Bernard Sterling, a good PNAI friend, has developed a theory that among Jews there are only “two degrees of separation”. If two Jews meet and start playing “Jewish Geography”, one of them will know – or be related to – someone known to the other.
Last week Barbara Schloss of West Hartford (known slightly to us through her relationship to Seymour’s cousins, Denise and David Shapiro) was having her hair done at a salon in Plantation, Florida. She had never before met her operator, Cheche Rose, wife of my best friend at Syracuse Univ, Sheldon Rose. Cheche said she knew only one person in West Hartford, Bernice Saltzman, with whom she and Shel had lost contact at least 20 years ago. She still had a book I’d given their first child, A Child’s Garden of Verse. She gave Barbara her address and phone to pass to me.
Barbara called about 1 p.m. today with this information. As soon as she said she met someone in a beauty salon in Florida who knew me, I said: “it was Cheche Rose.” I asked: “Is her husband still alive.” No.
Shelly Rose, born 1923 and raised in Bridgeport CT, arrived at SU under the GI Bill in my sophomore year (1947). Early in the Fall semester, he said to me in a Shakespeare class (the third class we found we were taking together), “You must be following me around.” For the next three years, whenever our schedules meshed, we had coffee, cigarettes and conversation at least three days a week in a campus eatery. Shel was an only child. He was short, stocky and near-sighted. He was a fine jazz pianist. He was outgoing, but never a show-off. He could talk about anything. He smoked pot.
We were best friends, but never lovers, although one time I slept in the same bed with him. We had gone to NYC for a Thanksgiving weekend (and he had introduced me to marijuana). We (and another 6-7 students) stayed in a mini-mansion in Scarsdale, home of a Syracuse coed Shelly knew, whose parents were away. We missed the early train back to Syracuse at the end of the weekend and arrived too late for me to get into my sorority house. Shel lived off-campus so I went to his room for the night and shared his bed. The only other memory I have of that weekend is “being stoned” and listening to Shel, also stoned, playing wonderful music on a grand piano in that mansion. I never smoked marijuana after that.
Shel had a short, disastrous first marriage. Around 1958 he met Cheche on a blind date in Bridgeport. She had come to the US from Buenos Aires. Her family had escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to Argentina. She was 10 years younger than he. She was working as a Hebrew kindergarten teacher in the Bridgeport JCC summer camp. Shel was studying at Univ. of Bridgeport. Another student at UB who knew her introduced them.
We saw Shel occasionally when business brought him to Hartford. He was into many different things. In the late-60s he had become an Evelyn Wood Speedreading Teacher and convinced me to take the course with the goal of also becoming a trainer. I took the course but never became a trainer. However, it was the best thing I could have done at that time; it gave me the confidence to tackle a new course of study at Trinity College (1972-76). At another time he was selling mutual funds, in those days the Dreyfus Fund. He didn’t succeed in selling it to us. Only 3-4 days ago Seymour said, relating to some wild swing on the stock market, “we should have bought Dreyfus Fund from your friend Shel Rose in the old days.”
He also continued to play piano at various clubs and bars. Once we met him and Cheche at a club he was playing and spent the evening talking and drinking between sets. That may have been the only time we met Cheche, but we had phone conversations. And Shel talked about her and their two sons so much, and with such love and passion, I always felt like I knew her well, too.
When I called Cheche today the feeling was confirmed. Not only did I feel I knew her well, but I realized she felt the same and remembered many things about me.
Shelly, she told me, died on Nov. 27, 1983. (I was stunned. 12 ½ years!) He had a motor scooter which he liked to ride for relaxation and recreation. On Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 23, he’d gone out “for a spin.” A car cut him off and he was thrown against a curb. He broke a rib which punctured his lung. He died four days later. He was 60. They had been married 24 years. At his death Shel was a psychologist doing mental health counseling. Cheche had opened her own salon in 1981. It saved her life to have this business after Shel’s death. She sold it in 1989 and since then has had her own space in another salon. Both sons, Judd 33 and Zev 31, are also hair stylists. Judd works in the same salon as she; Zev is in northern Florida. Neither is married. Both are happy, successful and well-adjusted. They and she are close to each other.
Cheche is one of six children. Her parents died in Argentina. Two brothers are dead. Three of her siblings live in Israel. She, Shel and the boys went to Israel in 1976, for Zev’s Bar Mitzvah. She doesn’t want to go again any time soon, but she talks frequently to her family there.
I asked her to send me pictures of her and Shel and the boys and promised to send her some of my family.