Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
after it migrated to his brain, thirty-five years after he had his last cigarette and nineteen
months after I convinced him to move to Manhattan.
A Jew, a native New Yorker, he was born and raised in the Bronx and commuted to
Manhattan from our home in New Jersey for twenty-five years, but he didn't live there
until the end of his life. His name was Sam. He was trained by the U.S. Army to be an
electrical engineer, but he ended up in trade journalism. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he
was editor in chief of
Electronics
magazine, which made him a big deal in the computer
industry just before the computer industry became such a big deal. At his funeral, my
brother, Robert, told the story of Dad's coming home from work one day and complain-
ing about a young man he had interviewed—stubborn, insubordinate, sloppily dressed,
impatient with his elders, a know-it-all: “ 'He reminded me of you, Robert,' ” my father
said. Of course the young man was Bill Gates.
My relationship with him as I grew up was, for the most part, a loving one. He could
do Donald Duck's voice, an imitation that made me laugh from the time I was three until
I was in high school. A baseball fan who adopted the Mets after his New York Giants
split for California—he had to hold his tongue after Bobby Thomson's famous home run
in 1951 because he was working that day among Dodger fans on a ship in the Brooklyn
Navy Yard—he taught me to throw (though he had a terrible arm himself) and watched
me pitch a Little League no-hitter. He was delighted when I decided to major in math-
ematics in college (he thought I was aiming at engineering), became incensed when I
dropped it (he didn't buy my explanation that somewhere beyond my second year of cal-
culus I got hopelessly lost), and was exceptionally proud that I ended up in publishing,
like him. He said to me, many times, with rueful pleasure, that I was a far better writer
than he ever was. And I remember his trying to teach me to ride a bicycle, a quixotic
enterprise; he never learned to ride one himself.
My father was always a pessimist and a bit of a grouch, though not always an un-
charming one. He was able to laugh at himself and now and then appear silly; he was
small, about five seven, and soft, but once for a Halloween party he dressed as Superman
in snug baby-blue flannel pajamas with a red
S
drawn on the front.
He never outgrew his Depression-era frugality, a nice way of saying he was a skinflint.
Once, when he bought a new car, he offered to sell me his old one, a white Mazda from
the late 1980s, for $2,000. My mother intervened.
“Just give him the fucking car, Sam,” she said.
This part of the portrait is possibly unfair. My father fed me, clothed me, paid for my
bar mitzvah, put me through college. We were a middle-class family and I never wanted
for what middle-class children had. In the mid-1960s, when I was in junior high school
and the Vietnam War was blazing every night on the evening news, I had the first symp-
