Since my brother passed away last Wednesday, I have been flooded with memories of him, many of them about our childhood. Just the two of us, sitting or lying on the floor, playing games, reading books, doing homework, or working on school projects. There was no TV, no iphone, no electronic games, not even a telephone, just the two of us.
Sam was 2 ½ years older than me, and the first born. He felt a sense of responsibility for me early on, once refusing to hit me back, even though my mother urged him to because I had struck and kicked him, and she felt “I should know what it feels like.” He stood there, shaking his head. “She is just a baby, I can’t.”
When I grew older, however, a quick punch to my arm reminded me to step back and shape up. In fact, the last time he punched me, I was already married and living in Cambridge. We were looking at apartments for him to sublet for the summer so he could use the Harvard library for his dissertation research, and I got punched on the arm. I don’t know what I did to provoke it. It had been awhile since I received the last one, and I thought I had finally graduated. It stopped me in my tracks, and I turned to him and said, “I am a married woman now, and this needs to stop.” It did. But he never stopped covering my back. He covered it for my entire life… and it still feels protected by his presence in the universe.
We were both born during the depression. Right after our parents married, the banks were closed and my father had to receive special dispensation to withdraw money to pay for their honeymoon and the furniture they had purchased. Being older he was more keenly aware of our family’s precarious situation and from the stories both Herta, his late wife, and Pat have told me, I think he had a life-long anxiety about money, even though he was financially quite successful.
When he was 9, my mother told us she was pregnant with Dan. I remember every detail of the scene clearly. We were in the kitchen of our apartment on St Marks Ave, way before St Marks Ave became chi chi. My mother stood in front of the table facing us and said simply, “I want you kids to know that I am going to have a baby.” I was thrilled, finally the sister (wrong) that I had been nagging my mother about. Sam reacted differently. “But we can’t afford to have a baby,” he said seriously, with a slight reprimand in his voice.
Many years later my father told me how anxious he was about being able to pay the medical bills. “I put aside a few dollars each week from the store proceeds and the household budget,” he said, and it was good that I did because it was a difficult pregnancy and your mother needed specialists”.
New York City started offering public kindergarten in 1941, but you needed to be 5 years old, to be accepted. I would turn 5, two months after the cutoff. My mother approached the school officials anyway. They deliberated. I fell a little short of the age requirements but Sam (probably in third grade) was at the top of his class, and seen as a “nice, polite well-behaved child.” Filling the class would also demonstrate the need, the administrators calculated. Finally, they accepted me and I happily rode into kindergarten on Sam’s coat-tails. When he graduated from 6th grade in PS 133, he was awarded a “gold” medal for being the best in his grade.
During the Second World War, we collected tin cans, which we washed, crushed and brought to a collection center along with newspapers for recycling, though I’m not sure that word was used then. We had a disagreement about the preparation of the tin cans; I felt we should remove the labels, which he thought was unnecessary and a “girl thing” worrying about neatness. He ultimately agreed, if I would remove all the labels. His late wife Herta didn’t call him the Prince for nothing.
We worked together on his stamp collection with stamps from countries that no longer exist, and Sam traced the progress of the war on a map we would spread out on the floor.
Sam became my teacher and coach showing me how to score all the plays in a baseball game, which I mastered, and to catch and throw a ball “like a boy” which I failed miserably. Sometimes we would take little trips together to Ebbits Field when the Brooklyn Dodgers played, and to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, one of our favorite places. They had an electronic tic tac toe machine which we tried to beat, and small animals to observe and pet. Later we went to Prospect Park and the zoo. We were 7 and 10 when Dan was born and my mother trusted Sam to take care of me. She was occupied raising Dan, caring for the house, and helping out in the store.
He helped me with my homework when I needed it, and ensured I would pass the Regent Chemistry exam, reviewing a year of Chemistry with me in one night. We traveled together on the trolley car to Hebrew school, and we went frequently to the library, near our father’s store. One day after Sunday School we went to Carol Diamond’s house, his Sunday school class mate, to see a black and white TV, which showed mainly numbers and patterns. I wondered what all the fuss was about. “This is the future” said Sam. He turned out to be right.
He learned the accordion which became one of his life-long passions, performing for the family and later playing songs that the little nieces and nephews could sing. When he was in high school, he worked in our father’ hardware store on Saturdays, making deliveries, shelving merchandise and waiting on customers, when needed. He learned tennis at Surprise Lake Camp, where he went as a camper and later as a counselor, and he played tennis and racquet ball regularly until Parkinsons interfered.
After graduating from Brooklyn College during the Korean War, when there was still a draft, he went into the army, putting his name on the local draft board list so he could get his choice of duty. He ended up as a clerk-typist at the Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, where he told us he worked hard patrolling the beach.
That was the beginning of his love for all things Asian including Chinese food especially at Restaurant #1, its actual name, in Chinatown. As we approached it, Sam would unfailingly say, “We have to go to the Number 1 restaurant,” which we did for fabulous dim sum.
He collected both Asian and African art, the most famous of which was known by the family as “the throne”. It was a brass chair with hanging figures covering the back and legs, which he bought in Greenwich Village, during one of his forays with my son Jonathan. It was an interesting piece rather than pretty. Herta, his wife, looked at it dubiously, convinced he had been duped. Over the years it was moved to different places in their apartment; place, first in the front hall, then in the dining room, eventually in his study, where it still resides. It was not a comfortable chair, no one sat in it for more than a minute, and I felt sorry for the kings who had to issue edicts from there. Herta’s feelings that he was naïve about the throne were legendary in the family. But as luck would have it, attending a meeting in Younde, The Cameroons, I visited a small but fine African Art Museum attached to a Benedictine monastery. There beautifully displayed, I spotted another throne. I moved in closer to examine it. Maybe a little bit smaller but it was an exact duplicate. I was stunned, then elated, and the smile on my face spread from ear to ear. The Museum catalog would prove its authenticity and provide Sam’s redemption.
After the army, he attended NYU and then won a Fulbright scholarship to the Philippines, where he did much of his initial dissertation research. About 30 years later, when I worked in the Philippines and met his friends and colleagues, I saw the awe and respect they felt towards him. Best of all they wined and dined “Sam Seidman’s sister,” regaling me with stories of his exploits there.
Following the completion of his PhD, he taught Economics at Rutgers for a few years before joining Lehman Brothers, helping them arrange the first international bond issue for the Government of the Philippines.
I was visiting my parents shortly after he informed them he was leaving Rutgers for Lehman Brothers. I thought it was a great career move, and I was thrilled. My father, however, was troubled and took me aside, seeking to understand why Sam would leave Rutgers where he was liked, and had a good position for Lehman Brothers, which he felt was risky.
Having heard my parents, especially my father worry about Sam’s wide interests and seeming dreaminess” frequently urging him to “Buckle down, be serious and do well,” I was struck by the dissonance between what success meant to my father and what it meant to Sam. Rutgers was the beginning of Sam’s climb to financial success while for my father, it meant he had already succeeded.
After being at Lehman Brothers for almost 10 years, he founded his own Investment banking firm, in 1972 which he ran until he retired. The move was a loss to me personally because at Christmas time, Robert Lehman opened his art-filled town house for viewings by their employees and guests. That was the collection he later donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sam was a feminist, a term he would never have used to describe himself. But his actions were the proof. He married two strong and successful women. He supported their work, was immensely proud of them and talked often of their accomplishments. He nurtured the career of his step-daughter a lawyer in the NY Attorney General’s office, who was the first to apply that label to Sam. He also advised his niece Caryn, with whom he was very close, through the process of taking her company public.
His striving for success was matched by his attention to his family’s well-being. I often felt he filled the position of paterfamilias beautifully. When I divorced, my children were young, 9 and 12. At that time he and Herta, his first wife, owned a home in Sagaponick, in the Hamptons, where we spent time in the summer. The house was on land that jutted out into a pond and Sam would say, “the house was surrounded by water on three sides, and four sides when it rained.” We brought Snoopy, our beagle there where it busily chased rabbits, and my son Jesse learned to sail a sunfish. Sam and Herta, seeing my anxiety about Jesse going out on the water alone, assured me he was safe, for if the boat turned over, Jesse could simply walk home dragging the boat behind them. They also made the house available to me when they were not using it, urging me to bring friends and enjoy it.
Sam traveled with his nieces and nephews when he could, taking my son Jonathan to France, and then Italy showing him the places that he loved. Then he took his nieces to the Yucatan peninsula.
It was hard to watch my brother decline over more than 10 years, but more dramatically in the last few years. When he died he weighed less than me and he was almost 6 feet. He managed the struggle valiantly, he did his exercises conscientiously, he retained his zest for life, his unending desire to go out for lunch, his love of and interest in people and most importantly his wit and sense of humor.
One day as I walked with him in Central Park, a woman passing by commented on his large, sturdy upscale walker. “Looks like you have the Cadillac of walkers,” she called out. “I beg your pardon,” he said, feigning insult. “This is the Ferrari of walkers” he replied emphatically, engaging with her in a competitive pursuit of the most exclusive and expensive brand name possible.
When he could no longer take his walks and the weather was good, he could be found, with his aide…whom he kept quite busy, sitting on a bench in Central Park, across from his apartment. From his perch he could see the runners whizzing by, and greet walkers entering the park who often stopped to chat.
As I watched him struggling to drink some water, during a recent visit, I said “swallow slowly.”
Without missing a beat, he replied, “Yes, one swallow does not make Spring.”
When I worked in Nigeria, I saw that the death notices for older people said, Celebrate the life of…. Today I am celebrating Sam’s life as I mourn his death.
I am deeply grateful for his caring, the bond we had, the fun we shared, the mischief we made, the chaos he caused, (grateful, only in retrospect), the ideas we exchanged and the laughter he evoked. He was in my life from the day I was born and will remain in my life until I die, but now only in my memories… which are, truly…. truly… a blessing.