Thursday,
December 20, 2018
Ruth
Weissman, mother of Barry, Donald and Bruce, was already deceased three years
when I wandered back into neighborhood of Kearny where I had seen her often
during the few years I drove picking up and delivering merchandise for Donald.
I
had come to the area of Kearny Avenue and Belleville Pike on another matter,
but nostalgia lured me to the place where Ruth had operated Donald’s Kearny
Cosmetic Plus, one of a handful of retail stores he had launched after he
started business in 1968 but had begun to close a short time prior to his
hiring me.
Stanley,
who had lived around 15 blocks away on the other side of Kearny had made
frequent stops here and at the other stores – including the most recently
closed in Rutherford – as had Stanley’s brother, Bruce, who I apparently had
replaced when I came on.
The
neighborhood over 40 years had changed, but not so much as to have lost its
blue collar feel. There was still a beauty salon a door or two away from where
Ruth had managed Cosmetic Plus, but some of the stores were the same stores I
remembered. The men’s wear store across the street was gone, as was the
housewares store, one of those was vacant, the other selling more upscale goods
designed to ensnare the yuppie walking wallets as they made their way to and
from Manhattan down the long hill of the Pike.
As
it turned out, the owner of the string of buildings that included the former
Cosmetics Plus was out of the sidewalk, surveying a world he’d owned for almost
50 years, and wondered at my interest in the place when he saw me there.
When
I told him, he looked more than a little sad, having heart of Ruth’s passing,
yet more importantly, he said he still missed her, and her assistant whose name
he mentioned, but I didn’t catch, and could not remember even though I had
liked her a lot when I made my stops here – perhaps her name was Cathy. I still
remember her face and her remarkable manners, and I had clear memories of Ruth,
who always treated me like a son.
Cosmetics
Plus, the owner said, was one of his earliest tenants, and he was particularly
fond of Ruth, who he called “a saint” even though she was Jewish.
He
said he missed her, and the store even thought he had not seen them in almost
as long as I had.
I
took part in closing down the store around 1976 or 1977, and never saw Ruth or
Cathy after that.
Yet
for my first two years driving for Stanley, the Kearny store was a regular a
beat as any, not just a source of goods being shipped there by the cosmetic
manufacturers, but as a stopover to pick up and deliver paper work and sale
items – and in high summer, I was assigned to take part in the sidewalk sale,
where I rubbed shoulders with Ruth and get to listen to some of her stories
growing up, most of which have been lost to the hazy of memory except those
that I was fortunate enough to write down later as a journal in college.
I
remember Ruth being small but sprite, and because I was still in my mid-20s,
she seemed old to me at the time although he was only in her mid-50s. She would
live to 93.
In a
journal I wrote for college in 1982, I recalled a few of her stories about her
husband Irving.
She
was apparently more outgoing than Irving was – she called him reserved.
But
she was very proud of his accomplishments and was proud when she got to
accompany him to various functions such as the time, he was part of a grand
opening of a hardware store in Teaneck he helped design, which featured a
prescription counter.
“He
was an expert on drug store design,” she said, though this sounded a little
tongue in cheek as if she believed Irv sometimes leaped into ventures just for
the challenge and was as surprised at the positive outcome as everybody else
was.
Although
Irving actually didn’t die until about two years before I recorded Ruth’s story
in my journal, she claimed she nearly lost him in 1967 to what was then called
“a cardiac ailment.”
“They
even hospitalized him,” she said, blaming his condition in the fact that he
tended to hold in his emotions.
“Then,
when we were to bring him home, he started to hiccup,” she said. “And it
wouldn’t stop. It went on and one. So, we took him back to get home. But the
doctors didn’t know what to make of us. They didn’t have a cure. They
recommended home remedies.”
These
were the same ineffective things we all did as kids when we got such things –
although he apparently didn’t try drinking out of water in which he’d doused a
lighted match or tried drinking from a glass the wrong way.
“He
put hot compresses on his stomach. He held his breath. He drank glass after
glass of water, and it still didn’t stop,” Ruth said. “The spasms didn’t go on
constantly. He might go on for an hour or so without one, but they’d come back,
lasting from 15 minutes to a half an hour. He even hiccupped in his sleep and
it was nerve-racking.”
Ruth
claimed the hiccups had to so with Irv’s emotions, but she didn’t have a clear
definition of what she meant by that.
Days
passed and so one of Ruth’s brothers, Monroe or Leo – she mentioned both at
various points in her stories – suggested a therapist, one specializing in
hypnosis.
“After
about a half an hour the hiccups stopped, and we thought it was all over,” Ruth
said. “So, did Irv, so he didn’t bother listening to the therapist’s tape
recordings left in order to continue the therapy after he was gone. Irv said he
didn’t have time to sit down and listen to the recordings. He said if he sat
down, he’d fall asleep.”
Unfortunately,
in the middle of the night, the hiccups returned with a vengeance.
Later,
the therapist blamed Irv for doing the exercises wrong that he’d provided. So,
the hiccups continued for one week, then a second week.
“Then
one day they just stopped and didn’t come back,” Ruth said.
Since
Kearny at the time was still a foreign country to me, I had to rely on Stan’s
directions to get there the first time, a route that took me down Route 46 to
Route 3, then south on Route 21 headed in the direction of Newark.
“But
if you end up in Newark, you’ve gone too far,” Stan warned me, clearly
remembering my first day’s trip in which I mistook Harrison Street for Harrison
Avenue and wound up in an accident.
Stan’s
instructions had me turn off onto a narrow road called Mill Street and weave
through equally narrow streets until I found the Pike and took this over the
bridge – passed the Arlington Diner – and up the long hill to Kearny Avenue at
the top.
Later,
I would go down the other side of the hill, through the trash dumps of Kearny,
across the stickle bridge into Jersey City and the Holland Tunnel and stops in
lower Manhattan.
The
Kearny store was a small shop tucked between several other stores including the
beauty parlor, a clothing store and some other shop selling trinkets of some
sort.
The
whole neighborhood had a small town feel that I found attractive.
Irving
was still alive at the time – passing away in 1980 – though if I ever met him
it was in passing and most likely when a very proud Donald gave him a tour of
the new warehouse on Kaplan Drive in 1997.
At
the time of his death, he and Ruth had been married for nearly 40 years. Ruth
would outlive him for nearly as long. But I’m sure, she never forgot him.
If
she told me how they met, I can’t recall it, although it must have been in
Newark where his parents operated a grocery store and her father did business
as a junk dealer.
She
grew up on 17th Avenue with her parents Jacob (commonly called Jack) and
mother, Fannie Best (shortened from some more complicated eastern European
name.)
She
had two brothers, Monroe and Leo, and two sisters, Beatrice and Anna – all of
whom apparently passed away before she did.
Ruth
treated me like an adopted son, and I still have memories of her greeting me
whenever I came around and sending me on my way with a wave, making me feel as
much apart of the family business as Bruce or Barry were.
The
closing of the Kearny store signaled a larger change that would alter my
feelings toward my job, and eventually lead to a much more viable corporation,
and lead eventually to my leaving, letting Donald realize his dream when he
relaunched the retail aspect of his operation aimed at a more upscale cliental
than the blue-collar types the original stores seemed to attract.
Standing
there with the owner of the property I felt all that rush through me again, as
if I had just missed the sailing of a ship but could still see the smoke rising
from its smoke stack on the horizon.
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