Invisible Ink

by Guy Stern

  Beyond shepherding me through my program, some of the teachers took a personal interest in me. Rose Kaufman, a Latin teacher, well connected in the Jewish community, got me my first job outside the occasional lunchroom work at school. I became a dishwasher at the Branscom Hotel, and a busboy at the Chase, and at the Jefferson Hotel. At the tail end of the Depression even those jobs were at a premium and Rose Kaufman interceded for me at the highest level with Mr. Kaplan, the owner of the Chase.

  But my stint at the Jefferson became memorable for another reason as well. One of the owners had also found a job for his father, who did not want to be idle. His son had brought him to America from Bulgaria and he now eked out a wage and learned English at his old age. Well, he did not advance much. We, as fellow busboys, talked to him because he seemed to have some influence on his son. He reacted invariably in one of two ways to our conversations with him. He would say “Izza good,” when he approved “Izza no good,” when he wanted to condemn. The other busboys and I tried to catch him in a situation where neither comment would be applicable. We never did, but I never forgot this eccentric old man and his two responses can still be frequently heard within the walls of our house.

  With these fledgling positions I was well launched on a “career” as room service waiter, then dining-room waiter with full union standing. My catapulting into that august standing came about through one of the most remarkable, if unheralded, exiles in Saint Louis, Johnny Ittelson.

  Ittelson had come to Saint Louis after a brief mandatory waiting period in Cuba, had made successful careers, first as a liquor salesman—salesman of the year for the firewater producers of McKesson and Robbins, then as maître d’ at the Jefferson Hotel in Saint Louis, and in a further though unsuccessful venture, as the owner of his own European-styled establishment, the Continental, located at the entrance of the much-visited Forest Park.

  His founding of the restaurant also brought about major progress in my career. I advanced from the lowly position of a busboy to the status of a waiter. (Actually my ironic remark is really ill-placed, because even such common jobs were at a premium during the tail end of the Depression.) Johnny had met me while he was a maître d’ at the Jefferson and I a busboy. When he founded his restaurant he felt a sense of loyalty to the fellow exile and recruited me as a waiter at the Continental.

  It is only in retrospect that I can fully appreciate the favors that Rose Kaufman and Johnny Ittelson did for me. Of course, my high school education at Soldan was invaluable, but of need, limited. By becoming for a while a member of America’s working class, I gained perspectives, closed even to many Americans who were born in this country.

  This added experience was three-fold. I became a coworker of men and women who provided the muscles for America’s well-being by their skills. There was Calvin, the dishwasher from Indiana, who threatened “to beat the sh-- out of me,” and in fact, landed a punch because he felt that I had talked down to him when I just used my usual vocabulary. I soon learned to talk his jargon. Then there was the fellow waiter who only addressed me by the name he bestowed upon me, which was Abie, a reference to me being Jewish. Finally there was the only waitress in our group, the highly efficient Opal, with whom I partnered as a waiter and who promised to introduce me to certain adventures for which I was as yet unprepared.

  The second new perspective supplemented what was lacking in my middle-class setting in Hildesheim. The Jewish community there was composed, for the most part, of established and well-provided professionals in industry and trade, the law, medicine, the arts, and music. There weren’t any entrepreneurs who in many cases had to survive by their wits. But in Saint Louis I became a close acquaintance of an intrepid, rare individual who exemplified such a person. That was Johnny. He ultimately succeeded in America because he could think beyond standard conventions and because he would often fail, but would never stay down. Somewhat by chance he assembled around him a group of immigrants with whom even most experts on Exile Studies became acquainted. If I hadn’t worked for Johnny, gotten to know him, his strengths and weaknesses—and learned to appreciate, perhaps to imitate his never-die spirit, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity.

  For a short while he also opened up to me one of the few centers, certainly in the Midwest, where nearly all the refugees from all walks of life in city would gather and could be observed by a curious youngster. All that came about because Johnny the Incredible had opened, yes opened, a restaurant. One observation of mine mirrors that group of exiles while not at their best. From the start Johnny had installed three pinball machines in a back room of the restaurant. Soon the players became tired of pitching their skills just against the machine itself. They started betting against one another for what would seem today ridiculously small change. The competition became as fierce as if the players had been in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. In fact Johnny had to intervene a few times when the rivalry almost became physical. On one of those occasions, when one of the participants made a lame excuse for walking out with the loot he had taken from his opponents or when someone had given the machine a forbidden push in order to correct the routing of the pinball. Because of Johnny’s manifold managerial talents and their influence on me, I became much more pragmatic. Hence, I will draw a full portrait of him and of our brief “association.”

  Johnny was at his best on the opening night of his restaurant. His planning had been meticulous. He had the financial backing from his cousin Henry and the décor of his restaurant left nothing to be desired. Tables and chairs called to mind the style of the Bauhaus. Beautiful light-brown napkins, folded in the form of crowns, matched the color of the table cloths. There was a music box that played tunes from operettas and burst forth, every hour on the hour, with the song “The Continental,” borrowed from a Fred Astaire film. And Johnny’s spirit hovered—yes, hovered over the entire décor. He himself took charge of seating people and operating the cash register.

  Johnny’s planning paid off. I spotted members of the high society of Saint Louis, among the arrivals hitherto known to me only from the society columns of our local newspapers. Even August Busch showed up with a large party. He was the famed proprietor of the gigantic brewery Anheuser-Busch. Johnny courted that party to a fare-thee-well, kissed the hands of the ladies—to their surprise and consternation—and put on a show reminiscent of Paris at its most glamorous period.

  I returned from work dead tired. The tables in my station had been filled three to four times. The evening marked my less-than-smooth entry into my status as a waiter. But Mr. Busch rewarded my earnest efforts with a munificent tip.

  Alas the triumph of opening night didn’t extend to the weeks ahead. The good citizens of Saint Louis had at first thronged to the new restaurant out of pure curiosity. Once that was satisfied, the aroma of the zesty spaghetti sauce, spreading from the citywide renowned Italian restaurant, Garavelli, located just across the street, made their mouth water much more than the hard-to-pronounce (and equally hard to digest Cordon Bleu) of our gourmet restaurant.

  Instead of the leading citizens of Saint Louis, the refugee circle moved in, but only for afternoon coffee and cake. There was a barber, more affluent than the rest of the refugees, who had had an exclusive clientele in Berlin and who became my favorite customer. He gave me one of the distinctive, if un-American, haircuts that I continued to sport in a period of my life when I still needed frequent trips to the barber. To indicate my rather sparse earnings the barber gave me a fifty cent tip when he and his wife dined at the Continental, which I returned to him as a gratuity for practicing his original haircuts on me.

  Despite a few such steady guests the income of the restaurant and with it the money from tips steadily declined. Johnny became moody. For example, he resented that I was not only a waiter on his staff, but also a student at Saint Louis University because he realized that I wanted to become a member of The Establishment. “You’re studying Spanish?” He was reverting back to his time in Cuba, when he added, “I, myself could tea
ch you that.”

  His first concrete measure to stave off the threatening decline of the restaurant was reducing staff. He started with us waiters. Admittedly we weren’t prime specimens of our profession. When the positions for Johnny’s experiment had been announced by the union, the demand for such employment was scarcely spectacular. Hence, among the hired waiters were some eccentric employees and a slightly senile retiree, who shuffled his way slowly through the dining hall. Then there was me, the fledging waiter and also a colleague, frequently less than sober and who in our dressing room sometimes told me, while in tears, what the demon alcohol had done to him in the past. I pitied him, but he found little understanding among guests whose orders he had hopelessly messed up for the second time. The union, used to the troubles they had had with him, finally endorsed his dismissal.

  In order to be able to spread his charm even more palpably among our customers, Johnny had recourse for help from his parents. He turned the cash register over to his stepfather, a former Berliner architect and businessman, finally turned refugee. He stuck by the old German proverb: “He who doesn’t watch his pennies will soon not have any dollars.” And for that reason he watched every item on the bill with infinite care while waiting guests, in growing frustration, hit the counter with their knuckles. Johnny’s mother, however, an aristocratic looking lady, had a piping voice and promptly had been given the nickname of “Chirpy” by her friends and old acquaintances, became a further addition to our motley staff as a sort of supervisor. Her measured steps took her from the kitchen to the dining room and back and she gave out with well-meaning advice for cutting expenses. Our leading chef, a highly qualified master cook from the Philippines, turned red-faced as soon as he caught sight of her. In exquisite language she advised him that one simply shouldn’t throw away the wrapping paper for the butter. “It’s excellent for greasing pots and pans.”

  One day the cook’s patience was at an end. He tossed his apron on the floor, disappeared like a lightning bolt, and was discovered again after he had been hired by the competition across the street. His position was filled by the second in command, but that worthy was hardly capable of filling his former chef’s shoes. This gradual breakdown of our infrastructure didn’t escape the wide-open eyes of Johnny’s wife, a chic but calculating woman from Berlin. She took action and confronted Johnny a few weeks later with an application for a divorce and soon after disappeared from our vision. Johnny, alternately depressed, enraged, and defiant, sought short-term substitutes with well-to-do customers who admired him as boundlessly as before. What was most on his mind was rescuing his restaurant. He wrote letters to the editor of the most important newspapers and used me as his ghost writer and editor.

  Then one morning the telephone rang at my aunt and uncle’s residence. He asked me to come to the restaurant early because he had a colossal idea. Immediately after my first class I tore myself away from the Golden Age of Spanish Literature and ended up in the tough reality of an enterprise approaching bankruptcy. But Johnny’s face was all smiles. “You will be the first one to hear of my rescue mission,” he said. “We will imitate European customs and hold a costume party right in our own restaurant.” Let me report that his costume ball attracted only the customary impoverished European refugees. My tips were below moderate. I had only one consolation, a young woman who had borrowed a rather daring waitress costume from her place of employment, had come with the expectation of meeting a well-heeled American male at the costume party. We consoled each other and continued with that long after the last guest had departed. The restaurant lasted only about eight months.

  I had to look elsewhere in order to practice my new-found skills. I ended up at the Rose Bowl, a bar and restaurant sought out by football fans. The combination of schoolwork and waiter’s chores worked for me until high school graduation.

  I soon lost sight of Johnny. Yet, I was destined to see him once again. World War II separated the two encounters. By 1957 I had become a professor at a good university and the German-Jewish American newspaper Aufbau had published a feature about me, giving out the name of my university and my department. Two weeks later I received an airmail letter. Wasn’t I his former waiter at the Continental and didn’t I frequently make trips to the Federal Republic of Germany, to which he had returned after retirement? Surely I could visit him sometime at his German home in Wiesbaden. In fact, in that very city I was to meet with a German writer for research purposes on my next trip scheduled shortly after hearing from Johnny. At first glance there was little left of the man of the world. He was walking on crutches, had aged badly, and was accompanied by an elderly live-in partner, who, as he whispered to me, was inclined for reasons of her own, to do him kind services but hadn’t turned romantic with him. But then I looked at him more closely. His light blue suit fit him as if it had been poured on, his shirt was immaculately white, his old cufflinks were glistening as in the days of old, and lo and behold, his car was a nearly new BMW. He had once more landed on his feet. He had become a special events director for the city government of an American city in the Midwest. Perhaps our luckless costume ball had served as a testing ground. So I asked myself whether this enterprising spirit, this man whom you couldn’t keep down, this visionary of a miniature world: wasn’t he also at a loss for his home country? If the Berlin of the twenties had lived on without a dictatorship this Johnny Ittelson or Hans Ittelson would have livened up the most humdrum surrounding with his ever-present optimism and his irrepressible spirit.

  I have jumped across the abyss of those eventful and sometimes horrible years between 1939 and 1957. In 1939 I was just on the verge of graduating from a wonderful high school. I have dealt above at some length with the intellectual rigor and prescribed discipline at Soldan, because I continue to believe that public education is the bulwark of a functioning democracy. My late wife Judith, a high school teacher of forty-odd years’ experience, liked to quote Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and will never be.” Today we stand in danger of selling public education to forces with profits rather than education as their goals and of confining the training of informed, broadly knowledgeable future citizens to those few who can afford the most prestigious private high schools. Is it really too late to return to the ethos and values of Soldan High School and other schools like it that enfolded me as a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant in those years of 1937–1939? After all, those years were beset by crises no less severe than those that purportedly necessitate the current dismantling of public education. I might add that I wrote the above paragraph in 1998.

  The time for graduation and the prom was approaching. I turned again to my benefactor, Mrs. Kaufman. She came to my rescue again. She found an anonymous donor who donated a navy-blue jacket and white flannel trousers, an almost requisite outfit for the graduation ceremony and for the prom as well.

  I consider one incident surrounding that graduation and prom as a barometer of my progressing Americanization. I couldn’t go to the prom, because I had to bus dishes that night at the Chase Hotel. But the prom was also held at the Chase and during lag time in the dining room I had the temerity to stroll over to the adjoining ballroom, busboy uniform and all, and to greet my decked-out, jitterbugging classmates. But with that stroll, which I knew would draw everyone’s attention, I had walked the long distance from the invisible-ink person to a healthily uninhibited American youngster.

  If I had been able to attend, I would have escorted—as it was then called—a classmate with the improbable name of Idamae Schwartzberg. We had become friends soon after my arrival at Soldan, though we actually met at the YMHA/YWHA (Young Men’s/Women’s Hebrew Association), where I was working out to secure the not highly touted number three spot as breast stroker on the Soldan Swimming Team. Idamae contributed to my Americanization, beyond the usual “European boy meets American girl” stuff, in a most visible, audible, and certainly permanent way. She had little patience with my German name, Günther, w
hich she termed a tongue-twister. She decided to retain the first two letters, and to add a “y.” I became “Guy.” The name stuck in high school and I retained it when I became a US citizen during basic training at Camp Berkley, Texas. People say it kind of fits me, especially in combination with my monosyllabic surname, which incidentally means “star” in English. Neither Idamae nor I had any money to speak of, so we would pack a picnic basket, stow our books for homework and get to the Saint Louis Forest Park outdoor opera at 3:30 p.m., right after classes, for one of the back row free seats that the city provided in conformance with the founding statutes. The time till curtain at 8:00 p.m. passed with homework, food, and tomfoolery. And then we were in the grip of performances of such musicals as Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing or Jerome Kern’s Showboat. We lingered till the last curtain call and the dimming of the spots. I have rarely felt more intensely part of the American scene than at those times, when the two of us, humming the just-heard melodies, were walking home through a summery Forest Park—arm in arm, with a bit of necking thrown in, like virtually all the couples around us. My fondness for the American musical started then. And today, when I, as the vice president of the Kurt Weill Foundation, thrill to Weill’s enrichment of the genre, I suspect that memories of those Forest Park summer nights, redolent of its flower beds and replete with simmering warmth and the joyousness of my first American love, are floating up to harmonize with the Weillian strains of, say, “Speak low, when you speak love.”

  During our incessant conversations Idamae and I not only advanced our romance, but reinforced each other’s interests. Idamae provided me with my first glances into the unknown world of Hollywood. Her artist elder brother worked for Disney Studios as an inker for the cartoon movies. His letters home were promptly communicated to me. On the other hand, I told Idamae of the occasions I attended performances at the Fox Theater in Saint Louis. I was invited by friends from the YMHA to accompany them to this huge movie house. There is no way I could have afforded the ticket prices. It was only through the kind generosity and inclusion of my new friends that it was made possible. They reached out to the new immigrant in a way that would help him become an American boy more quickly. It was the era of Big Bands, famous choral groups such as the “Ink Spots,” and solo appearances of performers. One moment of such a stage appearance has never left my memory. The comedian, Stan Laurel, appeared without his trusty partner, Oliver Hardy. I must admit that my friends and I felt we had been entertained by the person we thought represented unsurpassable stardom. At one point he had walked through the audience despite his sizable bulk and made spontaneous wisecracks about the people he passed. People roared with laughter.