by Linda Wolfe
Where to go instead? He decided on Washington and Lee in Lexington, Virginia. “It was in the South, and I liked the idea of living in warm weather again,” he would one day explain. “It was one of the better southern universities. And my pal Ronnie Levick was going there and having a great time.”
In the spring of 1947, he sent his acceptance to Washington and Lee.
That same spring, a woman named Jeanette Fererh, who hailed from Saranac Lake, New York, gave birth to a baby girl. She named her Joy, perhaps for the feelings that holding and cuddling the dark-haired infant inspired in her.
Jeanette was a charmer. Tall and voluptuous, with sparkling jade-green eyes and fine dark hair that she wore in a chignon, she had an irresistible way of relating to people. She’d focus entirely on whomever she was addressing, her stunning cat’s eyes glued to theirs, her wide mouth fixed in a radiant smile. And she’d issue lavish praise, compliments that made women feel they were trusted confidantes, men as if they were ten feet tall.
But her marriage to Ben Fererh wasn’t a happy one, and soon the two would drift apart.
On a balmy June weekend in 1947, shortly after he’d graduated from Milford, Sol Wachtler traveled to Queens to spend a few days visiting his friend Ronnie. Ronnie had glorious hijinks planned for Saturday night. A bunch of friends, all paired off into couples, would go to Manhattan and spend the evening dancing and drinking at some Broadway hotel, maybe the Astor, maybe the famous Biltmore, where all through the war their older brothers had kissed farewell to their girlfriends beneath the big clock.
But I don’t have a date, Sol pointed out.
Don’t worry, Ronnie told him. I’ll arrange one for you. With a cousin of mine.
She was Joan Carol Wolosoff, a high school junior, and she was rich. Her father, Leon, the son of a cantor, was president of Wolosoff Brothers, one of the big building companies in Queens. Her mother, Elsie, was a daughter of Max Blumberg, a lumber and millwork dealer who had come to America as a penniless fourteen-year-old from Lithuania and quickly amassed so great a fortune that he not only left millions to each of his children but became one of the most generous Jewish philanthropists of his era.
Sol didn’t know all this when he first laid eyes on Joan. He just knew that he liked the way she looked. She was blond and buxom—her nickname at the summer camp she had gone to had been “Tits Wolosoff”—and she was very graceful.
On their first date, bobbing and twirling to the hotel band’s feverish lindy hops and gliding in each other’s arms to romantic fox trots, they knew they wanted to see each other again. On their second date, they went to see Brigadoon, the number one hit on Broadway, and when they drove back to Queens, neither of them wanted to get out of the car, so they parked in her driveway and talked for hours about their friends, their families, their dreams for the future. On their third date, they went with a crowd of boys and girls to Jones Beach, where they watched the play of the moon’s silver light illuminating the crashing waves, and later the rays of the rising sun. After that, they started going together. Going steady. Except that they both knew that Sol would be leaving for college in the fall.
He was going to be a lawyer, he had decided by then. Washington and Lee had a program that enabled students to receive both their B.A. and LL.B. degrees in just six years.
Sol entered Washington and Lee in the fall of 1947. The school, one of the oldest universities in the South, had a bucolic campus that rolled across a hundred acres shaded by ancient trees and dotted with handsome Greek Revival-style columned buildings. Sol pledged a Jewish fraternity, Phi Epsilon Pi, and, remarkably, in his sophomore year was elected frat president, a position generally won only by an upper-classman. He had won the election, one of his frat brothers would recall years later, because he had an almost instinctive gift for politics. “It was like he was a favorite of some mythological god,” the frat brother observed. “Like he’d been given a magic potion to drink or an invisible cloak to wear. Something that always made him win.”
His political abilities had paid off in other ways as well by then. He had become the secretary-treasurer of the Washington Literary Society, a group that sponsored roundtable discussions, the secretary and speaker of the Forensic Union, a debating group, a prominent member of the Washington and Lee Debate Team, and a member of the Christian Council and War Memorial Scholarship Committee. His energy in pursuing his interests was extraordinary, and in a reprise of his experience at Milford, in his second year on campus he won an award, sponsored by the university’s Inter-Fraternity Council, that was reserved for the student “who has contributed most to campus activities.”
He was still keen on Joan Wolosoff, who had graduated from high school by then and was attending Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. Sometimes he made the five-hour drive to visit her; sometimes she came down to Lexington to see him. But they had agreed that they could each date other people, and occasionally, they did. Yet Sol wasn’t very interested in girls, not nearly as interested as some of his house brothers were. They broke the frat-house rules—girls weren’t allowed above the second floor—sneaking their dates past the watchful eyes of the housemother and into upstairs bedrooms. And they hung out with them at a town juke joint, dancing and drinking beer. But Sol didn’t sneak girls into his room, and he rarely turned up at the juke joint.
“He wasn’t a big ladies’ man,” another of his frat brothers would one day recall. “He wasn’t a make-out guy. He was very—well, clean-cut. And besides, there was Joan. There was always Joan.”
Sol had met her family the previous year—not just her mother, Elsie, and her father, Leon, but her uncles, Morton and Alvin, the one known as Bibbs. Leon was the eldest of the three brothers, a sweet-natured, energetic man who was always running. He’d bound up the stairs to his second-story office on Queens Boulevard, then skip down them, always taking them in twos. Morton, too, had a sympathetic personality and was known as the family peacemaker. But Bibbs, the youngest, was tough, opinionated, convinced that he was always right. Despite his scratchy exterior, Sol hit it off with him.
The three Wolosoff brothers had been in the building business for over twenty-five years. They’d constructed homes right through the Depression and even during the war, when, despite the fact that almost no new housing was going up, shrewd Bibbs had managed to obtain a government contract to erect homes near a naval base. Suddenly, after the war, they started to be immensely successful.
It was that sort of a time. People were clamoring for all the things they’d had to do without during the war years—to get a car, they’d pay a thousand dollars under the table. For an apartment, several thousand. And the demand for houses, houses roomy enough for war veterans who were producing the children of the baby boom, was mammoth. William Levitt began building inexpensive housing for veterans and in a few short years constructed and sold close to eighteen thousand homes. The Wolosoffs, too, began building similar low-cost homes, and they were snapped up as soon as they were erected. Then Leon began building more expensive homes.
The Wolosoffs did not live grandly during those early postwar years. Morton had an apartment in the city. Bibbs lived in a four-and-a-half-room apartment in Queens. Leon, the only one with a house, had a small, attached three-bedroom place, also in Queens.
But in 1949, the year Sol Wachtler was a junior at Washington and Lee, Bibbs decided to build a home in Nassau County for himself, his wife, Sylvia, and their two young sons. Nassau was home to some of the most luxurious houses in the country, an area in which until recently there had been vast open fields dotted with vegetable farms and edged by miles of scrub oak and gnarled pine along an untouched shoreline. It was an area where women whose photographs appeared in the society columns of newspapers attended debutante balls, where men still played polo and rode to hounds. And it was an area where once there had been few Jews but into which, increasingly, newly wealthy Jewish families had begun penetrating.
The North Shore of Nassau County was its “Gold Coas
t,” one of the richest areas in the United States, a region of rolling fields and high bluffs overlooking the majestic Long Island Sound. Land here was expensive, and better deals could be had on the flatter expanses of the South Shore. But he would buy and build, Bibbs decided, in the burgeoning town of Great Neck on the desirable North Shore. He could afford whatever he’d have to pay for the property—and he purchased six acres. He also decided that he would make his home a dream house, a place that would announce to all who saw it that here was a builder with vision and taste.
Perhaps Leon, too, would have decided to build himself a grand home. But in the spring of 1949, while he was running up the stairs to his office, he collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital, where it was discovered he had had a severe heart attack. Hospitalized, the forty-eight-year-old builder showed some improvement at first, but several days later he worsened and died. His daughter, Joan—his only child—became an heiress, inheriting real estate that was not yet income-producing, but that would one day be worth many millions of dollars.
After Leon died, Sol and Joan talked about getting married, but Joan’s mother, Elsie, wouldn’t hear of it. Sol had no money, he wasn’t society, and he was still just a college student. Sylvia Wolosoff, Joan’s aunt, made fun of him. “Elsie,” she called out to her sister-in-law one day when she was visiting her house and Sol arrived to pick up Joan for a date, “Elsie, the delivery boy is here!”
Sol and Joan bided their time. But they saw each other whenever they could. Once, in Sol’s junior year, Joan came down to Washington and Lee and, looking very much the prototype of the young postwar debutante, her blond hair bobbed and sleekly banged, her neck bangled with three strands of pearls, her smile a wide flash of perfect white teeth, had her picture printed in the school newspaper. Another time, she was named “the sweetheart of Phi Epsilon Pi,” Sol’s frat. Sol was proud of her and paraded around the campus with her on his arm, a frat brother who recalled Joan’s visits would eventually say, “Like a peacock displaying tail feathers.” “And why not? She was one of those perfect girls. Poised, self-assured, and with every hair in place.”
By 1951, the marriage between Jeanette and Ben Fererh had broken up and Jeanette was raising three-and-a-half-year-old Joy on her own. Jeanette would say that breaking up had been her idea, but years later when she was grown, Joy would tell intimates that her father had walked out, abandoned the family.
Joan Wolosoff had, by that same year, transferred to Sarah Lawrence College to be near her grieving mother, and Sol Wachtler was attending law school, where he was elected president of Washington and Lee’s Bar Association. He was also trying his hand at being a creative writer, coauthoring a column in the school paper, which ran under the byline “Sacco and Vanzetti.” Sometimes the columns were filled with puerile jokes or letters signed with such would-be amusing names as “Twisted Mind,” “Dementia Praecox,” or “Chow Hound.” At other times, there were short stories.
In one, a girl whose initials, like Joan’s, are J.C.W. and who, like Joan, is a psychology major, asks a young man to tell her a dream so that she can interpret the symbolism. Other friends have done her this favor, she points out. But the hero of the story, not wanting his inner self made public, refuses to present a real dream and instead makes up one so zany and so tauntingly overladen with Freudian sexual symbols, including snakes, boxes, umbrellas, and a mace “cunningly hinged to the navel of the bearer,” that the poor girl is utterly frustrated. “You’re not psychotic,” she tells him. “You’re … just plain juvenile.”
In another, a frat man’s girlfriend—“Every hair on her head was in place, every gesture correct and assured, and every aspect of her dress had a costumelike perfection”—comes down to Washington and Lee to visit him.
The hero isn’t happy to see her. “When Mary was not there,” he thinks, “her status was a source of pride” to him, but her actual presence irritates him. Their relationship, he fears, is bland and hypocritical. “Each weekend was another hollow climax, the apprehension of which was its own raison d’être. Each weekend for what seemed like years they had analyzed each other under superficial circumstances, and now they dragged themselves as actors to the final scene.”
That scene is a kiss. Anticipating it, the hero muses, “Their emotions would become aroused to some degree or another, because it was understood that some passion might be displayed at this appropriate time.” But, in fact, very little passion is manifested. Indeed, wiping his mouth after the kiss, the hero notices that so lightly and cautiously have he and Mary kissed that his handkerchief is hardly soiled. He is disappointed and filled with inchoate yearning.
At the time Sol wrote this story, he and Joan had not yet had sex together, although they’d been dating for five years. Restrained and proper, they’d agreed not to make love until they were married.
That they would be getting married was definite, and in Sol’s senior year of law school, they at last began laying plans for their wedding.
Sol wanted a big one. Joan wasn’t sure. She’d never liked large gatherings, and this one was promising to be huge. Still, she went along with Sol’s wishes and had her mother book the ballroom at the Plaza Hotel for a date in May. But as the day of the wedding drew closer, she grew increasingly uneasy.
In February, during a school vacation, she went home to her mother’s apartment, and Sol came up from law school so they could draw up a final guest list. The two of them, along with her mother and a few favorite aunts and uncles, sat around the living room discussing various relatives, and they couldn’t decide whether to ask this one or that, or both of them, or neither of them, or just how many people to invite, or whether to make the whole event bigger, or make it smaller. Joan started feeling anxious. This whole thing’s getting beyond me, she worried.
The aunts and uncles were growing vociferous. And then suddenly Uncle Morton said, “What do you need all this trouble for? Why don’t you two just go out and get married?”
It was ten-thirty at night. “What do you mean, ‘go out and get married’?” Sol asked. “How can you just go out and get married?”
“You could get married tonight,” Morton said. “All you need is a rabbi.”
It was true, Joan realized. They’d already gotten their blood tests. Why not just go out and get married? A few minutes later, Sol was on the phone to a rabbi and she was borrowing a navy blue satin dress from her mother and a ring from one of the aunts. And then she, Sol, and her mother, with Uncle Morton along to serve as a witness, raced off to the rabbi.
They were married so late at night that her mother always said afterward that she wasn’t sure if they’d been married on the twenty-third or the twenty-fourth of the month.
The day after the wedding, Joan and Sol went back to school—she for her final semester at Sarah Lawrence, he for his final semester of law school. Back on campus, Sol found an apartment for them—a couple of tiny rooms in a Quonset hut, one of those corrugated metal units erected right after the war to house married veterans. No refrigerator, but the place had an icebox, and he made arrangements for regular deliveries of fifty-pound blocks of ice.
Joan took the overnight train down to see her new home, and for the rest of the school year, she commuted between Bronxville, New York, and Lexington, Virginia. She was happy with her new life and so absorbed by her handsome, talented spouse that when asked to list her interests for publication in her college yearbook, she cited only two: the scholarship drive and her husband. On her graduation day, she tore off her cap and gown, tossed them to her father-in-law, who was standing in for Sol, shouted, “Give these to my roommate,” and raced off to catch a train for Virginia.
That summer, they rented an apartment in Hollywood, Florida, where Sol’s parents were living. Sol took a job in a law office and enrolled in a Florida law school to make up three credits he was missing and would need in order to graduate. He also applied for a commission in the Navy. The Korean War was going on, and once he graduated, if he didn’t get
a commission, he’d be drafted.
One summer’s day, he received a telegram from the Navy, eagerly ripped it open, and saw that he’d gotten the commission. He’d be a lieutenant junior grade, the telegram said; he’d be assigned to Naval Intelligence and stationed in Washington, D.C. What could be better? Sol was joyous, except for one nagging little thought. Just a few days earlier, he’d received a draft notice, telling him he’d be called to Army duty in a few months. Well, surely, he decided, the naval commission took precedence. And he promptly made plans to move to Washington. He quit his job and broke the lease on the apartment, his mother went out and bought him a Navy ensign’s black raincoat and a handsome briefcase, and his friends threw him a big farewell party. Then he went up to Washington to get his commission and find an apartment for himself and Joan. I’ll send for you as soon as I have one, he told her.
In Washington, he went to the Office of Naval Officer Procurement to receive his commission. But a desk officer said to him, “You were sent a draft notice?” And he gave Sol an odd look.
“Yeah, I got it about a week ago,” Sol acknowledged, starting to feel uncomfortable.
“Then you can’t take the commission,” the officer said. “Too bad.”
“Why not? I’m not in the Army.” He was indignant, stunned. “I’ve got a Navy commission. Here’s the telegram.”
“Yeah, but as soon as you get your draft notice, you can’t have your commission anymore.” And the desk officer walked away to the back of the busy office.
Crushed, Sol realized he would have to return to Florida, return in the Navy ensign’s black raincoat his mother had bought, and resume life in Hollywood, where he no longer had a job or an apartment and where everyone was expecting him to come back in a lieutenant’s uniform. He was terribly embarrassed. He was also at a loss about where to live and how to manage financially until the Army wanted him. What to do? Resourcefully, he got on a train and went to Atlanta, Georgia, the home of the Third Army in the area, begged to be taken in right away, and got himself sworn in as a private in the Army.