20 May 2011

Sidney Esikoff, 1919-2011

My name is Jason Perlow – I am Sidney Esikoff’s oldest grandchild. 

When you’re the first grandchild, you’re often the one to set the ground rules in dealing with your grandparents. After all, you’re the one that has to break them in.

I’m not sure when it happened, but it’s one of my earliest memories. I started calling the man and the leader of my family that we are memorializing today “Popi”.

I guess that somewhere in my two, or three year old brain, that I was able to determine that there was a difference between my Father’s parents from Freida and Sidney Esikioff, who lived nearby in Hollis Hills. I’m not sure why I chose the names “Nana” and “Popi” for Sidney and Frieda, but it stuck.

All of their grandchildren from there on called them that. I set the rules. 

I loved both sets of my grandparents very much, but my relationship between the people I called Nana and Popi was unique, and it is one that I will cherish for the rest of my life. It is also a relationship which played a tremendous part in creating the man that I am today.

Not many men or women are lucky enough to have grown up with lasting memories of all four of their grandparents. Twenty-four years ago, in August of 1987,  I stood before many of you on this very podium to memorialize Freida Esikoff, my Nana. I was 18 years old, and I’m pretty sure that I was much more composed delivering her eulogy than I am right now for my grandfather.

As a very young child, Both Nana and Popi spoiled me rotten, much to the resigned disapproval of my parents and without a doubt drove them completely crazy.

Later on, when my grandparents moved from Hollis Hills to their high-rise apartment in Manhattan, it was Nana who doted on and adored me – she brought me on trips to FAO Schwartz, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MoMA and also to her art gallery where I would run around, cause havoc and get to play with some of the most famous modern artists of the 1970s, even though I had no idea who they were at the time.  

Frieda wasn’t a very good cook, and I was told that she almost burned down her house once trying to cook a pot roast. But boy did she know how to spot a good buy on a Picasso, a Dali or a Miro.

She was the one who gave me an appreciation of beautiful things and whose art collection remains her legacy to this very day. I still think about Nana all the time and I know that she would have loved to have seen her Grandchildren grow up, get married, become successful and have children of their own. While I am not a particularly religious person or consider myself spiritual in any way, I know that somewhere out there she and Popi are looking down at all of  six of us in approval, and are very proud.

Still, it was Popi would pick me up on Fridays after school in his big Fleetwood Cadillac – he drove almost exactly the same model for years until they stopped making it, and resigned to drive town cars instead -- and took me to Yankee games, frequently the Playoffs and the World Series with the season tickets that he had for many years.

We’d often listen on the drive from Great Neck to the Bronx to his favorite music – which plays like the soundtrack of a Rat Pack movie. In the car and later on in life we'd sometimes talk about his years during the war, where he was a young Lieutenant in the US Army Corps, playing the role of a whiz kid war statistician and a bomb damage assessment expert flying over Europe on B-17s and B-24 liberators.

I was fascinated with how good he was at dealing with figures, since I was so terrible at math. I thought it would be so much easier to do with a calculator or a computer, but he did everything by hand, and in his head.

At the game he’d let me taste his beer and feed me until I was sick to my stomach with peanuts, popcorn, cracker jack, hot dogs and soft pretzels.

And as if that wasn’t enough, after the game, on the way back to their apartment where I’d stay over for the weekend, and I would often fall asleep on his leather couch watching late night re-runs Star Trek with him in his den, we’d go to Peppermint Park, the famous Manhattan ice cream and candy shop which closed many years ago.

So if you get right to the bottom of it, my appreciation for large, gas guzzling automobiles, big airplanes, the Bronx Bombers, Frank Sinatra, Captain Kirk and all forms of junk food debauchery comes from Sidney Esikoff. I won’t criticize his taste for cheap Canadian whiskey, that damned Crown Royal that I’ve been drinking so much of this week.

But besides the fun and games, I learned very early on in my childhood that Popi was a builder and a serious businessman – he frequently drove me to all the developments that were under construction and showed me all the houses being built. 

“You built all these houses Popi?” I once asked. No, he said, but “I’m a general contractor and a developer and I’m in charge of all the guys who do”.

I was in complete awe of him. To me, the man was a giant and could do anything. I wanted to be a businessman, just like him. While I don’t develop commercial or residential real estate for a living his strong work ethic and his perfectionism passed onto me and also on to all of his grandchildren.

I’ll leave you with one last thing that he told me as a little boy that will always stick with me for the rest of my life: “Jason, I don’t care if you become a ditch digger. Just be a very good one.”

Thank you for everything, Popi.  I love you.