My Coolest Uncle, Maurice Julius Freedman, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six, in his eighty-seventh year. To this day, every one of my living high school and college friends say that my Uncle Moishe (as my Grandmother Sylvia had called him and my Dad, Mom, Sister, and I called him) was the coolest of my very cool uncles.
Growing up, I was privileged to have had six uncles and four grand-uncles. Four of these uncles and two of these grand-uncles lived in the vicinity of New Jersey, my childhood state, at various times. They each had very different personalities. There is the still-living Jock Uncle, ten years my senior, who played high school football and at the University of North Carolina--until a knee injury ended what could have been a potential pro career, though he modestly denies the pro career part. This Uncle loved and still loves football and, to this day, loves Elvis Presley. He even looked a little like Elvis, and I remember meeting him as a six or seven year old, and how he lifted me and threw me in the air (I was a skinny and light kid), which I loved. This Uncle also loved telling my high school friends and me the greatest and funniest stories of his band of young, mostly Italian guys who were not quite Jets (definitely not Sharks) in Carteret, New Jersey. Their high school and immediate post-high school hijinks remain the stuff of legend.
There was also my Partying and Sports-Fan Uncle, my Uncle Bernie. Now departed, he, along with my brilliant, funny, musically-talented and literary minded Aunt Cathy, always hosted bar-b-que, Super Bowl and New Year's Eve parties. He adored my Aunt, who was my mother's sister, and took her on cruises and trips to various places. Uncle Bernie was the fun-time guy who took me, with his three boys, my very cool and funny cousins, on camping trips, as well as visits to West Point and Cooperstown, the latter place to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame.
He and the Jock Uncle were the Sports Guys. If you wanted to talk with the Jock and Partying Uncles, you better know what was happening with at least professional football, baseball, and basketball (though they both stopped watching the NBA in the 1970s, while I became and remain fanatical about it). They knew their sports as well as any regular caller to sports radio talk shows and the sports hosts themselves.
The other nearby Uncle, in my teen years at least, and still going strong in Florida, is my Hippie Vietnam Vet Uncle. In the early to mid 1970s, I would bump into him at rock concerts I was attending. For example, we met up serendipitously at a Grateful Dead concert in 1972, Pink Floyd in 1973, and Beach Boys/Poco in 1974, among a few other concerts. He has always been a happy-go-lucky personality, and a guy who, when you were with him, would always be laughing with you. He remains a truly kindly soul.
My grand-uncles, Nick and Carmen, were the guys who were barely employed, and somehow made money from time to time "at the track." Late in my Uncle Nick's life, I learned that Nick, more than Carmen, made money doing "juice" work for the Mob, which meant they beat up people who owed money to the Mob (with juice meaning blood, of course). They were not, however, in the Mob. They only did freelance work. Carmen was a relative family man, with multiple marriages, but also did some work as a plumber. Nick, however, nearly always had something vague going on. He was already infamous in the family for going to jail in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and not snitching, which always made him reliable to mobsters. Both he and Carmenooch, as the latter was sometimes known, were veterans of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and World War II (in fact all my grandmothers' four brothers fought in WWII). Nick's most steady job came in the late 1960s through early 1970s as the manager of the mob-run Continental Baths, where he hired a young Bette Midler and young Barry Manilow. The Baths were a gay hangout, though straights went there, too. At the dawn of the 1970s, it was Nick who broke my mother's and Aunt Cathy's hearts when he told them in colorful anti-gay language that Rock Hudson was a homosexual. In his old age, Nick told me that the Mob told him he could not steal more than 5% of the box office receipts--or else. Therefore, Nick only stole 4% of the receipts to be safe, and was careful to never go over 4%.
My Grand-Uncle Nick was also apparently nasty and likely worse to Bette Midler such that I would never blame her, if I met her, that she would yell or punch me for being the grand-nephew of Nick Russo/Rizzo (he used both names, though only the latter was his birth name). The irony is, though, my parents, sister, and I have always revered, and still do, the Divine Ms. M. Anyway, Nick either quit or left the position at the time the Continental Baths started their decline around 1974 or 1975. From there, he had spotty employment, and I would see him most often in his last years in Las Vegas, Nevada, when I would visit my grandparents who moved there in the 1970s for painting contracting and hotel service work, and then retired there in the 1980s. He died around 1991, saying to me in his last days that he had slept with a lot of women, and therefore had no regrets. It was a profound statement for him to make because I had read already that Aldous Huxley had once said philanderers were the only men he ever knew who, on their deathbeds, did not have regrets about what they did not do.
MY UNCLE WHO MOST INFLUENCED MY INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT: MITCH FREEDMAN, LIBRARIAN EXTRAORDINAIRE
However, the uncle I was closest to over the past almost six decades was Uncle Moishe, the name his mother, my grandmother Sylvia Cassif Freedman, called him--though he has been known to the rest of the world in his adult years as "Mitch Freedman." When this Coolest Uncle would introduce me at various functions I was invited to with him, he would introduce me as his nephew, but then say I was the "real" Mitch Freedman. That is because my Uncle had taken on the name "Mitch" when he and his then young wife, Hermene, moved to UC Berkeley around 1960 for what was supposed to be his seeking a PhD in Philosophy. My Uncle ended up crashing out of Philosophy because he had too much trouble reading Kant in the original German. Under his wife's threat to leave him (they later divorced in the early 1980s), he switched to Library Studies, where he graduated from Berkeley at the top or near top of his class in 1965.
My Uncle thereafter went on to become one of the three most important librarians of the last half century who took libraries from the card catalog to the online catalog, and, along the way, became American Library Association president just after 9/11/2001 events. He was always the political activist, at the edge of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley in 1964, but much more a centered political activist as a librarian fighting for union rights for public and private library workers, challenging censorship of books and people, and showing up to protest a variety of things that make us angry and frustrated at how far short the US falls from the ideals we are taught in civics classes and lie to ourselves about. He even has a Wikipedia page. See here.
I think it is clear at this point why I might have personally been closest to my Uncle Mitch/Moishe.
When I was still in elementary school and starting middle school, I was not close to my uncle. He openly told my parents, right in front of me, that he worried about me watching too much television. He would say, "How is Mitchell ever going to become reader if he only watches television?" My mother would say that I read well at school, and had time to grow up and develop an interest in outside reading. She would say I loved reading Dr. Suess and Maurice Sendak, and Hardy Boys mysteries. Despite my actively playing stickball, kickball, football, and lots of bike riding around the neighborhood, however, I did watch four to six hours of television a day through my early teens before listening to music became my passion. By age seven, I had memorized the TV Guide so my folks would never have to consult it. They would ask what was on television for that night, and I would proceed to tell them what was on six of the seven channels from the NYC area (PBS was in its infancy and simply didn't count yet), knowing every single prime time show. I also was a major Soupy Sales fan, and loved the Winchell-Mahoney Hour. And of course Looney Tunes, where I perfected my memorizing dialogue--and also trying to learn to become a cartoonist, which my mother squelched as ridiculous. Oh well. Anyway, I once had to correct the local newspaper for publishing out of date tv show information in its newspaper. In my seven year old handwriting, I not only told them where they were wrong, but provided them a template how to redo their section. In one of those "Isn't America great?" moments, the newspaper updated its format and began to correctly list what was on every night. :)
I also loved comedy albums. I memorized the songs comedian-singers Allen Sherman and Tom Lehrer wrote and sang, and listened to Bob Newhart, the First Family Vaughn Meader records, Flip Wilson, and Bill Cosby, among others.
But unbeknownst to my Uncle, I was reading even more than the children's books. As my parents also knew, I was reading Mad Magazine first and foremost from the age of seven. Consistent with my curious mind, I took the time to consult with sources in our home to understand the many Mad Magazine references. This included my parents, as well. My mother loves to tell the story of an eight-year-old Mitchell reading Mad Magazine, and suddenly asking, "Mom, what is S-E-X?" My mother replied, "It's nothing you need to know. It's just a word for what adults do but children should never do." Somehow I accepted that answer without further questioning, which shows how much I revered my parents' word. I also remember asking around that time--1965--why the astronauts who went into space did not find God. My mother replied, "He's hiding." I can't believe I accepted that answer, but I did for years--until I was about thirteen and then, at fourteen, starting to read Bertrand Russell and the New York Review of Books (NYRB). But I get ahead of myself except to say, both Russell and the NYRB were sources courtesy of Uncle Moishe.
Our home, however, was highly literate. We had scattered books and encyclopedias, mostly in our attic, but we also had regular and continuing subscriptions to Time, Newsweek, two daily newspapers, and one weekly newspaper. Starting in second grade, I read those newspapers and magazines, and at least skimmed or sometimes studied the books, and definitely the encyclopedias. By the time I was twelve in 1969, I had become deeply influenced by television, radio, and print media. I used to beg my mother to let me stay up late to watch "The Twilight Zone," in its last year or so, and then religiously in reruns. In the late 1960s, I also religiously watched "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on CBS, and, around 1970, began watching Bill Buckley's "Firing Line" on PBS plus another PBS show called "The Advocates." These programs complimented the Smothers' show as I began to learn about public policy and the art of debate. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., a hero in our home, and then RFK, had politicized me as I thought, What the heck is going on in our nation, and how can we get ourselves on a better track. After RFK's assassination, I rode my bike to the next town (Rahway) rail station to watch the funeral train go past to Washington D.C. and began to wonder how the U.S. future was going to change because of RFK's assassination. Yes, it was that moment I began wondering about alternate timelines, having already been immersed in the Twilight Zone and reading about a guy named Kurt Vonnegut. Around age fourteen and fifteen, I watched the famed and controversial show, "The Great American Dream Machine."
We were, though, still a Cold War Suburban Liberal home. It was a home where nobody drank alcohol, nobody smoked, and we were a tight knit and loving family. We were a family which revered FDR and JFK, and where we did not understand why my Uncle Moishe hated Hubert Humphrey so much. Also, we didn't understand why so many of our Italian relatives were racist and voted for George Wallace in 1968.
As I searched for books and old magazines in our attic, around 1970, I found several issues of Paul Krassner's "The Realist." My Uncle had paid for a subscription for my father--though my father found it definitely not to his taste. I of course had found "National Lampoon," too, and "The Realist" was a lost treasure.
One evening, around 1969 or 1970, I was watching David Frost on television interview Bill Cosby (!). I, like most of the U.S. population at the time, loved Cosby. In the interview, Cosby mentioned his main influence had been Lenny Bruce. I turned to my mom, who was watching with me, and asked, "Who is Lenny Bruce?" My mother replied, "Ask your Uncle Moishe. He loves Lenny Bruce. He was a 'sick' comic--and you'd probably like him. He might be dead, though."
Well! That was as great an incentive as any nerdy twelve-year-old needed. I immediately called my Uncle, who at the time lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My Uncle told me about Lenny Bruce, his untimely death from drugs in 1966, and that I should find at least one of his comedy albums. I did, and I was hooked! I also found, at a bookstore, a book that had transcribed nearly all of Bruce's routines. That book became a Bible for me. I soon memorized most, if not all, of the book. To this day, I will sometimes recall a Lenny Bruce line or routine in the midst of something happening or someone saying something else. I should add that, over the years, particularly in this century, my Uncle would call me to say how he referenced a Lenny line in a conversation with someone but the person didn't understand the reference--so he had to call me, tell me the context, and enjoy a laugh at his Brucian witticism.
Anyway, my Uncle found he liked talking with this precocious and curious-for-learning pre-teen. Knowing I loved music, and had learned some music theory through playing the accordion (bleh!), my Uncle, still in Minnesota, began to introduce me to his favorite bebop jazzers. These included the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, a favorite of his, Lester Young (a major individual favorite besides Clifford Brown), Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Pops Louis Armstrong, and others, of course. He winced at my early love for Dave Brubeck, but forgave me--and I still love Brubeck.
When I was thirteen, in 1970, for my Bar Mitzvah gift, my Uncle got me a subscription to I.F. Stone's then Bi-Weekly, which I devoured. Then, in 1971, when I was fourteen, Stone retired his then-bi-weekly, and switched subscribers to the New York Review of Books. That is how I began to read that magazine with the big dictionary a family friend had bought me for my bar mitzvah to understand the vocabulary of that post-graduate level journal. I continue to subscribe to and read fifty-five years later. For years, I could only talk with my Uncle about what I had read in the NYRB, which was a lifeline for to have anyone to talk with about the articles there. Every issue remains one where one learns something. It is the only non-formal academic journal where one may say that, with the exception perhaps of "The American Prospect."
When I was fourteen, my Uncle bought, and sent to me, two Bertrand Russell books, "Why I Am Not a Christian" (a book of essays) and the "History of Western Philosophy." I did not read the latter until college, but skimmed it. I (the word again) devoured "Why I am Not a Christian." This book immediately turned me into a First Cause/Jeffersonian Deist, and then later, Agnostic/Atheist. In going through my Father's archive of documents, photos, and paraphernalia yesterday with my mother, I learned that, in my Uncle's office, he had two posters of men he revered, Bertrand Russell and Lenny Bruce. I have had the same Lenny poster I purchased at a store in N.Y.C. since I was about fifteen. It graces my main bookshelf room in our home, though my wife hates the poster--and my children's friends thought it was a poster of Billy Joel. :)
My Uncle also introduced me to "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers," an "underground" comic by Gilbert Shelton, which led me to Robert Crumb and the world of "underground" comics. And no, the recent "Freak Brothers" animated series is awful, and I would never recommend it.
My Uncle, visiting the N.J./N.Y.C. area in 1971, took me to see the Julian Barry play, "Lenny," with Cliff Gorman. When my Uncle and Aunt Hermene moved back home to Westfield, New Jersey, my Uncle began taking me to concerts, including Frank Sinatra. He also once took me on a trip to see the Strand Bookstore in N.Y.C. When I learned to drive, it was great for me to be invited over to their home to listen to jazz, and sometimes, he would try to like the progressive rock I loved by then. Yes, I had found FM radio, WNEW-FM 102.7 in particular, through a cool neighborhood guy a couple of years older than me. This began to culturally radicalize me on top of the Uncle's influences. I became a progressive rock fanatic, and went to at least fifty prog rock concerts in the 1970s, and another twenty-five jazz or other music concerts in that decade.
One may think, and ask me, "Did you smoke pot or do drugs?" The answer was and remains a definite "No!" I had no use for drinking alcohol or smoking anything. And hard drugs? No way! My Uncle, however, at that time, indulged a bit in marijuana. I remember, one time, when I visited him in 1972 or 1973 in Minnesota, my Uncle reluctantly took me, on my begging, to see "Harold and Maude," which had been continuously playing at the Westgate movie theater. The theater eventually showed the film for at least two years straight. I had missed the film in the initial run, and always wanted to see it. He took me, but he decided to get high watching the film. My memory is he fell asleep during the film. :) I of course loved the film and would see it at least twenty-five times in revival theaters in the 1970s and early 1980s until I could buy the VHS and then DVD. However, I admit I have become wistful about the film, and have much more sympathy for the beautiful, though still flawed, mother, who simply was unable to understand her son because she didn't know how to relate to him. I have a very much opposite relationship with my mother, who I speak with and see every day. I add this singular fact for her sake as she is still going strong at ninety-one and will likely read this part at least. LOL.
Anyway, my Uncle was a very deep and abiding influence over the years for me, as I expect this shows. I have separately always been proud of his many accomplishments in the library field, and as a person. I was also honored to be a guest at multiple American Library Association (ALA) conventions in the 1990s and early 2000s. Through him I met the sainted Barbara Ehrenreich, who I consider the greatest public intellectual mind of the past half century, as she was broader in her writing and thinking than Chomsky, and far more open to speak with. See here for my personal story with Ehrenreich when I was trying to find a publisher for my eventually-published alternative history novel about RFK and the U.S. I should also mention his activities also landed him on the right-wing "Discover the Networks." See here. One should be known by one's enemies, I suppose. :)
This morning, I was trying to find the poem my Uncle wrote in his late teens in honor of Clifford Brown, who died in a car accident in 1956. I used to keep it inside one of my Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet albums. I can't find it yet, but it may be in a box in our garage, as with things like that. My Dad, who is in hospice right now, took the blow of his younger brother's passing better when I said, "Dad, you really have been a great archivist for your brother. It is the greatest gift you could leave him for his legacy." I am also going to try and find some of the videos my Dad took of his brother's various award ceremonies my father attended, and maybe a few of my uncle's local cable interview show he had when he was the head of the Westchester Library System from 1982 to 2005.
I offer my love to my cousins Jenna, Susan, Danna, and Jesse, and my Aunt Paula, my Uncle's second wife and now widow, and will always say my Uncle Moishe was, among my family members, my most abiding influence on my intellectual development. I will miss him dearly. I am comforted, however, knowing his legacy in the world of libraries will live on, and knowing too how many librarian activists have been influenced by his example and his leadership in the library field. If I'm wrong and there is something called Heaven, I am sure he is running around trying to find Clifford Brown, Lenny Bruce, and Bertrand Russell right now. And yes, they will be there if God is as loving and caring as people like to say.
I also end this blog post with a link to what my Uncle often told me was his favorite Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet work, "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You." He said "Sweet Clifford," as Brown was known among his fan base, had a trumpet sound that was sweeter than any other living trumpet player of his time.
