Akron’s location on the Erie-Ohio canal and its railroad connections had already made it an important commercial center at the time Benjamin Franklin Goodrich visited in 1869. He had planned to move his rubber factory from New York to Chicago, but the enthusiastic reception he received from local businessmen, and the development funds they offered, made him decide to locate in Akron instead.1 B. F. Goodrich was followed by Goodyear, Firestone, and other rubber companies, whose growth paralleled the rising automobile industry. Between 1910 and 1920, Akron, touted as the “Rubber Capital of the World,” was the fastest growing city in the country. By November 1922, when Stan Ovshinsky was born, fully a third of its population were recent arrivals, mostly from Appalachia and Eastern Europe.2 Among the latter group were Stan’s parents, Ben Ovshinsky and Bertha Munitz, who each worked for a time in the rubber factories.
Ben Ovshinsky
Ben came to America at age fourteen from the shtetl of Calgory (Kalvarija), on the East Prussian border of Lithuania. At that time, Calgory was part of the Russian Empire, where in the later nineteenth century the czar had granted Jews the opportunity to serve in the army. Such service was not always voluntary. At about age ten, Ben’s father, who was already carrying goods and people in his horse-drawn wagon, was impressed into the Russian cavalry, joining the ranks of the Nicolaischen Soldaten. After his thirty years of service, he was given a pair of boots, a sword, and a plot of land; he then raised horses and used horse-drawn wagons for deliveries. As Stan said, “Horses were in our family.”
The youngest of six or seven children, Ben was born in 1892 when his father was sixty-two. As a child he was put to work driving a wagon transporting Russian and German officers across the border. Under the wagon seat, the boy also carried contraband literature for the Jewish Labor Bund (part of the democratic socialist movement). A few years later, his political involvement brought him to St. Petersburg at the start of the 1905 revolution. Indeed, he seems to have been in Palace Square in front of the Winter Palace in January on the fateful “Bloody Sunday,” when czarist troops attacked peaceful demonstrators. Before he could escape, the charging cavalry rode him down: a horse stepped on his head, knocking him unconscious and leaving a permanent dent in his skull. In later years, Ben would comb his hair down over the hoof print. “And as a kid I used to try to push it up to look at it,” Stan recalled.
Figure 1.1 Ben Ovshinsky’s family. Ben, about ten, stands behind his father and mother. On the left is Ben’s oldest brother “Alter.” The woman on the right may be Ben’s older sister. The young girls, Sarah (front) and Rachel, are the daughters of Stan’s aunt, Bashe Garlovsky (not in photo). Thanks to Herb Ovshinsky for identifications.
About a year later, on hearing rumors that the authorities were planning to send Ben to Siberia, the family quickly gathered money to help him escape. After being smuggled into Germany, he found his way to America, entering the country in 1906 without any money in his pocket. He never saw his parents again and later received news that his mother had died of cold and starvation.
After landing in New York, Ben stayed for a time in Bayonne, New Jersey, with an older brother. He worked in the needle trade, the mainstay of many Jewish immigrants, but “couldn’t stand it,” according to Stan’s brother Herb.3 Learning about the union activity in Chicago, the politically motivated youth joined his twenty-years-older sister and her family there. Her husband, Stan’s uncle Lou, was a large, heavy-set man “with the appearance of a tough guy,” Stan recalled. He had worked in the Mesabi Range iron mines, and “his children all became plumbers.” In Chicago, Ben initially found work in a horsehair factory but soon grew restless working indoors.4 He was very strong and preferred more physical work outdoors, eventually finding a job he loved as a Chicago teamster driving four large horses.
While teamstering, Ben started organizing for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies (or the One Big Union). Ben would later tell his children memorable stories about how the Wobblies would chain themselves to a lamppost while giving their talks, or how he and his friend Bill Haywood, a leading radical labor leader, would get together and eat Mulligan stew. “Big Bill” advocated uniting workers in large, industrial unions rather than the separate craft unions of the AFL and wanted to give workers control of the means of production. However much Ben may have been attracted by such ideas, he didn’t stay long with the Wobblies because, according to Stan, he was annoyed by the way many of them would just “sit around the office talking” instead of organizing.
Ben next moved to Duluth, Minnesota, where he found work erecting telegraph poles along the railroad, and where for recreation he helped show wild mustangs for auctions. Stan remembered Ben telling how much he disliked the way the cowboys broke the horses: “he thought it was way too rough.” Ben’s gentler approach was far more effective and earned Ben the reputation of being “a fellow who spoke to horses.” Stan remembered how people in Akron would bring their “horses that had problems” to see Ben.
Ben’s railroad work eventually took him to the Pacific Northwest and California. He would sometimes jump trains and ride the rails like a hobo. (He often mentioned that he had met Jack London in a California hobo camp.) If stopped by a cop, he would use a pass he had obtained from one of his buddies whose father worked for the railroad.
Figure 1.2 Drawing of Ben Ovshinsky made during the Depression by an itinerant artist.
After a decade of wandering, Ben settled in Akron, which offered not only jobs but also a sizeable community of Jewish workers. He worked in the rubber factories for a time, then purchased a horse and wagon and set up a one-man business in which he could work outdoors, gathering scrap metal from machine shops and foundries and selling it to dealers. Because Ben was effective at networking with the local industries, his business prospered, and he survived the Depression. Harvey Leff, a childhood acquaintance of Stan’s, reported that, “most machine shops in Akron exclusively did business with Ben because of his reputation as a man of integrity and reliability.”5
As for Ben’s horses, he would buy ones that no one else wanted but that he saw were smart and easy to work with. Stan remembered a particular blind white horse who knew his way home when Ben let the reins go. Ben continued to work alone with a horse and wagon until 1934, when he replaced them with a truck, but he never fully made the transition from driving a horse. When he wanted to stop the truck he’d say “whoa.”
Bertha Munitz
The daughter of a farmer in White Russia (now Belarus), Stan’s mother Bertha Munitz came to America in 1914 at age sixteen. In the 1890s, her widowed father had married her mother, Rebecca Daitch, “the town beauty” in the shtetl of Dauschitz (Dokshytsy), about 65 miles north of Minsk, where the family lived on their farm. When the Russians evicted all Jewish farmers, she and her parents and two younger sisters left on one of the last boats to sail before the outbreak of World War I.
Arriving in New York, the family spent some time in Brooklyn, where an older brother from her father’s first marriage lived. Unfortunately, Bertha’s father was totally disoriented and couldn’t find work, so Bertha helped support the family by working on a punch press in a primitive machine shop.
They eventually settled in Akron, where one of Bertha’s sisters from her father’s first marriage lived. Soon Akron became the destination for many more relatives from Dauschitz—Munitzes, Mermans, and Kobatzniks. Growing up, the Ovshinsky children had hundreds of relatives in Akron on their mother’s side. But the support of relatives was not enough to ease the transition for Bertha’s parents. Two years after coming to America and still in his fifties, Bertha’s father died of pneumonia. Unable to adjust to life in America, he had, according to family lore, “spent most of his time sitting in shul with a book.” Nor did Bertha’s mother Rebecca, then about forty, ever assimilate. Out of her element from the very first day, she always demanded special treatment. Her grandchildren resented the way she would order them around and “carried herself like the Empress of Russia,” as Stan and Herb recalled.
As the oldest child, Bertha had to work, while her younger sisters were sent to grade school. She later learned to read and write English through the Workmen’s Circle, where she joined a women’s book club. Although she resented being denied the opportunity to attend school, Bertha liked working, which gave her a sense of dignity. One of the places where she worked was the old Goodrich Miller Plant 2, where years later her son Stan would work as a toolmaker (see chapter 2).
Ben and Bertha Ovshinsky
Ben Ovshinsky needed a room when he came to Akron in the winter of 1917–18. One of his friends, a kosher butcher who was Bertha’s half-brother, put him in touch with the Munitz-Merman-Kobatznik clan, which took Ben in. On meeting, Ben and Bertha were immediately taken with each other. Ben hesitated for a while to give up his bachelor freedom, but before long they married on May 2, 1918. He was twenty-six and she was twenty.
Figure 1.3 Ben and Bertha Ovshinsky, c. 1918.
The young couple lived at first in a small apartment in Warner Court, the poorest section of Akron. Bertha, who often used her Yiddish name, Teibel (dove) developed a reputation for being “a very kind and hospitable person who often invited neighbors and friends to stop by for conversation and food.”6 Always charitable, she took care of anyone who needed help. Bertha was religious; she kept a kosher household, attended holiday services, lit candles on the Sabbath, and wished she could go to temple more often than she did.
Ben was not religious like his wife, but he too was generous, agreeing to Bertha’s condition that her mother live with them and later to taking in other members of her family during the Depression.7 Ben’s sympathies were broader, though, as expressed in his social and political efforts to make the world better for others, while Bertha resented Ben’s political activities for taking time away from their immediate family. Recognizing the substantial differences between his parents’ values, Stan once asked Ben, “How could you marry her?” “Well, she was very pretty,” Ben replied. Stan concluded, “It was a case where enough physical attraction sort of conquered all.”8
The Birth of Mashie, Stan, and Herb
On March 5, 1919, about ten months after Ben and Bertha were married, their first child, a girl they named Myrtle, was born. Her nickname was Mashie, but to her friends she was Sandra.9 Like Bertha, she was religious, but she did not accept strict Jewish orthodoxy and became a reformed Jew who subscribed to Socialist Zionism.
Stanford Robert Ovshinsky, Ben and Bertha’s second child, came into the world on November 24, 1922. He was delivered in the upstairs part of the Wooster Avenue office of a German doctor, who, Stan said, “took care of all these immigrants.” The doctor nicknamed the boy “Schnuckelfritz” (cuddly boy), and “he was Schnucky to the whole family,” Stan’s brother Herb recalled.
Figure 1.4 Ovshinsky family. Back, left to right: Rebecca Daitch Munitz, Herb (about a year old), Bertha, Ben. Front: Mashie, Stan (not yet seven).
By the time Herbert Ovshinsky, Bertha’s and Ben’s third and last child, arrived on July 7, 1928, almost six years after Stan, the family had moved from Warner Court to Moon Street, where most in the neighborhood were Jews. Stan proudly took on the role of protective older brother, and bragged that as Herb grew up and attended school, the bullies would say, “Leave him alone. He’s Shinsky’s brother.” (For his part, while acknowledging the deep kinship he shared with Stan, Herb could not remember ever needing his brother’s protection from bullies.)
Figure 1.5 Herb and Stan (at about ages six and twelve).
The extended family clan was large, warm, and diverse and included many half-brothers and half-sisters because women often died in childbirth. They ate their big weekend meal on Friday night, and on Sundays typically had more visitors. As Ben’s business prospered, even during the Depression, the Ovshinsky home, with the only telephone on the street, became the gathering place for the family.10
Weekend shopping on Wooster Avenue, the bustling commercial street not far from the Ovshinsky home, was memorable family time for the children. Most stores were closed for the Sabbath on Saturdays, so Jewish families usually shopped on Sundays, or on Saturday nights after dark. The Ovshinskys did most of their shopping in a string of small shops, including a kosher butcher, a Hungarian delicatessen, a Jewish bakery, a chicken store, a hardware store, a drug store, a barber shop, a hat shop, and an all-purpose grocery store whose cans and boxes on high shelves were pulled down with the help of a retractable fork on a long pole. The smelly delicacies of the nearby fish market could be sensed a block away. Herb fondly recalled shopping on Wooster with his dad, going from one end to the other in his truck and stopping off at Roseman’s delicatessen bar on the corner for grilled hotdog sandwiches. Some of the shop owners were family. Uncle Morris, the kosher butcher, had years earlier introduced Ben to the family, and Uncle Abe, a baker who “was my mother’s older sister’s husband, made the best jelly rolls in the world.”
While many of Herb’s childhood memories of time spent with Ben dwelt on food, Stan’s were largely about work. Sometimes, especially when Ben was sick, Stan helped with metal collecting. He treasured this shared time, despite the fact that it was “the hardest work I have ever seen.” Stan remembered getting up at 4 a.m. to clean the stable, which was half a block from home, and having coffee with his father afterward. “He of course had coffee,” Stan said. “He gave me milk with coffee.” At night, when Ben came home, Stan would run out in the street to meet him; Ben would let him drive the horses home and help feed them. It was while going with Ben on his scrap collecting rounds that young Stan “fell in love with factories, machine shops, foundries.”
Ben was also an important influence on Stan’s social values. Both Stan and Herb remembered their father as a knowledgeable, self-taught socialist and intellectual who was always aware of events elsewhere in the world. He didn’t read English well, but he read widely in the other languages he knew—Yiddish, German, Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian—despite having poor eyesight. He could speak intelligently on many subjects, and wrote columns for Yiddish newspapers. As he had in Lithuania and Russia, Ben continued to be politically and socially active in Akron, both in the labor movement and in the Jewish segment of the Socialist Party. Drawing on his experience with the Bund, he helped to form the Akron branch of the Workmen’s Circle, where Ben’s children and grandchildren received much of their early education. Ben was also involved in starting a union that helped Akron peddlers resist mistreatment by the police and others.11
The aim of the Workmen’s Circle—to create “a better and more beautiful world”—was a goal Stan and Ben shared, and they would talk at length about how to achieve it. Stan considered Ben “my best friend,” and Stan was a best friend for Ben as well. Each found in the other the approval they could not get from Bertha. “He was just as much of an outlaw in the family as I was,” Stan reflected. Ben also set an example of tolerance; his progressive politics didn’t make him hostile to those with very different views. He even befriended some men in the plants who were in the Ku Klux Klan, recognizing that though some were dangerous, others had simply been misled. “He was a very physical sort of a guy too,” Stan explained, “not easily intimidated.”
Ben also loved the theater and music, sometimes acting in plays put on by the Akron Workmen’s Circle, practicing his lines at home with Bertha. In his earlier Chicago period, Ben had performed in the Yiddish Theater alongside the well-known actor Paul Muni (Frederich Weisenfreund).12 Ben had a good singing voice and loved to sing Jewish cantorial songs. Although he was an agnostic, he would sing in the choir of an Orthodox shul wherever he happened to be. When Ben sang in the Workmen’s Circle chorus, Stan liked to sing with him, “folk songs, songs of struggle, songs of the labor movement, in Yiddish.”13
These family and cultural experiences were strong influences, but for young Stan Ovshinsky, the most wondrous and influential place was the small public library on Wooster. He started to read at an early age, and would bring home books on many subjects—history, archeology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, politics, poetry, theater, cosmology, biology, and art. He loved reading plays by Clifford Odets or Chekhov as well as the novels of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and not only for their science fiction visions of the future. “I liked their politics,” he said. “When I was five or six years old,” Stan recalled, “I would read anything.”
For this insatiably curious boy, the librarians on Wooster Avenue made an exception to their rule that children could borrow only two books at a time from titles appropriate to their age group or grade in school. They allowed Stan to borrow all the books he wanted, on any subject and on any age level. In later years Stan could not remember how he had managed to gain this privilege, but he did recall that one day, when he was “tottering out with all these books,” one librarian remarked, “Stanford, what will happen to you? When you grow up you’ll have read all the books.”
In addition to reading all the books, Stan began reading the Sunday New York Times regularly, and he also profited from the Workmen’s Circle Yiddish school, whose teachers were well informed about current events. But “I learned nothing in grade school,” he said. “And they screwed me up in mathematics.” He blamed this on the school’s adoption of the progressive Winnetka plan, but it seems more likely that his difficulties in math came from the ways his mind worked differently from others’.14
Outside of school, Stan could follow his own interests, including science. “I always wanted a microscope set and a chemistry set.” Once there was enough money, “I got both when I was maybe eleven or twelve. I also wanted to get a book by H. G. Wells, The Outline of Science, that was advertised in the newspaper. But by the time I talked my parents into giving me the money they were out of it, so I bought The Outline of History instead.”
Stan’s scientific curiosity early in life had led to some ill-judged experiments. At the age of three or four, expecting that the air would hold him up, he jumped from the family’s second story porch with an open umbrella and nearly killed himself. (After that, Ben put a wire fence on top of the porch.) Stan also studied all the appliances in his home, taking most of them apart. Watching one of his aunts do laundry in the cellar at the age of four or five, he became interested in the rollers of the wringer. When his aunt stepped away for a moment, he almost lost an arm trying to see how the wringer worked. A bit later, he nearly electrocuted himself by poking his finger in a light socket. Bertha didn’t know what to make of Stan’s fascination with machines. Once, when he was playing with her sewing machine, eager to solve the mystery of how it worked, she asked him whether he wanted to sew. “No, no,” he replied.
Like many scientifically inclined boys of that period, Stan read popular magazines about science and invention, sending away for kits to make various gadgets. Among those magazines were some edited by the well-known science fiction writer Hugo Gernsback, who had come to the United States about the same time as Ben. His magazines like Popular Invention helped many other budding inventors of the period form their identity.15
Growing up in the Depression was an education of its own. Stan was almost seven when the stock market crashed in October 1929. Akron was particularly hard hit, and Stan was shocked when he saw evictions. Though his own family was not economically affected, seeing so much misery around him fed his desire to make life better for others and helped bring him into politics at an early age.
Stan became deeply committed to democratic socialism and strongly opposed to Communism and Stalinism. Adults took the boy seriously when he expressed his views. He recalled that when he was about eight, “I went to a barber at the end of my street, Moon Street, who was a member of the Socialist Labor Party, and so I’d end up arguing politics with this guy while he was cutting my hair. But nobody thought it was unusual that I was a kid taking on this grown man.” Stan was also invited to give political talks at the Workmen’s Circle and elsewhere when he was nine or ten. The Russian immigrants didn’t think twice about this. “Back in Russia many of them had started their political and their cultural activities at a very early age.” He was active in the Young People’s Socialist League, but for Stan, the point of socialism was practical, “to make a better life for working people, with education and so on. The people who believed that were called sewer socialists and so I became known as a sewer socialist.”16
Stan especially liked attending the Friday night meetings of the Workmen’s Circle, to which speakers were brought in from New York and elsewhere, many having left Europe to escape the Nazis or the Communists. These meetings were typical expressions of the secular, radical culture of Eastern Europe that Stan called Bund culture, and he looked back at it with fondness and regret. “We had a very rich life that won’t be duplicated again. Yiddish culture is almost dead. It was tremendously cooperative.” Its members “stuck together, helped each other. They were all bright and intelligent, even though they were carpenters, toolmakers, painters, rubber workers, shopkeepers, shoemakers, tailors.”
Stan’s intense early interest in politics did not rob him of a normal childhood. In many ways Stan was just a regular kid. He played with friends on the streets year-round and had many girlfriends. Through his relatives in Chicago, Stan got interested in boxing and would sometimes go to the park near their house and use the rings to box “just for the joy and the hell of it.” By the time he was in high school, he recognized the dangers and decided to stop.
One of Stan’s friends in this period was Branko J. Widick, who was always called BJ. Though he was twelve years older, Widick was attracted to Stan: “He was totally different than anybody I knew. He obviously had a brilliant brain.” They met at the Akron Workmen’s Circle. Widick was not Jewish, but he felt that the Workmen’s Circle was “the only place that had any culture in Akron. If you wanted to hear a good lecture, you’d go there.”17 Widick remembered being stunned when at the age of twelve Stan challenged the famous Marxist theorist Max Shachtman while he was lecturing at the Workmen’s Circle on the 1905 revolution. “Who is that brilliant young bastard?” Shachtman asked Widick. An orthodox Marxist in that period, Widick recalled that while he and Stan were both in the Socialist Party, they had considerable political differences, for Widick was a Trotskyite, and Stan was not. Their disagreements intensified to the point where they stopped seeing each other, but the break in their friendship proved temporary (see chapter 4).
Stan’s political work also put severe strains on his relationship with Bertha, who could not understand why her son preferred to spend his time in meetings rather than play with friends. She would say no when Stan asked to attend a political meeting, but if Stan was determined to go he would visit a friend and slip out from there to the meeting. At one point, perhaps recalling the Red Scare of 1919–20 and fearing that Stan might be targeted, Bertha tried to protect him. Stan came home one day to find that his mother had burned all of his books.
Stan did not share Bertha’s religious values, which caused further strain between mother and son.18 When Stan reached the bar mitzvah age of thirteen, marking a Jewish boy’s transition to manhood, he aligned with Ben (as Herb did later), who saw the ceremony as just a ritual in which children received presents like fountain pens. Stan’s refusal to have a bar mitzvah was extremely upsetting to Bertha and her family, who could not understand his reasons and wanted him to see a psychologist. He refused to do that too. Still, both boys were sent to a Yiddish afternoon school for many years, typically four days a week plus Sunday, and both developed a love of Yiddish language and culture. It was, in fact, through Yiddish that Stan found he could write for others, producing articles for a Yiddish Sunday paper published by the Workmen’s Circle for young people when he was eight or nine.
Well before this, Stan had also discovered that he could draw very well. To amuse himself he would spend time drawing on any sheet of available paper, but his mother did not approve of this means of expression. One of his kindergarten drawings was included in an art show in a downtown department store, but Bertha never told him. Stan continued drawing for the rest of his life, producing a huge collection of quick caricatures as well as a few paintings (see the interlude.)
Early High School Years
Stan found new interests and new frustrations at John R. Buchtel High School, which he entered in the fall of 1937. Still interested in many subjects, including writing, astronomy and other sciences, anthropology, and art, he continued to read passionately and extensively. As a result, he paid less than full attention to his teachers, whose knowledge often lagged behind his. Stan remembered one occasion when a high school English teacher asked the class to write a book review. Stan liked this particular teacher, from whom he had heard poems by Blake for the first time. But when he turned in a review of a book by André Gide he received an F. The teacher told Stan he failed him because he had made up both the name of the book and the author. “There’s no such person named Gide,” he said. From then on, whenever Stan realized that he knew more than his teacher, “I just didn’t argue about it.”19
In Yiddish school, on the other hand, some teachers appreciated Stan’s extensive knowledge. One allowed him to teach the literature class occasionally, and he was invited to give a class on current events and the history of the labor movement. The librarian recognized Stan’s contributions by letting him choose two books to keep. He selected Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and The Machinist’s Handbook.
More important than anything Stan learned or did in school was his dawning sense of vocation. By the time he reached high school, he had already been going along with Ben on his rounds for some years, experiencing the machine shops and foundries and at times helping with the hard work of using a pitchfork and shovel to load his truck with heavy steel scrap. He also enjoyed “looking at the machines, watching what they did, learning about things, talking to people in the various factories, shops, foundries.” This was when Stan “really fell in love with machines” and “learned to love industry.” “To me,” he said, “manufacturing has always had glamour to it. The glamour was being in the foundry, the flames, the sand, the noise, the machine shop, the smell of the oil and the chips coming off.” That growing romance offered Stan a ready answer when Ben asked him one day, “‘Simcha,’ which was my Yiddish name and means joy and pleasure, ‘what kind of trade are you going to learn?’”20 Without thinking, Stan said, “I think I’ll be a machinist and toolmaker. I just like that kind of thing.”
