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November 29, 2005
Eulogy for my Grandfather Edward Wigdor
I wouldn’t try to argue with my grandfather Eddie from his grave but I am not sure that is what he would have preferred. He might disagree about anything I have to say about him. Eddie was one of those people who derive pleasure out of an intellectual debate and was always hungry for a smart hour with a worthy adversary to discuss a subject shrouded by opinions and complexity. I am a genetic disciple of this stubborn argumentative trait. My sister Lisa can easily confirm this having debated with me in the back seat of a car and then after having me get close to convincing her of my point of view being asked to switch sides to argue the other side of the argument. My friend Robert wanted to create an event called Bringing Down the House where people could get a chance to rise from the audience to debate me.
I don’t know if I received love for debate and being contrarian from frequent interactions with my grandfather or an intellectual gene put into place through years of genetic selection of rabbis and philosophers. Eddie’s family, the Wigdor’s, are descended from the Rabbinovich family, one of the longest lines of rabbis so it is likely that this is the case. Eddie was cynical. It may have been his age and often times it was just from having been a business person for his whole life with the experience to spot crap when he saw it. When I went into business selling products over the web with VirtuMall he was astounded by the value of Netscape and other free Internet services. He kept asking “How can you make money on the Internet if everything is free?” It took the crash of 2002 to see the wisdom in his cynicism. He also challenged me when I was dating Nadia, a rabbinical student. He knew I was an atheist so he would ask “How can you be an atheist and marry a rabbi?” Nadia and I broke-up over this issue a few years later. Like me, Eddie was likely an atheist. He was skeptical of what claims had been made about God. But that didn’t change how he felt about his culture, history, and religion. He lived in a house with two sets of dishes and ate Kosher meals every day of his life.
I don’t remember Eddie as much from his youth other than from what I could gather he might have been like from stories he told or stories told to me about him. I remember him mostly from my own youth. It seems that from the perspective of a child grandparents start out antiquated and are born balding with grey hair. My grandfather liked to say little phrases to me playing with words and numbers and would say them to me even when I was beyond the age to just giggle about them. I can still hear him say “ABC Goldfish. MNO Goldfish. SAR!” or “Why did six eat seven? Because seven ate nine!” He also would ask questions that could confuse a little kid like “What would happen if a snake ate it’s tail?”.
When I came to Toronto he knew that I liked to play baseball but wasn’t a sports fan himself. But he took me to the Toronto Blue Jays game when I came to town and marveled at the new stadium and how much it cost the city. He liked to give me updates on how well the Blue Jays were playing, especially when they were playing well during the Red Sox poorer years in the eighties. More than once I received a blue jays jersey that I wasn’t sure whether to wear or not. He would also, with my grandmother and aunt, take me to the science or art museum in Toronto to look and learn about the world. When I came to town he and my grandmother would look for an event that might entertain me during my stay. He always wanted to know how I was doing in school, what I was studying, and to talk and compare how different things were from the US and Canada.
We didn’t go out to eat very often when I visited Toronto. We would sit at the long table at 260 Heath Street Apt. 1004 and discuss matters of great importance like the origin of life, what the meaning of quantum physics was, the cause of the middle east crisis, the benefits of socialized health care. While at the dinner table he was always very fired-up to talk about something that had just come fresh from the newspaper or radio. It was a contrast to when I would call him on the phone to wish him a happy new years, happy birthday, or to thank him for a gift. On the phone he was a man of few words thanking me for the call and then saying he had to go. He probably never got into the habit of low cost calls to talk long distance on the phone. He likely remembered back to the days when you paid by the letter for a telegraph whenever I called.
We did go out a restaurant a few times. I recall one place that was specially designed for children. The restaurant was decorated like a circus like atmosphere with an organ in the center and fresh popcorn on the tables. While we were sitting there was a man at the table next to us who was smoking. While this was long before the days when smoking was disallowed in bars across America Eddie took offense to the man and challenged him by telling the people next to us to stop smoking. I could see he was protective of us and willing to stand-up to make it known what was and was not acceptable regardless of what was allowed by laws. I am a non-smoker as is everyone in my family and everyone I have ever dated. He was a non-smoker in an earlier era when people smoked in their offices and doctors recommended brands of cigarettes.
He liked fresh air like the kind he breathed while traveling through the National parks in California with a travel companion he met on the way. While looking through some old photographs I found a carefully annotated journal of this trip with photographs next to descriptions of the journey. I don’t picture him as a young man needing a large social circle so much as someone with an urge to explore and to do so predominantly alone.
I can’t remember my grandfather without my grandmother. They were only apart after she died and he was crying, lonesome, upset, and worried about what would become of him. He looked different than I had ever seen him before, vulnerable. Part of him, something that propped him up every day was his relationship with Evelyn, his wife and companion. I had traveled to visit my grandparents while looking to make a movie called “Manufacturing Attraction”, a documentary on the shift to more mechanized forms of people meeting, dating, and connecting. I wish I had taken a video tape of him telling the story of how he met my grandmother. He loved to tell it. He had met a girl in New York and been interested in going out with her on a date. When he went to find her she wasn’t there but Evelyn, her roommate was available and he fell in love with her. He had found a soul mate and they stayed married for the rest of their lives, taking many trips together in their seventies and eighties and then propping each other up and caring for each other as they aged once they could no longer travel.
Eddie was a lover of the world who posted an Atlas in his bathroom and would buy detailed coffee table sized Atlases to look at. He had during the course of a lifetime traveled to the many places he had seen on the maps. I remember as a young child getting presents from these travels like a small wooden boat he had bought in Fiji. Among the books he raved about was John Irving’s Son of the Circus, set in a foreign modern landscape of India.
He was an early traveler doing business in Japan and China as an importer looking for electronics lines to represent in Canada. Because he was an individualist he had set out to build his own small business, as a lone salesman pitching a unique bag of goods. I know of two product lines that he sold that were very successful. One was the take a number systems available in supermarkets, bakeries, and deli counters where you take a number and go to the front of the line when your number is called. He also sold the type of intercom systems that were installed in high schools to announce to everyone that homeroom would be five minutes longer, or at the airport that a flight had been delayed.
He had later in his business life gotten interested in some more esoteric lines like a camera that took 3-D stereoscopic pictures, and a pencil with a series of discardable plastic tips with short sharpened pieces of lead in them. Like many other men, he was a gadget fan, the remnants that I could see in the Toronto apartment when he was so fragile were multiple reading machines for the blind. He was trained as an electrical engineer and even went to work for the army to help fit fighter planes to work properly in World War II. Apparently planes built to American standards wouldn’t always work for the Brittish so they needed to make sure certain parts, like the part where they drop bombs through, was aligned properly so that the bombs would drop on their targets rather than explode in the plane. On one of his missions they were testing the bomb release areas using explosive flares and the problem did occur that the bomb wouldn’t release. So he was flying in a plane above a flare he had just dropped into the chute that was capable of blowing-up a large chunk of the plane where he was sitting to do the experiment. Luckily the flare was a dud and didn’t explode even after landing, but it was a close call for him and myself (born two generations later). When he told stories of his work I could tell that work and engineering was a real love for him.
He was an athletic man who enjoyed swimming throughout his life. I recall one story that he had gone swimming one morning in the Fjords in Norway in water so cold that the locals didn’t dare to swim in it. He was a good structured lap swimmer who, even as his health was beginning to fail, continued to go daily to the JCC for a swim. I heard that he also was a tennis player. When he turned 65 he made some new friends who were 40 at the time and gave them a run for their money when he played tennis against them. It was only a broken hip that slowed him down and even then he continued to walk in the halls of his building despite failing joints.
In his final years he still loved to work and was looking for products for people handicapped like himself with limited eyesight or progressing deafness. I wonder what he would have been involved with had he been an fresh entrepreneur in the internet age. For me, having followed a similar path as an Internet entrepreneur his first question to me whenever we would meet would be the familiar inquisitive version of hello to a business person “How is business?”
He died of shock in the hospital after asking for his daughter Nancy to bring him his transistor radio so that he could listen to the news. He wanted her to make sure there were batteries in it.
I am very much his grandson.
Posted by dhousman at November 29, 2005 10:46 PM