|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||
ABOUT SYD HOFF Autobiography • Biography • Articles Written about Syd Personal Letters & Notes by Syd:
Articles by Syd:
The Golden Years The Golden Years have come at last The Cool Water On a summer afternoon in 1919 I sat in a bathtub of cold water playing. It was the one place my mother was reasonably sure I could play without getting run over. About a quarter to five my mother poked her head in and said, “Come on, you’ve been in there long enough.” I knew it was not the length of time I had been in the water that bothered her. My father would be home soon and if there was one thing he like waiting for him in the summertime it was a nice cold tub. I pulled out the stopper and lay there without moving until almost all the water was gone. Then I got out of the tub and started to dry myself. I was almost through when my mother called out for me to do the very thing I was doing. I put on the clean underwear she had hung back of the door for me and went past her in the kitchen into my own bedroom. By the time I had my knickers buttoned I could hear my mother rinsing the tub and letting fresh water in. After I had finished dressing I walked through the kitchen again, this time to the door of our apartment, and went out. My mother didn’t ask where I was going. She knew. She just called after me not to get sweated up, as if such a thing were possible. I hurried down the four flights of stairs and parked myself on the stoop to wait for my father. It was a wonderful place for waiting. Not only could you see the elevated trains pulling into the Jackson Avenue station –you could even see the people coming down the steps. What fun it was waving t my father every night the second I saw him, having him wave back, and having both of us keep on waving until he came right up to where I stood and snatched me up in his arms! I was not the only child in the apartment house who waited. There was another boy my age, who under equal admonishment not to run and play any more at this hour, sat and waited for his father, too. He said to me, “Today you’ll lose.” The remark surprised me. I had thought that only in my own mind was this a game, the winner, of course, being whoever’s father came home first. I smiled and said, “We’ll see.” Then I settled back with confidence. Never had his father come home before mind. A train came screeching up the tracks from 149th Street. My heart started beating faster. I suppose his did, too. The people were coming down the steps. He was waving and his father was waving back. I could not see mine. After they had both gone in I sat alone and wondered if I would ever forgive my father. More trains came up from downtown and still there was no sign of him. Now I was not concerned with the fact that he had not been first. I just wanted him to come home. My mother must have begun to be concerned, too. She called down to me with every train and asked if I saw him, as if she couldn’t see just as well from the window. After a while she told me to go to the corner and keep watch. I stood on the corner outside the candy store. After a while I got tired and sat down on the sidewalk. When you’re seven years old there’s nothing wrong with sitting on the sidewalk. Fewer passengers were getting off the trains now, but my mother kept calling, “Do you see him? Any sign yet?” “No! No! No!” I answered impatiently. We were hardly any comfort to each other. Hunger gnawed at my vitals, still I remained at my post, hoping and praying that each new train would deliver the precious cargo. The neighbors finished their suppers and came out with their folding chairs. “Maybe he’s out with the redhead,” one of them yelled up to my mother, jokingly. There was no answer. Dusk settled around me and the street lights went on. My mother called for me to come up and eat. I did not move. Finally there was nothing else to do. She fed me my meal in silence, most of the time her face turned away, except when she could muster a smile. Once she left me alone and went downstairs. I could see from the window that she went into the candy store – probably to make a phone call. When she returned I sat near her trying to think of something to say or do that would make her feel better. She must have sensed what was going on inside me because suddenly I was on her lap and she was rocking me back and forth. We were sitting like that, crying and kissing and clinging to each other, when there was a loud shout from the downstairs hallway. It was the candy store. There was a telephone call for us! My mother raced down the stairs, I right behind. She swept into the candy store and almost closed the door of the booth on me. “Hello? Hello?” she shouted. It was my father. I could tell by the way her face brightened. “Thank God,” she whispered. “I thought there had been an accident, God forbid.” Then she started to listen and some of the softness went out of her voice. When she hung up, she turned away without looking at me. I followed her upstairs into the kitchen and watched her emptying pots from the stove and putting things in the icebox. “Go wash around,” she said. I went into the bathroom and started to turn on the water in the basin. Then I saw the cool tub waiting for my father. I took off my things, hung them back of the door, and climbed in. Story: My Brother's Bar Mitzvah (letter sent to his sister Dorothy Ross) My brother was going on thirteen. He had to learn a speech. But Danny would always slam his book shut. “Aw, who wants to make a speech?” he’d say. Papa came home from work. He was a salesman and needed help with his valises. Mama was cooking. “How can he know it? He only knows baseball scores,” she said. We ate. “My son, I’ve hired a hall. There will be two hundred guests. They will expect you to make a speech,” said Papa. Rabbi Plotkin came to see us. Mama gave him a glass of tea. “Speeches aren’t important,” said the rabbi. “It’s what’s in a bar mitzvah boy’s heart that counts.” We watched him go home. Danny tried to learn. He locked himself in the bathroom and nobody else could go in. “Danny, what are you doing in there?” Mama shouted. It was summer vacation and Papa took me to work with him. “Maybe your brother will be able to study without you around,” he said. Papa showed his customers samples of stockings and underwear, and they gave him orders. “Please don’t forget! We expect to see you at Martinique Mansion on Beck Street for my other son’s bar mitzvah Saturday!” Papa told them. At night, everybody in our house sat outside, talking and eating ice cream. Mr. Galgano, the taxi driver on the third floor, told about how he had grown up in Italy with his parents. Mrs. Waleska, on the top floor, told how she and her husband had come over from Poland. “I wish someone would tell about us,” Mama whispered. Suddenly, Danny rose to his feet. “My dear parents, family and friends,” He said. “We are gathered here for a special occasion. Today I am a man.” Everyone in the street clapped hands. “Mazel tov! Good luck!” they shouted. People in the windows were clapping too. Papa jumped up. “Listen everybody! You’re all invited to Danny’s bar mitzvah at Martinique Mansion on Saturday” he said. “There will be a twelve course chicken dinner and dancing,” said Mama. Martinique Mansion was a great success and my brother gave a perfect speech. He got fountain pens, one hundred dollars in cash and a solid gold watch. My own bar mitzvah was two years ago, but I started reading Danny’s book now. Letter to Syd’s brother-in-law Dan (proposal for TV show) (Dan Ross, former Sr. VP City National Bank, Beverly Hills, Entertainment Division) Dear Dan, With your penchant for driving me into the limelight, this might be one more opportunity. Next year, 1997, will be the 50th anniversary of the CBS TV show I one did. Famous producer/director Worthington Miner (Tony) did my show; sustaining it was Tales of Hoff (a takeoff on Tales of Hoffman). Later with the first sponsor of a TV show CBS ever got, it was called Shorty. I did 18 shows for Ipana toothpaste, Sunday nights at 7:30 p.m. It would get so hot in the studio at Grand Central Terminal Building in NYC, a stagehand would have to keep passing me crayons. To see the show, the President of Bristol-Myers, the sponsor, had to go to a bar in Port Washington, Long Island. My own wife would take our kids to another bar in Rockaway Beach, Queens. Well, after 18 shows, Bristol-Myers was restless and they picked up a show with Bert Parks, then another with Tex and Jinx. Tony Minor, of course went upward and onward with “Studio One.” Of course, I went in a similar direction, doing cartoons for papers and magazines, and comic strips, then settled down to producing several hundred children’s books, starting with Danny and the Dinosaur in 1958. It’s that last item I think might make me a good prospect for publicity in 1997. Harper-Collins, my publisher will be re-issuing my 1960 book Where’s Prancer, for the Santa Claus Christmas trade, in the fall of 1997. CBS might surely want to review my work on that old TV show Shorty, although no prints of that are available. But I could be there in a studio, demonstrating that show, and then the network might want to show me as I appear in classrooms all over the country nowadays. Sound interesting, Dan? Where’s Prancer will not be out until the fall of 1997. But prior to that, Harper will at last be coming out with the CD-ROM of “Danny and the Dinosaur.” Who knows? The powers that be might even want to reconstruct Schwab’s Drug store on Sunset Blvd, where I used to have sodas nightly with my wife. Love, Letter to Syd’s brother-in-law Dan (cruise ship proposal) (the following letter sent to Syd’s brother-in-law helped launch Syd as entertainment on cruise ships worldwide) Dear Dan, What I described on the phone will be a spoof, with respect, of “fine art.” I would offer a one-hour illustrated satire of fine art, from DaVinci, Picasso, Miro, Chagall and Klee, right through the centuries. Drawing on 30-40 sheets, I will present the world’s greatest masters beginning with DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa.” I will then show a study of faces by Renoir, Picasso and others. How did religion influence Roualt and Chagall? How differently did Klee, Roualt and Picasso draw a clown? (How do I draw one with a simple letter “A”?) Chagall’s “Study of a Violinist” led him to have fish and even goat play violins. Nudes. How did we learn how to draw nudes in art school? Was Matisse much different? How did studying “stick figures” lead Degas to paint and draw ballet dancers? What a far cry to nudes by Miro, Klee, Picasso and others, and Paul Klee’s “Sexual Fantasy.” Why did Cassatt, Kollwitz and others reject “modern” styles, why was Diego Rivera once not “leftish?” How did Mickey Mouse affect Chagall? How did Picasso infuriate Hitler? Who were Ignatz, Krazy Kat, and Offisa Pupp? How did all the masters affect Charlie Shultz, Milt Gross, Trudeau and the world of comic strip cartooning? Regards, Letter to Dorothy November 26, 1995 Dear Dorothy (Dan, this one might be only for our wife), Yes, that photo you sent looked like Mom, but the lady was only an impostor, maybe Rich Little. Mom was far more beautiful, as those Victorian pictures she took with Pop at the turn of the century, would attest. (of course, Pop didn’t help when he took her for her first drive in the Chevy his “place” had bought for him, ran into a tree and she sustained a broken nose.) Mom, of course, lived in the shadow of her husband, who was so gregarious and had such an appetite for life. She probably never took a look at the NY Journal he brought home every day. A deep-rooted inferiority complex made her suspicious of nearly everything around her. Of course, there were the bi-weekly forays to Klein’s in Union Square, but otherwise she was strictly a “home girl,” throwing fistfuls of salt on the meat she would cook, and forcing herself to be hospitable when neighbors looked in on her. When her blood pressure rose to astronomical heights, our brother Danny would go rushing to her bedside from the taxi and lay his head on her chest, while I stood by rather coldly I’m afraid, because I suspected her of being a hypochondriac. It never mattered to her that I had just sold a drawing to the New Yorker. What was far more important to her was how much Danny had booked on the taxi that day or night. And oh, that sneer she had cultivated to protect herself form the outside world, like the time I wanted to join the Navy at fifteen, because I thought I’d have friends in uniform too. Or when I wanted to run away to Paris and live in a garret with artist friends of mine when I was at the Academy, working part-time as an usher at the Spooner on Southern Blvd. Mom, of course, was a “half-orphan.” She had never know her mother. Her father was Barnowitz, the redhead with a handlebar mustache, who owned a tiny fruit store on 167th Street. I remember his funeral. His body lay in their bedroom, surrounded by lighted candles, with the neighbors wailing away and pinching Danny and me because we were so cute. The family had been living in a five-story tenement with one toilet in the yard for the whole building. At three, Mom had become the adopted daughter of “Bubba,” and the sister of Harry, Bernie and Fanny. To this day, I remember Mom yelling to Pop when he’d be leaving on Tuesdays to go to Daum, Rogers and Spritzer, at 880 Broadway, where Danny and I spent separate summers working as stock boys. “Ben, call up my sister in Jersey City,” Mom would yell from the window on 158th Street and Trinity. And Pop would remember to call because the “place” would pay the fifteen cents for the long distance call. Mom’s full-time job, of course, was looking after you. Dutch and I always marveled at how close by you Mom always was. Her function was to guard your virginity, and I can only assume she succeeded, until the handsome Dan Rosensweig (later changed to Ross) came riding to the rescue from somewhere else in the Bronx, like Hopalong Cassidy. Yes, Mom was close to you, and I’ll never know how you got away long enough once to go on a hike to the Palisades, where our cousin Benny Berger fell to his death. But back to Mom’s sneer. She saved it mostly for Pop when she suspected him of looking at other ladies at 750 Bryant Ave. The sneer would even become frightful when Pop gave a lady or two a ride to Castel Hill Pool in the Bronx, where Mom seldom went because she had a fear of the sun, like I should have had. Yes, nobody was safe from Mom’s sneer, even some of my own lady friends on Bryant Avenue. “Go to your girl friends!” Mom would sometimes yell at me, when she didn’t know where I’d be going when I left the house. So, that’s enough of the memoirs for now. I’ll be leaving for Daytona tomorrow to visit some schools. Love to Carol and all,
©SydHoff.org 2009 |
|||||||
