Sometimes My Leqerville Friends Left Our Apartment Through the Front Door: The Life of an American Scientist

© 2018 Melvin Shaw. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-54395-441-8 eBook 978-1-54395-442-5

For Leqervillians and their kin, and to Marcia Kahn, my first kindergarten teacher.

I am indebted to my wonderful editor, Michael Fulgenzi, for translating these tales from Brooklynese into English.

I would also like to thank Lillian Hoddeson for a critical reading of the manuscript.

To all of my dear friends who are so very important in my life—and you know who you are:

Because this book is about my childhood and how it influenced my professional life, you probably won’t find yourself in this book.

Watch for the sequel!

Fondly,

Mel

Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 HARRY AND THE SWEDISH HOSPITAL – 1936

CHAPTER 2 KINDERGARTEN – 1941

CHAPTER 3 LOUIE THE WANGOO – 1947

CHAPTER 4 YETTA AND CARMINE – 1950

CHAPTER 5 CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES – 1953

CHAPTER 6 MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT – 1953

CHAPTER 7 A BROOKLYN JEW VISITS THE SOUTH – 1956

CHAPTER 8 LEWISOHN STADIUM – 1957

CHAPTER 9 ENGAGED – 1959

CHAPTER 10 BRIDGE – 1960

CHAPTER 11 ECK AND VAN VLECK – 1963

CHAPTER 12 SLAMMER – 1966

CHAPTER 13 PHYSICS IS FUN! – 1968

CHAPTER 14 FUR – 1982

CHAPTER 15 A THERAPIST EMERGES – 1983

CHAPTER 16 MY MOTHER’S EULOGY – 1987

CHAPTER 17 IF I WERE A RICH MAN,

I WOULD HAVE A NICE HOUSE – 1993

CHAPTER 18 THE NARCISSIST – 1998

CHAPTER 19 BEDS AND BEDROOMS, OR,

LIFE WITH MY GRANDPARENTS – 2005

CHAPTER 20 ANTI-SEMITISM – 2006

CHAPTER 21 THE MOST HATED MAN ON EARTH – 2008

CHAPTER 22 A TOILET STALL ADVENTURE, Or,

PSYCHOTHERAPY IS FUN, TOO – 2009

CHAPTER 23 HARVEY’S WORLD – 2010

CHAPTER 24 BUNNY AND MARCIA – 2012

CHAPTER 25 PAUL AND DONALD – 2016

CHAPTER 26 WHAT EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

TEACHES ABOUT THE REASONS FOR THE ELECTION

OF DONALD TRUMP – 2017

Works Cited

CHAPTER 27 AL ATTLES – 2017

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bibliography

FOREWoRD

Most of this book was discovered, or, rather, rediscovered, by Melvin during a move. Chapters he had written at various points of change or of reflection in his life were buried in a box in a closet—he had assumed they were lost. Once reacquainted with them, he was motivated to get to work on them, to bring them together cohesively, and to share them. Our review of them, and Melvin’s desire to present them, was chronological, beginning with Melvin’s birth, and thus did the overall effort become his memoir. Melvin continued to write and to revise as we worked, sometimes to get things right, sometimes to bridge a gap, sometimes to express his thoughts on our current world.

Melvin begins with his experiences growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in Leqerville, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. From there, he carries us through his years as a student athlete at Brooklyn College, his graduate studies at the Case Institute of Technology, his professional career at the United Technologies Research Laboratory and at Wayne State University, and his experiences as a psychologist.

Overall, Melvin focuses on transitions—childhood to adulthood, metropolitan to provincial, provincial to suburban, multicultural to mono-cultural and back again—through the lens of a Jewish American who came of age during a time of great American prosperity. What makes Melvin’s perspective unique is that he is both a physicist and a psychologist, an academic who is also enmeshed in the non-academic, suburban world. Throughout this book he frames religio- and geopolitical conflicts against the background of his own his triumphs and failures, bringing to bear his wisdom on subjects as far ranging as stickball and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Although this effort is very much about self-examination, it is also about the American Jewish experience, postwar New York, and the professional life of a physicist and psychologist in suburban Metropolitan Detroit. Engaging, early scenes from his youth are tempered by the conditions of his upbringing, and they set the stage for the examination that follows. Who is Melvin? What inspires him? What motivates him? In one essential way, as they play out here, the answers to those questions are no different for Melvin as they are for all of us: they change. They change with experience, with wisdom, with self-reflection, and ultimately, with mercy.

What I appreciated most while working with Melvin on this book, beyond the friendship I developed with him, was the didactic impulse of his narrative, at the heart of which is the value of looking forward, or the notion that if one is to look back, then one is to do so in order to look ahead, to advance, to get beyond whatever it is one needs to, regardless of the effort involved to figure out what that thing—real or imagined, forced or self-imposed—actually is.

There can be nobility in narcissism. And it’s within the pages of this book.

Michael Fulgenzi

INTRODUCTION

Although I was born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1936, my life really began in 1942, when I moved to a large apartment building in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In Yiddish slang, we called our neighborhood Leqerville, with no u’ following the q" (we were years ahead of other Brooklynites who, later on, would become a little more famous than we did for altering proper English). Serviced by Public School (PS) 91, the area was partially embedded in the area called Pigtown, where some of the Italian immigrants raised pigs.

In addition to our own, we similarly gave Yiddish nicknames to other local neighborhoods, particularly Cockerville (serviced by PS 161) and Schnorerville (serviced by PS 241). Translated to English, a lequer is a licker, or, rather, an ass-kisser. A cocker is one who sits and shits all the time. A schnorer is someone who tries to get something for nothing. You get the idea.

Leqerville, loosely shown and defined above on the map as the dashed region of Crown Heights, was not an area that existed geophysically in the real world, so when it disappeared in the mid-60s from Crown Heights, no one noticed it was gone. But when it lived, perhaps for thirty or so years, it was a vital, thriving, and extremely creative environment. It was a capricious phantom of reality, a blend of the mysticism of Eastern European Jewish culture and the secularism of the American Dream.

This collection of stories is representative of the nature of the ephemeral world of my Leqerville youth and its aftermath. My physics career started in 1962. I also became a psychologist in 1988. After I became a psychologist, I co-edited a book on the subject of creativity (Creativity and Affect). I had great fun with that endeavor, as I did with the three physics books I co-authored.

I am a grateful man. I have been very fortunate to have the unusual disposition to enjoy and to become a professional in both physics and in clinical psychology. This is my first attempt at writing a non-technical book. I hope that you enjoy my tales, many of which were written in the century that preceded this one.

The stories are in chronological order, but they are mostly self-contained, with some repetitive components, so you can comfortably enter the memoir at any chapter.

CHAPTER 1

HARRY AND THE SWEDISH HOSPITAL – 1936

On August 16, 1936, Yetta Shaw gave birth to her first son, Melvin, at the Swedish Hospital in Brooklyn. Eight days later, after ritual circumcision (bris), she was to take her son home. Unfortunately, neither she nor her husband, Harry, had sufficient funds to pay the hospital bill. Under these circumstances, it was common, apparently, for hospital officials to threaten not to release the child, and this they did.

Family lore has it that, without so much as a moment’s hesitation, Harry told them in no uncertain terms what they could do: they could keep the child. He and Yetta were going home.

If not for the generosity and kindness of the Swedish Hospital, I would have been an orphan. In fact, I always did wonder whether Harry ever paid that bill. If not, and I certainly think not, I am at a loss for how to pay for me: the Swedish Hospital is now defunct.

CHAPTER 2

KINDERGARTEN – 1941

Aunt Jean had me reading and writing before I was four years old; I have my Mother Goose book to prove it, and it’s dated, too. Along with my mother, Yetta, and grandmother, Clara, she spent a lot of time teaching and loving me. I remember that we all lived together from time to time before we moved from Williamsburg to Leqerville, in Crown Heights, when I was six.

Aunt Jean, a depressive like my mother and grandmother, killed herself when I was five. She jumped off a tall building on the lower east side of Manhattan. I remember sitting in the hallway of my fourth-floor apartment on Driggs Avenue in my pajamas looking down the stairwell and listening to loud crying and screaming. I remember feeling alone, scared of the shadows, and afraid to sleep.

I started kindergarten at about that same time at P.S. 16. In those days, kindergarten started at 9 a.m. and ended at 3 p.m. We went home for lunch between noon and 1 p.m. When we returned from lunch we were required to take a nap for thirty minutes on the mats that had been laid out for us. I refused. After two weeks of fighting with my kindergarten teacher, my mother was summoned to school. Had we had Ritalin then, I would probably have been medicated. My mother, however, had a better solution. She took me home, and I resumed school a year later in the first grade at P.S. 91, without ever really having had a kindergarten teacher.

My late wife, Bunny, would try to make me take a nap every once in a while. On rare occasions she succeeded, but never once before my fifty-first birthday.

CHAPTER 3

LOUIE THE WANGOO – 1947

On May 21, 1982, we held a Leqerville neighborhood reunion at the Hollenden Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York City. It was a remarkably electric evening. My wife at that time, Carol, and I stayed overnight across the street at the Waldorf, our usual outpost when in Manhattan.

We arrived at the party on time, and as we walked out of the elevator we heard from down the hall a steady crescendo of screams and raucous laughter. It directed us to the cocktail party phase of the reunion, which lasted for almost two hours, and it turned out to be the most joyous celebration of life I had ever experienced. I was so busy kissing and hugging that I never even found out where the bar was. Marshall Wilinsky reminded me that I gave him the worst beating he had ever received in his life. Joan Goldberg pointed out that I was the high school sex symbol (alas, about three decades too late!). I confessed to Miltie Herman that when he became crippled by polio I was elated, because he then wouldn’t be able to catch me and beat me to a pulp. (Miltie had wanted to toughen me up because I loomed as the future quarterback of our football team.) And then a man of about my height, with a lesser build than mine and with a wisp of a mustache and thinning hair, offered me his hand.

Aren’t you Mel Shaw?

And you?

I’m Louis Bair.

Now that certainly was impossible. Louie the Wangoo was a tall, bullish-looking creature who could frighten the daylights out of lesser human beings. He was also very special, one of our neighborhood’s first exceptional children. He had apparently made life so difficult for the conventional teachers in our neighborhood public school, P.S. 91 in Brooklyn, that it was asked of his parents to place him in a special school, P.S. 208. In the 1940s, we in Leqerville considered something like this the equivalent of banishment from the kingdom as punishment for crimes against the state.

From all indications, Louie the Wangoo turned out to be a successful professional in the New York City area. He certainly looked it. But his name immediately brought me back to the 1940s: I, as Robin, was running down the hall on the second floor of the north wing of our enormous apartment building. Louie, as Batman, was right behind me. We were trying to head off the Joker, who would probably be coming down from the third floor. I slowed for a moment, and, as I turned to ask Batman for strategic advice, I felt a crushing blow to the middle of my spine. The next thing I remember, Batman was hovering over me, slapping my face in an attempt to revive me. The blow, which had rendered me unconscious for several minutes, was Batman’s way of telling Robin to stop running and to be quiet or else the Joker would learn of the trap being laid for him. If I recall correctly, the Joker that evening was Malcolm Greenspan.

The only other incident I can recall where Malcolm, Louie, and I were so intimately coupled was one of the most eventful of my life—a wonderful Brooklyn street scenario that I’m sure helped me, at the tender age of ten, learn a bit more about the world.

****

The sun was beginning to set on a spectacular Sunday in the early spring of 1947. Several of us had spent the afternoon playing stickball in the schoolyard of P.S. 91. Louie, Malcolm, and I were watching a game of stickball in the schoolyard that pitted two constant adversaries, Poogie Kalotkin and Bo Blaustein, against each other. With Poogie at the bat, Bo’s tight fastball was fouled off upstairs, which, at P.S. 91, often meant off the school building on the side of the narrow playing area. This particular foul ball, however, managed to smash through one pane of the many dozens of panes of glass on the west face of the building. This face tenderly reflected the sun’s rays as it set and often bathed the schoolyard on those vibrant days in a lovely pink light.

No one recalls exactly what happened next, but, a few minutes later, the game had ended and our terrible trio found ourselves breaking up large stone pieces that had, for some reason, materialized from the low roof of a partition to the school that we had to climb every so often to retrieve balls that had been fouled back. Perhaps Poogie had climbed on the roof in search of extra balls and had thrown a boulder at Louie. Given Poogie’s savage nature in those days, this might well have been the case. Regardless, our terrible trio shortly found ourselves trying to make certain that every pane of glass on the west face of P.S. 91 developed a large hole caused by a small rock. It took us almost until darkness to achieve this state of perfection. I don’t recall my feelings after it was over, but during the attack we were all hysterically elated.

The next morning, as we lined up in the schoolyard to prepare for our Monday classes, Freddie Silverman