| OCR Text |
Show Joel Shaprio 5/26/82 tp 1 pg 6 as anybody, he dredges up incidences of his youth whether they're 100% accurate or -- I suppose the spirit of their accuracy is the most important part of it rather than the detail. such as, he came into San Francisco very shortly after the great San Francisco earthquake. He would talk about the ••• that was when, 1910? He was aware -- in other words, he was aware, but he had a personal experience with that kind of thing. Ah. He carried -- he would talk about being a travelling salesman in the west when men still wore guns on their belts. Guys were pretty rough. He, after all, was about the same size as I physically, he was about 5'8", not muscular structure. He was a man --he didn't --he had never done built up his body by being a miner or a cowboy or a rancher. He was a city boy. He was a city boy when he was born, he was a city boy when he came west and he got into the soft goods trades, the mercantile trades. So , he wasn't a hard fisted man. He was a very mild, gentle man. Curse -- I rarely heard a curse word from my father. I mean, it was just not in his language . He learned to speak excellent structured English. But laced with kind of an old world perception. But , there were very few hard edges of my father. He was a gentle kind of person. So, his going into the little towns of the west, a ya..ung, skinny, sallow faced Jewish salesman -- he told many times, he was the butt of jokes then that these tough cowboy types would seize on him as a little, skinny, Jew boy. And play jokes on him which he learned to take, which people at that time learned to take. I recall once he said he used to ride horses. (because) he had to ride horses. He learned to do it, of course, He said they set him up in a saloon one afternoon to take out a very nice little saddle horse with somebody to take a little ride. He said,yeah, he'd go, it would be nice, a ride in the countryside. He was just a fair rider, he's not a great rider, he just learned to get along. And unbeknownst to him, as he tells the story, this was a horse that had been trained, as they did in those days, to go out to the edge of the city, about ~ mile, and then would turn around and they would race in. And this was an exceptionally fast racing type quarterhorse, I suppose. And to repeat the custom was to take these |
