An interview with Mel

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I think Mel would have puked at the idea of someone writing about his life. What does someone else know about my life, he might have said. Instead, I can hear him say, “Let’s do this. You ask me some questions and I’ll tell you some things I remember.” OK we’ll do it your way.

Here’s my interview with Mel.

Dad, where did you grow up?

“Well, I grew up in New York; that’s were my Dad owned a pharmacy. In fact, he had a number of stores. They weren’t very successful. You see, my Dad was a good pharmacist, but not much of a businessman. From time to time my uncle Morris would help out a bit. Morris was a very successful lawyer. Morris tried to be a nice guy, but while he helped out, he was not much liked. You see, he would never just give you money, it always came with a message or scolding. It came with a zetz, so you never wanted to ask.”
“Anyhow, whatever, my Dad died when I was a young man, just out of pharmacy school and I took over the Drug Store. The last store was on Hooper Street in Brooklyn, just across the bridge from Manhattan. We had an apartment right above the store. It was a small apartment that we all shared. I hated working at the store. Not many customers and everyone wanted a discount. You couldn’t make money in a corner drugstore and I was not going to do that for the rest of my life. Then your brother Sam was born, and then you came along. The first chance I got to get out of the City and take a job in a hospital upstate, I jumped at it. That’s when we moved about an hour and a half drive up the Hudson to Beacon. I got a job at the VA hospital nearby.”

So how’d you meet Mom?

“Well, that’s a whole other story, you got time or you got to run? OK, you see I was a bit of a screw up in High School. I didn’t always do the work. My big love was to go dancing. That’s where I meet Bonnie. It was sort of a date arranged by one of our friends and we went dancing.”

How’d you end up in California?

“That’s a long story, but the short version is that I was in the Navy, and for awhile at the end of the war, I was in California and I could see how nice it was.”

Mom told us you have a story about how you helped win the war. Did that have to do with your job on the aircraft carrier?

“Not exactly, I didn’t do much on the carrier. I worked in the ship pharmacy and it was fairly routine. It was when I was in the Navy stationed in Maryland. You see, your mother got a job for the Navy to be close to me. She ended up as a secretary to some big brass. Lots of scrambled eggs on their uniform. When it looked like I’d be transferred overseas, she used her influence with her boss and got me a job locally. Anyway, one day, the big brass came to me and said they had a problem. President Roosevelt, who’s airplane sometimes landed at our airport, would use the toilet on the plane. It was a bit of a secret, but his pee was very acidic and a small hole was developing on the outside of the plane under the toilet. So they asked me if there was anything I could do. I went back to the lab and came up with a mixture to dilute the acid.”

So, how did that help win the war?

“Can’t you see,” Mel said with a smile and twinkle in his eye, “if that hole would have gotten bigger, President Roosevelt might have gone down with his plane and that that might have changed everything.”

How’d you end up as the Director of Pharmacy at the UCI Hospital?

“In those days it was called Orange County Medical Center. Its hard to say exactly, but I always made it a point to get to know the people in the different departments. We had a weekly poker game, things like that. My predecessor, Wendell Hill, took a liking to me. He was a great Director and was well known nationally, so he would travel a lot, meeting important people, giving talks. Meanwhile as his assistant, I kind of ran the show. When he left for a more important job, they looked for a new director. In fact, they got someone else for awhile, but I was well liked and knew how to run things. The next time the job opened up, everyone I got to know wanted me in the position, and that was that.”

Did you work other places?

“Oh yes, I always had two or three jobs. I worked one day each weekend at another hospital and two evenings a week at a drugstore. Your Mom and I always had the depression mentality. It wasn’t so bad. There was not much going on during these off hours, so it gave me time to think and to plan. I’m a planner. I was always weighing the different options. I still am that way, you know that. It was during these evenings that I figured out about investing in Real Estate and how that worked.”

This maybe a dumb question, but how come you never learned to cook? I mean as a pharmacist you knew about putting together different chemicals, heating things up and making new solutions.

“I don’t know how the one thing has to do with the other, but your mother did all the cooking. After I retired she was my life. We’d talk a lot. That’s what she liked to do and she was great at it. Why did I need to learn?”

What about those dogs, Alfie, Mischa, and the rest?

“I guess we did get a little nutsy about the dogs. We always had dogs. You remember our collie, Brandy, in New York, and Brandy II, when we got here. They were mostly for the kids. But when the kids left, we got Alfie. What a dog. He had nothing but love to give and didn’t ask for anything in return. And we got Mischa to keep him company;, then they had the babies. It broke my heart when they died. But what can you do? Life goes on.”

So what do you think about people reading about your life?

“Don’t be a putz. They are not really interested in someone else’s life. I mean it may be interesting for a few minutes, but they are really interested in what they’re doing, and I can’t blame them. There’s no point in looking back. You do what you got to do . . .”