A Few Minutes with the Mayor – September 2020

Recently, I received three postcards from Jacksonville citizens, all denouncing me as a racist for my July column. The column deplored racism, but the readers read it to mean quite the opposite. How very sad! I may have far more reason to condemn racism as well as religious or ethnic bigotry than these three, because I grew up seeing it directed at my own father. Perhaps writing about him will tell you more about me.

Born in Turkey in 1898, my father was an immigrant to the United States when he was 16. He was the youngest of seven brothers who, when World War One broke out, took him to Ankara, where he trained to be a barber, and put him on a boat for America, so he could escape the war. Dad told me three of them were killed in that war.

My father settled in Syracuse, NY, where he met and married my mother. It was the most unlikely of unions for he was a Turkish Moslem, reviled as heathens in conservative upstate NY, while she was a Baptist from a large family with roots back to the American Revolution. Even more unusual was the fact that he’d never attended school a single day in his life, while she was a third-year student at the Eastman School of Music studying to be a classical harpist. Love trumped hate! Ignoring her family’s ethnic and religious disapproval, they married and moved to New York City, never reconciling with her family.

Mom and Dad never talked about this. I never knew any relatives on my father’s side nor on my mother’s side. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins… these were unknown to me. Growing up as an only child, I was truly alone, or so I felt. Only I wasn’t alone. I was in one of the world’s most populated, modern and culturally-alive cities in the world. New York City was then very much like the city depicted in the musical, On The Town… not like West Side Story with its image of gangs and violence. We lived one block from the American Museum of Natural History, two blocks from the Hayden Planetarium, three blocks from Central Park, three blocks from Riverside Park and the Hudson River, and one block from a bustling Upper West Side Broadway pedestrian-oriented thoroughfare.

It was the perfect location for my father. Being an immigrant, where better to live than in a city of immigrants! The whole world came through Ellis Island into New York. Russian Jews, Turks, Cypriots, Italians, British emigres, Greeks, and Kurds, all these with their different cultures, became familiar to me.

The immigrants who came to America brought their age-old prejudices with them. All carried ethnic, religious or national feelings of superiority they’d learned growing up. Many tried passing it on to their children born here! I heard them all. They had special words to describe people they looked down upon, words for Jews, words for Irish, words for Poles, words for Turks; words I won’t repeat here because people like the three who called me a racist will accuse me of slander even by my calling attention to them. I heard them all… but never in my house. My father taught me to know better.

I also lived in another world, the world of bright lights… Broadway, Times Square, and New York City in general. When delivering newspapers on my 4am rounds, I would see couples returning home in taxicabs from night clubs or parties, dressed to the nines… she in full length gowns and he in a tuxedo. To my young eyes, it seemed to be the American dream come true.

However, my father never had much time for the “night lights.” He worked six full days a week, standing on his feet, never complaining, and glad to be in America. He never took out a loan, never borrowed or owed money, and never had a bank account. He couldn’t read or write, but he spoke five languages fluently. Dying young, aged 58, he had 2,000 one-dollar bills stashed in his barber shop towel heater. He earned every dollar.

With Americans more materialistic than ever, many would have considered my father “poor.” In money perhaps, but he was rich in knowledge and understanding of the world and people around him… with friends from all walks of life. He was rich in a marriage filled with love and caring. To my unknown relatives, he was a Turk… a heathen… and worse. To me he was the quintessential father.