00:07During one Thanksgiving my grandpa was telling us a story he told us that week a very attractive
00:13girl was in the elevator with him and he struck up a conversation with her and said that he's
00:19an artist and that how would she like to come up to his apartment for some posing and some
00:24romance and he's telling us this and we're all kind of dropped our forks you know at the
00:28Thanksgiving table when my grandpa died my mom and and her brother and sister went to
00:36his apartment to you know clear things out and see what they might want to keep and one
00:42of the things that we ended up having is his autograph book from 1924 when he graduated
00:48high school a lot of these messages in this book are signed fellow graduate which is a
00:54nice use of the word Jew all three of my grandfather's kids did very well my uncle was a nuclear
01:01physicist
01:01my aunt became a publisher a very successful health food and pet magazine publisher and my
01:09mother married an ad executive on Madison Avenue my grandfather looked like William Powell like
01:18kind of a swarthy Jewish version of William Powell he posed in bathing suits quite often for some reason
01:25not sure what that's about the crazy thing is I doubt we ever spent an afternoon together all on our
01:31own
01:31the only time we visit is when my whole family would visit and so I never really you know knew
01:38him
01:39I remember one time we were on a vacation and we were on some kind of um hayride and I
01:46had to sit on my
01:47my grandpa's lap and I guess I was like six years old or something but I don't remember it being
01:51a
01:51particularly comfortable warm memory it was like sitting on a on a bench there was really no warmth there
01:58between grandpa and grandson
02:12my favorite memory of my grandpa is probably that he used to make up stories I'd be staring into his
02:17beer and watching all the bubbles
02:19uh cascading up and he would tell us stories and he would make them up so it was there was
02:24definitely a hidden talent there that he didn't pursue
02:28I still remember is him telling me he had never introduced his family to the woman he would marry
02:35he didn't bring her up once and then when he was ready to marry her he just brought her home
02:41one night
02:45he smoked pipes cigarettes and cigars his first job was fetching sandwiches and cigarettes for mobsters that
02:53were playing cards in Brooklyn and kind of like spider and goodfellas I suppose but without getting shot
03:00and uh that's where he fell in love with smoke
03:06the climb the ladder of success which is signed your kid brother Benny Stark
03:11success wasn't something that meant a whole lot to my grandpa he was very unambitious and maybe he needed
03:18more doodles like this more symbolic doodles to motivate him aim high he's the only one in my family that
03:25drank beer
03:26and uh watched baseball when he was passing away in the hospital his last words to my father was just
03:35that's it
03:35that that was how he summed up his own existence with those two words that's it
03:43it's strange to end up with a possession uh from someone you didn't really know and weren't all that close
03:50to
03:50and now you have some intimate artifact you know from their life that's just strange and makes you feel
03:56somehow even more of a stranger um in your connection to them and uh than you might have been already
04:05so
04:13you
04:15you
