Happy Birthday Sam!

From Lynn

I heard that you want to know more about your maternal grandparents, Sam and Ruth Saul.  I’ve done so much family history, but I’ve focused on earlier generations.  This is a good reason for me to start documenting my parents’ lives.  I’ve got lots of history, documents, photos, and what they’ve told me, so I’ll get started now—and in the future, I’ll turn this into additions to my website and and lots more.

I’ll start with your grandfather, Samuel David Saul.  You were named for him.  He was born March 11, 1919 at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh (but his birth certificate says “Passavant Hospital” so I don’t know if that’s an earlier name for the same place or if he mislead us)—the youngest of his parents’ seven children, and the only one born in Pittsburgh.  Harry had come to Pittsburgh from Sereje Lithuania and Swansea/Cardiff Wales to join most of his brothers, but he married Lily Mandelstein of South Fork, Pennsylvania (where the Johnstown Flood started) on September 11, 1900, and they lived in Dunlo, Pennsylvania, in Cambria County, a very tiny town near South Fork , where Harry owned a general store.  They moved back to Pittsburgh just before Sam was born.  Sam’s older siblings were Sarah, Ida, Louis, Nathan, Theresa, and Florence.

The family lived on Robinson Street in Oakland when he was born, but that house is no longer standing.  By 1924, they lived at 1132 N. St. Clair, in East Liberty.  Harry had a tire and auto accessory business, in downtown Pittsburgh and briefly in East Liberty. 

When I was in high school, I got my father to tell me his life story for a biography assignment I had to complete.  Unfortunately, I’ve lost the original paper but I remember a lot from it.

Sam had a happy childhood.  One of the stories he told me was how, when his mother wanted one of the children, she would just start calling them from the top down—so when he started hearing Lou or Nathan’s name, he would take off so she wouldn’t be able to find him and give him chores to do!  Another story he told me was how he got a paper route and won a goose at Christmastime for his great efforts.  He happily brought the animal home—and his mother ordered him to take it to the butcher shop to have it killed for dinner.  He was heartbroken.

Harry Saul’s business, Keystone Tire, sold Michelin tires.  Sam would have the job of wearing the “Michelin Man” rubber suit and walk around East Liberty advertising the tires.  When he told me this story, I didn’t know what the “Michelin Man” was because at that time Michelins were not sold in the United States, so he drew a picture for me.  Later, when Michelin was re-introduced to America I saw a Michelin Man walking down Stone Avenue in Tucson and immediately remembered my father’s story.

When he was in high school, his family lived on Forbes Street in Squirrel Hill.  He started to drive his father’s car when he was about 14, at one point having it slide down the driveway into traffic on the street because he hadn’t figured out the brakes yet.  He also started to smoke when he was 14.

When Sam was in confirmation class at Beth Shalom in Squirrel Hill, he met Ruth Friedman, whose family had just moved to Squirrel Hill.  They dated for the rest of high school at Allderdice, although he was the business manager for school dances and Ruth always complained she had to sit on the sidelines instead of dancing with him because he was busy handling tickets and other business affairs at the dances.

In high school and at Beth Shalom, Sam became very close friends with Gene Lipman, who later became a rabbi, did courageous and important work as an Army chaplain with the underground during and after the Holocaust, helping move refugees to Israel, and became the Social Action Director for the Reform movement.  Gene’s influence on Sam was profound, and they remained close friends until their deaths.

The most traumatic event of Sam’s life was the death of his brother Nathan in 1937.  Nathan was a dentist and was apparently showing off his ether machine to friends in a way that it exploded and killed him. 

Sam never really talked about his emotions, and he did not talk about Nathan except to tell stories of their childhood, and that he had been a dentist, which Sam always related with great pride.

In Sam’s senior year of high school, his parents moved to Los Angeles because they were both in failing health and thought the climate there would be better for them.  Sam stayed in Pittsburgh, living with his sister Ida and her husband Meyer, to finish school, and then he joined his parents in LA.  He attended Los Angeles City College and then USC until he had gained California residency, at which point he transferred to UCLA.  At USC he studied history with Will Durant, whose 7 volume series The Study of Civilization Sam eventually bought, and which I have.  Durant really impressed Sam with the breadth and depth of his understanding of world history.  Sam always was especially interested in history and wanted to be a historian but needed a job where he could earn money, so he never pursued graduate studies in history.   Sam would always bring up historical precedents for current events we would discuss at the dinner table and loved to read major historical books as they were published.

Sam’s parents returned to Pittsburgh in 1939; his father died there in 1939 and his mother in 1940. When he returned to Pittsburgh, Sam transferred to the University of Pittsburgh and called Ruth Friedman, who was a student there, for a date.  She was dating Buddy Beck, a Carnegie Tech drama student from New York, and she didn’t give Sam an immediate positive response.  He said to her, “Will you or won’t you go out with me?” as an ultimatum; she said yes, broke up with Beck, and the rest is history.

After graduating from Pitt in 1940, Sam spent the summer on a cross-country road trip with his good friend Karl Stark.  He kept a very interesting journal of this trip, and there are some good pictures he took, which I’ll include in a later version of this story when I can find them.  In the fall, Sam enrolled in the Retail Training Bureau at Pitt (a business school that gave a degree similar to MBAs today) while working for a family friend at Frank & Seder department store in downtown Pittsburgh.   He and Ruth, who was now teaching elementary school, tried to make plans to marry, but the United States had entered World War II, and Sam expected to be drafted, so they waited to see what would happen.  But he was classified as 4-F—physically unable to serve, because of his severe asthma and skin allergies.  They made plans to marry and did, on June 28, 1942.  They held the wedding at Ruth’s family’s home on Beechwood Blvd. in Squirrel Hill, with Sam’s family rabbi and close friend, Benjamin Lichter,  officiating officially and their dear friend Gene Lipman, who would be ordained in another week, also officiating.  Ruth’s parents wanted their rabbi, from Beth Shalom, to also officiate, but Ruth thought 3 rabbis would be a bit much.

For their honeymoon, Ruth and Sam took a cross-country train trip—Sam showing off all the places he had been, with the highlights in Los Angeles, since had lived there and become an expert tour guide.  They also took mules to ride down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon—and they were so exhausted that they missed the mule train up the next morning, had to stay an extra day, missing their train out of the Canyon and having to reschedule the rest of their trip.  Nevertheless, it was an exciting trip for them both, one they told their children about constantly, promising us a cross-country trip if only Wendy would stop asking “When are we going to get there?” every time the car pulled out of the driveway.  In the summer of 1969, they took all of us (except Lewis, who went to Interlochen instead) on that cross-country trip.

As soon as they got back to Pittsburgh, Sam received his draft notice.  By summer 1942, the demands of the war were so great that asthma was no longer a barrier.  Sam did basic training and then was accepted into Officer Candidate School, winding up in the Transportation Corps, as a lieutenant assigned to shipping railroad cars on ships out of Long Beach, California.  Once he was in California, Ruth joined him there for the rest of the war.

Sam did not like to discuss his military service.  He told me a few stories that involved uncomfortable interactions with senior officers, and I suspect that he experienced anti-Semitism.  However, I have no details.  However, his service was written up in the Jewish Chronicle in 1944:

 I was born, Sam and Ruth’s first child, on May 22, 1945, at the Torrance California Army hospital.  The war in Europe had just ended; the first time I slept through the night was on V-J day, allowing them to celebrate.

After the war ended, Ruth returned to Pittsburgh with me, but Sam was delayed because a locomotive for which he was responsible could not be located.  Eventually he was put in charge of troop trains, accompanying soldiers going home for discharge.  He told me that many of the soldiers simply got off the train when it stopped near their home towns, not bothering to go to the city were their discharges were supposed to be processed.  He didn’t try to stop them.

After he returned to Pittsburgh, we moved in with Ruth’s grandfather, George Seigel, to the third floor of his house on Nicholson Street in Squirrel Hill.  Sam began to work for his brother-in-law, Jack Rosenberg, who had been a chemistry professor at Duquesne University but had developed a method for corrugating and coating steel for use as siding for military and other buildings and opened a business to produce it.  Plasteel Products Corp. was located in Washington PA, and Sam drove back and forth on Route 19 every day between Pittsburgh and Washington until just before Wendy’s birth on June 19, 1948, when they bought their own home, on Marlin Drive in Mt. Lebanon, to make his commute more reasonable and because they anticipated sending their children to the excellent schools in Mt. Lebanon.  Of course, his sister Sarah and her husband Jack—his boss—and their family already lived in Mt. Lebanon.

In 1950 Sam and Ruth, along with a few other Jewish couples in Mt. Lebanon, founded Temple Emanuel.  There were very few Jews living in Mt. Lebanon (in fact, the Virginia Manor section of the town had restrictive covenants which prohibited sales to Jews), but Sam and Ruth, and others there, felt that an organized Jewish presence there was important.  Temple Emanuel was established in the Reform movement, which Sam and Ruth had already associated with at Rodef Shalom, despite having been raised in the Orthodox and Conservative traditions.  Ruth had very negative experiences with Jewish practice growing up, and Sam felt that she would be more comfortable in Reform.  Furthermore, Gene Lipman had been ordained in the Reform movement, and Sam, like Gene, was drawn to the intellectual and social approaches taken by the movement at that time.  (Founding a congregation may have been in Sam’s genes; around the turn of the century, his uncles had founded the Beth Jehudah minyan in Allegheny (the North Side) so they could have a place for daily prayer near their businesses.)

Both Sam and Ruth taught in the Temple religious school in the beginning; Ruth made the Ten Commandments to sit on top of the portable ark that was used as services took places at various locations while the congregation had no building, and Sam continued to teach older students for many years. 

Lewis was born September 30, 1952 at the Marlin Drive house, the morning after Yom Kippur, when Ruth had a few drinks the night before at the break-the-fast dinner and didn’t realize in the morning that she’d gone into labor, until she was halfway down the steps in the house.  Sam called the doctor and delivered the baby based on what he was told on the phone; his sister Sarah came to the house and helped out.

Alan was born—at Allegheny General Hospital, where Wendy and maybe Sam himself had been born—on February 10, 1955.  Sam had an active part in that delivery, too; at one point, none of the hospital staff were answering call buttons from Ruth, so Sam took a chair and threw it into the hallway to get the staff’s attention.  (It worked.)  After Alan was born, we moved to a larger, just-built-for-us house on Folkstone Drive in the Cedarhurst neighborhood of Mt. Lebanon.

Although Sam worked very hard, six days a week, all the years he did sales for Plasteel, travelling around the country for one or two weeks at a time, he always enjoyed spending his time off with the family, whether at home or going to parks or on vacations at the beach.  And taking Daddy to the airport, or picking him up, was a  regular adventure for our family.  We would watch the planes take off and land, and he would tell us about his adventures working in places from New York to Alaska.  He would send us postcards while he was gone, which I collected, and he always brought each of us some small gift when he came home.

One of the most important things that Sam made sure we did regularly as a family was visit his sister Florence at Polk State School & Hospital, near Oil City PA.  Florence had contracted polio during the 1918 flu epidemic and a few years later, she went to live in this state institution.  However, her brothers and sisters always visited her and treated her like any sister they were visiting, although she was unable to walk or talk.  Sam, Sarah, Ida, and Tres always seemed to be able to communicate with her, talking to her in a regular way and understanding what she was trying to express.  We would take her gifts, take her out to get ice cream or eat dinner in Oil City, or just sit and talk and play with her.

Family dinners every night were most important for Sam.  Not only did we always eat delicious home-cooked meals, but he made sure the discussion involved current events, history, religion, music, family—everything important.  And he engaged his children in all of those discussions.  Shabbos evening dinners would be followed by going to services at Temple (although Wendy rebelled and went to football games, much to his displeasure).  Passover was a major family event, usually with one Seder at Sarah and Jack’s house and the other one at our own home.  Chanukah was always celebrated with great fun and lots of presents.

When Sam was promoted to Vice President of Plasteel, sometime in the late 1950s, this distinguished-looking photograph was published in local papers:

 

After years of working at Plasteel, Sam realized that Sarah and Jack’s sons were going to be the ones promoted within the organization, and he began looking for an alternative career.  In 1962 he bought the Ben Reynolds & Company music store in Washington, PA.  This was the most enjoyable work he could do.  He loved music, and the store gave him the opportunity to spend time with musicians and ordinary people who also loved music.  He sold pianos, organs, orchestra and band instruments, guitars, sheet music, records, stereos, TVs, and other products that related to the joy of music.  A music professor at W&J College would come in at lunch to just talk with Sam about their shared favorite topic.  The business expanded to having a branch within Kaufmann’s Department Store.

Eventually, however, Sam’s health began to fail, thanks to a lifetime of smoking cigarettes.  He had a heart attack in 1967, at a time when bed rest was the only known remedy.  He changed his diet, giving up eggs and butter, but while he claimed to have quit smoking, he continued to smoke secretly for the rest of his life.

In June 1967, they celebrated their 25^th wedding anniversary with a formal dinner party with family and friends.  The next day, they had even more friends and family with them “at home.”

 In the summer of 1968, Sam and Ruth took Lewis and Alan to Europe. 

In approximately 1970, they traveled to Israel with friends, meeting Wendy there while she was traveling for a year in Europe and living for some time on a kibbutz.  Sam really was moved by Israel and considered moving there (making aliyah), but he was confused by his inability to transfer his knowledge of Biblical and liturgical Hebrew to the ordinary language used in the street and to label products in grocery stores.

However, after his health got worse, Ben Reynolds was sold, and Sam and Ruth also sold their Mt. Lebanon home and bought a duplex in Squirrel Hill, a block away from Ruth’s mother’s home—and architecturally identical to it!  Sam helped Emalene a great deal, and he worked n the real estate development business of his close friend Seymour Baskin.  He was involved in remodeling the Webster Hall building in Oakland and developing a new community near Latrobe.  He enjoyed being involved in those properties.  Although they now lived in Squirrel Hill, Sam continued to be involved with Temple Emanuel and was very close to its then-rabbi, Bill Sajowitz, and its cantor, Murray Gold.  Despite several more heart attacks, Sam tried hard to remain active in the community and with his friends and family.

He enjoyed spending time with his first grandchildren, Kevin and Erica, when he went to Arizona or when they visited Pittsburgh.

He and Ruth bought a log cabin near Eighty Four PA and began working on remodeling it, thinking it would be a vacation retreat or retirement home.  He really enjoyed tearing out old plaster and trudging around the property in boots.  Plus, it was near Wendy’s farm in New Freeport.  However, the project became less and less feasible, and the property was sold before they finished it.

Sam always enjoyed going to the farm, and after Wesley was born, he loved opportunities to play with him.

On June 9, 1978, Sam was walking back to his downtown office after purchasing stereo headphones to give his nephew Gordon Friedman as a Bar Mitzvah present.  He had a massive heart attack and collapsed and died on the street.  He was 59 years old.

Sam, you were born not quite 3 years later and were named for your grandfather.  It’s too bad that you were never able to get to know him, but know that it is a great honor for you to bear his name.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!