Grandpa Sam Goldstein, Mom’s Father, was born in England on the way here. His family was from Rumania. I have his birth certificate. It is an official copy issued many years after he was born. He probably got it for the new social security system in the 1930’s. I know that’s when it was produced as it had a revenue stamp with George the VI on it. Edward the VII was king when Grandpa was born.

Grandpa was an anglophile. He loved to tell my brother and me that he was a Limey. He always drank tea to reinforce that notion, and he always put a lemon in it. He was a big man. He worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII. One day he was holding one end of a huge steel girder. The chain suspending it from the crane high above snapped. He held it up till his fellows got out from under. You hear tales of superhuman strength in a crisis. It was a heroic act, but that was the end of his back. After that he wore a back brace that looked just like a corset.

A CLOSE CALL

He died in 1984, just 16 days after my youngest daughter Lessa was born. My wife blesses his memory for that. If he had died just 17 days earlier the pressure would have been immense to name her Samantha. Jews are a mystical Eastern people. We believe in reincarnation, but don’t tell the average American Jew that! You name a newborn after a dead relative, “who doesn’t have a name yet”, to give the soul a resting place! But “Sam”?

“Sam’s what you name a dog”, my wife said. Worse, our neighbors at the time had the oldest beagle in the world. You guessed it: Sam. Sam had a skin disease which caused thickenings on his skin. As they hung down, getting longer and longer, the tissue would die and slough off. Right out of Night of the Living Dead. He would shuffle up and down the street in a display of grossness, looking neither to the right or the left. Moot point since Grandpa lived long enough.