My grandfather never wore an overcoat. That was Ezra, my father’s father, who had a candy stand under the Addison Street elevated tracks near Wrigley Field. Even in winter, when it was ten below and the wind cut through the station, Ezra never wore more than a heavy sport coat, and sometimes, when Aunt Belle, his second wife, insisted, a woolen scarf wrapped up around his chin. He was six foot two and two hundred pounds, had his upper lip covered by a bushy mustache, and a full head of dark hair until he died at ninety, not missing a day at his stand till six months before.
He never told anyone his business. He ran numbers from the stand and owned an apartment building on the South Side. He outlived three wives and one of his sons, my father. His older son, my uncle Bruno, looked just like him, but Bruno was mean and defensive whereas Ezra was brusque but kind. He always gave me and my friends gum or candy on our way to and from the ballpark, and he liked me to hang around there or at another stand he had for a while at Belmont Avenue, especially on Saturdays so he could show me off to his regular cronies. He’d put me on a box behind the stand and keep one big hand on my shoulder. “This is my grandson,” he’d say, and wait until he was sure they had looked at me. I was the first and then his only grandson; Uncle Bruno had two girls. “Good boy!”
He left it to his sons to make the big money, and they did all right, my dad with the rackets and the liquor store, Uncle Bruno as an auctioneer, but they never had to take care of the old man, he took care of himself.
Ezra spoke broken English; he came to America with his sons (my dad was eight, Bruno fourteen) and a daughter from Vienna in 1918. I always remember him standing under the tracks outside the station in February, cigar stub poked out between mustache and muffler, waiting for me and my dad to pick him up. When we’d pull up along the curb my dad would honk but the old man wouldn’t notice. I would always have to run out and get him. I figured Ezra always saw us but waited for me to come for him. It made him feel better if I got out and grabbed his hand and led him to the car.
“Pa, for Chrissakes, why don’t you wear an overcoat?” my dad would ask. “It’s cold.”
The old man wouldn’t look over or answer right away. He’d sit with me on his lap as my father pointed the car into the dark.
“What cold?” he’d say after we’d gone a block or two. “In the old country was cold.”