<\/p>\n
My clarinet teacher,<\/strong><\/span> Harry Golub, was nicknamed the Bald Eagle. Harry was hairless. Howard Zuckerman, a student, gave Mr. Golub the nickname. Mr. Golub taught out of a South Euclid storefront.\u00a0His dad ran a kosher butcher shop next door. Harry Golub owned the building. One of his better moves.<\/p>\n Zuckerman, like many junior high clarinetists, dropped out of private lessons around bar mitzvah time. I hung in through eleventh grade. During my high school years, Mr. Golub asked me how the clarinet dropouts were doing. I gave him some updates — so-and-so got straight A’s, so-and-so was on the tennis team.<\/p>\n Mr. Golub was often cranky because, for one thing, he didn\u2019t get along with the music department at the high school. They wouldn\u2019t buy instruments and sheet music from him, he claimed. Mr. Golub said the high school was in cahoots with another music store, the one out in goy<\/em> land — Lyndhurst.<\/p>\n I occasionally<\/strong><\/span> ran into Mr. Golub years later at Yiddishe Cup gigs, and he was still railing against the school system. He said, \u201cThose mumzers!<\/em> Those anti-semits!<\/em>\u201d He had a point. It was a city (yidn<\/em>) versus country (gentile) thing. Those gentiles in Lyndhurst were probably taken aback by the several thousand post-War Jews who moved into their farmland, built bungalows, studied hard (my friends did), and ate smelly salami. Mr. Golub, himself, ate Hebrew National sandwiches (from his dad’s kosher meat market) while giving lessons.<\/p>\n