This is the second episode in a series of excerpts from my memoir, Wilt, Ike & Me. The last one took place at the end of the summer of 1965 when instead of being able to continue with my sizzling teenage summer romance, I unexpectedly had to drive to Brooklyn with my parents to attend my first funeral.
In the chapters that follow in the book, I begin eleventh grade and the 76ers begin the NBA season. The team that my father had personally built over the last two years was now the most powerful team in basketball. It is still looked upon as one of the greatest NBA teams ever and this was a very exciting time for us.
But the focus of this series is on the events that took place just before and just following the sudden death of my father. Although it’s a sad part of the saga, it does lead up to a rather fascinating conclusion, so my advice is to stick with it through to the end.
This episode marks the beginning of some of the strange things that began to happen to me then. And so, the story continues.
Sometimes, things can be going along normally and then all of a sudden, your whole world gets turned upside down. There’s no point in dwelling on it, but the truth is, you never really know what’s coming around the next corner in this life. Something unexpected can happen and suddenly, you’re never the same again. It seems to happen to everyone. One way or another, we each enter into the dark night of the soul.
That’s exactly where I was heading as the last week of November began. I didn’t see it coming. We rarely do. But looking back, there were plenty of signs.
The first one was subtle. My brother’s wife was about seven months pregnant. Mike had been the first child in the generation following my father’s. Now this new baby would be the first child of the next generation. We were all unbelievably excited.
My father and I had driven over to visit them one afternoon. When we got home and pulled into the driveway, I asked him, “So how does it feel now that you’re going to be a grandfather?”
“What do you mean?” he asked me.
“Does it make you feel old or anything?”
He didn’t respond right away and stared out at the rose garden near the back door.
“I’m never going to be the grandfather to this child,” he said matter-of-factly, but in a distant tone of voice. I didn’t say anything.
“No. I won’t be the grandfather,” he repeated. “I’ll be the father’s father, but never the grandfather.”
He used to say quirky things like this all the time. It sounded like he was splitting hairs, and I didn’t pay any attention to it.
***
A second subtle omen came in the form of a comic book. Eleventh grade was turning out to be a great year for me. I was in student council and started thinking about running for school president. Cheltenham was a big high school, with about two thousand students. If I wanted to run, there would be a lot to do, and it was time to give it some serious thought. One night at dinner, I mentioned it to my parents and they both encouraged me.
The next day, when I got home from school, an old comic book of mine was on the end table next to my bed. It had stories about each president of the United States. I hadn’t seen it in years. My mother kept a few boxes of my childhood things in the basement and had pulled it out after our dinner conversation, probably to inspire me.
I recognized it immediately and remembered there was a strange story about Abraham Lincoln in the middle of it. I flipped to the center and sure enough, there it was, “Lincoln, the Mystic.”
It had two parts. The first one was called, “I Am Not Dead – I Still Live.” It showed a letter from a famous psychic that was found in Lincoln’s desk after he died.
Supposedly, following the assassination, the President’s son Robert Todd Lincoln went through all of Lincolns personal papers and destroyed a large amount. But for some reason, he preserved this one particular letter, which is now in the Abraham Lincoln Collection at the Library of Congress.
It was a life-after-death message that was brought to the White House by a psychic who had supposedly channeled it from Edward Baker, a close friend of Lincoln’s who had been killed in battle. It was written backwards and had to be read in a mirror. It said - “I am not dead. I still live…I experienced a happy reality - a glorious change by the process called death… Man lives on Earth, to live elsewhere, and that elsewhere is ever present. Heaven and Hell are conditions, not localities.”
The fact that Lincoln had a letter from a psychic in his desk was somewhat interesting news. But when I read the second part of the comic book tale, called “The Most Famous Pre-Cognitive Dream in American History,” I found it disturbing.
It showed Lincoln asleep in the White House. A mournful sound wakes him up. He gets out of bed and starts walking toward it. As he gets closer, he realizes that it is the sound of people crying miserably. He enters the East Room and sees a coffin on a stand, guarded by soldiers. “Who is dead in the White House?” he asks one of them.
“The President,” comes the reply. “He was killed by an assassin.” The crying gets louder. Lincoln looks in the coffin and sees himself lying there. The shock of it startles him, and he suddenly wakes up and finds himself lying in his bed. He realizes it had all been a bad dream.
I looked at the image of Lincoln, staring at himself in the coffin, and for some reason, I thought of my old Davy Crockett comic book and how crushed I felt when I realized my hero was dead. And as I sat on my bed, next to the end table, a quick flash of intense grief rippled through me like a shock wave. I quickly got up and put the comic away in a drawer. But that picture of Lincoln staring at his own dead body was haunting, and the image stayed with me for quite a while.
***
A more profound sign awaited me on Saturday morning. My father and I were sitting in services in the modern synagogue near our home in Elkins Park. He was thinking about changing our affiliation. We still belonged to Temple Sholom, but it was a long drive each way. This place was close enough that we could walk, which was a dream come true for him.
Toward the end of every Jewish service, a prayer is recited called the Mourner’s Kaddish. It’s one of the keystones of the religion, and every congregation does it, all over the world. Interestingly, even though it’s done to honor the dead, it’s a prayer of praise and never once mentions death or dying. The idea is that you always praise God, no matter what happens.
As we sat there, the rabbi invited the mourners to rise to say Kaddish, and one of the kids from my school stood up, which surprised me. “I know that kid,” I whispered to my father. “I didn’t know anybody in his family died.”
All of a sudden, my father got extremely serious. “This Kaddish prayer is much more important than you know,” he said. Then he spoke to me in a strange tone of voice, one I had never heard before. I could barely tell it was him.
“I want you to promise me that after I die, you will come to services and say Kaddish for me, every morning and every night. And that you will do it for the full eleven months and never miss a time.”
I had never heard him that somber before, and it didn’t make sense. I was definitely going to say Kaddish for him after he died, but that was twenty or thirty years down the road - he was only fifty-two. “Of course, I will, Dad,” I said matter-of-factly. “You know I will.”
Then the weird got weirder. “We’re in the synagogue now,” he said, still in the same somber tone. “There’s the ark and we’re in front of the Torah. I want you to make a solemn vow to me now. And understand, this is a vow made before God.”
Now, we were very close and nothing like this had ever happened between us. He had never asked me to promise him anything before in my life.
“OK,” I said, somewhat taken aback. It seemed like an old-fashioned idea, but why not?
“Good,” he said. “Now, repeat after me.” He paused, and then, like a judge administering an oath of office, he recited the vow, one sentence at a time. And I repeated it after him, word for word.
“I promise before God, that after you die, I will come to services and say Kaddish for you every morning and night for the full eleven months. And never miss a time.” When I said the last phrase, he exhaled deeply and slumped forward in his seat, with his eyes closed.
The next thing I knew, they started singing Adon Olam, which is the very last song of the service. It’s a happy, cheerful hymn. My father opened his eyes and looked relieved. He seemed like his normal self again and started singing along. Whatever that strange spell was, it was over.
When we got outside, it was a beautiful day. On the walk home, we were both happy, I always loved that time after services on a Saturday. I had fulfilled my obligation to God and my father and could get on with the carefree part of my weekend.
