I’m named after my father’s father, so according to Jewish tradition he would have to have been deceased when I was born. I don’t remember ever meeting my father’s mother. Sometime in the nineteenth century a relative whose identity neither my brother nor I knows changed the name Grodinski to Grodin.
My father had a store where he sold supplies for cleaners, tailors, and dressmakers: materials for suits, linings, zippers, buttons, and hangers, for example. My interest in our nation’s justice system began when I was fourteen. Now I’m preoccupied with it on a daily basis. A Negro boy, as African Americans were then called, who worked for my dad was arrested for something. He was out on bail, but my father kept him on. When I said, “But he’s been arrested,” my father replied, “He hasn’t been convicted.” Dad taught me the principle of innocent until proven guilty at an early age. I believe that my sense of fairness and the feeling that it was not right for me to be kicked out of things somehow joined forces at that time.
Since I had started kindergarten at four and Hebrew school at seven, by the time I got to high school at fourteen I wanted to be free after school to be involved with sports.
My dad felt I was lazy because I couldn’t bring myself to work in his store as much as my brother dutifully had. When I did show up, I remember sitting on a counter counting up grosses of buttons, among other mundane tasks, and wishing I could be somewhere else playing sports of any kind. While my confidence was growing with every passing election, unbeknownst to me something else was happening that was to have an equally powerful effect.
The tug-of-war between my dad and me over how much time I should spend in the store ended in a standoff. I was there, but not enough as far as Dad was concerned.
My father had been in and out of hospitals his whole life, but when he suddenly died at 4:55 p.m. on June 26, 1953, at the age of fifty-two, I was in complete shock. I was eighteen, and I know I haven’t really recovered. Our relationship had so deteriorated, from his point of view, that he asked me to put all requests for anything in writing, even though we lived in a small six-room house. “Anything,” in my case, meant getting to use the car, which Dad used to make deliveries.
It couldn’t have helped my cause that when Dad let me have the car to take my driver’s test, which I passed on the third try, I drove up to my dad’s store, saw him standing in front, and shouted out the window, “Dad, I passed, I passed,” and crashed into the car parked in front of me! However, he later said, “You’re probably a better driver than I am, but I’m too nervous.”
More than one person has suggested that my penchant for being involved in so many charities has to do with my guilt over my relationship with my dad. If I know them well enough I point out what Joanne Snyder said before my dad’s passing about my caring for others. Nevertheless, I obviously didn’t have the insight to know I wasn’t caring enough about my dad.
I still consider the way I dealt with my father my biggest mistake in life. It’s the one I chose to write about for the book If I Only Knew Then… Learning from Our Mistakes. My lesson was that if you love someone, even if you think you’re right, don’t try to prevail if you will cause your loved one stress. I know that now. Regretfully I didn’t know it as a teenager.
Dad did live to see me give the valedictorian address at my high school commencement. In my school, the valedictorian wasn’t the person with the highest grades but the class president. There were probably some 4.0s among us. I was about a 3.7.
In any case, I know my dad was proud and, I’m sure, astonished to see me up there.