Sound Effects

My biological father was very tall. He looked like Abraham Lincoln and Dick Van Dyke combined.

He was a runner but was a swimmer when my mother met him when she was 16  pretending to be 18 while working at a summer camp. He was the tan lifeguard.

They eloped!

 He had blue eyes and was a High School English teacher before he moved into advertising.

He made radio sound effects for Sacramento Tomato juice --the bloop bloop sound of thick tomato juice being poured. He had the quintessential radio voice.

I saw him on rare occasions. I was terrified of him. He would yell at me for stirring my ice cream.

He aspired to be a novelist but only worked on his autobiographical novel on Christmas Day. He loved Martini's too much too often, daily for lunch and dinner.

Once he joined the midtown Manhattan advertising world he married (3 overlapping advertising women) every ten years for 30 years starting families on each round.

The first one was my mother, Sonia from Brooklyn.

The second one was Renee. They had a baby girl with Down syndrome named Sydney who was institutionalized and died of neglect. Then they claimed to be Presbyterian or Episcopalian (not Jewish) so they could adopt two children. And they did, Nikki and Bill and he left when they were age 7.

The third wife, Liz had also been married twice prior and had 2 adult children a boy I've never met, and a girl Cathy from her first marriage. They stayed married until his death.