For Father’s Day this year, I gave myself a present. I went rummaging through an old high school yearbook from June of 1941 and an old Army Air Force graduation book from the heart of World War II, looking for traces of my own father’s history.
Lionel Olesker kept most of his story inside of him. He was the most modest man I ever knew. In his prime, he was a terrific handball player but insisted the important thing was simply to do your best. It didn’t matter who won or lost.
“Then why keep score?” I asked.
“Just so we’ll know when to stop,” he said.
When I’d ask him about all the wartime missions he’d flown over Europe, he’d invariably reply, “Who can remember?”
It wasn’t until he was gone that one of his cousins whispered to me, “You know your father was a hero, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. “What do you mean?”
A few other relatives who’d known him since the early years nodded their heads. They knew stories I didn’t know. But we were standing in a snowy graveyard at that moment, and a rabbi’s words for a newly deceased relative stole the moment away.
To this day, I’m ashamed of myself for not pressing my father about his wartime years so that I might understand him more — and he might have known the great pride I had in him.
He’d grown up in The Bronx, where he first met my mother, the former Selma Loebman, who lived across the street. He was 11 and she was 9, a newcomer on Findlay Avenue, when he first spotted her.
He picked up a snowball and threw it at her, and hit her in the face. She made her own snowball and threw it back at him. In The Bronx, this is known as foreplay.
My grandparents left The Bronx and moved to Atlantic City, where my father spent his last two high school years. The other day, as I leafed through The Herald, the Atlantic City High School yearbook, I was struck by the number of scribbled comments from classmates saying what a great guy he was, and what a terrific ballplayer.
One classmate called him, “The best basketball player I ever saw.”
My father never breathed a word about any of this. I knew that he connected to sports, though, because he coached a couple of my teams.
He was part of a generation that kept things inside of themselves. They grew up in the awful Great Depression and came of age just in time to spend four years fighting a war. They came home hungry to catch up on their lives.
My father’s life was pretty good, but much too short. He found pleasure in sports and music and politics. He’d been president of the Liberty Jewish Center brotherhood. He had a successful career in real estate. He and my mother had a terrific marriage that included lots of love and hollering over half a century, two sons, four grandchildren and extended Baltimore family.
He used to call me at my newspaper office. No “hello,” just an opening barrage: “Have you seen what’s in your newspaper today?” Some political outrage, and he wanted to share his anger over it.
A heart attack got him, at 66, in 1989. My brother, Mitchell, and I found him one Sunday morning when my mother was out of town visiting an aunt. He had his glasses on, and a newspaper on his lap. Maybe some political outrage of the day got to him. It was the last secret he took to his grave.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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