835: Children of Dave
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeper in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. My dad's ATM password was 119, till the day died. 119 was also in the password for his home Wi-Fi network. 119 was shorthand for 119 Bayard Street, which is where his grandfather, my great-grandfather, owned a tiny grocery store on the ground floor of a house in downtown Baltimore in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Picture neighborhood, Bodega, and you've got the general size of this thing. The family lived upstairs, worked downstairs. So much happened at 119 Bayard. So many things about our family were set in motion there. But my sisters and I only got little scraps of stories about the place. This handful of family-defining origin stories, like I tried it out now and then. Like for instance, there was the one about the chickens. My dad and his brother, Lenny, both worked in the store from the time they were little kids. And chickens were slaughtered at the store, which reeked them out, both of them. To the point where decades later, as grown men, neither were the made chicken, and they had explained this was the reason why, or there's the story about my great-grandfather's bookkeeping skills. I'm actually named for my great-grandfather, Isador Friedlander. My parents chose Ira instead of Isador, because Isador Glass is a passable English sentence. Is Adore Glass? My mom once told me that they picked Ira over the alternatives, because it sounded less Jewish to them, which just goes to show how completely utterly Jewish their entire world was back then. I've heard all my life what a kind-hearted man Isador was on a soft touch, which brings me to this next story we would hear now and then. During the depression, when everybody in the neighborhood was broke and buying on credit, Isador set up a system where every customer would have a little book, like this flimsy paper thing, where he would write down what they owed. But the thing about the system was, the customer kept the book. Maybe you see the problem with this. All the time, customers would chill up at the store and say, "I lost my book." And Isador would say that, "Math, it's okay. What do you think? Oh." And then they'd say some not very high number, and he'd write it down, and hand him a new book to take home. Years later, my dad became a certified public accountant, and this became one of the day Peter Parker got bit by the radioactive spider sort of origin stories. The bad bookkeeping he saw his grandfather do at 1119 Bayard, and how he was going to do better. I'm sure some good things happened at 1119 Bayard, but those stories didn't get passed down. We heard painful things. My dad was miserable working there, so his brother, his mom, my grandma, Frieda, got out of the store, went to college, taught Latin in junior high school, but then got dragged back into the family business against her will like Michael Corleone, when her dad Isador got sick.
Transcription truncated.