Along came the 1930s and the Great Depression. My father's household squeezed together, literally cramming great-grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, in all about ten people in one small dwelling. Whoever could find work earned a few cents and together resources were pooled. My father was an only child, but his ten-year older cousin, Albert, who, as his mother's youngest brother, was also technically his uncle, was functioned for him as an older brother. When the depression hit, my grandfather labored long hours as a furrier in grimy, crowded sweatshop condition, while my great-grandfather worked as a shoe repairer. Standards of sanitation and health were abysmal, and my grandfather (who would live to 94 years old in his own home without assistance or any significant health problems) contracted, or brought with him from Europe, various ailments including a constant respiratory condition that required treatment out of town in the fresh air of the countryside.

My father it turns out fell victim to one of the two scourges of the time: tuberculosis (probably what also afflicted my grandfather). The year was 1936 when my father became infected with TB. With no anti-biotics, Tuberculosis was a serious, often fatal condition and highly contagious especially in cramped quarters. So a heart-wrenching decision was made by his parents to ship their eleven year old off to a rural sanitorium, a ward of the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, in a place with the most unlikely of names, Thistletown. There my father spent three years of his life recovering (click on photos to expand). Infection spread, and ultimately, one hip and one knee were fused with metal plates and leaving his right leg to be stunted for the rest of his life. While at Thistletown he was visited every weekend by his doting mother. Although he was lonely, he was resourceful. He wrote to the RCA Victor company and explained his situation and asked if they would send him the latest model radio, a fancy job with a wooden console and dozens of plastic buttons. And send it they did. There were no radios or other distractions in Thistletown so my father spent those long three years collecting stamps (also by mail) and listening to his radio. The radio was a much coveted possession; so much so that when it was time for him to be dicharged, the hospital tried to keep it as their own. My uncle Albert had to go to the hospital and demand that it be returned, so family lore tells it, anyway.

When my father came back to his home, he was a teenager, but he was lame. Even back in his own home he slept, weather permitting, in the back of the house where there was plenty of "fresh air," thought to be a remedy for whatever ailed him. As he reached puberty one leg grew longer than the other and he was forced to walk with a lift on one foot and a noticeable limp. World War Two had just broken out and the older boys in the neighborhood were shipping off to the war. My father, who had no friends his own age, found that he lost the company of those he could rely on for compassionate attention, including his uncle/cousin/brother Albert who went off to join the U.S. Army.

So for the past seventy years, wherever my father went in public children pointed and adults stared. When he sat, his leg was fully extended because his neither his him nor his knee could bend. Until I was ten my family didn't own a car, and so we depended on public transportation. With escalators rare, and not "kneeling" buses, it was a slow, torturous journey when we went out as a family, say for a day at the Zoo. And yet, despite that, he was never handicapped or disabled in my mind. He was just my dad. He never threw a ball or came out into the yard. He never walked to the park with us, or rode a bike. He never drove a car, so for all our swimming and skating lessons and choir practices, all our synagogue youth group field trips, my mother was the family chauffeur. Still my father was always dependable; he knew the answers to everything. It seemed that he had spent his whole life digesting encyclopaedias whole (and he may well have). Despite having a degree in Pharmacy, sometimes you could swear he sounded more like a physician. As we were growing up we could scarcely notice the wince in his face as he felt the beginnings of his degrading hip and knee joints. He struggled valiantly, never complaining, to stay as mobile as much as he could. He continued well after so many men would have given up. Until this day, though is now bed-ridden, he has never resorted to a wheelchair (more on that later, I'm getting a little ahead of myself). If my father has taught me anything, it is perseverence. Few of us battle physical infirmities and stigma in the way that my father did. Yet despite the material poverty of his origins, and the cruel slow-paced, limp of his gait, he forced himself to every class and then opened his own pharmacy, achieving the goal of being his own boss.

Over the decades, he toiled as a pharmacist and entrepreneur, each morning rising at the crack of dawn in the 1950s and early 60s to open his little drug store. His mother's death from cancer in 1955 when he was 30 was a tremendous blow to him, as it had been she who took such loving care of him throughout his life.

In those days the druggist was also a tobacconist and the malt shop and the place you went to buy magazines. There my father put his heart and soul, his sweat equity as we would call it today. He raised himself up from his humble beginnings and became a solid member of the middle class. He grew up in a world, "when girls were girls and men were men," and the creepy feeling that my father was a mild version of the Archie Bunker stereotype seemed more like reality than fiction when we watched it together decades later. (Each of us surely seeing something entirely different on the black and white TV.) My father's physical limitations caught up with him at an early age. By the 1970s he was having increasing difficulty walking and standing, not good for a pharmacist who must be on his feet all day.
To be continued....

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