A Nice Memory by close friend Michael Haveson

We're having a sort of sun shower at the moment (no lightning, but a nice down pour) a lot like a summer storm in Vermont; so I grabbed my umbrella and took a walk to our mail box (approx 400 yards);  While walking back I remembered that on my bike rides with Don I began taking an umbrella (after we got drenched once or twice) and oh how he made fun of me; really, you're taking an umbrella on your bike?  Sure I am, see how it fits nicely on my rack, I said; and when it pours I'll even let you stand under it with me; it did, he did;  Wouldn't you know, on the next ride my friend had an umbrella on his bike rack as well.

My Best Friend poem from Bob Haveson with cover letter

Dear Paritz families and friends

I was fortunate to be part of a friendship where we were the same age, born and raised in New Jersey , of similar aspiration to serve people, which Don achieved early on as a pharmacist and me much later as a college professor and neither of us had an overwhelming desire to be wealthy.

We were sharers. Sometime he would edit my writing. We had similar feelings about movies especially art films ( Cannes or Sundance or other) so he honored me by

requesting lists of movies to see until NETFLIX obsoleted me. Of course we comforted each other during hard times.

At one time I was his only source of Brooklyn bagels. He reprimanded me heavily if garlic bagels were included in my delivery. For me to just say he didn’t like garlic bagels was so much an under statement. It was tantamount to simply saying, he didn’t like Hitler.

Our trips around the U. S. were exciting, seeing San Diego Pandas up close and realizing almost too late that San Diego was part desert and barely having enough water while bicycling areas we thought were benign. Don discovered the altitude at Grand Canyon was a thing to reckon with and I discovered that I was allergic to something in the area and had a fever for a few days. We never figured out what it was. Nevertheless, the recollection of riding mules together to the canyon floor along a steep rocky trail occurred during many of our conversations.

Few people had such a good friendship as long as we did and I will sorely miss him.

Your friend

Bob Haveson

Please accept this elegy as an expression of the meaningfulness of my family’s relationship with Don.Bob Haveson

My Best Friend

March 15, 2014

Don and Marie were lucky to have had such an agreeable relationship these recent years.

She entered his life and they had not only love, but the caring was very much in evidence.

Marie is a kind and wonderful woman from who it can be felt that her loss must be great.

Back in 1957 when our wives met in Sears; Don, Anne, Frieda and I became friends.

By 1968 our new families became daring enough to ski. Don was a good skier in N.J.

In Vermont he became a great skier with a little daring thrown in; he could do the glades.

We liked our wine, a little ambience, and relaxation as we dined in various restaurants.

We solved world problems or commented on them; ones not a picnic for great minds.

Biked clockwise around Lake Champlain from Vermont thru New York towns and back.

Windsurfed many Vermont lakes and then his favorites Memphremagog and Caspian.

Hiked our share of hills, none treacherous, but filled with trees, trees and glorious views.

In winter we snow shoed in Johnson and watched the ducks skate the Paritz’s pond.

Bikes in tow we traveled to Nova Scotia , Assateague Maryland and the wild ponies, etc.

In 2007 I injured my ankle and we decided to ride closer to home along the Potomac .

It pleased us; Ellen, Sandy, Mike, Cori, and Michael made lasting friendships as we did.

We played chess because Don humored me. Years later he admitted he disliked the game.

He played poker and ping pong well when he went to Rutgers . I wasn’t any challenge.

He played saxophone as I did, but I never heard it. Anne told me of the times she heard it.

He played it boldly in the basement to invisible audiences until he was ready to not play.

He told me that he could not ever play as good as his father. I understood. Me neither.

Don fought the big C twice. Each time he overcame it. Maybe because of his exercise.

He walked as often as possible; at a comfortable rate 1 hour and 15 minutes per day.

When Tina and I visited we strolled the causeway WEST with Don neath a placid sky.

In the distance, tremulant light presented a daring display and the show headed our way,

And with the lights came clamorous claps of thunder and a bath not unlike a water falls.

Though soaked we evaded it by walking at marathon pace Eastwardalong the causeway,

Causing us to laugh with glee that we had not been disintegrated by a Star Trekian phaser

Or the natural forces of nature, which we had imagined were moving at warp speed.

All that being said about our good times we still shared several thoughts and tribulations,

And when I was disappointed by one doctor or another Don always picked up the phone.

My Pharmacist listened, made suggestions or disagreed with a hair brained idea I had.

Don, by definition: a good friend to share an ice cold beer or an exciting experience.

Reflections about Don Paritz from son-in-law Steven Bronstein

My name is Steven Bronstein, married to Sandy, Don's Son-In-Law.

Not long after meeting Sandy, I was invited to dinner with Don and Ann at the Johnson house. We were eating Shrimp Wiggle and talking around the table. I made some comment about the way of the world and Don looked at me (count to 5) and did not say a word and went back to eating. I was thinking, “What was that?” What was he saying by his silence? Was he annoyed or disinterested? I did not know and I was totally unnerved. A few minutes later he looked up from his dinner and asked me a question about what I had said. By his question it became very clear that he had been thinking about what I had said and had something very insightful to ask and we continued talking about that issue. It took me a while to realize that he had not been dismissing my comment, he had been thinking about it and when he had something to say, he did. It was the first time I came to really understand what a “considered opinion” meant. Don was comfortable with quiet and did not feel the need to fill the space with words. He always listened carefully and spoke with clear and careful thought. Over the next 20 plus years Don and I spoke about a great many things and I benefited from Don's wisdom and good consul. I am grateful for all of his support and encouragement.

            He was also a troublemaker. After his long silence he might ask a question that poked at the heart of a troubling issue and know that he was about to start something. He would have this little smile, thinking to himself, “this is going to be fun” and looking forward to what might come.

He was challenging, playful, brave, adventurous, and honest.

Don was a rare and beautiful person. I miss him very much.

Reflections about Don Paritz from daughter Sandra Paritz

Memorial

I just want to thank you all so much for coming

It warms my heart to see you all here

Some of you have known my Dad longer than I have

            Some of you don’t know him at all--and just came to support us.

I appreciate you all so much

For those who didn’t know him, I thought that I would tell you a little bit more about him

From as early as I can remember I wanted to be like my Dad. Even to this day..

            He was so smart, and confident, and clear

He knew exactly how he wanted to live his life: that is--he just wanted to do what made him happy

This makes him sound like a Hedonist, but I think it was more than that.

What made him happy was being a loving family man, devoted friend, and deep thinker

He worked hard to provide for his family

And he also loved to play.

He loved to ski, bike ride, water ski, hike.

He had ridden his bike about 20 miles the day before his stroke.

One of the things that is so great about this, is that you knew that when he was spending time with  you, that is exactly what he wanted to do.

He rarely did anything he didn’t want to do.

He loved to talk about just about anything.

It was impossible to find a topic about which he hadn’t read, thought about, and come to some interesting conclusion.

Growing up, he and I would have long discussions about all kinds of things. Often after everyone had left the dinner table, we would keep going.

Even though we agreed about a lot of things--he was a bleeding heart like me:

            for example he thought that there should be universal health care, and housing should be socialized.

Nonetheless, he often took an opposing viewpoint, I think just for the fun of the debate.

This was the beginning of my legal training.

Later when I went to college and studied philosophy and then law, we had some real debates.

            But he was always so interested in everything that I was learning and thinking about.

            We would talk about existentialism, phenomenology, tax law--things that no one else really wanted to talk about. He was always interested.

Even though he loved to talk about things, he was not exactly much for small talk--

            Much to the dismay of any boyfriend I may have brought home for dinner.

He was not being judgmental, or intentionally making anyone uncomfortable.

He was just completely comfortable with silence.

If he didn’t have anything to say, he didn’t say anything.

But if there was something interesting to talk about--he was right there.

Really, he may have been the least judgmental person I’ve known.

He was a pharmacist and owned his own drug store in Morrisville, and Johnson.

            People would come in and talk to him for a long time about their lives, their aches and pains.

Many people would have lost patience. He was always happy to listen. It was not that he was doing anyone a favor. He was truly happy to listen.

He befriended many of the characters in town that others could not tolerate.

This is not to say that he was a saint. He was a bit of a trouble maker, and would stir things up for his amusement.

I am a bit of a health food nut. Especially when my kids were little, I made sure that they did not eat sugar and processed foods etc.

One time when my son Max was about 4 yoa, my Dad, Max and I were going to a miniature golf place. On the way I started feeling pretty sick.

We stopped somewhere to get Max a snack, and I stayed in the car, feeling crummy.

I will never forget the sheepish grin on my Dad’s face when they came out of the store. He got in the car and said, “I didn’t do good”

Max had Ring Dings, a Coke, candy.

I’m surprised he didn’t have a cigarette.

.

In addition to being a trouble maker, He really enjoyed having fun outdoors. Growing up, we spent every winter weekend skiing.

            We’d get there when the lifts opened and ski until they closed.

            We never went in for lunch. Not because we weren’t allowed, but because no one wanted to.

            If it was below zero we’d pile on the blankets on the lift.

            When it was raining we wore garbage bags.

            But we always went.

In the summer it was waterskiing. We’d go every weekend and sometimes in the evenings after work.

We bought trick skis so we could do 360’s. We learned to hold the rope with our toes.

When I was older and living on my own, he started calling once/week.

When I heard his voice on the other end, I knew it would be a long conversations--often about an hour.

So, I would grab a cup of tea, and settle down someplace comfortable

And we would talk--about everything and anything: politics, science, a trial I had coming up,

relationships.

He was never hurried. It was always as if he had all the time in the world for you.

I just loved that. I miss these calls more than anything.

After my diagnosis, he’d call more than 1 X week.

And always before and after every treatment.

It recently occurred to me that he wasn’t just calling me.

            He was calling my sister Ellen, my brother Mike, his Brother Joel, grandchildren, his friends Michael and Bob Haveson,

Having these long conversations with all of them.

All the people that he loved and cared so much about.

Just like every other Sunday, he called me the day before his stroke.

I’m pretty sure he also talked to Ellen and Mike that day.

When I asked him how he was doing, he said what he often said, “I’m living in Paradise”

I think he really was.

He will always be my inspiration.

I 

Slide show for Don Paritz's memorial produced by son-in-law Paul Gittelsohn

Short Biography of Don Paritz written by his daughter Ellen Paritz Gittelsohn

Donald Irwin (Yisrael) Paritz, May 13, 1935 – March 15, 2014.

Biography Introduction

In a rental car in Florida after Dad’s stroke, Sandy softly chuckled.

“What?” I looked at her.

She pointed to the window where we saw in slowly moving traffic a truck with the large letters D-O-N on the back and more D-O-Ns on the side. During that very sad time, we both felt happy for a moment as though we were watching him continue on to the next adventure as he said good-bye.

Biography

Growing up as told to me in bits and pieces:

So, his first adventure was being born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, May 13, 1935. He grew up in Elizabeth with his parents Mildred and Maurice, younger brother Joel, and grandmother next door who had immigrated to the United States on a boat as a single mother of nine children without knowing a word of English. Dad learned to understand Yiddish when his grandmother and parents wanted to hide their conversation from the children. His mother taught him to read at age four so he would be occupied and, from my perspective, he was indeed occupied by a sharp expansive intellect his entire life.

As a child, Dad used his business sense to help his jazz musician dad and dreamy mom manage a shoe store. He collected baseball cards, read superman comics and O’Henry stories, rode his bike and enjoyed (as a Jersey boy) going down the shore with his family. He also enjoyed getting together with his many cousins (descended from the nine children who came over on the boat) at a cousins club.

Both parents worked during the day so Dad and Joel figured out how to prepare meals for themselves. One time their parents came home to discover the boys had ingeniously saved themselves some work by disposing pots, pans and dishes in the trash rather than wash them.

Dad had eye surgery as a child on a stubborn eye that stayed lazy his whole life.

He attended an all boys school where he made some good friends, learned to play the saxophone, became a great appreciator of jazz and learned to fight a little. Although he did not believe in struggling for grades or struggling for anything in his life, he did earn good enough grades to attend Rutgers College of Pharmacy. Memorizing for chemistry was as easy as taping notes to the car dashboard and spending money came to him through winning a few poker games. He spoke of a fellow student who was struggling in pharmacy school but loved taking history classes. Dad advised him to be impractical and switch to history. The student became a professor of history and was happy.

Dad met Mom—Ann Miriam Bodner, at a party while he was still in pharmacy school and she was working as a department store buyer after graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology. They married one year later,  snapped a lovely picture with Lucy the pink elephant on their Atlantic City honeymoon and brought me/Ellen, their first child, to Dad’s graduation from college. They joyfully brought their next two children, Sandra and then Michael into their family. Dad supported his family by working first for pharmaceutical companies, then as a drugstore pharmacist owning a drugstore with his cousin Jack Einhorn.  Also, by maintaining a weekend family day with fun activities. No work or even cooking allowed.

As Dad’s children grew older, the family fun day turned into the family ski day. Skiing and a subscription to Vermont Life magazine convinced him that living in Vermont was better than living in New Jersey so in 1972 he moved his family to Morrisville, Vermont where he owned Peck’s Pharmacy and tried to change his Jersey accent, a little, to blend in with the customers. We all worked in the drugstore. Sandy and Mike, along with Dad, became avid skiers but he tried to get us all to maintain the family fun day by going skiing and eating fondue après ski at The Shed restaurant in Stowe.  In Vermont he allowed us to have a St. Bernard named Fred; our third in a succession of four dogs growing up.

While staying physically active skiing in winter and water skiing in summer, Dad stayed mentally active by teaching himself computer programming during the early days of computers and writing his own bookkeeping program used in more than one drugstore owned by him at different times. When he wasn’t writing programs, I would often see him and my mother sitting in their twin vibrating lounge chairs in the evenings reading. Isn’t that what everyone does with their evenings?

While a percentage of his children rebelled a little, he calmly maintained his expectations while waiting for the opportunity to show his appreciation. Dad and Mom together offered an open invitation for communication with their children that even extended to our friends who always felt comfortable in our house. One friend claimed that water tasted better at our house. We always came around and I believe my core values were built on that communication together with the stable-reliable-enjoyable home life provided by them.

After Dad’s children grew up he and Mom explored the Caribbean Islands and took a memorable Alaskan cruise.  They joyfully welcomed each of their five grandchildren and two step grandchildren into the family deepening their connections to all of us.

He and Mom both faced cancer in their fifties and used all their problem solving abilities to continue on with their enjoyable life together. Sadly, Mom succumbed in 1996.

Dad eventually sold the drugstores, retired, joined a ski club and several bike tours or just bike trips with his long time friend Bob Haveson that took him to Ireland, Hawaii, the Grand Canyon and other places. He also travelled to France for a month with his friend Helen Walker.

By the new Millennium,  Dad began spending more and more time in Florida to help his mother Mildred in her nineties and because he liked Florida leading him to sell his house in Johnson, Vermont to become a snow bird owning a condo in Essex and another condo for wintering in southeastern Florida.  He met and married Marie Denis Parsons who we’ve gotten to know and love during the last six years of Dad’s life.

Dad gave up skiing and wearing a winter jacket just a few years ago but kept walking and riding his bike. The day before the stroke he went on a twenty mile bike ride and talked to me on the phone about how happy he was that relatives and friends were visiting them in Florida and there were always many things to see and do.

After the stroke, when Sandy, Mike and I were in Florida in Dad and Marie Denis’s apartment , I noticed next to his easy chair was his Nook reader upon which he read many digital library books and a filled out crossword puzzle.

Dad carved out a beautiful vibrant life for himself through all he could appreciate in the world fueled by the love and attention he consistently gave to his children, grandchildren, spouses and all of his family and friends.

As I go through these days so close to his departure from our world and I miss our once per week long phone calls and have to stop myself from looking forward to picking Dad and Marie up at the airport in mid May for our Vermont summer together, I simultaneously feel sad and elated over the way I sense his presence in the way I think and perceive the world. I see him in our children’s smiling faces, hear him cheering me on to embark on a new adventure, and talk to him in my mind as his calm knowledgeable voice helps me sort through a problem. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing to feel a little awkward with the word love. I’ve already written a little too much in this biography and could write a lot more all for the purpose of saying “I love you Dad with all my heart.”

Early Life of Don Paritz written by his brother Joel Paritz

Since I am the last remaining member of the original Paritz family and the only person who grew up with Don, I can give his early history which helped to shape his personality and life.

His parents were good hard-working people.  His father’s parents were immigrants who gave up everything to get out of Russia, including their name.  Paritz is the name of a town.  People with Jewish names changed them in order to flee the country. His mother was an immigrant from Poland whose Mother was able to get to the United States with nine children after their father was killed in WW1.  Lucky for them, since they all would have been murdered by the Nazis if they had stayed.

Don grew up in a one bedroom apartment with four people and just enough money for food, rent and clothing.  His father was an ex-musician with no skills or education.  He had what was called a Mom and Pop shoe store in a town that was so rough that we could not live there.  Don’s parental involvement was limited, since his father worked 9 to 9 six days a week plus an hour travel each way.  This amounts to 84 hours per week and his mother was also at the store four days a week.  Sundays, they were so exhausted that they just rested.

Don learned that his best option was to be outside.  His formative years were spent pretty much on the streets.  This allowed him to be out of a cramped apartment and be with his friends.  He learned to play sports and later became a dedicated card player and his life became similar to ghetto people today.  He was a product of the streets and his friends.  He played so much cards and became so good that he liked to brag that he paid for his last two years of college tuition playing cards in the Student Union.

He had no sense of what social approval meant.  He was poor and had a mother who was mentally ill.  If someone said “who is that kid Don?” he knew that the answer was that “he is that poor kid who lives in that apartment and has the crazy mother.”

When he was 14 our Uncle got him a job in a warehouse and a new life started.  He discovered that he could make money and buy things. Suddenly, we had a record player, etc.  He eventually saved enough to buy himself a car when he was 17.  From the time he started to work I almost never saw him again.  He was either at work, in school, or on the streets with his friends.

When he was finishing High School he had one window of opportunity.  His parents said that they would work as long as it took and if he could figure out how to get into College and pay for it, he could live home and not pay for room and board.

He took this opportunity and got into Rutgers, Newark, worked and paid for it all.  The only time I saw him was if I got up at night and saw him studying.

Somewhere near the end of his achievement of getting through college he became a different person.  He knew that he could make a good living; he met Ann who was an angel, and brought her home for us to meet.  From that point on he became successful, had a family, and you know the rest of the story.

All of you know what he was like.  When he died, Lisa said the classic description of Don.  He was a great guy, a caring friend and, most of all, interesting.

How do you become those things?

(1)        You start off with nothing.  This teaches you not to be afraid of failure, since you know that even if you fail you will land higher than where you started.  This gives you the courage to move a family of five to Vermont when you and Ann decided that this was a better place for your kids to grow up, even if you have to give up all of your economic ties and start over again.

(2)        Don’s lack of social standing when he grew up left him without any understanding of what it was.  He never looked up to anyone and never looked down at anyone.  He never knew that there was a difference in people.  When he met a woman who happened to be black, he never noticed.

(3)        His life growing up on the street taught him that family was family, but friends were also family.

When you put this all together, you wind up with a guy who cared about everyone, would talk to you about a problem and make the time to care and listen, whether it took five minutes or five hours.  No matter who you were and what you were, you got his full attention.

So, thanks for being who you were and thanks for your love and support and thanks for being interesting --- and thanks for being my brother.

By Joel Paritz

Hi Everyone,

I've created this blog on Donald Irwin Paritz's (know as Dad to me, Sandy and Mike) 79th birthday. It's  for family. Soon I'll be posting things connected to Dad's Memorial gathering. Feel free to add your postings about your family.

Go ahead and subscribe to this blog if you would like to see and contribute future postings.

Love,
Ellen