The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met
“This is the chief of police! Who’s this?” asked the gruff voice at the other end of the phone.
The little boy said his name into the phone timidly. He’d dragged a chair from under the gray formica dinette table in the kitchen and slid it across the linoleum floor, placing it under the telephone mounted on the wall. He was standing on top of the chair, his knees a little weak at the sound of the commanding voice addressing him.
“You causin’ any trouble over there?” the chief of police asked.
“No,” answered the little boy.
“Then put your dad on.”
Pop’s Best Friend The voice on the phone belonged to my father’s best friend Sammy. And the little boy propped up on the chair was me. I’d soon grow accustomed to Sammy’s sense of humor. He’d alternate between the chief of police and the head of the fire department until I learned the drill and just went along with the fun.
Over the next several decades I’d grow to marvel at Sammy’s outsized personality and picaresque escapades. I’d experience Sammy both directly, as well as once removed, like a fly on the wall, observing with fascination as he interacted with my dad, regaling him with his stories and impressing him with his feats of boldness and bravado.
If only I had a nickel for every time my father said, “Someday I’m gonna write a story about Sammy for ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met.’” When I was growing up in the 1950s, Reader’s Digest was the best-selling consumer magazine in America, and the most popular feature in Reader’s Digest was a series called “The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met,” each column written by a different storyteller about someone who’d left an indelible impact on them.
As I remember the two of them back then, Sammy and my dad looked like a couple of Rocky-Graziano-style ’50s welterweights, each standing 5-foot-7 and walking around at about 150 pounds. They both had sons they named Martin, Sammy’s boy about three years older than me. Sammy and his family always called their boy Marty, while my family always used my full name.
Personality-wise, my dad and Sammy were worlds apart. Sammy was always out-there, rough-and-tumble and raring to go. My dad was often quiet and troubled, trapped in his own head.
I think my father honesty expected to immortalize his best buddy in Reader’s Digest someday. But his mental illness got in the way. My father suffered from debilitating depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He did stints in mental institutions three times during my childhood and adolescence. Between the sedatives that drained his energy and the electroshock therapy that battered his brain, he never quite reached a frame of mind that might have enabled him to apply his considerable vocabulary to capturing Sammy’s inimitable personality and wild adventures on paper.
My Turn After my father’s death, I always told myself that I would give it a try. I’m sure he would have loved that. Although he probably would have written about different things. He and Sammy had a history together that began before I was even born.
Sammy’s parents and my dad’s folks both emigrated from Russia to America in the early 1920s to take advantage of the opportunity to buy land. This was a privilege denied to Jews in Eastern Europe back then.
Sammy’s dad and my paternal grandfather both started poultry businesses and met at a a local farmers co-op, where they became friends and formed close family bonds. They were part of a thriving community of New Jersey Jewish chicken farmers during the first half of the 20th century. I’ve read there were over a thousand of them raising some 16 million chickens that produced 240 million dozen eggs a year. I remember helping my mom and dad collect the eggs from our chickens and package them in cardboard crates in the cellar of our house.
My dad and Sammy must have played together as kids when their parents visited each other, just as I played with Sammy’s son when our parents socialized. Today those times appear in my mind like sepia-colored photographs of pure, unadulterated nostalgia.
Gone Fishin’ I especially remember our fishing trips. Sammy would take my father and me with him and Marty to out-of-the way spots that he’d discovered himself. They were always secluded and surrounded by unspoiled nature, and we usually had the places to ourselves. They had names like “The Sheep Wash,” or were untrodden paths like the spot at Jacob’s Creek Road going north from Trenton to Titusville, N.J. There we could fish for bass in the Delaware Canal, or climb down the steep, rocky hill to fish for carp, muskies, perch or shad in the Delaware River. Sammy would lead us like a sherpa to these places, where brown earth met dark water hiding a menagerie of mysterious creatures.
Baiting our hooks with slithering, slimy night crawlers or home-made concoctions of cornmeal, flour and honey, we’d cast our lines and wait for the action to begin. I’d watch Sammy’s every move, the way he took in the natural beauty around him while keeping a watchful eye on the tip of his rod. When it showed the slightest tremor of a bite, he’d switch into another gear of feral intensity.
When his rod bent and the game was on, Sammy’s chest and shoulders would tense up beneath his T-shirt and his working man’s biceps would bulge. Next thing you knew Sammy was reeling in a whopper. He’d keep them — and the ones we others sometimes caught — sloshing around in a big, galvanized aluminum bucket that we’d load into the trunk of his car. When we got back to his place, he’d gut and clean them and turn them over to his wife to cook for us.
Baseball and Beer Sammy loved baseball, too. He coached a local Little League team, the Lions, sponsored by American Cyanamid, a giant chemical manufacturer and huge employer that was gobbled up by larger companies and integrated into the mega-corporation that today is Pfizer.
I remember my parents leaving me with Sammy one afternoon when they had to attend to some business. He set me up with some potato chips and orange soda in his den, turned on his old black and white TV and popped open an ice cold can of Schlitz.
For the next couple of hours we watched the Yankees of Whitey Ford, Micky Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto and company playing somebody — I can’t remember who. All the other teams were just a blur to me back then.
“Mart,” he asked me, “What’s better than a cold beer and a baseball game on a summer afternoon?” I hadn’t a clue. “More beer and more baseball,” Sammy said, wearing a look of contentment that conveyed palpable bliss.
The Two Sides of Sammy As far as I could tell, Sammy was a loving and faithful husband to his wife Lil, who was close lifelong friends with my mom; he was a great father to his children: In addition to Marty, he had an older daughter named Etta, whom I remember looking like a combination of a young Ashely Judd and Marisa Tomei — I had a wicked crush on her for a while — and finally, Sarah, the youngest, whom everyone knew was a happy mistake, born when Sammy and Lil were well into their 40s.
Sammy was decidedly a man’s man, as that term was defined in his day. He would not have approved of the sensitizing of men that occurred in the decades that followed. He would not have liked Harry Styles’ low-cut, silver-sequined jumpsuits or his bending of gender identities. To Sammy, fluid was what you applied to your car’s breaks to keep them in working order, not your attitude about your preferred pronoun on any given day.
Nor would Sammy have had much patience for the notion of a man having to ask a woman for permission to touch or kiss her, at least within the bounds of a good-faith potential romantic encounter. Today’s complicated rules of consent would have struck him as perplexing and downright counter-biological; if a woman who was already in bed with a man and well down the road to doing it, locked in an embrace in some state of undress with the door closed — if she was having second thoughts at that point, I suspect Sammy would believe she was way overthinking things.
Sammy thought like the character octogenarian F. Murray Abraham played in the second season of “The White Lotus” — the grandfather who assured his 20-something grandson that women “want it just as bad as we do!” When his daughter Etta, in her teens, complained to him about a boy who had been a bit too assertive for her tastes, he told my dad and me he said to her: “Someday some guy’s gonna grab ahold of your knobs and your gonna say, ‘Hey, ya know, that feels pretty damn good!’”
I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone use the term “knobs” for nipples at the time, nor have I since.
I even found myself on the receiving end of Sammy’s baser side once, in a fairly typical display of what today might be characterized as “toxic masculinity.” My father had taken me to the dermatologist in Trenton to treat my teenage acne. I was about 15 or 16. On the way back we stopped by Sammy’s. When my dad told him where we’d been and why, Sammy asked me point blank, “So Mart, ya gettin’ any lately?” This was right in front of my father! Then he said, “You’d be surprised, Mart. A good piece o’ tail’ll clear your face right up!”
It would be another few years before I’d experience a “piece o’ tail” of any quality — not until I was a freshman in college. I can only imagine the colors my face must have turned beneath the popped pimples and acne cream from the morning’s treatment. And who knew what my father was thinking. He’d not even gotten around to giving me “the talk” yet. And sadly never would.
Then there was the story Sammy told my dad and me about the time he was a young stud working as a house painter. He was painting the living room of some home when the lady of the house, who had been resting on the couch in her bath robe, revealed that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Her suggestive pose gave rise to Sammy’s manhood, and the story he told my dad and me of how he expertly navigated his way into her with the skill of a fighter pilot landing on an aircraft carrier.
Like Father… Having Sammy as a father had a profound influence on his son, whom I also admired and envied for his confidence and swagger. One time when I was about 8 and he 11, we had ridden our bikes to the general store in my rural neighborhood to buy some candy. When we came back to where we’d left our bikes, they were gone.
As we were walking around hunting for our bikes, two burly older kids brought them over and threw them on the ground in front of us. Then they bullied us into a dark, deserted barn behind the store. Thy began intimidating us and, at one point, ordered us to get down on our knees.
Marty looked over at me and squeezed the muffled word “Don’t!” from his lips. The adult me shudders to think what might have happened if I’d have complied. In true bully fashion, the older boys relented when we — or at least Marty — let them know we’d been pushed to our limit. Afterward, Marty told me, “My father taught me never, ever to get down on your knees to anyone.”
Years later when Marty and I were both in our teens and lifting weights in my garage, I asked him if he thought our fathers could overhead press 100 pounds, the goal we were shooting for. “I wouldn’t ask my dad if he could lift 100 pounds,” he scoffed. “I’d ask him if he could lift 200 pounds!”
To his son, there was nothing Sammy couldn’t do, and it rubbed off on him. I wish I could have bottled a bit of that alpha serum and used it on myself.
The Time He Went Too Far While most of Sammy’s antics were amusing, one of his exploits almost got him into serious trouble. His wife had come down with the flu and a municipal work crew was making loud construction noise in the field right across from his home, interrupting Lil’s rest.
When they didn’t comply with his first polite request to quiet down, he did what Sammy would do. He grabbed his German luger — a souvenir from the war that he kept on his desk; I used to see it sitting there, with the swastika engraved in the handle — and he marched outside to tell the man in charge that if they didn’t stop he’d start shooting.
Next thing he knew he was standing in a jail cell. Cooler heads ultimately prevailed and Sammy was let off with a warning. “I can’t even tell you what I woulda done if anything had happened to my Lil,” he told us afterward. “I don’t think I would have lived if I’d o’ lost her.”
How I admired the simplicity of Sammy’s black and white sense of right and wrong, good and bad, men and women. And it wasn’t just Sammy, but those times, in the 1950s, when the whole country was like that, and Sammy was like that on steroids. I know those attitudes are not right for today. But I can’t deny a nostalgic longing for the simplicity.
When Things Got More Complicated Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. First, our farm and Sammy’s both went out of business, as did hundreds of smaller poultry businesses in the area that were squeezed out by larger ones. Afterward, Sammy put his talented hands and mechanical ability to work for an engineering design firm called the 5th Dimension. “I love what I do, and I do what I love,” he used to say, paraphrasing the saying by Confucius that “The man who loves his job never works a day in his life.”
If only my own father had been that fortunate. After the farm, he worked at a factory as a shipping clerk. And far from being the happy, raging bull in the china shop of life that Sammy was, my dad became increasingly despondent and took his own life. I was 20 at the time.
Sammy was one of the first to drive over to offer his condolences. He sat next to me on the couch, our knees touching, and he kept shaking his head. “I used to think that when a man committed suicide it meant he was yellow,” he said. He pronounced it “YELL-a,” like they said it in old-time cowboy movies. “But I don’t think your dad was a coward. I think he lived with something that was just too tough to take.”
After his stint at the engineering design company, Sammy landed a job at Princeton University as a maintenance man on the cyclotron — a particle accelerator used in nuclear physics research. He loved that work, too. It enabled him to meet bright young students, including some from China whom he’d invite over for dinner with his family and friends.
But after years working at the university, he began to experience physical and mental deterioration that robbed him of his strength, affected his cognitive ability and his speech, and relegated him to a wheelchair.
When he and Lil came to my wedding, he was a weak, helpless shell of his former self. I remember one of my uncles saying with tears in his eyes that he couldn’t bear to see him that way.
Sammy’s brain atrophy worsened and he died from what his family believed was radiation poisoning from the cyclotron. They tried to sue, but to no avail.
And that was the end of Sammy. Ironic that such a dynamic character ended with barely a faint whimper.
And yet, the vital Sammy remains alive and kickin’ like a bronco in my brain. He got me to recognize the look of a life well-lived, with zest and zeal and commitment. Without a doubt, he was imperfect. But he sure was unforgettable.