Memoirs of a "Mad" Dentist

By Julian Firestone

I believe that almost any very motivated person with a righteous causein any sphere of endeavorcan fight censorship by a status-quo-minded bureaucracyand win, and then by effectively spreading the truth can make a significant difference. . . like the persistent file clerk Erin Brockovitch whose courageous investigating of a giant utility company eventually established that the health of countless people had been been severely compromised by leakage of Chromium 6 into the groundwater.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503544932

Julian Firestone

Julian Firestone, a practicing dentist having been duly licensed to practice in the State of New York in 1947, has fought against a membership corporation of which he is a member, for a judgment declaring the invalidity of certain provisions of defendant's code of ethics and regulations and enjoining their enforcement. Julian Firestone is a dentist-artist-violinist (in that order of proficiency), over 80 years old, and has happily been hanging in with the GVO for decades. He is listed as specialized in General Dentist under General Dentistry in New York, New York .

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Memoirs

of a

Mad Dentist

Julian Firestone

Copyright © 2015 by Julian Firestone.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015902541

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-4494-9

                Softcover        978-1-5035-4495-6

                eBook             978-1-5035-4493-2

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Rev. date: 02/19/2015

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Contents

Preface

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

PREFACE

"F IRESTONE! ARE YOU mad?!" the gravelly voice bellowed at me over my chairside telephone. What the hell do you want to do? Bring a bunch of damn malpractice suits down on our heads because of your rantings?! The voice caught its breath, and, simmering down a bit, declared, This is Jack Barsh speaking, Chairman of the Public and Professional Relations Committee of The First Dist rict.

The Chairman’s words made me feel like being clobbered with a mallet. I fell into a dumfounded silence. He was in error! He couldn’t have grasped the reasonableness!

I had been having a more than pleasant morning in my dental operatory on July 20 of 1962 since I was expecting momentarily to receive a call from my Dental Society giving me permission to read my script over WBAI-FM. My patient, a graduate student at nearby NYU, gazed through the partially opened venetian blinds at the brightly sun-illumined nearby Washington Square Arch and the tops of trees heavy with sloping summertime leaves. I was painlessly, gently shaving away two teeth which would serve as abutments for a fixed bridge, needed to replace her lost molar. I thought as I worked: In a few weeks I will speak out publicly to help prevent these sort of patients in the future!

My patient at her initial visit had told me the old sad story: I lost that tooth, but it was my own fault. You know, you don’t see a dentist, and so you allow a little cavity to get bigger, you develop a toothache, then the dentist has to take the tooth out. And so my radio talk concluded: The law today offers the public little protection. Although competent root canal therapy makes extraction because of toothache scientifically unnecessary, a dentist can legally extract a tooth to relieve pain and infection without suggesting root canal therapy… Whatever suggestions are adopted to legally reinterpret ‘standards of the community,’ one thing is certain: Some action is necessary to protect the public from conventional dentists.

One out of four Americans wore a denture by age 40! Soon, after 15 years of tediously making prostheses for pitiful dental cripples, this being the what-can-you-do-for-your-country President Kennedy era I would become part of the people’s right on, conscious-raising, tell-it-like-it-is revolution of hope!

In so counseling the public to avoid extraction-oriented dentists I wanted no praise from my dental society, for I was but dutifully actualizing the published PURPOSES AND AIMS OF THIS SOCIETY of the First District Dental Society of New York, which were to Elevate professional standards; safeguard the standards and improve the methods of dental education; and direct the public opinion in relation to oral health.

It’s your Dental Society, said Nancy, my secretary, when the call came in.

The O.K. to give my radio talk! I exclaimed excitedly as I swiveled around on my dental stool and eagerly reached for the chairside wall telephone, my face bursting into a smile of self-satisfaction.

I strongly advise you to cancel your talk, Firestone, the Chairman now intoned in a grave monotone.

But why? I ventured. What did I say that was inaccurate? My ears felt like they were turning very red.

That’s not the issue, Dr. Barsh’s now pronounced, sounding agitated at being challenged. "You know damn well, Firestone, that it’s a violation of our Code of Ethics to reflect upon the dignity of the profession, and to disparage the services of dentists to the public." He recited this from the Code, almost by rote, emphasizing each word.

Look, we’re not stopping you from giving your damn talk, Firestone, he added. All you have to do is leave the Society. But so long as you’re a member you have to abide by our rules.

And what will happen if I do broadcast?

Appropriate action will be taken against you, Firestone, under our Code of Ethics, which you agreed to abide by when you joined the Society. . . .

So began the disconcerting phone call which three years later resulted in the dramatic five-column-wide news story A Suit With Teeth in It published by Joseph R. Hixon of The Herald Tribune Staff on May 30, 1965. That article, replete with my photograph taken in my office (shown on the following page) opened:

A dentist on Washington Square Park who doesn’t like having his public statements disapproved by his local dental society is suing in Supreme Court to void the society’s censorship rules.

July 20, 1962

Dr. Julian M. Firestone

11 Fifth Avenue

New York, 3, N.Y.

Dear Dr. Firestone:

I have received your manuscript from Dr. Eugene R. Ball, for review, in light of your request for possible broadcast over a local radio station.

As chairman of the Public and Professional Relations Committee of the First District Dental Society, I find the material unacceptable for radio broadcast.

Your manuscript has been placed in the society files. Many thanks for your continued interest in dental and society activities.

Yours truly,

Jack Barsh, DDS

copies to:

Dr. Isidore Teich

Dr. Eugene R. Ball

The suit was disclosed yesterday when the American Civil Liberties Union reported it has assigned its counsel, Emanuel Redfield, to the case of Dr. Julian M. Firestone vs. the First District Dental Society of the State of New York. The case involves a broadcast the dentist wanted to make over WBAI-FM last winter.

The Society didn’t like what Dr. Firestone was going to say about dentistry, and its ethics committee told him so in a letter dated April 19.

In his taped talk, Dr. Firestone was protesting the second-class dentistry dispensed to under-privileged economic groups, dentistry in which, he said, teeth are yanked rather then fixed. . .

A lengthy court battle ensued, which, with the help of the ACLU, I finally won and continued to win through every last appeal the society was able to make, my unique victory making newspaper headlines. . .

Dentist Wins

A Court Fight

On Censorship

and evoking many congratulatory letters, such as that by Dr. Harry P. Garfinkel, a dentist from Manhattan, who wrote with a bold pen . . .

Heartiest congratulations on your victory in the court.

The dental society cannot stop the truth. The truth will always prevail.

Your fight was wonderful!

I then several years later decided to write my autobiography in order to inspire others to also make a significant difference. By recounting over four decades of my life––replete with their diversions, hindrances, complications––it would show that I was not innately endowed, like a Wagnerian Siegfried, with the courageous, heroic crusader qualities mentioned by many letter writers, but that the vital key to my––or anyone’s––success was long-term motivation.

Troublemaker! is however not a polemic, but primarily a very personal good story, one akin to Sinclair Lewis’ famed novel, Arrowsmith, about Dr. Martin Arrowsmith, an idealistic research pathologist, who likewise comes to face obstacles placed by crass and publicity-minded forces. As such Troublemaker! is similarly no more basically about dentistry than Arrowsmith is about bacteriology.

As a good story like Arrowsmith, mine is also replete with dramatic conflicts, romance, adventures, humor, poignancy, misadventures. There even are melodramatic episodes… such as when I was an Army dentist stationed in Germany in 1952 and decided not to return to my father’s denture-oriented ‘gold mine’, my mother wrote:

. . . We have reared a ruthless monstrosity devoid of any normal human feelings & principles.

Your latest treachery will be very costly to you - not only financially - but emotionally - degraded as you are. To repeat you will find it increasingly difficult to live with yourself no matter how you try to escape by new interests & hobbies - new horizons, etc. white wash - soothing opiates to appease your conscience - or what is left of it.

You are doomed.

No one, can escape a reckoning with his own inner self - not even you.

As ever,

Mother

My life as an artist is integral to my tale. A 1947 Brooklyn Eagle article entitled Practices Dentistry During Day, Wins Success As Painter at Night is shown on the following page. A whole chapter describes an amazing day I spent with Picasso in his studio in Vallauris, which chapter contains photos I took of him holding his erotic sculpture.

Troublemaker! is therefore an eclectic, dramatic, thought- and emotion-provoking, offbeat, upbeat, entertaining tale, albeit having a purposeful focus.

The genesis of my lonely, heroic crusading dated back to when I was a child of ten, in 1934, because that was when began my firm long-term motivation to become a doctor in the best sense of the word as I understood it then––and still do––the scientific healer who is unconditionally dedicated to trying to make and keep people whole and sound. . . certainly not a dentist like my father, since he casually extracted teeth, and my parents wanted me to become a dentist.

That is therefore when my saga begins.

Why such an extensive autobiography? Erich Fromm, in the opening paragraph of Beyond The Chains of Illusions, states:

IF A MAN asks himself how he ever became interested in those fields of thought which were destined to occupy the most important place throughout his life, he will not find it easy to give a simple answer. Perhaps he was born with an inclination for certain questions, or perhaps it was the influence of certain teachers, or of current ideas, or of personal experiences which led him along the path of his later interests––who knows which of these factors have determined the course of his life? Indeed, if one wanted to know precisely the relative weight of all these factors, nothing short of a detailed historical autobiography could even attempt to give the answers.

Inherent in autobiography is the fact that one might be idealizing oneself. Freud was wont to quote an aphorism by Nietzsche which went something like, My memory tells me I have done this. My pride tells me I cannot have done this. My memory yields. Therefore, to prepare for writing I have searched through boxes and a file cabinet, hunting out records of others’ reactions to me, as well as my own writings. (My wife always said I was a pack rat who saved everything.) And if a picture is worth a thousand words, many are included. Letters and other writings are presented verbatim, rather than paraphrased, in order to let the reader judge for himself.

ONE

W HEN I WAS ten, in 1934, I overheard my mother say to my father about me, He’s so good with his hands… he will make a good dentist! I developed then the deep seated suspicion that whether I wanted to or not my parents had that agenda for me: I should be made to follow in my father’s footsteps by becoming a den tist.

But in my father’s dental office I recoiled at the sight of many try-in sets of false teeth set in blood red wax mounted on hinges, all lined up on the shelf of his small lab, and finished plates (my father called them) in a bowl of water… all to be worn by people! I shuddered when I recalled seeing my Uncle Sol rinse his plates in water, and then suck them back through sunken-in cheeks onto empty gums, and go through muscular contortions to make them stay in place. A dentist, apparently, patched up teeth when you are young; later, he pulls them out when they unaccountably go bad.

I wondered if I would need plates some day since I was always getting cavities, and I hated to sit in the dental chair. The very knowledge that I would be drilled sent pangs of fear into me, and caused my shirt to be drenched. Sit still!, my father commanded me. How can I work when you squirm around? My father then lectured me, in the form of a serious jest, Be true to your teeth, or they will be false to you! I therefore steeled myself and tolerated the drilling for fear of losing my teeth and needing plates.

That teeth could be false to you, puzzled as well as alarmed me. Sure, since teeth could become sick, early care was best. Yet there was a big difference between becoming even very sick, and dying. In a class in public school a teacher had us see by means of a microscope amazingly small animals swimming around in a drop of water, and she explained to us how microbes cause sickness, a theory pioneered by Louis Pasteur and made into a science by Robert Koch. She then said that at one time in history a physician’s treatment of choice when confronted with a very infected limb was to amputate it, but that by application of the scientific germ theory physicians came to kill infecting microbes, thus saving limbs and lives. I then wondered why that this same healing science strangely didn’t seem to be applied by dentists, since people at their hands lost molars, important organs of the body, thus eventually needing sets of clumsy plates, like my Uncle Sol.

And so, though I respected the good intentions of my parents, I resolved not to become a dentist but to be a physician… a doctor in the best sense of the word as I understood it –– a scientific healer who is unconditionally dedicated to trying to make and keep people whole and sound.

In order for my parents to prepare me to later accept their hidden dental office agenda, as a child I was told that life was and always will be a dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest struggle from which they had to lovingly shield and guide one as soft and impractical as myself. To drive home their point, my mother told me and my older brother cautionary sagas about my father’s heroic struggles. I should say lectured, for the format was that she talked, we just listened. This indoctrination was cleverly masqueraded as normal family dinner conversation.

My mother, nee Rose Lewitt, was a very attractive woman: chiseled classic features, soulful eyes and self-styled aristocratic bearing. Born in New York City on November 7, 1895 and a graduate of Hunter College, by profession she was a kindergarten teacher; and by serious avocation she was a fine pianist. But she was also the family historian and moralist, and well suited by personality to those roles. Trained not only as a kindergartner but in motivational child psychology, she had through the years honed her skills in subliminally tying in tales of a hostile world with our father’s drive to not just survive but to prosper through dentistry.

Such disguised sessions began when I was about ten, in 1934. The setting was of vital importance to my mother’s heroic narrative: this was the opulent dining room of my father’s Castle By The Sea. And his Castle was in fashionable Manhattan Beach.

Manhattan Beach. This is the eastern end of a peninsula in southernmost Brooklyn; it is bordered on one side by a narrow bay, Sheepshead Bay, with its small, colorful fishing and leisure boats, and on the other by the ocean with its then private beach (seasonal summer passes could be purchased by residents of the area for twenty dollars). Sandwiched in between ocean and bay are the modestly lavish separate homes, such as my parents’, each on its own estate surrounded by a well-manicured lawn and appropriate trimmed shrubbery and tall trees. Our mother never let us forget that my father’s Castle By The Sea and its opulent setting were a far cry from our previous small apartment to the rear of my father’s walk-up dental office in neighboring Brighton Beach, where we lived until I was about six or seven.

Brighton Beach is a melange of stores and apartment houses. The more favored houses overlook the boardwalk and a wide public beach, crowded by many thousands in summer. But slightly inward is the broad main business street, Brighton Beach Avenue, on which we lived, overshadowed by the rattling BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit) El trains. Chinese restaurants, candy stores, delicatessens, hot potato knishes stands abounded (but perhaps no longer do, since the area has in recent years taken on a Russian flavor). . . . But not one bar or liquor store, our mother stressed, which are found only in neighborhoods where the Irish live! She told us that our father built his Castle By The Sea to get us out of Brighton Beach, and that it was the product of his inimitable and indomitable will power. Yes, she added, with a pointed nod toward me, "dentistry has provided your father with a good living for us all."

My father, a well-built, barrel-chested, attractive man of medium height, with an infectious, proud smile and a full head of slightly graying hair, took great pride in that he, a poor immigrant from Russia (born there on May 1, 1888), the eldest of eleven children, had with effortllar, laying the foundation, and so on upwards. It is an imposing two-story yellow stucco building with an upper front porch. To its rear, on the side overlooking the lawn, is another porch on which he loved to sit and read his Tolstoy, play chess with us, or just gaze at his birds as they hopped about in the lawn’s stone bird bath.

I say his birds because my father had entitled a poem To My Birds, which he wrote in 1934, when I was 10, then carefully typed out, and proudly now read to the whole family. A few of its many stanzas reflect on his immigrant experience. . .

Toward the front of the lawn was a large evergreen tree surrounded by red flowering azalea bushes; hedges and tall poplar trees –– Planted with my own hands, he proudly often said –– on the long side of the lawn lent privacy to his domain. From the street a winding red paved path led upwards, via wide stone steps to the right of a magnolia tree (magnificent when in full blossom), to an oval-topped mahogany front door. This entrance was made impressive by an ornate lantern to one side and a stained glass window on the other, which he had specially made.

Dentistry, for my father, was thus much more than a profession. It was that which enabled him after a long struggle to own his own home in the beautiful as well as posh Manhattan Beach. He often said with pride, Many prominent dentists, lawyers, even judges, like Judge Liebowitz, have their homes here!

Manhattan Beach was originally zoned only for one-family homes, but it was exclusive as well in a psychological way for my father: He said, "Before us there were only cultured goyim. We were the first Jews to come here!"

Brighton Beach is where the cheap Jews live, my mother explained to us, "but of course not even they will live in Sheepshead Bay, across the Bay, because that’s where Wops, ‘cheap Italians,’ live." Wops, I recently learned, was the acronym derived label for Italians who had snuck into America without papers.

By cheap I understood not an intent at a religious or national slur (for my parents were Jewish and they idolized Giuseppe Verdi), but rather how they characterized persons who (in their judgment) were not motivated to struggle to attain (through education and will power) a cultural upliftment (as signified by becoming professionals who reside in a refined residence). By this criterion my father bragged that none of his nine brothers or his sister ever amounted to anything. He explained that this one runs a dinette, that one is a pawnbroker, another is a sailor, another a dental technician, his sister is a secretary. Not a college graduate in the lot!

My mother had three elder sisters who did go to college, but a fourth, the oldest, the dull-witted Ida, my parents utilized as a free live-in servant. The other three were: Margaret, whom I met but once, who was stocky and sarcastic looking, and was typified by my mother as A crazy spinster school teacher who examines men’s noses to get an indication of the length of their penises; Lily, a photo of whom (I never met her –– she married a civil servant and lived in Washington, D. C.) always reminded me of the soprano Galli-Curci as Violetta in my Victrola Book of the Opera –– she had a long face with a long nose and a sad demeanor; and Ethel, a warm, nurturing jolly soul with twinkling eyes, always smiling in my memory, who lived in the City! with my Uncle Alex, the doctor, and their three wonderful children, the beautiful, sweet Marian, and the twins, Morty and Jesse, who like their father both became doctors.

The Lewitt Family, and my Father

The%20Lewitt%20Family%20and%20my%20Father.jpg

My mother proceeded early-on to inform me and my brother (as the start of a typical installment of my father’s cautionary saga) when we had begun to eat the delicious soup brought to us by my Aunt Ida, that Dad came over to America from Russia at seventeen, not knowing a word of English, mind you! She then repeated, as reinforcement, the family story, as well-known as The Three Bears, of my father’s heroic travails: Your father worked nights to support his nine younger brothers and one sister –– who as you know, all never ultimately amounted to much because they lacked your father’s drive. Your father worked against almost insurmountable obstacles to get his high school diploma.

My father listened to all this in silence, nodding his head occasionally.

His father, in contrast, we were once told, had the peculiar knack of failing at everything he ever tried. He was good-natured, but he was a schlemiel when it came to business. My father resolved to be neither a schlemiel nor a schlemazel. (A schlemiel, it was explained to us, is the bungler who spills the soup. The schlemazel is the one upon whom he spills it.)

What will these children ever know of struggle? my father interjected at last. He spoke perfect English, without the slightest trace of Russian or Yiddish although he still read and spoke both. They don’t know how lucky they are to go to a real school! They don’t even know they’re Jewish, much less know, thank God, what it meant to be a Jew in Russia under the Czar. In Russia they made you know you were Jewish, with pogroms. School for a Jew in Russia was only an informal gathering around a teacher. But who needed schooling? If there was work, it was as a tailor, a farmer, a factory worker. I could never be a doctor there. Ach, but what’s the use of talking, Rose?! I might just as well talk to the wall. These children don’t realize how well off they are!

My father then, shaking his handsome commanding head, pushed himself away as if in disgust from the table and made his exit into the living room.

"Finish all the food on your plates, said our mother. Starving children in Europe would do anything to have this food!

Your father first studied engineering at Drexel Institute with some help from a kindly man, she continued, but in a confidential tone, and graduated with honors, I’ll have you know, even though he is too modest to mention it. But your poor father saw that engineering was not a career for a Jew in in those days. It was a straight path to poverty.

As I do my research I discover that my father did not graduate from Drexel, much less doing so with honors. I also find out that after dropping out from Drexel and engineering he changed his Jewish-sounding surname to Firestone. A To whom it may concern: letter certifies that Herman Feirstin was a student in the evening class at Drexel Institute in the year 1910-1911. He completed a course in Engineering Drawing, one evening a week, with a grade of 71, and in Trigonometry, one evening a week, with a grade of 70.

"Your father had to become independent of the whims of an employer, and dentistry could make him independent. He was always good with his hands, like you (nodding to me) and he concluded that dentistry was the profession for him. And all the while your father had to work hard to amount to something. He supported his entire family by punching tickets in the subway. Your father became a dentist so that he could give you children opportunities he never had. And he vowed that we would become so independent that our children would never have to support us in our old age. Your father’s a remarkable man! And after a long series of associations your father attained some measure of financial security. I helped him out by being a kindergarten teacher during those terrible Depression years."

Enough talk already, Rose, our father then said from afar. These children will never know what it’s like to have to struggle!

Our mother nevertheless continued her cautionary saga, now in an almost whispering voice. Yes, sometimes we think you children have it too good. Your father loves music like you children do, but he wasn’t offered lessons. Why, he would skimp on his lunches to hear a concert by Mischa Elman! She then inclined her head toward me and said with a smile, "You know, Brother, several years ago you actually asked me, Mother, how will I know when the Depression is over?! But thank goodness your father and I were able to spare you that wonderful experience. As Angelo Patri (the reigning child psychologist of that day) says, Don’t beat your children, the landlord will!"

Brother, used in the previous paragraph, was my childhood nickname which arose when my elder brother (two years and four months older) could not pronounce the name Julian. It appears in a touching twenty-verse poem my father composed for me and my brother, Donald, in 1934, when I was ten. Entitled, To My Sons, it was a simple expression of his joy at our very existence, but also contained his guide for good living (Please be kind to everyone,/ and never make one cry; . . . Don’t get angry and unpleasant/’Ere you know what’s all about,. . . Clean your teeth, scrub your body,/ This will give you strength and health, . . . Please be careful when in the street,/When you cross don’t be in a hurry, . . .) A part specifically to me went:

After the dishes had been cleared by my Aunt Ida (which brings to mind that my father used to brag that when he courted my mother he vowed, You will never have to put your hands in hot water!), my mother often went through with us the extensive family photo album she had carefully compiled through the decades. She did this to graphically illustrate the benefits accrued to us from being children of a dentist.

I took possession of this album when I found it in her Manhattan Beach Castle By The Sea bedroom after she had died in 1987, at the age of 92 in Glenside Nursing Home (ironically, a nursing home that my father, in conjunction with a consortium, had built in New Jersey as a business venture). It was originally a fine looking album, and measures 10 by 14 inches. Through many years of showing it had developed a fraying of its matt thick black leaves as well as of its shiny alligator-texture green cardboard covers. Embossed in gold on top is PHOTOGRAPHS set in an ornate gilt box above Made in England. The photographs and other memorabilia in it date back to 1915, and go up to 1967.

With great delight my mother firstly pointed out snapshots of herself as a young woman. Above one, which always stands out in my memory, was written in pen Sweet 16, for she is indeed startlingly beautiful and sweet looking there –– long hair piled above her regal features looking much like a Gibson Girl in her fluffy white outfit. Then she showed one of my father as a young student––obviously taken by a commercial photographer––in which he looks quite handsome dressed in a suit with vest and wearing an ornate satiny bow tie, with his right hand to his forehead, slightly below his carefully groomed hair, elbow on a table, as he gazes downward at an open book deep in thought. And many, many others: my father and other students crowded around the legs

My%20Father%20as%20a%20Student%20at%20New%20York%20College%20of%20Dentistry%2c%20and%20as%20a%20Graduate%20in%201917.JPG

My Father as a Student at New York College of Dentistry, and as a Graduate in 1917

My%20Father%27s%20FIrst%20Office%2c%20in%201917.jpg

My Father’s First Office, in 1917

of a body being dissected in Gross Anatomy; a large picture of my father and his nine brothers and one sister and their parents posing formally around a fully laden seder table; a printed picture of my mother’s father, looking like quite the patriarch, on a pamphlet cover subtitled A. LEWITT Treasurer of the Hebrew Alliance; my father and his nurse at the chair in his 1919 dental office; shots of my mother and her sisters taken at the beach garbed in their knee-length black bathing costumes; my mother at Hunter College (sporting a kooky hat with a feather).

Not to be upstaged by my father in the professional department, my mother was especially proud to show us a long 1915 New York Times article quoting from her notes as a student teacher, headlined Human Element In Kindergarten Work, which she read to us, as well as a subsequent 1915 letter by the Head of the School for Kindergartners at Hunter College to the Principal of Public School 4 at which she did her study, which concludes, I agree with you that such careful observations on the part of Miss Lewitt show a real appreciation of child nature.

My mother was also apparently a bit vain, since, wanting to be taken for one younger, on a leaf of this photo album she stapled in a page from her passport on which she had crossed out the 1895 of her birth date and written in "1901" to its right… which would have made her fourteen years of age when she was a student teacher in 1915.

If my mother was vain, this quality was constantly fed and encouraged by my father, since his searching out and then winning

The Lewitt Family, and my Father

The%20Lewitt%20Family%20and%20my%20Father.jpg

Rose Lewitt as his wife was for him one of his greatest achievements, rivaling his success as a dentist and creation of his Castle By The Sea. Her main attraction to my father, apart from her outstanding pulchritude, classic profile, intelligence, college training and fine Yankee upbringing was that she played the piano well. My father used to brag, with a smile, that he auditioned every girl he met, and my mother won his contest. She played well enough to later on accompany my violin teacher in recitals he gave over New York radio station WOR. Next to her Gibsonesque picture in her Hunter College yearbook was the comment, Her music hath charms.

Many of the decorations within my father’s Castle were a hymn to his American beauty. He commissioned an oil painting of my mother posing in an aloof but attractive Victorian manner, wearing her long string of pearls over an elegant black velvet gown, which he hung, illuminated, above the red-brick fireplace.

Mother%20and%20Father.jpg

And so one of my father’s not just greatest pleasures but sign of achievement of success was to be able to sit in his favorite living room chair, feet on a comfortable hassock, set across from the fireplace with its overhead illuminated portrait of his Rose, thus to read his Tolstoy (by the light of a lamp upon whose parchment shade he had an artist paint red roses) and alternately listen to and watch his Rose seated at the Steinway baby grand across the room play with emotion his favorite Chopin nocturne or perhaps a movement of the Beethoven ‘Moonlight Sonata’. Did you like that, Herm? she would then ask. Yes, that was beautiful. Play it again, Rose.

On August 1934 my father indeed composed a lengthy ode to her, which he then had an artist copy out in script with black ink on a 20 by 24-inch sheet of parchment that had been spattered with red ink and decorated with hand drawn stemmed roses. This he then had framed and hung prominently in the entrance porch near the living room. These are a few of the 20 stanzas:

To a Rose

Thus in the face of father’s evolved love and respect for my mother, compounded by her own sense of worth and righteousness, I felt it was impossible to openly oppose my parents’ united front judgment that I should become a dentist.

I therefore but listened to my mother’s glowing narrative and gazed at these icons, during which she often paused slightly (a difficult thing for our mother) for us to digest it all, then said, That’s the type of background which nurtured you children!

She went on to show us other photos: her wedding photograph –– my father in a tuxedo, she in white with a decorative string of pearls across her forehead, dated Dec. 24, 1919; several on their honeymoon in Atlantic City; one seated in a mobile chair on the Boardwalk; my father riding a horse, and another, posing proudly bare-chested atop a mountain crag; shots of my father’s Castle By The Sea with us all posing on the lawn, including Mopsy, my lovable white wirehaired fox terrier dog. And photos of my father, proudly posing with his nurse in his first dental office, in 1917.

However my favorite photo was that of my mother’s sister Ethel’s husband, my Uncle Alex, a real doctor, showing him on duty dressed in hospital whites and stethoscope… because I had resolved to become a physician. I knew he was a real doctor not just because of his stethoscope, but because when we visited him at his home-office in Manhattan, the city, after I told him I wanted to become a doctor he took pride in showing me his microscope, such as one I imagined was used by Pasteur and Koch. After I gazed in awe as strange purple and red swirls came into focus, he said: You have to know the fundamental cause of a sickness before you can treat a patient, and added, You can become not just a doctor but a great doctor, Julian… Learn all the basic sciences… Chemistry. Biology. Study hard. Set high goals for yourself.

And so, though I very much respected the good intentions of my parents, I more firmly than ever resolved not to become a dentist but to be a scientific healer: a real doctor, a physician like my Uncle Alex.

TWO

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A PART FROM THE tension created by constant not so subtle indoctrination to make me want to be a dentist, I would say that my childhood was a happy one.

Summers especially were fun times, especially after we have moved to the Manhattan Beach area. I loved to romp barefoot through the grassy lots between homes, the area then still being underdeveloped, on the way to the beach, which was also called Manhattan Beach, its eastern extension being called Oriental Beach (which featured Olympic-size swimming pools). Together they were one large private enterprise of the realtor-entrepreneur, Joseph P. Day. Since we residents didn’t require lockers we could buy season passes for only twenty dollars. That magnificent area featured not merely the natural beach with calm waters and outjutting rocks to climb upon, but a bandstand upon which played such luminaries as Benny Goodman and Paul Whitman. It had a large cafeteria, tennis and volleyball courts, clock-golf, shuffle-boards, softball diamond, sports classes and so forth. It was there I was taught to swim well enough to win a medal in one of its weekly contests, learned to play chess as I sat with my brother on the pool-side bleachers, and developed a zest for tennis. But of paramount life-long interest to me was that there I received my initial instruction in art. For in addition to classes in arts and crafts, such as basket weaving, leather tooling, they featured classes in life drawing as well as sculpture.

Before going to the beach I enjoyed (usually) practicing my 3/4 size violin for several hours, standing before the open garden window in my shorts… this led to my lifetime appreciation and participation in the making of music. At age eleven in December of 1935 I gave my first performance in a series of annual violin recitals by the pupils of my violin teacher, given at Washington Irving High School auditorium, in The City!, playing Schumann’s Traumerei. The program from that and other of my student recitals were stapled by my mother into My Scrap Book. (And well over six decades later I perform in this same fine concert hall as a member of the violin section of my local Greenwich Village Orchestra!)

Toward evening, after returning from the beach there were pleasant chores to do. Standing sun-soaked in my bathing trunks there were hedges to shape and trim precisely. Then I raked the golden leaves from the lawn. Lastly came the really fun part: making rainbows of bell-shaped mist appear with the water hose as I sprayed everything green in sight, making sure I (and Mopsy) got drenched as well. And on Tuesday nights there were fireworks to be seen and WOWed at from The Boardwalk off Brighton Beach. And maybe later, if we had the energy, we hiked up to Coney Island and had hot-dogs-and-root-beer-at-Nathan’s! On other evenings I might play a Schubert Sonatina with my brother or mother at the piano, or a game of chess with my father or brother.

I must confess to having become a radio addict, for our table-top Majestic radio came to play a central role in my life. I still miss it all: the Amos ‘n’ Andy and The Goldbergs characters and banter; Spike Jones’ kooky trumpet solos and arrangements; all the evening comedian shows (The Jack Benny Show, others with Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen,

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George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jimmy Durante, where I memorized all the standard punch lines, as That’s a joke, son!, Well…); crime-buster programs with superheros like The Shadow, The Green Hornet, Dragnet, The Lone Ranger; secret decoder rings to write away for; special radio dramas by Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin and Orson Welles; my introduction to Broadway via the The Lux Radio Theater dramas in the Little Theater Off Broadway of my imagination; The Inner Sanctum (with its creaking door!). And shared with my parents were the Ford Sunday Evening Hour of classical music, the Alfred Wallenstein Symphonette, the Saturday Live Opera from the Met, with Milton Cross’ inimitable deep voice narrating each plot.

Another source of entertainment was listening with glee to many of my father’s cornucopia of jokes. And when he got started telling them there was no stopping him! To this day I chuckle over them. Almost all reflected on his experience as an immigrant having to learn and master English. One, quite ribald, was his favorite: So there was this Italian who was arrested for using indecent language on a bus and he was taken before the judge. ‘I noa speaka dirty words!’ he protested. ‘Tell the Court exactly what you did say,’ said the Judge. ‘Well, deesa friend of mine, he’s a greenhorn, and he have to go down toa the Mississippi but he noa know how toa spella it.’ My father would act out each broken-English word with appropriate gestures, pauses, emphasis and facial expressions. ‘Mis-sis-si-ppi!, it’sa easy, you dummy!–– Emma, she comma first!. . . Then I comma! . . . Thena twoa essas they comma together! . . . Then I comma again!. . . Then twoa essas they comma together again! . . . Then I comma again! . . . Pee-pee twice! . . . Then I comma again for the las-ta time!!’

Without caring to see if we got all the double entendres (which I didn’t, except for the pee-pee) my father would roar with laughter and proceed to his next one: "Not just good diction but good inflection is important for a greenhorn not to be misunderstood… There was Sammy who was wrongly arrested and brought to court to be tried. ‘Did you have a knife?’ the Judge asked him. ‘I had a knife?!,’ he answered," my father said, giving the knife?! the Yiddish quizzical inflection of disbelief. "‘I had a knife,’ the clerk wrote down. ‘Did you stab him, Sammy?’ asked the judge. ‘I stabbed him??!’ Sammy answered similarly. ‘I stabbed him,’ the clerk wrote… ‘Guilty!!’"

You have to listen with caution when a foreigner speaks, my father then said and began his next one without missing a beat: ‘How much is this gorgeous horse,’ a man asked in a stable. ‘Deesa horse he’sa one hundred dollar,’ said the owner. ‘One hundred dollars for such a beautiful horse?’ the man asked in disbelief. ‘Well, he no looka so good,’ said the owner. ‘What do you mean?! He looks great! I’ll buy him! Here’s the money!’ And fifteen minutes later the man came back angrily to the former owner. ‘This horse is stone blind!’ he cried out. ‘Well, like I trya to tella you, mister. He no looka so good.’

We all really were ‘laughing our heads’ off by this time, which further encouraged my father. His last joke for the evening reflected perhaps upon his changing his own name from Feirstin to Firestone: So this Yid told a man his name was Sam Ting. ‘Sam Ting? You’re not Chinese! That’s a strange name for a Jewish man,’ the other man said. ‘Vell, I know, I know. But ven I got off the boat at Ellis Island I stood behind another man on the line where they register you. And ven they asked for his name to put on his papers he said, ‘Jack Johnson.’ ‘Jack Johnson,’ I thought to myself, ‘dot’s clever of him!. . . a fine American name, like for a regular Yankee! I take that name also.’ So ven my turn came next and they asked for my name I said, ‘Sam ting!’ My father gave Yiddish inflections where needed. He had the greatest fun of all, basking in our laughter, enjoying the recognition of his skill as a sit-down comic and raconteur enormously. I could only admire my father all the more for his being so in touch with my funny bone.

Wintertime, while yet in grade school, I equated happily with Work Time. Schoolwork was as much an enjoyable part of my life as listening to afternoon radio adventures as Buck Rogers. I even envied the more advanced homework that was assigned to my older brother, Donald… and once tried my hand at it. Leave it alone! he ordered me. "It’s my homework! My favorite school subjects are English & Arithmetic, I wrote in MY MENTAL PHOTO page of my Schoolday Memories P. S. 225 graduation book in June, 1937 (that 41/2 x 6 affair of about fifty or so glossy pages of different colors, covered in leather, with comments such as Roses are red/ Coal is black/ Do me a favor/ And sit on a tack. Good luck! Your sis grad-u-8…").

Arithmetic, the usual bugaboo for my classmates, I loved because it dealt with logical, fundamental, incontrovertible, useful truths. And its study was enjoyable. Our math teacher I especially remembered by the fun way in which he taught us about the three dimensions: "There was this boy who wanted to hide, so instead of standing still on one point (drawn on the blackboard) he had the good ideas of running down a line (drawn), but then when they were about to discover where he went he ran off at right angles (drawn) into a second dimension; and when they almost caught him again he thought of another great idea, to hide by running upwards, into a third dimension, like this! That’s creative thinking for you, isn’t it?!" And every Friday, if we did well in our work, instead of teaching math he would sit on his desk, his feet dangling toward us, and do a seemingly unscientific but wonderful thing… read to us another installment of Huckleberry Finn!

We had a great monthly newspaper, The Brighton Beacon (Subscription price of The Beacon is twelve cents per term) and I landed myself a place on its Editorial staff, and had my own by-lined column, PROFILES. In one column (pasted in my mother’s My Scrap Book) I gave my Impressions of Well-Known People I admired… and the reader had to guess his or her name: He is a short, corpulent and swarthy individual, rather nervous of temperament and addicted to forceful opinions. This man has devoted himself unceasingly in the past towards the civic betterment of New York City. (Mayor La Guardia); She is one of the outstanding social workers in this country. Has an extremely gracious and affable personality. Is tireless in her efforts to improve the poor living conditions and bad environment of many unfortunate people who are thus afflicted. She is the first lady of her station to engage in such activities. (Eleanor Roosevelt); He is of medium height and is slightly rotund. He likes to enter a room and tell a story or spring a puzzle on the class and sometimes relate a humorous incident. On many an occasion he has taken part in the teaching of the day’s lesson. Prof. Einstein must have stolen the theory of relativity from him. (Mr. S. Branower, the Principal.)

My first real test of my manliness, in the sense of my ability to think and act independently, came as I approached the age of thirteen, that symbolic ‘coming of age’ time I had heard about, when my father said, Well, Brother, it’s Bar Mitzvah time! Because we were apparently Jewish I was enrolled in Sunday School classes, which were eventually to be followed, I gathered, by some sort of ceremony. This Sunday School was in the basement of the Temple Beth El of Manhattan Beach (a Reform temple, as contrasted with the Orthodox temple, also in the neighborhood).

It was initially interesting to just hear traditional biblical stories such as those about Creation, about the liberation of Jews from the Pharaoh, about the destruction of the Second Temple, and to sing a few songs (led by the Cantor) in phonetic Hebrew (none of which I understood). It was a pleasant pastime –– especially at Purim, when we also spun little dreidel tops and played games –– and it pleased my father. I related these Sunday School classes to that once a year warm, wonderful Passover seder given at the home of bubbe, my father’s mother, which featured such delicious specialties as gefilte fish with horse radish and chicken soup with matzo balls, and which was attended by many of my father’s nine brothers, their families, and his sister, my full-of-fun Aunt Rose (who occasionally had taken care of me when I was tiny). I, usually the youngest person present, had the duty of asking The Four Questions, which I read from a pamphlet (Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights? . . .).

Entertaining as all this was, I soon thought that my Sunday School stories of Creation and such were but ancient legends. This was because I had just read about the famous 1920’s evolution Scopes monkey trial case, the question of Science Versus Fundamentalism, in Clarence Darrow’s The Story of My Life which I found in my P. S. 225 library. Darrow’s discussion of prescientific biblical mythology, along with my public school study of mathematics and science, which included basic cellular biology and Darwin’s theory of natural selection and basic astronomy, led me to conclude that these were supernatural guesswork stories. How could each of these be literally true! –– the account of how the sun was made to go across the horizon of the earth to make daylight (biblical "facts" which centuries ago resulted in the sharp conflict between Galileo and his church), the story of Adam (the idea that man and all the other animals –– for certainly man and beast were all animals –– were made full-grown in an instant!) and Eve (made from Adam’s rib!), the parting of the Red Sea, the Tower of Babel, and so forth. These accounts obviously could not have any scientific validity for me. Maybe science did not have definite answers about how life was created originally… but saying I don’t know, or, Let’s try to investigate, as I learned in public school, seemed healthier to me –– and more exciting! –– than inventing convenient biblical stories.

Another obstacle to my acceptance of my Sunday School indoctrination was that I learned that the words bar mitzvah meant ‘liable to the commandments’, which were supposedly God-given talmudic biblical laws. As I entered adulthood I would, as a Jew, be required to dutifully keep these commandments, a code of behavior which would govern all my actions. This Law of the Torah (the specific biblical Law for Jews supposedly handed down to Moses by God at Sinai), I was told, prescribed how and what a Jew may eat even today. But they obviously weren’t sacred laws for my parents: not only was there was not even the minimal Friday night kosher ritual meals, my father indeed often brought home a huge delicious canned Polish ham (supposedly tref or unclean –– why unclean? ––it was indeed quite sterile in its metal can, I thought). Truly a noble ham! my father would say with a broad smile as he sliced it. Nor did we attend the requisite services at the Temple. Or we did, once. I told my father afterwards that all this repeat-after-me, and the appeal to Our Father, our King, open the gates of Heaven to our prayers! was in vain, just gobbledygook and silly and I refused to go back… which decision pleased my parents.

Yet at home there was no discussion of this basic Sunday School Judaic mythology or my ideas about it. My parents simply told me that I was Jewish (in contrast with being a goy, whatever the real distinction was I could only wonder about). This, too, was an affront to my sense of intellectual independence –– to have to consider myself Jewish for no other reason than because my parents said they were Jewish: my identity had to be achieved by me rather than given to me at birth.

I was sure that I wasn’t a member of a race, if that was defined as a people by virtue of blood stock, any more than were the Nazi "Aryans. This issue was very much in the news then. Under the recent 1935 Nuremberg Laws German citizenship was now limited to those of the Aryan race. Jews were thereby also defined by race (those who had four Jewish grandparents), and they would be guilty of race defilement if they married or had sexual relations with Aryans." To call Jews a race simply by blood, I concluded, denigrated their minds, their spirit, and played into the hands of the Nazis.

And yet quite apart from my parents’ ambivalent attitude toward religion, I knew that many boys went through Bar Mitzvah training, even going to a rigorous Hebrew School. Not knowing my parents’ reaction, I decided independently that my books on science outclassed the dogma of the faith of Abraham. Calmly as I could, I told my father I did not wish the further study of biblical Jewish law in order to have a Bar Mitzvah ceremony with the Rabbi. With an obvious sense of relief he nodded his head and smiled.

My father thereupon settled his Bar Mitzvah social problem by throwing a huge bash in the billiard room in the basement, replete with beer for me to drink! At that secular Today I am a man occasion I received as presents, among other things, three fountain pens… a common enough experience as to be memorialized in a Borscht Belt comic’s Bar Mitzvah stick, Today I am a fountain pen. From my violin teacher, Mischa Goodman, came a treasured copy of The Standard Opera Guide.

In the same vein of learning to think independently, but also to express myself in that regard, four months later I was to enter and win my P. S. 225’s Peace Prize Contest. My essay was duly printed in our Brighton Beacon June, 1937 issue and proudly mounted by my mother in My Scrap Book. It gave me my first real sense of rational power: my ideas for the betterment of mankind were judged worthy of being aired publicly… and my essay was topped with imposing headlines!:

HOW TO INSURE

WORLD PEACE

____________

This Was the Winning Essay in the

Peace Prize Contest

____________

Insuring world peace is the greatest problem today, for without it, this world would be a poor place to live in. All our future hopes for the advancement of progress and civilization depend on it. And yet this peace, this most sacred peace, is being threatened today.

Europe itself is an open powder keg, just waiting for someone to light it; Spain is like two small boys fighting and each one having a dozen promoters in back of him. There are many factors causing these conditions and they must be eliminated.

One of the most threatening factors against peace is the intensive armament race and the vast remilitarization of the leading nations. This situation is not a foreign one, for these conditions also presented themselves before the World War. To get rid of this race, binding treaties for disarmament must be made by all nations. Tariffs must be abolished to encourage free trade and friendships. Peace propaganda must be spread throughout the world. International goodwill should be made by frequent international events such as the Pan American Conference, the Olympics, etc. There should be government control over munitions so that munition makers cannot sell munitions to other countries in order to make profit.

All these measures and ideas for obtaining peace must be realized and enacted in order to insure world peace. These factors mentioned above strike at the very foundation of international disagreements. If the causes of war are investigated, it will be found that ignorance and blind nationalism are the chief causes, but if they are attacked and gotten rid of by the means suggested previously, then world peace will ensue and the world will be made safer for democracy.

These are the chief means and hopes of inspiring peace.

––Julian M. Firestone, 8B1

I learned later that my Essay was politically incorrect, since my observation that "Spain is like two small boys fighting and each having a

Graduation Portrait, from P.S. 225 in 1937, sporting my Peace Prize Contest Medal

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dozen promoters in back of him…" caused quite a bit of controversy about giving me the prize since the prevailing leftist anti-war voices in South Brooklyn would not admit that Communist as well as Fascist influences played roles in the conflict.

The Peace Prize was concrete evidence to me that I was indeed becoming a man, a mensch . . . and it was my very own accomplishment rather than some ritualized Bar Mitzvah ceremony hopeful pronouncement.

Armed with my imposing public school Peace Essay medal and graduation Commencement Exercises Program with my name asterisked as an Honor Pupil I confidently looked forward to going to the famed (for its excellence) Abraham Lincoln High School. My parents took me to a photographer and had me pose in my graduation suit, replete with flower in its lapel, wearing my Peace Prize medal and holding my ribboned rolled diploma and gazing slightly upwards and smiling lightly with the over-all demeanor of one satisfied with himself and full of justified confidence, which I was. My future starting with Lincoln High was mine to freely explore –– with medical school as my secret goal!

But then, just before entering high school the issue of whether I would be allowed to freely choose medicine as my future profession came out during one of the routine dinner table indoctrination sessions. My mother, having held forth for quite some while, finally said: To make a long story short, as the expression goes, your father and I carefully planned and achieved our life goals, often despite great obstacles, so that you children could grow up in a decent and safe neighborhood and never know what it means to have to struggle, then, looking at me, continued, "and so that you, Brother, could one day grow up to be a dentist like your father, but without having to face his