Читать книгу Sid Gillman - Josh Katzowitz - Страница 11

two EARLY LIFE

David Gillman lived a long, fruitful life, and he eventually would pass those survivalist genes down to his son, Sid. David was born in 1885 in Austria, and after he immigrated to the United States, he lived in New York, working as a police detective. He was a strong man with a well-built body, and he was just as strong in his principles (for instance, he refused to let his mother, who lived into her 100s, move to America because he was worried about her traveling in her old age). He would eventually pass all those traits down to his son as well.

David Gillman met his wife, Sarah Dickerman, while in the big city. He was an immigrant marrying a native New Yorker, and he eventually swept her away to Minneapolis. By then, David had left law enforcement, dabbled a bit in the grocery store business, and years after he made his way north, he operated movie theaters. As it turns out, love of movies might have been the most important characteristic David bestowed upon Sid.

David was a friendly sort, and he made many friends when he and Sarah moved to the upper Midwest. Up and down the street, David was well known and well liked. He was basically a politician, shaking hands, slapping backs, and making himself a popular figure in the northern part of Minneapolis.

As a detective, he taught himself how people would act and react in certain scenarios. As a grocer, he taught himself how people wanted their lives organized. As a theater owner, he learned how to separate people from their money and then keep him coming back for more. He knew how to make people happy—or at least happy enough so he could keep food on his table—and that, sadly, was not necessarily a gene he passed down to his son. It was a gene Sid, in his later life, could have used.

Sarah hadn’t finished school and couldn’t read or write, so she’d often bribe family members to read the letters sent to her by letting them scarf down poppy seed cookies as payment. When the Gillmans moved to Minnesota, she was the housewife and the caretaker of the family she helped produce.

First, she gave birth to Irving in 1905, and soon after, she bore Leonard, who died as a child. Nearly a decade later, she finally got her baby daughter when Lillian emerged from the womb.

But on Oct. 26, 1911, two days after Orville Wright flew a glider for almost 10 minutes in North Carolina, the father of the modern passing offense breathed his first breath and screamed his first scream. His parents named him Sidney Gillman—they decided against burdening him with a middle name—and they bestowed upon him the Hebrew name of Yisra’el, the same name given to Jacob after he wrestled God’s angel.

Sarah spent the rest of her life, which cancer cut short at 52 years old, as a homemaker and the spiritual head of the household. Like the vast majority of families of the time, David earned the money while Sarah made the family run smoothly at home. She went through many low points—her father, Louis Dickerman, deserted the family when she was a young girl; she suffered through the death of Leonard; and she experienced the anti-Semitism that plagued Minneapolis like a horde of locusts—but she had strength and she had wisdom, and she made sure the family was well cared for at all times. “She was a doll,” Sid said. “A sweet lady.”

The Gillmans weren’t overly religious, though they belonged to the Beth El temple, where the men sat downstairs and the women were segregated to the balcony. The Gillmans acknowledged the Jewish holidays, but in the end, he didn’t think much about studying Torah or listening to the rabbi’s sermons and the cantor’s prayers.

Instead, he was into sports. Really, really into sports. For Sid, life was about athletics and very little else. From the time he was a little boy and discussed his future as a baseball player with Irving as they slept in the same bed until the time he graduated from North High School, his spirituality was tied to a baseball, a football, and a basketball.

“I didn’t belong to the French club,” Gillman said. “I didn’t belong to the debating club. I was a football, basketball, baseball player, and didn’t care about anything else except North High rah.”

His mother, Sarah, didn’t accept that. She didn’t want a boy who cared only about the crack of the bat in the spring and of the shoulder pads in the fall. She preferred a more well-rounded son. A son who could read the books she could not and one who could fill the house with beautiful music in which she could bask.

When Sid was 7 years old, he was introduced to the piano and to classical piano lessons, and for the next 10 years, he dutifully practiced on the family spinet. An hour a day, oftentimes mind-numbingly dull, the grandfather clock near him ticking away ever so slowly. Eventually, he became quite a good player. Good enough to earn him plenty of money in high school and college, thanks to well-paying gigs, and to keep him as one of the best-dressed students at North High.

He was the ringleader of a small combo of jazz players. Sometimes, five players. Sometimes, four. Sometimes, six. They called themselves Sid Gillman and his Red Hot Chilis, and they’d play your bar mitzvah, your Sweet 16, and the reception after you made your marital vows.

“We played practically every wedding in Minneapolis,” Sid said. “If you wanted to get married, it was to our music.”

Music was a passion he’d hold the rest of his life. His collection of jazz records was legendary, and until his hands and old age forbid it, he continued to play the piano whenever he wasn’t studying football. Yet, while his mother wanted to instill the arts in him—keep him as well-rounded as possible and take sports off the brain for at least some of the time—Gillman resisted. As Gillman got older, he practiced the piano, and afterward, he rushed out the door to play football with his buddies. The arrangement, though, didn’t always work for Sid. So, he turned devious, and one day when Sarah wasn’t looking, he set the clocks in his house ahead 20 minutes.

“One afternoon, the gang wouldn’t wait, so I cheated,” Sid said. “Mother let me go after that. She figured anyone who wanted to play that rough game of football that badly should have the chance.”

Never again would there be a conflict between music and football. Football, in Gillman’s mind, was always No. 1. His Red Hot Chilis were No. 2.

But life changed for Gillman one day when, while playing a Sweet 16 party, he glanced over from his piano and gazed at the pretty brunette who had just arrived with a suitor. That’s the day his priorities shifted. Football was still No. 1—more or less, it always would be—but his Red Hot Chilis were about to fall to No. 3 on his priority list.

Isaac Reisberg was born in the Ukraine in 1895, and he immigrated to the U.S. not knowing what he could or even wanted to do. He learned one thing very quickly, though, upon his arrival at Ellis Island. Americans liked to make it as easy as possible when it came to foreign surnames.

When Reisberg showed the customs agent his documentation, the agent took one look at the Reisberg moniker and proclaimed, “You don’t need that much name.” The man standing in front of him now would be forever known as Isaac Berg, and that man slowly emerged into his new world.

Berg eventually met and married Regina Frankenstein—the two were wed at the Polish childhood home of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister—and they made their way to Minneapolis, where Isaac worked at a dry-cleaning plant with some friends.

As influential as Sarah Gillman was in Sid’s life inside their house at 1008 Sheridan Avenue, Regina was just as dominant in the raising of her daughter, Esther Berg, who was born in Minneapolis on June 12, 1912, and grew up two miles from Sid.

“She was a beautiful person,” Esther said by the time she, herself, was an old woman. “She was a little person with a big mind. She was one of the smartest women. She had a wonderful philosophy about life and about people that has carried on to us. She always thought there was something good in everything, and my kids say the same about me, that I’m a Pollyanna. But that’s the feeling she imbued me with. It made it easy for me to love.”

While Sid thought about little else but sports, Regina and Isaac opened up a world of culture for Esther, a world with limitless horizons. Isaac, whom Esther described as a dreamer, introduced the family to the arts. They attended lectures. They took in the theater, where one day, they watched future Academy Award winner George Arliss star in The Merchant of Venice. Regina dragged Esther to ballet lessons, though this was an interest that soon faded away. Her parents, though, tried to make her well rounded, and she loved them for it.

“They filled us with that,” Esther said.

Esther remembers herself as extremely shy, and whenever a stranger approached, she hid behind Regina’s skirt and whimpered until she had been left alone. But by the time she reached kindergarten, she had asserted herself as the official “teacher’s helper,” and her personality bloomed. No longer would she hide in her mother’s clothing. Instead, she sparkled.

By the time she reached high school, the outgoing girl already had played the lead of Mimi Mayflower in The Return of Hi Jinks, participated in another play that was performed solely in French, taken over the French Club presidency, and made her mark on the debate team. Because the family didn’t have much money and because she was so petite, she could wear greatly discounted sample clothes, and eventually, she learned to knit and sew (many years later, she created the wedding dress for her oldest daughter). Every Sunday, her family of six (she had two brothers and an older sister) would pack lunch, climb into a streetcar headed for Lake Harriet, and spend the day attending band concerts. “There was,” Esther said, “always something with music.”

Esther, though, loved her sports. Really, really loved her sports. She got that from her mother, who would sit next to the radio and listen to baseball games every day. Sometimes during the evening, Regina would board the streetcar with Esther and her brother Ted, and they’d set sail to watch the Minneapolis Black Hawks play hockey. On the weekends, Regina and Esther listened to big fights on the radio, like the night of September 23, 1926, when Gene Tunney beat Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship before 120,000 spectators in Philadelphia.

“I cried for days when Dempsey lost,” Esther said. “He was my all-time hero.”

Naturally, Esther read the local paper’s sports page, and every once in a while, she’d flip past an article about Sid Gillman, who was fast becoming a star athlete at North High. She’d turn the page and move on to other items and other subjects.

Then, one day, she accepted a date to a family friend’s Sweet 16 party. In the middle of the living room was a piano player in front of a baby grand, providing the soundtrack of the day, and she glanced over and saw the handsome athlete. Esther remembered that sweet music for the rest of her life.

When the Jews first immigrated to Minneapolis, it was after the Civil War when whites had begun to spread to the Midwest and beyond in an attempt to develop the smaller towns and make them into strong, blue-collar cities. While St. Paul already had established two synagogues by 1878, only about 100 Jews lived in Minneapolis by 1880. The Jews came from Germany and were attracted by those industries the Anglo-Saxons had already begun to build. The unique immigrants began opening stores that sold clothes and other goods to the lumberjacks and workers around the area.

By 1900, the Jewish population had grown to 6,000, and a decade later, it had more than doubled to 13,000. By the time World War I ended, farming around the area was an endangered career, the labor industry and sawmills were dying off, and the opening of the Panama Canal was negatively impacting the Midwest’s railroad industry. As a result, the unemployed infiltrated Minneapolis and St. Paul, looking for work. And they were angry.

Minneapolis’s culture of anti-Semitism became a real problem with the influx of unemployed citizens (though, curiously, the citizens of St. Paul were much more tolerant). Religious leaders invoked hateful language when referencing Jews, and those in the community forbid them from taking part in civic and social organizations—that meant no entry into the Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club, or Toastmasters International. They couldn’t buy houses. They couldn’t take certain jobs.

“The telephone companies, the banks, they never hired a Jew in their lives,” said Budd Guttman, a first cousin of Gillman’s who was about a decade younger and grew up in Minneapolis idolizing him. “You couldn’t sell your house to a Jew. That was in the real estate guides.”

Writes Laura E. Webb in a 1991 edition of Minnesota History magazine: “The post–World War I years were marked by a continuation of the 100 percent Americanism brought on by the war, but without an external enemy, these xenophobic feelings were directed inward at recent immigrants and their families…. Historian John Higham wrote of this period: ‘The Jews faced a sustained agitation that singled them out from the other new immigrant groups blanketed by racial nativism—an agitation that reckoned them the most dangerous force undermining the nation.’”

Jewish gangsters in Minneapolis during the 1920s didn’t help their standing in the community either, especially when people read in the newspaper rags that gangsters like Isadore “Kidd Cann” Blumenfeld and Mose Barnett had been linked to the police department and the mayor in a sleazy web of corruption and crime. The editor of the Saturday Press, Jay Near, went on the attack in 1929, writing, “I simply state a fact when I say that 90 percent of the crimes committed against society in this city are committed by Jew gangsters … It is Jew, Jew, Jew, as long as one cares to comb over the records.” This was at a time when Jews made up less than 5 percent of the state’s population, making Near’s assertion a little hard to believe.

That didn’t stop Near from getting even more vicious: “I have withdrawn allegiance to anything with a hook nose that eats herring. I have adopted the sparrow as my national bird … until [the Ku Klux Klan] hammers the eagles’ beak out straight.” At the time, Near was seen as extreme, but that doesn’t mean he was alone in his views, particularly when an area evangelist named Luke Radar spewed some of the same hateful rhetoric for a quarter-century and gathered a rather large following.

Guttman remembers the anti-Semitism well. He remembers racing down the alleys between houses after school because if his xenophobic schoolmates caught him, they’d give him a beating. That’s why he learned to box in seventh grade, so he could teach his peers some respect and so that his legs wouldn’t have to carry him so fast if he found trouble. Boxing for Guttman was a necessity, and Gillman surely felt the sting of discrimination as well.

“Growing up,” Guttman said, “I thought my middle name was Kike.”

The intolerance in Minneapolis lasted until the late 1940s, but the winds began to shift after an article by Carey McWilliams in Common Ground magazine shamed the city. McWilliams wrote there was an “iron curtain” that separated the Jews and the Gentiles, and he declared Minneapolis the U.S. capital of anti-Semitism.

“It was a blow to the city’s solar plexus,” said Hyman Berman, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Minnesota.

Mayor Hubert Humphrey, who went on to serve as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president before losing the presidency to Richard Nixon in 1968, appointed a special commission to investigate the citywide discrimination, and he eventually used that successful paradigm shift to fuel the rest of his political career.

But that was many years in the future. Many years after Sid and Esther had left the city. For them, the idea that Jews were lower than the dirt that good, native Minnesotans walked on was still prevalent. For them, the idea of a Jew buying a house or giving him a job was downright offensive. “I did have aspirations,” Esther said. “I wanted to be a schoolteacher very badly. I remember discussing this with my senior high school counselor. She said, “You know, Esther. With you being Jewish, they’re not going to hire you in Minneapolis. Do you want to go to a small town?’ She sort of talked me out of it.”

After high school, she got a job with an insurance company as a receptionist and took night classes at the University of Minneapolis, declaring a psychology major. But she never finished her degree. And she never got to be a schoolteacher. Neither Sid nor Esther would ever really break away from the anti-Semitic culture of the Midwest. It followed them, haunted them, and changed the track of their careers. But it also helped shape their personalities and the way they treated others. They learned—independently and collectively—to live with it. But, like Guttman, they also decided to fight back. They just landed their body blows without having to strap on boxing gloves.

“Sid was the first kid that left the Jewish ghetto and became well known,” Guttman said. “He was our hero. He was our Jackie Robinson.”

With Sid’s name appearing more and more frequently in the local newspapers, Sarah Gillman began keeping a scrapbook of all his athletic exploits. At that point Gillman didn’t know what he wanted from life—whether he should try to play sports in college or continue to furnish his high-end wardrobe with the dough he collected from his music—but he did know this: sports was still his No. 1 love. And Sarah was destined to record it the best way she knew how: by cutting out the newspaper articles she couldn’t read.

At North High School, Gillman made the all-city football team in 1927 as an offensive guard, in 1928 as an offensive tackle, and in 1929 as an offensive end. In basketball, he was an all-city guard who played excellent defense and had a nice touch from outside range, though he later said, “As a basketball player, I would have made a good goalie in hockey.” In baseball, he could hit the ball and hold down first base pretty well.

After a stellar sophomore season in 1927, it didn’t appear he would play football at all in 1928. One Friday before the season began and just after he had returned from football camp, he had to be rushed to the hospital with an infected arm. He had suffered the infection days earlier from a small cut, probably in football camp, but only when the infection began to spread did he feel it was necessary to take medical precautions. Though it could have been some kind of smoke screen for his future opponents, his coach, Tom Kennedy, said he didn’t expect Gillman to play that season. Yet, Gillman started the first game and went on to become an all-city player at his new position.

Gillman battled a knee injury during his senior season and had to sit out a few games. He also was hampered by a charley horse all year, and as one overzealous reporter wrote, “He went into each game only through sheer nerve and grit” and with his “never say die attitude.” Before the 1929 season, Gillman was shifted to end (basically, a receiver who lined up near the offensive line) to make good use of his pass-catching abilities, though after catching three touchdown passes his sophomore year, he never scored again in high school. As one newspaper reporter put it, “he came through at his new post in brilliant fashion.” He was also helpful in carrying the ball in Kennedy’s end-around plays for which the coach was well known. But what really stood out in Sid’s game was his jumping ability to catch passes. That kind of talent meant colleges would be interested in securing his services for the next four years.

The year before, Clarence “Biggie” Munn—who played next to Sid on the North offensive line and who Gillman years later called “tougher than a month-old steak”—had committed to the University of Minnesota. Munn, who would go on to coach Michigan State to the 1952 national title, already was showing his potential as the best offensive lineman ever to play for the Gophers, and Gillman was getting plenty of attention from the Minnesota coaching staff. After all, he grew up just across the Mississippi River from campus.

Gillman, though, needed to gain weight. Already, he was a voracious eater, but Gillman weighed a skinny 185 pounds, and in order to play collegiate football, where everyone was bigger and faster, he needed to put on the poundage as soon as possible. So, Sid ate and ate, a habit that never quite worked its way out of his system.

“My brother, Don, used to walk home from school with Sid,” Budd Guttman said. “One day, my mom said she was going to make dinner for Sid and Don. Don said, “No, we had two corned beef sandwiches and a malted milk at the deli.’ My mother was talking to his mother on the phone, and later, Sarah called back and said that Sid ate a whole chicken when he got home.”

But his lean figure didn’t mean he wasn’t tough. On non-football Fridays, Gillman would try to cut out of piano lessons early and head to North Commons Park to play sandlot football with his buddies. He’d put on a uniform, and by the end of the game, he would be so black and blue that the bruises would last all week. That’s how brutal those games were, but it helped build the toughness and stubbornness in Sid that would last throughout his playing days and into his coaching career.

Some of that pluck is reflected in that scrapbook that Sarah so lovingly created and stored. Today, the 85-year-old book lives in the house of Sid’s youngest daughter, Terry, in San Francisco. Sid’s high school exploits take up about half the pages, and the other half consists of Sid’s collegiate career and various diplomas and love letters from his future wife. Eventually, the scrapbook will be placed in the hands of one of Sid’s grandchildren, where it will tell some of Sid’s story. But only a small portion. Only a small slice of how Gillman played on the field and a tiny portion of what was to come after high school and college.

When Sid would love two things: football, and a pretty girl named Esther.

On a Saturday afternoon in 1929, Esther Berg was invited to a Sweet 16 party, and she arrived on the arm of a long-forgotten suitor. Sid Gillman was already there, playing soft music on the baby grand. Esther undoubtedly knew about his athletic prowess and most likely recognized him, but she also was on a date and probably didn’t spend much of her time looking Gillman’s way.

Gillman, though, had a different reaction. Said Gillman, decades later as the two sat on the couch in their San Diego home and smiled at each other at the memory: “It was love at first sight. I looked at her and said, ‘She is mine.’” Then, Gillman got clever. He tapped a friend named Tom Egan, a fellow member of the all-city football team, to call Berg on the telephone the next day. The purpose of the call: to determine if Berg was going steady with the date she had brought to the Sweet 16 (she was not). Then, Egan, acting as proxy for Gillman, asked Berg out for the next Saturday (she accepted).

By the middle of the next week, Gillman had taken a job at another event and couldn’t pick her up for the date. So, Gillman asked if it would be OK if a friend of his picked her up from her house and brought her to the party (it was). After his gig was complete and Gillman’s day of work was through, Esther and Sid had their date.

And that, as Esther liked to tell her daughters, was the beginning of forever.

They went out a few times but didn’t see much of each other, because she had graduated from high school early and worked a job and because Gillman was busy playing football and basketball. There just wasn’t enough time. But something had sparked. By the time Gillman had graduated and was trying to figure out where he should go to college, she knew that he was the guy for her. Gillman also was smitten with the petite brunette.

“I have to tell you, she was the prettiest girl in Minneapolis,” Gillman said. “She used to stop traffic she was so pretty.”

Still, he knew he couldn’t stay in Minneapolis. Even with Esther, he knew he had to get away for college. Though Minnesota courted him, Ohio State had a secret weapon. A man named George Hauser, a former star at Minnesota who was then the line coach at Ohio State, talked to Gillman about enrolling at the Columbus school. It was 750 miles away from home—and from Esther. But Hauser was persuasive. And Gillman figured the only way to move forward with Esther was to move far away without her. Gillman worried that if he stayed in Minnesota then, he might never leave the state.

“I felt that she and I had to separate for a while,” Gillman said. “I would have said, ‘Let’s get married,’ and she would have said, ‘No, we’re not getting married until you get your degree and make something of yourself.’ I knew that if I went to Minnesota, I wouldn’t have lasted very long. [Going to Ohio State] was the smartest thing I ever did.”

Said Esther: “He knew it was most important that he get his degree first. He didn’t go into football or any sports education [major]. He was a political science major and a history minor. He was going to be a lawyer. I thought, ‘God, that’s even better than what I need.’”

Funny thing about Gillman’s plans, though. Thanks to an eccentric, most likely crazy coach named Francis Schmidt, Gillman’s judicially charged ideas were transformed into something else entirely when his time at Ohio State was finished. Football was his life before he met Esther. It was always priority No. 1. With her by his side, he still couldn’t escape that equation. He thought he could be a lawyer, maybe play a little piano on the weekends, build a family and be a regular guy. But in reality, he was destined to spend his waking (and some of his non-waking) hours inside a stadium, inside a film room, inside the locker room.

Football, you see, was still No. 1, and at Ohio State, it would become his career as well as his love.