My Journey

By Alan Levy

The book describes grwoing up in NYC, being the first member of his family to graduate from college and graduate scool and descibes the development of important new medical products and the formation of multiple early stage healthcare companies and the process of taking companies public and selling companies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665718172

Alan Levy

The author grew up in NYC and was the first member of his family to graduate from college and acquire an advanced degree. He has had an interesting career as an entrepreneur, starting and selling mutliple healthcare companies and has been involved with the development of multiple important medical products.

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Copyright © 2022 Alan Levy.

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AArchway Publishing

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-1818-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1816-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1817-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022901587

Archway Publishing rev. date: 02/10/2022

Contents

The Beginning

My Parents

Special Relatives

Me

The Bronx

Bar Mitzvah

Food

City College of New York

Women

South Campus and Graduation

Purdue

Our Wedding

Allied Chemical

Ethicon

Heart Technology

A Venture Capitalist

Heartstream

Northstar Neuroscience

Frazier

Incline Therapeutics

Chrono Therapeutics

Afterword

The Beginning

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I n the beginning—actually, I can’t go all the way to the beginning or even that far into the past. I can only go back to my grandparents and a bit about my great-grandparents. The more distant parts of my history are lost to endless wars and upheaval in Eastern Europe.

My grandparents on my mother’s side, Bertha and Morris Marcus, both came from the same shtetl, near Vilnius (Vilna) in what is now Lithuania. At that time, however, it had been incorporated into Czarist Russia.

My grandmother’s parents were Motel and Sarah Kranitz. Motel was born in 1861 and died young in Vilna in 1895. I don’t know what his occupation was or anything else about him except that he married Sarah, the daughter of Reb Kalman, in 1882. (l have no idea whether Reb Kalman was a rabbi or whether it was just an honorific title). Sarah, born in 1863, came to America with her youngest daughter, Pauline, in 1908 to join the rest of her children. She passed away in New York of cardiovascular disease in 1931. There is a photograph of her when she was a young woman. She is wearing a lovely peasant blouse and has a poised, confident expression. She looks a little like my mother.

My mother’s grandparents on her father’s side were Tsippa and Aaron Marcus. Aaron was born in 1842, Tsippa in 1844, and they were married in 1864. They both died in the same year, 1897, in Vilna. They had eight children, all of whom immigrated to the United States.

Though they both came from the same shtetl near Vilna, I don’t think my grandparents knew one another. They traveled to America separately. They were both in their teens when they left their homes to travel thousands of miles to a country where they did not speak the language or understand the culture. I am in awe of their courage and their spirit. They came at the beginning of the twentieth century. They traveled overland to a port, probably in northern Germany, and then booked passage on a ship for a long, cramped, unpleasant voyage across the Atlantic. I don’t know, but I imagine they were in steerage, packed together with hundreds of other poor immigrants on their way to the New World, with Spartan accommodations, poor food, and limited ventilation. People got sick and children cried.

They passed through Ellis Island, and each went to live with relatives on the Lower East Side of New York. They lived in poor, overcrowded, unhealthy tenements in a strange country, not speaking the language, while still only seventeen and nineteen years old.

Vilna was called the Jerusalem of Europe. What would motivate so many people to leave Jerusalem and undertake such a dangerous and unknown migration?

The City of Vilna traces its founding to the thirteenth century. There are conflicting stories regarding when Jews first came to Lithuania. It is generally accepted, however, that Jews migrated to Lithuania in large numbers during the reign of Grand Duke Gediminus (1316–1341). They were attracted by his invitation to merchants and craftsmen and the accompanying economic opportunities. His descendant, Duke Vytautus, granted additional privilege to the Jews near the end of sixteenth century. Thereafter, the Jews of Lithuania had a level of freedom and economic prosperity unknown to the Jews of Poland, Russia or Germany. Their conditions worsened, however, in the sixteenth century under the influence of the Catholic clergy and Lithuanian landowners of large estates. But it was still better for the Jews than anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

In 1792 the Jewish population of Lithuania was 260,000, and it was the center of Jewish learning in Eastern Europe. Elijah ben Solomon, the Genius of Vilna, (1720–1797) shaped the analytical study of the Torah and the Talmud in opposition to the Hasadim (ultraorthodox Jews). Everything changed in 1795 when Lithuania became part of Russia. The conditions of the Jews worsened dramatically. Pogroms and antisemitism drove tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews to immigrate, many to the US.

Lithuania became a republic in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. In 1941 Lithuania was occupied by the German army. During the Second World War, 95 percent of the Jewish population was murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian fascist collaborators. Before the war, Vilna was 40 percent Jewish and contained over one hundred synagogues. We visited Vilna around 2010; there were only 3,000 Jews in all of Lithuania and only 1 synagogue.

My grandparents were part of the diaspora that left Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century when Lithuania was part of Russia and the Jews were suffering physically and economically. Like many others, they traveled across the world to seek economic opportunities and freedom.

My grandfather Morris Marcus was born in 1885 and came to America in 1904, when he was nineteen. He lived with his older brother, Ruben, who was a member of the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union. Ruben got Morris into the union and helped train him, and Morris became a skilled metal worker. He never learned to read but was able to build sheet metal parts by following the drawings. As a member of the union and a skilled craftsman, he was able to make a good, but more importantly, secure living. He worked in buildings all over the city, including the construction of Radio City Music Hall. He never became a citizen. I suppose because of his embarrassment at not being able to read.

My grandmother Bertha was also born in 1885 and came to America when she was only seventeen in 1902. She lived initially with her older sister, Bessie. She slept on a cot in the kitchen in Bessie’s Lower East Side tenement. Bertha was an extremely talented seamstress. She initially worked in a factory sewing sailor hats. I have always imagined a sweatshop, filled with women working at sewing machines with very few safety precautions or amenities, much like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which was destroyed in a terrible fire and caused the deaths of hundreds of young women. Bertha designed women’s clothes and could turn her designs into lovely dresses and blouses. She worked in the garment industry until she had children. She was so talented that the famous designer Hattie Carnegie tried to hire her at a huge salary for the time. She turned it down because she would have been earning more money than her husband, Morris—a totally unacceptable situation in the early twentieth century.

She was such a talented seamstress. If my shirt got dirty when I was little (which apparently happened often), she was able to sew a new one for me in less time than it would’ve taken to wash the dirt out. If she was repairing something that I was wearing or making me a new shirt (right on me), she would have me chew on a piece of bread. This was her superstition to prevent me from being pricked by the needle she was using. Apparently it was effective, because she never, ever, pricked me with a needle.

When I was a little boy, I played the title character in that famous play Pandolph, the Bear Who Said No (more about that later). My grandmother made me a bear costume out of my grandfather’s old long johns—amazing.

I have photos of Morris and Bertha when they were young, before they were married. Morris is dressed in a striped suit with narrow lapels and some sort of pin or button attached to his left lapel. He is wearing a white shirt with a very stiff and uncomfortable collar and a narrow dark tie. He has wavy dark hair, parted in the middle and a full, luxurious moustache. I never saw my grandfather with a moustache and a full head of dark-brown hair. He is slender and not looking directly into the camera. The look in his dark eyes is one of pride and self-determination. Bertha is wearing a dark blouse with puffy sleeves that fall to her elbows in the photo. The blouse is decorated with lace at her neck and at the tip of the sleeves. (I wonder if she designed and sewed the blouse.) She has what appears to be a gold bracelet on her left forearm. She has short dark wavy hair, and there is just the trace of a smile on her lips and in her eyes. She has an uncanny, but not surprising, resemblance to my aunt Lillian, her youngest daughter.

At some point they were introduced to each other by friends or relatives. They lived in the same neighborhood. I don’t believe a matchmaker was involved. They were married in 1911, when they were both twenty-six years old. I have a wedding photograph. Morris is standing alongside the bride. He no longer has the moustache, and his hair is a little thinner. In this photo he looks directly and self-confidently into the camera. Bertha is seated to his right, in profile. She is wearing a white dress with decorative stitching. Her dark hair is longer, styled and tied up in the back. She has an ample figure and again just the hint of a smile. She looks happy.

My grandmother was the most caring, patient person in the world. When I was a little boy, I was a huge baseball fan, in particular a passionate Yankee fan. I would talk to her for hours about the Yankees. I am sure now that she had no idea what I was talking about. I may as well having been speaking Chinese, but she would sit and listen and smile.

I will return to my mother’s parents and their children, but first I wish to introduce my father’s parents. My grandparents Julius and Jennie were born and were married in Kletcheva—a shtetl (a small Jewish village) on the outskirts of the larger city of Kalish, which is west of Lodz in what was then-czarist Russian Poland. They came to the United States in 1906, with their 1 year old son, my father, George. The story I have been told is that my grandfather had been drafted and served in the Polish (Russian) Army for several years. Afraid of being drafted again, rather than endure additional years in that Army, my grandfather, grandmother and their baby son emigrated to America. They spoke no English and endured a harrowing, extremely unpleasant trip across the ocean to an unknown land—with a young baby in tow. I have always had difficulty with that story about additional service in the Army because my grandfather was a very gentle, pious, retiring man. My memory of him is of a small, thin old man, with pale, almost translucent skin, blue eyes and cold hands. As with my other grandparents I am in awe of their courage and daring to leave their home, their family and everything familiar, to come to a strange land, with a strange language and strange customs.

Like so many other Jewish immigrants they moved in with relatives in crowded, unsafe, unhealthy, lower Eastside tenements in New York City, until they could afford their own small, unsafe, unhealthy, apartment. Julius and Jennie and their children lived in a tiny apartment with no bathroom. They shared a bathroom with all the other tenants on their floor.

A few years ago, I visited the Tenement Museum on Delancy Street in New York City, we visited some of the apartments and watched films of the lives of the occupants. The apartments were dirty and crowded with numerous clear safety violations. The fact that millions of people left their families and everything familiar and traveled for weeks, over thousands of miles, to live in these awful tenements, made it clear that their lives and their opportunities in their homeland were so bad that they would willingly, enthusiastically, emigrate to America to build a new life for themselves and their families—and their descendants.

What was in like in Kletcheva?

Kletcheva is a very small village. Jews had been living there and the surrounding larger city, Kalish, since the 12th Century. In 1264, Boleslaw the Pious, was the first to grant the Jews a charter, giving them certain economic and religious freedoms. This was expanded and included all of Poland by King, Casimir the Great in the 15th Century.

In 1776, 305 Jews were living in Kletcheva. They were mostly craftsmen and merchants. There were Hasidic and non-Hasidic synagogues and even a German Reformed Jewish synagogue. However, living conditions became dramatically worse for the Jews when Poland became incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 19th Century. There was a rise in antisemitism and a rise in pogroms. The deterioration of conditions, both economically and physically forced many Jews, including my grandparents, to leave Poland in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

It got much worse for those that remained behind. A Polish antisemitic press, physical beatings and restrictive economic polices made life very difficult for the Jews still living in Kletcheva and Kalish. On the eve of the Second World War there were 20,000 Jews living in the area, 30% of the population. During the War, they were first forced into the nearby Zagorow ghetto. From there they were sent to death camps like Chelmno and Auschwitz. Others were murdered in mass executions in the surrounding forests. Only a small handful of the former Jewish residents survived World War ll.

Much later in my life I was told that our family name was actually Witkowski, not Levy. I was told that it was changed by a clerk at Ellis Island who had difficulty spelling and pronouncing Witkowski. I have researched this and concluded that name changes by clerks at Ellis Island are an urban myth. There is no evidence that clerks at Ellis Island changed people’s names. They copied the names from the ships manifest. A more likely explanation is that Julius changed to a Polish name, Witkowski, either to avoid the draft or to avoid persecution in Poland. When he boarded the ship to America he changed it back to Levy. However, we will never know for certain.

As you will see, I spent very little time with my father’s parents, so I know much less about them. I know that they were very religious and maintained a kosher home.

Julius worked in the garment industry and he and my grandmother had five children, three sons, my father George and his two younger brothers, Morris and Alexander and his two younger sisters, Mary and Hannah. Grandmother Jennie, died young of a heart attack. Julius married a widow, that he met at his synagogue when his children were grown. I’m told that she was a lovely woman, but I only met her once when I was quite young.

My Parents

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M y mother’s parents primarily spoke Yiddish at home. Yiddish is a corrupted, German based lingua franca of the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Ashkenazis. My grandparents learned English, but never spoke it well, and always with a pronounced Yiddish accent. My grandfather never learned to read. However, my grandmother took classes and learned to read and write in Yiddish and English and became a citizen.

She took her responsibilities as a citizen seriously and voted in every election. I remember her, on occasion, taking my sister and I into the voting booth with her. Franklin Roosevelt was her hero and she always voted a straight Democratic ticket.

Like many immigrants, they were somewhat ashamed of their background, their lack of education and being foreign. They wanted to make sure that their children would be real Americans. All of their children attended public school, the great equalizer, the great democratizer. They were not Lithuanian Americans, they were simply Americans. Though their children understood Yiddish, they all spoke English without any trace of an accent. My mother and her sister, Lillian, both graduated from high school. Their brother Danny attended college and served in the Army during the Second World War. The Army was the second great equalizer.

My other grandfather, Julius, also spoke Yiddish and never became very fluent in English, but again thanks to the American public school system all of their children became Americans and spoke English, without an accent.

My father George, was born in Europe in 1905 and came to the United States with his parents in 1906. As the oldest son, he was expected to go to work as soon as he graduated from Stuyvesant High School.

His brother Morris, graduated high school and worked his way through college with a degree in Agriculture from Auburn University in Alabama. I have tried, without success, to imagine what it was like for a poor, religious, Jewish boy, from New York City, to spend four years and attend college in a small town in the rural South in 30’s. I’m sure it was not very pleasant. I doubt that there was a Jewish social center, or many other Jews, or much religious tolerance. Morris then spent his career at the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture in Maryland. I learned, just a few years ago, that Morris was instrumental bringing the initial herds of dairy cows to Palestine shortly after the formation of the State of Israel. He was recognized by the Israeli government for this important contribution.

I believe my father’s sisters, Mary and Hannah, both graduated from high school. Subsequently they each married men who were modestly successful (more successful than my father) financially. Mary and her husband, Hubert (Hubby) had a daughter, Jane. Hannah and Jack had a son, Peter. Unfortunately, Peter died of a drug overdose in his early twenties.

My father’s younger brother, Alexander, was committed to a mental institution when he was a young man. He remained in that institution the rest of his life and died in that institution. I only learned of Alexander’s existence a few years ago, long after my parents had died. They never mentioned anything about him, even that he had existed. Thus I can only provide these scant, sparse, frightful, details.

My mother graduated from Washington Irving High School, an all girls school, in 1928. Girls were not expected to go to college and so, like my father, she immediately went to work. Her first position was working for a handbag (pocketbook) company. She sketched designs for new model handbags. One of her co-workers and friends was Hannah Levy. She introduced my mother, Sylvia Marcus, to her brother, George Levy, my father.

I don’t know anything about their courtship, but I know that they were married in 1933. I was surprised to learn that they had a large wedding, 200 people, at the Hollywood Gardens at Prospect Avenue in the Bronx. There was a sit-down dinner, a chicken dinner. My mother rented a wedding dress for $15.

I have a photograph of my parents shortly after they were married. My father is wearing a three piece suit, a white shirt and a tie. He is very slender (as he was all of his life). He has a narrow moustache (which I never saw) and dark wavy hair. He is looking directly, confidently, into the camera. He has his arm around my mother. She is wearing a plain white dress and a matching small white hat. Her dark hair turns up at her neck. They look happy and so much younger than they appear in my memories of them.

They were married and had children in the depths of the Great Depression. Like so many others who lived through it, the Depression scarred them for life. Security, a secure job, was of the utmost importance. They were always very careful with money. This is not a criticism. They never earned much money. However, they managed to provide my sister and me with what we needed so that we never, ever, felt poor growing up. They stretched a very limited income as far as possible, and even managed to accumulate savings.

Initially we lived on Boston Road, in the East Bronx, which I barely remember. In 1941, when I was four, we moved to the West Bronx, to 1693 Nelson Avenue, on the top floor of a walk-up six story apartment building. We lived in that apartment until I left home to attend Graduate School at Purdue in 1958, when I was 21.

Even today, New York is divided into numerous ethnic neighborhoods. Ours was largely a Jewish neighborhood, largely of the children of immigrants. It was a neighborhood of many, many similar six story apartment buildings, for blocks in every direction, without a tree or a blade of grass. I thought it was the best place in the world to grow up!

George, my father, was very quiet and introverted at home, among their friends and among family. I remember him as subservient to my mother. I am not sure that the term henpecked is appropriate, but over time I felt that she bullied him and even demeaned him in front of others. I sometimes felt that my mother wished that my father would push back, but he never did. On the infrequent occasions when we would all go out to dinner, he would ask my mother What should I eat? I think the dominance/subservience dynamic got worse over time.

My father was not a very warm or friendly person. My son Mitchell, a psychiatrist, is convinced that my father was on the autism spectrum, before the autism spectrum was a thing. My father worked as a clerk at a furniture moving company, Clark and Gibby, in Brooklyn, which was not particularly remunerative. My sister reminded me that on Saturday evenings, for many years, he also worked from 12 PM to 6AM at the New York Times, putting the Sunday edition together and loading the papers on to delivery trucks. For six hours of hard work he was paid $10, in cash. That story illuminated what I failed to appreciate when I was younger, how precarious their financial situation was, to the extent that $10 made a meaningful difference. It also gave me a greater appreciation for my father’s sacrifice and commitment to do whatever he could to provide for his family.

My mother stayed home to raise the children. (It was a different time).

My father read a great deal but I don’t remember us ever discussing books. He also was a regular reader of two New York newspapers, the Post, which was liberal at that time, and the Daily News, which was politically conservative. They were distinguished, not by their broad journalistic excellence, but by their extensive coverage of the local New York sports teams. My father was a great fan of the Yankees (baseball), the Rangers (hockey) the Knicks (basketball) and the Yankees (who became the Giants, football).

I can’t explain how this first generation American became such a dedicated fan, certainly not from his father Julius, who wouldn’t have known a shortstop from a bus stop, and thought it was all wasteful nonsense. Whatever the cause, my father was a passionate fan who listened to the games on the radio (before television), got upset and cranky when his teams lost, and was euphoric when they won. He took my sister and me to baseball games at Yankee Stadium and to Ranger hockey games at Madison Square Garden. I don’t know what else I inherited from my father, but I know that because of him I became a dedicated fan of all the same teams, though the players on those teams have changed many, many times, and I have moved thousands of miles away. I am one of those irrational fans who gets upset and cranky when my teams lose and euphoric when they win. Though I know it is totally illogical, I am glad that I have this character flaw. It was the one thing that I passionately shared with my father, and the one thing we could always talk about.

When I was about ten or younger, I remember playing catch with my father. I clearly recall that he was left handed and had bought a left handed baseball glove to play catch with me. However, I don’t remember very many instances of us playing together.

In 1948 my father had what was believed to be a heart attack. The first response of his employer, Clark and Gibby, was to fire him. He was in the hospital for several weeks and then transferred to a cardiac rehabilitation center. Finally, he spent two weeks living with my mother’s parents, so he wouldn’t have to walk up the five flights of steps to our apartment. I remember that we bought him a portable radio, one of the very first portable radios, so he could listen to the games of his beloved Yankees.

Several months after his heart attack he came home, but everything had changed. My father got a new job, working in the evenings, so he would avoid rush hour traffic on the subway, and my mother had taken a job.

My father woke up and left for work while I was at school, was not home for dinner, came home after I was in bed and was asleep when I woke up for school in the morning—so our interactions became much less frequent.

His new job was as a clerk at a large liquor distribution company, Blue Star. In the 1950’s the company changed from manual systems to computerization. It was a difficult adjustment for my father. In fact my mother came in to work with him several evenings as he struggled to adjust to the new technology.

Again, it is something that I wish I had discussed with my father, with my greater appreciation, today, for familial responsibilities and struggles to adjust to new technology.

I have a lot of memories of doing things with my mother, but aside from Yankee games and Ranger games,-commiserating when they lost and celebrating their victories-l have few memories of interactions with my father. My sister reminds me that both parents took us to see the Circus and the Rodeo at Madison Square Garden, along with occasional excursions to the beach. I wish I had more memories, but I am glad that I had sports to share with my father.

My mother, Sylvia, was the strong presence in our household. My impression is that ALL decisions were made by my mother, sometimes with my father’s participation, but often not. My mother was a stay at home Mom until I was about 11, my father had a heart attack, and she had to work to help support the family.

Though she only had a high school education, my mother was very bright, not in an academic sense, but in a pragmatic, streetwise, manner. However, I don’t think she was a very happy person. She felt that her father, my grandfather, Morris, whom she adored, did not love her, certainly not as much as he loved his son, my Uncle Danny. She also felt that she was unattractive. I don’t think she was happy in her marriage. She wished that my father was more assertive, was more outgoing, was more extroverted and, I believe, more successful financially.

She worked at Hearn’s Department Store in the Returns Department. After she had been at Hearn’s for a few years and had joined the Union, the Union called a strike for higher wages. My mother joined the picket line and the strike went on and on. The management of Hearn’s was obdurate and uncompromising, and fired all of the striking employees. After several months my mother left the picket line and went to work in the Foreign Department at Macy’s. She stayed at Macy’s for 30 years, until her retirement, when she was past 65. Her pension, after 30 years at Macy’s was a munificent $97 a month.

She never felt fulfilled or appropriately appreciated or rewarded in