These are the People ...
Harold Grossman: My Stepfather

*Writer's note:

 Dear Friends,

This is a draft of a chapter to a second book I am currently writing that'll focus on the individuals who have had a pivotal impact on my life.

Harold relished telling the story of how his mother would hang kosher salamis to dry them out on the back porch, but it happened invariably that he and his brother Jack would eat them well before they ever finished aging.             

Harold Grossman was a gutte neshuma, a good soul. He was my mother’s second husband and a good provider under whose roof I lived longer than I had with my dad. Of his many attributes, there was one in particular that left me with an abiding affection. Harold never sought to usurp my father's role.  Even though I lived in Harold’s house together with my brother Ron and my mom for more than ten years, he respected the fact my dad was just a short drive away in Chicago and with whom my brother and I maintained a close relationship. Though I do not know what child support arrangements my dad and mom had worked out, I do know that Harold supported me in countless ways over the years.

He was a generous man by nature, soft-spoken and very dignified.

What Yiddish I know I owe to Harold. Of much greater importance than even the words I have retained over the years is the appreciation for the colorful expressiveness of the mamaloschen Harold imparted to me. What he remembered from his boyhood he recalled with genuine glee and gladly shared with me.

Harold, his brother Jack, sisters Dorothy and Jane were blessed with beautiful and wonderful parents: Morris and Eva Grossman, truly lovely and gracious people, whom I was privileged to know as a boy.  

A tiny twosome, Mr. and Mrs. Grossman were a handsome couple-one might even describe them as “quaint”- each crowned with snow white hair. Their language was a dialect of “Yinglish,” neither Galician nor Litvish. They sounded like Myron Cohen, one of the best stand up comics ever. Do you remember him from the Ed Sullivan Show years ago?

It was exceedingly difficult not to love them.

I believe it was Erev Shabbos, Sabbath Eve on Friday night, when Harold, my mom and I stopped by to visit them in their apartment on Briscoe Court.  The hour was after sundown when we arrived and, for that reason, Harold’s parents would not have answered the phone had we called them or, I suspect, invited us over that night because-much to our dismay- their apartment was enveloped in pitch darkness.

Naturally curious why all their lights were out, we noticed them sitting quite comfortably on their plastic cover- fitted sofa as if nothing were amiss. Not one ray of light could be had. To this day some forty years later, I do not know if the Grossmans had their lights on timers but had neglected to set them in time before sundown or forgotten to turn on their Sabbath lights, but a fond albeit befuddled memory it remains to this day!

 "Pa," said Harold, always the dutiful son but who had forsworn Jewish religious observance when he enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, "you're ‘gonna’ sit here in the dark?! Just lemme tu ..."

"Zol zein shtil, Herschele! 'Don' touch!” barked Zayde who did not pronounce the 't' in ‘don't’.

"But, but ... " Harold blurted out.

"But, but 'nuting'! Shah!"  Zayde let forth.

"Ma!?" pled the son.

"It'll be fine tatele. Listen to your father," she counseled.

"Mom, why are we sitting in the dark?" I asked.

"Shah! Listen to Bubbe."

If only Mel Brooks had seen this.

We did not stay much longer. Leaving behind the magical, albeit dark wonderment of Erev Shabbos, Sabbath Eve, in the apartment of Morris and Eve Grossman, we returned home to Friday night, however well-lighted.  

Harold and his brother Jack were fine men, founders and owners of a plastic manufacturing company in St. Louis, Missouri, who provided steady employment to many men over thirty years in business. I worked there too during summer vacation and came to know many of the employees whom I knew to be sincere in their devotion to Harold as a man and employer.    

Many years after I had left his house, when already married with my own family, Harold was involved in a serious traffic accident. Though he survived, his health began to decline precipitously thereafter. He passed on about a year or two later.

It was my privilege to memorialize Harold at his graveside. We are diminished now that he’s gone, but the world is a far better place for his having been here!

"Zichron l'vrocha" ... May his memory be for a blessing!

Alan D. Busch

11/2/07