Wheel Dog Cheechako

By John Spitzberg

JOHN SPITZBERG and his five dogs, Chucky Cheese, Gracie Girl, Reba III, Jjay and Wu Wu live in Willow, Alaska, the home of the start of the Iditarod Dog Race on the first Sunday of March each year- weather permitting. Wheel Dog Cheechako is John's memoir of how a kid from Washington D.C. wended his way to the Last Frontier and spent 30 plus

• Language: English
• Publisher: Go To Publish
• Release date: Dec 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781950073771

John Spitzberg

"John is the parent of two sons, Jeffrey and Jerry, a wonderful daughter-in-law, Royanne and three grandchildren, Jeremy, Jordan and Emily. He was in the US Army and Air Force, taught school, practiced social work and has written three books, Doing it the Hard Way, Tsunami, No Good and Kelly House. "

Book preview

Chapter One

In the Beginning

Plagiarized line from a popular book

Washington D.C. (District of Columbia) is a city below the Mason Dixon Line and therefore technically in the South. A swamp for the most part early on when chosen to be the nation’s capital, it is now referred to as the Federal Triangle which is downtown. A lot of folks don’t have a clue as to why the word triangle is used. Executive, Legislative and Judicial bodies run our lives. It is the grand triumvirate. The city is hot, sticky and humid in the summer and full of politicians, most of whom know what’s best for America and all its people, or say they do. I am happy to be as far away as possible from those who know what’s best for me. Plus, we are far from a monolithic people. We are not all cut from the same cookie cutter. The U.S. is a glob of this and a glob of that and that is what is so beautiful about our country and at the same time maddening.

I was born in Northeast Washington at Garfield Hospital on May 23, 1938. Arthur Garfield was another one of the presidents assassinated. He died in 1883 and I was born in the hospital named for him fifty years later. Garfield’s name sake was torn down years ago. I am cynical enough to think that the land it was on is quite possibly now a shopping mall.

Doing research for this memoir brought me to a letter dated July 11, 1938 that I found written by my maternal grandfather, Julius Kiefe. It appears that my first home was 2817 Seventh Street, N.E. A stamp then cost three cents. One stamp had B. Franklin’s face, the other G. Washington. Grandpa lived in New York City at 240 W. 102 with my grandmother, Etta who would play a significant role in raising me. There are two letters in the envelop and over and over Julius writes of his love for me, his little one and only grandchild.

The letter talks about a German Shepherd, Liebschen that my mom and biological father owned and Grandpa’s admonition to train her well or lose her respect and willingness to do as she was told by my parents. Probably I began to love dogs while still in the womb. The letter goes on to talk about relatives still in Germany who sent me $10.00 as a gift. Hitler is mentioned, but not vilified yet. He refers to Uncle Henry, an "Aryan and some sort of a business deal with my dad, Jimmy Shapiro. Henry married my Aunt Ruth and they had four daughters. Grandpa called Henry a greenhorn".

I wonder if the area in N.E. Washington is gentrified as is so much of once was poor, Black and Hispanic streets where drugs, violence and prostitution dominated the area. Washington is the personification of what many cities in this country have experienced. Middle and economically lower-class European cultures giving way to poor African and Hispanic communities with a smattering of Asian (mostly Chinese back then) giving way to upper middle class white and people of color with university educations retaking the streets displacing the poor to suburban neighborhoods which were once white lower middle-class neighborhoods. I can remember old European women dressed in black rummaging in garbage cans in the alleys behind our apartment looking for food. Maybe these were Italian, Greek, Albanians, I don’t know, but they wandered the alleys looking suspicious, fearful and furtive. I imagine they were immigrants who could not shake their old country trials and tribulations. They were the ones who escaped, but memory of poverty and starvation accompanied them to the shores of America and the statue of the woman who watched for them. As I write this, I realize that they were much like the three dogs I have because they, too, brought histories of abuse, neglect and at least in Gracie Autumn’s case, starvation.

There is nothing more unsettling than looking for a place where you lived and finding another building or shopping mall where once stood your home, your life blood of your existence. Someday I want to go back to where Garfield Hospital stood. I hope that there is a plaque or memorial somewhere. I doubt that there will be anyone alive who remembers… Funny, over these many years I have met many people born in Washington, but never have I met anyone born at Garfield. (Wrong, I just met a doctor on an airplane bound for Baltimore and a conference. He lives in New York but was born in Garfield three years after I). Small world.

I’ve seen pictures of my early years as a baby. Mom or Jimmy, my biological father, cradles me in them. Jimmy was a good-looking guy with curly light brown hair, a strong looking physique and a charismatic smile. He loved to dance, was a lady’s man and quite the charmer. He’s been dead for many years now, and he played no part in raising me, but after some fifty years, I am reunited with Neil and some of the Shapiro family.

I know that at one time he loved me with all his heart but had to escape the pressures of living with Mom and a son. Mom preserved letters that he wrote to me from wherever he happened to be after he left. They started coming to us when I was about two or three years old. The letters are filled with words of remorse for having left me and always words of endearing sentiment.

My mom was also very comely with long brown hair piled upon her head in the style of the period. There was a story which Mom told me that, if true, was interesting. I had god parents who lived off Connecticut Avenue on Woodley Street. They became friends perhaps when, Edythe, my mother worked for the Feds during the war. She had room and board in their home. Back then, proper young Jewish women did not live alone. She substituted the Offenbergs supervision for her parents’ guidance.

Across the street was a Rabbi/Cantor and his wife whose son became famous on Vaudeville. His name was Al Jolson. Jolson was visiting his parents and the story goes that he held me in his arms and sang a song to me. Jolson was considered the most famous entertainer in the world at one time.

My stepdad, Maurice who adopted me when I was about eleven years old painted a portrait of Mom which is in my son’s home in Florida. Until her death in 1982, she was always pretty and in some sense regal. But she was never a happy woman. I think her condition was somatic, psychological, and mixed together with a sense of entitlement unmet by people in her life. She loved me, but I was also a reminder of Jimmy.

Mom’s dad, Julius Kiefe, an immigrant from Stuttgart, Germany died on December 28, 1938. I was five months old. I found his naturalization papers, a long sheet on parchment. Apparently, Grandpa lived for a while in Cincinnati, Ohio and became a citizen of the US in the Queen City in 1904. I don’t remember him, but he reportedly worked for a circus as a tight rope walker, a newspaper reporter in Chicago and covered the first electric chair used in Chicago, and a maître d in a famous restaurant which was frequented by the mob bosses. My mom presented a rich fantasy world and painted a picture of my grandfather that remains with me to this day. Julius was portrayed as a man rich in colorful life experiences. When I was a youngster, I dreamed of being just like him or as he was portrayed by Mom. We even have a silver-plated cup with horses and garlands wrapped around the cup. Mom told me that our family owned racehorses in Germany and that we won the cup at a horse show. She talked of great wealth in the old country.

On the other hand, a cousin, also from Germany, in a thick German accent, swore that we stole the cup in Germany from a rich family and stowed it away on the ship used to migrate to the New World. Mom was furious with the cousin and barely spoke to him for years.

Some Jews heeded warnings that Adolph Hitler meant to blame the economic woes of the German people upon the proud German Jews. Hitler screamed his mantra of making Germany great again and blamed first the Catholics, then the Jews, foreigners, and gypsies for the problems confronting the Germans. However, my family came to this country long before the Jews had to escape the Nazis.

I believe that George Santayana said something to the effect that he who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it. Are we in need of heeding this warning? We seem to be in the throes of another tyrant who blames everyone but himself for the problems we face. No two situations are exactly alike, but the similarities between Hitler and the current president bare consideration.

Many Jewish families were able to flee to Ellis Island, the Holy lands, Australia, South America and South Africa. Wherever they landed, they assimilated. Years ago, I remember my mom showing me a Muter Cross, a mother’s cross, a metal from World War I given to a proud Jewish mother who lost a son fighting for the Kaiser on some front during that war. Back then German Jews fought English, French and American Jews. Nationalism was alive and well. I suspect that it was like brother fighting brother in our uncivil war between the states. German Jews loved their country and Kaiser and died for their country as Jews in the United States died for Old Glory. Such a sad history of berserk Nationalism.

Anyway, Mom and Jimmy, my biological father did not last long as a married couple. I think she believed that Jimmy wasn’t good enough for her, and she never let him forget that he was of Eastern European ancestry, a village Jew with little education whose parents entered the country at Ellis Island with little money, while mom boasted of being a German Jew with resources and nobility. One of the myths that I grew up with was that I had a German aunt who was a queen somewhere in Europe. She was Tanta Leija. In America, she was a house maid. On the other hand, one of my cousins was William Whyler, the movie director with multiple Oscars and a trail of thoughtful movies.

He directed Friendly Persuasion, The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben Hur. Mom was invited to stay at Willie’s home in California during the summers and she brought me autograph books with signatures from people like Margaret O’Brian, Butch Jenkins, Gloria Swanson and a host of other femme fatales and gun slinging movie heroes. The autograph books disappeared when I was in my early teens. I suspect that someone knew that they would be worth a lot of money someday and took them. I wish the thief lots of good luck and hope that the books brought him or her great wealth.

So, when I was about two or three years old, my mother and father split up. Jim joined Roosevelt’s Conservation Corps and then the Army and went to the Pacific Theater. Mom and her mom, Etta moved to 244 Hamilton Street, NW and raised me. I can still remember the name of my kindergarten teacher, Miss Paxton. And, I remember my best friend, Jacky Erlich. His father and mother owned a poultry shop where they sold kosher chickens. They were Orthodox Jews and once when I was three years old, our icebox exploded in the night causing flames to engulf the kitchen. The Washington Post ran a picture of me in my pajamas holding a teddy bear surrounded by darkness and fire engines surrounding me. I guess they were hurting for news at that time of night. Grandma, Mom and I shared a room in the Erlich’s apartment for a night or two until the apartment was restored and livable. I still see the little boy with his teddybear in his arms.

I have a vivid memory of sitting on a kitchen table while my mom and Jim fought over who was to give me a bath. It was a Sunday evening and Jimmy and his buddy Sam were going to a dance at the Jewish Community Center on 16th and Q Streets. For years, the J was the only place where Jewish young people could meet and build relationships. Jimmy felt pressure to leave and kick up his heals with his friend Sammy. So, a little three-year-old watched the adults around him fighting about who would give Johnny a bath. I still feel a sense of sadness when I think about what happened. I am confident that others have memories which remain within them and bring back sadness as well as joy. Elephants and humans are given the gift of memory of experiences from long ago. It’s what we do with the memories that separate us. They can be glorious recollections or bring on nightmares.

Grandma ended up bathing me in the kitchen sink. Can you believe that? Seventy-six years ago, and still lingering in the recesses of my brain. I wonder how much of that memory is responsible for who I am today? While I’m at it, I also remember that Jimmy visited me while he was on furlough from the Army. I may have been about five years old. We went outside and threw a football to each other. I threw the ball way over his head and blurted out, I’m sorry! He came over to me and admonished me for saying I was sorry. To this day, when I apologize to someone, I think of that vignette in my life and how I totally rejected his reprimand. Jimmy grew up in a rough neighborhood in Chicago far from my mom’s North Chicago apartment. Many years later when I came to know my half-brother, Neil, eleven years my junior, he told me that his dad, Jimmy was constantly fighting Irish, Polish and Italian Catholics who were encouraged to beat up on Jewish kids. Jews killed Jesus- right? On that front, I could identify. But his father and uncles encouraged beating the bejesus out of the toughs, while my mother encouraged me to turn the other cheek. To this day, I am not a pacifist.

Another thing I remember about the Erlichs and later the Rothbaums who became my mother and grandmother’s best friends was that I would walk to shule, a synagogue, with them on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. We had to wear shoes which were not made of pig skin on the High Holidays. Little kids continued to run in and out of the place of worship, and all the people read from books written only in Hebrew and Aramaic. We, kids and most of the younger adults, did not understand what any of the prayers meant and only memorized passages for their Bar and Bat Mitzvah when they became thirteen. Then after the parties and gifts usually of money or fountain pens, they promptly forgot what they had learned. I believe that even the elders knew everything by rote and knew very little of what they were saying. All I remember from those episodes was that men and women prayed separately and they kept swaying and bending as they pretended to read from their prayer books. Many of the men would come outside for a cigarette every now and then. They all wore shawls and their yarmulkes. They studied the book of Deuteronomy and lived by Levitical law found in the five books of Moses. For the most part they read Yiddish papers, studied Torah, worked hard at their businesses and prayed every Sabbath and their kids became doctors, lawyers or rabbis.

Being a German Jew with roots in the Reform Jewish movement born in Germany with heavy emphasis on Rationalism and progressive thought of the times, Mom determined that I would be raised a Reform Jew. While there were many Orthodox and Conservative Synagogues, there was only one Reform Temple in those days, The Washington Hebrew Congregation on H Street. My mother being a divorced woman was treated as a charity case by Rabbi Gerstenfeld, who looked like God in the eyes of a small child, and I was permitted to go to Sunday School without Mom having to pay dues for it. The congregation sold the building to a Black congregation and the building is presently in the middle of Chinatown. It still has magnificent stained-glass windows and a large scroll of Torah embossed upon the building. It may be owned by a Black AME church.

Even as a small child I was acutely aware that I was different from the other children. Some very wealthy boys and girls went there. One was Maury Povich who I believe is still working in television with his own show. His father was a famous sportswriter for the Washington Post. The Gerstenfelts treated me as sort of a protected child, a charity case, with kindness, and I spent many afternoons at their home on California Street off Connecticut Avenue. Their home was huge, adorned with beautiful paintings and each of their three children had his or her own bedroom, plus a playroom. Jonathan, Lynn and Roger were the rabbi’s children.

The Orthodox and some Conservative Jews didn’t consider Reform Jews to be Jews. We learned no Hebrew, had no Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, didn’t have to go to Hebrew School, but most egregious was that men and women sat and prayed together. To this day Israel, a theocracy in some respects, treats Reform Jews differently than real Jews. Maybe this is why I consider myself a Cheechako, a want to be. Maybe it goes all the way back to my youth. A little psychology isn’t a terrible thing… even in the hands of an amateur.

As I got a little older, every Saturday weather permitting, Mom and I would walk to the Petworth Library about two or three miles from our little apartment. Grandma stayed home because the walk was too tiring for her. The streets were safe back then in the 40’s and early 50’s. Mom would find books to read for the week while I joined other little boys and girls for storytelling. A librarian read to us from children’s books and provided childcare so that the parents could talk amongst themselves or read. The carpets were warm and fuzzy and all of us felt secure.

My favorite radio shows were Let’s Pretend, The Shadow, the stirring music of the William Tell Overture providing the entrance for the Lone Ranger and his trusted friend Tonto. I had no awareness that Native Americans and every other minority was beaten down, abused and decimated. I was so isolated from the real world.

We were not a home which knew about or had historic roots in Socialism, Anarchy, Communism or anything except for love of America. Many Jewish children were raised with love of Socialism and even Communist paradises and saw pictures of Lenin, Marx and Browder on their parents’ walls in New York City and Chicago or called their daughters Emma for Emma Goldman. I was raised with love for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. I was in my thirties before I fell in love with American radicalism and realized that Franklin Roosevelt simply put a bandage on the depression to save Capitalism and avoid revolution. I still love him, but hold no illusions that he wanted to defeat Capitalism.

My mom, Grandma and all our relatives bought into the American dream and we were taught to believe in it, lock, stock and barrel. They loved the United States and believed the words on the Statute of Liberty by Emma Lazarus, Hand me your tired, huddled masses yearning to be free. I lift my lamp unto thee. They considered themselves fortunate to be accepted into America, while other Jewish kids were taught the reality of the land of the free. I didn’t know of the greeting in Kenilworth, Illinois- No Jews or Dogs allowed! And I knew nothing of lynching, tar and feathering and the Klu Klux Klan. My education was sorely lacking.

As I gained weight, I identified with the famous detective, the Fat Man, played by William Conrad as he wheezed his way through his cases. He was a hero just because I sensed that he was the underdog due to his girth.

I loved my ice cream at the Wiley Brothers shop. They created the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial sundaes. They were so good, and I’m salivating just writing about them, But they were fattening and full of sugar. Maybe that’s why I fight Diabetes and am on insulin every day. Oh, by the way, the U.S. has just been judged number one in the world for obesity. We are truly an exceptional land.

I am not an accomplished poet, but I wrote one dealing with our exceptionality. I placed it in a booklet of poems by Veterans For Peace combat poets and others who are in sympathy with striving for peace and social justice.

WE ARE NUMBER 1

The good ol USA has done it again

We’re Number 1 in obesity

Used to be something special

Diabetes, Heart Attacks, now plain to see

Violence and preparation for mayhem

We’re Number 1, 37 percent sold in the world

Sell the most weapons to other nations

Old glory proudly saluted unfurled

Gun deaths, 88 guns for every 100 people

40 gun related deaths for every 400,000 souls

Better not touch our 2nd Amendment rights

Ask not for the bell tolls

So much for this exceptional country

We’re number 1 in divorce, drug addiction

Debt zaps our economic strength

We’ve killed more civilians, caused more infliction

Make America Great again some say

Number 1, scrap social programs, privatize it all

Prisons, public education, high walls, keep them out

Put on a uniform for God and Country, stand tall

Yes, we’re Number 1 in all the wrong things

Some will say America Love it, or leave it

Health care, education, environment and mortality

None of these indicators seem to fit,

We are Number 1 after all

When I lived in Bethel, Alaska, I was in the library and Andy, a part-time assistant carried on the tradition of reading stories to young Yup’ik children and playing with them. Some of the kids did cut outs of animals surrounding the Delta. I had a flash back to my youth in Washington. It’s been 70 plus years or more and children still love to be read to and feel a sense of well-being curled up on the carpeted warmth of the reading room. Some things will never change and that is good. I, too, felt the security of the library, my mom and some of her friends who read to me and helped to ward off the fears of growing up poor, without a father and naïve to the prejudice against Jews, people of color and those who did not fit the mold of white, Christian, middle class.

On those Saturday afternoons, after my mom and I returned from the library and after a bowl of tomato soup and macaroni and cheese mixed in a big soup bowl (Grandma made the best macaroni and cheese in the world. My mouth waters, just thinking about it.) Mom and I listened to the Texaco Opera of the Week from the Metropolitan in New York City. Even as a child I loved Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, La Boheme and even some of the complicated music composed by Verdi. We didn’t listen to Wagnerian opera because we were taught that Hitler loved Wagner. I don’t know whether that was true or not, but to this day, I stiffen when I hear anything Wagnerian. The first opera I ever saw was La Traviata done at the Kennedy Stage behind what is now the tennis courts on 16th and Kennedy.

From time to time Mom, Grandma, and I would take the bus down to the Potomac River and watch the military bands and orchestras perform. For poor people like us living on Mom’s lowly government wages, it was a chance to hear classical music and see the stars of Broadway and cinema for free. The colorful uniforms of the military bands, the stirring music of John Phillip Souza and a pride unfounded for the Red, White and Blue, embraced my little body. The 4th of July celebrations with dazzling fireworks, especially the firecrackers were amazing. We children were introduced to the war propaganda machine that children on each side of the war were subject to. America, the land of the free- the other side the home of the vile, yellow peril and murderous dictators.

The horrors of Jim Crow were particularly evident in the nation’s capital. Black people, who were from African nations and wore their garb. were tolerated and even allowed into restaurants, while Black and Brown Americans, some of who were war heroes had to eat in the back kitchens and would not be seated where any low life White person could get a meal, if he or she had the money. I drank from White only water fountains, road in the front of city busses, went to Rudolph Elementary School and knew only one Black child, whose name was Whitey, ironic really, and he had to travel halfway across the city to go to school. His dad was a janitor in a near-by apartment building. I was naïve and clueless until three boys decided to beat me up because I killed Jesus, their Christ. Whitey, maybe two years older than I and the others wouldn’t let them beat me up. I think that was the first inkling that I had that I was different, and that a black kid protected me. It was to have a profound meaning in my life forever. I was different too, and to this day, I don’t feel like the majority wherever I go. Even in Israel, I felt more akin to the hated Palestinians because I was raised a Reform Jew, not a pious, yarmulke wearing, Orthodox Jew.

During the war, WMAL, a radio station, on Wisconsin Avenue had kids and wives come down to the station and make a record to be sent to some father or husband overseas. My biological father, Jimmy, was somewhere in the Philippines and when I was five years old, Mom took me down to the station and I made a record for him. Even though their marriage was on the skids, she did what she could to sustain and even foster my relationship with my biological dad. Intuitively, she knew that it was important for a boy to have a relationship with his father. I don’t know whether he ever received the record, but it was all part of the effort to maintain morale for the troops. Another recollection I have is that when I was seven years old, my mom and I took the train from Union Station in D.C. to Chicago to see her mother’s family. Another radio show which was nationally syndicated was The Breakfast Club of America hosted by Don McNeil. Mom took me to the show, and I marched around the breakfast table to music and loud applause. They had a guy, Sam, who was like everyone’s favorite uncle and I got to meet him on the show. What excitement to be on the Breakfast Club! Wikipedia had this to say about the show: John Doolittle wrote a book about this program, Don McNeill and His Breakfast Club (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001)

Before Garrison was even a twinkle in Mr. Keillor’s eye, Don McNeill launched a radio show with a unique mix of humor, music and audience participation. From 1933 to 1968, the Chicago-based Breakfast Club aired every weekday on the ABC radio network (originally NBC’s Blue Network). Millions of Americans tuned in to hear songs, jokes, interviews, the March around the Breakfast Table, the Moment of Silent Prayer and other regular features. (Except for his dedicated support of public prayer, McNeill eschewed politics, though he did run for president in 1948 on the Laugh Party ticket.

I would have voted for him, but I was only ten years old. Back then one had to be 21 years old to vote. The Constitution was amended to drop the age to 18. After all, young seventeen- year olds were going to war, dying and many came home disabled, and changed for the rest of their lives.

In this thoroughly researched and highly readable account, Doolittle reminds us just how popular Breakfast Club really was, especially with homemakers of modest means but also with the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Justice William O. Douglas. Many celebrities were guests on the show, including Jimmy Stewart, Lucille Ball, Jerry Lewis and even nobody’s like me.

When I was only 11 or 12 years old, Mom would let me take the bus downtown to Independence Avenue and the Army Medical Museum where I’d wander from one exhibit to the next. I remember the mannequin in the Iron Lung, a metallic tube in which those with the dreaded disease, polio, would be placed to help children and adults breathe. Everyone feared polio and President Roosevelt, stricken by the disabling disease was much loved and admired because he showed the world what a disabled person having endured polio could do with grit and determination.

I would leave the museum and go to the Natural History Smithsonian building for hours and hours. Or I’d walk over to the White House and sit in Lafayette Park across the street from the presidential home. I might have even fed the pigeons next to Barnard Baruch. He often sat on a bench and consulted with world leaders. He was a mentor to Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt. I wish I could say that I remember him; I don’t, but never-the-less he made an impression on me when I was a student of Political Science. What I do remember was the freedom I had to wander the streets of the nation’s capital and to explore my surroundings without fear of untoward actions by people who wanted to hurt me or compromise my youth. When I listen to NPR (National Public Radio) talk about the streets of our urban communities today, I am reminded how lucky I am to have been born when mayhem, senseless gang warfare, and killing people in the name of God did not exist or at least not in the quantity we hear of it presently. Regardless, World War II was raging, people of color were less than second class citizens and Jim Crow laws allowed for lynching’s and destruction of property.

During the war, only the rich escaped the long lines for bread, meat and butter. We were working poor and Grandma and I stood in a lengthy line across the street at the elementary school for bread, butter, meat and potatoes. Rain, snow, sunshine, it didn’t matter. Years later when I helped feed the homeless and poor in the breakfast line at the Prichard Park in Asheville, North Carolina which I went to every Sunday to give out clothing donated by good people and tell the homeless and poor about the Asheville Homeless Network, reminded me of those grey years of standing in those lines. Probably all of us find links to our past in our present. It all reminds me of pictures from the Great Depression in the 20’s and 30’s.

Mom and Grandma raised me during the war and into my youth. Mom was one of many thousands of young women who migrated to the nation’s capital to work for the federal government. Newly divorced and hungry for finding a suitable man to help raise her son, whatever free time she had was spent at the Jewish Community Center. Grandma, a convenient babysitter was from Austria and her family migrated to Chicago in the early twentieth century. She was a plump, matronly woman who fought heart disease most likely due to her diet of Jewish foods such as chicken liver, latkes, tons of cholesterol and bad triglycerides. I often found comfort nestling in the folds of her flabby breasts and arms. Back in the 30’s, 40’s and into the 50’s softig (fat) women with double chins were a sign of wellbeing and even opulence. How many people dropped dead of clogged arteries from all that lavishness? European Jewry counted the number of chins as marks of wealth. Wow, what we didn’t know back then. Today obesity reigns in areas of poverty, fast food diets and places where, in general, people are poorly educated, influenced by people who prey upon their ignorance. Even now in the 21st Century, our poverty- stricken people seem to be replete with obesity as opposed to other parts of the world where poverty usually brings emaciation and starvation. I’ve already shared my poem with you.

My mom smoked Lucky Strikes without filters and believed the lies perpetrated by the cigarette companies. Thankfully, she stopped smoking when I was a teen, but I have always had respiratory problems which could have been aggravated by the second-hand smoke. No one talked about second- hand smoke back in the 40’s or even 50’s as far as I can remember. I don’t know whether somehow secondary smoke could have even affected the tiny embryo growing in her belly.

My Uncle Harry, in Chicago, was a tailor and he and his wife raised five children in the tenements, two boys and three girls. He was my maternal grandmother’s brother and they both migrated to America from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their first language was German which meant that the Germanic peoples inhabited their village at the time they were born. My cousin, Dave made rank in the Army during World War II. I think he was a Master Sergeant, but his brother Al didn’t enlist for some reason. They both married and had daughters who I have no contact with. If they were religious Jews, I never heard anything about their belief system. I think they were part of the hoard of Jews who stopped believing thanks to Hitler and his genocide. I know that my German relatives in New York and California, my paternal Grandfather’s side of the family, either embraced Christianity or were agnostics, maybe even atheists. Later, when I became an adult and after much thinking about this matter, I coined a belief system- I am an irrelativist. It seems to me that it doesn’t matter if there is a god or not. If so, I haven’t much use for this entity. Just as there are bad fathers and mothers, this entity is just bad to the core. This supernatural being the world calls by different names such as God, Allah, El is at best a bad parent, I sort of think that all we have is each other and a humanistic belief system probably works best, at least for me.

However, and this may make some sense to some, we, all have three, maybe four separate areas of the brain which put together make us who and what we are. Cognitively, this lack of concern about a deity makes sense to me, but emotionally somewhere in my limbic system probably from my youth at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, I have a profound love for this entity, God and I thank it almost daily for giving me so much. I look at it as one might try to explain love or some other highly charged and mysterious idea. It doesn’t have to be rational, intelligent, or real. It is just there and without my wishing to think about it comes out and I sing praises to its presence and being there for me. Cognitively, it is irrelevant. Clearly, I realize that it all is in my head, my brain and I make it what it is. I wish I were more erudite and could explain it better. I leave that to the scholars who are more able to put the pieces together in this grand puzzle. Generally, I don’t trust people who make religion their profession as clergy. Emotionally, I have met some clergy who I love and admire, but they have chosen professions based on faulty conclusions in my opinion.

One thing I do believe and that is this thing we, here, in America refer to as God, is used as a defense for murder, mayhem and violence more than any other excuse for the atrocities perpetrated upon humankind. Religion, at least organized religion, is a shield upon which discrimination, bigotry and other horrendous manifestations hide and runs amok in general even though there are some organized religions which are less virulent and more excepting of all human beings and other animals.

As an adult, from time to time, I have joined some of them and found peace and serenity. But, in general, Religion, Nationalism and Capitalism strike me as being institutions bad for humanity. Capitalism is a cancer; some cancers are more lethal than others, but they are all bad and there are no good cancers.

Two events remain vivid from my years as a small boy growing up in Washington D.C. I went to the Sunday school and joined in group activities. I remember that I got into a snowball fight with Jonathan, the oldest son of the Rabbi. We were having fun, but I ran into a doorknob of the huge two doors of the Temple. Reform Jews called their synagogues Temples, like the Greeks did.

Spewing blood, the first person to find me, crying and dazed, was Mrs. Gerstenfeld. She took me to the emergency room of the closest hospital, and they stitched me up. The Congregation paid for my childishness. I thought that Rabbi Gerstenfeld was God and remember that when I saw him after many years later, he was a diminutive, frail man and certainly not the anthropomorphic picture I had as a small child.

One of my friends was Rosilie Goode, the daughter of Rabbi Alexander Goode who went down on the Dorchester Naval Ship in 1943. Along with three other chaplains of different faiths, he gave up his lifejacket to soldiers in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. A postage stamp with the four chaplains linking arms together as they prayed for their fellow soldiers was put into service and to this day, the ecumenism of their heroic sacrifice is still remembered from World War II days. A postage stamp showing the four chaplains together and their ship sinking was published by the Federal Government after the war. There is much more about this historic tragedy in Wikipedia for more information.

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Another vivid memory from my childhood is that my mom had a good friend, a woman who she may have met while working for the government during the war. When I was three or four, Mom’s friend, Lorraine, who identified as a Cherokee Native, brought me a toy orange dog and it along with five or six other toy animals slept with me in my little bed for years. I still have the dog. He’s been with me for 78 years. The dog, in a fit of jealousy by my Toy Manchester Terrier, Ricky, was nearly torn to pieces when I was about 13 years old, but I kept it and a few years ago a doll maker in Asheville, North Carolina did a superb job of sewing the dog’s neck up, doing doggy plastic surgery on its mouth and muzzle, placing new eyes in its sockets and restoring its balance. This dog without a name has been in four or five continents with me, sits next to a picture of my deceased dog, Reba perched high upon a book shelf here in Willow, AK. I don’t want my terrorist, Chucky Cheese near it.

Sadly, my mom’s friend who gave me this dog became a military widow during the Korean War. Her husband, Kenny, was a flyer who was killed somewhere in the Chosen Frozen. I suspect that many of us have carried relics of our past with us wherever we go. Mine is this orange stuffed toy dog. I do not think that my children, grandchildren, nor my yet unborn great grandchildren will feel the attachment that I have for this stuffed animal. So, probably I will ask that he be buried with me.

My mother, Edythe, was brought up in Albany Park in Chicago. She went to Roosevelt High School. It still operates and when I found the school, most of the kids were Latino and Black. But back in the early thirties, the neighborhood was mostly Jewish. One of my cousins, Terrie spent time in the Navy, and I’ve seen pictures of her in her naval uniform. I think that I had a crush on her, but she found it amusing that Edythe’s little boy found her attractive. She and my cousin, Grace never married. Their older sister, Gerrie, waited until she was in her sixties to marry, marrying an older distinguished gentleman, Louis Justice who died after just two or three years of marriage to Geraldine. The rest of their lives the three sisters lived in the same hi- rise on Lakeshore Drive in the city around Fullerton. The boys, as mom would call them, Dave and Al died in their fifties leaving wives who quickly dissolved any sense of family with my mom. Mom’s death closed the doors to so many thin strands to both my grandmother’s and grandfather’s side of the family. Mom was the great communicator and would not stand for any family member not writing letters filling in day by day happenings and sharing all the latest gossip about the family . Her death was the death of family continuity. Mom would have loved Facebook or Twitter. Particularly, Facebook would have meant that she had hundreds of friends and routinely kept in touch. I use it a bit, but not like Mom would have.

Grace, Uncle Harry’s middle daughter taught ballroom dancing for Arthur Murray studios in the Loop. So many lonely middle-aged people took classes hoping to connect with someone of the opposite sex to give meaning to their drab lives. Arthur Murray studios were country wide and provided much hope and happiness for people everywhere. They taught tango, merengue, rhumba, two-step, waltz and I would bet that many people who performed on the Lawrence Welk Show learned their first dance techniques at Arthur Murray’ studios. I suspect that in urban communities Arthur Murray still exists and maybe even for the gay and lesbian community as well. Back in the thirties, forties and into the fifties homosexuality was still in the closet. I am so overwhelmingly happy that the sixties brought an opening of so many doors which were closed and disastrous for so many wonderful people. Civil Rights, I suspect, gave new breath for everyone, not just African Americans. May it be so forever, and may President Trump and his entourage not set the clocks of freedom, humanitarianism, efforts for peace and social justice back to the Dark Ages. I do not hold out a great deal of hope for our future under the Democrats or Republicans. We desperately need two or more new parties… One could be a Labor Party, another a Humanist Party and a third Peace and Social Justice Party. A dove could represent the Peace and Social Justice Party. In this way the donkeys and the elephants would have real competition instead of the charade we call Democracy now.

Sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s I was invited to spend my summer organizing for the Service Employees International Union and the local president, Hazen Griffin. He was president of a SEIU local in Chicago. He wanted me to try to organize saleswomen and stock boys and men on State Street in the Loop.

I found myself on Lawrence and Kedzie Avenues one night after work. Darkness was descending. There were red brick apartment buildings, one after another and I saw some laborers refurbishing one of the buildings. Something drew me to the corner building on Kedzie and Lawrence. I walked in amongst sawdust, tools, nails and floor- boards strewn everywhere. I think each building had three or four floors with two apartments on each level. I went into the first-floor apartment on the right side. Something pulled me into that apartment, and I had the sense that I had been there before. It was the strangest feeling, like my life was somehow involved with this place.

Floor- boards were torn up, walls were freshly painted, and emptiness surrounded me and yet, I knew this empty apartment. A couple days later I called my mom and dad and told them about my surrealistic experience. My mom, ever the mystic who told fortunes for years, almost in a whisper said, Johnnie, that was where I was raised by your grandmother and grandfather. I spent my teens in that apartment. You see, God sent you there. At that point, I was teetering on being an atheist. But to this day I do not understand how I was so drawn to that place. I have not had any experiences like it since. Why that building, why that apartment? Coincidence, maybe, maybe not. A part of my philosophy is not to shut doors on the unknown, but also not to say that what I don’t understand belongs to some supernatural entity or grand plan, and then to bestow blessings upon it. Where is the evidence for that? I almost abhor the word faith. A poignant moment is occurring as I sit in my car in Willow, Alaska. The clouds are so low and thick that I cannot see the mountains. Some would say that I take it on faith that Denali is there. No, the mountain is there whether I believe or not. Were a plane to fly into them I would see a ball of fire. This is fact, not faith.

But I am getting way ahead of myself. I started school at the Rudolph Elementary School across the street. Grandma, with me in tow, and my holding her hand for dear life, took me over to the school to enroll me in kindergarten. Kindergarten is German for child’s garden. Here I am 79 and I remember Mrs. Paxton, my kindergarten teacher and I cannot tell you what I had for breakfast this morning. Long term memory versus short term? I was five years old and like most kids probably scared of the unknown. I enrolled with my best friend Jacky Erlich. All the apartment buildings were the same. Two apartments on the first floor and two on the second. The Erlichs were Polish Jews with parents from the old country, probably shtetel Jews with little education, but strong backs having picked potatoes and other vegetables in the fields. The pogroms sent many of us to America and some to Palestine those many years ago.

As I have already written, they were so different than the Jews in the Reform Temple, the Washington Hebrew Congregation where not a word of Hebrew was used in services, nor were children Bar or Bat Mitvahed. At the age of sixteen Reform Jews confirmed that the teens had attended Sunday School. In the Orthodox, not one word of English was used, but if one’s ear was attuned, Yiddish was mingled with the Hebrew and Aramaic prayers. This was the language spoken by grandparents and sung to little children preparing for bedtime. But in my home, High German was sung. Guten nacht, gay schlaff, a Brahms’s lullaby was my last words heard before I fell asleep. Very different than the village Jews who migrated to New York and the beckoning of the Statue of Liberty. Hand me you poor, your teeming masses yearning to be free. I lift my lamp onto thee. Emma Lazarus wrote the poem, but it is longer than the words so many refugees knew, particularly those who started their journey at Ellis Island:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs, astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name?

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

‘Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toast to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

I doubt that many know that these last lines were part of a powerful poem which seems so far from our collective hearts presently. The 21st Century and the Obama and now Trump regimes make her words seem almost childlike and of little relevance today. Homeland Security makes a mockery of this beautiful poem. Sad, so very sad. On the other hand, were it not for a religious fervor which believes that if you are not one of us, we can and will destroy you in the name of our supreme being, one would not have to disrobe (almost) to board a plane. It seems to me that fundamentalism of any ilk is a scourge upon the Earth.

Jacky Erlich was a blond haired, kind of big kid and was full of mischief. Many a time we got into trouble together for climbing over fences, going too far away to play and not being in ear range of our respective families. Jacky may have had some developmental delays. I didn’t know anything about that then, but sure enough at the end of the year Mrs. Paxton wanted to retain Jacky and me to redo kindergarten. She claimed that we had not advanced enough to enter the 1st grade. My grandmother wouldn’t hear of it. Taking me by my hand, she marched to the principal’s office and in her thick, Austrian accent stated emphatically that her Johnnie vill nicht in Kindergarten blieben. "Johnny will not stay in kindergarten."

She won, and I learned my first lesson about bureaucrats and while Jacky remained for another year in kindergarten, I was reluctantly promoted to the first grade. It was my first experience with how public-school administrators generally give in to people who demand respect and dignity. It is a mindset which I have struggled to fight against throughout my life because it speaks to the inequality of humankind. It may be because I do not demand respect and dignity in the eyes of others. I own that if it is so. I would test this theory when I was an officer in the Air Force. Troops would salute me when I was in uniform but ignore me when I walked amongst them in blue jeans and t-shirt.

Years later when I worked at the Mark Twain School for severely emotionally disturbed children, I was embarrassed to see Jacky again with his son who was being enrolled in our school. We hadn’t seen each other for at least 30 years or more. His son was a chip off the old block. I could see Jacky in him, and the boy had already been in many schools, expelled, in kiddy jail and had a record by then.

Jacky was divorced, his parent’s dead and for a short while we talked about our youth and the fact that his parents had let the elementary school hold him back. It was to be the beginning of one problem after another and eventual drop-out for him. We had coffee a couple of times, but lost track and I have not seen him since. We shared one experience. By the time we reconnected around 1980, we both had been through at least two marriages ending in divorce. I have no idea how many wives he had, but I have had five and never, never amounted to much as a husband. I greatly admire those who go for years and years with the same person. It just isn’t for me. I remember a woman who said that I was unstable because I couldn’t maintain a relationship. I thought her pejorative, but maybe she was right. On the other hand, I am a roamer without grass under my feet. Trite, but true.

The world has all kinds of people to make it a whole. Somewhere I read that many people who make it into Whose Who in American have had at least seven major career changes as a rule. I don’t know whether this is true having not done the research to check the facts. However, when it comes to marriage, the goal is to stay the marathon and remain with one spouse until death do us part. This is a religious notion primarily. I wonder what seven career changes mean in a religious connotation. Clearly, the United States bases practically all family law upon religious morality. Thankfully, we are moving only so slightly and not giving into religious bigotry when it comes to same sex marriage and the raising of children. I fear that a conservative Supreme Court could hamper this glimmer of human rights. I worry that the new president’s nominee Neil Gorsuch may destroy any gains made. He already is mirroring Anthony Scalia, the deceased Supreme Court Justice. Someone told me that Scalia was Gorsuch’s hero as he was growing up.

In the early 1940’s while I was in elementary school living in Washington D.C. meant that people were commanded to use tinted dark blue light bulbs, so that the Germans could not see the homes should they be able to attack by air with bombs. It never happened as far as I know but little kids in school were fed as much propaganda as I am sure the children in German, Italian and Japanese schools endured. We were taught to get under our desks and go into fetal positions upon command by the principal if an airstrike should happen. The fire department would come and show the kids gas mask, hazardous material garb and the likes. We had none in school, but maybe, just maybe there would be time to don all this clothing. I doubt it. And I doubt that we would be saved by pretzeling (?) ourselves under our flimsy school desks. I wonder whether the adults were to do the same thing. I have images in my head of grossly overweight teachers struggling to save themselves from nuclear annihilation under a desk for a five-year-old. As I review what I’ve written, I am listening to Jimmy Hendricks at Woodstock playing his tortured and angry version of the Nation’s Anthem. It screams at me in a most perverse manner because all I can think of is how it represents the countless wars, millions of dead and maimed and those we have killed, and his rendition speaks to me, yes, for me. I have just finished watching the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn. It is about Ernest Hemingway’s and Martha Gellhorn’s tempestuous marriage during the Spanish Revolution against Franco, the rise of the Lincoln Brigade, the horrors of Stalinism and a time in American history which I would have loved to have been active in. But for Edythe, Celia, and their new beaus Jimmy Shapiro and Jack Rothbaum, only romance, marriage and babies were on the horizon. There is no evidence that my parents, grandparents or any relatives experienced the rush of blood through their veins that rush through mine when I read of the heroics of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade dreamers who rushed to Spain with thousands from around the world to fight the Fascist dictator, Franco. Similarly, no one in my family becomes astatic and melancholy when Joan Baez sings about Joe Hill or Hazel Dickerson sings of the lives of coal miners caught in the mines below the ground in West Virginia and Kentucky. I hold myself responsible that my sons, my grandchildren, nor any of my wives have ever felt the rush of adrenalin which careens through my body when I read the preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, Wobblies! I have been a Wobbly for about 45years and like Alaska, I am in love with being a Wob. I recognize few truths. This is one that I do.

Preamble to the IWW Constitution

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class.

Even now as I reread the preamble, I am struck by the fact that I still accept everything in the document and with a little tweaking to make it relevant to present conditions, the preamble speaks to and for me. I firmly believe that Capitalism and Nationalism are destructive ideologies for all humanity. I am a citizen of the world. How can I think less?

As I have written, my parents were not worldly people of letters and historic significance and most likely knew nothing of the rise of Fascism, nor for that matter cared, until what was happening to the Jews of Europe punched them in the gut. Those who left their roots in all parts of Europe before the Nazis took over were the lucky ones who managed to find a way to escape the pogroms, the mass murders of Jews and others because they were different and of course Jews killed their lord and savior. The downtrodden, of which Lazerus wrote, did not seem to raise a social conscious which demanded action, not sorrow and financial contributions alone. Or perhaps I am being superficial and condescending. You be the judge. While I am at it, I want to discuss the concept that I believe comes from Old or New Testament scripture. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

I think that this is foolish nonsense. I encourage people to judge me. I hope that they can do so with a measure of fairness and human kindness, but regardless there is nothing wrong with friend and foe alike appraising me. If they share their judgment with me, I can grow from it, ignore it or denounce their point of view. To be sure, I judge people routinely. Most every day, I read quotations from the Dali Lama. Many times, I find strength from them. But some of what he wrote I do not ascribe to and it is outright childish thinking. Since I live in Alaska, I have begun to