My Anecdotal Life

by Carl Reiner

  “What are you doing, Papa?” is something I often asked. I remember coming home from school one day and seeing him quickly toss something into one of the drawers of his workbench. From the time I was six until he retired, he worked at home. I asked him what he was working on, and he said he couldn’t tell me.

  “Why can’t you tell me, Papa?”

  “Seig nicht ein nahr halb arbeit!” he answered.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It is an old German-Jewish saying,” he said, smiling. “It means, ‘Don’t show a fool half work.’”

  He explained that “fool” in this sense meant one who could not appreciate or understand what the end product might be.

  My father worked on his inventions on Saturday and Sunday nights, when the family slept. One Sunday, I wandered into the kitchen and caught him sitting at the kitchen table on which were lying dozens and dozens of round pieces of white paper. With a small jeweler’s file in one hand, a sheet of white paper in the other, under which he held a dime-sized tempered-steel disk, he rubbed the rasp against the paper-covered steel disk and produced a dime-sized piece of paper. Using his jeweler’s loupe, he would examine each paper circle and check it for burrs or imperfections—the imperfect ones he would discard. Had he been able to afford a punch press, the two thousand disks that it took a year to make by hand could have been extruded by a machine in minutes.

  I had caught him in the act of inventing, and for some reason he allowed me to watch him work. Was I ever fascinated! When the table was filled with the little pieces of round paper, he would pick up each one with a fine tweezer and, with a small brush, carefully paint one side of the paper with a black, inky fluid. He would then hold the paper disk between his thumb and forefinger and paint the tiny bald spot where the tweezer had held it, and then gingerly lay it on the table to dry. This process would continue until all the paper disks were coated and dried. Before making and painting a new batch, he collected the painted disks, arranged them into a small pile, painted side down, and carefully slid them into a foot-long black tube. The process took a year of Sundays and I was there when he finished packing the second of the two tubes.

  What he had built was a dry-pile static-electricity battery that he hoped would power a pendulum clock. I remember him taking a piece of cotton thread, making a little knot at the end of it, and then letting the knot hang between the two paper-filled tubes that stood upright about three inches apart. He expected that the knot would be attracted to one of the tubes, pick up a positive charge generated by one of the dry piles, be repelled by it, and then be attracted to the other tube that was negatively charged, pick up that opposing charge, be repelled by it, etc., etc., etc. He foresaw that this attracting and repelling process might well continue for a hundred years. His plan was to build a clock with a simple escapement for the hands and have a pendulum swing between the two static-electricity batteries to generate enough power to move the hands. And this time it worked! I say “this time” because a year before, he had built two dry piles using the wrong paper and the wrong chemical coating for the two thousand other paper disks that failed to attract the cotton knot.

  On this second attempt he used a more porous paper and coated it with magnesium compound instead of a silver one.

  He continued to work on this project for many years, finally handcrafting a handsome brass-trimmed, glass-domed pendulum clock. He was awarded two patents, one for the simple three-geared clock and one for a static-electricity battery that was capable of delivering two thousand volts and one milliamp.

  By the time the patent papers came through, the clock had been in our dining/living room, proudly perched atop a breakfront—or china closet, as my folks referred to it—and had been ticking away for more than twenty years without once stopping. It was 1953, and I was in my third year of working with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, which, that year, was being sponsored by the Bulova Watch Company.

  At an after-show dinner party, one of the company’s representatives lent me his ear, into which I poured some of the details of my father’s perpetual-motion clock. He was both interested and skeptical, and invited me, my father, and his clock to visit the corporate offices that coming week.

  While waiting in the reception area of the Bulova Watch Company’s impressive offices, a handsome Saville Row–suited man sporting a deep tan and slicked-back graying hair came in, introduced himself as Arde Bulova, shook our hands, and good-naturedly warned my father that his chief engineer had voiced skepticism about what we had claimed for the clock, and then he breezed out.

  The skeptical engineer’s assistant, who was, no doubt, equally skeptical, invited us into an office and said that the chief engineer would be with us presently. After so many years of work, my pop was about to show his baby to someone who had the means to manufacture it. I was nervous for him but he was his cool scientific self. The chief engineer, wearing a white lab coat, entered, shook our hands, and got right down to business.

  “To be perfectly honest with you, Mr. Reiner,” he said, addressing my father, “we have doubts that your clock will do what your son says it will, but I am curious. Let’s have a look!”

  Pop said that he wasn’t surprised they were dubious, and went on to explain in great detail everything that went into the making of the clock and his reason for claiming its unusual longevity, citing the fact that in twenty years, the battery tests showed no discernible diminishing of power. They listened attentively, asked a few questions, and after peering at the clock from all angles, the senior engineer said something we had not expected.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch! The damn thing works!” he shouted, clapping his hands. “You say this same battery has been powering the clock for twenty years?”

  “Over twenty.” My father smiled. “I don’t have a spare, and I don’t intend to build one.”

  The engineer repeated, “Son of a bitch! That is one helluva clock, Mr. Reiner, one helluva clock!”

  He asked my father to leave a copy of the patent papers and promised to get back to us in a few days. When he did, he reiterated how wonderful he thought my father’s invention was, but added that it came under the category of a “novelty item rather than an accurate timepiece,” and therefore Bulova had no interest in manufacturing it.

  My father did not seem to be too upset when I told him their decision, in fact he bolstered their arguments by saying that “pendulum clocks are notoriously inaccurate.”

  “They must rest on a level surface,” he explained, “whether it be on a floor, like a grandfather clock, or a mantle clock like mine, and even if they’re leveled off correctly, they have to be reset every week or so.”

  My father was a true stoic. He had to be terribly disappointed but he showed no signs of being hurt or angry at the rejection.

  He and I tried to market the clock one more time. We were invited to appear on a Philadelphia television show called The Big Idea where inventors were given the opportunity to do a show-and-tell demonstration of their invention and perhaps pique the interest of some viewing entrepreneur who might deem it worthy of developing.

  The afternoon we went in front of the cameras, my years of television experience were of no help. I trembled as I introduced my father to the show’s host and the audience. Papa was calm and composed and acquitted himself nobly. Without a bead of sweat on his brow, my Papa the watchmaker became my Papa the science professor. He described, in both technical and layman’s language, how the clock was made and what made it tick.

  We waited a few weeks. When we did not hear any encouraging words from the show’s producers or from their viewers, we knew we had struck out again. My father took the rejection in stride. I think that, like all creative people who would welcome recognition and financial success, he derived enough satisfaction in coming up with a new idea, implementing its development, and seeing it become what he had envisioned it would be.

  Earlier, pop had been granted a patent for his clock that was powered by a flashl
ight battery, which, unlike his perpetual clock, was successfully marketed and made a lot of money—not for Pop but for the company that manufactured it after my father’s patent expired. Pop had received the patent right before the depression of the ’30s. At that time, most people opted to spend their money for food, clothing, and shelter rather than for cute battery-operated clocks. During World War II, which followed the Great Depression, cute clocks were not as vital to our nation’s survival as big, cute bombers, submarines, and tanks.

  Three or four years after the war, the patent on the flashlight-battery clock ran out, and an enterprising German clock company manufactured it. A small victory for our enemy. I like to think that it wasn’t a businessman sympathetic to the Nazis, but I doubt that back then there were any other kind. Again, my father never showed himself to be bitter about this disappointment. To this day, every time I see a clock that runs on a battery, I tell myself or anybody who is with me, “My pop invented that!” My three children, Rob, Annie, Lucas, and my nephew Richie all have a glass-domed battery-driven clock on their mantles—clocks that I bought at a department store and presented to them so that they can remember their grandpa and can tell their children, Jake, Nick, Livia, Romy, Rosie, Rachel, and Max that their “great-grandfather Irving invented that pretty clock on the mantle!”

  Pop’s perpetual clock outlasted my mother, who passed away in 1963. After her sad passing, I invited my pop to come to Los Angeles to live, which he agreed to do.

  My father had packed hastily and took from his Bronx apartment only his clothes, the family photos, his watchmaker’s tools, and the dry-pile-battery clock. When he unpacked the clock, which he had hand carried in a little vinyl bag, he shook his head, and said, “Tsk-tsk.”

  I can remember two other times he was provoked to utter those two discouraging sounds. The first was when I was about fourteen and sitting on the couch reading the sports section while Pa was at his bench repairing a watch. I heard a subtle “tsk-tsk” escape from him. I looked up to see him peering at his index finger. Imbedded in it was the shaft of a jeweler’s screwdriver. While tightening a screw, the screwdriver had slipped and gone right through the fleshy part of his finger. Before gingerly unsheathing the screwdriver, he shook his head, and said, “Look what I did—tsk-tsk!”

  He delivered another of his low-key tsk-tsks when, at the first test of his perpetual battery, the knotted cotton thread hung limply between the two poles, being neither attracted nor repelled by either battery. After a year’s work, his disappointment deserved at least an “Oh, shit!!” or a “Damn, damn, damn!!” But that was my pop. A stoic’s stoic with a high threshold for pain.

  A third tsk-tsk, which I feel deserves to be catalogued before I return to Pop’s perpetual clock, made me look up from the New York Giants box score. It was his reaction to something he was holding in his hand.

  “Look at that,” he said whimsically, “a silver filling! Do you know how many years that filling has been in my tooth?”

  I had no idea.

  “Thirty-six years!” he announced proudly.

  “How can you remember when that filling was put in?”

  “Because,” he said, smiling, “I put that filling in myself when I lived in Vienna—lower left molar.”

  My father went on to explain that he had gone to a dentist to have a couple of cavities taken care of, but the dentist had caused him such pain working on the first tooth that he decided that he would fill the second one himself. Once again, he relied on a book, this time to learn how to fill a tooth. From his dentistry book, he learned how to clean out the decay, sterilize it, and cut the sluices correctly to hold the filling firm, and how to make the proper amalgam of silver and mercury for the filling.

  He bought a set of dental tools. Being a watchmaker, he had a hand drill that he used to clean out the decay. He said that because he treated himself gently, he had much less pain than he would have had, had the professional dentist handled the drill. I have yet to meet anyone, dentists included, who has ever filled his own tooth.

  Back to the tsk-tsk my father uttered in my California home that provoked those last memories of his stoicism.

  “I should have taken a little more care packing the clock.” Pop sighed after tsk-tsking loudly. “I shorted the battery! I just wasn’t thinking.”

  He went on to explain that, instead of removing the pendulum, he had left it resting against one of the piles. He had just lost his wife and, as he put it, “my best friend.” Who would have expected him to think of anything but that? Bessie and Irving Reiner had been married for forty-seven years and lived in almost perfect symbiosis. Each could do what the other could not do or would not care to do. My father made the rules of discipline, and my mother enforced them, often using a yardstick in the process. For all of their years together, excluding the few months that my father invoked his right to remain silent, sometimes for long periods, it was an eminently successful mating. I think my father considered silence preferable to loud squabbling. It did less harm to the children and kept nosy neighbors out of the loop.

  “They don’t have to know our business!” was the operative admonition both my parents used when anyone in the family raised his voice.

  “Does that mean that the clock won’t work?” I asked, concerned that it would not last for the forty more years Pop had conjectured it might.

  “We’ll see,” he said, setting the clock on the fireplace mantle, “it was only shorting for a day.”

  He gave the pendulum a gentle push, and the clock started up.

  “How do you like that.” My father smiled. “It still has some juice left.”

  My father stayed with our family for about five months and got to know his California-born grandson Lucas, who was two and a half, and got to spend time with his older grandchildren, Robbie and Annie. It did my heart good to see them together. My father was a very undemonstrative man, at least that’s how I perceived him to be when I was a teenager, but I learned from watching him behave with Lucas and Robbie and Annie, when they were babies, that he was a loving man who kissed and hugged them with fervor. I had to assume that when I was very young, he must have behaved that way with me.

  My father returned to New York. After residing at the Hotel Gorham, a rather pleasant apartment hotel on West Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan, which I had leased for six months, he moved to the Hotel Latham, on Twenty-eighth Street, a “not-so-fancy hotel” where he said he would be “more comfortable.” When I visited him there, I understood. It resembled his Bronx apartment in many ways, the most obvious being the age of the building and the crackled porcelain bathroom sink that was an exact duplicate of the one he had washed in at 2089 Arthur Avenue.

  I called him often, and we chatted about his grandchildren; my brother and his family; the hotel residents with whom he had become friendly; a lovely old woman, Mrs. Henderson, who he hinted “had eyes” for him.

  Pop lived at the Latham for about six years, and never once did we not connect, until the day the switchboard operator informed me that he had checked out and moved to Florida, an absolutely inconceivable move for him to make. He was one of the most hidebound, creatures of habit extant. I called my brother, Charlie, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, who told me that Pop had awakened with a chest pain and phoned to say that he was not feeling too well. For our pop, who filled his own tooth, to admit to any discomfort sent Charlie speeding to New York to bring him to his home. It was then that we learned what neither of us knew before, that our pop had been suffering with a heart condition for some time, a piece of information that a confirmed stoic would never think to share with anyone, especially his children, and certainly not the hotel operator. Rather than tell her he was moving in with my brother because he was not well, he told her he was going to Florida. My brother assured me that my father, who didn’t call me because he didn’t want to worry me, was in good spirits. He reassured me that he was fine and happy to be in my brother’s home, where he would be able to chat and visit with hi
s teenaged grandchildren, Richie and Elaine.

  Estelle and I, on our way to Europe for a two-week summer vacation, stopped off to visit him and were happy to see him up and about and dressed as usual, white shirt, trousers, and vest. Pop had lost a bit of weight and explained that the pills he was taking for his heart and the diuretic pills he took for the edema in his legs had robbed him of his appetite. He said it was a difficult balancing act.

  “Well, Pop,” I remember saying to him, “you always liked to experiment with things. Now you can do an experiment on yourself.”

  “You know something,” he said wistfully, “I think that I’ll finish that experiment—on the other side.”

  His exact words.

  A week later, while Estelle and I were vacationing in Florence, I received a call from my brother telling me that our father had passed away in the middle of the night. I felt awful that I had not been there for him.

  Sharing one of the limos at the funeral, Charlie and I reminisced about our father. We found ourselves laughing at his idiosyncracies and remembering riding with him when we attended our mother’s funeral seven years earlier. Pop remarked that one of his oldest friends, Ben Kurtzman, was buried on the other side of the cemetery and wondered if, when he joined my mother, there might be a way to visit him. He considered coming up with some kind of plan for a subway to connect the underground plots. Charlie’s wife, Ilse, who was a Holocaust survivor, was understandably upset by our macabre humor and later asked how we could joke about something so sad. I don’t really know why we did. It could be that it’s a family trait. My father seemed to be comfortable doing that.

  The tale of my father’s last invention and his passing added another strange coincidence to the two I had described earlier.

  Charlie noticed that the perpetual battery, which had been powering Pop’s clock for over fifty years, expired—on the very day our father had.

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