Antecedents
My mom was (especially in comparison with my dad) fairly conventional, so I have relatively little to pass on about her. Her family hailed Lithuania and I have a photo presumably of Mom’s grandparents, Yehuda and Mariasha (nee Mirvis) Tatelman, in the “old country” (Fig. 1.1) who immigrated to the US and eventually settled in Rochester, New York. Her father, Joseph Kevovitz, came through Ellis Island in 1908, died in 1947 (before I was born), and her mother (Ida) passed when I was 6, so I never knew either of them (Fig. 1.2). Joseph and Ida had four children, David (Fig. 1.3), Marion (Fig. 1.4), Lillian (my mom), and Herb (Fig. 1.4). (Sort of) interestingly, all four siblings married and had two kids each, with a total of four girls and four boys. Upon Dave’s suggestion, the family changed the last name to Kevin sometime during World War II. Dave married Belle Rubenstein and they and their two kids (Dan who was about my brother’s age, and Lori who was about my age) lived in Kensington (just north of Berkeley and about an hour’s drive from Los Gatos). We’d visit them every Thanksgiving (I don’t recall them ever coming down to our place), and other than being impressed with their house in the Berkeley hills (their house had stairs!), my main memory was their ping pong table in the basement, where my brother Ned would square off against Dan while I watched. Mom’s other two siblings remained in Rochester. One year Marion, her husband Leon Blostein, and their two daughters (Judy and Nancy) visited us in Los Gatos but I never met Herb and his family (wife Doris (nee Katz), and kids Michael and Julie) until I made a trip back east some time after college. I don’t remember much about that trip either, except thinking that Doris was a real firecracker1.
But my mom had an atypical aspiration for that time, in that she always wanted to have a professional career. In high school, she was on the newspaper for four years, ending up as coeditor, and hoped to go into journalism thereafter. However, finances preclude her from going to college, and she ended up working in a variety of jobs in town. Then a friend of hers, who wanted to become a nurse, asked Mom to come take an exam with her. Mom had never considered nursing before but went along with her friend. Well, the friend failed the exam, but Mom passed. She didn’t have any other prospects, and so she entered nursing training at Rochester General Hospital, graduating in February 1944.
She tried to enlist in the Navy, but they wouldn’t take her because she wore glasses. But the army was less picky and commissioned her as a second lieutenant (and provided two pairs of steel rimmed glasses, to boot) (Fig. 1.5). Her first post was at Halloran General Hospital on Staten Island, where she met my dad when he was a patient there, invalided from Italy. She was then transferred to McCloskey General Hospital in Temple, Texas waiting for embarkation orders to the Pacific Theater. During this time, she cadged a series of rides with military pilots for a brief visit back to Rochester via Ohio. One of her return flights was on a B-17 bomber. When over Memphis, the pilot invited her up to the cockpit, asked her if she wanted to fly the plane. So, she sat at the wheel for perhaps 30 seconds, when the pilot decided that was enough. Thus, I can proudly (and truthfully) say that “My Mom flew a bomber during the war.” Ultimately, she served on Iwo Jima and Saipan. Her experience overseas proved particularly valuable to me, as she taught me the best way to pack clothes in a suitcase.
After the war, she returned to Rochester, where she worked as a private nurse. She didn’t like that job, nor the cooler weather (compared to the South Pacific). A nursing friend in Long Beach invited her out there, so Mom moved to California, getting a position at Cedars of Lebanon in Los Angeles in 1946. When she was overseas she had received Christmas cards from various folks, although she never sent any out. Once she settled in Los Angeles, she sent out cards to those that had remembered her, including Dad. He then responded, telling her that he and his brother were moving out to southern California, and when he got there that he would look her up. He did, they hit it off, and got married in 1947 (Fig. 1.6), after which she took up a position at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, where a lot of celebrities were treated. She saw John Wayne when he visited his wife in the hospital (with the same swaggering walk you see in the movies) as well as Gary Merrill (then husband of Bette Davis). Once (the exceedingly handsome) Cary Grant came in for the removal of a little cyst on his chest. Mom was the medication nurse on the ward, where the general policy was for a (male) orderly to be responsible for prepping and shaving and male patients before surgery. But she didn’t give the orderly the chance and instead took the opportunity to shave his chest herself.
After we moved up to northern California, she worked part time but returned to full time nursing when the Good Samaritan Hospital (less than two miles way) opened in 1964. Ned and I were in junior high then, while Dad was able to arrange his schedule to be home when we got home from school. Later she took training through the University of Redlands to become a nurse practioner, and was employed in number of positions, including the Red Cross blood bank in San Jose, the County of Santa Clara and the City of San Jose.
Mom was much more into family than Dad and kept up communication not only with her siblings and their families, but a wide variety of cousins and such (I could never keep track of who was who). She returned to Rochester by herself quite often to visit family, as well as attend her high school and nursing school reunions.
I think Mom was fairly healthy most of her life, although she suffered from several issues late in life, including a minor heart attack. Ultimately she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which she knew was fatal. But she told us she never expected to live as long as she did (88), and accepted her fate calmly, dying at home in her bed.
In contrast, my father not only had a much more colorful life, but had a remarkable sense of humor, so I know a lot more stories about him. Joseph (or Josef) Zuparkov (or Zuparkoff, I’m not sure which) was an overseer on a Russian general’s estate in Lithuania (so although he lived in Lithuania, he was actually Russian). He had a son named John, who (according to what we heard) wanted to avoid being drafted into the Czar’s army, and in 1911 or 1912 emigrated to England (he wanted to come straight to America, but the immigration quotas were filled for that year). He had to wait another year or two to cross the Atlantic, in the meantime serving as a merchant seaman; at Ellis Island, his last name was shortened to Zuparko. He married Anna Juodaitis (Fig. 1.7) in Newark, New Jersey in 1913, and they had three children, John, Edward (my dad), and Helen, and they grew up in Hillside, New Jersey. Fig. 1.8 is a photo of (I think) Anna’s father, wife and a sister. My dad knew no English when he started school, only Lithuanian. When we were kids, Dad taught us a few Lithuanian words: how to count to 10 (I learned them phonetically as: vena, du, tres, katara, penka, shesa, septima, ashtona, debina, dashims) as well as the insult “Tu ira gavat” (“You are a snake”) and “Rapusha” (bullfrog). As little contact we had with my mom’s family, we had even less so with my dad’s. His mother (who married Peter Brush after her first husband died), had moved to Long Beach, and we saw her once a year (Fig. 1.9). I remember visiting Dad’s sister Helen and her husband (Loren Littlefield) once when they lived on Long Island. I accidentally stepped on their dog’s tail and it instinctively bit me just under my eye, but there was no serious damage – somewhat surprisingly, I never developed a fear of dogs. After Loren passed, Helen moved out to Arizona because she suffered from arthritis and the drier climate eased her suffering somewhat. She came up to Los Gatos a couple of times, including once when I escorted her to San Jose’s Egyptian Museum, while Carolynn and I visited her in Arizona once. Contact with Dad’s brother was even more tenuous. John evidently did not approve of him marrying Mom, and cut off all ties with our family (and in an attempt to sound more American, shortened his last name to Zark), so I never met him or his wife, Grace. I later learned that during WWII John worked on machining submarine periscopes at Crucible Steel in New Jersey. He later moved out to southern California and had two children, Robert and Diane, whom I met only once (at Mom’s memorial service) – they were both delightful and charming.
My dad’s father died in 1930, just two weeks short of Dad’s 14th birthday. This was in the Depression, and so at age 16 Dad quit high school in order to help support his family – he never went back to school again. He never considered himself “book smart” and my brother Ned only saw him read two books: one about golf by his favorite golfer, Sam Snead, the other about improving one’s memory. But Dad was one of the most practical people I ever knew – he was a whiz in figuring out how to get physically things done.
Growing up in tough times, he hustled for jobs wherever he could find one. He told us that in the space of one year during the Depression, he had something on the order of 50 jobs. His experiences included working for a florist, in a cabinet shop, and as a plumber, electrician and carpenter. Once he was asked if he could drive a truck that required “double clutching” to deliver a load of bricks, and Dad said yes. The thing is, he had no idea what double clutching was, but he wasn’t about to stop that from him getting the job (to double clutch, you take your foot off the accelerator, stepped on the clutch, shifted from one gear into neutral, let up on the clutch, step on the clutch a second time, continue shifting into a new gear, and then accelerate as you let off the clutch). But, since he didn’t know what he was doing, he stalled out the truck at the foot of a hill, just a hundred yards or so from the site. So, he hauled the load (a half ton worth of bricks) up the hill by hand. This took most of the day, and he returned to the yard very late, but he got the job done. He of course was immediately fired, but he got paid for the day, which was all he cared about. Another of his jobs was at a hat factory in Newark, where he would dunk hats into vats of mercury so that the felt would attach. This meant immersing his arms into the toxic mercury, but no one worried much about health care for workers back then.
One day he was drinking and started up his brother’s car and ran into a wall. He became a teetotaler after that. I never saw him touch a drop of alcohol, but Ned told me he drank a beer once during a golf tournament, when it was really hot and there was no water or soft drinks available.
He was drafted into the Army in June 1941, and during basic training was given the option of several “specialties” to train for. He opted for “Cook and Baking School” (as he called it) thinking that if he qualified there, perhaps he’d be exempted from serving in the front lines; he learned to make great apple pies, although when he was instructed to cook a turkey, they neglected to tell him that you had to remove the insides first, so that meal failed. He did receive a Certificate of Proficiency as “First Cook” at Camp Blanding in Florida, but was still assigned to the 17th Field Artillery Regiment (Battery “F”), serving as a loader for 105mm (and later 155mm) howitzers. For the 105mm guns, they usually assigned two guys for loading shells, but he was a big guy and was able to handle that by himself. He served in the European Theater of Operations in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. His outfit got “wiped out” (Dad’s words) during the battle of Kasserine Pass (February 1943), but Dad was lucky – at the time of the battle he was in a hospital in the rear lines, suffering from a reaction to an immunization he had received. When he recovered he took part in a desperate action at El Guettar in Tunisia. He had another close call along the Volturno Line (near Telese) in southern Italy when their position was shelled, and he was trapped in his foxhole by the debris and dirt that had covered him. There is a photograph of a couple of guys crouching over the foxhole that he was still in – they hadn’t yet dug him out (Fig 1.10). This meant he was “buried alive” for a while, leading him to become somewhat claustrophobic afterward (sometimes he’d get “the shakes”). Because of this, he was sent back stateside due to “exhaustion” (now recognized as PTSD) – he could no longer function in a combat zone. There is a well-known story about Gen. Patton slapping two soldiers in hospitals in Sicily who were suffering from the same diagnosis – the second guy, Paul Bennett, was from Dad’s outfit. Dad was sent to Halloran Army Hospital on Staten Island, where his nurse was Lillian Kevin (see above).
He returned to New Jersey after his discharge and got a job at a gym in Newark. Meaning only to take a temporary break, he drove out to southern California with his brother John. But he liked it so much he never returned, and then married Mom. At that time, she was working with a woman named Shockley, and since the housing situation was tight, Mom and Dad ended up sharing a house in Hollywood with the Shockley’s. When Mom and Dad went to Yosemite on their honeymoon, Mr. Shockley went through their belongings and found Dad’s bank book and realized that Dad had some money saved up. Dad’s plan was to try to take a year to become a professional golfer, but in the meantime, he had a black friend named Cumbas who owned a residential cleaning company. Racism was still very evident then, so this guy got Dad to act as the business’s “front” man – Dad worked with him for a little while and learnt something about the business. But Shockley convinced Dad into starting their own cleaning business instead, using Dad’s money to get things rolling (one of their clients was Grumman’s Chinese Theater). But Shockley didn’t like the idea of cleaning toilets and such, and left Dad to do the actual cleaning, while Shockley handled the paperwork. Having never finished high school, Dad agreed to this, since he wasn’t fond of paperwork, but never minded doing physical work. They were doing OK, and Shockley then convinced Dad into buying a broken-down cafe. Dad refurbished the place and it did OK for a while – Dad kept working in the cleaning business while his partner operated the cafe. But a waitress at the cafe was “tapping the till”, and the money from the cleaning business was going out of the café, so that partnership fell apart. Dad lost upwards of the $4,000 he had invested in the business, leaving him with a profound leeriness of trusting others thereafter.
Dad always enjoyed physical activities. He was a good baseball player in high school where he played catcher and was considered a strong hitter. Some major league teams were even interested in him for their farm teams before he dropped out. During the Depression he caddied for a country club and had hoped to earn a living as golf pro (Fig. 1.11), but that didn’t pan out. He played some semi-pro football at some point, even though he didn’t know all the rules, but he was big and strong, and (as typical in those days) played both offense and defense. After his discharge from the army he worked in a health club in Newark where he used to play handball with a local racketeer. When we were growing up, I remember he would do 50 to 100 pushups a day, as well was using hand exercisers called “squeezers” (probably another 50-100 reps) to build up his hand strength, and he was active well into his 70’s. When he needed to demolish a wall, he took to it slinging a sledgehammer. When he got tired, he would “rest” by walking around the yard picking up rocks and debris. Then he’d go back to swinging the hammer. When he required abdominal surgery, the surgeons later said that they had a tough time opening him up because his abdominal muscles had been so strong from his exercising, as it made the incision process much more difficult. And in the 1960’s, long before jogging became widely popular, he’d run around the block a couple of times each day. This was before running shoes had been introduced, and he just wore his old combat boots. Later he realized that he could use the track at Raymond J. Fisher Junior High School after hours. He would run clockwise around the track, even though everyone else there ran counterclockwise, so he’d be continually passing other people going the other way. And Dad being Dad, he refused to change directions – he’d let them have the inner track as he went wide to avoid collisions. But one time, another jogger was running with his dog, and every time they’d pass, the dog would lunge at Dad. So Dad took to carrying a baseball bat while he ran, in order to fend off a possible attack. The next time he came across that guy, the guy told him: “You’d better have something more than a bat the next time you jog here”. Dad thought about it for a while, and went to an Army Navy surplus store, where he bought a holster. So, Dad is now jogging with a holster at his side. The next time the other guy showed up, Dad saw his eyes get big as they neared each other on the track and the guy immediately left. Dad figured he was going for the cops and took the holster off and placed it off to one side. Sure enough, a little while later the guy came by with a policeman. The officer stopped Dad and asked him if he had a gun. Dad said “No”. Then the cop asked if he had a holster. “Oh yeah, I got a holster.” The cop asked to see it, and Dad obliged him and took him to the empty holster. About then the guy with the dog came up to them to continue to complain. So Dad then said HE wanted to complain, noting that the guy didn’t have his dog on a leash. He never had a problem with that guy again.
But most of all, Dad loved to play golf. Beyond the times the family went out together, he also had regular games with builders and other building inspectors (including Al Hooven, George “Scotty” Bochel, Augie Garcia, and Fred Hauck). They hated waiting for other foursomes, so they made sure to be the first ones off, sometimes teeing off when it was still dark or foggy, and had to depend upon the sound made on their first drives to figure out how far their balls went, since they couldn’t actually see them2. But his best golfing buddy was a builder named Earl Tanner. Tanner had made a lot of money and owned condos in South Lake Tahoe and Hawaii, as well as his own plane, and he would fly with my Dad out to play golf all over northern California. But Earl died when his plane crashed, and Dad never had quite the same joie de vivre afterwards.
Dad’s other key character was a love of joking around, and his sense of humor became legendary at City Hall (the incident involving gangsters will be treated in Chapter 7, section 3). Besides joking around for the fun of it, he used humor to defuse upset members of the public. While handing complaints in the building department, he attended one woman who railed against her contractor, citing among other problems that there was grass growing in the crawl space under her house. Well, there was nothing the City of San Jose could do about that, but my dad told her that she should call his brother-in-law. When she asked why, Dad replied with a straight face that his brother-in-law would soon be released from Soledad (a prison about 70 miles south of San Jose), who owned the local franchise for “short-handled lawnmowers.” Luckily, the woman appreciated the joke.
Then there was the time there was another complaint that had been ongoing for several months, and Dad was requested to write a letter to the complainant. So, instead he calls the person, saying something to the effect, “My boss wanted me to write you a letter about this, but he doesn’t know I can’t write. If he finds out I’ll get fired. I’ve got a wife and two kids and if I lose my job then my family will go hungry.” He went on and on in this vein for some time. By the end of his spiel, the person gave up on the complaint – problem solved with one phone call.
Dad also had a unique way of making a point. One time he noticed something wrong at a couple of houses in a new building tract. When he stopped there to talk to the builder he’d have a worried look on his face while continually glancing up at the roofs. When asked how he was doing, Dad said he was OK, but it was getting close to the end of the month, and he hadn’t yet filled his quota of chimney “knockdowns”. He’d look up at the roofs again, frown and then leave. He’d return in a day or two, and the builder would anxiously ask him how it was going, and he’d say OK, but he still needed eight knockdowns. He’d look up at the roofs again, shake his head, and leave. He returned after another couple of days, with the builder sweating bullets. After a few preliminaries, he told the builder that he was still shy of three knockdowns. So he said, “Tell you what. Knock down the top two feet of those three chimneys and then add three more feet on their rebuild. That way I’ll get credit for my three knockdowns.” Well, the builder was happy to comply, figuring that was a minor cost to incur to keep the building inspector happy. And that was how Dad was able to get the builder to raise the height on three chimneys that had been too short for the building code, while still maintaining a friendly relationship.
His sense of humor was so appreciated in City Hall that a street was named in his honor (Fig. 1.12). Dad told two different stories about this. The first story is false: Dad complained that some builders in a new housing tract were always misspelling his name, so he wrote “Ed Zuparko” on a piece of scrap wood and nailed it to a post on a street corner there so they would get his name right. Later, some city engineers came by, saw the sign, and assumed that was supposed to be the name of the cross street, and put it in on the official map.
But the true story is more prosaic: city engineers had proposed the name “El Lisa Drive” for a new street that had a 90 degree turn in it. Afterwards, the engineers were told that City regulations required different names for the street before and after this sharp turn, and so they had to quickly come up with a second name for the part of the street that was perpendicular to the other. Dad was walking down a corridor at City Hall one day when one of the engineers yelled out: “Hey Ed, how would you like to have a street named after you?” Dad thought they were pulling his leg, so he said “Sure”, and kept on walking, not giving it another thought. Until weeks later when he discovered they weren’t kidding, and there was now an “El Zuparko Drive” in southern San Jose. The kicker is that back in Los Angeles, Dad was friends with a Frank Lisa, so perhaps “Lisa” and “Zuparko” were always destined to be joined3.
I have always been an Anglophile, loving anything English or Scottish. Although I knew we were of Lithuanian ancestry, I always hoped there was some British connection in our family. Once I asked Dad if there was any Scottish blood in his family, and Mom burst out laughing, saying that Dad would indeed have made a good Scot (at the time, I wasn’t aware of the Scottish reputation for, er, “thriftiness”). And Dad was indeed “thrifty” – because of the hard times he suffered through during the Depression and afterwards. Our family never wanted for any basic necessities, but we never had anything fancy. As kids we didn’t miss anything – we just had what we had and were happy. During one of our vacations to Disneyland, he bought a Mickey Mouse balloon (which was not cheap) for Ned. Ned accidentally let go of the balloon during the transfer and off it flew, and Dad got angry with the balloon vendor, insisting that Ned be given another one. During the family drives to Aptos Beach Gold course, we’d pass “The Lost World”, a dinosaur-themed amusement park that was across Highway 17 from Santa’s Village in Scott’s Valley. I was intrigued by the dinosaurs there, but we never stopped to see them. Then one day Dad decided to unbend and take me there after all. We went up to the ticket gate but he got upset when told that the Park’s policy was not to allow unattended children in, and he’d have to go in with me … which of course would cost the additional price of an adult ticket. Well, he refused to be fleeced – he was happy for me to go in alone, but he sure wasn’t about to get scammed into paying extra for something he had no wish to see. So, we came back home, and I never did get to see the dinosaurs. Once when he was babysitting Ned’s youngest daughter Katie, he prepared her a bologna sandwich. The bologna clearly had some moldy spots on it, and she didn’t want to eat it. Dad insisted it was still good enough but relented only when she offered the bologna to the cat, which refused to eat it as well.
During the summers, Mom occasionally flew back to visit family and friends in Rochester, New York, leaving the three men of the family to fend for ourselves for a week or two. During this time, Dad would make apple pies for us the way he learned in the Army – with huge chunks of apple. (His other culinary tidbit that I latched onto was “watermelon boats”: he’d slice a watermelon in half lengthwise and using a soup spoon, I’d hollow it out, consuming the whole thing). But during one of Mom’s trip he really outdid himself, at least as far as Ned and I were concerned. My brother and I each had our own bedrooms, and these rooms shared the same wall. Well, not a wall exactly – rather half of the wall was a closet that opened into my brother’s room, and the other half of the wall was a closet that opened into mine, with a thin wooden partition separating the common sides of the two closets. So when Mom was on the other side of the continent, Dad asked Ned and me if we wanted a secret passage, and of course we jumped at the chance. He took a saw to that thin partition cut out a kid-sized hole, allowing us to sneak into each others’ room via this “passage”. And it was a secret because we were not to tell Mom about it (we made sure to always keep our closet doors closed and hang the longest clothes directly in front of the hole to avoid it from being discovered).
When an old White Front store in San Jose was being demolished, Dad was given the chance to grab the insulation (which consisted of asbestos panels about 2.5 feet square). He rented a big van for a day and Ned and I helped him transport the panels back to our house, where Dad lined the attic with them. It really helped keep the house from getting too cold or too hot, but none of us had any idea of the health risks we ran.
One rainy day he was in a car stopped at a light and got rear-ended. He got whiplash from that, which ended his jogging career. The other motorist was a schoolteacher, so Dad chose not to sue him. This was only one of many health problems that afflicted Dad in later life. Luckily Mom was a nurse and was able to do a lot to look after him. At one point Mom took him into the hospital thinking he was having a heart attack, but it turned out to be an “anxiety attack”, probably an aftereffect of his PTSD. But then he suffered a couple of strokes that basically took the life out of him. His speech was affected, and his aphasia caused him to use incorrect words in sentences. Although he recognized Ned, he would call him Johnny (Dad’s brother’s name). Then he was diagnosed with cancer. But even then he continued to exercise – Ned saw him doing sit-ups in the back yard. Eventually his health issues became too much for my Mom to look after, and she placed him in the Veteran’s Hospital in Menlo Park (right next to a golf course), where he passed at the age of 79, due to pneumonia (“the old man’s friend”).
Like a lot of people from his generation, Dad resisted having anyone making a fuss about him. For Christmas, he’d want only the simplest of gifts from us kids – the most I could get him to accept was a couple of cakes of Williams Shaving soap. He had no interest in any sort of memorial after he passed away. But as the years pass, I have come to have a better understanding of how much of a good man he was, and although he was just your average working Joe (well, maybe not “average”: after all, how many other fathers would cut a hole through his kid’s closets with the warning to “Don’t tell your Mother”).
1 Upbeat, lively personality.
2 One day, he taped a couple of caps (those red square patches with a little bit of gun powder that were used in toy guns) to the face of his driver, to see the reaction of his golfing buddies when his opening shot was accompanied by a loud explosion.
3 There were a lot of other funny stories about Dad from work, but I can no longer remember them. Maybe Alfie Gerhardt (who was in my class at High School) could tell you – his father worked along with my dad as a City building inspector as well.