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This set of anecdotes was assembled by Gary Simon, Abe’s son.
As a child, I learned that Dad was regarded as naturally funny. He was in constant demand as master of ceremonies at various events around town. These were not prestigious venues; I believe that he performed for the Sons of Italy, the Polish Falcons, and the like. He was a master of ethnic accents, and he had a catalog of jokes that morphed into the patois of the group he spoke to. For our area, the accents were Italian, Polish, Jewish, and Irish. So here is the beans and BBs story, one of his more famous jokes. I heard him deliver this several times to different audiences. The written form just does not do justice to the spoken, so I can give only the outline of the joke. BBs, by the way, are little metal pellets used in air-power guns. Quite a few boys around town had BB guns. These guns might be used to kill a small bird or a squirrel, but they were too weak to inflict bad human injuries. The story:
Little Tony rushed into his mother’s kitchen after playing a very exciting baseball game. (Tony would be Stanley for a Polish group or Irving for a Jewish group.) Momma was busy making a big kettle of beans to be used for the family gathering the next day. “Calm down, be careful,” his mother urged. But Tony was a little bit careless, and his baseball bat bumped into a box on the kitchen shelf above the stove. The box contained BBs, and these all fell into the kettle of beans, unobserved by Momma. (It was never explained why a box of BBs would be on a kitchen shelf.)
The family came over the next day. They all ate heartily and enjoyed themselves immensely. On the following day, mother got a call from one of the relatives. “What did you have in those beans?” “Why do you ask?” asked Momma. “Weren’t they good?” “They were delicious, but I just have to ask.”
The cycle of what-was-in-the-beans and weren’t-they-good was done at least three times. Dad’s proficient ethnic accent increased the story’s tension. Finally, it came to this. “I have to ask, because…. when I bent over, I killed the canary!”
The audience howled. Every audience. Every time.
They loved my Dad. And so did we all.
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Dad’s years in the automotive business made him an expert on the car problems of folks who were not rich. It is quite certain that around Wilkes-Barre, most people were not rich. One of the balkiest, most annoying parts of cars in the 1950s and 1960s was the carburetor. The carburetor has been almost completely replaced by fuel injection. Many people today do not know exactly what it did.
In the cold winters of northeast Pennsylvania, carburetors did not perform well, and plenty of folks could not get their cars started. What to do? Call Abe Simon! Dad knew how to do magic with carburetors. He helped out friends and relatives at many cold, awkward, inconvenient moments. I watched his performance a number of times, and I saw his methodology. Sometimes it worked for me. It always worked for him. Remove the air filter and expose the top of the carburetor. The flap at the top needed to be forced into an open position. He did this by placing a screwdriver so that the flap could not close; then the person inside the car had a very good chance of getting the ignition to spark. He claimed that he was just doing the work of the choke. Cars of that vintage had an automatic choke and sometimes these did not work as well as the former manual choke. Wow. Anyone born after 1970 probably has no idea exactly what was going on in this story.
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Dad was in the woods with his father Jacob. Dad spotted a snake and alerted his father. He was thanked and also rewarded with a new bicycle. (This story was told to Dad’s grandson Josh, as well as to others.)
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Dad was once spanked by his father. His grandmother Rosa said, “You’ll thank him for what he did.” Dad replied, “Thank him for almost killing me?” Rosa said, “You’ll thank him.” (This was told to Dad’s grandson Josh, as well as to others.)
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Dad had a shelf of joke books. I of course spent a bit of time with those books. There were absolutely no off-color jokes in those volumes. There were, however, plenty of ethnic jokes that rose to the level of high offensiveness. The Irish were drunk, the Jews were conniving, the Scots were stingy, and the Poles were stupid. The book chapters were generally ethnically sorted. The chapter on jokes about blacks was particularly insulting. Well, this was the 1950s or 1960s. I am pleased to report that I never once heard Dad do in public a joke that was ethnically offensive.
There’s a borderline exception to this last statement. There was a time around 1960 when Polish jokes were popular. These had the form “How many Polacks does it take to ….?” or perhaps “How many pieces in a Polack’s jigsaw puzzle?” I do remember that Dad would listen to, and even enjoy, those jokes, but he would never use them in one of his routines.
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One of Dad’s favorite lines was “What time did the eight o’clock bus leave?” He asked this of young children. Every child was asked this question. I got to hear it many times, and I was sick of it. But the children reacted in different ways. Some were just shy and couldn’t answer at all. Some gave a simple I-don’t-know. Others grinned in a partly embarrassed way and volunteered “Eight o’clock.” And, by the way, his line was totally committed to memory; it was always eight and never any other time.
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Whenever I was together with one of my male cousins, Dad got our names mixed up. I don’t believe that he was trying to be cute or funny. I think that he genuinely got confused. I was often called Ronnie or Jesse when we were all together. I don’t believe that I was ever called Maury; Dad just could not get me mixed up with Maury. To this day, I do not know why this confusion ever happened.
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People with a comic sense manage to get off single lines that stick in memory. I recall a Simon vacation to Cooperstown, New York, in which we stayed in the upstairs of a family’s house. I cannot recall why we were in that spot instead of a motel, although a place like Cooperstown can run to overflowing in the summer. The accommodations were acceptable, but well below hotel standards. As Dad contemplated that skimpy pillow that he would use for the night, he noted that “This pillow is so thin it only has one side.” I don’t know if that line was original, but I had never heard it before. And I have not heard it since.
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Dad was a master of repartee with waitresses, and he had quite a few lines that always led to smiles. “My wife and I would like water, please. In separate glasses.” He would ask for a coffee refill and then extend his two hands, cupped together, toward the waitress. He’d show then faked recognition, withdraw his hands, and offer the coffee cup.
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I don’t know how I came to love the woods. It certainly was not from my parents. Mom was urbanized, and Dad had a talent for getting lost.
Memory recalls only one family foray into the woods. This was for a picnic on Joe Palooka Mountain when my sister and I were under six years old. Yes, Joe Palooka Mountain is a real place. As I recall, Mom packed up a picnic lunch, we drove to the spot on the mountain, spread out a blanket and started to unpack the food.
But Dad spotted a snake, and we quickly grabbed everything and left. I was too young to be a reliable observer, so I cannot fill out the details. I will always remember the incident, but puzzling questions remain.
Dad claimed the snake was a copperhead, a poisonous variety native to the area. Was it really poisonous? Dad had no talent at all for taxonomic distinctions, and I’ve always suspected that he regarded every snake as poisonous. Common garter snakes were much more common.
It was our last picnic.
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The morning was thick with the still humidity of a late Pennsylvania summer. The year was 1999, just a few months before my father’s 86th birthday. I had dedicated the day to my Dad; it was a chance to do something special for him.
He had never visited the graves of his grandparents, and we were going to make the sixty-mile trip to Shamokin to see those graves for the first time. His grandfather had died a full ten years before he was born. Dad’s grandmother died when he was about six, so he barely knew her.
Dad took the comfortable front seat of our Dodge Caravan, and I drove. As we took the local roads to Interstate 81, Dad asked “Gary, how many miles are on this car?” I told him that the car was then at 75,000 miles. He pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. “Boy, I remember when a car with that many miles was just about all done.”
Dad’s life centered around automobiles. The family home in Mocanaqua was extended with a brick garage and grew into an operation with gasoline pumps, auto parts, repairs, and new and used cars. Dad’s older brother got the business started and brought my father into it. It was claimed that they were the second-oldest Chrysler dealership in the state. This is hard to check, as dealerships have merged and changed identities.
Dad chatted freely as we drove along. He remembered the introduction of the automatic choke, power steering, and automatic transmissions. I enjoyed this bit of nostalgia. I’ve used the manual choke, but only on lawnmowers. I’ve used cars without power steering, and I am happy for this improvement. I learned to drive with manual transmission, and I can tell you what a clutch does. Dad recalled that some of the Chrysler cars he sold in the 1950s had automatic transmission levers on the dashboard. Yes, I remembered those also.
His nostalgia was inclined to historical interests. He would never use the phrase “good old days” for anything related to cars. His whole life was a witness to the improving automobile.
A few automobile changes did not please him. Some things were just gadgets waiting to break. He was at first not happy with automatic electric windows, but he liked them after they became reliable. He marveled at the notion that the store’s teenage customers would buy things like fender skirts and kits to make louvers in the hood covers.
I reminded him that he was well-respected around town for his ability to make carburetors behave. It seems that every friend, relative, and neighbor knew of his ability to start a car on a cold Pennsylvania night. Dad possessed a genius knack for out‑psyching a carburetor. I watched his performance quite a few times, and I’m still dazzled by his skill. Progress marched onward, and fuel injection systems have made Dad’s skill largely irrelevant.
The trip rolled onward. We talked about the cars that the family had: the old Plymouth Belvedere sedan and the Barracuda, along with all the peculiar colors and features.
The happy chatter filled up the trip, and we reached our destination. The graves were in the Jewish cemetery of Shamokin. The town prospered when the world cared about anthracite coal. Those days are gone, the residents slowly moved away, and the single synagogue was down to a few caretakers. I had planned for our visit using Internet information and then letters. Our contact person was Irvin Liachowitz, who took care of the synagogue and also kept the keys to the cemetery. We met Mr. Liachowitz at his jewelry store. He closed up the shop and led us to the cemetery. The graves were easy to locate in this small area. Tears welled up in Dad’s eyes as he ran his fingers over the inscriptions on the grave markers. As decreed by Jewish custom, we placed pebbles on the markers, perhaps as a sign that the deceased have been visited or perhaps as a tiny reminder of how little we can do for those loved ones who are no longer with us.
We also found something unexpected. On the reverse side of Dad’s grandfather’s marker, at ground level, was a small engraved inscription. The stone was donated by Dad’s father.
This was an emotional day for Dad and me. Both of us were pleased. We rehashed family legends as we rode back. He continued his stories about the automobiles that he had driven. My Dad lived through the decades of changes in the automobile not as a spectator but as a very active participant. Somehow the family nostalgia and the automobile nostalgia fit together.
Dad thanked me for organizing this trip. I realized that I had enjoyed it just as much as he did. It was a very special day.