Page 78 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
As Vito was the owner, he had the barber chair closest to the win- dow. For some reason, my father always had his dark, wavy hair cut by Phil, who worked at the second chair. On Vito’s retirement, he sold the shop to Phil, who now renamed the shop Phil’s and moved to the first chair. My father, a creature of habit, moved with him. For reasons of principle (my father, you’ll recall, was a very principled man), however, now that Phil was the owner, my father concluded that Phil was no lon- ger entitled to receive the tip that he had given to him for years. Phil took umbrage and expressed it. My father explained his principle to Phil, but Phil remained unimpressed by Dad’s logic. I never did find out where my father subsequently got his haircuts.
The second shop was Chodosh’s, which was referred to in 1950s parlance as a “candy store.” Candy was the least of this small store’s offerings. A rack outside the front door contained the latest issues of Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Plastic Man, and other superhero comics, all of which I savored; some horror comics, from which some of the images still haunt me; and, most important to me, starting in 1952, Mad Magazine. Inside was a small counter, from behind which an aproned, large, and imposing Benny Chodosh made and served, among other things, egg creams. The egg cream was the Holy Roman Empire of bev- erages, in that neither an egg nor cream was to be found in or near it. Rather, it was a drink that consisted of chocolate syrup (hopefully Fox’s U-bet), a small amount of milk, and a lot of seltzer, which was sprayed into the glass when Benny pulled a lever similar to that employed to prepare a draft of beer. (Two other popular drinks were the Cherry Coke, not dissimilar from today’s Dr. Pepper, and the lime rickey, a drink made of fresh lime juice, sugar, and seltzer, and sometimes garnished with a maraschino cherry. I experienced these drinks only when in the company of my cousin Peter in Manhattan Beach.)
I became addicted to egg creams, and when I left home for college in Amherst, Massachusetts, I was astonished to learn that the people at the local diner, Shumway’s—to which we would repair for ice cream, sodas, and what they called frappes (milk shakes made with ice cream, pronounced “frapz,” without the accent aigu that was borne by the
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