SIUC Theater in the Eighties: The View From the Chair

        To borrow (not to say steal) a rhetorical trope from Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, it is time to speak of SIUC. I went there as a tenured Associate Professor to serve as Chair of the Department of Theater in 1984, and I left in 1993 to begin a new career as an attorney. The years in between were filled with highs and lows, and represented both the first utter failure of my professional career and the most life-affirming decision I have ever made. It has been difficult for me to consider the ramifications of those nine years, but the time is finally right some twenty-eight years later. Out of respect for the living and the dead I will avoid the use of names in this narrative, but of course anyone who wishes to and most of those who were there will easily recognize the people I mention. Of course these remembrances are my own, and others may remember the same events differently. 

         I first applied for the job as Chair in 1982. At the time I was Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Oakland University, a regional state university in Michigan. It had begun life as a branch of Michigan State, and when I arrived in 1977 it had no academic theatre program. Interestingly, though, it was the home of an LORT-C theatre (a small but fully professional theatre) unassociated with the academic side of the institution; a supposed professional actor training program that was a complete failure foisted on the university by the first Artistic Director of the professional company; and what amounted to a community theatre for the students which received no funding but was allowed to call an old barn on the property home. I was brought in specifically to teach an Intro to Theatre course previously taught by the head of the actor training program that had been canceled as well as to develop other theatre courses. While there I published several academic articles and my first book; won several grants; and got approval for an academic theatre major. I was rewarded by being promoted, tenured, and named as Chair of the new Department of Theatre and Dance. 

        SIUC was searching for a new Chair for its Department of Theatre in 1982 because its incumbent Chair, a nationally known scenic designer and only the second Chair in the history of the Department, abruptly retired and found a new job in another state. I was not a finalist in the search, but a new Chair was hired and reported on campus on July 1, 1983. By July 7 he had resigned. So they began a new search. I applied while on sabbatical, which meant I was contractually obligated to return to Oakland University for one year following completion. I met with the Dean of the College and the senior professor in the Department (a nationally known playwriting teacher and the Acting Chair during the first search) at the American Theatre Association annual convention in August. I became a finalist this time, had a campus interview, and was offered the job by the Dean in due course. He wanted me to start in January, but I explained that I would be just returning from a sabbatical and could not leave that soon. He had a discussion with my Dean at Oakland, and they agreed that I would start the new job on July 1, 1984. 

         There were things afoot at SIUC that I had no idea about. The Dean had hired another finalist for the position, whom the faculty had rejected, as a Visiting Professor. He took my place during the Spring semester in 1984, and I inherited him when I arrived. It turns out that he had been fired from his last job because of sexual harassment, and unknown to me had continued his advances to young men in the Department and in the Summer Playhouse company. I also discovered that the Department’s only directing instructor had taken a leave of absence to try and get her MFA. Without an advanced degree she was facing certain denial of tenure. So the Dean figured he could get both finalists for the price of one, and hired the other guy to teach directing for 1984-85. What a mess. 

         And that wasn’t the only mess. The Department had conducted a search to replace the scene designer who retired, and had recommended a candidate to the Dean. This candidate was already a member of the Department, replacing the lighting designer who was on sabbatical. They knew him and trusted him, and wanted to hire him on the tenure track. Instead, the Dean hired another candidate, with similar credentials. He had been trained in what was then Czechoslovakia and emigrated with his family to the United States. His candidacy had some support in the Department, but the internal candidate had more. The Czech began in January 1984, and I inherited him and the Department’s resentment at his appointment when I arrived in July. 

         The rest of the Department was even more of a mess. The playwriting program was in good shape, but rest of the Department was on shaky ground. The costume designer had not designed a costume in years. There was a raging alcoholic running the costume shop. There was a Latvian scholar with a world-wide reputation who had neither directed nor designed in years. The entire acting and directing programs were staffed by temporary Instructors. The acting/voice teacher resigned before I arrived and the Department conducted a quickie search resulting in me making an offer to a very well-qualified woman from California. When she insisted she would only come on the tenure track I convinced the Dean to make it so. She arrived in July, moved to Carbondale with her young son in August, and immediately resigned. The reason she gave was that her son could not adapt. I suspected other reasons but of course accepted her resignation. 

         So there I was: two weeks until classes started, and missing an acting and speech instructor. There were four classes, two undergraduate and two graduate, that I needed covered. There were no local people who could help. So with the Dean’s permission I opened an emergency search and got on the phone. I called all the qualified candidates from the original search (there weren’t many), and came up with two who were still available and somewhat interested. I invited one of them to come to campus the next week, and those of us who were around interviewed her. I was unimpressed, as were my colleagues, but she could do it. Another call to our only other candidate revealed that he had accepted another position, so we were stuck. I called our candidate in California and offered her the job. We agreed she would start after Labor Day, so I still had to cover four classes for two weeks. Fortunately between myself and the remaining acting faculty we were able to do so. 

         This young woman stayed with us for two years, mostly because none of us could stomach the thought of another acting and voice search. She directed two productions for us, and acted in the Summer Playhouse company the summer in between, although I did not hire her to direct in the summer. I think on balance our students were cheated, but it was the best I could do. 

         Early in my first year the Dean asked me what my priorities for the Department were. I told him that we needed a production-oriented costume designer who could resurrect our moribund MFA in costume design program, and that we needed to regularize our acting/directing faculty by hiring on the tenure track. These were things I needed his help with; the other things I wanted to do we could do internally. So I set to work on a plan to get things done. 

         First up was the costume designer. The incumbent was the lowest-paid full professor in the university; I was absolutely shocked at how little she was being paid. She was moderately old (early sixties) and very tired. The problem was, she was paid so little she couldn’t afford to retire. So I (with the help of the Dean) presented her with an incentive package. 

         Retirement at SIUC was through SURS—the State University Retirement System. The amount of a professor’s retirement pay was 2.2% times years of service times the average of the professor’s four highest paying years. For example, a professor who served 25 years would get 55% of the average of the four highest paying years. After 36 years of service that amount topped out at 80%. If that average was $30,000, then the professor would get $16,500 in retirement pay. That amount would then go up a guaranteed 3% per year. But if in the last year of employment the professor taught three additional summer courses, at that average rate of $3,333 per course, the total would go up $10,000; the average would go up $2,500; and the retirement pay would go up $1,375 per year, or almost 10%. That would be a deal too good to pass up, and that was the deal we offered her: one time only, take it or leave it. She took it with alacrity. The Dean provided her with two sections of interpersonal communications (she was also a trained counselor) and it was up to me to provide the third month. I decided I could not in good conscience assign her to design costumes for the Summer Playhouse season; that would have been a disaster. I had no money for summer courses except for the playwriting program, which was needed for the MFA and PhD programs. So I decided she could do the least harm as a director, and assigned her the first production of Summer Playhouse to direct. The play was a classic twentieth-century murder mystery, which any competent director could do in his or her sleep. For better or worse it was over in two weeks, and our summer productions usually sold out to season ticket holders. When I saw the production I was mildly disappointed, but not overly concerned. She had missed a fundamental part of the play, but unless you knew it you wouldn’t know. The audience made no complaints and the reviews were acceptable if not up to our usual level. It was only later that the students in the cast came to me with complaints, and I assured them that they would find the other Summer Playhouse directors better to work with. And they certainly did—the other three directors that summer were me, the temporary but very capable acting/directing professor, and the temporary but very capable movement/acting instructor. The productions were excellent (if I do say so myself) but audiences were down because southern Illinois was simply not ready for a season which included The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I date the decline and ultimate death of Summer Playhouse to the choice of that play. 

             In any case, we were allowed to hire a production costume designer to fill the outgoing costume designer’s faculty line. She arrived on campus in the Fall of 1985 full of great ideas and with a free rein to run the program, and for that matter the entire Design BA and MFA programs, because our Czech scene designer was not an administrator and had no idea how to shape a curriculum. His designs were striking, but his teaching was not yet up to snuff. That was a problem I could postpone to a later day, so I did so. 

         The other Design area faculty member was our Lighting Designer/Technical Director. Those two positions each required a full-time person, but we only had one slot. When I enquired about the history of that anomaly I discovered that the original Chair of the Department prided himself on his frugality and while the other major state universities (University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana and in Chicago; Illinois State University; Northern Illinois University; even Western Illinois University) were expanding almost without limit during the sixties, he purposefully kept the size of the faculty and the program at SIUC small. When in the eighties we really needed half again as many faculty members we could not get them. So we were stuck with one LD/TD when we needed two. 

         And the circumstances of that one man were very strange. According to the Dean this faculty member had been denied tenure and the Dean did not think he should have been. So he exercised his prerogative and changed the position from a faculty position to a support staff position. The man had the same duties as before but was on a 12 month contract instead of a 9 month contract like all the other faculty except for me because I was the Chair. This was the situation I found when I came in. I didn’t like it, and the LD/TD didn’t like it, but we were stuck with it. Unbeknownst to me he was leisurely looking for a new job, and he eventually found one and resigned. I was once again stuck with a national search in a very short period of time, and I once again hired a temp who was qualified but barely acceptable. He stayed with us for a year and a more leisurely search turned up a much better candidate. He stayed with us for three years but ultimately could not stomach being support staff rather than faculty. By that time faculty and staff searches were no longer my responsibility, but the Department searched diligently and hired the best we could find. The Dean, by the way, continued to turn down the Department’s requests to change the support staff position back into a faculty position. That problem was not solved until some years after the Dean left to become Chancellor at one of the University of Wisconsin campuses. That jump from Dean to Chancellor, incidentally, was most unusual and most likely the payment of a political debt by the system President. 

         The next priority was regularizing the acting/directing faculty. All were on temporary appointments and the Department had no security. As I may have explained earlier we had three positions: acting and voice; acting and movement; and acting and directing. I could also teach acting and directing (and I later taught both) but I was limited to one course per semester while I served as Chair. Initially I taught a large-lecture Intro to Theatre course with three grad assistants, but I soon changed that arrangement. Each of the grad assistants had at least an MA if not an MFA, so I simply gave each of them full course responsibility for two sections and supervised them as they completed their graduate assistantship duties. 

         In any case I was determined to replace the acting/directing teacher. I had begun to receive complaints from students about sexual harassment and very little research revealed his shameful history. He was nationally known and highly respected but he had resigned from two tenured positions under threat of being fired after an inquiry. Further he had been the other final candidate for the position I held, and having him in the Department was destabilizing. I wanted him gone, and finally got him gone. I was able to use money as an excuse; he was very highly paid, and as a temporary faculty member we could no longer afford him. He landed on his feet, taking a position at Cal State Northridge. His death from AIDS some years later was as regrettable as all such deaths were, even if entirely predictable. In his place we hired a Russian director with excellent production experience but little teaching experience. He was also a temp, and I let him go after two years. We then hired another temp, a professional TV and stage director who had done a workshop for us some years before. His productions were exquisite but I again got complaints about sexual harassment and did not rehire him. 

         The acting/voice position was a much better story. After I declined to rehire the temp I had brought in from California I was able to hire another temp, from the University of Arizona. He stayed with us for two years and then moved on. I fought to keep him but was unable to do so. He recently retired as Chair of the department at the University of Kansas, so obviously somebody saw things in him that we did not. The good news was that I persuaded the Dean to let me hire on the tenure track. We conducted a national search and were able to hire a wonderful young woman. She only stayed with us for two years as she found a much better position, but she stabilized things for us for a while. From then on acting/voice was no longer a problem. 

         Nor was acting/movement a problem for long. I was able to persuade the Dean to let us hire on the tenure track. We conducted a national search and after a little finagling I was able to hire the man who had held the position as a temp for years. He was woefully underpaid but a tremendous asset to the Department. He was a highly skilled choreographer and an inventive and skilled director. Without him Summer Playhouse would have been a disaster. Despite his abilities I think I was the only one in the Department who fully recognized his value. I encountered a good deal of opposition when I announced that I wanted to hire him, probably because his MFA was from SIUC and some of the faculty still thought of him as a student. In any event I was delighted to get him on the tenure track. Unfortunately he was a little too good for us; the next year he accepted a tenure track position at Indiana University with a substantial increase in salary. I was crushed. He recently retired as head of their musical theatre program as a full professor with a well-deserved national reputation. With the position firmly on the tenure track, though, I was able to conduct a national search and filled the acting/movement position with a young woman from the University of Arizona. She was a fresh MFA but she fulfilled all our hopes. In due course she was tenured and promoted, but shortly thereafter she left the Department to become Director of the University Honors Program, a position from which she retired recently. She had a worrisome bout with breast cancer but has come out of it fine and is doing well. Her daughter is a musical theatre performer who has had tremendous success in her early career. 

         So in the Fall of 1986 all was going well. We had a production costume designer on the tenure track. We had the acting/voice and acting/movement positions on the tenure track. We still had a temp in the acting/directing position, but at least the problem hire in that position was history. And then the roof fell in. The Dean not only refused to authorize a tenure track position in acting/directing, he also refused to authorize another temporary position. The results were catastrophic. We immediately eliminated the MFA programs in acting and directing, and we rearranged the undergraduate curriculum to more clearly represent a BA program rather than a BFA program, which our previous major resembled. But we still had students in the pipeline who needed to complete the MFA programs. So I did the only thing I could do and taught two directing courses per semester as an overload. The rest of my work as Chair suffered immensely, but to me it was the lesser of two evils. The MFA students finished their degrees, and the undergraduates got all the courses they needed to complete their degrees. And I hatched a plan to create a new faculty position out of whole cloth. With no more MFA programs in acting and directing, we had four graduate assistantships available. I took the money from those plus a little more from reducing the PhD assistantships from half time to 3/8 time and suddenly had enough to hire a new faculty member. And much to my amazement the Dean authorized us to hire on the tenure track! So we conducted a national search and began interviewing candidates. We had over 50 applications and interviewed seven candidates, but they all had the same reaction: the salary we were offering was ridiculously low. The eighth-ranked candidate was one of our own students, and he was so happy to get any kind of a job that he accepted my offer. I freely admit I took tremendous advantage of him, but finally all the acting and directing positions were filled with people on the tenure track. 

         Incidentally, it turns out that the only reason we had an MFA in directing in the first place was that the playwriting program needed directors for the original plays that were produced each year. There was both an MFA program in playwriting and a playwriting track to the PhD program, which never made any sense to me. If one was appropriate then the other one wasn’t, almost by definition. I had it in the back of my mind to work towards eliminating one of these two, but not until I was promoted and more secure in my position. I would have had to go up against the senior member of the Department, who wielded enormous influence within the university community, and I simply wasn’t ready to do that yet. 

         But 1986-87 was a a significant year for another reason. I had been appointed Chair for a three-year term, and that year I was reappointed for another. I began an inquiry into what it would take for me to be promoted to full professor and was told that it exclusively hinged on my publication record. That was rather disappointing since I had no time for research. I decided I needed to jump-start my research program, and I proceeded on two fronts. First, I worked at completing a book on fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien for which Carol and I had a contract; and second, I secured a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar fellowship to spend eight weeks at Northwestern University studying the staging of Shakespeare with John Styan, an internationally known scholar in the field. This seminar would require me to spend eight weeks off campus, and I did not have that much vacation time accrued. So the Dean made me a deal. I used four weeks of vacation, and he assigned me four weeks of an off-campus assignment to recruit faculty and students and to conduct research. It meant I had to be off-campus for most of Summer Playhouse, but it was a compromise I was willing to make. The Dean appointed one of the tenured faculty members as Acting Chair; I directed the first production of the summer; and I went off to Northwestern with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. I should have known better; something was just waiting to rise up and smack me in the face. 

         1986-87 was also the year I solved the Department’s scene design problem. When I did the Czech designer’s annual evaluation I gave him a year’s notice of non-reappointment; in other words, I fired him. Untenured faculty can be fired with a year’s notice during the first four years of employment; after that it takes good cause to fire or deny tenure. I expected him to stay another year, which would have given me time to conduct a national search. Unfortunately he resigned at the end of the academic year. We conducted an emergency local search to replace him and we hired one of our PhD students. This student had an MFA in design and had many years of college teaching experience. When the next year we conducted a national search on the tenure track we ended up hiring him again, although he was still a student in our PhD program. He was eventually tenured and promoted all the way to full professor, retiring after many years in the program. He may not have been as flashy a designer as the Czech, but he was just what we needed for our program. 

         That something that rose up and smacked me in the face was the budget. While I was away Sumner Playhouse ran a huge deficit for the first time. It happened on my watch and was my responsibility. There was a combination of overspending on productions and overestimating box office income, which resulted in a deficit in our cash accounts. We had two kinds of accounts: state allocations and cash. In theory we would spend all of our state allocations and make up the difference with our cash accounts. The first problem I encountered when I came in 1984 was a significant cut in our state allocations. Each year we received less and less. This was the Dean’s decision. We had at that time a significant balance in our cash account, which we could carry over from year to year. As we could not significantly decrease production expenses while maintaining production quality (which I had from the university’s President and Provost was a goal we could not miss), we spent more and more from our cash account. The two crossed in the summer of 1987. The second main problem was that we were just not getting the audiences we used to get. Fewer and fewer members of the community wanted to pay ever-increasing ticket prices. And ticket prices had to go up just so we could stay even. 

         The Department’s budget situation was quite unusual. We had a business manager (an academic professional position) who with a couple of grad assistants from the playwriting program took care of the box office and who managed both the production budgets and the academic budgets. This was quite unusual; almost all the time in other institutions the Chair takes care of these areas. When I inquired as to why this was the case I was told that the previous Chairs either didn’t want to or didn’t know how to manage a budget. I was content to leave things as they were. But then I discovered that things that the academic budget was supposed to cover—faculty travel, equipment, telephone, etc.—had for many years been sacrificed to the production budgets. I instituted reforms to this system, for which the faculty was grateful. This also had the effect of making the production budgets more transparent. While year after year the academic year production budget was reported as balanced or making a small profit, the fact of the matter was that it had been losing money for years. Most surprisingly the same was true of the Summer Playhouse budget. I reported to the Dean in the Fall of 1984 what our business manager reported to me: that Summer Playhouse had made a profit of $5,000. The Dean, incidentally, proceeded to cut my state allocation budget by $5,000. The reality was, as I discovered later, that Summer Playhouse had run a deficit of more than $12,000. I did my best to balance things out, but the numbers were what they were and eventually it was going to fall apart. In the summer of 1987 it did. 

         The first thing that happens when there is a deficit in a cash account is that the state auditors come in. They descended on the Department like locusts hungry after a seventeen-year hibernation. For more than a week they reviewed every invoice, every purchase order, every expenditure, and every deposit. They checked deposits against ticket stubs. They interviewed everybody involved, including some students. They were looking for signs of embezzlement, and it turned out that I was their primary target. That made sense, because I was the administrator in charge of the accounts. By the time they were done they knew more about our budgets than I did. The Dean told me privately that they found no culpability on my part, and apparently they were disappointed. Usually in these situations they nail the administrator for some bad act or other. Here it turned out that way too much was spent on Mame and everybody hugely overestimated how many community members would be willing to fork over $10.00 to see it. It is a situation many theatres find themselves in every year, but it was our first time. In response to this proof that our summer productions were woefully underfunded by the university, the Dean decided to cut our budgets yet again. I pointed out that the President and the Provost wanted the program to continue as before, and he responded by taking all budget authority away from me and giving it to an Associate Dean with no theatrical experience. I decided not to argue further; it clearly would get me nowhere. 

         I had managed to get a few things done between 1984 and 1987. I pushed through a change in all MFA programs from two years to three years, to bring us up to national standards. At the same time I used my supervisory authority to change the form of the MFA thesis, over the highly vocal objections of our Director of Graduate Studies. Previously students had been forced to use a quasi-scientific format, pretending that their creative project was some sort of experiment. This made no sense, and in fact was downright laughable. I changed the format so that the students wrote about the project before the fact (which included a detailed analysis); during the fact (including a rehearsal or development journal); and after the fact (including evaluations of the project). The students were unanimous in their praise for this change, and many more finished their theses than before. I also spearheaded a one-year MFA program for those with an MA who wanted to upgrade to an MFA, or for working professionals with sufficient experience who wanted or needed one. This new program brought us quite a few excellent students, in both acting and design, who would never have been in the Department otherwise. 

             I finished and published my second book, this one in collaboration with my wife. I thought it would give me the credentials for promotion to full professor, but I underestimated how disliked I was by the two tenured full professors in the Department. They essentially blocked my application. 

         I completely overhauled the Department’s undergraduate advisement program. When I arrived a graduate assistant in the playwriting program was advising all undergraduates. Unfortunately he had no training or experience as an advisor. During my first year one of our best undergraduate women found out she would not graduate because she was never advised she needed to take the basic costume and makeup class. I arranged for her to take it as an independent study, and resolved to fix the advisement situation. It would never work with a random MFA student, and the entire faculty was stretched to the breaking point already. So seeing no alternative I took on the task. I had served as the undergraduate advisor for ten years at two institutions before coming to SIUC, and it took a lot of time once a semester, but it was manageable. Some departments had a staff advisor, but we were just too small. Eventually this problem was solved by the Dean hiring an advisor to serve both us and Speech Communication. The new advisor knew little about theatre but had an MA in Speech Pathology, and she eventually took my graduate Theatre Management course and did extremely well. There were no more problems caused by poor advisement. 

         The inequities in faculty pay were profound. The Dean would simply allocate a certain amount of money each year to the Chair, who would then distribute it as he or she saw fit. The previous Chairs saw this as a prize to be won, and gave it all to whomever, in the Chair’s opinion, had the best year. The other faculty got no raise that year. The problem with this is obvious. The raise is rolled into base salary and continues year after year. Pay inequities increased every year. I guess I was the only one who saw this. I changed it immediately, instituting a system wherein everyone shared in the raise money, as a percentage of base salary. A faculty member might get a higher or a lower percentage, but inequities were reduced. I went up the line and got supplemental raises for our Latvian full professor who was so poorly paid; one year I got him an 18% raise. He never did thank me, but I knew what I had done. 

         Some of the work of which I was most proud was with our graduate students and their theses and dissertations. During my years at SIUC I mentored more than twenty MFA students and about a dozen PhD students, many of whom would not have completed their degrees otherwise. This work continued well after I resigned as Chair, and in fact continued during my last summer while I was cleaning out my office in preparation for my leave of absence. 

         On the other hand, I was less successful in some things I tried to change. When I came in 1984 the Department had a new secretary and a new business manager. Neither knew anything about theatre, and the secretary in particular was unacceptable. She came to work late, could not type very well or very quickly, and could not operate what little outdated machinery we had (a ditto machine, for example). She left after my second negative review to plague some other department. I was able to hire a secretary of my choice, and she did more than satisfactory work. She stayed until I resigned as Chair, and then went to a larger and more prestigious department. The business manager was quite competent, and she caught on to our needs quickly. She was close to retirement, though, and after the state auditors stopped sniffing around she chose that way to leave. I pushed a new job description all the way through Springfield, and hired an Arts Administrator (that was the title of the new job I created) with an MFA. She could not handle our budgets, though, and left after only two years. By then I was no longer Chair, and the Department went back to the well and hired another business manager who knew nothing about theatre. I tried to fire the costume shop supervisor but ran into union protections and was unable to do so. I discovered I was the third Chair who had tried this, and all of us failed. He stayed until he retired, some years after I had left. Interestingly, he designed costumes for two of my summer productions and did an excellent job. Go figure.

     The straw that probably broke the camel’s back was my own union activity. Many of the state universities had faculty unions. SIUC did not, and in my opinion one was pretty desperately needed. I became the Vice President of the IEA/NEA (Illinois Education Association/National Education Association) faculty union organizing committee. This really pissed off the Dean, who thought of Department Chairs as administrators. We Chairs, on the other hand, thought that we were members of the faculty. Obviously this disconnect in the perception of our places in the order of things caused problems. The committee gathered faculty signatures and eventually forced an election. The union lost this first election but there were so many problems exposed that they eventually forced a second election which they won. From that time on SIUC faculty were represented by a union, and they remain so. Although unionization happened after I left, I believe I had a hand in it. 

         The last year I was Chair, 1987-88, was rather eventful. This was the year we lost our acting/directing professor and I taught overloads. This was the year our Czech scene designer left rather than return as a lame duck and I hired our own student as a temp. This was the year I hired a new acting/movement professor because another university offered our long-time professor more than he could refuse. This was the year we overhauled both the undergraduate and graduate curriculums. This was the year I took all the revenue from production ticket sales to repay the deficit from the previous summer. And this was the year I resigned, although my reappointment would have kept me in place for two more years. The Dean once again cut our budget, and I recall my words to him exactly: “I did not come here to preside over the demise of a once-proud department.” Not terribly original, perhaps (it plays off of words uttered by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Winston Churchill in 1942), but it accurately incapsulated my feelings. The Dean accepted my resignation with alacrity; I’m pretty sure it was what he was angling for all along. I sent the Department a notice, and the Dean conducted an internal search for a new Chair. Besides me there were only three tenured members of the Department eligible, and the Dean appointed the playwriting professor, whom the Department had rejected at least twice before. I would remain as Chair until the end of Summer Playhouse 1988, and then I would, as they say, return to the faculty. 

     I was scheduled to direct The Sound of Music in Summer Playhouse but I was not excited about it. Our excellent acting/voice professor and our departing acting/movement professor got together and made me an offer I could not refuse. She would direct The Sound of Music and I would direct the non-musical play of my choice. I settled on Children of a Lesser God, knowing it would be the last production I would direct for quite a while. There was payback coming from the new Chair, and I was prepared for it. Fortunately the production gave me sustenance. 

         After I stepped down as Chair I taught three courses per semester and supervised the PhD students teaching Intro to Theatre. I came to campus as infrequently as I could, basically only for classes, office hours, and meetings. I went into counseling, to help me decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was 41 years old and had just failed at something for the first time in my life. I did not want to live in a separate city from my wife until I retired. I could not get a decent job where she was and she could not get a decent job where I was. I needed to make myself portable; to find a job I could do from anywhere. So after a year of soul searching I decided to go to law school. I took the LSAT and was admitted to SIU’s law school. I enrolled as a part-time student in the Fall of 1989. 

         Law school did not come entirely out of the blue. In high school I always said I wanted to an attorney, and when I graduated from college I had to make a choice. I could go to law school, or I could go to graduate school and work towards a PhD in theatre. I made the latter choice and never regretted it, but I always wondered what would have happened if I had gone the other way. I had that very rare chance to find out. 

         For the next four years I continued to teach full time and I went to law school part time. One of the few benefits available to faculty members was free tuition, and I took advantage of it. Along the way I took a paid sabbatical leave for one semester and attended law school full time. I became a writer and then an editor for the law review, and I joined a moot court team, winning national honors for two years in a row. My last year I served as National Student Director of the program, an unusual opportunity available only because I was on the four-year plan instead of leaving law school after three years as almost all law students do. I concentrated on criminal procedure and plaintiffs’ personal injury law, assuming rightly that these would be my areas of practice once I graduated. In short I had the full law school experience despite the part-time nature of my studies, and I graduated with high honors with no debt. 

         Part of the payback from the new Chair that I was expecting came in the form of his objecting to my taking more than two classes as a time. I normally took three or four classes, but I remained part-time and always scheduled around the classes I taught. He said that the College had a policy of only allowing professors to take two courses at a time, but I was not taking courses in the College; I was in the law school. He had no leg to stand on, and I refused to comply. He took it to the Dean, but I won. 

         The other payback came in the form of scheduling and denial of directing opportunities. He refused to assign me a directing slot either in the regular school year or in Summer Playhouse, despite my experience and seniority. He assigned me to teach the basic acting class despite there being other classes available I was more suited for. He refused to assign me to graduate classes, despite my experience and seniority. In short, he was trying to drive me out of the Department, and eventually he succeeded. Of course that had been my plan from the beginning, but I wasn’t about to take away his satisfaction. 

         While having reverted to “just a faculty member”, I continued to serve the Department. When our senior history and criticism scholar finally retired I chaired the search committee and we hired a young woman with excellent credentials as an Associate Professor. She soon became Assistant Chair to handle the budgets that the Chair could not, and after she was tenured and I was gone she became Chair. I chaired the search committee that hired our temporary scene designer on the tenure track. I also chaired the search committees that hired two successive acting/voice professors, and the promotions and tenure committee that considered the second of these when he requested early promotion and tenure. His request was denied. The tenured costume designer (who was also leaving the Department for personal reasons) and I considered that our parting gift to the Department. It was simply too soon to know if he would serve the Department’s needs for the long haul. When he came up for tenure at the regular time three years later he was denied not by the Department but by the College committee. The position was later filled by one of our own graduates (whose thesis committee I had chaired) who went on to a distinguished career. He recently retired from Western Illinois University, where he served as head of their acting and directing programs for many years. 

         When it came time for me to graduate from law school I accepted a two-year temporary appointment as a judicial clerk in the Illinois Appellate Court in Chicago. I requested a two-year leave of absence from the Department and it was granted despite objections from the Chair. After all, I had hired all but one of them, and they felt they owed me this courtesy. I did not intend to return, but I did not tell them that; I wanted to keep my options open in case I couldn’t find a job as an attorney closer to my wife. The Chair reluctantly signed the form and sent it to the Dean. The Dean sent it back; he would only approve one year of leave at a time. If I wanted a second year I could make a new request in a year. I knew what was going to happen, but I accepted the decision. Sure enough, the next year while I was in Chicago happily doing my job in the Appellate Court I got a letter from the Chair telling me I needed to agree to return in August or resign. After some back-and-forth with the Dean I did in fact resign. I was confident of my ability to get a job. 

   

         The reason for this was that my first job out of law school paid better than the salary I had earned at SIUC after 20 years of post-PhD teaching. And that job was designed for a 26-year-old fresh out of law school with no experience. If worse came to worst I could continue with the Appellate Court, or become an Assistant State’s Attorney, which paid even better. If I was willing to stay in Chicago I could have joined a law firm at over $100k per year, but I preferred to live in Charleston. As it happened I had a bunch of interviews within an hour of Charleston, and I ended up joining a plaintiffs’ personal injury law firm exactly twenty minutes away. I spent the next fourteen years happily suing insurance companies, conducting trials, and doing state and federal appeals. I retired at 62, and spent another four years writing wills, trusts, and deeds for friends who needed legal services and trusted me to draft these important documents. 

         In retrospect I never should have gone to SIUC. The warning signs were all there, if I had only had the good sense to look for them. I was blinded by the supposed glamor of being Chair of a PhD-granting department, and by the professionalism of Summer Playhouse. I was also drawn by the prospect of being significantly closer to Charleston. I had turned down teaching jobs in the Quad Cities and in northern Indiana, and I had lost a job I wanted badly at Washington University in St. Louis. Being three hours away instead of nine hours away from Charleston and my wife looked pretty good.  I loved the students (for the most part), and I was able to do a lot of good. I truly enjoyed directing, during the academic year and especially in the summer. Some of my colleagues, though, were unbearable, and the Dean was a huge disappointment. On balance I did better than could have been expected, and if I hadn’t gone there I would never have become an attorney. So it’s all for the good. 

         If you’re interested in more information about me and my training and experience, as well as my career as an attorney, you can find it in my memoir, The Little Yiddish I Know I Learned From My Grandmother, and my legal memoir, For Three Weeks I Owned the University of Illinois. Both are available from Amazon.com.

In The Teeth Of The Evidence

    One of the things my wife Carol and I take for granted these days is excellent dental care. We both have cleanings and check-ups four times a year, and a full set of x-rays once a year. I have one implant, one bridge, and about ten crowns. Every few years the dentist finds a cavity, or a loose crown, and he makes the appropriate correction. Additionally I see my periodontist once a year for maintenance on my implant. Recently Carol had a molar that was too far gone to save, and she got an immediate appointment with a dental surgeon. Both of us had our wisdom teeth out more than thirty years ago. 

      Fortunately we have enough assets to pay for all this, but more importantly we don't have to because we have fairly good dental insurance as part of our State of Illinois retirement benefits. It costs about $18.00 a month, and some years the insurance pays out more than we pay in. It hasn't always been this good, dentally speaking. When I was a kid we didn't have enough money for dentists, and at least in our income bracket there was no such thing as dental insurance. My parents told me that it didn't make sense to spend money on "baby teeth", since they were going to fall out anyway. But they gave in when I was a teenager and took me to a dentist when I had very bad cavities in my adult teeth. 

     Until I was in my late twenties I assumed that I would have all of my teeth taken out by the time I was thirty. That's what had happened to my mother when she was 27 and to my step-father when he was 31. Both had ill-fitting and very cheap upper and lower dentures. They were both significantly limited in what they could eat. So I never imagined that taking care of my teeth was very important. 

    This extended to my daily cleaning regime; I was taught to brush my teeth once a day in the morning, and I got it into my head that this was primarily for fresh breath. I don't think anybody in my entire family knew about flossing, and I was certainly never taught to do it. I eventually heard about mouthwash, but even that was reserved for special occasions. And since I never saw a dentist regularly, no one was around to bully me into brushing more frequently, or flossing.

    Once when I sent to the dentist when I was about 14 I had a cavity that was so bad the dentist strongly suggested a root canal as the only way to save the tooth. When they found out how much it would cost they immediately said no and instructed the dentist to fill the cavity and let it go. I had little idea what that meant, but for years I walked around with a partially completed root canal packed with filling material.

     By far the worst thing that lack of money ever did to my teeth was keep me from getting braces. Those of you who know me know that I have a weird bite with extremely crooked teeth. This became obvious when I was a young teen, and I badgered my parents into taking me to see an orthodontist. After a thorough exam and a set of x-rays, the dentist told us I had too small a mouth for all of my teeth but that he had a plan. This would have involved pulling a couple of teeth, taking out my wisdom teeth when they came in, and wearing metal braces for a coupe of years. But it would have solved all of my problems. The cost, however, was prohibitive; as much as my step-father earned in a year. And they had a hard time qualifying for a car loan, let alone a loan for (as they thought) unnecessary dental work. So they told the dentist no, and they told me he told them privately that my teeth were too soft for braces and that I would end up losing all my teeth.

        Who knows? If I had had braces I might have ended up as an actor, or an attorney.

     Speaking of which, when I went into private practice as an attorney in 1995 I went to see an orthodontist. He examined my teeth thoroughly, took a full set of x-rays, and told me my mouth was too small for all of my teeth but he had a plan. It involved pulling a couple of teeth and wearing braces for a couple of years (I had already had my wisdom teeth removed). The cost was not prohibitive, and our dental insurance would have paid a good part of it. My teeth were not too soft for braces, and by then they had developed "invisible" clear plastic braces. But I couldn't stand the thought of removing a couple of healthy teeth. So I decided against it.

        My reason may have been different, but I reached the same conclusion that my parents had come to some thirty-five years earlier. Under these circumstances is it reasonable to blame them for the state of my teeth today? Perhaps not. And yet I do. It just seems to me that one of parents' responsibilities to their children is to care for their health: their physical health, their mental health, their dental health. If we had children I certainly would have provided them with braces if they had needed them. Or with the treatment of a dermatologist if they had needed it. Or with anything else they truly needed, regardless of the cost. Of course that's easy to say, since we have no children, and since we have sufficient money. What we would have done if we didn't have the money, as my parents did not, I cannot say.

      I do know that when I was an adult, out of college, married, and with a job (well, a graduate assistantship is sort of a job), I did not go to the dentist regularly. I had a molar pulled in 1970 because I had let it go too long to save, but fortunately I did not have any other serious problems. Finally, when I was in my 13th year of full-time teaching I started seeing a dentist regularly. I looked into having my missing molar replaced, and agreed to have a bridge installed. This involved having the two teeth on either side reduced and covered with caps, with a false tooth attached in between. If implants had been available I would have had one, but I was not offered that option. It was also during this time that I was referred to an oral surgeon to remove my wisdom teeth. And when I began having teeth capped as well as having cavities filled.

        Straightened and capped teeth are important in some fields. There is no direct discrimination against attorneys with messy mouths, but anything that calls one's trustworthiness into question is not good. Clients of course must trust their attorneys, but so must judges. I have written elsewhere about my belief that I once won a case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by making a judge laugh in oral argument (see For Three Weeks I Owned the University of Illinois). There is no question, though, that missing teeth and gaps between teeth are fatal for actors. I had a student some forty years ago who got an excellent review in a major Detroit newspaper for playing a leading role in a local professional theatre, but the reviewer also referred to the unmistakeable gasp between her front teeth. She had them capped immediately, and worked regularly on stage and on TV until she married the son of a Pultizer Prize-winning playwright and shifted her focus. And I have heard it said that Georgia Democrat Stacy Abrams might have won the Governorship or possibly become Joe Biden's VP candidate if not for the gap between her front teeth.

      After I stepped down as Chair at SIUC in 1988 I began seeing Carol's dentist regularly, for cleanings and fillings. I kept seeing him after I became an attorney and moved to Charleston in 1995. Along the way he referred me for a root canal, and that turned into an extraction and an implant. My periodontist regularly tells me that I have the strangest bite he has ever seen, and he keeps a cast of my mouth in his office. He says he expects my teeth to shift one day, endangering my implant. So far there's no sign of it, but I see him annually just to make sure. Our regular dentist has retired, but we continue to see his son who took over the practice.

        Most of the time these days I don't even think about my teeth. I have cleanings and check-ups regularly, and my dentist catches any problems before they get too big. I don't expect ever to lose another tooth. In my family, that will be a first. I hope my brother and his kids are as diligent, but I have no confidence in such an outcome. What we learn at our mother's knee is difficult, if not impossible, to change.

The Little Yiddish I Know I Learned From My Grandmother, Part II

    When Donald returned from Japan in January, 1953, he had exactly two weeks to move his family to an Air Force Base near Kansas City, where he would receive his next stateside assignment. He and Shirley withdrew me from kindergarten, packed up their meagre belongings (having lived with Etta and Norman they had no furniture or other home furnishings), bought an old car (I think it was a 1939 Ford), and hit the road. This was before the days of interstate highways, so we used a map we got at the gas station and used back roads. There was only one stop at a motel, one stop for an auto repair, and another for a flat tire (I said it was an old car).  When we arrived at the base after two days of driving with one day to spare we checked into a motel that had cottages designed to look like teepees. My mother and I stayed there for two days while my father processed endless paperwork, and he ultimately told us he had to be at Randolph Field (it wasn't even big enough to be an Air Force Base) near San Antonio, Texas, in two days. So we packed up the car again and drove for two more days. We had to check in to another motel because Donald hadn't yet been assigned housing. On our third day in Texas, however, we moved into enlisted housing, a two bedroom apartment in a complex built by the lowest bidder and looking exactly like it.

    Randolph Field had its own elementary school but no kindergarten, so I was not enrolled in school until September. I remember playing records on our portable record player, playing with Donald's guitar (which he did not play either, but he intended to learn), meeting and playing with other kids my age, and learning to ride the two-wheeled bicycle I received for my 6th birthday. Shirley's memories of that time are not so pleasant. She needed dental work, and the butcher disguised as the base dentist ended up pulling all of her teeth and ordering upper and lower dentures for her. I imagine he got some sort of commission or kickback for every set of dentures he ordered, but of course I could never prove it. She was 27 years old.

    Meanwhile in Buffalo Etta and Norman were having problems with the Normetta School of the Dance. After more than twenty years they were forced to declare bankruptcy and they lost their second-mortgaged home in the process. With Dorothy and her family taking care of Julia in the house on French Street there was nothing holding them in Buffalo, so in the summer of 1953 they packed up their old car and moved to the Phoenix area, where one of Etta's sisters lived. They bought a little house (three bedrooms, one bath, about 1000 square feet, a carport instead of a garage) on what was then the outskirts of town. It was a builder's model, which was why they could afford it, located on 51st Street near Thomas Road. It was more or less in the middle of a field full of tumbleweeds. There was no air conditioning, and the temperatures routinely topped 100 degrees for several months. On the other hand, there was no snow in the winter, a major consideration after living so many years in Buffalo. All that remained was figuring out how they were going to make a living.

    Norman had a number of get-rich quick schemes, most of which Etta vetoed. She started buying penny candy in bulk and selling it to the neighborhood children out of their kitchen at a huge markup. She added making and selling popsicles and frozen chocolate bars to her business, and actually did quite well. Norman set himself up as a tropical fish breeder, using the third bedroom for the purpose. He sold tiny exotic fish at what seemed to be a discount, mostly to children, and made his real money selling them tanks and other equipment needed to raise his fish. He eventually began breeding and selling parakeets, and later still he began breeding and selling special chickens that laid pink, blue, and green eggs. But those ventures were many years later; his immediate concern was bringing in enough money every month to pay the mortgage and buy his special steaks, chops, and roasts. So they opened a new branch of the Normetta School of the Dance and took to fleecing the naive once again. They were now in their fifties, though, and the simple physical activity was hard to maintain for even three hours a night. And they didn't have Shirley to help as they did in Buffalo. So Norman (for once) swallowed his pride and looked for a job.

    Jobs were plentiful in the Valley of the Sun in the 1950s; business was booming and the place was expanding by leaps and bounds. Most of the jobs, though, required physical abilities Norman did not possess, and others required education he lacked. Those few that he was able to land (clerk in a drug store, secretary in a real estate company, for example) lasted a very short time because he was unable to stomach working for somebody else. Most he quit before he was fired. By the end of 1953 Etta began to despair of him ever finding a steady job, but in January of 1954 he was hired as an independent contractor for a termite inspection company. Termites posed a serious problem in Phoenix and almost everybody who owned or bought a house in the Valley needed termite inspections. He worked for himself, could set his own hours, was not overexerted, and didn't need to get along with anybody. His stature even gave him an advantage, since he could get into attics and crawl spaces a normal-sized person would have trouble fitting into. It was perfect for him. It didn't pay much, but with the other gigs he and Etta had going it was enough.

    Shirley and Donald were having their own money problems in Texas. While the housing was cheap and Shirley shopped exclusively at the PX, there was never enough money to get from one end of the month to the other. Enlisted men were simply not paid enough to raise a family. So they fought constantly and loudly, and eventually Donald's frustration grew to the point that he started hitting her. 

    I entered the first grade in September, 1953, and excelled despite the fact that I had never finished kindergarten. Partly this was because I could already read and none of the other children could; and partly it was because I was a placid child who had learned that the best way to get along with adults was to give them exactly what they wanted. So the inexperienced and flustered young woman who was my teacher knew she never had to worry about me. At the end of the school year I was excited to have found something (namely, going to school) that I was so good at. I looked forward to the second grade with high expectations.

    During the summer of 1954, though, things blew up. During one particularly virulent fight between my parents, Donald hit Shirley across the face so hard that her dentures flew out. That was the end of it for her. She ran into my room, where I had been listening in dread, locked the door, and cried herself to sleep. She stayed there until Donald left for work the next day, and then she packed suitcases for the two of us, called a taxi, and took me to the Greyhound Bus station. We went to the bus station in San Antonio and caught the late night bus (it was a local, stopping every half hour or so) for El Paso. There we caught another bus for Phoenix. Shirley was going home to her mother.

    We me moved into Etta and Norman's little house in Phoenix, and though we didn't take up much space we completely filled it up. My mother slept in the spare bedroom and I got the back room with the fish. There was also a back door in this room, which came in handy from time to time. At the end of the excruciatingly hot summer of 1954 I enrolled in the second grade in a little public school in Scottsdale, a western suburb of Phoenix. This was one of the places that Etta and and Norman ran their dance school. Norman knew some people on the school board and was able to get me enrolled even though I lived outside the district. The main reason for this was that there was a huge push for integrating the public schools in Phoenix, and Etta and Norman did not want their grandson going to school with schvartzes (Yiddish for Black persons (from שוואַרץ‎, shvarts, 'black'; cf. German: schwarz; OED); offensive). This arrangement lasted for only one semester; in January of 1955 I transferred to Griffith School in Phoenix, a public school with no Black students but plenty of Latinos, mostly of Mexican descent. During the semester I was in Scottsdale, though, I began my theatrical career by playing the youngest of the Three Billy Goats Gruff in the class play. The seed was planted that would bloom eleven years later when I got to college.

    By far the most important thing that happened during 1954-55, though, was the introduction of Bill Parks into my life. Etta and Norman once again despaired of their daughter Shirley ever finding another husband. They helped her to get a divorce, and Donald was ordered to pay child support of $25.00 a month to her until I turned 18. The military may be many things, but it is certainly efficient when it comes to the payment of child support. All Shirley had to do was send a copy of the court's order to the office of the Randolph Field commander and the child support was sent to her like clockwork on the first of every month. Donald was also given visitation privileges with me but he used them only once. Even before the divorce was final Etta and Norman were on the lookout for a suitable man for Shirley, and they settled on Bill Parks.

    Bill was 28 years old and a drifter. He was in Phoenix working for the same termite company that Norman worked for, but Bill did the hard work: he did the actual termite treatments that Norman found necessary during his inspections. He needed a place to live, and sure enough Etta and Norman invited him to live with them. That meant, of course, that he was living with us. Bill moved in with me in the fish room, and we shared bunk beds. I found him fascinating. He had been a cowboy on the rodeo circuit and a professional wrestler. He had been in the Navy at the end of World War II and had been a crewman on a PT boat. He loved to hunt and fish. His life was about as different from Norman's as it could possibly be. I found out later that he was also a raging alcoholic who had nearly drunk himself to death and that he was a pathological liar. At the time, though, I didn't know those things and wouldn't have cared much if I did. 

    Shirley found him as fascinating as I did, and just as Etta and Norman had planned they fell in love. They both turned 30 in March of 1956, and in early April they drove to Las Vegas and eloped. The funny thing was, they took me with them. I was nine years old, so I wasn't allowed on the floors of the casinos, but I could watch from the outside windows or from the coffee shop while my elders blew all the money they had on slop machines, poker games, crap games, and the roulette wheel. They even got people to gamble in the coffee shops and higher-end restaurants with a lottery-type game called Keno. Another thing Bill had been was a professional gambler, so he thought he could come out ahead if he just kept gambling long enough. On other occasions he did, but not this time, Bill and Shirley called Norman to send them money to get home. He did so gladly, since he now had a hold on his son-in-law.

    During our time staying with Etta and Norman she resumed her occasional Yiddish lessons. I learned words about foods and people but nothing about the structure of the language, syntax, or grammar. It was impossible for me to apply the scant vocabulary I absorbed without broader context.

    During 1955-56 I was in the third grade at Griffith School. I have written elsewhere in this blog about the summer of 1956 ("My Entire Family Ran Away and Joined a Carnival",  https://davidstevensblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/my-entire-family-ran-away-and-joined.html). During the Fall of 1956, though there was an incident that changed my life. I had started Hebrew School during the third grade, and once a week my grandfather would drive me two cities west to Glendale for lessons. The first thing I learned was the short version of Kiddush: "Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam, borei peri ha-gafen. ("Blessed are you God, our Lord, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.") It's the prayer over the wine before Sabbath dinner, and at our Temple it was also give during Friday evening services. All the pre-Bar Mitzvah boys in the congregation took turns on Friday nights, and when my turn came I proudly chanted as I had been taught, something no other boy had been able to do. I could see the older men in the congregation nodding their heads and smiling; it felt wonderful to be recognized like that. 

    It was about this time in 1956 that I distinctly recall attending Uncle Abe Holzman's funeral. He had married Etta's sister Fannie, who had passed away earlier. They had moved to Arizona some time before Etta and Norman did. The whole family made the trip to Mesa, where the funeral was. There was an open casket, which I had never experienced before, and it made me quite uncomfortable. To this day I would rather not attend a funeral with an open casket, but I do if necessary.

    The next week was Yom Kippur, and we had a special dinner at home, with the fine china and crystal and a tablecloth. Norman asked me to say Kiddush, and I proudly rose and recited. I was not used to the crystal wine glass I had been given, however, and I dropped it on the china, breaking it, the china bowl the matzoh ball soup was in, and the china plate beneath. Needless to say, the wine spilled all over the tablecloth. I was terrified, afraid I would be hit as my mother had been hit. That was the only time I knew when someone got very angry, and I thought that was what always happened when people got angry. And sure enough, my grandfather completely lost his temper and began verbally berating me. My mother did nothing, but Bill literally stood up for me. He got Norman to quiet down, and we packed and left the house. That night we stayed at a motel, and the next day we moved into an apartment about half way into downtown Phoenix. 

    I transferred from Griffith School to Creighton School, and continued the fourth grade. 1956 was the year that the Salk Vaccine for polio came out, and I got my first shot right in school. In some subjects Creighton School was ahead of Griffith School, and in others it was behind. I was confused much of the time. My confusion only grew when we moved again, this time to a house near Seventh Street and McDowell Road. I transferred yet again, to Emerson School. We were to stay in this house, and then the one next door, for more than ten years. The houses were owned by Bill's new Boss, Clyde Pierce, Chairman and CEO of Pierce Farms, Inc., a local diversified business rivaling that of Del Webb, if not as well known. Bill was to be in charge of maintenance for all the Pierce properties, a substantial if not terribly well-paying position. Free rent, free telephone, and a free company truck came with the job, so even if the pay was not substantial it was enough. I went back to Creighton School for my second Salk Vaccine shot, and also for the sugar cubes that contained the new Sabin Vaccine. I was as immunized against polio as it was possible to get.

    I have also written elsewhere in this blog about the summer of 1957 ("Baseball and Doing the Building", https://davidstevensblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/baseball-and-doing-building.html). I played Little League baseball for two more years on Bill's teams, making the All-Star team as an outfielder in 1959, the year I turned 12. My baseball career being effectively over (I couldn't compete with other teenagers) I turned my attention to more cerebral matters, becoming an Eagle Scout in 1959 at age 13, and graduating first in my eighth grade class that same year. I became a newspaper carrier at age 13 as well, moving from a small route near Emerson School until I started high school to a larger route near my high school to the best route in the entire state for my last three years of high school, the downtown Phoenix route. I made an average of $1,000 a month delivering around 100 newspapers a day, with a $40.00 a week bonus for the difficulty of the route. I was named Carrier of the Month, Station Leader of the Month, and First Runner-Up for Carrier of the Year. When the Phoenix Gazette began a college scholarship program in 1965, I was honored by receiving the first $2,000 scholarship they ever awarded. I graduated as valedictorian of my class in 1965, winning more scholarships and awards than I can name, accepting finally a National Merit Scholarship to Michigan State University. It turned out that my scholarships covered all of my college expenses, which was a good thing since my parents could contribute nothing.

    I never saw my grandparents during my last years at home. They held a grudge better than most people I've met, and my parents were content to keep them out of my life. When I was 13 my mother had another child, my brother William Reb Parks. His name came from an old racehorse Bill used to own, and Shirley's paternal grandfather's name, even though she did not remember him very clearly. Reb didn't meet Etta and Norman until he was six years old, when they swallowed their pride and made up with Bill and Shirley. They wanted to get their hands on their young grandson, but Bill made sure they kept their distance. They did their best to raise him so he wouldn't want to go to college and leave home like I did, and in that they succeeded.

    The summer after my first year of college I returned to Phoenix and worked for the U.S. Post Office as a substitute letter carrier. It was a civil service job based on a test, and by then I was a dab hand at taking tests. My high school friend Ernie Nedd (who is Black; apparently Etta and Norman's racist fears were justified; going to school with people of other races inevitably leads to interracial friendships!) also aced the civil service exam, and we worked at the same post office all summer. He ended up with a scholarship to Brown University, by the way, but dropped out, got drafted, lived through a tour in Viet Nam, and finished his degree and law school at Arizona State in Tempe. That summer, though, we earned $2.35 an hour, which isn't much but at the time was almost twice the minimum wage otherwise available to us. I saw Etta and Norman several times that summer, but never for an extended period. I never lived at home again, and it was three years before I saw them.

    I received a nice surprise for my twenty-first birthday in 1968. It turned out that my mother had taken some of that miserly child support she received every month and put it into a life insurance policy for me. It matured when I turned 21. So I had an extra cushion of $500.00 for my senior year.

    At my mother's insistence Carol and I invited Etta and Norman to our wedding in 1970, and I was relieved when they declined. By that time Norman was pushing 70 and Etta was almost 65. They were too old to take the bus and couldn't afford to fly. We saw them the following summer when we went to Phoenix to visit my parents. This was Carol's first time meeting them, and I hoped Norman would be civil for once. No such luck, though; just about the first thing he did was proposition Carol. I suspected it was another of his tasteless jokes, but Carol remains convinced he was deadly serious. In any case it all but ruined our vacation, and it wasn't just to escape the heat that we packed up my parents' Toyota Land Cruiser and travel trailer and toured the northern part of the state, including particularly the Grand Canyon, for our last week in Arizona. 

    The last time I saw Etta and Norman was over the Christmas-New Years vacation in December 1980 to January 1981. Carol and I had attended the Modern Language Association annual convention in Houston. Carol was looking for a more permanent college teaching job and had interviews with about 20 colleges and universities. We were pretty sure she woulds get a good job, and although she got an unheard-of job offer at Texas Tech following the convention (job offers only come after on-campus interviews) she ended up taking a less prestigious but far more satisfying job teaching at Eastern Illinois University, where she stayed until she retired. During that visit we had a very nice dinner with Etta and Norman on December 30, and then two nights later we got word that he had been taken to the hospital in the middle of the night.

    Etta and Norman had moved from their little house on 51st Street to rural location where Norman had a retirement job taking temperature, humidity, and pressure readings at the top of a mountain. They moved because their chickens were making too much noise for the neighbors, and although the chickens were grandfathered in they either had to get rid of the chickens or move. So they moved. When Norman went to the hospital he went to a rural hospital, and it took all of us two hours to get there. By then, Norman was dead. He had developed meningitis after breaking his collarbone in an auto accident that was his own fault. He died as he had lived, a narcissist who always thinks he knows everything better than anybody else in the room. 

    Norman was cremated within a day of his death, and following the cremation the family held a brief memorial service for him. My mother and grandmother insisted that I recite the Hebrew prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, for him. I should have refused, having not considered myself Jewish for many years (from the date of the Yom Kippur incident, to be precise). But I gave in, and my mother found an English transliteration for me. The prayer begins in the familiar manner: "Yit-gadal v'yit-kadash sh'mey raba . . . ." (Magnified and sanctified be G-d's great name . . . .") and I got through it all. I felt nothing for Norman then and I feel nothing for him now, but I felt bad for Etta. They had been together for more than 50 years and she had no idea what she would do without him.

    Shirley then stepped up and gave her mother what she needed, just as Etta had given Shirley what she needed all those years before when Shirley came running home after being beaten by Donald. She moved Etta into a vacant apartment in the complex where she and Bill then lived, sold their rural home, took care of all their debt, and set up Etta's financial affairs. All that was left Shirley put into a couple of CDs, which Etta insisted be placed in joint tenancy so Shirley would get them when Etta passed away. Or so Etta intended.

    Four years later I was directing a production of Fiddler on the Roof, ironically, when I got word that Etta had died. I skipped the final performance and flew to Phoenix for a few days while we held a memorial for Etta and, as we thought, settled her estate. Carol couldn't come with me because we had a guest from out of town who had come to see the production, and she had to return to her university to teach two days later (we lived in separate cities for 14 years due to our inability to get decent jobs near each other). I returned in time to get ready to move to another job, only three hours from Carol instead of eight hours away.

    Less than a month later my mother called me to tell me her sister Dorothy was suing her for half of Etta's estate. Etta had died without a will, and under those circumstances the surviving children normally split the assets remaining after all debts are paid. When accounts are held in joint tenancy with right of survivorship, however, as Etta's CDs were, the money is effectively taken out of the estate. That was the case here, and if she wanted to fight it Shirley could have prevailed. She would have had to hire an estates attorney, however, and the fight would have been expensive and would have taken over a year. The CDs had face values of only $50,000.00, and it just wouldn't have been worth it. I advised her to split the money with her sister, and for once she took my advice. Etta and Norman had had their last affect, for good or ill, on my life. Shalom, I thought to myself. Peace be with them. But I did not think, and do not think to this day, that their lives should be for a blessing. There was too much water under the bridge for that.

    Shirley died of lung cancer, quite ironic because she had quit smoking thirty years earlier, in 2000 at age 75. Dorothy passed away in 2008 without another word, not even to say thank you, to her sister. Nor have her children, my cousins, ever been in touch. Donald, with whom I had reconciled after a long estrangement, survived until 2014 at age 86. He left me the bulk of his small estate, which I nonetheless split equally with the son and daughter he adopted with his second wife. He and Shirley had pledged on January 1, 1950, to meet in Times Square at midnight on January 1, 2000. Fortunately she was too sick even to consider it; I can't imagine it would have been a good experience for either of them if they had followed through. Bill, though, outlived them all. He survived the loss of Shirley, alcoholism, skin cancer, bladder cancer, atrial fibrillation, and heaven knows what else, to die on July 1, 2020, at age 94. His smallish estate is tied up by his trust for ten years after his death, and even if I'm still alive at age 83 I'll see to it that the bulk of his estate goes to his son Reb. Reb needs it for his retirement much more than I do and much more than his children, who can all make their own livings, do.

This is Donald in about 1962.

Me in the late 1940s.

This is me and Carol with Bill and Shirley and

Reb with three of his children in 1998.

This is me with Bill and Shirley when I became an Eagle Scout in 1960.

Me with my dog Koko when I was named

Station Leader of the Month for the newspaper.

The Little Yiddish I Know I Learned From My Grandmother, Part I

    My maternal grandmother, Etta Felger Brock, was born in Ukraine in 1905. Over the next ten years her entire family emigrated to America, eventually settling in Milwaukee. Her father, David Felger, went first alone in 1910. Etta's older sisters Fannie and Rose went next in 1913. In 1914 her mother Sylvia Stelnick Felger followed with Etta, her younger sister Katie, and her younger brother Morey (Moishe). They spoke mostly Yiddish at home, although they naturally spoke Ukrainian. They were close enough to Poland that they spoke fluent Polish as well. For political reasons they felt it wise also to speak Russian. In the long run it was a very good thing they left when they did; following World War II there were no Jews left alive in their village (Ustylúh), including the relatives who died because they would not or could not leave. In my imagination it looks like the end of "Fiddler on the Roof", although I doubt there was any musical accompaniment or any turntable.

    So at age 9 Etta began living in a strange new place, looking for an old familiar face, and learning an entirely alien language. Fortunately the whole family had a facility for languages, and within five years she was speaking English like a native, albeit with a marked Milwaukee accent. Her father died in a factory accident in 1915. She lived through the First World War and the pandemic that followed; her mother, however, died of the influenza in 1918. Etta cared for the younger children for a while, although still a child herself, but they were soon sent to live with an uncle in Montreal, Canada, for a time in 1918 or 1919. Both returned to the United States, and all of the children, including Etta, became naturalized American citizens.

    Etta became of marriageable age (17) in 1922.  The problem, however, was that she was a midget--defined as a perfectly proportioned person, but under the height of 4'10". Dwarves, on the other hand, share the short stature but have some sort of physical disproportion. Nowadays both are defined as dwarves, with those formerly called midgets now called pituitary dwarves, and their condition is said to be caused by Growth Hormone Deficiency (GHD). The main national association, the Little People of America, does not distinguish between the two. At the time, however, a midget would look down his or her nose at a dwarf, so Etta had to find another midget to marry. And to complicate matters, that male midget had to be Jewish. So a search began.

    It took a year or so, but she found one living in Buffalo, New York. Norman Franklin Brock stood about 4'6" and had been born in 1900. His father, William Brock, was a miller and Norman worked for him as a laborer in his mill. His mother, my great grandmother Julia Brock, was a housekeeper who ran their home as a boarding house. Norman was their only child, and they worshipped him. William was born in 1856 and consequently was too young for the Civil War and too old for World War I. His father, Wilhelm Brock, moved his family to Buffalo from Germany, and became William Brock, a name that he passed on to his son. Etta married Norman in 1923, and they lived with his parents. 

    Norman spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew, so Etta began teaching him simple words and phrases. Unliked his wife, however, Norman had little knack, and even less love, for languages. He refused even to attempt Russian or Polish. Etta was a wonderful cook, having learned (with all her sisters) from her mother. All of them cooked the traditional European Jewish dishes: knishes, kreplach, matzoh ball soup, blintzes, as well as traditional Russian dishes like borscht. Norman, however, was a picky eater, and his mother had indulged him in this. What he wanted was meat and potatoes, and the vegetables he could tolerate were limited to peas and corn. He could stand chicken once in a while, but for the most part it was steaks and roasts. There was little scope for her culinary skills.

    My mother Shirley was born in 1926, and her sister Dorothy in 1928. Neither Etta's nor Norman's family had any significant money, so it was necessary that Norman work. He was unsuited for work as a laborer, as he was listed on the Census of 1920, and he also lacked higher education. He tried working in various businesses for a while, but could never stand working for somebody else. He suffered from what my step-father referred to as "short man's disease". The obvious solution was to start his own business. So in 1929 Etta and Norman moved out of his parents' house (they have a separate address in the Census of 1930) and opened the Normetta School of the Dance.

    It has always seemed strange to me that two people completely untrained in dance could think they could teach it to children. That's what they set out to do, however. They rented halls all around the Buffalo area for one night a week (many were available due to the Depression), put up some posters and put some ads in the newspaper, and waited for the kids to show up. And show up they did, at first in dribs and drabs and later in torrents. For each shiny dime (not an insignificant amount for most middle-class families in those days; only in the forties did they raise it to a quarter) a child between the ages of 6 and 16 was entitled to an hour's instruction in the fundamentals of tap, acrobatic, or ballet. They would teach for three hours each evening, six nights a week, and make a semi-honest living. I qualify that adjective somewhat, since it is usually assumed that a teacher knows something about the subject matter being taught. Norman and Etta knew little, but both had the gift of gab and made each hour enjoyable for the kids who knew even less about what they studied. I also assume that the children enjoyed being taught by adults no bigger than they were. So the Normetta School of the Dance flourished.

    As a cash business there were also tax advantages, again not exactly honest. Their business model allowed them to close down one location and open another at the drop of a hat, and they did so frequently throughout the thirties, usually whenever there was an incident where a child got hurt or when there was a complaint. As Shirley and Dorothy grew up they both became students, and Shirley actually became quite accomplished. She became first a tutor and later a full teacher in the School. She fantasized about a career as a dancer.

    During the thirties, though, Norman's father William died, and the Census of 1940 shows them again living with his mother. They were not in the family home where they had lived before and where Norman had grown up, but in a newer house in a better part of town, on French Street. My great grandmother Julia remained in this house until she died in the sixties.

    In 1940 Shirley turned 14 and had begun high school. She did very well. She was particularly good at algebra, to the surprise of everyone in the family including herself, earning a perfect 100% mark in the subject. In the 1941-42 school year she continued her study of mathematics by becoming the only girl to enroll in geometry, and the roof fell in. For some reason she simply could not understand why triangles were congruent, and the idea of a proof completely baffled her. The outbreak of war in December gave her an excuse, and at the end of the first semester, having failed geometry, she dropped out of high school altogether. She went to work in a defense plant.

    Shirley had grown to the height of 4'10 1/2", and she was proud of that 1/2 inch. It meant she was not a midget, although she was still shorter than everyone she met. Her sister Dorothy reached 5'. Both children were raised ostensibly Jewish, but not a lot of emphasis was placed on the religion. Both wore simple silver Stars of David around their necks. These were hidden by the high-necked blouses they inevitably wore, and very few people ever saw them and so very few people outside of their immediate circle knew that they were Jewish.

    It only took one, though, and that one made quite a fuss about it. It happened during a lunch break at the defense plant in January, 1945. Shirley was 18 and had turned into quite a competent worker, her dreams of earning her living as a dancer far behind her. Her lack of a high school diploma kept her from advancing to a supervisory position, and in fact this event finished her defense plant career entirely. The plant floor was overheated for some reason, and Shirley had unbuttoned her blouse's top buttons. Her Star of David was thus visible, and out of nowhere an otherwise pleasant middle-aged Polish woman stood up, pointed at Shirley, and said in a voice a trifle louder than strictly necessary, "You killed my God!" At this point Etta would have decked the woman, despite giving up a foot and a half in height,  but Shirley was made of less-stern stuff. She didn't know what to say, she didn't know what to do, so she sputtered something about not having been there 1900 years ago and ran crying from the room. She didn't stop until she got on the cable car to go home and she never went back. The plant, by the way, never paid her for her last two weeks and never explained why.

    Etta and Norman began to worry that Shirley was too retiring ever to find a man to marry. And Etta's tradition was that the parents would make the match anyway, although she conveniently forgot the fact that she and her sisters had all made their own matches due to their parents being dead. So they set out to find a suitable husband for their older daughter. Their choice was somewhat puzzling.

    Donald Robert Stevens was 19 at the end of the war and was working at the same defense plant that Shirley had left. He had not been drafted due to the fact that he served two years in juvenile detention for theft. His parents disowned him, and when he got out when he turned 18 in September, 1944, he needed a place to live. Etta and Norman took him in. Initially they had no matrimonial plans for him, as he was a Polish Catholic and they had reason to be skeptical of that particular combination. But as time went on and Shirley showed no sign of finding a husband on her own they reassessed their position. Since she was Jewish their children would be raised Jewish, and that was all that mattered. Living in the same house meant that they were thrown together often, and inevitably unless Etta and Norman intervened to prevent it the two young people were going to be attracted to each other. So they were, and Shirley and Donald were married in September, 1946, when they were both 20. I was born in June, 1947; they wasted no time.

    During this time Shirley's sister Dorothy lived with her grandmother, Norman's father Julia, in the new house on French Street. She married a full-blooded Iroquois, Bud Douglas, in 1950; they had three children: Diane, Debbie, and Mitchell. Bud and Dorothy divorced in the late fifties, and she never remarried. She inherited the house when her grandmother passed away. Aside from once in 1969 when I stopped in Buffalo to see her on the way home from visiting Carol in Rochester and once again in 1970 when she and the children came to our wedding, I had no further contact with her.

    Shirley and Donald (and me, when I came along) lived with Etta and Norman. The end of the war, of course, meant the defense plant closed, and all of the good jobs went to the war veterans. Donald was limited to work as a laborer, and Norman knew there was no future in that. So he suggested to Donald that the young man seek a career in the military. He could retire after 20 years with half pay for life, or after 30 years with 3/4 pay, and he would learn a good marketable trade. It would mean some time away from his family, of course, but the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks. In his own mind Donald was desperate to get out from under Norman's roof, and he jumped at the chance. The Air Force was willing to overlook his "youthful indiscretion" as they termed it, and his enlistment was approved in 1949. After basic training he was assigned to Japan, where as an enlisted airman he could not bring his family. He served in the remains of the postwar occupation and then got caught up in the Korean War. He did not come home until January, 1953.

    The first five and a half years of my life, then, were spent with my mother under Norman and Etta's roof. My first memories are of the house on Buell Avenue, sledding down the railway embankment in the winter, throwing tomatoes picked fresh from the garden in the back in the summer. My mother Shirley once again helped with the School of the Dance, this time as a paid "professional" teacher. I went to many of the sessions simply because there was no one at home to take care of me and babysitting was too expensive. I was never much of a dancer, although I enjoyed the acrobatics and apparently learned more than I realized. I found this out years later when I fit right in to the musical comedy choruses for which I auditioned. I have distinct memories of kindergarten, where I excelled. My mother and my Aunt Dorothy read to me every night and I was reading myself by the time I was five. I have a vague memory of visiting my grandmother's sister, Aunt Kate, in the early fifties.

    It was during this time that my grandmother Etta began teaching me Yiddish. I don't think she ever tried me on Russian, Polish, or Ukrainian, but I can't swear to it. I do know, though, that when several of my college classmates studied Russian, it didn't sound as strange as I expected it to and some of the vocabulary was familiar. My grandmother Etta also tried to introduce me to her prodigious cooking skills, but my grandfather Norman still insisted on good old American meat and potatoes, so that was what I wanted. When we visited Aunt Kate she and my grandmother chatted seamlessly in three or four languages and I was astonished. Despite the informal language lessons from my grandmother, though, the person who had the greatest influence on me during this crucial time was my grandfather Norman. He was a petty tyrant with more than a streak of dishonesty. He thought the world owed him a living, and he had no shame. He built himself up by tearing down everyone around him. And unfortunately I became more like him than I care to admit. Even today, some 70 years later, if I'm not careful some of the old patterns I learned at his knee come breaking through.

    There's more to the story of me and Etta and Norman, and of course Shirley and Donald and Dorothy, as well as others who haven't entered the scene yet. My sincere thanks to my cousin Jim Holzman, Etta's great nephew, for his prodigious genealogical research. I have relied upon it heavily. I will continue with Part II of this narrative when I get around to it.

This is Etta and Norman in 1943.