Bob Abraham, My Dad

My father, Robert Abraham, was born on May 12, 1928 in New York, NY. His family moved soon thereafter to Woodmere, NY. Woodmere is one of the Five Towns on Long Island, a group of villages on the south shore that, I as I understand it, was the quintessential nouveau riche Jewish community. Bob was the first of two children that Henry (NMN) Abraham would father with the former Karoline Simon. His sister Virginia (Ginger) would arrive two years later, and a half-brother, David, ten years after that.

Henry was born in New Orleans in 1899, the son of Morris and the grandson of Henry. The elder Henry was a German immigrant who became an eminent leader in the business community, one of the most important financiers and entrepreneurs in New Orleans as it became the center of the world cotton trade. Henry had has hands in many enterprises, including a cotton processing plant and a cotton trading company, as well as a partnership with the Lehman family in New York that later became the Lehman Brothers investment bank. He is prominently mentioned in histories of New Orleans, noted as being one of America’s millionaires in an 1870’s compilation.

Henry died just after the turn of the century, and Morris took over many of his business interests. Over the next ten years he proceeded to lose most if not all of what his father had accumulated. I’ve heard two explanations: Henry’s (Bob’s father), in which he explained that Morris speculated very heavily on cotton prices just before The Great War, and lost his fortune when the government instituted price controls; and my dad’s, which described him as a heavy drinker and gambler. From the little research I have done, the second explanation appears more likely; my brother is still digging into the story. At any rate, Henry had to miss out on college and go to work to support himself and his family.

There are many gaps in my knowledge, but I know that he landed in New York and became an insurance agent. For almost all of his career he ran the Woodmere Insurance where he sold and serviced Chubb Insurance Policies to the increasingly affluent, mostly Jewish families in the area.

In 1926 he married Karoline Simon. He once described her to me as “not a beautiful woman, but very handsome”. From her pictures she appears to be rather short and stocky, with a bit of a snub nose and a bob-cut. I think Henry was a bit uncharitable; she was pleasant to look at, and projected an amiable, no-nonsense demeanor. She is best known to my generation as an excellent golfer; she was once Woodmere Country Club Champion.

In 1932, Karoline had a blood vessel burst in her face, and she unceremoniously died. Bob was four, Ginger two. Now that I have raised three children, I am dumbfounded when I consider the impact that it must have had on my father and my aunt to lose their mother at such a desperately dependent age. I know that human beings are more resilient than we often believe and many who lose a mother go on to have happy, well-adjusted lives, but it is difficult for me to fathom it. Her sudden death and void she left behind would go on to impact the lives of her descendants for generations.

Two years later Henry married Doris Isaacs, who became Dad’s stepmother. Doris took over caring for the children, but apparently did not readily bond to her two step-children. It also did not help that his father was not a nurturing sort; he was the typical patriarchal type of his generation. My dad never talked about his relationship with his father, but I knew Henry well enough in later years to know that he would not have been a man to offer much emotional support to a child, let alone one who had lost his mother in infancy. He was loud, outspoken, belligerent, and he liked to drink. He was not particularly lovable. So the absence of their birth mother continued to have an impact on the children.

Bob grew up as a shy, insecure little guy. Certainly his emotional development was stunted by the absence of his mother. It became a family joke over the years that in many ways Bob always remained four years old; he was awkward, stunningly impulsive, and juvenile in his enthusiasms and frustrations; throughout his life he asked child-like questions and then often asked them again a few minutes later. I can only imagine what his childhood must have been like without his birth mother.

He would only describe it as not very happy. He really would not talk about it, but when you asked a second time he would say that all of the other kids were smart and sharp and aggressive, and he wasn’t. In a culture where it was expected that a young man would be a doctor or lawyer or banker, and to not be was akin to being a panhandler, he was not in the game. He had a few childhood friends, but he never spoke much about hobbies or other activities. I can’t recall a single happy memory he ever cited about his childhood.

There was one part of growing up that he did enjoy: summer camps in the Adirondacks, which he attended every year. While he never talked about that much, either, he would say that he liked camp and he became interested in wildlife. He learned the names of birds and trees and developed the interest that would become his passion later in life. He also claimed to be the best swimmer in the camp, and he remained an effortless swimmer throughout his life. His growing love of nature led to his choice of a career: he wanted to work for The Forest Service.

So he decided to go to college and study Forestry. He would prove to have quite a tumultuous college career. He started at Paul Smith’s College, a nature-oriented liberal arts school in the Adirondacks near Harrietstown and Upper St. Regis. His father missed him terribly, so he only stayed a semester and then went back home. The next year he tried Syracuse University, but he struggled academically and again only lasted a semester. His next stop was Boise St. College in Idaho. That didn’t go so well either, he once told me he was bullied when he was there, as a short insecure Jewish kid from Long Island in Idaho.

About this time, his sister who was attending Richmond Professional Institute set him up on a blind date with her friend’s sister, a nice Jewish girl from Richmond, Doris Tatarsky. One thing led to another, and in 1950 they got married at age 22.

He and Doris eventually landed in Southwest Virginia, where he continued his studies at VPI, a small agricultural and engineering school on the edge of Appalachia, and she attended Radford College. He went on to earn his Forestry degree there when they agreed to waive his requirement to pass Organic Chemistry; the department said he might not be able to pass Organic, but knew more about birds than the professors. 

While he attended VPI he worked part-time at the local newspaper.

He lasted in The Forest Service for about three years. He served stints in Mt. Shasta, California and then Grants Pass, Oregon. During this period they had a son, David, in 1953. But Bob was prone to getting lost in the woods, and with an infant at home, he struggled with the 10 days on/4 days off schedule. And he and Doris missed the support they might be receiving from their families. So, he left the Forest Service and they decided to move back to Richmond. A few months later while visiting a friend back in the Blacksburg area he discovered that his previous employer at the newspaper was interested in hiring him. So they moved back to Southwest Virginia, settling in Christiansburg.

A few months later he had an opportunity to buy the job-printing business that accompanied the newspaper operation. He took the offer, and started Christiansburg Printing Company, where he did small jobs for local business, like printing brochures, handbooks, manuals, menus, and so on. He would go on to do this for nearly forty years.

Bob and Doris, like many married couples, were in many ways opposites. Doris was mature, independent, self-confident, and capable. Bob was child-like, needy, and impulsive. Doris was serious and practical. Bob was impulsive and emotional. Doris was social and effusive. Bob was halting and awkward, though he did enjoy being around people. Both were bright; Doris was a teacher, and she could sew, and knit, and make things, and take on any sort of challenge. Bob was probably ADD and could not focus on things, but he had a remarkable vocabulary and a formidable memory. His impulsiveness and clumsiness drove her crazy; his shyness was not a problem, she filled the gaps in conversations.

Over the years more kids came along. Michael, in 1954; Ricky (me) in 1956; and finally a girl, Karen, in 1961. The kids brought issues, as kids always do, each raising the stress level in the household by another order of magnitude. All of the children were lively and demanding, and it was a boisterous household. It was probably a fairly typical family, each of us happy and unhappy in our own ways, they were the only ways that we knew.

Running a printing business was not necessarily a role for which he was well suited; the printing business required skill with machinery, analytical ability with job design and costing, and the people skills to manage customers and employees. Bob was reasonably competent with the analytical piece, and capable with managing customers and workers. But it’s hard to imagine how he ever managed to deal with the machinery. He swore a lot, and stomped his feet, and threw lots of ruined paper, and became good friends with the journeyman press repair people. He had the wrong temperament to be a skilled machine operator, but somehow he was able to produce the jobs, and build a successful business. He never made a whole lot of money, but our family never had a need that went unmet. And Bob cared a great deal about his employees, many of whom were with him for twenty years or more. He derived great fulfillment from running a successful business, and was very proud to be honored several times by the local Chamber of Commerce.

Bob was an enthusiastic and devoted father. Though he had never played sports, he loved that we were passionately involved. He played with us in the neighborhood, and later coached our baseball and basketball teams – though he knew nothing about the sports. He attended every game we played, and especially loved watching me play football and basketball in high school. I took for granted that he never missed a game; I once told a friend that he knew nothing about coaching baseball, and he replied, “But he is always here”. Left unsaid was that most of the other dads were not.

He and Mom were also committed that we would have the whole gamut of world-expanding experiences. We went to two World’s Fairs. We went to Cooperstown and The Everglades and Grandfather Mountain and Nags Head and Niagara Falls and New York City and camping trips and beaches and museums. My brothers were active in the Boy Scouts, and we owned a cabin on Claytor Lake for a while. All of these trips were punctuated with both crises and triumphs, and they yielded indelible memories.

Bob was not very adept at sharing fatherly life-lessons or wisdom he had gained; he surely had no role model from his own childhood. But he set examples by the way he lived. He was insistent that character was independent of race, or color, or class; he said that he had known good people and bad people in all walks of life. He stood out as a supporter of the local Negro community (the words of the times); I remember, among other things, he nominated a colored man for the Kiwanis Club (he was not accepted). I don’t recall other details, but the colored families knew that Bob was their friend. Recently one of my classmates who is now a college president told me that Bob was one of the first community members to promote real equality for the Negroes in our schools and businesses and clubs. They all knew who he was and that he would stand up for them.

In fact, being a small town, just about everyone knew each other. Most of the more prominent families belonged to the local country club, and many were on the city council and the local boards and the service clubs. Bob was not, though he did enjoy being in Kiwanis. He and Doris had good friends, George and Mildred Gerberich in particular, and they had some social outlets. They sometimes went to bridge parties and Cotillion Club dances, where twice a year they would leave the house with a fifth of liquor in a brown bag and come home with it still above the label. For the most part, the demands of parenting did not allow for many other interests.

Being Jewish was not a major factor in our lives, to me more of a minor annoyance like a pebble in my shoe. We did go to Sunday school in Roanoke, which I hated, and we did all have Bar Mitzvahs, which provided for raucous reunions with Aunt Ginger and the cousins. I did not experience any real prejudice, though it always remained something that marked us different from the normal kids. Bob was largely indifferent to his Jewishness; the Jewish men in Roanoke seemed to see him as an odd bird, perhaps due to his complete lack of the trademark Jewish condition (ambition). I often thought of our family, the Jews of Christiansburg as being, as Wilt Chamberlain once described himself, a population segment of one.

In my teenage years Bob experienced significant health problems. He had a series of problems with kidney stones, and was often in great pain as he tried to pass them. Sometimes he had to go to the hospital so they could explode them. He was diagnosed with parathyroid problems, and had two surgeries to remove his parathyroid. He also had an operation on his side, I don’t recall why. I later came to believe that all of these problems may have stemmed from his years of cavalier handling of the powerful solvents he used to clean his printing presses. But who knows? I was not very good at supporting him during this period; I hated the hospital, and refused to visit him. I still carry some guilt about that time.

Of course there were so many, many other experiences that we all shared. My memories revisit me at random and unexpected times: him teaching me to drive (“pretend there’s an egg between your foot and the pedal”); or trying to impart his love of fishing; and hours of playing ball in the front yard. Getting lost at The World’s Fair. Going to the hospital with a broken arm. Raising two litters of puppies. So many memories! Being a father was Bob’s greatest joy. We took him for granted; the importance of having a real father to a child can only be measured by knowing a child who did not have one.

Inevitably we grew up and moved on. And Bob moved into his greatest era: retirement. Another family joke is that Bob may not have been that good at working, but he was world-class at retirement; he passed on the printing business to Michael and took up his new life with great enthusiasm. He began fishing regularly, and spent hours on the New River and at Claytor Lake. He took up scuba diving, and with his new friends Tom and Diane took many trips to the Caribbean, Belize, and even the Great Barrier Reef. He became an avid photographer, especially of wildlife; he took thousands of shots of sea creatures, birds, and the minks and muskrats he saw on the river. He was thrilled with his new digital toys, his cameras, computers, and printers. He may not have been a skilled photographer, but he succeeded by brute force, producing an extensive library of exquisite photos by taking tens of thousands of shots. He loved to send them to the local newspaper, which, to his delight, often printed them. His outdoor life brought him great joy; surely these were his happiest years.

He and Doris no longer had the stresses of raising children, and they settled comfortably into their new life. They took trips to many places, including Israel, Iceland, and Australia, to name just a few. They played more bridge, and joined more clubs and political groups. They loved traveling to visit their seven grandchildren. They seemed more relaxed and contented, and seemingly closer in spirit and temperament.

In his late sixties, Bob was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was treated with radiation, and this became an afterthought. However, it would come back to haunt him two decades later.

As he aged through his sixties and seventies and eighties, he gradually became less capable and curtailed some of his hobbies. He fished less, and would not go out on the river alone. He stopped scuba diving as the trips became too much for him. He turned increasingly to walking and taking pictures, sometimes in the woods and eventually the paved path along the New River. But this was a gradual process over twenty wonderful years, and his love of nature and photography only grew stronger. It was a great day if he got a good shot of an interesting bird; it was a wasted one if he didn’t. He was just as impulsive and child-like and filled with wonder as ever; his friends loved him for his enthusiasm. Every great picture Bob took was, for him, the first one.

Two years ago at age 87, Bob began a precipitous decline. His bladder began to fail due to damage from the radiation treatment twenty years prior. He began to have regular urinary tract infections, which gave him high fevers and landed him in the hospital. The strong antibiotics they gave him quelled the infections, but they gave him severe stomach pains and suppressed his appetite. He was in and out of the hospital every couple of months; when he was in the hospital he grew increasingly despondent and depressed. Eventually his kidneys began to fail, and he had tubes put into them to bypass his bladder altogether, requiring him to have urine collection bags. But still the infections continued, and so did the stays in the hospital. Being bed-ridden caused his spine and nerves to deteriorate, and he began to have significant pain in his back and buttocks. His prostate cancer also returned, which may have been the primary cause of his spinal pain. It was a dreadful period for him; he endured hour after hour after hour in the hospital feeling miserable, and knowing he would have to go back again a few weeks later. Eventually the pain and misery began to dominate his life, and he lost his will to live; he decided he would not to go back to the hospital again. The pain continued to worsen, and hospice care greatly increased his medication, until he was often incoherent.

As I write this he is on his deathbed. He has been non-responsive for three days. He is on massive amounts of morphine, but he appears to be resting comfortably. We talk to him and hold him, and hope that he hears us. We will all be relieved when his suffering comes to an end, it won’t be very long.

How does one measure the value of a life? If it’s by career success, or wealth gained, or accolades earned, Bob’s was unremarkable. But if it’s by living with honesty, and integrity, and respect for people of all origins, Bob will be judged much more kindly. If it’s by being a loving father, a devoted husband, a man who was always there for his family and his community, he will be near the top of the list. And finally, if it’s by being a truly authentic person, a man who lived without an ounce of pretense or guile or rancor, who found great joy in nature and people of all walks of life, Bob was a real champion. Bob may have remained child-like for all of his long lifetime, but he was surely God’s child. We all loved him and will miss him dearly. Good-bye, Dad.