Eulogy for Solomon Stein
By Alan H. Stein, Son
December 26, 2006
We finally have conclusive proof that nobody lives forever.
While everyone expects their own parents to live forever, they generally recognize that won't be the case for anyone other than their parents. My father was the exception. My sister wasn't the only one who considered him a "force of nature," We all expected him to live forever.
He was our hero, and our role model. He taught us how to live by living. He taught us how to enjoy life by enjoying life.
I can't separate my mother and my father. They were individuals, but they were a team. I can't talk about my father without thinking about my mother, and how blessed Evey and I were to have them as our parents.
They gave us many gifts, but perhaps their greatest gift was the freedom they gave us by not depending on us for their happiness. We knew when they were proud, and we felt wonderful when we made them happy, but it was liberating to know they did not depend solely on us for their happiness.
I was very glad they never changed the locks after I got married, because Marsha and I would come over and they wouldn't be home; they would be busy dancing, or at a free - it had to be free - concert in a park, or visiting friends. They were having a good time, and that was a gift. Even after we moved to Waterbury, it was not uncommon for us to drive 93 miles to see them, and then have to let ourselves in. It would even happen in Florida; before we came, they would always remind us where to find the key if they weren't home when we got there.
My father could fix anything. This was a valuable skill, since my mother was very good at not being able to work gadgets and that sometimes led to damage my father had to repair.
I can still visualize him lying on his back by the toilet, fixing the leak; I need his advice about that right now, because the downstairs toilet is leaking; I was planning on trying to fix it on Sunday.
The washing machine wouldn't work. This happened quite often. My father would take it apart, figure out what was wrong, put it back together and get it working again.
Televisions. The drug store had a gadget that would test vacuum tubes, for free. That was important - it was free. I think my father was their best customer.
He loved gadgets. That was an important trait he passed on to me. And besides inventing things, he built things.
Whenever he had to move his office, a not infrequent occurrence, one of the first things he'd do in his new office was hook up an electric eye so the bell would ring when someone walked in - or out.
He built a radio transmitter, which I used with my friends to broadcast the play-by-play of fictitious Yankee games. And when tape recorders came out, he got one of them, reel-to-reel, and we could record our broadcasts.
He put together a working toy telephone; Evey and I and our friends would string the wire through the house, or in the yard, and talk to each other.
There were some things he was not interested in and this led in some ways to a distorted impression in my mind. For example, he wasn't interested in sports. I grew up believing only kids were interested in sports. I never heard any adults talk about sports growing up. The first time I heard adults talk about sports was when I was in my twenties and visiting Aunt Toby and Uncle Morty, and heard my Uncle talking about the Buffalo Bills.
Despite his lack of interest in sports, he still made an attempt to accommodate my interest. He once took me to a Yankee game and even then he showed amazing judgement, since the game he took me to turned out to be an historic game - the Memorial Day doubleheader in 1956, the day Mickey Mantle hit one off the facade, the closest anyone ever came to hitting a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. Unfortunately for me, at barely nine years old, I was busy watching the hot dog vendor when The Mick swung, didn't realize anything was happening until everyone in Yankee Stadium but me stood up, and didn't see the ball hit the facade.
When I was in Little League, there was a requirement that fathers serve as umpires. He had to read the rule book, which was like reading a foreign language to him, went through the minimal amount of training, and finally, to our horror, was assigned to be one of the umpires in a game my team was playing. There were two umpires for each game; in that game, the other umpire had to do double duty. For me, at the time, it was embarrassing; as I think back, I'm filled with awe that my father would go through that ordeal for me.
At funerals, everybody says nice things about the deceased. When it comes to my father, as his dear friend Judy Hirsch, who helped him make the last few years active and happy ones, said, nobody had a bad thing to say about him when he was living, either.
And except when it came to his children and grandchildren, my father was rarely critical of anyone. He also wasn't much of a businessman; he wasn't really that interested in money, except in not wasting it.
He once took in a younger partner, hoping it would enable him to take some time off once in a while. It worked out until his partner found their secretary more appealing than his wife and began ignoring his half of the practice. So instead of having a partner to share the load, my father wound up working twice as hard, taking care of his partner's patients as well as his own, but only getting half of the profits.
He also worried his partner would steal their patients and take off with all their records, so besides working twice as hard in the office, my father laboriously photographed his patient's records at home, a few every night, just in case he went in one day to find his records gone.
This was one of the most difficult periods of his life, ending only when my father bought off the partner he had brought in for free. It came up in a conversation recently, but my father's only comment about the former partner who made his life miserable was "he was really a very nice guy."
Both my parents grew younger as I grew older, although eventually they did start slowing down. But even when he hit 94 and complained he just didn't have the same amount of energy he had when he was only 93, my father kept up a schedule that left me in awe, and which I couldn't keep up with.
On his 90th birthday, I helped my father remove nails from what was left of our old wooden shed. He had gotten a new, metal shed, and had gotten the old one taken apart, but it would have cost another $75 to have it hauled away. Of course, for my father, that would have been a waste, since he could take the nails out, cut the boards down into smaller pieces, and take it out for the trash collection, a little bit at a time.
So that's what he was doing on his 90th birthday, and I was helping him. But I couldn't keep up with him. He kept hammering, and sawing, and pulling out nails, like a machine, while I was struggling to keep up, feeling I needed a break, but how could I rest while my 90 year old father kept hammering away? I got tennis elbow, but he still seemed indestructible.
If I can get mad at him for anything, besides turning Evey and me into orphans, it's that neither he nor our mother prepared us for this. They lived independently until our mother died six years ago, and he kept living, independently, without needing our help, until he was hospitalized at the end of August.
When our mother died, I said it's not often that one can say an 85 year old died before her time; it's even less often that one can say a 95 year old died before his time.
We were all blessed to have my father with us for longer than anyone has a right to expect and glad he was able to live life to the fullest until nearly the very end.
Thanks, Dad