So, where did this heartbreaker come from? To answer that, we need to go back to the year Ruth Lowe’s sunny personality greeted the world for the first time.
Figure 7: Ruth's birth certificate
She was born in 1914, 16 months ahead of Frank Sinatra. While no one could have predicted it, their lives would defy the odds and collide 25 years later in indelible fashion, dramatically altering each of their existences forever.
Ruth’s birthplace, Toronto, is the capital of the province of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. Today, it forms part of the Greater Toronto Area with a population of six million people. “T.O.” is a centre of business, finance, arts, and culture, and is recognized as one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world. Originally called York and established in 1793, it was incorporated as Toronto in 1834. Following the Second World War, refugees from war-torn Europe and Asian jobseekers arrived there, as well as construction labourers, particularly from Italy and Portugal, setting a standard where immigration from all parts of the world would see Toronto’s population grow.
Today, we’re talking about a prominent centre for music, theatre, motion picture and television production, and home to Canada’s major national broadcast networks and media outlets. The city’s varied cultural institutions include numerous museums and galleries, festivals and public events, entertainment districts, national historic sites, and sports activities, attracting over 25 million tourists each year. It boasts the tallest free-standing structure in the western hemisphere, the CN Tower, and is home to the Toronto Stock Exchange, the headquarters of Canada’s five largest banks, and mission control for many large Canadian and multinational corporations.
But, on August 12th, 1914, Toronto was a simpler place. Baby Ruth is born there to Pearl and Samuel Lowenthal. And, as is often the custom of the time, the patriarchal name is shortened to better “anglicize” it, Lowenthal thus becoming Lowe.
As Ruth grew up, it became pretty clear that no matter where you hung your hat in the 1930s, life was never going to be easy. The Great Depression had torn the stuffing out of so many former realities and people wondered if their existences would ever be joyful again. Sumptuous meals, lavish entertainment, Charleston jubas, bathtub gin, and gay repartee had been replaced by the doggerel of smashed dreams, bitter confusion, and utter dejection.
For the Lowe family in Toronto, these times were not new, however. The four human beings didn’t need a worldwide financial challenge to set them straight. They lived it, 24/7. You see, Samuel Lowe was a struggling grocer who never seemed to find real success.
“He was a gregarious, heavyset charmer,” recalls Muriel Cohen, Sam’s daughter, Ruth Lowe’s younger sister. “He’d been born in New York City and was longer on the entrepreneurial spirit than actual business smarts. He and my mother, Pearl, seemed to always struggle to keep ends together.”
Sam’s life had never been serene. As a boy, he faced the fact that his family couldn’t afford to raise him, so he was placed in an orphanage. His youth was spent in turmoil: he never overcame the shortfall that these early days and lack of education presented.
“Despite the nasty upbringing, he turned out to be quite a charming man,” Muriel recalls about her father. “He could sing and dance and loved to entertain. Ruthie caught that bug from him, though not me. To my mother, however, he seems only to have brought a great deal of stress and heartache. He was never able to earn enough money to support his family.”
Ever the speculator with an eye to making his fortune, one day, Sam announced that the four of them—Ruth, Muriel (better known as Mickey), Pearl, and him—were moving to Los Angeles. “Los Angeles!” Mickey exclaims. “We were just kids, Ruth and me. Moving away from home was a misadventure at best!”
But the family relocated from Toronto to the LA suburb of Glendale. “It was such a shock leaving our home in Canada,” Mickey recalls. “Still, Glendale turned out to be a lovely place to grow up. We settled on a street featuring palm trees lined up like sentinels. It seemed there was music everywhere in town, and, on Sundays, we’d venture over to a park to hear outdoor concerts.”
The Lowes lived in a small bungalow amid the lavish Californian foliage. Quite a change from Toronto’s climate. But even with Glendale’s booming success and the southern sun shining bright, Sam still struggled. He tried his hand at running a meat shop but failed to make enough dough to put food on the table.
“I remember I was about ten when my mom told me she and I were heading back to Toronto for a wedding,” Mickey says. “I wondered even then if we’d ever come back.”
Her premonition was right. While in Toronto, Pearl received a call from Sam saying he’d packed in the business and was returning east with Ruth. He sold their house in Glendale, complete with furniture, shipped the piano home, and drove back to Canada.
“It must have been quite a shock to my mother,” Mickey recalls, “but, for me and Ruth, it was just another of life’s passages. I guess we were used to the pandemonium by then.”
Back in Toronto, Sam’s persistent business exploits continued to fail. It finally wore him down. He threw in the towel.
Soon after, he died virtually penniless.
“I was only 13 when he passed away,” says Mickey. “It’s funny: the exact circumstances of his death were never clear. Seems on the day he died, no one knew where he was. They searched and searched. I can recall it was terrible.”
Rumors of suicide would dog the family for years, Ruth, herself, never being prepared to accept that her loving father would have left her in that way.
“He would never have killed himself. He would never have left me like that,” she would tell her daughter-in-law many years later.
But the reality was, Sam Lowe had been found in his car with the motor running and the garage door firmly shut.
“We’d never had a lot of money,” Mickey says wistfully, “but now, with dad gone, there wasn’t even the hope of cash coming in to support us.”
Figure 8: The Lowe Family
Pearl was left to raise Ruth and Muriel on her own. If such a fate was demanding at the best of times, the Depression was the worst of times. Mind you, she had the benefit of being near her mother and sisters for support. But truth be told, there were days when Pearl wasn’t convinced she’d be able to keep a roof over their heads.
The poor woman struggled, working as a seamstress at Tip Top Tailors. But she couldn’t take the stress, not being fast enough at sewing. She had to quit. The three females were forced to move around, renting rooms in other people’s houses.
“These places were so hot in the summertime,” Mickey remembers. “Air conditioning wasn’t yet a common reality. So, on some nights when it got really steamy, we’d just haul out and sleep on the back porch to get some cool night air.”
Figure 9: Mickey, Pearl, Ruth
But, in such a sad and uncomfortable situation, at least Sam Lowe’s innate musical talent had been passed along to his oldest daughter.
And it would soon pay off beyond her wildest dreams.
Meanwhile, Frank Sinatra’s genesis in Hoboken, New Jersey, coming a mere year and a bit after Ruth’s, almost didn’t happen. He nearly perished at childbirth, surviving the ordeal being considered a miracle in itself.
December 12, 1915 sees the emergence of a baby boy weighing in at 13.5 pounds. The doctor struggles to remove such a large infant from its 19-year-old mother. He uses forceps to make it easier, thereby ripping the baby’s cheek, neck, and ear, in the process puncturing the eardrum and causing severe scarring to his left cheek, neck, and ear that ran from the corner of his mouth to his jawline.
Panic sets in. The child’s not breathing. The mother is in poor condition. Assuming the baby won’t survive, the doc focuses on mom. But amidst the cacophony of yelling in Italian in the Monroe Street flat, Rosa, the child’s grandmother, grabs the baby and holds it under the cold water tap until he suddenly starts wailing out his first song of anguish. This is how Frank Sinatra endured childbirth, entering the land of the living, to the point where he would comment later, “They weren’t thinking about me, they were just thinking about my mother. They just kind of ripped me out and tossed me aside.” It was a seminal moment that would affect his somewhat distant personality forever.
For its part, Frank Sinatra’s birthplace is very different from Ruth Lowe’s. Hoboken is a city on the Hudson River with a population of about 50,000 souls today. It’s part of the New York metropolitan area and the site of Hoboken Terminal, a major transportation hub for the tri-state region.
First settled in the 17th century, and apart from its celebrity as Sinatra’s birthplace, the city boasts renown as the location of the first ever recorded game of baseball, occurring in 1846 between the Knickerbocker Club and the New York Nine, at Elysian Fields. Not only that, but the first centrally air-conditioned public space in the United States was demonstrated at Hoboken Terminal. Today, the metropolis is home to the Stevens Institute of Technology (one of the oldest technological universities in the U.S.) and has the highest public transportation use of any city in the United States, with 56% of working residents using public transportation for commuting purposes each day. Hoboken, New Jersey, has also been home to several filming locations (including a wedding scene from Jennifer Aniston’s film “Picture Perfect” and Elia Kazan‘s 1954 classic “On the Waterfront”).
While Hoboken, today, is recognized for upscale shops and condominiums, it was not always thus. By the 1960s, the city had begun to deteriorate, sinking from its earlier incarnation as a lively port town into a rundown state of affairs. Turn-of-the century housing appeared shabby. Real-estate values declined. With shipbuilding cheaper overseas, industry started to fade, and single-story plants surrounded by parking lots made manufacturing and distribution more economical than old brick buildings on congested urban streets. Hobokenites began heading to the suburbs. The city was clearly in decline.
But, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hoboken witnessed a speculation spree, fuelled by transplanted New Yorkers and others who bought many turn-of-the-20th-century brownstones in neighborhoods that the still solid middle- and working-class population had kept intact, as well as by local and out-of-town real-estate investors who bought up 19th century apartment houses, often considered to be tenements. Hoboken began attracting artists, musicians, and upwardly mobile commuters who valued the aesthetics of residential, civic, and commercial architecture, its sense of community, and relatively cheaper rents (compared to Lower Manhattan). The Hoboken Parks Initiative municipal plan was established to create more public open spaces. The Hudson Shakespeare Company was formed and began performing “Shakespeare Mondays” at Frank Sinatra Park. Empty lots were built on. Tenements became fancy condominiums.
Overnight, it seemed, Hoboken had become a “hip” place to live. Once a blue-collar town, characterized by live poultry shops and drab taverns, the city had transformed itself into a small metropolis filled with gourmet shops and luxury dwellings. By 2016, Hoboken was ranked as the 2nd best city in New Jersey for entrepreneurs.
So, there we have it: the daughter of a poor Jewish butcher in Toronto and the son of poor Italian immigrants in Hoboken, separated by just 16 months and a mere 340 miles as the crow flies.
The similarities and differences between the two are intriguing.
Consider that Saverio Antonino Martino Sinatra, Frank’s father, is almost illiterate and bounces from job to job as a fireman, boxer, and bartender. Meanwhile, Ruth’s dad, Sam Lowe, tries his hand at several businesses but never quite connects with success.
The mothers are vastly dissimilar. Ruth and her sister Muriel had always regarded their mom, Pearl, as “worn down by life”; quiet, unassuming, putting up with whatever was sent her way. Yet, you would never describe Natalina Maria Vitoria Garaventa that way: “Dolly” Sinatra is a pistol: loud, foul-mouthed, smart, and very ambitious.
Figure 10: Ruth, Pearl, Mickey
Ruthie herself is innocent, trying desperately to put money on the family table by holding down a series of jobs.
But Frankie: he’s a scoundrel, being arrested in his twenties and charged with carrying on with a married woman. The young man is self-absorbed, with an air of entitlement, interested only in himself and his desire to sing.
Ruth is Jewish, but not overly.
Frank’s Catholic, but not overly.
Both get married in unions that don’t end well: Ruth’s terminating with her husband Harold’s untimely death. Frank’s concluding when he and Nancy divorce.
Ruth dies at 67 on January 4, 1981.
Frank defies the odds and makes it to 82, expiring on May 14, 1998. His pal Kirk Douglas offers, “Boy, heaven will never be the same!”
And consider this: even in death, the amazing unification of life forces that has existed so long between Ruth Lowe and Frank Sinatra takes a final karmic turn.
The last tune played at Ruth’s funeral? “Put Your Dreams Away”, the very song she had wrestled with, creating the immortal ditty overnight for her friend Frankie’s radio show.
And the last tune played at Sinatra’s funeral? “Put Your Dreams Away”.
There you have it. If you believe there are forces out there just causing things to be, then this is your chance to celebrate.
“I chose that song specifically for the conclusion of Mom’s funeral,” says Tom Sandler. “It just seemed so right, so fitting, so, so perfect.”
And as for the Sinatra memorial, Charles Pignone, senior vice-president of Frank Sinatra Enterprises, recalls,
Everybody was just sitting there and then this voice comes up. You heard the strains of the arrangement, and you’d look around and see Nancy Reagan, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen. It was a who’s who of Hollywood and New York. There was an audible gasp and then there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.10
A surreal moment in time: the amazing merger of lives and talent had finally expired, in a way so fitting, so unforgettable.