Alfred Shail Dubinsky

by Donna Dubinsky
22 April 2017

Alfred Shail Dubinsky was born on July 23, 1926, in Providence, Rhode Island.  One of my childhood friends gave him the nickname of Pops, which has stuck in our family for over 50 years, so I hope you’ll indulge me in sometimes referring to him as dad and other times as Pops.

Pops’ parents were Edith Goldfine and Frank Dubinsky. Frank had emigrated from the Ukraine, arriving in the U.S. in 1908 as a boy of 7, having followed his father, Boruch, who arrived two years earlier, with $4.  Edith was born in Rhode Island.  Because her family had emigrated from Russia in the 1890s, they were well established, if not prosperous, owning some property and later a jewelry business.  Indeed, Frank “married up” when he connected with Edie.  Pops was their first born, with my Uncle Bill following nearly five years later.

When Pops was a child, the family relocated to Hartford, CT., where dad and Uncle Bill spent their childhood.  Probably the most notable thing about Pop’s childhood was that he contracted polio in 1938.  Although he recovered and even did athletics in high school, he claims that he suffered some paralysis in his throat which caused him to dislike public speaking and could have led to the problems he experienced over the last few years of aspiration pneumonia.

Pops told us about his earliest memory.  The family lived in a tenement and the garbage was wrapped up and thrown down a chute.  He decided he wanted to be a garbage collector since they got presents all the time.  Since he ended up in a recycling industry, he sort of did.

Dad attended and graduated from Weaver High School (mom also had attended Weaver, but she was a few years older, and they didn’t know each other until later).  Dad had a club in high school called the Kingsmen.  When I asked him what the club did, he laughed and told me “nothing”!  They just wanted to have a club because everybody else had one, so they picked a good name and got matching jackets.

I found dad’s Weaver yearbook when cleaning his apartment.  Here’s what it said about “Al”:  scholarly and fun-loving, plenty of ambition, girls and jokes (we’ll get back to that later!).  I also note with pride that he was the class salutatorian.

Pops graduated in 1944 and enrolled briefly at Trinity College before leaving to enlist in the Navy.  He returned after the war to Trinity to complete his bachelor’s degree on the GI Bill, graduating in1947.  Pops’ time in the Navy principally was spent in school studying electronics and he never saw any action.  But, as it did for a generation of young men, the GI Bill gave him a life-changing education.  He went on to get his MBA at Columbia University in 1949.  He had come a long way from Boruch’s penniless arrival forty years earlier.

Pops met my mom, Lillian, when he and some pals crashed a Jewish wedding on a boring Saturday night.  She told us that she fell in love the day they met – she particularly liked how tall and handsome he was.  They were married on June 18, 1950.  When mom met dad’s grandfather, Boruch Dubinsky, Zayde thought she was a shiksa.  Ironically, Zayde only spoke Yiddish and Pops couldn’t understand Yiddish but mom did, so mom had to tell him that Zayde was telling her to get out of his house! 

Pops started his career as an economist and quickly settled on the aluminum industry as being an important and growing industry, one where he could build a career.  In 1953, he got a job with the biggest aluminum company, Kaiser, who sent them to live in Newark Ohio, a small town outside of Columbus.  They lived in a log cabin and mom was miserable – she missed her family terribly and felt particularly lonely when baby Michael came along in 1953 and she had no family to support her.  The log cabin was heated by a space heater and my grandmother blamed my mom for picking out a terrible place, whereas it really was Pops who made the choice.

Kaiser had hired Pops because he was Jewish and they had a program they wanted to target Jewish scrap dealers with.  But then they cancelled the program so they fired him.  He started looking for a new job and contacted Columbia, his alma mater, to find out if there were any job postings in the aluminum industry.  The career center told him - Kaiser was hiring!  Since Pops had just been laid off from Kaiser, he quickly concluded that once Kaiser didn’t need a Jew to talk to other Jews, they didn’t need one at all.

So he took his skills, and his family, to Cleveland to work for Alloys & Chemicals in 1954.  I remember this as a successful, happy period for my family, but learned recently that Pops hated this job.  It took him years, but he finally jumped ship in 1966, going to Michigan Standard Alloys in Benton Harbor, Michigan.  Once again, my mom ended up in a place she didn’t want to be, and now with both me (1955) and our baby sister Ann (1957) in addition to Michael.

When the company closed in 1976, Pops became an entrepreneur, founding his own company, Alfred Metals.  Alfred Metals was a scrap metal broker, purchasing scrap aluminum and reselling it to aluminum smelters.   Alfred Metals was a successful business and Pops enjoyed making good friends throughout the industry.  When I was cleaning up his apartment, I found his contact book, full of names like Allied Metal, Garfield Alloys and Tobin Metals. 

Pops retired early, in 1986 at the age of 60.  He and mom moved to Palm Desert, where they lived for the next 20 years in active retirement.  They made a fabulous set of friends, traveled extensively, had film clubs and bridge clubs, and went to theatre.  I think this was the happiest time of their lives.  In 2005, we convinced them to move to the Vi as they started to experience health problems.  Mom really didn’t want to come, but Pops did, and I’m so happy that we had them nearby for over 10 years.

That’s the basic chronology of dad’s life, but let me tell you now some aspects of his personality. 

First, Pops was very smart.  He was an analytical kind of smart, very good with math and loving anything having to do with numbers.  Indeed, when he could barely talk the week before he died, he asked to know his numbers – his temperature, oxygen saturation, blood pressure.  I recall just a few years ago when my husband Lenny was bragging about his electric Tesla car, claiming that the power was free because of the solar panels on our house. Pops pointed out that Lenny really needed to amortize the cost of the panels, so it wasn’t actually free.  Pops was totally on top of all of his personal financial management until the very end.  In fact, my last complete conversation with him was about his taxes, when he asked me to prepare a comparison of this year to last year, line item by line item, before he would sign off.

In addition to being analytical, he enjoyed being very organized.  Every bill had some sort of note on it, with the name of the person he spoke with meticulously catalogued.  I found throughout the apartment lists and lists of movies that he intended to see and restaurants he wanted to try.  He had a system for keeping track of first mom’s and then his medications that appeared chaotic but was totally under control.  He tracked his investment accounts carefully and filed away decades of paper statements.  When I tried to change him to on-line statements, he rebelled.  He had filed away articles on just about every subject – how to improve your balance, 10 simple Google search tricks, a list of emoticons.

He was a quiet, calm leader – not a showy guy.  He was president of our temple in Benton Harbor during some crucial years.  There were two temples – ours, the reform “temple” and theirs, the conservative “synagogue” – but the town really could only support one.  They decided to merge. Well, this was very tricky since the customs at the temple were very different from those at the synagogue.  So, 6 men got together, 3 from each group, and hammered out a deal, item and item.  Will there be an organ?  Can girls read Torah?  Who will be the rabbi?  Then, wisely, they put the whole deal, compromises and all, to both congregations for an up or down vote.  You weren’t allowed to pick it apart, to vote only on the things you liked.  The merger was approved.  A few years ago, we hosted an event for an Israeli think tank in our home.  Pops came.  The president of the organization was lamenting the fact that it was impossible to create a constitution in Israel given the very different constituents.  Dad told this story, suggesting that a similar process might be the only path forward – a few wise, calm people figuring it out, then selling it as a package deal.

Pops was not very religious.  He was a bar mitzvah and he always belonged to a synagogue, but it was more out of a sense of community than about the religion.  When I interviewed him on tape in the year 2000, I asked why he had become president of the temple.  He said, “because when you’re called, you serve”.  He also had served as the head of his industry association when asked.  Last year, I was asked to become the lead trustee at Yale.  It’s a challenging time for all universities, including ours, and I was reluctant to take on the responsibility.  I went to talk with dad about it.  I explained that it would impact my time with him. I asked what he thought and he was crystal clear, “when you’re called, you serve”. 

When we were growing up, Pops was not much of a family man.  He left the child-raising part to mom.  Once we all became adults, he was much more interested, and I know how much he appreciated the love and support of Ann and Jere, Michael, me and Lenny.  Dad really rose to the occasion when mom became ill with Parkinson’s.  For years, he took over and managed her health care and medications.  He was totally devoted to her and she told me before she died that he had gone directly from husband to prince.  Mom passed away when they were just shy of their 63rd anniversary, showing all of us a model for a successful marriage.  Pops never let me take mom’s name off the front door and her photo stayed front and center in his apartment.

I think Pops was much happier as a grandfather than as a father.  He loved Bradley, Jennifer and Marina, and always wanted the update on all of them when I stopped by.  Let me tell you one of my favorite moments.  After I brought Marina home from Russia, and she didn’t speak English yet, I came upon dad sitting at the kitchen table with her, earnestly consulting a Russian travel phrase book in order to communicate.  More recently, perhaps just a year ago, I texted dad to say I planned to stop by and visit.  He enthusiastically responded … “that would be great – I’d love to see you!”  This reaction was a bit surprising as he generally was not THAT enthusiastic about me visiting.  I showed up, and he seemed confused, asking “where’s Marina”?  I immediately realized he had mistaken the message as being from Marina rather than me.  He was caught red handed with showing his preference!  Jenny couldn’t join us today, but I want all three of you to know how much Pops loved you and, Sarah, how thrilled he was that you and Brad found each other.

So let’s get back to that high school yearbook comment. Two things dad loved his whole life:  women and jokes.  He was nothing if not consistent.  As to the women, he probably had an indiscretion or two, I don’t know – or want to know, but mainly he just liked the company of women.  When we started having regular caregivers to help mom, Pops was worried that he would not like having people in the house.  Instead, he enjoyed having such lovely ladies in his company.  He had a bevy of women checking in with him over the last few years – my friends and his – Judith, Julie, Linda, Nancy, Kim, Ann, Katie, Sara, Stephanie … okay, some of the husbands, too, but, really, it was the women he adored.  Enriqueta, who first was mom’s caregiver and then dad’s, was a huge helper and ray of sunshine in his life.  Thank you, Enriqueta.  Amongst the notes I received after dad died was one from the nurse, Pearl, at PAMF, who wrote that dad always called her Maganda, Tagalog for beautiful.  Sounds like dad.

As to jokes, he had a constant supply of them.  He ran a virtual clipping service for all of us in the family and many of you friends as well.  We received joke after joke, cartoon after cartoon.  They were always appropriate and funny.  Pops could remember a joke for every occasion.  I will just tell you one.  Just a few days before dad died, he could not speak very well, but his brain was working fine.  He called us close and with difficulty suggested a joke.  At first we thought he wanted us to tell him a joke, but then we realized that he was telling us one.  We waited.  He managed to get out the words …. “Everybody comes here and asks me if I’m comfortable.  Do you know how I answer?”  No, we said, waiting again.  He said, “Yes, I make a good living!”  We all laughed.  The next day Dr. Yumi, came to visit, two days before Pops died.  When Yumi arrived, her first question to dad was, “are you comfortable”?  He could barely speak but he still could smile.  I said, “go for it, dad”, and he looked at Yumi, mustered all his strength and responded, “Yes, I make a good living!”

Well, the third thing that dad happened to like all his life, in addition to women and jokes, was booze.  Pops had an over 60 year struggle with the stuff.  Indeed, my childhood memories of my father always include him with a glass of scotch.  I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of anything in my life as when Pops made the hard decision to accept treatment and become sober at age 86.  He took it very seriously, being more introspective through the process than I ever thought possible.  As most of you know, dad was a shy and private man, a bit of a loner.  Unlike mom, he did not have a lot of friends.  I always sensed that drinking was the way to relax around people and make friends.  Ironically, it was in recovery and his involvement with AA that he made the best friends of his life.  The support and love of AA is something marvelous and I thank those of you here who became part of our lives in the process.  By the way, Pops didn’t like the religious part of AA, but he found a ‘humanist” version of the 12 steps that he found much more appealing.  I’ve brought a copy to share with you here. We should all learn from dad’s example that it is never too late to make positive change in our lives. 

Before I end, I just have to touch briefly on politics.  Pops was a lifelong liberal and devoted democrat.  He was a voracious reader about politics including detailed policy papers that he frequently forwarded.  He inhaled politics, particularly in this last campaign, and was a huge Hillary supporter.  I expect he died with Rachel Maddow on TV.  One of the best things we ever did is sign up Pops for Facebook and got him an iPad, and I know that many of you were frequent consumers of his posts.  Amazingly, that last week before he died, I picked up his cell phone to see if there was any personal email that I should read to him.  What I saw was a long list of political email distributions, including from Trump, Pence, and Breitbart News.  I looked at him, astonished, and asked whether he was a closet Republican, and I was just finding this out.  No, he responded, I just want to understand better how the other side thinks.

Pops had a long, slow decline over the last year as a result of a lung infection which just could not be cured.  His last week in hospice was comfortable.  He was surrounded by his family and he was not in pain.  He had all his marbles, and he was making the decisions about his care.  But he really was not happy with his options.  He would have liked more time, more time to enjoy the company of women, tell a few more jokes, and maybe see what happens in the next election.   

Dad and I were very close.  I saw him or spoke with him at least every other day for years.  I always felt that I took after dad more than mom.  Michael and Ann, they are all Darling, whereas I am a Dubinsky through and through.  Pops always claimed that he had nothing to say, yet when I visited, we chatted non-stop.  I had a powerful urge to call him last weekend, not even about anything specific, but just because I wanted to talk to him. 

I’d like to close my thoughts by having you all join me in the serenity prayer.  Pops learned this prayer in AA and he found it profound.  I’d like to leave these words as his last gift to you.

"God,
 give me the serenity to accept what I cannot change,
 the power to change what I can,
 and the wisdom to know the difference."