What’s it all about, Tommy?

Back in that other century, on his 90^th birthday, my “Uncle Tommy” jumped rope for twenty minutes at the downtown YMCA, without so much as breathing hard or turning red in the face. So notable was his achievement that there was a picture and story in the Cleveland Press. It was mentioned that he was a physical fitness aficionado, and went regularly to the summer Bernard McFadden health camp in Western New York, and was one of their prized students.

Tommy lived for much of his later years in a quiet house on the road to Chardon. He was never married, but was very successful in business, founding a food service business that eventually served a majority of the city’s factory workers called United Food Services.

Shortly after he reached that landmark birthday he was living in a disheveled apartment in the Statler Hotel downtown.  A year later he was dead, having been ripped off a by a couple who befriended him, feigning to care for him. He left no immediate survivors.

He was good gentleman. Short, with twinkling bright blue eyes and curly hair. Frequently giving his nieces and nephews gifts on special holidays. Tommy talked a lot when there was someone to listen and I can remember one lunch time parked at the corner of 12^th and Chester talking for half an hour about something before I got a chance to mention some charitable ideas I had. He always came through with a smile.

And he did a give a lot of money to the Cleveland Sight Center.  There is a plaque there at 101st and Chester that bears his name. He was generously involved in the Hebrew Free Loan and other charities. It is said that on the way home from work he would often stop by the site of many of his beneficiaries to see if all was going well.

His funeral was well attended in the Mausoleum at Mayfield Cemetery. It was so cold that the radiators stated banging during the service, as if someone out there was trying to protest the Rabbi’s words. And then they buried him in the cold wet mud of a Cleveland winter.

I started to wonder: ”What’s it all about, Tommy?”

Is there any meaning in the lonely childless life...that ended with jumping rope and getting ripped off?

Certainly his charitable instincts, regardless of his motive, have done good work that continues well beyond his death.

And it is said that in the light of a full moon, the shadow of a little man with twinkling eyes and a broad smile can be seen merrily jumping rope in the parking lot of the Sight Center or the Jewish Federation.

As if to tell the world, in his own unusual way, that his life had meant something after all.