Page 260 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

Max (AR’s son-in-law)

I must have met Abe in the late twenties, because Hilda and I
were married in ‘31. At that time he was running a forty-acre ranch
out in Artesia somewhere, growing tomatoes, and he also had a
wholesale fruit and vegetable route in that area. He would get up
about four every morning to deliver produce, then go work on the
ranch until five or six in the evening. We never knew when he was
coming home. I happened to be at my in-laws’ when the Long Beach
earthquake struck. The table rocked and everything was bouncing
around. We knew it was serious, but we didn’t know where it was
centered until they announced it over the radio. So then we
wondered if he had been caught in it or had gotten past it. But he did
finally get there, and told us he had been driving when it hit, and the
road had started waving up and down in front of him.
But usually when he got back from that long day of work, he
would sit down to eat dinner, lay his head on his arms, and be fast
asleep before he’d finished eating. Yet, he had the strength to do it,
to keep those hours of hard work. And he was a very intelligent man.
He knew how to read and write Hebrew, but he held in contempt the
religion as it was observed in the temple, because he could see
through all their shenanigans. He would talk to the rabbis, and he
would know more Hebrew, and could outtalk them. He was one of
the original Zionists in Los Angeles, and knew all the big-shots—the
Hellermans, and people like that who were the top social strata of the
city.
His early businesses failed—the junk business with his brother,
the Ford agency, and the produce route. He would give credit to the
storekeepers, and lose the receipts; they’d fall out of his pockets.
They stole more from him than he made. In the end he gave up the
route, and never made much from the tomatoes he grew: when the
price was up, it meant the crop was bad; and when he had a good
crop, so did everyone else, and the price was too low. And he was in
competition with truck farmers like the Japanese, whose whole family
worked the ranch. He should have been a scholar or a rabbi instead;
he was too honest to be a businessman.
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