Page 261 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

I remember one odd thing. While he was on his route one day, he
was offered a piece of art. Egyptian art, he was told, and very old. I
think he paid two dollars for it. He brought it home, and showed off
his mitziah, that he had bought so cheap. Well, it turned out to be a
brass artillery shell that somebody in the war zone had punched out
into the face of a familiar comic strip figure of that time! He was
completely taken in by it.
He had a truck, about two-ton; a stake-bodied truck. He bought it
used, and would run it until something went wrong with it. Then he
would get it home somehow, and at night start repairing it. He
bought another used motor, same size as the truck’s, and he
overhauled that. After that, whenever the motor had a problem, he
would exchange it for the one he had just rebuilt. I would help him
install it. He had a pit dug in his garage. It was not a one-man job, but
he did it himself before I came into the family. He had a hoist, and I
would have to line up the engine with the transmission while he was
under there. We would do this Sundays and at night.
Even then, when he was on his routes, when he would see
someone chopping down a tree, he’d stop and get out and ask for a
piece of the wood. He didn’t know what kind of wood it was, but he
would take it home and then figure out what he could make out of it.
He’d start from scratch with that branch or some boulder he’d picked
up, and chip away at it. He wouldn’t spend any money on tools. And
you couldn’t buy him any tools, either: Carmel and Hilda wanted to,
but he wouldn’t have it. His blades were chipped and his methods
were primitive, but he carved away, and some of his pieces are pretty
good. He was like Grandma Moses, who was making a name for
herself at that time: start from nothing, and teach yourself.
I gave him some laminated blocks from my wood-turning shop to
work on; he would tell me what size he wanted and I would make it
up for him—or, if I had something in the shop big enough, I would
cut it down to size. Sometimes I’d have a big solid piece of wood or
an end of a piece of hardwood and give it to him to carve. He had no
experience with wood, didn’t know the different types. Actually, he
learned carving when he was a yeshiva bucher: he would carve the
Chanukah dreidels, and was good enough at it to be in demand by the
other people in his village. When he didn’t have to get up at four in
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