Read Online Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It to Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life by Frank Bank, Gibu Twyman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Frank Bank, Gibu Twyman
Tags: test
Ads: Link
they'd flip on the television that night and see on a hit TV series.
"Oh, look, there's Leonard and Sylvia's kid. Didn't he deliver nice meat today?"
That was their reaction, rather than: What in God's name is he doing soiling his delicate hands with common labor when he's a movie star?
It was only natural, you'd pitch in on the family business. Almost all the big stars just seemed more like normal, flesh-and-blood people.
I don't know how many times you'd go to a restaurant in the '50s and see a movie star and it was no big deal. "Oh look, there's Jack Lemmon." Go back to eating. Let them eat. No big commotion.
We'd go to a place called Wil Wright's on Saturday night for ice cream sodas and constantly see Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart. We never said a word to these guys.
Why can't we do this now? What has changed? I don't know. People are weird, I guess.
People weren't so much into idol-worshipping, it didn't seem to me, back then. We'd respect them. We'd leave them alone. I mean, keep in mind, I lived in West LA, where a lot of stars did live. They'd go to the market themselves, instead of sending the servants or whatever. A guy like Gary Cooper, maybe, had to hide a little. If you were Dick Clark, you hit the market yourself.
If you had a lot of confidence in yourself, you'd be a high visibility person.
To this day I don't know how many times I ran into Walter Matthau in West Los Angeles. A million times maybe. He doesn't hide from anybody. He leads his life the way he wants. He's a bright man, a really cool old guy. He used to live at the race track and I'd see him there when I went with my old
Page 52
man. Him and Jack Klugman. They were always at the races.
And speaking of off to the races, the meat business was doing pretty well with Mom and Dad busting their humps and me dropping deliveries all over town.
But Sylvia was far from satisfied. I told you she was a go-getter.
She was very creative. And when I was 5 or 6, I used to wonder why we didn't have a Christmas tree like you'd see on the lots all up and down Wilshire Boulevard.
I was a rotten little putz. "Wah! Why can't we have a Christmas tree?" I whined.
Well my mother always felt bad about that. All of a sudden she gets the bright idea. God's truth, Sylvia Bank, my mother, invented Chanukah decorations.
All Chanukah decorations.
At least any of them you ever saw out on the West Coast.
I mean, she didn't invent the dreidelthis toy top with the Hebrew letters on each of the four sides, which kids spin at Chanukah. That was invented thousands of years ago.
But Sylvia invented the folding dreidel, the folding starall of the paper ornaments, all the paper streamers, the banners with the letters spelling out "Happy Chanukah," the electric menorah.
She invented all of this to keep me quiet.
Actually, some of it was to keep me happy because I was spoiled and I felt bad being a Jew in the middle of all this Christmas stuff. I sat there and watched her. I watched my mother with her scissors, take a great big white Christmas bell that she bought at Woolworth's and cut it into a folding Jewish star.
Sylvia started a company called Jewish Holiday Novelties, at our house. In those days there had been none of this stuff. My mother went to all the rabbis in Los Angeles and all the synagogues and all the gift shops, and they started selling.
Boy, they caught on big time.
We were living in the Fairfax area, which was the big Jewish district at the time. Still is, in fact. Within two years, our house and our garage was filled to the rafters with boxes of my mother's stuff.
Maybe it was watching my mother's motivation, the strong desire she had to accomplish and succeed at things, that got me to teach myself to read and do addition and subtraction along about the time I was 4 years old.
I learned to read and do math off the old Racing Form.
Maybe I was just bored. I was, in effect, an only child at the time. My brother had gone away to World War II, then come back, then
"Oh, look, there's Leonard and Sylvia's kid. Didn't he deliver nice meat today?"
That was their reaction, rather than: What in God's name is he doing soiling his delicate hands with common labor when he's a movie star?
It was only natural, you'd pitch in on the family business. Almost all the big stars just seemed more like normal, flesh-and-blood people.
I don't know how many times you'd go to a restaurant in the '50s and see a movie star and it was no big deal. "Oh look, there's Jack Lemmon." Go back to eating. Let them eat. No big commotion.
We'd go to a place called Wil Wright's on Saturday night for ice cream sodas and constantly see Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart. We never said a word to these guys.
Why can't we do this now? What has changed? I don't know. People are weird, I guess.
People weren't so much into idol-worshipping, it didn't seem to me, back then. We'd respect them. We'd leave them alone. I mean, keep in mind, I lived in West LA, where a lot of stars did live. They'd go to the market themselves, instead of sending the servants or whatever. A guy like Gary Cooper, maybe, had to hide a little. If you were Dick Clark, you hit the market yourself.
If you had a lot of confidence in yourself, you'd be a high visibility person.
To this day I don't know how many times I ran into Walter Matthau in West Los Angeles. A million times maybe. He doesn't hide from anybody. He leads his life the way he wants. He's a bright man, a really cool old guy. He used to live at the race track and I'd see him there when I went with my old
Page 52
man. Him and Jack Klugman. They were always at the races.
And speaking of off to the races, the meat business was doing pretty well with Mom and Dad busting their humps and me dropping deliveries all over town.
But Sylvia was far from satisfied. I told you she was a go-getter.
She was very creative. And when I was 5 or 6, I used to wonder why we didn't have a Christmas tree like you'd see on the lots all up and down Wilshire Boulevard.
I was a rotten little putz. "Wah! Why can't we have a Christmas tree?" I whined.
Well my mother always felt bad about that. All of a sudden she gets the bright idea. God's truth, Sylvia Bank, my mother, invented Chanukah decorations.
All Chanukah decorations.
At least any of them you ever saw out on the West Coast.
I mean, she didn't invent the dreidelthis toy top with the Hebrew letters on each of the four sides, which kids spin at Chanukah. That was invented thousands of years ago.
But Sylvia invented the folding dreidel, the folding starall of the paper ornaments, all the paper streamers, the banners with the letters spelling out "Happy Chanukah," the electric menorah.
She invented all of this to keep me quiet.
Actually, some of it was to keep me happy because I was spoiled and I felt bad being a Jew in the middle of all this Christmas stuff. I sat there and watched her. I watched my mother with her scissors, take a great big white Christmas bell that she bought at Woolworth's and cut it into a folding Jewish star.
Sylvia started a company called Jewish Holiday Novelties, at our house. In those days there had been none of this stuff. My mother went to all the rabbis in Los Angeles and all the synagogues and all the gift shops, and they started selling.
Boy, they caught on big time.
We were living in the Fairfax area, which was the big Jewish district at the time. Still is, in fact. Within two years, our house and our garage was filled to the rafters with boxes of my mother's stuff.
Maybe it was watching my mother's motivation, the strong desire she had to accomplish and succeed at things, that got me to teach myself to read and do addition and subtraction along about the time I was 4 years old.
I learned to read and do math off the old Racing Form.
Maybe I was just bored. I was, in effect, an only child at the time. My brother had gone away to World War II, then come back, then
Similar Books
