grandfather would stay up to watch the Midnight Special – a Friday night TV show that showcased rock and pop artists performing live – just to make fun of the bands. The next day he’d be in our kitchen pretending that he was playing a guitar, only he held the “guitar” so close to his chest that it looked like he was playing a ukulele. And then he’d make a high-pitched sound to imitate the singing.

Once we were watching Stevie Wonder on TV. He claimed that Stevie Wonder really wasn’t blind. I guess he thought Stevie was trying to con us.

Then he discovered a pop artist he liked: Jim Croce. I think he was lagging a little behind on the Jim Croce curve, though. I had already grown tired of him. Whatever the reason, I didn’t share his interest in the singer.

“Daniel, do you like that Jim Croce?” he’d say. “Boy, can he sing.”

And then Jim Croce died in a plane crash. Now I really felt guilty about not liking his music.

Ben Katz always wore a hat. Even though men’s hats hadn’t been in style for decades, he was attached to them owing to his many years earning a living as a hat blocker. Grandpa Ben owned Katz Hatworks in downtown Kansas City, which cleaned hats wholesale. The business did well, especially during the Depression, when most men were getting their old hats cleaned rather than buying new ones.

Katz Hatworks was destroyed in the late ’50s in a fire started at a nearby hotel, but by then hat-wearing was already declining. I talked with him one time about the demise of the hat. I claimed hats went out of fashion because John Kennedy didn’t wear one.

“It was the college kids,” Grandpa said with the conviction of a man whose livelihood depended on hats.

A few years after the end of the hat cleaning business, my grandfather began selling damaged freight. The Yellow Freight Company, a freight trucking company, would auction off its goods damaged during transport. My grandfather bid on the merchandise, which was still in good condition, and sold it throughout Kansas City.

He relished this work. Traveling all over the city, he called on friends, associates and customers he was referred to, bargaining with whomever needed three rolls of carpeting, four cases of typewriter ribbon or a set of encyclopedias (I got that one) – whatever he had stored in his garage that somebody wanted.

After a day of selling he would come over to our house, perhaps ask my mother to make some kasha, sit at the kitchen table and tell her his war stories. One time he told us about a young man who worked in a warehouse of a business he sold to in North Kansas City. This man apparently didn’t have a family, and it was his birthday. My grandfather bought cold cuts from a deli, a cake and everything else necessary for a proper birthday party right there in the warehouse. The young man was moved to tears.

I once helped with delivery following one of Grandpa’s deals. He had sold some carpeting to a pharmacist friend of his who owned a pharmacy on the Country Club Plaza, Kansas City’s plush shopping district. To transport the carpeting, we had to position the rolls just right in the back seat of his car. I sat in the back holding them down. We made three trips, one for each roll.

We rode into the Plaza on our last run, half a roll of carpeting sticking out the back window of the car. His pharmacist friend, a neatly dressed, young Jewish man, was grateful:

“Thank you very much, guys. You really went out of your way … Have a nasal spray.”

Grandpa Ben always carried a lot of cash. He drove a nice car. He liked to buy things for his loved ones, and he was always willing to come to the aid of friends and family. He helped his brother-in-law get started in business in the 1940s. He gave jobs to friends in need. Born in Kansas City in 1906, the child (and sibling) of immigrants, he pursued the American Dream. But the Stock Market Crash and the Depression made him cautious.

He wasn’t a big risk taker. He kept his money in certificates of deposit. His caution sometimes caused him to let an opportunity slip away. He would tell the story of how he was offered the chance to invest in a new innovation, an automated car wash. But he let his friends talk him out of it. And then he was given the opportunity to buy one of the first Dairy Queen franchises. Again, his friends told him it would never fly, and he listened.

He might never have struck it rich, but his family was priceless to him. Ben Katz was the fifth of six children born to Solomon, a tailor, and Sarah. Lou, Jenny and Ann, who were older than him, immigrated from Russia as children. My grandfather was born in America, as was his sister, Fanny, the baby. They grew up in Kansas City in the Jewish neighborhood. It really was a Jewish neighborhood, too. One night, Grandpa Jake and Grandpa Ben were in our living room reminiscing about their formative years. Although they didn’t know each other growing up, they both had the same memory of watching the local blacksmith work in his shop when they were little.

Remarkably, when Grandpa’s siblings followed him to suburban Prairie Village, Kan., in the early ’50s, they all bought houses just a few blocks from him. His older siblings, with their Yiddish accents and Old World origins, seemed older than him than they actually were. When they all got together at our house, Aunt Jenny, the next to the oldest, shy smiling and gap-toothed, would serve as the oral historian of life in Czarist Russia. Once she recalled that the house the family lived in had a dirt floor.

Embarrassed, my grandfather kvetched, “C’mon, Jenny, that’s not true.”

My grandfather married Bertha Eisman in 1927. They had two children, Marna, my aunt, and then Sandra, my mother, who was given the nickname “Cookie.” Grandpa tried calling Marna “Sugar,” but the name never stuck (Thank G-d.).

 My grandfather carried pictures of his grandchildren in his wallet: my sister, Beth, and I; and Aunt Marna’s children, Lisa, Janice and Bruce Bahn, who lived in St. Louis. When he showed those pictures to anyone he would say, “This is my sunshine.”

He always greeted us effusively, kissing us on the face and pinching our cheek. This was no little-old-grandmother cheek pinching, either. He would really dig in, as if he were grabbing a good piece of real estate.

When my cousins came to town, he’d take us out for ribs, Kansas City being the barbecue capital of the world, or at least that’s how we saw it. After one of these outings Grandpa complained to the Bahns, “You all are poor eaters.” His indictment seemed incongruous. The Bahns upheld the Katz eating standards as well as anybody. So when it came time again for Grandpa to take us out to dinner, Lisa said to him: “Let’s go have a Poor Eater’s Contest!”

Ben Katz was not a religious Jew, in many ways quite the contrary. He had a strong Jewish identity, though, and was proud of his people. One night my family was watching a TV special. The show was over – the credits were rolling – and Beth got up to change the channel. My grandfather, still gazing at the screen, called out, “Don’t change the channel.” We asked him why not.

“I’m looking for all the Jewish names,” he replied.

Once he described to my mother making a deal with a non-Jewish customer he knew, as the bargaining intensified.

“He said, ‘I’ve got a little Jew in me’,” Grandpa recalled, outraged. “I about flattened him out.”

Aunt Marna remembered that when my grandmother was dying of cancer in 1963, she asked my grandfather, as they sat in the lobby of the hospital in front of a large window, whether he still believed in G-d.

“Who made all those trees?” he answered.

The years passed. Grandpa’s daughters moved into middle age and his grandchildren grew up. Lisa got married. Sadly, Aunt Marna died of breast cancer in 1983, at 51. Ben Katz never seemed to age.

I graduated college and decided to get a Master’s in political science at Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio. My father bought me a used Toyota Corolla as a graduation present, and I was going to drive it there. One night before my journey Grandpa said he wanted to go with me. He wanted to know how to move the stick shift in the Corolla. I showed him, making an “H” pattern in the air with my hand. He told me the last time he used a car with manual transmission, the stick moved diagonally. With that out of the way, he was set for the trip – all 773 miles.

I left on an August morning, picking up Grandpa at his house. I headed east on I-70. I was drowsy and I kept shutting my eyes. He asked me if I wanted him to drive, but I told him I was OK. He asked me again, and I pulled over to the shoulder. We switched seats. He grabbed the stick and shifted into first, rolling back onto the highway like the Toyota was his own baby.

We made the trip in two days, stopping at a motel in Kentucky for the night. When we arrived in Kent, he checked into a motel and flew home the next day.

A year later, in October, I was in Boston, looking for a job and visiting an old friend, when my mother called. Grandpa died in his sleep. He was 79.

Our rabbi, Rabbi Margolies, said in his eulogy that when he talks to mourners before a funeral, he asks them if they were close to their parent. They often equivocate, he said; my mother answered without hesitating.

Ben Katz was a crowd pleaser. Like any crowd pleaser, he left us wanting more: more love; more caring; more closeness. Jim Croce wanted to save time in a bottle. We can’t save time; instead, our hearts are filled with a Grandpa who dared to get close to us.