![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/toby-1984-106x300.jpg\")
Toby Stratton (1917-1986). Photo 1984.<\/p><\/div>\n
My father,<\/span><\/strong> Toby, took me t<\/span>o a lightning-round tutorial with Cousin Gershy. (Gershy <\/em>is short for Gershon.) Gershy looked horrible — three strokes and two heart attacks. My dad didn’t look any better. My dad died of leukemia two months later.<\/p>\n Gershy had shotguns, a steer horn and a shalom plaque over the mantle. Gershy said, “You wouldn’t believe it, but I used to be a shtarker (s<\/em>trong guy\/bully). Now I’ve got this little curl in the tail — that little something different — that something the new treatment doesn’t cure. You’re in trouble, they say. They say, ‘We can’t straighten out your<\/em> tail. You’re dead.’ That’s what the doctors tell me.”<\/p>\n My dad didn’t chime in. (The docs guessed my dad had another two years.)<\/p>\n A gun dealer had sold Gershy the steer horn for $50, and now the gun dealer wanted the steer horn back. “Gun dealers is a funny ballpark,” Gershy said. “He could shoot me, but a deal is a deal. That’s the way it is.”<\/p>\n Gershy owned<\/strong><\/span> a shopping strip center on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights. (The building had Gable Pharmacy and Bass Lock & Key.)<\/p>\n Gershy’s price was too high, Toby said.<\/p>\n “If the kid is interested,” Gershy said, looking at me. “I’d come down.”<\/p>\n “It’s up to the kid,” Toby said.<\/p>\n “I’ll work with him,” Gershy said.<\/p>\n On the <\/strong><\/span>drive home from Gershy’s, Toby said to me, “Gershy has mellowed.”<\/p>\n Mellowed?\u00a0 <\/em>Gershy did not seem mellow to me — not part of the Donovan, mellow-yellow ethos. “And he’s a gonif<\/em>,” Toby said. “Don’t buy anything from him.”<\/p>\n I didn’t. <\/strong><\/span>Instead I bought<\/span> an apartment building in Lakewood a year later. I bought the Lakewood building because I wanted to prove to myself I could pull the trigger — buy a piece of investment property — without my dad telling me what to do. My dad was dead. I was 36. I bought the apartment building from a man named Chisling. Odd name, right? I could have used some advice from my dad.<\/p>\n
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