Category — Sports Pages

This post is for everybody who read my recent Wall Street Journal article about my dad and wants more info on him. (The WSJ article is linked here.)

My father, Toby, got a letter from a Piney Woods Arkansas man, extolling my dad’s homemade foot powder: “Mr. Lesbert: Do NOT stop making the powdor! Do NOT stop!!” Toby used to make the foot powder in the basement. The company was Lesbert Drug Co., named after my sister, Leslie, and me. My dad stopped making the powder. The Arkansas man was about his only customer.

Then Toby started selling cosmetics. Then he starting buying buildings . . . on and on.  He was the Jewish Willy Loman. (Kind of like how klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras was the Jewish Benny Goodman.)

My dad schlepped me to banks. I remember a banker who called my dad “Teddy.” That was weird. My father’s given name was Theodore and his Jewish nickname was Toby. This banker liked to talk Tribe (baseball) and his wife’s spaghetti recipes. The banker was a “people’s person,” he said. (Maybe he was a dogs’ person too.)

My father was not a people’s person.  He was the Lone Ranger. He got the mortgage and we got out of there.

My dad owned one LP record, of the Ohio State marching band. My dad had stock records. Toby bought his first stock, Seaboard Air Line, when he was at Ohio State. Air line meant train line back then. Air line was the shortest distance between two points — the way the crow flies. My dad never made money on stocks. He was too busy buying and selling and not holding. Toby was even a stockbroker for about six months in the 1950s at Bache & Co.

He liked numbers. He was a numbers guy. Totally.

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Yiddishe Cup’s singer, Irwin Weinberger, wrote a sweetly nostalgic song about attending baseball games with his father, who was a Holocaust survivor.  Irwin even mentioned The Rock in the song: Rocky Colavito.  (Next up, a song about Harvey Kuenn for the Detroit market.)

Nowadays Irwin is laissez-faire on sports — unless the Indians get hot again.

Guys are supposed to talk about sports, and drink when they get together.  I know this isn’t always a fact.  One Yiddishe Cup musician calls sports a “cult.”  This musician is proud he doesn’t know a thing about pro sports.

The whole town went ape-wire over the Cleveland Cavaliers. He didn’t care.

Some of the other guys did.

The previous time Yiddishe Cup was sports batty was 1997, when the Indians were in the World Series, and Yiddishe Cup was playing Simchat Torah gigs.  (Goys: Simchat Torah is right after Succot.)  We hid in the temple’s cloak room and caught bits of the action on a small portable TV.

Yiddishe Cup is not sports adverse. Yiddishe Cup plays a variety of fight songs, including The Yiddishe Cup Fight Song, which is a major-key freylekhs (hora) interspersed with the verbal chants of  “Go Cup Go” and  “De-feat Maxwell Street.”  Maxwell Street, from Chicago, is our archrival.  They probably don’t know that.

Here are other fight songs you need to know in our part of the Midwest:

1. Ohio State.  Use “Hang On Sloopy” or “Fight The Team Across the Field.”  Sometimes we hold off on “Hang On Sloopy” until the Buckeyes score.  That’s the protocol.  Be aware of this if a guest is listening to the game at a gig.  If you play “Hang on Sloopy” before the Bucks score, it’s bad luck.

2. Michigan’s “The Victors” is a biggie. This tune is one of the most insipid tunes of all time.  Or greatest — depending.

Other requests: Michigan State, “On Wisconsin,” and the Pitt fight song, which is not the same as the Steelers’ song.

Forget about Notre Dame unless they get a Jewish quarterback again.

Be flexible.  For instance, Yiddishe Cup knows “Are You From Wooster?”:

If you’re from Oberlin or Denison or Wesleyan U.,

The Scots will take good care of you before they’re through.

Wooster has many international students and a lively Hillel.  Check out The COW (The College of Wooster) with your 16 year old.  Great school.  Yiddishe Cup has played there a half dozen times.

Another good, small Ohio school is Kenyon, which Yiddishe Cup has played a few times.   Kenyon has a Medieval dining hall out of Hogwarts.  The school’s swim team dines there wearing big purple capes and eats tons of priceless food.  Swipe that college ID card.  Free food to students, $50,000 to Dad and Mom.
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Tomorrow:
DOUBLE PORTION OF MANNA . . . Bandleaders’ pay.

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