At my birth in 1955, my solidly Jewish mother exclaimed, “A boy! He’ll be a doctor!” I don’t actually remember it very well, but I respect my mother and trust her account.
Even if this is an American stereotype, my mother couldn’t imagine a goal higher or an achievement greater than producing a doctor. It wasn’t about being Jewish; it was about making a difference in the lives of others. She never doubted this was my lot in life, and my father never questioned it (or her, on much of anything). For all my interest in music and film, as well as my abiding claim that I was meant to be in theater, I never really doubted it either.
Knowing the career lurking in my future, I took special note when, around the age of four, I was marched into the office of one of Louisville’s finest pediatricians. I didn’t care much for the antiseptic smell of the place. His paternalist tone—“Well, young man, let’s take that shirt off”—made me skeptical. And when he pulled out needles, swabbed the business end with alcohol, and wiped my arm with the same swab, I could see what was coming. He turned his back for a moment and I was gone, past the receptionist desk, out the front door, and up a tree two blocks away.
Sitting in that tree and watching my mother walk beneath me, first in one direction and then the other, calling my name, I knew the truth. She had otherwise been a good mother, but on this score she’d been mistaken. The last thing I wanted to be was a doctor. Who would want to spend his life pulling kids out of trees? Let one of my know-it-all older sisters be the stupid doctor. I liked movies. I had inherited the Switow family passion for film. Take me out of the tree and give me a cushioned seat, a bag of popcorn, and a darkened theater—was this too much to ask? Even now, remembering it, it makes sense to me.
I’m convinced that our family’s movie-loving gene came from my great-grandfather, the source of my first name, Michael (“Grandpa”) Switow. He died in 1940, a decade and a half before I was born. But I’ve always felt a spiritual connection to him, as if my destiny ran on from his. I’ve learned all that I could about him. Though a stroke at age seventy left his left side paralyzed, his memory and sharp wit were intact, and he spent the next few months dictating his life’s story to his secretary. The memoir remains one of my family’s most cherished possessions, although my grandmother Lela, Michael’s second daughter, handed down this review of her father’s book: “Half of these stories are true—we just don’t know which half!”
His name was Michael Switofsky when, at sixteen, he left his family, his friends, and his village in northern Russia. Unwilling to be drafted into the army of a country that persecuted Jews, he escaped to Austria and, after hard months doing odd jobs in abject poverty, stowed away on an ocean-going freighter bound for the United States. He landed in New York Harbor in winter 1878, joined other Jewish immigrants of that era on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and tried to survive as a street peddler. Lonely and broke, he soon headed south and west, doing odd jobs, construction, manual labor, selling whatever he could barter along the way, and living briefly in small communities in the Midwest before moving on to the next town. Along the way, he developed the three rules of business that he would preach for the rest of his life, with enough people remembering the sermon for it to be handed down from generation to generation:
I’ve always assumed that creatively applying his third rule is what caused him to leave most towns so abruptly.
In the boisterous, swaggering river town of St. Louis, Missouri—a place that swarmed with merchants, drifters, gamblers, and women of leisure—Michael met Annie Tuval, who was none of these things. Michael had learned that selling neckties—“one for a dime, three for a quarter”—would earn him more money in a day than digging ditches did in two weeks. Annie motivated him to sell. He travelled through neighboring states building up a dowry and returned to St. Louis in 1892 to ask Annie’s father for her hand in marriage. They wed later that same year.
Annie didn’t like the sound of Switofsky, so after she took Michael’s name she had it shortened to Switow. Annie’s relatives were in the candy business; soon, so was Michael Switow, learning to make hard candies, saltwater taffy, and other confections. By the time their brood was complete—two older girls and three younger boys—the Switows were running a modestly successful candy store in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky.
But Michael had bigger dreams. In 1893, he had attended the Chicago World’s Fair where he and the rest of America got the first glimpses of new wonders such as Cracker Jack, the Ferris wheel, and Thomas Edison’s Kineto-scope for viewing moving pictures. Magic! Instantly, the man for whom I was later named visited the future and saw how much more candy he could sell if he converted the confectionary store into a makeshift movie theater at night. By 1908 he was showing silent movies there, often with piano accompaniment supplied by him or his son, Harry—later known by all in my family as Papaharry.
The movie house was such a hit that Michael set about opening theaters in small towns throughout the region. Even during the Great Depression, his businesses thrived as people struggling to survive found a nickel’s worth of escape in the latest serial or feature film. In an earlier generation, Sam Clemens had made a living by having Mark Twain describe the era, the people, and the fantasies of the day; in his own day, Michael Switow could make a dime selling it all in a darkened theater, along with some popcorn and candy.
When Michael and Annie’s second daughter, Lela, married David Sagaloski in 1920, she must have loved his work ethic. Dave ran a furniture store by day, a twenty-four-hour diner called Pappy’s Restaurant at night, and in between managed a farm that grew produce for the restaurant and popcorn for the Switows’ theaters. What Lela did not like was Dave’s bulky surname. She figured out that if she shortened the name and added a second “a,” her family would be listed first on the “S” page of Louisville’s phone book. And with that, the Sagaloskis became the Saags. My father, Eddie, born in 1924, was the middle of three Saag sons.
As a youngster, my father loved his visits to Grandpa Switow’s theaters. On a good Sunday afternoon, they might hit three or four as they sped over the Kentucky and Indiana highways that connected the small-town cinemas. (When he thought I was old enough to hear it, one of my dad’s favorite stories from those Sundays was of Grandpa arriving at a theater with a tremendous need to relieve himself. Since the women’s restroom was on the first floor and the men’s was in the basement, Grandpa strode into the women’s restroom and was doing what he needed to do when the manager rushed in, shouting, “No, no, Mr. Switow—this is for the ladies!” Grandpa looked down, nodded, and said over his shoulder, “You got that right, Cal.”)
Eddie Saag was a hard worker and bright, but by his own account was never much of a student. He frittered away a year in college before World War II summoned, and he became a demolition specialist in the Army Corps of Engineers. While serving in France in 1944, a bomb Eddie was defusing detonated. The episode earned him the Purple Heart and a reputation for quiet strength. I don’t remember a single moment in my entire life in which I questioned either my father’s courage or his devotion to me and our family.
Once back in America, Eddie took a shine to a teenager playing basketball in the alley between his family’s house and hers. Elaine Koppel was five years his junior, and the last thing her overprotective father wanted was for some returning veteran to court his daughter. But Eddie won Elaine’s heart, and in June 1948 they were married. A workaholic like his dad, Eddie worked three jobs. He did whatever needed doing at Pappy’s Restaurant. He managed a drive-in for M. Switow & Sons, the growing chain of indoor and outdoor theaters run by his grandfather and uncles Sam, Fred, and Harry. And he worked at Saag Brothers, a construction company he founded with his brother Henry. Meanwhile, Elaine raised their three children. First came daughter Terry, the straight-arrow overachiever. Next came Barbara, creative and rebellious. And then there was me, the tree climber, Michael the Second.
As the baby of the family, the only boy, and the first male Saag grandchild, I led a charmed life. By the time I was five, I was allowed to put on “work clothes” and tag along with Dad to the construction sites. I would sit proudly at his side as the construction team pored over blueprints and site plans. And then I would do whatever I could to get as dirty as possible so that by day’s end I’d wear proof that I’d been working. At some sites, I would get to deliver the last few whacks of the hammer to nails driven by the lead carpenter, Loggie. So far as I knew, Loggie had no last name, and neither did John or Guy the Painter. They all had nicknames: Filthy McNasty, Gantze Macher (Yiddish for “big shot”), Good-for-Nothing, Jack, Cadillac.
By age eight, I was working at a Switow drive-in theater, selling tickets in the box office before the movies started and manning the concession stand at intermission. I watched the same movies night in and night out, becoming a student of film without the bother or tuition of enrollment. At the end of the night, while Dad and the concession stand manager were reconciling the books, I was sent out to “clear the arena.”
Clearing the arena consisted of walking up to the cars still parked in the back row after the last movie had finished, standing on my tiptoes, shining a flashlight through the fogged up windows, and telling the surprised patrons, clad and unclad alike, “Time to go home!” I could have begun practicing then the line I would later perfect with patients after a physical exam, “You can put your clothes back on now”—although the gravel parking lot was a little less clinical.
By the time I was eleven, I’d been promoted to movie marketing. Sort of. The first of the so-called “spaghetti Westerns,” A Fistful of Dollars, was to open at the Kentucky Theatre on 4th Street in downtown Louisville. The afternoon before the premiere showing, I was in my great-uncle Sam Switow’s office above the theater, filling up hundreds of balloons that would be pushed off the marquee in just a few hours. As part of the promotion, while most of the balloons were empty, some of them had cash stuffed in them—mostly one-dollar bills, a few fives, tens, and twenties. One balloon contained a Ben Franklin, a crisp hundred-dollar bill.
At one point, Sam looked up from his desk to see me still furiously tying off balloons using fingers that had grown raw. He asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told him I wasn’t sure. He then asked me if I was a son of a bitch, and I told him, no, I wasn’t. “Well, then,” he declared, “you shouldn’t go into business, because the only person who makes it in business is the son of a bitch who is a bigger son of a bitch than the other son of a bitch!”
I can’t remember if I replied, but I know what I was thinking: Guess I won’t be going into business.
That same year, I traveled with Dad to Shelbyville, Indiana, to help at an outdoor theater called the Starlite Drive-In. To run a sewage line to the Starlite, we needed to cross under a nearby highway, and that meant narrowing traffic to a single lane. The first few days in Shelbyville I was the flagman, stopping traffic in one direction and admitting it from the other. But after days of watching Cadillac, John, and others perform what looked like a much more interesting task, I asked: Could I be the jackhammer guy?
The next thing I knew, I was trying to hang on to a seventy-five-pound jackhammer as its body slammed a metal blade into simmering asphalt fifty times a second. Success was chiefly a matter of holding on, and I was too frightened to let go, too embarrassed to fail. So I rode that ear-shattering, body-snapping machine for an hour, and then another; I held on until the end of the day. I had never exerted such energy, nor had I ever felt such pain. But at day’s end, Uncle Harry and Dad took me back to the motel, handed me a Falls City beer, and said, “If you work like a man, you can drink like a man.” I was hot, tired, dirty, and on top of the world. I was a man.
Then came summer 1968, the summer of the assassinations: first Dr. King and then Robert Kennedy. Each death, and both deaths, reverberated through Louisville in a way I still struggle to describe. Temperamentally as well as geographically, Louisville was nearer to Ohio than to Mississippi, not really in the South but not entirely in the North. The assassinations sent shock waves through my hometown. The birthplace of Cassius Clay—later transformed by events and by choice into Muhammad Ali—erupted in riots. Buildings burned. Cars were overturned and shops looted. Anarchy reigned. The fabric of our nation and our city had been torn once again, ripped by the still unfinished business of the American Revolution and the Civil War.
Within my family, and for me, the reaction was deeply personal. Ours was a joyfully Jewish household, whether we were singing the ancient Shabbat blessing around the dinner table or belting out bawdy songs with Uncle Harry at the piano. I never felt overtly discriminated against for being Jewish, though I sometimes felt singled out—like when I had to be excused from eighth-grade football practices to attend bar mitzvah classes, and the coach described it as “your day to go to Jew School.” But after the assassinations, with those two strong voices against bigotry silenced, I was left feeling vulnerable and alone, wondering, “Who’s next?”
American Jews had always been in kindred spirit with the oppressed, especially the oppressed in black America. I now know that a large number of the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s were Jews. Rabbis across the country and especially in the Deep South spoke out early, forcefully, and often against racial segregation and bigotry. (Rabbi Milton Grafman of Birmingham’s Temple Emanu-El, my religious home in Birmingham, was among the loudest and most influential of those voices, a tradition maintained by our current rabbi, Jonathan Miller.) When racists planted bombs at Birmingham houses of worship, it was not only in predominantly black churches. Birmingham historian Solomon Kimerling records that five years before four young black girls died in a bomb blast at the 16th Street Baptist Church, an even larger bomb had been planted at Birmingham’s Temple Beth-El, but it was discovered before it was detonated.
I mourned the deaths of Bobby and Martin as if sitting shiva for my own kin. There was new poignancy to the Torah portion I was preparing for my bar mitzvah: the last verses of the thirty-second book of Deuteronomy, where God tells Moses he may glimpse the Promised Land but will not reach it himself. I’ve never been depressive; in fact, I’ve occasionally been found obnoxiously cheerful. But the deaths of King and Kennedy sobered me. It may have been the first time I saw the dark side of the world in such a way that I felt it, deep inside of me.
And it wasn’t just me; the spring of ’68 reached all the way into our kitchen. We were both Jewish and fiercely, proudly American. Our family marched behind a decorated-veteran father who had gone to war willingly and come home gratefully. By working hard, keeping our noses clean, and treating other people fairly, we believed good things would happen; that was the American Dream, and we were just going about the business of achieving it. But so was Dr. King; so was Bobby Kennedy. We felt their losses like a blow to the nation’s creed as well as our own. I wrote their spirit into my Torah speech, insisting that even when our goals seem hopelessly out of reach, we must keep trying to get there. It didn’t seem like magic then; it just seemed right.
It was a lot to think about during the sweltering days on the construction site. Nearly thirteen and big for my age, I had a job digging postholes with a heaving, greasy auger on the back of an ancient, yellow Case tractor. Hilton “Pitt” Pitcock drove the tractor, positioning the auger above the spot where I was to guide it down, hold it true, and make sure the result was a clean hole where a drive-in movie speaker post would be placed. It had to be eighteen inches in diameter and four and a half feet deep to hold the concrete and steel needed to build the South Park Drive-In Theatre on National Turnpike in Louisville.
A leather-skinned chain smoker whose squint reminded me of Clint Eastwood’s, Pitt was respectful because he knew I could be his boss one day. But he cut me no slack. If I signaled “thumbs up” before pulling my head clear after inspecting the hole, the auger would roar out of the ground looking for me. I can still taste the blood in my mouth from the two times I recklessly held up my thumbs and Pitt pulled that lever early. I don’t think he did damage intentionally, but neither do I think he was watching out for me as if I were a child.
After a particularly long and hot June day, I was amazed to find myself still unbloodied when Pitt called out, “Quittin’ time.” I was wearing more dirt than cloth. Red dust saturated every pore of my body, but we had dug 185 postholes in one day, a construction crew record that may still stand. Pitt squinted at me over his half-finished unfiltered Camel and muttered, “You did good, Mike.” I still consider it one of the highest compliments I have ever received. I wish I could put it on my office wall next to my diplomas and professional tributes. “You did good, Mike.” Some days I still want to believe it.
The construction trailer had air conditioning, and Dad and Uncle Harry were indulging themselves in that luxury. They handed me my Falls City beer. I tried to stretch the ache out of my back, studied the dirt that shrouded me, sucked down that icy beer, and thought to myself, I don’t want to do this the rest of my life. I wasn’t cut out for construction. I wasn’t enough of a son of a bitch for business. I was back to the career options I had contemplated as a runaway kid in a tree: movies, or medicine—or maybe, somehow, both.