halls and popular nightclubs. Mickey couldn’t have been more different from the plodding fellows her sisters had married, such as Irv, the kindly husband of Helen (the eldest), who ran a candy store; or the deadly practical Eddie, who ran a grocery business with his wife, Esther. Although Mother adored her father, Mickey was in a different sphere from him as well. Yes, they were both incredibly hardworking, but my father got applause and adulation for his work. Sure, our family didn’t have any more money or live too far from the rest of the Epsteins on Cleveland’s East Side, but Grace had married an artist . To her mind that made us inherently better.
In some ways my father’s family wasn’t too different from Mother’s. They also had emigrated from Russia with little to nothing, but the Katzes were a far gentler bunch than the Epsteins. My grandfather Max, well known in the community as Mendel the tailor, had brought my grandmother Johanna to America after their marriage had been arranged by a broker in Latvia, where he had stopped on his way to the New World. Johanna was an educated woman who spoke several languages, while Max had had no schooling whatsoever. But together they navigated a life in the new land that was Cleveland, which offered its own share of hardship. I remember my dad telling me that one of his earliest memories was of standing by his father’s side outside a hospital, where his mother was suffering from a breakdown after losing an infant child, and wondering when or if she was coming home.
My father eventually had three siblings: his brother, Uncle Abie, and two sisters, Jeannie and Estelle. Despite financial struggles, all the children somehow received music lessons. Abie played the violin, Jeannie the piano, and Estelle danced ballet en pointe and sang. The family held concerts at home on Saturday nights, which they called Katz’s Follies. On summer evenings, neighbors would gather on the street outside their apartment to listen to the music coming through the open windows.
Dad was the serious musician in the family, even something of a prodigy. With his small pencil mustache, pomaded side-part hairstyle, and fine features, he looked like a performer (although not a Jewish one—there was nothing the least bit Semitic about his appearance). As a teenager he played clarinet and saxophone in the high school band and picked up small jobs around town doing the same. He and his baby sister, Stell, entered every amateur night they could find, but not as a brother-sister act. Pretending not to know each other, each gave an individual performance, doubling their chances of winning the grand cash prize. “Myron Katz” played a version of “The Saint Louis Blues” that brought the house down, while “Estelle Kay,” a perfect doll in her hand-sewn ballet costume, melted the audience’s hearts with her song and dance routine en pointe. Often, it was a tie between the two of them, and Dad and Stellie would split the prize, which they would turn over to Johanna for much-needed grocery money.
At fifteen, Dad became a professional musician. He joined the Musicians’ Union and was a regular with the Johnston Society Orchestras, playing everything from stag parties to country clubs. Although he continued to attend high school until he graduated, my father became the major breadwinner in his family. He supplemented his own father’s meager income and supported his brother through college so that Abie could become a pharmacist.
Right out of high school, Dad was hired to go on the road with Phil Spitalny (one of the talented Spitalny brothers, who both were composers and orchestra leaders from Cleveland). It was while waiting at the train station to leave for the tour that my seventeen-year-old dad met and fell instantly in love with my mother (“The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life,” he said). She was fourteen, and after they married, two years later, they were hardly ever apart
Darrell Gurney, Ivan Misner