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
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