I know I left you hanging with the Becks moving to Cleveland of all places. I’m going to guess around the early 30s.
Grandpa Max was always in financial trouble (I have that in common with him) but he simply lacked skills. In his later years, both my Grandfathers were house painters. At the same time.
My mother’s side of the family were highly cultured, and pretty well off in Moscow before the reds wanted to turn them into cannon fodder and Grandpa Charles brought his two girls and sickly wife to the upper west side.
My mother was born here.
The point was, that Grandpa Max moved his family: Fannie, Hy, Aaron, and Teresa (the youngest to Cleveland. One job he had, long before Seinfelds Kramer horse incident was delivering milk by horse – which he fed something awful to and who they say besides leaving a malignant odor behind him all day causing the housewives to complain to the milk company… well the horse (and this may just be a story) died, and he was charged with feeding the horse some sort of grass that horses aren’t supposed to touch.
But that sounds fishy. a) I contend the milk company would feed the horses, and b) Grandpa Max had been living on the lower east side of NYC steering a horse-driven wagon and selling pretzels. I can’t be sure about the pretzels but I can picture him doing just about any job that required a lack of care.
No doubt Max had a checkered business history and he’s passed it down to me.
I am stalling getting to the point of the Cleveland move because (this is called telescoping) there is some very horrible stories coming up which will ripple through the Beck chapters and I’m still procrastinating telling a story that I know very little about and I had the fundraiser thing to put together…
BECK 