EXCERPTS
FROM A FAMILY MEMOIR

      We both deplore not having asked more questions of Sam, and, earlier, of old Morris Eskin, his father. Old Mrs. Eskin died in the thirties and is a more obscure quantity. The principal thing we know about her is that she was an Orthodox Jew, and seems to have served (among other things, one hopes) as the incarnation of what was to be circumvented, deplored and ridiculed by Morris Eskin. Indeed, old Morris Eskin was something of a freethinker, a libertarian, and strongly anticlerical. He seems to have had some kind of basement den--or maybe just a corner of the cellar--in the little Baltimore row house, where he made a point of frying up things like ham and eggs, as a ceremony of defiance against obscurantism. Occasionally, he seems to have enlisted, or admitted, his son Sam into these conspiratorial proceedings, which did not keep Sam from having a deep, if complex, concern about his mother, nor from harboring all sorts of resentments against his father. Oedipus lurks backstage--which is where he ought to remain.

   We do not know when nor at what age Morris Eskin, doubtless fleeing pogroms, emigrated from the Russian empire, probably from Smolensk (or maybe Kiev: Smolensk was outside the Pale, whereas Kiev was just inside). His name was probably Moishe, which was edited into "Morris." Let us say he was in his twenties and came with a wife, though he might have been fifteen and married here. It was most likely in the 1880's, perhaps the early '90's. The port of entry was most likely, and classically, New York, but he wandered south a ways and lived in Washington for some time, until moving to Baltimore in 1898, shortly after the birth of Sam.

[Ed. Notes. The Boyd's Directory of the District of Columbia,1899, by R. L. Polk & Co., lists four Eskins: Harris, tailor at 1010-1st NE, Isaac, tailor, 945 Md av. SW, Jake, tailor, at the same address, and Morris, locksmith, 6222 Va av. Sw. This may or may not be Sam's father.]

[The Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 of Baltimore, MD. Reports the year of immigration for Morris as 1890 and "Na" for naturalized, and his age given as 35. Rachel, aged 33 is shown as his wife, the year of immigration as 1895. Each of their places of birth shown as "Russ-Great Russian". The numbers of years of marriage is shown as 11. Morris' occupation is shown as Engineer/Locomotive and her occupation as Saleslady, Grocery store. Both sons were enumerated as being born in the District of Columbia, with Sam being listed as Samuel aged 11, and his brother as James aged 9. They were living at 1734 Bell Avenue, Baltimore. Their Maryland born neighbors' occupations were listed as Front Matcher/Shirt Factory, Fireman/Locomotive, Dispatcher/Railroad, Carpenter/Railroad shop, and Conductor/Steam Railroad.]

     Morris had reputedly been a foundry worker in the old country, (though how many foundries there were in Russia at that time is an open question: maybe he just worked for a blacksmith, perhaps he was a locksmith). In most other cultures, he would most likely have been illiterate, but Jewish culture, even in the lower classes, placed a high value on the written word. He was an autodictact, who absorbed, probably a bit helter-skelter, "advanced" ideas on politics, religion, science, and life in general. Indications are that, after emigration, he had a special interest in Roman history and in the Utopianism of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. It would be interesting to discover what periodicals, organizations, and movements might have influenced such a man in Czarist Russia, and what he picked up in the New World. One report makes a freemason of him, which is possible, though most masons were higher up in the social scale.

     He was a short, stocky man, but doubtless very strong, for he became a fireman on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad--an extraordinarily strenuous job--and it was many years before he was moved up to locomotive engineer-an unusual trade for a Jewish immigrant. He presumably read English well though spoke it with a heavy Russian/Yiddish accent. He always felt, in respect to America, immense gratitude, admiration and loyalty--which also earned him some scorn from his son, who at an early age veered toward a squarely socialist/vaguely Leninist view of things, which persisted for a very long time (he took some epigonous version of it to the grave with him). Sam also is said to have berated the old man for adopting a racist--or at least condescending--attitude toward Negroes. If this is accurate and not just Oedipal agitation, it is somewhat surprising on the part of a man of such relatively "advanced" ideas, but was doubtless imbibed from the border-state ambiance of Maryland and the District of Columbia--especially the working folk of Irish, English, and Italian stock that Morris Eskin rubbed elbows with, and who were surely as anti-Semitic as they were anti-Negro.

     It was with the likes of these that young Sam mostly hung about in South Baltimore, some of whom he maintained a grudging relationship with all his life, muttering after every reunion something in the way of "bigoted, racist son of a bitch!" I remember well a genuine character named Clayton Gentry, who was one of Sam's pool-hall pals and challengers, a Baltimore city fireman and clearly part of the in-crowd among low-level ward politicians. He was in fact also known as Charley, because he was either a bigamist or the next thing to it, and had two households who both played the game that the other did not exist. The anti-Semitism of people like him made an exception for Sam, who had a precocious talent for an idiosyncratic kind of assimilation.

     Long after Sam had gone through several other lives, and when he was living comfortably, though unostentatiously, in Woodstock, New York, cultivating both his passion for folkmusic and his innumerable connections among the radical chic, artistic crowd, he would periodically tune in another frequency and bring up Clayton Gentry. The two would stay up half the night, playing pool, berating--but with remarkable, almost comical unflappability--each other's Weltanschauung, and drinking the cheap bourbon Gentry had brought up from Baltimore, where he obtained it most certainly through illegal channels and which Sam, ever frugal regardless of his economic position, or perhaps as an ideological gesture like his father's ham and eggs, bought ten cases at a time and served to all comers, chic or otherwise.

     It was in such company, then, that Sam, as a child, learned to play pool, poker and hooky, and garnered soft-shelled crabs in Chesapeake bay. Though skillful enough, he had little bent for team sports, but acquired a reputation as a dangerous wrestler: a tough guy, in short. When not playing hooky, he listened moodily to his schoolteachers, neither inspired nor inattentive.

     Uncontrollably restless, he dropped out in the eighth grade and left home, prompted partly by the image of locomotive engineers going away, far off over the horizon, deep into the land. Locomotive-less himself, he rode the rails and lot, hobnobbed with hoboes, was a hobo, took every variety of odd job...and kept moving. He was a cowboy--of sorts--in Wyoming, a factory hand in an Alaskan sardine cannery, a housepainter, a construction worker, a taxi driver in San Francisco, and especially, for several extended periods, a merchant seaman. This last, to be sure, answered to his urge "to see the world," as the expression goes, but also to a much deeper, more neurotic, almost superstitious need to keep moving, not to be bounded, not be crowded. That too he took to the grave with him. He was all packed up when he died, his house up for sale: he simply hadn't quite yet decided where he was going.

     In 1925, he sailed into San Francisco, where he fell in with a radical/bohemian crowd of artists, writers, intellectuals, and hangers on, associated mostly with Telegraph Hill. He became the house proletarian for a while, perhaps a sort of mascot, but was soon of them, fishing around for his art. For some years it was photography; for a briefer time it was sandal-making, which he practiced in the Telegraph Hill of Delaware, Arden. (Sam, over the years, touched base at all such places, where he was usually a well-known character who made a point of showing up unexpectedly: Greenwich Village, Aspen, Provincetown, the Big Sur, and, more definitively, Woodstock. If he had believed in an afterlife, he would now be in the Art Colony of the Great Beyond, but straining to take off.) Eventually, his art turned out to be folk music, the singing of it, mostly at parties, or occasional concerts and benefits (veterans of the Spanish Civil War was recurring cause); and, more important, the collecting of it in all parts of America, and some other corners of the globe. That was of professional grade, and it provided precisely the right pretext for his roaming and rambling. He made a few records--both of his own singing and of field material collected in America, Mexico, Israel and the Caribbean, and became well known to other folklorists, but not to the general public. His stock account of his avocation was that he was one of the folk and had been singing these songs long before anyone told him they were folksongs.

     It was in San Francisco that he met Pearl Hefferlin who had hitch-hiked down from the back-country of Montana to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley. Her art was dance and the writing of somewhat sentimental poetry, and she too hung about Telegraph Hill, provisionally miscast as one of the bohemian crowd. It was there that Sam met her, was quite taken with her as a good-looking gal and an intellectual-cum-artist-in-the-making, and persuaded her, perhaps just for the hell of it, to marry him (one should try everything once). …In 1924 Sam and Ann (as she was henceforth re-christened) showed up often at bohemian parties, where Ann suffered little jealousies, and shivers of disapprobation as Sam drank and caroused. But there were romantic moments too when they walked along Ocean Beach in the moonlight, or when Sam serenaded her with a mandolin at her doorstep as she took a bath upstairs, leaving the window open. His affectionate nickname for her was "Marvooreen" (I don't know where it comes from--something else I should have asked one of them); hers for him was "Dungaree." …Yielding to his restlessness, she quit two months short of graduation and took off with him across the country in an old automobile called a Star. They stopped to take odd jobs here and there, and spent some time on the East Coast, saving their pennies for a big swing into Europe... They were married after a brief, unorthodox courtship, perhaps because she was being "good" and wouldn't sleep with someone she wasn't married to. She appreciated the gentleness with which Sam introduced her to the mysteries of sex and "made a woman of her," and later wrote of him as a "wonderful lover." Nonetheless, one has the intuition that their sexual life was not satisfactory…

     …Sam took Ann to Baltimore to see the folks, where she was made duly uncomfortable by Mrs. Eskin's glowering suspicion about the shikse. Morris Eskin, on the other hand, took his son aside and said, "Sam, if I was you, I'd marry Ann," and Sam slapped his thigh in delight and said, "Pop, I already did!" They worked some more at various menial jobs, and, in time, a few hundred dollars saved, embarked for Europe late in 1926, her art temporarily Dalcroze dancing, his, photography. Both, however, also practiced the literary option by keeping a daily journal with alternating entries by Sam and Ann. It makes moderately interesting reading, in spite of the stylistic awkwardnesses that come, probably of trying to be "literary" ("'tis," "'twould," "anon," "heretofore"). After a day or two in Paris, they went to Marseilles, which was a disappointment, then Arles, which was more picturesque.

     Sam, on the whole, reacted glumly, hostile to palaces and cathedrals, and finding the French bound by desperately narrow horizons, avaricious, and frequently dishonest. He picked out, a bit reluctantly, picturesque things to admire here and there. Conversely, she expressed general appreciation for donkeys and winding streets and the like, but allowed how the French did often have a pinched, constricted expression and demeanor. She was perhaps identifying the French version of Madge Hefferlin's pinched, constricted outlook. Nothing in her responses would have led one to predict the love affair that was to develop between her and France, centering on her life-long friend and mentor, Jeanne Blanc, and a futile attempt to go into chicken farming and an idyllic country life some fifty miles south of Paris -- the Les Roches project.

     Sam and Ann hung about southern France, then made their way back to Paris where they settled for some time in a tiny apartment, watching their cash dwindle and trying to get into the spirit of things by going to the comedie francaise, the opera, and small night clubs, where they met mostly other wandering Americans. They still hardly spoke a word of French. Sam for the next four decades would remember how he had asked the way to the AW-per-uh to uncomprehending Frenchmen, until one finally caught on and said, "Ah, l'oh-pair-AH!" He acquired a taste for Pernod rather than for French wine, and would amaze restaurateurs by ordering glasses of it with his meal. She drank little, and Sam accused her of being a "bum rum hound." They were both, a bit grimly perhaps, determined to imbibe some culture. Ann writes things like "Today, the Sorbonne, and a rapid lecture in good French by a pompous German-looking professor, on Keats and Shelley! I understood little, but approved of it all--the atmosphere of youth and enthusiasm is good for morbid introspection."

     In 1927, their funds were running out in Paris, and it was decided that Sam would sail back to get a job and send money, and that the other return ticket would be cashed in. There was a hesitation about a camera, which Sam yearned for and could be gotten more cheaply in Paris. Her generosity, or his insistence, closed the deal, but left her with a dangerously slim cash margin…

     Sam came and went out of her life (or she out of his), siring a child at her request on the way. When she settled in France he stayed in America. In the last two years of the twenties he bummed about moodily, looking for and not finding satisfactory work. Photography faded into a mirage. Sandal-making was fun, but unremunerative. He learned the banjo and the guitar, and, for a brief period, thought he might be a writer (he had Jack London in mind, which accounts for the designation, on my birth certificate, of "writer" under "father's profession"). He travelled back to the West Coast, had plans for going treasure-hunting and magazine reporting in Mexico, cooked up various other projects, and sometimes just moped.

     …The marriage fell into a curious kind of suspension. She and Sam, it seems, assumed they were good friends, probably lovers, perhaps traveling companions again in the future, but with no prospects for home or family. Not that Ann pressed for these, but she doubtless yearned for them, at the very time that the "family" dimension in her life centered more and more on her French friends. The signals Sam and Ann sent each other were as if guaranteed to foster confusion and misunderstanding. He seems to have come back to France briefly in October, 1927, but absolutely nothing is said by either of them about this visit… …Ann's mode of commitment now was to get a secretarial job in New York, where she lived in ferocious frugality, saving every penny for "Les Roches." Her relationship with Sam during the following two years is most obscure. They clearly did not live together, and perhaps saw very little of each other. On the other hand they did correspond, though mostly in inconclusive, abstract terms, about what they wanted in life and what to make of their marriage. One thing is clear: Sam bitterly resented the savings account set aside for "Les Roches," when his understanding was that they would support each other's "art," and that what he needed was photographic equipment to try to make a go of it. But she was seriously expecting him to see the light and convert to the Les Roches project, and the Les Roches people.

     That did not happen. In time, she came to see him as economically unreliable, and to feel that they had different "ends, friends, beliefs" --which was true enough. Eventually she decided impulsively to contribute not only her savings but a child to the Les Roches project--whatever it was. Being a properly brought up girl, and also because on a Berkeley hillside she had once declared she wanted to bear his child, she settled on her husband for the siring, and, to make a long story short, sailed back to France, pregnant, in the fall of 1929…

     Paradoxically, given economic swings, Sam was more unemployed than employed until 1930, when he got a job with the United Parcel Service in New York. He had worked briefly for them on the West Coast, where it was founded by an entrepreneur of some genius named James Casey, but Sam was too footloose to stay with them. At the end of his rope in New York, he signed on with them just as they were organizing operations there, intending to follow his usual practice of working for a while, then heading for other climes with whatever he had saved up. But something of a minor miracle happened (no, not a miracle, for a miracle by definition cannot be accounted for without assuming divine intervention, whereas Sam's career, though improbable, can). The near-miracle was not that he was good at his job, which had to do with figuring out the most efficient ways of coordinating UPS trucks with the department stores that were their principal customers in those days, but that UPS was growing so rapidly that Sam was sent from one city to another to help synchronize trucks with stores. Thus, while it is inconceivable that he could have lasted in a nine-to-five headquarters job, his restlessness was sufficiently nourished by UPS expansions--Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, etc.--that he stayed on and on. He tried to quit after ten years, but war was looming and he was begged to stay on for the duration (he was not draftable because of an arrhythmic heart, which had interfered with enlistment in the Marines when he was seventeen, but not with the Hemingwayesque way of life that ever claimed his allegiance)…

     …In the mid-thirties he had a substantial liaison with Cornelia Evans Goodhue, an unpretty but most interesting woman, with a razor-sharp mind and a gift for words. She was the sister of Bergen Evans, the popular English professor who became for a while something of a television star, and wrote a couple of reference books with him. Connie was part of the Greenwich Village crowd in those days, though always at a distance from the obligatory Marxist-Leninist line and its various factions. Unlike Ann, she was an extremely independent, self-sustaining woman, who, as I was surprised to learn many years later, had lived with Sam for only a very brief period. On the other hand, she maintained a cordial, unruffled relationship with him all his life. Though no more child-oriented than Ann, she too decided she wanted a child and that Sam was a good bet for siring: the two women had that much in common. But unlike Connie's, Ann's association with Sam remained always in murky, and sterile, emotional waters, and ended in thirty years of obstinate non-communication. In any case, thus was born my half-brother, Otho, in 1935, whom Connie kept at a certain distance from Sam, as a precautionary measure against erratic fatherhood, managing nonetheless to duplicate for him her own untroubled relationship with Sam…

     …When war drove…Ann back to America in 1940, there was a very brief,non-committal but not uncordial reunion when Sam met the boat at the pier and put up this "French" family in Connie's apartment. He got along better with Jeanne than with Ann, who seems to have been grim about it all. What then happened, according to her account, was that a lawyer (the initiative is unclear) told her, "But, Mrs. Eskin, you receive much too little money given the circumstances!" and counseled suing for high alimony and child support.

     (That move badly misfired as Sam dropped out of sight and out of state, and resurfaced only five or six years later. It was he who got a divorce in California on grounds of desertion, and obtained a settlement of $50 a month for child support. She never saw him again.)

     …He stayed with UPS until 1945 or 46. One would like to know more about how he got on with other executives: well, as evidenced by the results, and the testimony of those who, interviewed after his death, remembered him with admiration--but the question is how? How, after all, did this eccentric crypto-Leninist and guitar-strummer at Greenwich Village parties manage to relate to Jim Casey and his corporate vice-presidents? He was clearly leading some sort of double life. When the drivers began organizing, he is said to have been consulted because of his labor "background," and recommended that UPS deal with the Teamsters, rather than with a competing, politically more radical union. The "background" in question was largely an early flirtation with the Wobblies, whose highly romantic blend of European syndicalism and rugged Americanism was tailor-made to attract a personality like Sam, who probably saw something of himself in the idealized Wobbly troubadour and martyr, Joe Hill, and their tough-guy leaders like Big Bill Haywood.

     Sam maintained no relations...with the UPS people after he quit. He was always delighted with the irony that it was he who had gotten his brother Jim--the "good boy" approved by the family, whom he heartily detested--a mid-depression job with UPS, where he made a humdrum, low-level, life-long career...

     Sam, for his part, took maximum stock options, and found himself, after fifteen years, with a modest revenue from dividends that enabled him to wander about the world as he pleased, collecting and singing folksongs whenever the occasion arose. UPS, meanwhile, continued its astonishing, unceasing escalation, which made him eventually fairly rich--richer, in any case, than anyone realized, because his rugged lifestyle tended to eschew the normal signals of wealth, like Cadillacs and swimming pools. He was always uncomfortable in fancy restaurants and luxury hotels, and hardly ever set foot in one. On the other hand, when he liked something--like high-fidelity equipment long before it became an accoutrement of every middle-class household--he did not hesitate to treat himself to the best.

     This last--and long--phase of his life, began with no fixed abode--only a well-equipped house trailer with which he zigzagged the U.S.A. from coast to coast and north to south, frequently mooring his vehicle to the houses of hundreds of friends all around the country. (Knock, knock; enter: "Can't a fellow get a drink in this goddamn place?" "Well, look who's here!" "Sam, old boy! I just had a card from Turnbull. I thought you were in Houston." "That was last week.") In this way he maintained independence and sociability in a blend perfectly tailored to his personality.

     Sam did decide to try out fatherhood for a summer in 1946 by driving across the country with his two sons, aged sixteen and eleven, and introducing them to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mesa Verde, the Petrified Forest, as well as to the bohemian crowd of Boulder, Aspen, Arden and the rest. Sam would be expansive, clearly if obliquely delighted at exhibiting sons--yet one more facet of his multi-dimensional personality and its willful unpredictability. The sons both tended to be shy and awkward, the defects of adolescence, in this case amplified by the unfamiliarity of the milieu. Sam compensated for it all by "promoting" the boys in his own manner--a process that was to persist all his life, as the boys became accomplished college students, acquired advanced degrees, and climbed up their respective career ladders. His own manner, however, was a highly idiosyncratic version of the caricatural Jewish "my son the diplomat," "my son the college professor" syndrome. He mingled, sometimes disconcertingly, a superstitious esteem for education and professional status, and an almost resentful suspicion against both, emanating from his autodidacticism, his Hemingwayism, and his man-of-the-people comportment.

      The trip across the country for the eleven-year-old and the sixteen-year-old was not a total success, though Sam, clearly, was trying hard. But he had acquired the reputation, which he probably cherished, of being impossible to live with, and his unacknowledged project of living up to it made, at times, some rough going on certain stretches of Route 66 and the rest. He was moody, demanding in certain areas, and easily annoyed. He was fussy about "chores" and the keeping of order--justifiably, no doubt, in the limited space of a trailer which he kept shipshape with the organizational efficiency that had generated his success at UPS, but tension-provoking in these newly begotten fumblings between father and sons:
"Who the hell left the goddam butter on the table? It'll turn to soup!"
"Keep that screen-door closed! Like this, see? You gently click the latch shut. You got it?"
"All right! Just throw those apples away! Who cares? It's only money!"

He was ever afflicted with the impatience that the very competent often direct, not only against the slobs, but even against those whose temperaments make them slightly more careless, or who have different priorities. One of the chief source of difficulty--not readily identifiable at the time--was Sam's profound and perhaps indiscriminate, unconscious competitiveness: he was in competition with any male above age three. Since one phase of competitiveness is aggression, it tended, in respect to adolescent sons, to manifest itself as comparative ego-undermining: often as seemingly (and intendly) good-natured, joking sarcasm, but in fact ego-damaging:

"Are you sure you've got enough sleep? We've only gone a hundred miles since you dozed off."

"Do you think you can manage to break those eggs, or do you want the instruction book?"

     One of the transcontinental projects was to teach the sons the guitar, but pedagogy was not one of his many competencies. At the beginning, the boys grimly practiced, but had very limited talents, which dissolved altogether in the face of pressures more than digital. The father, for his part, ended up with a conviction that his sons hated folk music; it became virtually impossible, for the rest of his life, to persuade him otherwise. In truth, the elder son, for years, furiously envied his father's skill with song and guitar, and particularly the social triumphs of which they seemed inevitable attributes:

"Sing us a song, Sam."
"Shshsh! Everybody quiet! Sam's going to give us a song." Such social successes, such musical skills, were the subject of hours on end of daydreaming, year after year.

     The cross-country trip was the curtain-raiser of a father-son relationship that continued ever rocky, but not uninteresting. In 1948, Sam and his trailer rolled into Woodstock, in the foothills of the Catskills, where, some fifty years earlier, a wealthy disciple of Ruskin and William Morris had founded an enduring arts-and-crafts colony, and where Sam had many friends.

     An enormous estate on a magnificent hillside was subdivided for sale, and Sam impulsively bought, for a handful of change, a few acres with a barn, a corncrib, and a chicken coop. The buildings were transformed into living, work, and pool-table spaces, with the somewhat grudging help of the sons, whose inefficiency and ineptness continued a constant source of irritation and sarcasm. Sam, in any event, settled into Woodstock--or came as close there to settling as he ever would anywhere. He did manage, in time, to stay put perhaps an average of half of the year. The rest of the time he might be found most anywhere: Mexico often, the U.S.A. north to south and east to west, Amazonia, Hong Kong, Europe, Israel, the Caribbean, the Soviet Union, and more.

     The women continued in his life as numerous as they had doubtless been in his younger days (I don't know much about the earlier ones, except Ann and Connie). There was, among many others, B---, the number one radical-chic hostess of the Woodstock in-crowd--highly literary, highly knowledgeable in all the arts, though practicing none, divorced from a distinguished pianist, and for many a years a sort intellectual arbiter elegantium, who set the political, intellectual and aesthetic tone of a certain Woodstock milieu. There was C---, wife of an also distinguished homosexual composer, also extremely bright but compulsively talkative, who found heterosexual solace and companionship with Sam, but ended up in a long-lasting love/hate relationship that, from the outside, had its piquancy. There was D---, a psychotherapist who worked on Sam's psyche with extraordinary persistence, her ideology dictating that, with enough patience, everyone's psyche was penetrable and reformable; but, in the end, she had to admit defeat. There was E---, gorgeous, glamorous, vivacious blond with a particularly sexy way of playing boisterous games of charades. There was a meek little woman whose name I've forgotten, picked up on a cruise (an uncharacteristic mode of travel, but try anything once--besides he was beginning to grow old), whom he brought up to Woodstock, where she was clearly out of place, but adoring and hopelessly hopeful. There was the last one, F---, thirty years younger than he, self-confident but something of a nitwit, who mostly flattered his ego by her age and attractiveness but constantly provoked his explicit contempt by her conversational babble (such remarks as "is anybody listening to this bullshit?"--which would leave her remarkably unphased, and babbling on.) All of these (and doubtless others) had designs on Sam, convinced they had the right angle on him. He eluded them all, and took great pride in it. Resistance to marriage became, existentially, a centerpiece of his identity: Who is Sam Eskin? Sam Eskin is the man no dame can nail down. One has to admit that, indeed, he was a catch: charismatic, good-looking, popular, fun, and even, it turned out, well off.

     His party manners became legendary. He had built himself, for example, a huge trapezoidal table, the height of a coffee table, but which, set in front of the big fireplace, served as dining table for as many as fifteen guests, as center of conversation, and, at livelier occasions, as a stage on which Sam would get up to dance to Dixie-land and blues records in a style all his own. He had an astonishing capacity for alcohol, and, Socrates-like, could drink most anyone under the table and get up as usual at the crack of dawn. Only once in a blue moon was too much too much, and he ended up blotto.

     He died in his home at the age of seventy-six, September 7, 1974, of a sudden heart attack which startled hundreds of people across the country --and the sons-- who had come to consider him quite as incapable of mortality as of settling down. "No fancy stuff," his instructions read; "just pickle the remains in good whiskey and wait for the second coming."

     We threw a big party.