My mother’s baby brother, Herman Spivack, who lived in Los Angeles and thereabouts for many years, died on Aug. 21 at the age of 102. He was one of six siblings (a seventh died as a toddler) and 15 years younger than my mother, who died in December of 1995 and would be 117 were she alive today.
Uncle Herman was at our house often throughout my childhood. He would arrive in the midst of what seemed to be a flurry, as if he had come from and was headed back to someplace very important. Perhaps he was.
He was brought up in relatively poor circumstances in a family that had lived on the Lower East Side, in what is now the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, although they may have settled in Brooklyn by the time he was born. My mother said he went to “night school” for 12 years, which may not have been perfectly accurate, although he had a master’s degree in physics and was known among peers for having pioneered advancements in transducer technology. In other words, I considered him brilliant, although, like me, you may have no idea what transducers are without going to a dictionary.
He had studied as a young man at George Washington University, and later at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., under a professor who he said was renowned and he then made the nation’s capital his home , working at the National Bureau of Standards before moving to California in 1946, where he started the West Coast Research Corporation, an aeronautical instrumentation company, which had government contracts.
My brother, who was six years older than me, took off for Washington to work for our uncle when he graduated from high school in Bayonne, N.J., at only 16. The experience was life changing, prompting him, after a time when he played clarinet in the U.S. Army band in Berlin after World War II, to go to Columbia University and become an engineer.
Uncle Herman was a dashing young man when I was a teenager, and he introduced me to new, sophisticated experiences, like going to a mid-Manhattan restaurant (Lindy’s perhaps) where I had my first lobster and buying me popular music recordings. Having heard from his daughter, Robin Spivack, that a graveside service was to take place today, I couldn’t help thinking, and writing, about him. I wish I could have been there.