My Journey: Lessons I've Learned Along the Way: The Memoirs of Leonard I. Eckhaus

By Leonard I. Eckhaus

A look at the journey we all make in life, told through vignettes and providing insights the author has gleaned over the 75 years of his life. Describing the successes, failures and lessons learned along the way, the author offers his views on what's really important in the long run and how to achieve success in one's own personal and professional life.
Mr. Eckhaus spent over thirty years in the computer field, creating and managing the largest association for data center managers in the world. He also produced a record album (CD) that received two Grammy nominations in 2018.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543949483

Book preview

Tree

INTRODUCTION

In 1958 a TV program called Naked City premiered. It was a police drama that took place in New York City. Each episode concluded with a narrator intoning the iconic line: There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.

And so, in keeping with that, to the best of my ability, I bring you mine.

It seems impossible to me, but I am, in fact, now 75 years old. How did this come so quickly? Where did all the years go? It seems like only yesterday that I was just a boy, then a young man. I think my father expressed the speed of this aging process best, just before his 60th birthday (which he never did reach) when I asked him how it felt to be nearing this milestone. His answer was I may be turning sixty, but inside myself, I still feel like I’m sixteen. And, I’m here to tell you that I feel that same way at 75.

And so, I am going to try and document some of the things that I remember and what I have learned over these seventy-five years – how I remember my life -- from the beginning, including what life was like in general, and for me as I was growing up.

Let me start by saying that I have had numerous successes and failures over the years. I have lost loved ones that will always hold a dear place in my heart. I have a few regrets, but only about the times I let down people I love. I have also been charmed with a life that has surpassed my greatest dreams and is more than I ever had the right to expect.

When I was seventeen and dating Linda Rosenthal (born Linda Drab and soon, at age 19, to become my wife), my dreams were as follows: to marry Linda; to have a ‘good’ job (one that would enable me to support my family in some reasonable manner); to have children; and to maybe – if I got lucky – one day own my own home. In looking at my life from the outside, some might say that I achieved that and much more. I say, achieving those original basic goals (wife, job, children, home) is truly the ultimate accomplishment – it is everything in itself. There is no better than that – more money, a larger home, a luxury car, an even better job – those are all nice, but truly unneeded frills. And believe me, I know – I’ve had them all. At seventy-five years old, this is what I’ve learned - a home, with the love of your life at your side, with a warm, loving family – that is the ultimate fulfillment of all life has to offer. In the final analysis, true success is when you can look back at your life and the memories make you smile.

So, here is my story, told through anecdotes and vignettes that I hope will provide at least some insight for both you, the reader, and to myself, into how I came to be the person I am, the things that are most important to me, and what has driven me to make the decisions I have about how I’ve lived this life for the past seventy-five years.

BOOK ONE:

The Start of It All

IN THE BEGINNING

Breathe…breathe the doctor calls to the young woman…Now, push! Push harder. And with that, the infant’s head begins to emerge, and the doctor gently helps bring this new life into the world. It happens an estimated 350,000 times worldwide every single day. Amazing then, that each of these over one billion new lives that arrive each year is utterly unique – each an unknown quantity with endless potential. Some will become world leaders in politics, medicine, sports, and so many other fields. Some will flounder and never acquire even basic happiness. No two life paths, no two experiences, will be exactly the same. Each life’s destiny unpredictable.

Life is a journey, with often unexpected twists and turns, leading to who knows where. In some lives failure breeds determination and success. In others, this same failure brings depression and devastation. And, if we live long enough, we get to look back and marvel at how it all played out.

For me, this all began on September 18th, 1942 in Crotona Park Hospital in the Bronx, New York.

I was born during World War II - a tumultuous time for the whole world, but particularly for the Jewish people. On the day of my birth, Hitler was still actively attempting to exterminate all the Jews left in Europe. Judenfrei was his goal and he came damned near to achieving it. On that very day, the day of my birth, the official order for Vernichtung durch Arbeit was approved by Otto Thierack, Nazi minister of justice. This ‘Extermination Through Labor" was a principle that guided the operation of the Nazi concentration camp system, defined as the willful or accepted killing of forced laborers or prisoners through excessive heavy labor and inadequate care. Had I been born in Europe instead of the U.S. I would most likely not have survived the first few years of my life.

My father, Sidney Aaron Eckhaus was thirty years old when I was born – my mother, Hortense Eckhaus, nee Roth, was twenty-six. Both of their parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Europe – my father’s parents from Poland, and my mother’s, from Hungary. Both were Jewish, both were warm, loving people, and both were determined to build the American dream: to create a safe, comfortable home for themselves and their children; to educate and raise their children, enabling them to achieve their own happy, successful lives; and to carry on the Jewish traditions that were so much a part of their own lives. And this family into which I was born, also included their daughter, my sister Sheila Rosalind Eckhaus (later becoming Mrs. Howard Phillips).

And so, my life began – in a safe and wonderful land and with a warm and loving family. And from that very first day of my life on up through and including every single day of my seventy-five years, I have always had the comfort of feeling loved. I have never been without that. Not for even one day have I not felt loved. And it is this love that has given me the confidence to reach out beyond myself and find my way in this wonderful, but sometimes cold, world.

I was born into a very different world than the one that exists today. If ever there was an age of innocence, that was it. Before TV, computers, and things like self-driving cars. Before the sexual revolution, a time when movies showing married couples in their bedroom, had to show them sleeping in separate beds; and when the word ‘pregnant’ was not allowed on screen. We had no terrorists, no real drug problems. We were much more naïve. Morality was much more defined. A ride in a car was considered an exciting outing. Movies were only available in a movie theater. Homes were not air conditioned. Children safely played with friends outside and didn’t even have to stay in front of their own house. Weekends might mean a picnic in a nearby park. Ice cream was a big treat. If you were sick, you didn’t have to go to the doctor’s office, the doctor came to your home.

MOVING TO BEACON, NEW YORK

When I was about one year old, we moved to Beacon because my dad couldn’t find work in New York City. Jobs were scarce. At one job he applied for, he was told that his hand-writing wasn’t good enough, so he took a class in calligraphy. After that, he had the most beautiful, easy to read, handwriting. Not being able to find anything in New York City, eventually he answered an ad for someone to drive a milk truck in Beacon and was able to get that job. At first, he came to Beacon by himself, to find an apartment for our family. Then he moved us. As it turned out, the job in Beacon never materialized. We were there, in a new city and he had no job. When he did find a job, it was not in Beacon, but in Newburgh, a city directly across the Hudson river from Beacon. To get there he had to take a ferry each day.

In Newburgh he worked for the Strook Mill Company, repairing huge looms. He had never seen a loom before, but when asked if he could repair them he told them he could – and, he did!

EARLY MEMORIES

One of my very earliest memories is of being lifted by my mother, held in her arms and holding on to her as she walked around carrying me. I couldn’t have been more than one or two years old. She was chewing gum and the smell of her in that moment, remains with me today, and brings me back to another place, another time. Like a wonderful fantasy.

Len at two years old

In 1945 I was three years old. I was in the hospital, in bed, having just come out of surgery to remove my tonsils and adenoids. I remember being alone and frightened. What had happened to me? My throat hurt. I started to cry. The door to my room opened and my parents walked in. I was so happy to see them. They were smiling and as they approached I could see something in my father’s hand. He gave it to me. It was a plastic water pistol – something I had been asking for. They kissed me, and I was beginning to feel better already. Then they told me I could have ice cream. And I just felt better and better.

It is 1946. I was four years old. We lived in Beacon, New York. Our address was 25 Kent Street. The apartment we rented was on the second floor of the house. We had electricity, but on the walls of each room were the remnants of the old gas lamps used for lighting before the building had electricity. We were lucky enough to have a refrigerator but some of the other families on our block still had an ice box (an insulated cabinet used as a refrigerator to keep food cool). I remember the iceman’s truck pulling up in front of a nearby house and the driver getting out. He would give us each a chip of ice to suck on, while he used ice tongs to lift a fifty-pound block of ice he would have to carry up a flight of stairs to deliver.

I knew ice boxes very well. My grandparents had one in their apartment in the Bronx. They lived in a fourth-floor walkup (no elevators – very bad for the iceman). They had two ways to keep food cold: an icebox, which they used all year long, and a fire escape outside their dining room window, where they would put food to keep cold in the winter. Doing this was risky though – sometimes the food would freeze and, depending on what it was, might have to be thrown out.

I remember one day I was playing with a friend, in his backyard, a few houses away from mine. It was lunchtime and I could hear my mother calling me, from an open window, to come home and eat. It was safe for me to be out with my friends and our biggest concern was having to go home for things like lunch and dinner.

I was only four years old, but already used to being packed up and going away for the weekend. Every single weekend, my Mom would pack clothes for us to wear over the next few days, and some food to give us on our way, and then we would set out to visit her parents, in New York City – the Bronx to be more exact. We would take the train from Beacon to New York City and then the subway to my grandparent’s apartment in the Bronx. All the way my mother would be holding me in one arm (or on her lap if we were sitting), hold paper bags filled with clothes in the other, and always, always holding on to my sister’s hand. I don’t know how she did it, but she was a very determined young woman. And my father must have been a saint. Every weekend, after work on Friday, he would leave Beacon and travel to New York City to be with us.

In 1947 I was enrolled in Kindergarten. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Quackenbush. I was five years old and had to walk two miles from our home to the school and two miles back. There were no school buses to take me. I also had to come home for lunch, so I walked a total of 8 miles each day – in sun, rain and snow. When I walked home for lunch, I was always late getting back to school. Sometimes I would run and get there out of breath, huffing and puffing. When I began going to school, my Mom insisted on walking me there every morning. I hated that and kept asking her to let me go alone. Finally, she relented and allowed me to walk to school, by myself. This made me feel like a ‘big boy’. What I didn’t know was that for the first few days that I walked alone, my Mom had been following me at a distance to make sure I knew the way and didn’t get lost.

My Kindergarten class – 1947 - Spring Street School, Beacon, NY. I am third from the left, front row.

In 1948 my family moved to Newburgh, New York, where my dad worked. He had left his job at Strooks and now worked for Toback & Sons as a sewing machine repairman. Newburgh is directly across the Hudson River from Beacon. There is no bridge between Newburgh and Beacon so the only way to get across at this location is by ferry boat. The nearest bridge is in Poughkeepsie which is 18 miles further north.

In Newburgh my parents were able to purchase a home (with some help from my Dad’s employer, ‘Toback & Sons’). It was on the corner of Grand and Clinton Streets, at 271 N. Grand Street. It is a three-family house and we occupied the second floor. My parents rented out the first and third floor apartments. The house was built in the 1700’s as a single-family home but had since been converted into three separate apartments. It was heated using coal, which was delivered regularly in the winter and got shoveled down a chute into a coal storage bin in the basement. Eventually we converted the heating system to oil. Soon after we moved in, a law was passed in Newburgh requiring all three-story (or higher) apartment homes to have a fire-escape, which my Parents installed, even though it was an expense they really could not afford.

Our apartment had three bedrooms, one bathroom. We had a porch that was off the dining room facing Clinton Street and my parents spent a great deal of time sitting out there when the weather permitted. My bedroom was directly off the living room. It was tiny, just enough room for a single bed, a toybox and a dresser. My Dad made my toybox and covered it with decorative fabric. The light fixture on the ceiling in my room was shaped like a drum. There was a small window. The best feature of my room was that when we finally got a TV, and when my door was open, and I was in bed, I could see the reflection (from the glass doors on a bookcase right outside my room) of our television set in the living room, so I could lay in bed and watch television before falling asleep.

We had no air conditioning. No one did in those days. In the summer heat and humidity, we kept our windows open, hoping for a breeze, and used a small fan to help cool us down. I remember lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, twisting and turning, my head sweating and my pillow getting wet from the sweat.

Electricity wasn’t as reliable as it is today. It was not unusual for us to lose electricity, particularly when we had a storm, and when that happened we were prepared with candles that we would light and place in the main rooms of the house. When Sheila turned sixteen, my parents gave her a Sweet Sixteen party. Back then, when a girl turned sixteen years old, Sweet Sixteen parties were an important event. The girl would get a corsage made of a few flowers with sixteen cubes of sugar attached. It was a big deal – a rite of passage. The night of Sheila’s party, with all her friends there, we lost electricity. But it didn’t ruin the party. We had the candles and lit enough of them to light up the house, so the party could just go on as if nothing had happened. It actually made the party even more special.

My Sister Sheila circa 1954

My sister and I never really had a pet. My dad showed up one day with a cute little puppy, but my mom was not happy about it. They lined the kitchen floor with newspapers and blocked the dog’s way out of the room, but it urinated all over the place anyway and the next morning my mom made my dad take the puppy away.

I had a goldfish that I won at a fair, but I didn’t take very good care of it and eventually it died. My sister had a very small (tiny actually) turtle. She kept it in a container placed on the windowsill in our living room, but one day when the windows were open, the turtle, container and all, fell out and dropped to the ground below. And that was the extent of our pets.

We finally got a TV in 1951 and that was very, very exciting. Prior to having our own TV, we would often be invited to Frieda and Irving Klein’s (friends of my parents) house to watch theirs.

They had a son, much older than I, who always teased me by calling me Chicken Coop because my last name (Eckhaus) made him think of EGGhouse and an egg house was a chicken coop.

The Kleins had a ten-inch screen and an added ‘globe’ that was basically a magnifying glass that made the viewing area larger than the actual screen. With a globe covering the screen, the only good viewing was directly in front of the TV. If you were off to the side, the view was distorted. So, the adults got to sit directly in front of the television, and we kids sat off to the side, with the distorted view. But I would still get excited to be there. It was TV after all, and it opened up a whole new world for me.

Our first TV was a large, beautiful piece of furniture. The wood cabinet shined and contained a sixteen-inch General Electric TV, an AM/FM radio and a record player. It cost $500 and I have no idea how my parents ever saved up the money to buy it. I am sure they were proud to finally have it. I know I was. I remember watching programs like I Love Lucy, Amos and Andy, The Horn and Hardart’s Children’s Hour, Howdy Doody, cowboy movies for hours on end each Sunday morning, and Yankee baseball games. Early TVs used rooftop antennas to get reception. The reception was often not very good. It was common for the picture to be very snowy, meaning it was filled with moving white dots, blurring the picture. The TVs also had horizontal and vertical control knobs to correct the effect of rolling screens and other lines that would frequently appear and make watching the picture almost impossible. Back in 1951, we had only seven channels available to watch. And all of them went off the air from midnight until six am. The main TV brands were RCA, Dumont, Emerson, Sylvania, Zenith and General Electric. They cornered the market back then; interesting that none of them are still in that business today.

We also had a telephone. We had what was called a party-line. Private lines, 2-party lines and 4-party lines were available. The more parties that shared the line, the cheaper the telephone service. We had a 4-party line. That means that four families shared the line, so when you picked up the telephone someone else might be using it and you had to wait your turn. Waiting your turn meant picking up the phone every few minutes to see if anyone else was using the line. The click when you did that was audible and could be heard by the people on the phone - it was an irritant, but it did let them know you wanted it. Our telephone number was 2153-J. When you picked it up to make a call, a telephone operator asked, Number, please. and you would tell her (the operators were all women), the number. Then she connected you through to that person.

We are Jewish, and my family was fairly observant. We attended a Conservative synagogue just one block away from our house. I went to Hebrew school three times a week right after regular school let out. My sister Sheila went to the Hebrew school also. In the Jewish religion, when a boy reaches the age of thirteen, he becomes Bar Mitzvah. Back then, in the Conservative Jewish movement, girls didn’t. Instead, girls back then, including Sheila, had a Confirmation. A Bar Mitzvah is a ritual and family celebration commemorating the religious adulthood of a boy when he reaches the age of thirteen. A Confirmation confirms a young woman’s commitment to Judaism and to Jewish life.

Our synagogue, called Agudas Achem, had once been located on another street a few blocks away from where it is today. It has an interesting history in that it is the synagogue whose cantor at one time was Al Jolson’s (the famous Jazz singer’s) father. It is the synagogue where Al Jolson himself sang Kol Nidre one year when his father was too ill. And this story was made into a blockbuster movie called The Jazz Singer in 1927. That film was also famous for being the first ever Talkie. Before that, all films were silent, with subtitles, and accompanied by someone live playing the piano.

At home we kept kosher. On the Sabbath we didn’t pick up a pencil to write; we didn’t ride in the car; we didn’t turn lights on and off in the house – my mother left one light on in the hallway, so we could see to use the bathroom at night; my Mom didn’t cook on Shabbos – she left the oven on very low, so she could heat up the food she had already prepared on Friday. On Saturday morning my father often went to pray in the synagogue. Later on, when I was a bit older, I would go with him.

We celebrated all the Jewish holidays, going to shul, lighting the candles, eating the traditional foods that my Mom would make. For Purim, the story of Esther and Mordechai saving the Jewish people from Haman, was read in the synagogue from the ‘Magilla’ (in the biblical Book of Esther). We children were encouraged to wear a costume to shul to hear the reading of the Magilla. I always dressed as Mordechai. My dad made my costume, consisting of a black robe and a cardboard mask with cotton pasted on it for eyebrows and mustache. It was fun putting on the costume and going to shul to meet all my friends. One year, a photographer from our local newspaper showed up and took a photograph of us, in costume, and it ran in the next day’s paper. I still have a copy of that newspaper article and photo. In shul we were all handed a Greggor (noisemaker). Each time the name Haman, the evil man who wanted to kill all the Jews, was read from the Magilla, we would all crank up our noisemakers -- sort of a better, and certainly a more fun, version of booing.

Passover is the only holiday we didn’t celebrate at our own home, in Newburgh, in our own shul. For Passover, we went to New York City and stayed at my grandparent’s home. They always had a large Passover Seder, with all my aunts, uncles and cousins in attendance. My grandfather prepared the house by selling the Chametz (food that was not kosher for Passover) to a non-Jewish person (so he no longer owned them) and performing the traditional rite of searching the house for any crumbs that may have remained after the house was cleaned of the chametz. We then sat down in his dining room, at the same dining room table on which my mother had been borne, and he began the Seder – the re-telling of the story of the Jewish people leaving Egypt after many years of slavery to the Pharaoh and beginning their journey to the promised land (Israel). My grandfather recounted this entire story in Hebrew – not in English. Because of this, most of us had no