Ch 11 - Family Chemistry: Growing Up with My Father’s Gold
Below is chapter 11 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
My father was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS. That’s when he gave me the gold.
ALS causes creeping paralysis. By my first visit a month after the diagnosis, December 1979, he had stopped driving. He couldn’t grip the steering wheel or maneuver the driving pedals. With my mother driving, he was reduced to barking out instructions. I thought he’d be relieved to have me, his oldest son, at the wheel. But simply maneuvering him into the passenger seat and fastening his seatbelt provoked surly outbursts that made me bumble.
I tried to discuss this weird ALS calamity the day I arrived home. But he went right to the gold.
“Skip, there’s something I need you to do.” His voice was hushed. He used my childhood nickname. This was urgent and personal.
“Sure. What is it?”
“My gold. I want you to sell it.”
“Gold?”
“Eight ounces. The money is for you and your brothers. I can’t do it now.”
“Sell your gold?”
Gold! Oh, even for a socialist rebel son like me, this brought exciting images: Scrooge McDuck, the fifties Disney comic book character, cavorting about his huge swimming pool teeming with gold coins; Goldfinger, the Sixties Bond movie villain, breaking into Fort Knox to cart away America’s gold bars; Oscars; Krugerands…
But there was a problem: my father had transformed his gold into zinc.
My father was a chemist, and he could do that reverse alchemy. He had purchased the gold for one of his home businesses in the Sixties. While I was working on my Ph.D. degree, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and smoking dope, Dad worked on his home mail order business for selling gold plated parts he manufactured in his workshop. He had been chemically dissolving extra gold into zinc as camouflage.
Here was my mission: retrieve this gold from the zinc, and turn it into dollars for my brothers and me.
The gold was in my father’s workshop, his mysterious retreat in a dark corner of our basement. I hadn’t stepped in there for years, not since our clash years ago over my attempt to clean up that workshop.
I crept downstairs to the workshop. Through the dim light I saw the massive wood workbench with the sturdy vise guarding the near corner. Like when I last saw it long ago, the workshop was littered with nails, screws, wires, sandpaper, wood and plastic and metal parts, and projects. A vast array of tools hung on the pegboards above, surrounded by shelving dense with boxes, jars and cans of supplies, and larger tools too. This was where he’d disappear to build and tinker. As a boy, I was certain he could conjure up anything down there.
I hunted, and it didn’t take long. Atop the great workbench, poking up from the center of the clutter, I spotted a large plastic bag. It had a hand-written label: “GOLD.”
Thank you, Dad, for that label. Because this bag contained only a coarse gray powder with pebbles.
I stared at it. Gold? My inheritance?
Not exactly. No twinkling or sparkling, no glitter or glow. It was five pounds of dull gray gravel.
We were back at the kitchen table, speaking softly.
“What should I do with it?”
“Sell it to a precious metals refiner.” He named one. He had done business with refiners for years. Nothing to it.
I imagined walking into some grimy shop in industrial south side Chicago and trying to sell that stuff. No, I’d be trespassing in heavy industry. I’d be squashed. Or laughed out the door. It was written on my face: suburban, academic, young, soft…not the owner of pure gold.
I needed another plan. I asked Dad, “How do you separate the gold from the zinc?”
“Simple,” he said. “Any chemistry student could do it in a laboratory.”
I took notes. Dissolve the gray zinc-gold compound with concentrated nitric acid. Let it stand, and the gold will drop to the bottom. Filter off the acid solution. Then rinse the residue with water. When dried, it would look like cinnamon powder. That would be pure gold.
“Yes,” I thought, “it would be simple, if I was a chemist.”
I had studied chemistry in high school, and I actually had liked working with the precise formulas. But I remembered nothing. I should have taken more chemistry in college. I was just a useless historian.
This was the first of many tasks my father entrusted to me to complete the business of his life. Others followed in the coming months: clean out the basement, complete his retirement, arrange for an estate plan, watch over investments, find medical treatment, find home care, deal with insurance policies, do something with the Florida condominium, don’t let ALS expenses deplete us. And, oh yes, purchase cemetery plots for my parents.
The galloping pace of the dreadful disease, the horrific spreading paralysis of his body, outstripped his ability to prepare for the end. He turned to me, his oldest son, for help.
There had been our early telephone call about the devastating ALS diagnosis, with my request at the end: “Don’t make any big decisions without consulting me.”
Astonishingly, for someone who relied only on himself, Dad agreed to include me in these decisions. I felt good about it. I could help him. But visiting again a few months later, I was aghast to discover that he had made no decisions about his business affairs. He was through with decisions. He was preoccupied with ALS, with his failing body. Mom was preoccupied with helping him. The decisions were all left in my hands.
How could that happen? I knew nothing about the business of middle class life. At 35, I lived hand-to-mouth, a historian with meagre income, a part-time teacher, a political radical, a Berkeley bohemian who still lived on the margins, as if the freewheeling Sixties and Seventies never would end.
“I should have become a lawyer,” I concluded. “Or at least a doctor.” Something useful. I could have become anything when I was young, when I joined the Sixties student rebellion. Now, a decade later, just a historian, I was not ready for my father to die.
“When my time comes,” I vowed to myself, “I’ll do it differently.” I would sell my gold and get my affairs in order before I faced any ALS predicament.
Of course, I had done it differently. That was my problem. At 35 in 1979, I still was living as if it was the Sixties. I had no gold. I had no wife, no kids, no house, no job with income, no investments, no savings, no insurance. I had no business to complete.
But my father was dying. I had to assure him: “I’ll take care of the gold.”
That promise haunted me for decades.
* * *
My father, Sam Kann, was a can-do man, like his generation of American-born children in Chicago’s East European immigrant Jewish community. They had risen out of Depression scarcity to build an affluent post-war life.
Born in Chicago in 1915, my father grew up on the immigrant West Side, working with his parents in their tiny neighborhood stores while living in the back rooms. He graduated from high school in 1933, at the bottom of the Great Depression. While working by day through the 1930s, he took night classes for years, receiving a college degree as a chemist. He was a scrappy Jewish guy who worked in heavy industry as a metallurgist, developing metal plated parts for airplanes, radios, and telephones.
I grew up in the comfortable new suburban world of the Fifties, the world that Dad and his generation built after the war. My father married my mother, Ann, the younger sister of a school pal. They had two children in quick order, and a third later, and they cared for their own aging parents too, part of sprawling immigrant families. When I was 11, in 1955, we moved from a tiny West Side apartment to a sparkling new brick home in a raw new suburb, Skokie, that was half Jewish. I grew up with my father’s expectations from the Fifties: the highest grades on report cards, winning little league baseball games, college and professional career ahead, and of course my own family too.
It was not easy between my father and me. Take his basement workshop where he left me the bag of gold zinc in 1979. That marvelous retreat where he could build or fix anything was in chaos when I was a kid, teeming with his tools and projects. One summer afternoon, age 13, 1957, I tried to surprise him with the gift of reorganizing the messy workshop. But when he returned from work that day, he stormed around the house cursing that that I had scrambled everything. Hot humiliating tears spilled down my cheeks. I had vowed never again to intrude in that workshop.
So it went. School grades: A’s and B’s, never good enough. Little League: a star player, fine, but bat lefty, not righty, you’ll do better (I did worse). Help him build a patio? I was clumsy, he was critical, he had no patience for me. I dropped out.
My father was from a generation of Jewish men who were certain. Immigrant parents and Depression youths had set them on a single-minded lifelong pursuit of achievement in business and the professions, with those sturdy brick homes, solid suburban family lives, and affluent futures for their children. The goals clear, the paths open, the landmarks intact, they never swerved after the war.
I was from a next generation of second guessers. We merrily rebelled in the Sixties, questioning everything: the government, the universities, the suburbs, our families. We challenged our parents’ steady way of life into oblivion. When the smoke cleared in the Seventies, nothing was left to rely on. Our paths ahead demolished, going forward we swerved again and again, uncertain about our direction ahead.
I came to manual labor myself, in my thirties, as a partner in a northern California ranch collective, named Chamokome, that emerged out of the Sixties. At Chamokome I discovered I could repair a toilet, sheetrock a wall, and split wood.
When my father came to visit me in California in 1978, the year before the ALS diagnosis, I invited him for a work weekend gathering of my comrades at our ranch. He was impressed by what he saw that weekend: the craftsmanship and the comradeship. He wanted to change how he and I had done it.
“You know, Skip, I have one regret,” he blurted out as the visit ended. “I’m sorry I never taught you to work with your hands.”
“Why?” I asked. I still simmered over his anger back when I had reorganized his workshop 20 years ago. Forgive? No.
My father worried about me in his dying year, and now that I am a father I understand. Back in 1979 when he received the ALS diagnosis and entrusted me with his gold, I was 35. I had a Ph.D. in history rather than the tax law career I had intended in 1962 when I went off to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That university, one of the great centers of the student upheaval in the Sixties, opened the door to new possibilities for me: join the great civil rights struggle, resist the Vietnam War, support the working classes with redistribution of wealth, democratize the universities, and explore the counter culture, for starters.
Next, sure instinct drew me to graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley in 1966. It was the site of the Free Speech Movement, the greatest American student upheaval of the Sixties. There I hurled myself into European revolutionary history and the student movement. After the student rebellion ended in the 1970s, I remained in Berkeley, working on two books about immigrant left wing Jewish chicken ranchers, while subsisting on writing grants and part-time teaching.
When my father was dying in 1980, my life in Berkeley showed no sign of my father’s climb from West Side Chicago immigrant ghettoes into the suburban middle class. I had only the television set my father had bought for me on that 1978 California visit, as if that television set would place me back on the road to suburban normal.
I knew my father worried over my future when he was struck down with ALS. I was his unfinished business, more difficult to fix than cleaning the basement or preparing an estate plan.
With Dad’s ALS diagnosis I felt undone, unprepared for the huge looming uncertainties, his and mine. “How could he be dying?” I thought. “I’m only 36. I’m not ready.”
Now the gold, there was something concrete I could tackle. Just separate it from the zinc and sell it.
Today I’m amazed by what I did next. Dad told me the gold-zinc compound would pass through airport security. This was decades before today’s intrusive airport searches. So, down at his workbench again, I redistributed the gravel into 13 packets, each wrapped in layers of plastic bags. Heart thumping, I transported the packets of Sixties treasure in my suitcase on an air flight back to the San Francisco Bay Area. No problem. In December 1979, I was back in my Berkeley apartment with the gold. I told myself, “I’ll get to the gold when I’m ready.”
My father died a year later. As he declined over those months in 1980, during a series of visits to Skokie I helped him complete his life: the basement, his retirement, the estate plan, the investments, medical treatment, home care, the ALS expenses, the Florida condominium, the insurance, and more, including purchase of those burial plots.
At one visit, perched on a ladder, I actually repaired a kitchen light fixture, with my father below in his wheelchair, shrunken and frail, still barking out orders I tried to follow, our last clash. As the family’s historian, I taped him telling his life story, creating a historical record that satisfied us both. I introduced him to my new girlfriend Stephanie, who flew across the country to meet him; he liked her, and to my surprise when he asked about our future I told him we would marry. I read to him from my first book – the actual book with my picture on the flap and the dedication page to him and my mother – published the month he died.
I witnessed his courage facing the terrible disease: the relentless paralysis of limbs, the devastating assault on his respiratory system, the complete loss of independence and privacy, the disappearance of a tantalizing retirement at their Florida condominium, the fear we’d have to place him in an institution. I was with him through it all.
Dad and I talked about his life and his approaching death, about what he had accomplished and what he had missed. He regretted the self-employment opportunities he had passed as too risky. He wished he had seen the magnificent Grand Canyon. He never would learn what would happen with our family after he was gone.
Our family was the great accomplishment he did see. He had achieved the goals of his generation with Mom and the three sons: his job as a chemist at a large corporation, our comfortable middle class life in that brick house in Skokie, the high aspirations and achievements of his three sons. The sons would live on after him and carry his memory into the future with their own achievements.
We discussed my future, a future he would miss. I told him that future would be good, and I think he believed me. I wasn’t so certain myself, but I did have my new book. No wife or kids, but Dad met my new girlfriend Stephanie. I thought we had said and done it all, Dad and I. I was almost convinced he was at peace about me.
I did everything except Dad’s first request: that gray gravel wrapped in the plastic bags, now stashed in my Berkeley apartment. I still wondered: how to acquire nitric acid to dissolve the zinc? How to get into a chemistry lab? Could I distill the gold in my kitchen sink using my own silverware? And how will I sell this gold?
I considered throwing it away, the gold with the zinc. That would be a quick easy solution. No one would care. But that was impossible. My father had entrusted me with his treasure. I cared. And, of course, I wondered what this gold was worth. I wanted my share of this gift.
I placed the plastic bags in the cardboard box with my report cards, awards, and degrees from grammar school, high school, and universities, together with my ping pong trophies. That box held my achievements as a kid. And buried in that box, there it remained, my father’s gold in the zinc, this odd remnant from Dad’s 1960s, the treasure I had not yet reached, another achievement yet to be completed, our unfinished family chemistry.
* * *
My life changed after Dad died. I thought of it as completing the job of growing up.
The Sixties were over for me. I moved from Berkeley to San Francisco in 1983, into a flat with Stephanie when I started law school at 39. I brought along to San Francisco my bags of gray gravel.
Stephanie and I married. The wedding was at my Chamokome ranch, on the first ridge above the ocean in Sonoma County. Relatives, ranch comrades and California friends joined us. My mother was there with Chicago family and friends who had been with us through my father’s ALS ordeal, and now they joined us in California for this happy chapter in the life of our family.
Two years later, Stephanie and I had a baby, Julia. Now I had my own new family, a wonderful family. I often thought, “How Dad would have loved seeing my life with Stephanie and Julia.”
As I built a new career as a litigator, as Stephanie became a child psychologist, as Julia became a sparkling young woman, we purchased a series of San Francisco homes. My car no longer was large enough to hold all our possessions, so we hired movers. And each time we moved, I personally transported the cardboard box with the plastic bags of gold-zinc gravel.
I accepted Dad’s long-ago apology for not having taught me to work with my hands. I placed his tools at my Sonoma County ranch, where Dad and I had worked together that weekend he visited in 1978. I still use some of those tools today.
I rented a safe deposit box in the early 1990s for the valuables we began accumulating. Yes, me, valuables. It was strange, but I discovered that too was part of growing up.
Year after year I received an annual rental statement for the safe deposit box, and I’d ponder the old enigma: the gold in the zinc, the nitric acid and the lab, the promise to my father years back in 1979.
Then, in 1998, both keys to my safe deposit box keys disappeared: one fell off my keyring and the other disappeared from a pile of old keys in my dresser. Now I needed the bank to break into the box. But when I thought about the bank breaking into my safe deposit box, I imagined the gold setting off alarms, with bankers in pinstripes crowding in to investigate. As a former Sixties radical in the struggle for social justice, now a tough litigator, I was surprisingly hesitant about trying to retrieve my Dad’s gold. Once each year, on receipt of the safe deposit box fee statement, I briefly thought about the gold, quickly paid, and then pushed it out of mind for another twelve months.
When I received the bank statement in 2005, I had a disturbing new thought. What if the compound had leaked out of the plastic bags? I hadn’t seen those bags for years. I couldn’t recall how I had wrapped them.
And, here was another question: could the zinc, over time, turn acidic? What is zinc anyhow? I imagined an acidic ooze of zinc and gold dissolving the bags and eating through the wall of safe deposit boxes. Would the bank come after me for damaging its box?
I followed the price of gold. It was around $400/oz in 1980 when my father gave it to me. There were years of fluctuations with market booms and crashes. Then gold skyrocketed in 2011: up to an astronomical $1,800/oz. Half a pound of gold, at $1,800 per oz: that was nearing $15,000!
Stephanie, sympathetic to my plight with the gold, called the bank herself. She learned the bank’s procedure for accessing the contents of my safe deposit box without the key.
Her instructions sat on my desk for more years. By then I was blasting ahead in a new career as a court administrator. I had become a director at a California government agency, one of its top managers. With all my new authority as a boss, I wished that I could just order the gold to turn up in my house. But, no, I had to work for that gold. I had to get it myself.
As a government official, now I was close to the public radar screen. My new fear was newspaper coverage. When I thought about breaking into the safety deposit box, I imagined reporters, too, crowding in for stories about my gold.
I retired in 2011, over 30 years after my father had given me the gold. Retirement caused me to think about mortality. If I did not complete Dad’s chemistry, I would leave the same problems for Stephanie and Julia. How would they get into the safe deposit box? Explain the contents? Extract the gold from the zinc? And sell it?
“Be responsible,” I lectured myself. “Don’t leave the problem for someone else, like Dad did with me.” But now I also knew better: every task my father had given me when he was dying in 1980 had been a building block to my growing up. Strangely, at 67, I still had one block out of kilter.
But now, retired, I felt ready to get my gold. I called the bank and reported the lost keys. I made an appointment for the box with the missing keys to be opened.
Easy.
One Saturday morning I went to my old bank in one of my long-ago San Francisco neighborhoods. A bank technician was waiting with a large hand drill. In one decisive motion, he drove the drill bit through the box lock, that simple. He summoned me over and opened the other lock with the bank’s key. I pulled out my safe deposit box and scurried to a private cubicle. No alarms. No pin-striped bankers. No paparazzi.
It had been over 20 years since I’d last handled that safe deposit box. Nothing was seeping out. The box was not corroding. Good start.
I eased open the lid. No explosion.
I peeked in. I rummaged around. And, to my astonishment I found no gravel. No Sixties treasure.
The box held something else, another valuable: my long-forgotten hand-written instructions from my father for separating the gold from the zinc. Those papers now were yellowed and brittle with age, still with my careful scrawl, like a treasure map on golden parchment.
Terrific. I thought, “These instructions will be useful.”
But only if I had the gold. Where was my gold?
I sped home and reported to Stephanie the good news: no more safe deposit box problem. And the strange news: no gold. I was crazed. Politely, she did not roll her eyes.
I tore into our basement, the repository for all my historical records. Hours later, no, it was not on the shelves. Not in the back-storage room. Not in the crawl space under the stairs. But, finally, in the last possible spot, in my own basement office, at the back of my office closet, beneath a pile of ancient boxes, in a carton with my school achievements, I struck…well, I struck zinc.
Turned out, that gold dissolved into the zinc, had been keeping me company in my basement office all those years
The packets were intact from 32 years ago. Thirteen, each carefully wrapped with plastic bags containing the gray gravel with the gold, exactly as I had arranged them in my father’s workshop, December 1979, for my airplane flight to California.
Now I had the gold. And now I had my father’s directions for separating the gold from the zinc. I was elated. I was back to “Go.”
* * *
A few weeks later, I strode into the laboratory of a friend who was a research physician. I brought all five pounds of the zinc-gold compound in the 13 sets of plastic bags.
Yes, my friend was ready with concentrated nitric acid. For years I had pondered how to get this stuff. Order it through a catalogue, or from a comic book ad? Steal some from a high school chemistry lab? Get it however people get chemicals. Walgreens? Wal-Mart? My old high school in Skokie?
But all I had to do was ask a friend for nitric acid. Here it was, a clear liquid in a bottle, placid but powerful, the great elixir I would use to undo my father’s reverse alchemy and transmute the zinc back to gold.
We went to work. First, a test run. On with the lab aprons, the safety glasses, and the rubber gloves. At long last, real chemistry.
We placed a scoop of the zinc-gold compound into a glass container under a chemical hood. We poured in nitric acid. We watched. This truly was the acid test.
The colorless nitric acid consumed the entire sample. The glass jar clouded through with a darkening liquid substance.
“That’s the zinc!” I exclaimed. “It’s dissolving in the nitric acid.”
Soon, another darker cloud began sinking to the bottom of the container. This was exactly what my father said would happen.
We removed the acidic liquid and found a small residue at the bottom. As Dad had instructed, we flushed it with water and siphoned off the liquid. We placed the residue in a test tube and separated more liquid by running it around a centrifuge. In the end at the bottom of the tube was a pinch of a cinnamon-colored substance. Just as my father told me.
“Gold!” I shouted. “GOLD!”
I was 70 years old. Time for high fives?
No, it was too soon for high fives. Our sample test consumed half the bottle of the marvelous nitric acid. I still had my five pounds of gray gravel, less a scoop. It was too much zinc to process in this little lab.
Only one thing was left to do. Take a picture! With a huge grin, I held up the tiny vial with the cinnamon powder. After three decades, I had broken through the zinc. There was my father’s pure gold, a pinch. And I had reached it.
But most of the gold remained in the zinc. Turned out, this was a small-scale industrial job. Just as my father had told me in December 1979, some 30 years ago, I needed a precious metals refiner.
* * *
The world had transformed since my father gave me the gold 30 years ago. Now there was the internet. And on the internet, a search for precious metals refiners turned up thousands of webpages with buyers around the globe who are delighted to take your gold by mail. They’ll assay it, refine it, and, they say, pay for it.
Did anyone actually sell gold this way?
My knowledge of selling gold derived entirely from the writer Calvin Trillen, writing in The New Yorker in 2011, where he described Toronto’s “cash for gold” business. With rapidly rising gold prices, storefront operators ferociously competed to purchase gold in jewelry, coins, scrap metal, teeth, you name it. There were charges that gold-buying practices fostered antisemitism, a store firebombing, and murder for hire. There was intervention by a rabbinical court. Oy!
My own solution appeared unexpectedly. Going to the movies with Stephanie one evening, I found us parked right in front of a store with a big sign in the window: “WE BUY GOLD.”
Stephanie and I looked at each other. We both knew the meaning immediately. It was a message! “Sell the gold!”
The store was on an old-time neighborhood business street where I had shopped many times. That un-gentrified boulevard was a familiar throwback to the 1950s West Side Chicago neighborhood of my parents, but with a shop that bought gold.
I prepared. I checked gold prices on the internet. I re-read my Calvin Trillen article.
In the quiet of my basement one afternoon, I brought out my plastic bags to transfer the zinc-gold compound into a large jar for transport to the store. Just before pouring, a new worry floated up: “Is there something dangerous in this gravel? Asbestos? Cyanide? An explosive?”
I thought about my father. He had been 64, three years younger than me now, dying, when he gave me the gold three decades ago. I had been 35, still half formed, his eager-to-please, trusting oldest son, trying to do this job for Dad.
“Would he have given me anything dangerous?” I thought. “Just what is this zinc stuff? And who was Dad, really?”
I knew how careful I was with the safety of my own child. I knew how I supported my daughter’s welfare. I thought, “Dad would have been the same with me.”
I summoned my memory of his face. I thought about his heroic ordeal with ALS. I recalled our discussions about his past and my future. I pictured our first talk about the gold at the kitchen table in December 1979: his request for my help, my promise to take care of it, and his confidence I’d do as I said.
Who was he? He was my father, at the end of his life, with an unlikely Sixties scheme to help his sons, handing me a remaining responsibility he could not complete. And, at long last, at 70, grown up with the Sixties long behind me, I was ready for this big job.
I poured the compound into the large jar. I was ready to sell gold.
Next morning, I discovered I had to be buzzed into the store. I entered through double security doors, and it was a security guard who admitted me. I signed in, and then waited until my name was called. I looked at gold artifacts for sale in display cases, and watched a stream of people selling valuables over the counter. This store, attractive because it was on a familiar business street, was alien to me. It was a pawnshop.
When my name was called, I stepped up to the counter and explained my business to the clerk.
This took some courage: “I have about eight ounces of gold. It’s in this zinc compound. I want to sell it.”
I showed him my jar with the five pounds of gray gravel.
The clerk did not miss a beat. He fetched the owner, a middle-aged man with owlish glasses and a steady demeanor. I explained my proposition. He examined the jar. Then he gave me a sharp appraising stare.
I thought, “This will not work.”
“How did you get it?”
I explained my father the chemist, his gold purchases and sales with Chicago metals refiners in the Sixties, his security reserve of gold, the unfinished business with his illness, my long quandary over what to do with it. I tried to keep the three-decades tale brief, but the pawnbroker moved on well before I concluded.
He took a sample from my glass jar, and I watched him run tests at a table behind the counter. Positive for gold, he reported. He wanted to hold the jar with the compound. He would send a sample to his gold refiner.
After all these years, a gold refiner. I thought, “Let’s find out what I have!”
As an attorney, I believed in gut checks. I liked how this pawnbroker looked straight at me and asked questions right to the point. He passed my gut check: an honest businessman. Okay. I was ready to leave the gold-zinc gravel at the pawnshop.
The pawnbroker called a week later. He told me the amount of gold projected by his refiner. Now we were dealing in troy ounces of gold, the real thing. He offered $8,500.
Wow! Money. In the thousands. I could actually sell this gold. My next thought screamed, “Do it!”
But I told him I wanted to think further.
I did more research – the internet again – on gold prices and troy ounces and selling gold. My attorney instincts told me to bargain. My father’s voice said I was doing well.
I countered the next day at $10,500, based on the troy ounces of gold he projected. And the international market price of gold. And my gut feeling. When he explained why that was too high, I felt reassured. This exchange was familiar. I realized I was negotiating the price with the pawnbroker.
He responded at $9,300. Now there was a good number, divisible by three, easily split with my two brothers. Another sign. I may have been leaving money on the table, but gold prices had been falling for a year. The deal was in reach. I wanted it done. I wanted this final piece of the Sixties behind me.
I signed over the gold next morning at the pawnshop. I walked out with $9,300. Cash!
I felt light. I felt released. I was satisfied that I had completed the job for my father, as he had requested and as I had promised. I was happy about all those greenbacks in my pocket. I floated along the sidewalk buoyed up by that wad of bills.
And my father’s voice? He was satisfied: “Good job, Skip.”
Simple.
That afternoon I sent my brothers checks for $3,100. It was a jolt from the distant past, a surprise, a final gift from our father. They were delighted. That was fun.
Job done, almost.
I set aside my $3,100. What could be special enough for my father’s dying gift? For 33 years of my perseverance, overcoming 33 years of my hesitation. For bringing my Sixties to a close. For making good on my promise to Dad those many years ago. For completing this last piece of growing up?
I found the answer: a vacation with my daughter Julia, the splendid granddaughter my father never knew, with Stephanie a shining part of my promised good life after his death.
Julia and I met in Chicago, my father’s home town where I had been a child. We toured Michigan Avenue and Grant Park, explored the museums, and rode bikes along the Lake.
One morning Julia and I went out to Westlawn Cemetery where my father Sam Kann and my mother Ann Kann – who Julia had known as “Granny Annie” – were in crypts. These were eternal resting places that Mom had selected because other family members were buried in nearby graves, but she considered the crypts cleaner than graves in the dirt.
That evening, over a long dinner in a fine Chicago restaurant, I told Julia the story of the gold, the Sixties, and how I finally grew up. This was our family chemistry.