A little more than two blocks from where I grew up was a Baskin Robbins ice cream store. Two blocks beyond that was Cutler Park, a small park where my friends and I would go to play –depending on the season– football or baseball. Both the store and the park were on the other side of a busy street from my house, so I started going there around the age of seven when my parents figured I had enough common sense to cross the busy street without getting run over.
An old fellow ran the Baskin Robbins store. He wore a kind of classic milkman/soda jerk outfit: white shoes, white pants, a crisp white short sleeve shirt, and a small white, paper garrison hat. The man was thin and old with little grey puffs of hair sticking out of his ears; over the course of prying thousands and thousands of ice cream scoops out of the hard-packed tubs he had developed ropey muscles on his liver-spotted forearm that sported a blurred tattoo. He would flip up the clear cover, grab the metal scoop out of a little water bucket, hit it twice on a sponge of dubious cleanliness, lean into the freezer bin and, wasting not a single fleck of ice cream, twist out a tight, perfect little sphere of ice cream.
The Baskin Robbins’ drinking fountain was the only source of water when we spent hours of hard play at the park. Before the age of seven when I went into the store with my parents or visiting relatives, the old man was always professional, bordering on obsequious, the very picture of customer service. After I started going with my friends to the park, he would yell at us in his thick German accent whenever we came in to get a drink of water after a hot afternoon of playing football. Given my limited frame of reference, I thought he was one of the crankiest people I had ever met. His Jekyll and Hyde customer facing skills shocked me.
All of our fathers had fought in WWII and, by proxy, we had an instinctive –or at least media-driven– distrust of people with German accents. I am sure our fathers would not have agreed with this position. Soon this group of kids I hung out with started referring to him as ‘the mean old German guy’.
Baskin Robbins used to have a promotion to where you would fill out a card with your birth date, and they would send you a coupon around your birthday for a free ice cream cone. I really liked my birthdays and I would take that coupon in to redeem with a little secret sense of pride and accomplishment for having had a birthday. The mean old German guy would look at it suspiciously like I was trying to pass a forged $20 bill. He would then –grudgingly– serve me one of his perfect little frozen spheres.
This was how I had pigeon-holed this fellow during my childhood. He was mean, he was cheap, and he disliked children. Sometime in early high school he must have retired or died because I never saw him again. I never really gave him much of a second thought either.
When I was a senior in high school I was dating a girl from my history class. She was Jewish. One of the assignments for class was to see the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. Up until that moment I had never been consciously aware of the Holocaust. Now, sitting in this darkened theater with my girlfriend quietly sobbing beside me holding my hand in a death grip as we watched historical footage of concentration camps, it hit me that these were her people who had been systematically murdered. She shared a cultural and genetic heritage with those humans whose bodies were being bulldozed into open pits. It was tangibly real to her. From that point forward, I began to take notice of references to the Holocaust.
A few months later I saw a close-up photograph of numbers tattooed on the arm of a concentration camp inmate. It triggered a memory from childhood, and suddenly I knew where I had seen such a tattoo; a tattoo that a pressed, white, short-sleeve shirt could not cover. I found myself recalibrating my assessment of the cranky old German guy at Baskin Robbins. I also experienced a wave of guilt for thinking so many unkind thoughts about this man. Here was a fellow who had probably been in his 30s during the collapse of the German economy; no wonder he was frugal. He then saw that same economic collapse bring Hitler to power. I cannot imagine what this man must have suffered and lost. I think it would have embittered me too.
I was a pretty good kid. Even so, my little group of friends and I had some childish prejudice going against this man because of his accent. Sort of like an old enemy of our fathers might be an enemy of ours too. Ironic, because this man suffered more at the hands of the Nazis than did any of our fathers who actually fought in the war. Even today I feel a lingering sense of guilt.
People are not necessarily what I first judge them to be; this is a lesson I continually relearn. If I had a time machine that gave me do-overs, I would go back and try to get to know this skinny old man with a temper. I am sure he had stories to tell. I might even talk him into giving me a job so I too could learn to create, without waste, tight little frozen spheres that people desired to eat on their birthday.
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