When I was seventeen I visited my grandparents Goody and Casey, my mother’s parents, in Los Angeles. They were living in a tiny apartment in a seedy neighborhood of old buildings soon to be replaced by newer ones.
This was in striking contrast to how they lived for most of the 1940s and 50s and 60s when they owned a large house with a swimming pool in an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles. They had a cook and housekeeper, drove expensive cars, and at the height of their riches owned fifty apartment buildings in nice parts of the city, a second home in Palm Springs, and hundreds of acres on the outskirts of Los Angeles awaiting development.
I remember as a little boy riding around in Casey’s convertible Lincoln Continental from one apartment complex to another where Casey would inspect the premises, confer with his managers, and exchange niceties with his many renters.
Casey was a gambler. One of his famous sayings was, “I wish I had a dollar for every dollar I’ve lost playing gin rummy.” Then he would arch his eyebrow and say, “For that matter, I wish I had a dollar for every dollar I won playing gin rummy.”
He did not read books and spent many an evening at their country club playing Gin Rummy for ten and twenty dollars a point. He would never play golf just to play golf. There had to be money on the game. He once lost fifteen thousand dollars on nine holes of golf, and this was in the late 1950s when for fifteen thousand dollars one could buy a nice house in San Carlos and a big beach house in Santa Cruz.
Goody, by contrast, was an intellectual interested in psychology and art, an avid collector of Asian antiques, and left the moneymaking entirely to Casey. She wrote long thoughtful letters to her friends and grandchildren, and was a fantastic story teller.
Casey’s son, my uncle Howard, was an even bigger gambler than Casey. A successful entertainment lawyer, he bet on college sports, pro sports, played poker several times a week in high stakes games, and gambled with real estate.
Then came the Big Deal. Casey partnered with Howard and two of Howard’s associates and they bought a huge chunk of land on Wilshire Boulevard, several acres. Today those acres are covered with office buildings and high-rise apartment buildings and the land is worth many billions of dollars.
Casey’s dream was to build an exclusive retirement community and hotel with an adjoining office complex, entertainment venue, and medical center. He mortgaged all his apartment buildings, all his land, everything he owned, and put every penny into this incredibly ambitious project.
Shortly before ground was to be broken on the Wilshire dream, Howard and his colleagues pulled out of the deal and Casey lost everything. I don’t know the details of how and why this happened, but literally overnight Goody and Casey went from being fabulously wealthy to being paupers dependent on my parents.
Even more bizarre, Howard and his wife and kids moved into Goody and Casey’s opulent home, and Goody and Casey became frequent visitors there. Casey talked his way into sharing an office with a low-end real estate shyster and life went on.
Goody was born into a poor family in the Jewish ghetto of Detroit in 1900. Casey grew up in Flint, Michigan where his family owned a dry goods store. Casey attended college on an athletic scholarship. When he and Goody were first married, they were desperately poor for several years until Casey’s real estate deals started paying off.
So there I was in Goody and Casey’s tiny apartment, seeing them for the first time without their great riches. It was Goody’s sixty-fifth birthday. I said to her, “What a fascinating life you’ve had.”
To which she replied, “If you live to fifty you’ve had a fascinating life.”
Her answer puzzled me at the time. When I turned fifty I recalled Goody’s proclamation and felt I knew what she meant. To be born and survive the helplessness of infancy, to learn to walk and talk and socialize, to grow into adulthood, to experience love and loss and pain and happiness and sorrow, and to reach an age when we are no longer young and the body is no longer capable of doing what it could do so easily when we were ten and twenty and thirty and forty, is to have had a fascinating life.
*
Good news. We just got our first radio plays for our new CD Through the Fire. A station in Georgetown California and a station in Milwaukee Wisconsin played Really Really You. A station in Bloomington Indiana played Rico, a station in Warren Vermont played Real Good Joe, and a station in Boise Idaho played Rico, too.
Mazel tov!
a link to a site that will give you all the downloading/streaming/listening options for Through the Fire.
https://throughthefiretoddwalton.hearnow.com/
and a link to where one can buy the CD of Through the Fire
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRSNHR6H/ref=dm_rwp_pur_lnd_albm_unrg