Page 274 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Reminiscences

He showed me once how the telephone was hooked up in the
basement. He plugged in an earphone and listened to conversations
going on up in the house without anybody knowing it. He also
melted lead for sinkers down there. And he kept many different sizes
of barrel for making alcohol: one-gallon, five-gallon, ten-gallon, even
up to fifty-gallon barrels. There was one method of making wine he
used every year, putting sugar and cherries into bottles, and a
chemical reaction liquefies everything. The family would drink his
wine at holidays. He made a lot of wine.
I learned a lot about tools down in his basement. I did a sort of
photo-essay of his basement, on slides, just before he moved out of
Figueroa Street. And once I made a tape-recording of his voice—it
was on a cheap machine I bought after World War Two at a five-and-
dime. Eventually I’ll be able to find it. But it’s not like a modern
cassette recorder; the tape did not record at a constant speed, so it
can only be played on that machine.
He had an old Moon, made by Cleveland Motors; it would be
worth a fortune today. I think it was an in-line six-cylinder. He was
always in the garage, hammering the pistons down. It was built like
the inside of a stage coach, with tassels on the windows and all those
things old cars had. The wheels had wooden spokes, and the tires
pulled off very easily. The gas tank was attached to the back with
metal straps; the car had no gas gauge, so his method for finding out
how much gas he had was to stick a siphon into the tank and suck
out some gasoline, which he would spit out. Very bad for the
kidneys. The ignition key went into a lock on the knob of the stick
shift. I remember riding in the Moon when I was a child. And a few
times, when I was over there visiting with my parents, I got into it
and started it; even rolled it a few feet. He came out and yelled at
me—I must have been about six years old.
He had some large books in Hebrew which he said his father had
sent from Poland. And he preferred old scientific books; none of his
science books were up-to-date. He got them mainly out at the
junkyard where he worked; plus his friend Sam Lavitus owned a
junkyard, and he would get things there, as well. When he moved to
Orange Street, most of it was lost. He hired a friend of mine who had
a truck. Abe didn’t want to take a lot of stuff, so he told my friend he
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