Jerry Eichenblatt lived his life for his family and friends, and throughout his life, provided them a wide range of entertainment in all fields: comedy, drama, adventure, tragedy, and even romance (in his way).

Jer was born in Brooklyn on September 24, 1932 to Morris and Julia Eichenblatt of the Bronx. He spent his childhood in the Bronx, on Walton Avenue, within spitting distance of Yankee Stadium, with parents and his two older sisters, Bernice and Laura.

He liked to tell the story about how, when he was 5, he climbed up onto a wall he knew he ought not have climbed, and so of course, he fell, and when he did, he knocked his head. Ever since, he said, he'd been cross-eyed.

In his teen years, he apprenticed in his father’s sheet metal shop, where he learned to work the machines, and also keep his fingers (via the example set by his father, who lost many of his own to that occupational hazard), and to measure, design and of course, schlep.

Jer inherited his strong work ethic, along with his soft spot for those in need and his playfulness with children, from his dad. From his mom, he inherited a unique kind of fastidiousness and cleanliness, which manifested, among other ways, as a keen sense of organization and a frugal approach to possession maintenance that wasn’t always entirely realistic.

Jer married in 1954 to the love of his life, and greatest challenge, Roberta Grand, and within the following 6 years, his three children were born and wreaking havoc upon his organized and meticulous sensibilities.

In all the years since, Jer's life was devoted to three main functions: family life, accounting and adventure. Family life was always number one for Jer, accounting a means to providing, and everything with Jer was an adventure - from schlepping the family 3000 miles west from the Bronx to LA in '57, the many moves to a series of apartments and houses around the LA area, schlepping again in 1966 to Pascagoula Mississippi and then, back again to LA in '69! And all of the travels and adventures - camping trips, many cross-country drives - between and since. G-d forbid we shouldn't move to a better home, miss a single roadside attraction, or - horror of horrors! - a National Park! A man with schpilchas!

Schpilchas!

Speaking of schpilchas (Yiddish for "ants-in-the-pants"), Jerry Eichenblatt was a man for whom "leisure" was a foreign concept. On weekends, if he wasn't working on leftover work assignments, he was always found fighting his endless battle with crab-grass and other damnable weeds, fertilizing the dichondra, warring with snails and with moles burrowing in the back yard, cleaning up excrement left by or bathing the many dogs he brought home over the years, sucker as he was for a dog in peril, and so forth.

In the rare cases when the yard was not calling to him, there were endless household projects to be undertaken. No weekend was free of them (except when the weekend involved travel, family visits or camping!). Walls were built to create new rooms, cabinets, racks, storage units - anything Jer could build, he did!

Jerry Eichenblatt was not an idle man.

Collector!

Anything of utility was not something Jer had the ability to discard. Coffee can? Perfect receptacle for 10,000 mis-matched nuts and bolts, which, if you could ever find them, might someday prove useful! Jars? Screw the lid under a shelf in the garage, toss some of the nuts and bolts in the jar and screw the jar to the lid and you had visible storage for crap you would never use! Even the elastic waistbands cut from worn underpants were useful items to be kept in case that elastic would be someday useful, say for holding a bunch of books together or somesuch!

Bins full of old electrical outlets, light receptacles, every box he ever used to move anything he ever moved or boxed - all of it were kept because, damn it:

• it would be wasteful to discard it (ecologist!)
• it might be useful someday, and then he would not have to go buy another one (pragmatist! cheap guy!)
• he simply wanted to keep it (sentimentalist!)

Desk drawers were filled with every office supply ever purchased or acquired from store, sales representatives or charity - pens & pencils inscribed with every kind of advertisement and logo, erasers, clips of all kinds, pocket knives, staplers, legal and ledger pads, ancient calculators, every imaginable size of envelope - chances were good that, if you needed just about ANYTHING, you could find it in one of Jer's desk drawers!

Jer could not be called a hoarder - no, unlike hoarders, Jer would not be caught dead keeping ANYTHING that did not have some kind of utilitarian value. And anyway, he was WAY TOO NEAT AND ORGANIZED to allow things to pile up anywhere in HIS home!

Frugal Guy! Generous Guy!

Jer was all about substance and function, and, of course, frugality. If there were a choice, frugality always won over substance and function for Jer. Take the 1960-something Renault Dauphine he bought (the one that looked like an uglier, poor-man’s VW beetle - buy a Volkswagen?? Over his dead body!). Undoubtedly, it was the cheapest car on the market at the time.

He drove that tin can from Canoga Park to work in El Segundo until the end of the first of his 9 lives, when he ended up thrown through the windshield and onto the asphalt of the 405. He was dragged to safety by a good Samaritan. Miraculously, he was relatively unharmed, as he was on several other similar occasions over the course of his illustrious life.

That car was the predecessor to a 1970-whatever Gremlin, a Plymouth Valiant station wagon (which is probably still functioning to this day) and many other cars that exemplified the Jer approach to life - everything he owned (with exceptions for utility that was of perceived value to him or his family) was basic and functional, frequently devoid of style, and occasionally downright ugly. Ever seen a Renault Dauphine or a Gremlin?

Don't call him "cheap"! Jer was FRUGAL! He had no time or patience for unnecessary expenditures of any kind. Anything he could fix or build himself, he would not even think of buying! No restaurant was ever patronized by Jer whose check was not scrutinized with his accountant's eye for every detail, and if it was a dime off, management would hear about it! No restaurant was ever patronized by Jer whose prices were not known in advance to fit his definition of "reasonable". No product was purchased without being shopped for the vendor with the best prices.

And yet, when in need, family and friends found him out to have a rare and deep generosity.

The Eichenblatt household regularly played host to a wide variety of characters dragged in by his children, all of whom were fed well and frequently given a place to stay when in need and without question. His children got cars (even a motorcycle!) on occasion, and even an entire house was purchased in Humboldt County, California so that his children would have a place to live. Loans were made and forgiven, and expenses were paid when his children were in need of assistance. An entire family was taken in when their house was destroyed by Hurricane Camille - they were given a place to live while Jer helped them rebuild their home with his labor.

Early adopter! Consummate Nerd!

Jer was among the last of the great characters of an extraordinary generation of characters of the New York Jewish persuasion. He was a consummate Nerd, long before anyone knew what a nerd even was. We're talking thick, horn-rimmed glasses, pocket protector, slide rule - the whole bit.

He was always interested in emerging technologies, particularly when it came to tools and items that could be used to expedite or memorialize.

Jer was an early and proud owner of an 8mm movie camera, an expensive commodity for a frugal guy at the time, and he wielded it often and with questionable skill (note the endless sequences of mountains and trees shakily moving by, while family frolicked unwatched nearby!). No awards would be won for cinematography, but there are the countless hours of footage of the family and all of the many travels, in glorious black & white, he has left for posterity. To Jer, utility was item. number. one. - if an item had no utility, he had no use for it. An 8mm movie camera, in his mind, was the very embodiment of utility, with its unique (at the time) way of preserving moments and thereby transforming those moments to an enduring history.

Jer was also an early adopter of the computer! Owner of one of the very first "portable" computers in the very early 80s, Jer brought home an Osbourne (a 30lb suitcase with its tiny, built-in monitor and dual 5.25" floppy drives), on which, with pride, he pounded out his spreadsheets. (The man did not know how to stop working!).

Never a man to avoid a challenge (or save a buck), Jer kept up with modern technology, and went through a series of technologies folks his age were slow to adopt, both for his and Rob’s personal lives and for his tax business, and always because he was able to do the math. If it would cost him less in cash or labor to adopt some technologies in the long run, Jer was 100% there.  

For example, way back in the day, in order to save $ on cable service, Jer installed a series of “Rabbit” devices in their condo that used the signal from one cable box and broadcast it wirelessly to all the other TVs in the house. This practical endeavor had its one-time cost and initial schlep to install (which he managed to figure out how to do by himself), but set him up so that he would not have to be “damned” if he’d pay TimeWarner monthly for additional cable boxes!

In a more convenience-oriented mode (and perhaps to help keep him from falling asleep at the wheel), Jer invested in XM Satellite Radios for his cars and motorhome almost the moment that technology came available. This was not cheap, and XM had the audacity to charge monthly for the service, but this was a technology that Jer could abide, and was willing to pay for, because, dammit, it was practical!

Designer! Builder!

Whenever something needed doing, Jer was all over it. Everything was a design problem that had a solution. Dog was digging out and escaping the back yard? Dig a ditch and fill it with concrete beneath the fence! Fence not good enough? Build a new one! Need more space in the house? Build a wall between the garage and some free space – wallah! - new room! Going to travel with a trailer and need more storage space? Design and build a wooden storage rack to sit on the roof rack of the station wagon! Need to store stuff? Use free materials (coffee cans, baby food jars!) to organize your junk!

Math! Jer could do all of this because… math! Whenever numbers were involved, Jer was the master of them. Pages of diagrams would slowly evolve – rough sketches turned more refined, soon with numerical markings for all component parts, cut lists and necessary hardware. After hours spent with these drawings, trips to the local hardware store and lumber yard (rarely a 2nd trip was ever required, for Jer almost always knew to. the. number. what was required first time out, the building process would begin, and invariably, each step of it was deeply considered and led perfectly to the next.

Some projects were done in a day, some lasted days or weeks, but all were approached with a patience he reserved for non-human interactions, and a meticulousness that inevitably led to a project well executed – and one that would last and last.

Jer worked in his youth with his dad in his sheet-metal shop, and it is likely that he learned from his dad the way his kids learned from him. All his children have creative skills and are unafraid of tools. This is a legacy he has passed to his children, and one which they cherish.

Civil Libertarian! Unabashed Liberal!

Jer was always subtle about his political opinions.

NOT!

Anyone who knew him who read that sentence will have gotten a good belly-laugh, for Jer was neither subtle, nor bashful about his political views, and was more than willing to stand up and be heard (whether you wanted to hear him or not!). Loud? Oh boy! Be careful what you say, if it’s controversial, because Jer will give you a good talking to at extreme volume if you are wrong (and he will know if you are!).

Long before the word “liberal” was co-opted by the right as a sign of weakness and undesirability (and long after!), Jer adopted the mantle and wore it like a badge of honor. And he lived it in every way. He was a true “bleeding heart”, with an eye for injustice and an intolerance to his core for it.

Jer firmly believed, and taught his children, that all human beings were of value, regardless of heritage, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation – none of that mattered to him, so long as the person was “good” (meaning courteous, considerate, and not Republican). He had no tolerance for people or institutions who, in his mind, affronted others’ rights.

Jer walked his talk. A characteristic story took place in the mid-60s in the Deep South, where Jer, in a fit of mid-life crisis, had moved his family to take a transfer to a better job. The fact that there were maybe 5 or 6 Jewish families brave enough to live in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1966 (the population was 11,000 at the time) and that the civil rights movement was at its most contentious at the time, apparently made no difference to the 30-something-year-old Jer. So he took his position and commenced to hiring his team. He hired a nice young man with excellent qualifications, and thought nothing of it until he took his new hire out for lunch, only to find that the restaurant refused to serve his employee because he was an African American.

As the story goes, Jer made a name for himself by launching into a tirade in his employee’s defense, and by all accounts, left the restaurant staff with an earful they’d never forget, and proceeded to repay their bigotry with a boycott of the restaurant. That, dear reader, was Jer putting his money (literally) where his mouth was!

There are many other examples of Jer standing up for his own, or his family’s (or others’) rights. He could not tolerate people making up their own rules, could not abide abuse of power or sexism or racism or (yikes!) anti-Semitism. He wholeheartedly supported his children whenever they challenged unwarranted authority or exercised their rights, and he’d send notes or show up to give the authority figures (principles, vice-principles, gym coaches, etc.) a piece of his mind whenever required. And, long before it was popular to do so, he fully supported his wife when she decided to go back to school and ultimately complete college, graduate school, and obtain her Ph.D.

Another way Jer put his money where his liberal mouth was took the form of generous donations to the organizations he felt were doing the work he believed in. After he was no longer able to manage his own finances, his son discovered dozens upon dozens of causes getting monthly or annual contributions, and all of them for civil rights, environmental protection, animal protection, the state and national parks and of course, various Jewish causes.

Jer had a whole lot of opinions, and as has been said, he was not shy about propounding them (and at high volume!), but he was also always always up for an argument (that is to say… “discussion”) about them. Jer was a student of history, and extensively read histories of all the important issues of past and present – all of American History, the Civil War and the World Wars to the Israeli conflicts and statehood. He read the newspapers daily, and he spoke from knowledge, not speculation. He engaged people in conversation about issues and principles, and was not satisfied with arguments that had no foundation in fact (remember facts?). He was sometimes relentless and overbearing in ensuring that his point was made and that you damn well knew he was right!

And he was right, mostly, because Jer was a man who knew what he was talking about.

Savant Cinema Somnambulist!

On the community (that is to say parental) waterbed in the Eichenblatt household (the location of the central TV in the Ellenview house was in the master bedroom), it was not uncommon of an evening for the family to gather to watch a movie while Jer, who had a knack for falling asleep in the midst of mayhem, snored away contentedly.

But beneath the snore lurked a man whose mind was somehow still working and ready leap into semi-conscious action! For, whenever a question arose amongst the family about who an actor was, or what other movies s/he might have been in, out of the fog of sleep, Jer would come to life and correctly interject the answer before falling off again into slumberland.

One might write off a single incident of this sort as lucky, but the family witnessed this feat on many occasions. Amazing!

 

....MORE TO COME! This site is a work in progress!