while abbie and i were growing up, the ragtag splendor of Worcester lay before us with a beauty all its own. It was a small but thriving city of industry, proud of the billows of smoke pouring out of the smokestacks of Wyman & Gordon, which made airplane forgings, the Norton Grinding Company, which made grinding wheels, the giant American Steel and Wire Company, the Knowles Loom Works, and the United States Envelope Company—huge manufacturers supplying a world market at their height in the ’40s and ’50s.
Built on seven hills like ancient Rome, the city had a spread-out quality that is unusual for the Northeast. You felt that it was still a question of land in Worcester, and not of the vertical space of other cities. Civic and commercial buildings were larger than houses, but not by much. The gorgeous train station looked to us like a cathedral that made Worcester the center of the world.
Today all but one of the great factories are closed, and the train station is boarded up. And if you ask a Worcester native where he’s from, he’ll usually say Boston. That’s how much things have changed.
As kids, our pride in America was painted in the bright colors of a local history we only half understood. Yet we realized what it meant for certain events, some hundreds of years past, still to be important. Concord Bridge, where the first shots of the American Revolution had been fired, was only a half-hour’s drive away. The Patriot publisher of The Massachusetts Spy, Isaiah Thomas, had come to Worcester to escape Tories in Boston and continued printing his paper here. In the 1850s, the first International Peace Society was founded in Worcester. At the turn of the century, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman ran an ice cream parlor here right before Berkman took the train to Pittsburgh, where he attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick. In 1909, Sigmund Freud gave his only lecture in America at Clark University in Worcester. In the 1920s, Robert Goddard tested rockets and developed rocket technology here that the Germans used later for their V2s. In 1926, Margaret Sanger gave what may have been the first speech on birth control, also at Clark. And Judge Webster Thayer, who presided over the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, lived here on Salisbury Street, where his home was bombed by anarchists. M-14 and M-16 rifles used to come from the Huntington-Richardson munitions factory a few blocks from where we grew up. The birth control pill was invented here too. In his speeches, sometimes, Abbie used to say, “The two greatest things to come out of Worcester were the pill and me, and some folks here wish the pill came first.”
The city’s most distinctive architectural feature is the Worcester threedecker house. The large, hard-cornered boxlike structures aren’t exactly pretty. But they are homey in the best sense—built from the inside out with a real sense of the needs of families. They are homes that meet the sky low to the ground and embody one of the fairest low-income housing deals ever agreed to. Originally designed to keep workers close to the factories, they are the most decent way I know to fit three families into one house. They are large, spacious, and practical, a middle-class solution that might have worked well in other cities.
Nowhere in Worcester does it feel like you are in a bedroom community of Boston, although the state capital is only forty miles east on the Massachusetts Turnpike. To Boston, Worcester is an unwanted relative, unmannered and arrogant. And many of Worcester’s best and brightest children agree. They leave at the first chance and don’t look back. Even with wave after wave of new immigrants arriving, the Worcester population has dropped by almost half since postwar days—to around what it was in the 1930s.
The people who stay have a good toughness about them. Among them are some of the people who seem to miss Abbie most. In the minds of many of his Worcester friends, Abbie was a sign of hope. Out of the anonymity of Worcester, he went on to be famous. Is it their own anonymity, I sometimes wonder, that frightens them the most, and was that what Abbie released them from? Not only was he from Worcester, he was proud of it. Since his death, sometimes, I see a searching look in their eyes. They do not compare me to him. But it is as if, being Abbie’s brother, I am what is left of him. And perhaps something more. I am a part of him that has survived. In the end, I’m still Abbie’s manager here. Seeing me helps them remember him. Binding contract.
Growing up in Worcester, Abbie and I had to sort out the Judeo-Christian world into its component parts. At the predominantly Irish-Catholic public grammar schools we attended, they wanted us to act like good Christians. The teachers were often spinsters who cracked our knuckles with wooden rulers, and who sometimes had our entire class practice silence for periods as long as an hour. At Christmastime, we silently mouthed the words to “little Lord Jesus, asleep in the hay,” which our classmates sang with all their hearts.
As we passed the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on the bus home from Saturday-afternoon movies, we took off our caps and crossed ourselves just like the other kids, without irony, but also without any understanding of what the gesture meant, or why we were doing it. Phyllis remembers one of the boys from the neighborhood accusing her of having killed God, sending her home sobbing to Ma. And I’ll never forget the day Billy Mitchell, my best friend until I was ten, punched me in the nose for killing Jesus. After being punched once, you might say you were only half-Jewish.
Starting in grammar school, we went to yeshiva after regular school, four days a week and Saturday. The rigor of it could be tough on an eight- or nine-year-old. When your gentile friends were out on the street playing, you were studying the Talmud with ten or so other Jewish boys under the comfortless fluorescent lights of the shul parlor.
Rabbi Fogelman, short, stocky, bearded, humorless, and arrogant, was a disciplinarian. The way he bore down on us between the rows of desks, we thought he hated us. And I can’t remember anything I learned from him. The experience of Fogelman’s yeshiva was followed by Mr. Plich’s Conservative shul, which struck me as no less authoritarian. Then came the more progressive Reform temple, where the services were shorter and the songs were livelier. “Ein Keiloheinu”—the Jewish equivalent of the Baptist “Free at Last”—suddenly had a beat. The teachers were more open at Reform temple as well. We actually had classroom discussions, my first experience of a class, religious or otherwise, as the site of an open exchange of ideas. And most important, at the Reform temple boys and girls were mixed in together.
We learned how to dance, and, when left to our own devices, how to kiss and play spin the bottle. We also learned that Judaism was not just a religion but also a way of life, one that embraced open thinking.
Cantor Adler, who prepared boys for their bar mitzvahs, let us ask questions. Then he would get us used to looking for our own answers to our questions. And once we’d spoken, however timidly, he would throw his hands up in the air and say, “Well! Whatever you think!”
Then there was Mrs. Williams’s class, where we talked about the history of the Jews. The recently concluded Second World War was discussed, and the Holocaust, although we didn’t call it that. The term we used was “the camps.” History, and by that I mean the horror of history, was something we never talked about anywhere else, not at school, at home or with the boys. That class was meant to teach us more than what had happened: It was designed to impress on us that somehow we were connected to what had happened. And we were meant to understand that, because of what had happened, we, as Jews, were different from other people. We carried in us a more weighty burden of responsibility. You could say history was taught to us as the underpinning of our guilt. History, the way Mrs. Williams taught it, made us believe we had a place reserved for us in eternity. Whatever the horrors, there was, as a counterbalance, a thin thread of underlying optimism, reminding us that since we as a people had survived, the downturns of history were in some sense transitory, a part of a larger picture. That, more or less, was the philosophy.
As young as we were, we came to experience at temple release from a certain weight of guilt or despair that was thick in the air but never actually articulated at home. At temple you could talk about the bottomless things, the things you carried with you which made you brood and for which you thought there were no words.
In 1936 and 1939, when Abbie and I were born, worldwide anti-Semitism made our parents and the Jewish American community around them timid and fearful. Hitler was representative, not exceptional, in many of his opinions. Before, during, and even directly after the Second World War, Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews was not one of the things about him that rankled other world leaders. At no time during the war, for example, were any of the trains to any of the internment camps disrupted by Allied bombardment. As an anti-Semite, Hitler was a leader of government in step with his times.
There were daily discussions and arguments about war and peace in Europe whenever a newspaper found its way into the house. The shadow of anti-Semitism was omnipresent. And yet our early years were cloaked in safety. By comparison with the Jews of Europe and around the world, American Jews like our parents felt that they had received a special blessing by being American: Where others were perishing, they would have to bear the particular responsibility of having survived. And I believe that sense of safety, so excessive by comparison with the worldwide suffering of the Jews at that time, tended to drown out the timidity and the fear.
And there was another, even more powerful influence: By the time of the Second World War, the Jewish experience had already become the Jewish American experience, a complex, layered phenomenon. Already by the end of the war, the passion which Abbie and I embraced most proudly, aged ten and seven respectively, was patriotism. We used to arrive hours early for the parade on the Fourth of July or Veterans Day—then called Armistice Day. And not we alone, but as many as 100,000 or 150,000—in Worcester, a city of only a quarter of a million! The crowd lining the thoroughfare would be fifteen deep on either side, and not a dissenter among us. Not a breath of irony anywhere. Not a pacifist for miles.
Abbie and I would hold in our chests as the procession advanced before us: the broad-bellied civilian leadership of Worcester first, putting on a stately front. The drummers behind them began their flams, followed by the amphibious “ducks,” and then the lumbering brown tanks, preceded by a rumbling sound like gathering thunder that shook the buildings up and down the street. Then the smartly dressed troops, every soldier a hero in our eyes, and last the cops—Worcester’s finest in their elegant blue uniforms. There were no warmongering generals, only peace-loving ones. Men like Omar Bradley and George Marshall were admired for the Berlin Airlift and their plans for the reconstruction of Europe. They were thoughtful, reasonable fellows, leaders among men, American paragons.
Later, when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were accused of giving the secrets of the nuclear bomb to the Russians, they were accused not only of treason but, implicitly, of failure to assimilate. Their names were never mentioned in our house, not during the trial, or even later at the time of their execution in 1953. Today the thought that world peace might have depended on a balance of nuclear power between the two countries, the thought that the Rosenbergs might have been right, doesn’t seem so unthinkable. But at that time it was. We were Americans and Jews, in that order. Americans first.
Being American meant we were large in our hearts and we always won. It meant that what was good for us was also good for the world. It meant that even those we beat to a pulp would be better off afterwards, since they would then benefit from our superior democratic institutions. However large one’s imagination might be, the breadth and vastness of the land could match it. As children we took these notions in with every breath and heartbeat, and never doubted them. On every street in Worcester there were flags flying in front of most of the houses. Nothing made you so proud as seeing those flags waving. Jewish, Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek, Swedish, French, Armenian—you knew there were names people might call you to put you down, based on where you came from, dirty names, but you knew you were also American, and there was nothing wrong with that.1
The post war years were among the happiest of our lives. Between 1946 and 1950, America was having an irresistible love affair with itself and we felt a part of it. These were Abbie’s preteen years, when “freedom” meant the ability to explore Worcester, with me tagging along behind. Ma was happy. The world was about as young as it was going to get.
In the years after World War II, The March of Dimes was leading the fight to find a cure for polio. It wasn’t uncommon to know someone who had been stricken with the awful disease, or who had a family member who was. So a lot of children did what we did, which was to raise money for the March of Dimes. Abbie came up with the idea of doing a variety show modeled after the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, a popular radio program. We built a stage in our basement with wood and orange crates, solicited “acts” from the kids in the neighborhood, and rehearsed for weeks. On the afternoon of the performance, the few kids from the neighborhood who weren’t performing as well as some of the parents paid a dime each to catch the show. Abbie served as emcee, starting with a pitch about the battle against polio. I did my impersonation of Al Jolson. Phyllis danced.
Some of the things American didn’t mean yet: the utter destruction of the various Native American nations, heedlessly wiped out by violence, disease, and deceit; the violence which destroyed the great American workers’ movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the ignominy of slavery, which created much of the wealth of the nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and other incontrovertible facts. These other particularly American legacies would have been unimaginable to us. Literally unimaginable. They were not taught in the schools or discussed in the press. No one seemed to find anything disquieting in the myth that Columbus had “discovered a new world” already inhabited by more than a million Native Americans. Such was the velocity of the general rush to the center of American culture that people acted almost as if nothing else existed, not really. So that years later, when through music and television, cracks of light began to fall on us, their effect would be truly explosive and enduring.
The first presidential election I can remember was in 1948, when I was nine. In our family we liked Dewey, the Republican, over the incumbent Truman. A Dr. George Gallup polled voters up to two weeks prior to the election, then stopped. He felt that responsible people, the bulk of voters, would have made up their minds by then, and he posted a sweep for Dewey. Truman was reelected. Although the exploitation of the fickle electorate would have to wait another decade and a half, it was with the election of 1948 that the fickle electorate was born. From then on Gallup would know to poll up until the last minute.
Television imagery began to rivet us in the early ’50s—I remember Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee, who headed up the Senate Subcommittee on Crime. In my brain he will always be coupled with his archenemy Frank Costello, boss of the New York crime family. Their faces were spliced side by side on the nightly news like the two were prom king and queen. But the real influence to which we opened up our hearts and minds during the late ’40s and ’50s was the movies, which filled our Saturdays now, replacing yeshiva.
Walking down to June Street on Saturday mornings, Abbie and I would take the number 5 Speedway bus—which had superseded the nickel trolley—all the way to downtown Worcester. Getting off at City Hall, we would make our way over the Commons to the Capitol Theater for a comedy or an adventure. Then back across the Commons at noon for lunch at the Woolworth’s counter: a hot dog and Coke followed by their homemade waffle with three-flavored ice cream—all for twenty-five cents. After lunch, we would walk back over to the movies.
In those days each theater was associated with one of the major studios. You went to the Warner for an RKO thriller, to the Loews for an MGM musical, and to the Capitol for a Paramount adventure. If you wanted a Republic cowboy picture, you headed for the Plymouth. The Plymouth was special to us. Once a month, for an extra fifty cents, you could see a live show: the Great Blackstone, a magician, or Tex Ritter, who came onstage riding a huge, sixteen-hand horse surrounded by Indians on foot. Abbie and I were usually the only ones cheering the horseless Indians and booing Tex.
All the theaters were magnificent, with huge crystal chandeliers which dimmed. Then the trumpet call which heralded the Movietone newsreel, narrated by Ed Herlihy, whose voice was much better than the nasal tones of Walter Winchell on the radio at home.
We saw a lot of Western talking pictures, starring Randolph Scott, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, or Gary Cooper. In 1947, we saw Unconquered, in which a drenched Paulette Goddard—in her white satin blouse through which her nipples pressed gently—is swept away by the raging river and into Cooper’s arms. That night, I had my first nocturnal fantasy. I can still see her reaching for the tree limb, and then valiantly hanging on. She was the female star I can remember best from those early days. Much later, we learned that Paulette Goddard was Jewish and had married Erich Maria Remarque (after an earlier marriage to Charlie Chaplin, who would become one of our favorites later on), the author of one of my all-time favorite books, All Quiet on the Western Front. When she died in Switzerland a few years ago, a long way from her roots in Brooklyn, I wept for all she had meant to me.
In the late ’40s, Dad’s business started to flourish. You could always measure success in those days by the automobiles people drove. Dad wouldn’t get his first Cadillac for many years, but already in the late ’40s he’d go every year to the Ford dealership across the street from his office for a new station wagon for Worcester Medical deliveries. The dealership was secretly owned by a Jew, Eugene Ribakoff, since Ford wouldn’t allow Jews to own dealerships, with another guy named Malboeuf who acted as the front man. But Dad always made sure he dealt directly with Gene. He believed you always did business with your own kind. And it never would have occurred to him not to buy a Ford because of the company’s anti-Semitism.
Also in the late ’40s, Abbie’s horizons began expanding beyond the family and the temple. He was bored by the separatism, the self-ghettoization, of Jewish American life at home and at temple. By the time he reached his early teens, Abbie was “going down the line” to hang out on the corner of June and Chandler Streets with the shtarker goyim (gentile toughs). He learned to shoot craps and play in alleyways. He smoked cigarettes, rolled his Lucky Strikes into his T-shirt sleeve, and taught himself to play pool and bowl until he was good enough at both to earn money hustling at the rec hall in downtown Worcester. The living-room mantelpiece started to fill up with trophies Abbie had won in bowling, Ping-Pong, Duncan yo-yo tournaments and, later, tennis. Abbie loved the trophies. They were his earliest attempt to define himself, create himself. From the age of thirteen until he went off to college, the culture that he steeped himself in was street culture. He wanted to see himself in terms of an American experience, one that resembled the world he watched on the big screens downtown. And the craft he studied to perfection was the street hustle.
Not only was Abbie a pretty good gin rummy player, he knew how to deal from the bottom of the deck in poker. And he was a pretty good shoplifter. He carried a knife and wasn’t shy about using it. Abbie wanted his new friends to think of him as one of them, and made sure of it by acting differently from the other Jewish kids.
I missed Abbie’s companionship and resented the attention he got. When I felt lonely, I would hide away in the basement and sometimes no one would notice. They were too busy dealing with the vildah-chayah—the wild and crazy one. I remember squeezing myself under a long worktable with a lit candle and my eyes pressed shut, pretending I really had run away to a distant city. After what seemed like hours, I heard Ma and Dad asking where I was. But whatever I did, I wasn’t able to elicit the drama that Abbie seemed to evoke without even trying. I thought I was less loved, expendable. Somehow it seemed to me that the qualities I had weren’t as important as the qualities Abbie had. The bleakness I felt was indescribable. And at such moments I hated him.
But then, with an uncanny instinct, Abbie would seem to know just what I was feeling, and he’d turn on the charm, inviting me to a movie or a high school football game. All of a sudden you realized that you didn’t hate him after all, actually you loved him a lot. He had that ability to make you miss him. The terrible thing was that Abbie never seemed to depend on you in the same way as you depended on him, and that always gave him the advantage.
Summers were always the measure of our family joy and prosperity. In the late ’40s, we’d spend a few weeks each summer at the largely Jewish resort of Old Orchard Beach in Maine, closing up the house and piling trunk after trunk onto the train for the daylong journey in the heat. The heart of Old Orchard Beach was its huge, mile-long pier, cluttered with the tourist attractions of the day, sort of a New Englander’s Coney Island. Something for all ages. I loved the magical horses of the carousel and the freshly cut potatoes sizzling in the Frialators at the French fry stand, and the big bands—including the Count Basie Orchestra, Benny Goodman, and the Dorsey Brothers’ and Harry James’s bands—that played in the casino. I’ve never been able to find anywhere else a fullness in the air like the smells of the fresh fruit mixing in the salt air as we walked down the main street toward the pier. And, thrilling to us at the time, fireworks were legal then in the state of Maine. Abbie and I could, and did, blast off rockets from the beach.
One year when money was tight, Ma shipped Abbie and me off to people she knew who lived on a farm in the town of Hudson outside of Worcester. There my brother and I worked hard, rising at dawn, milking cows, gathering eggs from the hen coop, tilling the ground, and planting the late crop. I suppose Ma’s plan was to get a break for herself, get some fresh air into us, and teach us about work, all at the same time. That year I resented my role as my brother’s “companion,” as if I were little more than a sidelight to Abbie’s limelight, even in Ma’s eyes.
Starting in 1951, summers became really earthshaking for us. Cape Cod, the most desirable Massachusetts sun spot, wasn’t open to Jews. Whether they refused to serve you or were suddenly completely booked when you arrived, hotels and restaurants always made the point clearly. But that year we began vacationing in Onset, a town right on the Cape Cod Canal just north of Cape Cod. And it is because of Onset that, even now, the last days of June are filled for me with a powerful feeling of imminent happiness.
With Truman in the presidency, and Dad’s business showing a small profit, we began renting our own house for the whole summer season in Onset—just the four of us, Ma, Phyllis, Abbie and me, with Dad driving his new Buick down for weekends only, since he couldn’t leave the business for extended periods.
The water was warmer in Onset Bay than up in Maine, and calmer too, so we sometimes spent whole days on the beach. Abbie and I liked to take a bottle of catsup from the house, and go clamming for quahogs, splitting them open as we found them and eating them on the spot. We couldn’t bring them home because they weren’t kosher. Trayf, Ma would say. She swam a mile a day, from one end of the beach to the other, with Abbie and me running along the beach keeping pace with her. Or she would teach us to swim, the four of us splashing around together. Phyllis remembers Onset as where she first came to know, and like, how she looked in a swimsuit.
Abbie and I sometimes hired ourselves out on Johnny Lopez’s White Lady, starting at five a.m., with the lady shining from her polished brass fittings to her white prow and sails. Olive-skinned, short, with a Latin-lover’s mustache, Johnny always wore the same matching khaki shirt and pants, his personal uniform. Johnny’s claim to fame was a cousin or nephew who was a Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher. But Johnny was formidable in his own right, weather-beaten and as terse and sweet as a young hero out of Hemingway—the guy that loves the girl but whose manliness somehow can’t accommodate love.
Abbie and I baited and untangled the lines for Johnny’s tourists and helped them gaff their fish into the boat and off the hooks. When they disembarked, they would tip us, less if they hadn’t caught anything, more if they had. And we would repeat the apocryphal story Johnny had taught us about the German sub that had come up the canal and torpedoed the sunken boat at the end of the canal that we passed on every trip.
Once a week Abbie took me to the movies at Onset’s only movie theater. The one I remember best was Mighty Joe Young, and for one scene in particular. About halfway through the movie, after Joe, the great ape, has been taken from his island—where he was treated as a god—and brought back to New York in a steel-barred cage to suffer the humiliation of serving as a mighty prop in a night club act, the film approaches its emotional climax. We see Joe rise from beneath the stage, holding Terri Moore seated at a piano playing “Beautiful Dreamer.” I had already fallen in love with Terri Moore, but this is the scene in which you realize how much you love her because, of course, you see how she has made even Mighty Joe vulnerable and gentle—and Mighty Joe is the one with whom you identified. You loved Mighty Joe too, but only in the way you loved yourself, that is, with pity, not passion. Abbie and I were both crying our heads off. Afterward, Abbie tried to play the tough guy, saying, “It’s only a monkey.” I didn’t believe him for a second. When we heard later that Howard Hughes had shacked up with Moore and then gotten her to give up her acting career, we felt he had stolen her from us. So sincere was our resentment of Hughes that when he died decades later, we didn’t mourn him at all.
Onset had a penny arcade where the local Cape Verdians gathered, with a jukebox and a penny machine that pounded out cards of your favorite hero—Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy. Or Claudette Colbert and Paulette Goddard. You could shoot down a Japanese Zero or a German Messerschmitt. Or you could play a poker machine for five cents. It was here that we first heard Fats Domino.
And on Tuesday nights, I would pull out my trumpet and play “Oh My Papa” at amateur night at the bandshell in the park. Never anything else. I knew the song, made famous by Eddie Fisher, by heart, so I didn’t need music. Every week I played “Oh My Papa” and I never won. My sister Phyllis suggested I learn another tune. But I was adamant.
Friday evenings Dad would arrive, bringing fresh corn and the gladioli he always brought and which Ma hated. She would accept them graciously, then turn to us and say that they belonged in a funeral home. Saturday nights he might take us to wrestling matches at the Onset Casino. Or, if he’d heard of a restaurant on the Cape, we would pile into the Buick Roadmaster and make the drive across the Sagamore Bridge. Most of the time, the restaurant would let us eat, even though they recognized that we were a Jewish family. The rest of the time we’d double back to Tiny Tim’s Pizza in Buzzard’s Bay, just the other side of the Canal from where we started out, where it was a safe bet they’d let us eat. Once, in Hyannis, we walked into a nearly deserted restaurant to be told all the tables were reserved. When Dad said that seemed unlikely, the man blocking our way said simply, without anger or passion, but perhaps with a slight edge to his voice, “We don’t serve people of your persuasion,” like he was describing a law of nature or something: No hard feelings, that’s just the way it is.
The Onset Hotel, where Abbie and I played the pinball machines, was a run-down, small establishment without a pool, without a golf course, without horses. But it was only a block away from the ocean. It had a great patio and on this great patio it had a great shuffleboard. On the screened-in porch sat the local big shots—the alter kockers, or A.K.s, as we called them—with their fat cigars. They lorded over the view of the still, empty, and quiet green commons and the bay.
At the back of the hotel, the main attraction was the jukebox, the hottest jukebox around, featuring Vaughn Monroe’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” along with tunes by Al Alberts and the Four Aces, and Teresa Brewer. Put another nickel in the nickelodeon and you could close your eyes and imagine dancing with your darling while Patti Page crooned the “Tennessee Waltz.”
In Onset, Abbie became my best friend. He found it in his heart to treat me as an equal, somebody he could teach and somebody he could trust. Our sister Phyllis remembers Onset as a place of “incredible freedom.” How much of this was due to the fact that Dad was only an occasional presence? If you ask Phyllis, the answer is a lot. If you asked Florence, our mother, perhaps the answer would have been a lot. For Abbie and me, though, the freedom had more to do with our ages—in the summer of 1952 he was fifteen and I was twelve—and the sun, the sea, and the great brashness and optimism all around us.
Somewhere around Abbie’s sixteenth birthday, he made friends with two of his classmates at Classical High School back in Worcester. And this time, the friendship grew into a real bond. Both Paul Cotton and Haskell Morin were Jews, and both, like Abbie, were exploring the world around them, looking for adventure. Paul was a large, quiet kid who played left end on the high school football team and whose family were Conservative Jews. Haskell, “Hack,” was smaller than Abbie and shy. The two boys quickly took Abbie as their leader, and together they called themselves the Motley Three, or the Ruth Street Stomping Society. They were in search of big blasts. “Skin me, man, in the name of the almighty A”—for radio disc jockey Alan Freed—was their greeting. Paul and Hack followed Abbie because of his daring and boundless energy. Leadership went right to Abbie’s head. He became the wild man of Classical High. He even started getting into fights, although not because he sought them out; he had gained a reputation for toughness and people liked to put it to the test.
With his friends, Abbie stole cars for joyrides, usually returning them after they were done. They’d play chicken on what we used to call the “Speedway,” Mill Street in Worcester. The posted speed limit on the speedway was thirty-five miles per hour, but the challenge there was to drive it at seventy-five to ninety. Then they started to play a variation of the game that involved trying to see how long the driver could go at speeds of twenty-five or thirty miles per hour without touching the steering wheel. Once when Abbie was showing me the game in Dad’s station wagon, I chickened out first by opening the door and rolling out minutes before Abbie let the car go off the road and right into Coes Pond.
Halloween got to be his favorite night of the year, the official occasion when Abbie and his friends would go out to raise hell, cutting clotheslines and slitting convertible tops around the neighborhood with their switchblades. But they quickly extended the occasion to include the nights before and after Halloween as well, and before long Halloween became a state of mind that encompassed just about every night of the year.
Abbie also started bringing girls up to his room to have sex around this time, while Ma and Dad were downstairs watching t.v., with Hack posting guard at the top of the stairs. And one day Abbie decided that since he was the local expert on jerking off, it was his civic responsibility to educate the neighborhood kids on the art of masturbation. He gathered four or five teenagers in our basement and placed a gallon jug on the floor, challenging them to fill the jug with jiz, and guessing how long it would take. Nobody thought this was anything out of the ordinary. Abbie used to go into the bathroom, lock the door, and jerk off into a shot glass that he kept in the medicine cabinet for that purpose. Then he would dutifully transfer the semen into the gallon jug. He used to time his efforts and said he could come in fourteen seconds flat. Years later I asked Hack if Abbie used any props, like underwear or pictures. Hack’s response was that Abbie had a photographic memory, which was true. I’d never thought of that.
When Abbie was sixteen he met Herbie Gamberg, someone with whom he could let his guard down. Gamberg was an all-around regular guy, a jock, but also took his brain seriously, and it was the combination that Abbie admired. About five years older than Abbie, Herbie attended a nearby college called Brandeis, and after a hard weekend game of softball or basketball, he’d fill Abbie’s head with the ideas of people like Nietzsche, Freud, and Camus. Abbie was impressed. And Gamberg, like Abbie, was a little guy and a Jew, so Abbie would have seen more than a little of himself in Gamberg’s words. I think Herbie Gamberg was the first person Abbie emulated, and I think that what Abbie emulated in Herbie was the synthesis Herbie seemed to represent of physical strength and intellectual sensitivity. Abbie hadn’t seen that before.
Throughout his high school years, Abbie’s sex life kept increasing. Nobody was getting laid more than Abbie. The girls just adored him. Abbie looked at sex as an experience of life that was more than sexual. What Abbie did he did spontaneously. Once, Abbie told his friend Haskell, he picked up a hitchhiker about his age one night on his drive back from a visit to his girlfriend Suzie in Everett. The hitchhiker and Abbie pulled over and jerked each other off for the hell of it. As far as I know, that was his only gay flirtation.
Throughout his youth, Abbie was moving in two directions at once. Part of him was assimilating, getting tougher, bringing his persona of the all-American hustler toward seamless perfection. The other part, wholly unassimilated, tender and fragile, was retreating ever further inward. But it was this second part, hardly visible, that was the stronger, more determined side of his personality. Abbie used to say he was never more than half a martyr. That was true. But it was this half, increasingly in later life, that would lead actions and trigger his responses.
Others around Abbie, including me, were growing taller than him. At 5'7", he’d stopped growing. And he suffered from his asthma, which meant that the specter of emergency oxygen treatments was a constant companion. As a Jew, he felt he was accepted by many of his non-Jewish friends only up to a point. Of course, these limitations only made Abbie more daring, more adventurous, more gregarious.
And so the tender part of his nature became an alienated part of Abbie’s personality.
On June 9, 1953, in the late afternoon, Abbie was at home talking on the phone to Suzie during a raging storm. The operator interrupted the call to say that the Worcester Chief of Police was trying to reach Dad. Since Dad was out of town on business, Abbie took the call. The police chief told him that the storm had created a health emergency and that medical supplies were urgently needed. Even through he was only sixteen, Abbie figured that the responsibility fell on him as the oldest son. Following the police chief’s instructions, Abbie drove the family station wagon into downtown Worcester to open up the store. He was met there by a Red Cross representative. Abbie began supplying intravenous solutions and other first aid supplies for the Red Cross emergency stations. He also called New York suppliers to arrange for an orderly flow of resupply shipments. Meanwhile, outside it had grown pitch dark. Fist-size hailstones were falling at high velocity and there were wind gusts blowing well over a hundred miles per hour. In the middle of it, Abbie started driving the station wagon through the most ravaged areas of North Worcester dispensing supplies. He saw huge areas flattened by the storm: “Trees smashed into houses. Rooftops torn off. . . . It was a war zone. We lugged plasma into tents, climbing over dead bodies and people screaming. I worked the entire night.”2 The next day, Abbie returned to help with the horrific job of searching through the rubble. The Worcester Tornado turned out to be one of the worst storms in the country’s history, with thousands injured and over a hundred people killed.
In his telling, Abbie always emphasized the excitement of moments like these—the speeding through downtown Worcester on his way to reach the injured, for example—as if all he was interested in was the action. But what I remember is something else altogether. Abbie needed to help people. Doing so was the only way to express something deep inside himself that he didn’t like to let people see, not even me. Underneath his wild persona, he felt a connection to human suffering powerful enough for him to feel the need to hide it much of the time. Maybe it had to do with some very needy part of himself, or something in him that was so pure that he was a little embarrassed about it, afraid you’d laugh at him if you knew how much he cared.
I don’t want to make my brother sound like a hero. He wasn’t the type to throw himself on a grenade. But I want people to see the side of him that he came to hide so well, because it’s the best lens through which to understand the strength of his convictions later on.
In the spring of 1953, Abbie argued with a biology teacher and found himself expelled from Classical High. The following fall, Ma and Dad enrolled him in Worcester Academy, a private prep school. The money didn’t matter to them, as long as Abbie was happy.
The family began to watch television more. We watched John Cameron Swayze, the original anchor, on NBC, which was, with its stars Howdy Doody and Milton Berle, the station to watch. Eisenhower seemed to have things well in hand but was always playing golf. We might have wondered, who was running the country? In 1954 and 1955, the McCarthy trials were televised. It wasn’t a matter of “politics” to us. The point was McCarthy seemed scary—you naturally identified with his victims, and when he questioned them, not allowing them to speak, not respecting them, accusing them of the worst kind of betrayal of their country, you almost felt like you were being accused yourself. Of course, we didn’t understand what was going on, didn’t really know what McCarthy meant by the word “Communist,” or whether those he accused were innocent or guilty. By their very helplessness and confusion, we found ourselves questioning our own patriotism. It was the first crack in the dam, the beginning of the end of the America we had until then believed was eternal. But one still didn’t question authority. Abbie thought he was going to be a doctor. I planned to be a veterinarian. We both believed that the world was immutable and that all you had to do was to find your place in it.