The Columbus Jewish Historical Society

Interviewer:  This interview for the Columbus Jewish Historical Society is being recorded on July 7^th, 2024 for the Columbus Jewish Historical Society Oral History Project.  My name is Sarah Schoenbaum and I am interviewing Steve Seeskin.  So, welcome, Steve.

Seeskin:  Hello.

Interviewer:  I just wanted to start out asking you what you thought when the Historical Society called you and asked you to do an interview?  What were your thoughts at that time?

Seeskin:  Well, I was kind of surprised since I’m not a native person of Columbus, Ohio.  I am a transplant from Cincinnati via Dayton, but I thought maybe the reason for asking me to be interviewed was the fact that I am the Commander of the Jewish War Veterans here…

Interviewer:  Uhm-hm.

Seeskin:  …in Columbus, so I thought maybe that was the reason, so, those were my thoughts.

Interviewer:  Uhn-hn, and I think that was the reason and we will get to that because that’s something you are doing now, but let’s start a little bit further back in your life and can you give us your full name and if you have a Jewish name, what’s your Jewish name?

Seeskin:  Okay.  Steven.  S-t-e-v-e-n.  My middle name and initial are both the same J – J-a-y or the letter J.  Seeskin- S-e-e s-k -i-n and my Hebrew name is Shmuel.  I’m named after my maternal grandfather Samuel.  Shmuel Yehuda and we can complete that.  I think the rest of this might be Yiddish not Hebrew, but my father’s name would be ben, son of, Haskal, and I think that’s a Yiddish name.

Interviewer:  How far back can you trace your family tree?

Seeskin:  Um, I can basically go back to my great grand-parents.  I didn’t know them but I can go back that far.

Interviewer:  You say you didn’t know them but do you know of any stories that were sort-of passed down through the years about your family that far back?

Seeskin:  Stories.  Well, they all left what was known as the Pale of Settlement.  Of, course, we’re talking about in the later 1800’s is when the migrated to the United States and that was under, they were under a lot of duress.  Those were times, the Czar was still ruling Russia and it wasn’t pleasant for Jews there.

Interviewer:  Uhm-hm.

Seeskin:  I know that my great grandfather brought his family over to the United States.  He was fearful that his sons would be drafted into the Russian army and that was a long-term deal.  It was like, it was a 20 year commitment in those days.

Interviewer:  Wow.

Seeskin:  Yeah, it wasn’t like as we know it a two or four-year enlistment, so, like many Jews they left that area of the world seeking a better place to live. And for some reason or another, I don’t know, they all came to the United States, say and, in fact, to the Cincinnati, Ohio area, and I don’t know why…

Interviewer:  Uhm-hm.

Seeskin:  …but the only story that I so to speak have, and it’s almost like a family folklore is my surname Seeskin, S-e-e-s-k-i-n, and where did it come from?  So, they claim, that wasn’t how we were listed on the ship’s manifest when they came over and they came through Ellis Island, and at least some of the story goes, my great-grandfather Seeskin did not speak English and must have spoken Yiddish or a localized language that wasn’t understood by customs people and grabs his son or points to him, which would have been my grandfather, and says seesekin– Yiddush for a sweet child and so we are named.

Interviewer:  That’s a beautiful story.

 Seeskin:  Yeah.  Now, whether it’s all true or not, I don’t know, but we call it…

Interviewer:  We don’t care.  We like it.

Seeskin:  …we call it family folklore.

Interviewer:  We like the story. What were your parents’ names and did you have any brothers and sisters?

Seeskin:  Yes. My parents.  My father was Charles, Seeskin, of course.  My mother Shirley Boyar – B-o-y-a-r.  The family name was changed in the generation preceding her. It was Boiarsky and they changed it to Boyar.  I have two siblings, both, all three of us are boys.  I am the oldest of the three and the middle one is deceased.  My youngest brother, he and his family live in the Chicago area.

Interviewer:  Okay. Where were your parents born?  Were they born in Cincinnati?

Seeskin:  Basically.  My father was one of four children and they were born in Cincinnati.  I believe he was the youngest and they, he lived his whole life in Cincinnati.  My mother, I think, was born in Cincinnati, so to speak but grew up in her early years across the river in Kentucky, Newport, Kentucky.  It so happened that her father, my grandfather, owned a lot of property in Kentucky.  How he came about that, I’m not exactly sure but he died at a very young age, something like 37.  My mother was two years old, the youngest of three children and he left my mother, uh, my grandmother, a lot of property which, you know, we’re talking the days before Social Security and she basically, you know, maintained the family household with these property rentals.

Interviewer:  Uhm- hm.

Seeskin:  the income from those, so, she later, when my mother was, I believe, already in high school, moved into Cincinnati proper.

 Interviewer:  Okay.  So, what can you tell me about your early childhood, both secular and Jewish?

Seeskin:  Okay.  Secular and Jewish. Well, I, you know, like I say, I was the oldest of three boys.  We were two years and another two years apart, so a total of four years between us.  We had a pretty typical life back then.  The family was, was very important aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents.  I had three of my four grandparents lived to old age.  One died at something like 37 years of age, but the other three lived in to their 80s and 90s, so, we were close-knit.  My parents, basically having grown up in Cincinnati, especially in their high school years, had lots of friends, mostly Jewish friends, so, they were, they were well known in the community.  Let’s, let’s say that. I would say that financially, they suffered some.  They didn’t, my father, my father served in World War II and was wounded in action, and got a small disability out of that.  His biggest regret, as he would tell me, was that he didn’t take advantage of the GI Bill.

Interviewer:  Hm.

Seeskin:  You could get more education than he had. He was a very, very handy man, with his hands and tools.  There was almost no job that I ever saw that he wouldn’t tackle and do a great job at it, but he was basically, oh, a laborer of sorts.

Interviewer:  Working for a company?

Seeskin:  Yeah, working for a company, working for a company. A couple times he tried to start something on his own and literally failed miserably, and like I say, we had some financial difficulties from time to time.  I remember my father borrowing a sum of money from my mother’s sister and husband.  It was a tidy sum and he did pay it back and all but, it was not always easy.

Interviewer:  Do you remember the kid feeling the pressure of that or you were a kid and that was sort of like, oh…

Seeskin:  I mean, I remember feeling, it, in my peer group, children, kids, it seemed like, you know I was always, I had less money to, than they did.  They had more freedom with money than I, so, but I got by.   It wasn’t, there was no, how do I want to say, I didn’t blame my parents.

Interviewer:  Right.

Seeskin:  I just knew that they struggled financially and, with three boys, but like I said, they were very tight with their family, extended family.

Interviewer:   Uh-hun.

Seeskin:  So, Jewish-wise, my mother came from an Orthodox background which was common in those days.  There wasn’t so much Reform and Conservative.  I’m talking they got married in the, well, they got married shortly after the War, in 1947.  I came along in 1949.  So they, what am I trying to, I lost my train of thought for a moment there.

Interviewer:  You were talking about your Jewish upbringing.

Seeskin:  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My mother was brought up with an Orthodox background.  My father was bought up with a, a very little religious background.  It was mostly, I would say, if you want to call it religious if it pertained to Jewish-type foods, and the fact that both my parents, er, grandparents were Yiddish speaking although my grandfather came to this country as a young child, two years old and he did get some education and some schooling.  He learned to read and write and he was basically a self, self-learned man.  He was quite learned, but particularly the sciences of the time.  He was self-taught on that, but he had no regard for religion. None. Judaism.  My grandfather, today you would call him an atheist or an agnostic or something.

Interviewer:  Uhm-hm.

Seeskin:  I don’t know if they had labels like that back then but the story my father would tell me was, that they sent my father off to a religious school, cheder, as it was called and he went and he came home after the first day of Jewish schooling and my grandfather says to him, “Well, how did you like it?” and he says, “Uh, frankly, I didn’t like it.”  My grandfather says, “Don’t go back,”

Interviewer:  Right.

Seeskin:  …and then he never went back.

Interviewer:  Okay.

Seeskin:  So, my father had very little religious background. My, the household was not very religious.  We did observe holidays, not so much Shabbat, the Sabbath, but more like the holidays, the, in particular Passover/Pesach, Hanukah, a real “major” holiday, but we children, we would light the candles and play with the dreidel and all that business, and have family, you know, gatherings. I remember going to my mother’s sister’s home which was more traditional, more Orthodox.  We would go there and celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Break-Fast and all that, that sort of stuff, not so much in our home.  My father, in fact, like I say, he had very little upbringing.  One of his more favorite summer activities was to barbecue pork ribs, spare ribs out, out in the, you know, backyard on the grill, and that’s just the way it was.

Interviewer:  He was before his time.  That’s what everybody is doing now.

Seeskin:  Yeah, so, right, but they felt it very important that they raise their sons with a Jewish education.  We all went to a, a Hebrew training, religious school, Sunday School, we called it for that.  We went to a Conservative synagogue’s school and all three of us were, you know, bar mitzvahed, so, they did see to it that we got a Jewish upbringing and education to the extent that they could do that.

Interviewer:  Uhm-hm.

Seeskin:  They weren’t all that trained in doing that themselves, but, yeah, my youngest, today, I’m almost ashamed to say I can no longer read Hebrew.  I can read all the prayers that I have memorized.  I can follow with my finger in the Hebrew, but I couldn’t, if I, given some Hebrew I wasn’t familiar with, I can’t read it anymore.

Interviewer:  Even if, when it has the vowels?

Seeskin:  Oh, even with the vowels. I can’t even pronounce it anymore.  My youngest brother, on the other hand, he’s more the scholar than I was and today in his Conservative synagogue, he’s the primary Torah reader so, and Torah reading is more difficult.  It doesn’t have the vowels, so…

Interviewer:  Yes.

Seeskin:  …he’s he did much better with it than I did, but that’s the way it was.  Like I say, we struggled some financially and we, we had a Jewish upbringing even though it wasn’t what I would consider a strong Jewish home.

Interviewer:  How was school in general, like in the regular, how were you in school in your regular…?

Seeskin:  Yeah, yeah.  I, I didn’t do so well in grade school and in high school. I got by on pure brain power.  I have been told I test out “genius level” and while I wasn’t a studious individual, I had the brain power and I got through on brain power, got through school certainly not by studying and certainly not by doing lots of homework and, I mean, I probably skipped a lot of homework.

Interviewer:  Do you remember an area that you particularly enjoyed?

Seeskin:  Oh, I always liked mathematics, yeah.  I remember if I did my homework at all in mathematics, I did them during the first period which, I think, was called ‘Homeroom.” [grinding sound] I, I, I just breakneck-speed cranked, cranked that stuff out.  The sciences were okay.  The social sciences less okay, but okay.  English, I couldn’t bear English, studying English, but, yeah, I mean, I graduated, I went to high school, my grade school, I should say, was probably 85, 90 percent Jewish.  You know, on the Jewish holidays, the place was vacant…

Interviewer:  That’s funny.

Seeskin:  …and no Jew ever won the annual prize for perfect attendance.  Never.  It was, it was, it went without saying. junior high and senior high I went to the same school for the 12 years, ‘er, six years, I’m sorry, six years and it was a large Cincinnati public high school.  It was, oh, my graduating class for instance, was about 750 students and it was approximately one-third Jewish students, one-third White Anglo-Protestant, WASP, (if you want to call it then) students, and about one-third African American (in those days we said Black, today we say African-American) students.  I graduated probably in the lower half of my class, only because, like I say, I just wasn’t a studious individual.

Interviewer:  Uhm-hm. Wasthere any person in your life at that point in time, you know, in school or out of school, that you felt influenced you in a positive direction?

Seeskin:  I have to say it was my father. My father was a hard-working, honest man and he taught me to be the same way.  When I was 16 years old, I took on, you know, a part-time job at a Kroger’s store and, you know, he taught me the discipline of work and honesty, so, yeah, I’d have to say it was my father.

Interviewer:  So, we were just talking about high school and then, how ’bout did you go to college?  What happened then after high school?

Seeskin:  After high school, I went to the University of Cincinnati, studied business, did miserably at it.  I gotta’ say, all those years in high school of getting by just on my native abilities, not learning how to study?  Well, it all caught up with me. I got into college and I did okay in the mathematics stuff ‘cause I liked it, but the other stuff, I just, didn’t know how to study.  I didn’t know how to learn it, had to move at a faster, deeper pace than did, did high school and I didn’t do so well. I had to drop a number of classes to prevent from failing and eventually that all caught up with me, too.  This was the era of the Viet Nam War and the draft and they were drafting people who lost their student deferment due to low accomplishment levels, so, or they never had it to begin with.  So, I had lost my student deferment.  The draft in those days, they went by your birthday and each day of the year was assigned a number one through 365 and I think mine was something like eleven, very low and I got notices of “report for the draft physical,” and I, I knew that time upcoming I was going to be drafted, and to be drafted, I would have to be in the Army, and that didn’t appeal to me.  I would get a what do you want to call it, a foxhole or maybe it was a rice paddy, in the Southeast Asia. That didn’t, that sure didn’t appeal to me, so, I looked in to other opportunities in the military and the one that appealed to me the most was the Navy.  They had an electronics program where they gave you two years of electronics training but they also required a six-year enlistment, so, it was two years of school and four years of serving in the Navy, so, I chose that, and, so, off to the Navy I went, learned electronics, served aboard a ship, a somewhat large ship.  It was 450 Navy personnel and it would carry about 1200 Marines.  This was a Marine transport, would transport the Marines and all their equipment, including landing equipment for doing amphibious assault landings.

Interviewer:  At that point in time were there any Jewish, how do you call them – midshipmen on your boat…

Seeskin:  Okay.

Interviewer:  …that you knew of?

Seeskin:  There were two other fellow Jews, if you will, out of the 450.  I can’t speak for the Marines that were aboard, but I was an electronics technician.  Another fellow was a, they called him a radar-man.  He would man the radar to navigate the ship and spot targets so to speak.  The other was the ship’s doctor.  We never did anything Jewishly together.

Interviewer:  Not on holidays?

Seeskin:  Not on holidays.  I don’t remember any, anything Jewishly. Never saw a, a rabbi chaplain on that ship.  I would take, we got generous leave every year.  You get thirty days leave, which is same as vacation, and I would typically go home unless I was overseas.  I would typically go home to my family for the Jewish holidays – Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur.  I think I went a couple times for Passover so, I would observe the holidays that way. [  ?]  I can’t recall one bit of antisemitism on board the ship or my time in the Navy unlike my father who served in the Marine Corps during World War II.  He said there was plenty of antisemitism.  He experienced plenty, but I experienced none, and, in fact, I kind of, I won’t say I flaunted it but those leaves that I would take to go home for the Jewish holidays, I kind of let my peers know why I was taking leave at that time and going home.  I was proud to be Jewish and my peers gave me no reason to want to hide it or anything like that and I thought it was [ proud?]  to let them know what I was doing and some of them would ask me questions.  They were always good questions.  It wasn’t belligerent, so that was not a bad time, at least not Jewishly it wasn’t.  In fact, it wasn’t a bad time at all.  My second tour of duty I was assigned to a ship under construction.  In fact, that ship is in the news all the time these days.  It’s the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower.  I was assigned to that ship while it was being built at Newport News Naval Shipyard.  I was…

Interviewer:  Is it in Newport News now?  Do you know where it is now?

Seeskin:   I believe, well, Newport News is a civilian yard where they build or possibly repair ships.  It’s across the river from Norfolk, Virginia and I believe that’s where it’s homeport is Newport as was my homeport when I was on board the amphibious assault and I failed to mention, while I was on board the amphibious assault ship, spent six months in the Mediterranean, France, Italy, Spain, in particular.  Unfortunately, never went to Israel. Went on North Atlantic cruises, a couple, two or three of them up in, to Great Britain, Holland, I recall, a number of cruises to the Caribbean and the northern, very northern shores of South America, like Columbia.

[Note:  Seeskin served aboard the USS Ponce (LPD-15) which is homeported at the Norfolk Navy Station]

Interviewer: So, that saying “Joint the Navy and see the world” is it true?

Seeskin:   “Join the Navy and see the world.”  I did and I saw good and I saw bad.  I’ll be honest with you, but, yeah, I did see the world.  When I was aboard the – I really wasn’t aboard, they call it aboard – aboard the pre-commissioning crew, cruise of the Eisenhower, my time was rapid…my time was coming to an end of my six years, and…

Interviewer:  Did it go fast, those six years?

Seeskin:  Yeah. They went pretty fast.  I was a model sailor.  I was a good sailor, you know, never in trouble, and always, somebody made a point to, as, ‘why can’t more be like me.’

Interviewer:  You had said earlier that you weren’t a good student.  When you got to the Navy and had to study…

Seeskin:  Yes.

Interviewer:  …did you become a good student?

Seeskin:  I did.  Studying electronics and all, I really had to learn how to study and learn I did.  I learned well and we’ll come to that in a moment, the payoffs, but when my time was up, I intended to go back to college and, oddly enough, the thing I wanted to study was computers, and not because so much my electronics background but my job on the, on the Eisenhower Pre-Commissioning Crew was to build the ship’s technical public communication library from nothing.  Now, I gotta’ tell you there’s lots of technical publications on an aircraft carrier.  They got a technical pub’ for everything you can think of…

Interviewer:  Really?

Seeskin:  …right down to the, the toaster in the galley.   I mean, you know, operator’s manual, and a repair manual, and technical, technical manual laying out all the, well, in the case of electronics, blueprints, if you will, circuits and such, and yeah, I worked with some people in data processing to develop a computerized library for the ship.  As we received more publications, and oh, by the way, these publications would come with change notices, you know.  Every time they updated equipment, you got change notices and everything and they had to be posted and so-and-so.  It was a complicated library, but I worked closely with data processing people to get us this, this computerized library, and enjoy, thought I would enjoy learning computing, which I did when I went back to school, but anyway, the higher-ups in the military, my chief petty officers, my division officers, right up to the captain of the ship really, I would say, twisted my arm very hard, to re-enlist, stay in the Navy rather than go out, go back to school on my own.  In fact, the captain of the ship promised me, so to speak, he would get me into a program whereby I would learn, I would go to school, go to college, and like, once a month I had to report in, physically, in uniform.  Otherwise, I was like going, like anybody else going to school.

Interviewer:  And they would pay for it.

Seeskin:  They would pay for it. They would pay me my salary during the time I was going…

Interviewer:  Wow.

 Seeskin:  pay my room and board, the whole business and at the end when I would graduate, I would get a commission in the United States Navy.  Very, very tempting, let me tell you.  Like I say, I enjoyed the Navy, so-to-speak, but I thought to myself, “Steve, you can take the GI Bill and go to school and not have any obligations, and for that matter, if you want to go back in, you can probably go back in after you graduate,”  but it was a better, better deal so-to-speak, to let the Navy pay my way, but, I just wanted to have freedom of choice when it was all said and done.

Interviewer:  You didn’t want somebody to own you.

Seeskin:  Yeah. Right.  Now, I have to tell you, ‘cause I told you I did very poorly in high school although I was smart and that I learned how to study when I was in the Navy electronics school and I did very, very well in college, my second go-round after the military.  I graduated from the University of Cincinnati.  I went to school full-time, probably the minimum to qualify for full-time.  I think it was like 12 credit hours or something like that, where maybe the average student did 15 to 18 credit hours, but I did full time and I worked full time and I worked as a junior computer programmer, and I did very well in school. I came out a suma cum laude, which is top honors, and I could have done it in high school but I just didn’t. I didn’t have, I didn’t have the drive, the willpower.  My parents weren’t the kind that, you know, hounded over me and my studies and what have you.

 Interviewer:  Maybe your nervous system just needed to settle down.

Seeskin:  It may have been.  It may, it could be any number of things, I’m sure, but anyway, I did very well, and I went off and got a job with NCR, the old National Cash Register company and moved to Dayton, Ohio, so, any, anything that I missed in the early years through school, through naval years, college, I don’t think I, I think I pretty much hit it, so, I went to work at NCR.

Interviewer:  Before you go into that, you know, we hear so many things about men that come out of Viet Nam and the emotional toll it took on them. Because you, you were on a ship, did you escape that or how did you feel like it affected you?

Seeskin:  Well, I was quite fortunate, lucky, if you will.  The ship I was on, the amphibious assault ship, was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet.  I never went to the Pacific, never, never went to the shores of Viet Nam. So, I never saw Viet Nam. I never saw the horrors, not sure how I would have reacted to all that.  I’m just not sure, but I never had any of that.  I did somewhat, I don’t even know if I have stories to tell, but especially among young Jewish men.  They didn’t much join up the service and even my old high school chums, my friends, you know, I sort-of kind-of remember them.  I’d come home from leave and I was forgotten. They didn’t much, have much to say or do, to or with me.  I was different than them at this point.

Interviewer:  Do you feel like you had matured?  You had gone through a big…

Seeskin:  Well, I don’t know if maturing, but yeah, I guess we all matured, so-to-speak, but it just, my old high school chums, friends, they did everything they could to stay out of the draft and I’m somewhat ashamed to say, some of them would go to family doctors and get doctors’ almost excuses not to serve in the military and that’s the way it was, and I was, I was, very few Jewish men went in the service, unlike, say World War II where Jewish men went just like everybody else, and maybe more so.

Interviewer:  Hm. Why do you say that?  What makes you say that?

Seeskin:  I, what makes me say so?  I think, you know, what they did know about what was going on in Germany and with concentration camps, and mass murders, etcetera, etcetera. I think Jews as much as anybody and somewhat more, felt, felt the call.

Interviewer:  Okay.

Seeskin:   I think later on during my generation, not so.  They, Viet Nam was not a favored, not a war that was highly favored.  My own youngest brother, I will tell you, threatened to move to Canada.  He wasn’t, he wasn’t going to serve.  He never did, but he stayed in school, stayed in school, stayed in school until the draft ended. So, you know, I was somehow different than….

Interviewer:  But what you’re saying is that Jewish men at that time felt, oh, and, you were saying in World War II felt a certain obligation to go…

Seeskin:  Absolutely.

Interviewer:  …because, because of what was happening.

Seeskin:  Absolutely.  My father served.  His brother served. My mother’s brother served during World War II.  My mother served in a civil service, but military position, it was, you know, so, yeah, Jews were all in in World War II, not very, maybe even Korea.  I can’t speak so much for Korea. Not so in Viet Nam and not so, to be honest, Jews do not, there is no draft anymore, but Jews are not volunteering in big numbers. It’s just, that’s the way it is.

[Further information about Seeskin’s military service:  He also served on the Dwight D. Eisenhower Pre-Commissioning Unit at the Newport News Shipyard [to later become commissioned as the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. He was honorably discharged as an Electronics Technician Petty Officer First Class.]

Interviewer:  Thanks for sharing that. So, you were about to talk about National Cash Register.

Seeskin:  Yeah, I spent a few years working at National Cash Register and finally I was a little, oh, I was upset.  I wasn’t getting promoted like I thought I should.  I thought I was doing the same work as my, the people I worked with, same level of work, same type of work, yet I was a grade younger, lower than they were, and I decided I was going to look for another opportunity and I eventually found one.  I announced this to my manager that I was planning to leave NCR and the next thing I know, I’m getting called in by a vice president to his office.  Well, a vice president. I never saw the man before. I never heard of him, you know, and he, I was too far removed, and I was explaining that at the time I joined NCR, I took a battery of different kinds of tests which I recalled I did, and I just considered them at the time just employment, you know, tests.  They would decide based on these tests, if I was suitable for hire and what kind of a position etcetera, etcetera.

Interviewer:  How they were going to attract you.

Seeskin:  That’s right.  Well, unbeknownst to me, this vice president told me that when I took those tests, I was identified as scoring extremely high, so high in fact, that they delegated these few individuals, and it was a few, to a program that NCR had developed called Fast Track which had been written up numerous times in those days, back in The Wall Street Journal as a program, such that they would rotate you into different jobs, and get different learning experiences, and perhaps, even get some additional, formal, more formal education, and for whatever reasons, I was told, while I was designated for that program, I never participated in it, and I think managers that I worked for, and I worked for maybe two or three managers in the years I worked there, didn’t want me rotated out.  They wanted to keep me.

Interviewer:  Because you were such a good employee.

Seeskin:  I was a good, I was a good employee and such, and so, this vice president offered me immediate promotion to next grade up, immediate acceptance into the Fast Track program and if I did well, all the rewards that came with that. Sounded pretty tempting but I, you know what I learned from my father was integrity.  I think I told you – honesty and integrity and I had some, I had made a commitment to somebody else and I stayed with that.  To this day sometimes I think about it and say, “Gee I wished I’d,”   Two things I regret:  one maybe I should have stayed in the Navy and gone through the, the program they wanted to put me in for education and commissioning,  and the second opportunity I had was here at NCR, and my stubbornness, my integrity, said, wouldn’t let me do that, and I sometimes, to this day, even think, “What?  What would it have been if I had done either one of those two things?” So, uh, you know…

Interviewer:  You have a rather independent streak.

Seeskin:  Yes, I had an independent streak. I’d even call it a somewhat stubborn.  Once I made up my mind, I had thought it out and ‘this is what I should do and I will do that,’ but I sometimes, I have some regrets. Let’s just say.  What could have been.  You only get a couple chances in life like that and some people don’t get any. My, my word of advice to younger people starting out in their adult life, young adult life, is consider these opportunities very seriously because they’ll come and if you let ‘em go, they’re gone.

Interviewer:  When you come to a crossroads, take your time to make the decisions you’re trying to make.

Seeskin:  Exactly.  Seek out advice.  I probably never, you know, I probably, probably the only person I went to when, in the NCR situation was the recruiter that had recruited me for the new job and, by gosh, he didn’t want to lose the commission off it, he was going to receive.  So, yeah, it would be, if you come to a crossroads, if you come to a decision, if you have an opportunity, give it due diligence.  Think it out.  Seek out advice, and you know what?  You still may have regrets. I don’t know, you know, but at least you, I don’t feel like I did all the things I should have done.  I, I just kind of made up my mind and that’s, that’s that.

Interviewer:  And you might have ended up with the same decision in the end but you would have felt clear if you had taken more time with them.

Seeskin:  Right.

Interviewer:  Yeah.

Seeskin:  So, I mean, I went on to a career and I moved around a lot in jobs.  When you work in the information processing, is what we called it back in the day – today it’s computer sciences and – you tend to work on a lot of projects. Projects come and go.  They ramp up.  They ramp down, and when they ramp down, guess what happens?   The talent gets laid off because they just they’re excess people and they cost a lot of money, so I moved around quite a bit in jobs.  I did a lot of contract work.

Interviewer:  Did that feel stressful?

Seeskin:  It’s stressful when you get laid off.

Interviewer:  Yes.

Seeskin:  Always worrying where the next job will come from. Yeah, but I survived it.  I was, in most cases, able to find a job. Some relatively quickly.  Probably, the longest I went unemployed was six months.  That’s probably the longest and so, I moved around to lots of different, just like I was going to do at NCR, different jobs only this was with different companies and it took me well, like I said, I started out in Cincinnati, went to Dayton.  Ultimately, I did get married.  My wife…

Interviewer:  And how did you meet your wife?

Seeskin:   You know, when I was in the Navy and later on when I was, after the Navy, my immediate going to college, I didn’t [ date/ go out? (* there is a skip in the recording)] a lot, and I would say, in the Navy, there was not a lot of opportunity for young, to meet young Jewish women either.

Interviewer:  Would you have liked to have met somebody Jewish?

Seeskin:  Yeah.  I did in fact.  I met somebody Jewish and we did get engaged.  I was I in the Navy.  We got engaged and I broke that off.  It just wasn’t going to work for me.  I rushed into things.  Getting an opportunity there where opportunities weren’t plentiful.  Like I say, there weren’t a lot of Jewish women around in my Navy days and anyway, I did meet somebody.  We did get engaged and we later broke it off.  After I was working after college, I had a professional career.   Somebody, an older gentleman where I worked, introduced me to a young lady who, he said, he had spent a time in the hospital and he said this was a nurse that took care of him and we hit if off pretty good.  When we started talking marriage and I started backing away.  She was not Jewish and I started backing away saying, “I’m not sure that this as a marriage would work,” And I wasn’t a strong participating Orthodox Jew.

Interviewer:  Were you going to synagogue at the time?

Seeskin:  No.  I was not, but I just, that’s the way I felt, and no, I was not, I was not a synagogue goer.  My parents had joined a Reform temple in Cincinnati.  Mostly they did that after my youngest brother, er, middle brother died. By this time my parents had also died.  My brother died of a suicide.

Interviewer:  I’m sorry to hear that.

Seeskin:  Thank you.  It was a very tragic event.

Interviewer:  It sounds horrible.

Seeskin:   Yeah.  It was horrible.  It was drug induced. He was on, way out on drugs.  Anyway, that’s what happened.  My parents joined a temple after that.

Interviewer:  Did that seem to help your parents and give them the support they needed?

Seeskin:  It did help them and, but by the time I met this young lady, my parents had also died.  They died in a common accident.  They died of a carbon monoxide poisoning accidental in their home…

Interviewer:  Three…

Seeskin:  …so, I had lots and lots of tragedy.  My brother had committed suicide, my parents who had died relatively young.  My father was sixty-four, my mother fifty-nine.  Both were in reasonable health, not yet retired.

Interviewer:  And what helped you at that point?  What were your resources?

Seeskin:  Family.  Extended family.  My youngest brother lived at that time in St. Louis, and so, we weren’t all that close.   I mean, we were probably closer than, as brothers, you know, we felt brotherly love, okay, but we weren’t, he was far away from me.  That kind of close we were not. He, my brother, was a professional psychologist and he somewhat blamed himself for my brother, not recognizing my brother being in crisis, the youngest brother.  He somewhat blamed himself and then he still does to this day.  He’ll still tell you he should have recognized it for what it was, and, but as I say, my parents, by the time I met my, this lady friend, my parents had passed also, and not that long ago, maybe two years, and she decided that she was going to take Jewish religious training from a synagogue or temple, and she looked into it at a temple.  Like I said, I wasn’t even a member anywhere and she did enroll in their Basic Judaism classes is what they called it.  I went as well, as support.  We later joined that temple.  That was in Dayton, Ohio, and we got married, so, and we’re still married, I’m happy to say, you know, so…

 Interviewer:  I’m happy for you.

Seeskin:  …she’s the love of, the love of my life, so…

Interviewer:   That’s nice, that’s nice to hear.

Seeskin:  Yeah.  Tragedies and other adversities I overcame and everything, this, this was a good thing, okay? Now, she had two children.  She was divorced.  She had two sons.  One, at the time, was twelve or thirteen, thirteen, I think, and the other son, I got home from the honeymoon and he wanted me to teach him how to drive.  He was sixteen.  What a thing to fall into fatherhood, first thing out of the box!

Interviewer:  One of the things, one of the things I think people like least of being a parent.

Seeskin:  Well, shoot, you know, we hardly got the honeymoon over.

Interviewer:  Where did you go on your honeymoon?

Seeskin:  We went to Aruba and we had a wonderful time there.

Interviewer:  Supposedly beautiful there.

Seeskin:  Very beautiful, so, yeah, we came home and the first thing I heard was, “I want to learn how to drive.  Teach me.”

Interviewer:  But to me, for him to trust you enough to do that says a lot, like you’re starting out with a gold star.

Seeskin:  Well, thank you.  I think I did, I had been fatherly-like to them when we were courting.

Interviewer:  You must have been.

Seeskin:  Neither one of these two boys, the rabbi that converted my wife said the boys were too old to automatically become converted because of the mother.  They needed to make some decision on their own if they wanted to do, if and when they wanted to do that, and that if-and-when never has come.  They certainly respect Judaism but they have never indicated that they wanted to become Jewish, and in fact, the younger one, I would say a couple of his best friends from back in high school days were Jewish friends, but yeah, so, you know, I’m used to a household that so-to-speak shares all the holidays, and I’ve grown accustomed to that, you know.  There are my holidays and there are their holidays, and their holidays I will participate into, so much as they allow me and I allow them to participate in mine as well, so that’s, that’s how that works.

Interviewer:  And your brother in Chicago, do you share holidays with him at all?

Seeskin:  Somewhat rarely.  When he was in St. Louis, we went out and visited a few times.  Chicago, lesser, less so.  I just, you know, I could drive out to St. Louis and it was no big deal from Dayton or Columbus.  I was getting to how we got to Columbus but I’ll come back to that.  Chicago, driving up there and getting around in Chicago, no fun.  My brother lives on the famous Lake Shore Drive, you know, and it’s traffic bumper to bumper like I can’t believe.

Interviewer:  It’s beautiful though.

Seeskin:  It’s, it’s, it’s beautiful.  He’s got, you know, three grown-up children.  I think, it’s three grandchildren.  You know, by the way, I’ve got two grandchildren now.

Interviewer:  Congratulations.

Seeskin:  Thank you.  Both are college graduates. Well, one’s a graduate and the one’s going to graduate in a year, so they’re not young grandchildren anymore, and my brother’s grandchildren are quite a bit younger.  You know, he took all this time going through school and getting a PhD., and getting a career launched and so-on and so-forth before he got married.  He got married, you know, much later in life than me even.  Well, I never had children but then my wife started having children, so, yeah, we don’t go up to Chicago very often.  I have cousins that live in Chicago as well, first cousins.  I got one who is a professor emeritus at Northwestern University.  He has a PhD. in philosophy and taught Jewish civilization, so…

Interviewer:  Hmm. How did he end up, do you know how he ended up with that?

Seeskin:  Well, unlike my parents, his parents were very education-minded for their children and they all went to graduate school.  One became an attorney and one became an educator.  Well, two of them became educators, the PhD and a daughter who was my age, cousin who became a religious school teacher, so they, along with, education was stressed in their house.  My aunt and uncle were not particularly strong Jewish people but they brought up their children with strong Jewish education, stronger than mine.  Mine, and yeah, the one became a professor and taught Jewish civilization and he…

Interviewer:  Interesting.

Seeskin:  Yeah.

Interviewer:  So, I don’t want to lose the opportunity to talk about your connection to the Jewish War Veterans [Organization?].

Seeskin:  Oh, absolutely.  A number of years back, and I want also to talk about my volunteerism…

Interviewer:  Yes, both of those.

Seeskin:  …which this leads into.  I got 2:12.

Interviewer:  Okay.

Seeskin:   So, where was I?  Jewish War Veterans.   For a number of years, I belonged to the Jewish War Veterans.  I did not participate in any of their events.  I, I  never went to a single War Veterans meeting, you know.  I just was a member. I joined what was called a Member for Life.   I paid a high-rate dues and got a lifetime membership.  At the temple I belonged to in Columbus, and I was going to quickly tell you how we came to Columbus.  We came to Columbus because my mother, [er] my wife, job, had a job opportunity which was, with the company she was with, to relocate from, from Dayton to Columbus with a substantial promotion.  I, at that time, was doing contract work and I was mostly traveling.   I didn’t, a lot of people, mostly, if I worked, I worked out of my home.  I didn’t have an office to go to or I traveled, so I could go anywhere.  We came to Columbus. After we got married, we, well, we got married in Dayton, belonged to the temple there.  When we came to Columbus, we first went to one temple, Beth Tikvah, if you must know.   It was a, it was a, quote unquote, it was a schlepp from Gahanna to go out to Wes’, Worthington for services, so we looked for something closer and we, we got Beth, Beth Shalom which they had built – we lived in Gahanna and they were a stone’s throw away in the south part of New Albany.  We were in the north part of, practically touching borders with the temple, so… Now, something happened at the temple.  I became quite friendly with this couple.  They were quite a bit our senior.  He, today is in his 90s.  She is deceased, but anyway, but anyway, he, this gentleman was, he and the cantor – this was a, what do, well, she’s well-known in the community.  Gail Rose.  I’ll mention her name.  Gail and he would annually put on a Veterans program around Veterans Day, the Shabbos around Veterans Day and they were co-chairs, this gentleman and Gail Rose, and ultimately, the gentleman invited me to help him and eventually, after that, he had a plan where he was going to retire out of it and I would take it over and I did. So, I became the co-chair and I’ve been the co-chair with Gail Rose for a number of years, and one day this gentleman says to me, he says, “You’ve told me you were a member of the Jewish War Veterans, right?” and I says, “Right,” and I says, “but I never go to, I’ve never been to anything Jewish War Veterans. I’m just a member on paper.”  He says, “Would you like to go to the Columbus Post and meet them?”  and he says he was willing to take me and introduce me around, and I says, “Yeah, why not?”  So, he takes me to the Jewish War Veterans.  They were having a, and my wife went, too, they were having some kind-of a social event.  I believe it was, it was like a Hanukah brunch at the JCC.  So, I said, you know, most of these guys were quite a bit older than me, most of them.  I don’t have a whole lot in common with them but I do have in common with them, this thing, so I’ll come back, and I came back a few times to different meetings.  Ultimately, after a year or two of this, the Commander, who had been the Commander for a number of years, and stayed Commander for a number more after that, asked me.  He, in his name, he was well-known in the community, Saul Laub. Saul and another gentleman, Herb Greff, was a past National Commander for the Jewish War Veterans, they came.  They approached me and asked me, with some hands-on learning and training by then, would I like to become the Commander of the Jewish War Veterans someday.  I said, “Yeah, that sounds interesting.”  So, I became the Senior Vice Commander and I stayed in that position for a number of years.  Ultimately, this Saul Laub, he’s now in his early 90s, probably ninety- three, I’m thinking, and he takes ill and I’m talking serious ill.  He’s not the man he once was and Saul’s daughter who was living in Cleveland, came down numerous times to see him.  He was living in a home for aged and she had to convince him to give up the Jewish War Veterans position of leadership he held, something he didn’t want to do, even as ill as he was.  She twisted his arm like I had my arm twisted by the naval captain?  She twisted his arm and he finally, and we’re talking six, seven, eight, nine months later, concedes, “Okay, I can’t do it anymore,” and, reluctantly, turns it over to me. And I’ve been, this is three or four years ago.  The man has since passed on and I’ve been the Commander.

Interviewer:  Is that a satisfying position for you?

Seeskin:  Yes and no. I do it out of duty and I’ve curtailed a lot of our activities because nobody was showing up for activities.  The Jewish War Veterans is becoming, at least here in Columbus, I can say, is reaching older men.  There are about 33 of us here in Columbus.  There’s, I think, 39 members of our Post.  Six of them don’t even live in this state.  They live with their caretaker children.  There are three that are, two that are younger than myself and not that much younger.  I’m 75 and most of the other ones are late in their 80s or into their 90s and they just don’t get around like they used to and they can’t do what they used to and you have to understand that, and I’ve kind of held it together as a duty.  So, does it give me any satisfaction?  Some, but I can’t say great satisfaction.  It’s, it’s more of being a witness to its falling apart, dying, and not knowing what to do with it.

Interviewer:  You’re like a hospice care person for it.

Seeskin:  I am like hospice for the Jewish War Veterans.  So, we’ve curtailed most of, all of our activities.  Recently, always until this year, we always participated in the Bexley Fourth of July Parade.  We had last year, three cars. Herb Greff and his wife in one car.  Herb I mentioned as being the past National Commander, myself and another gentleman in my car – that gentleman who was a Jewish War Veteran since that time has had a stroke and is in the Wexner Home for the Aged now, and we had one other guy who drove his own car, and the only reason he drove his own car is because he smokes like crazy, like a chimney and nobody would ride with him and he couldn’t ride with anybody else ‘cause he couldn’t without having a smoke.  So, we’re down, I contacted the parade committee and said “Unfortunately, we just won’t be participating anymore.”

Interviewer:  And that was a hard call.

Seeskin:  It was a hard call. It was Herb Greff and myself and this guy that smokes like a chimney… (Redacted) not terribly satisfying in that sense.  I see this going on with other organizations.  By the way, other Veteran organizations suffer the same pains.

Interviewer:  Of course.

Seeskin:  I’m talking about organizations which are quite large, like American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars.  They’re also having lots and lots of attrition, and mostly, you know, people dying off, veterans dying off.

Interviewer:  And you had said earlier, that, you know, starting with the Viet Nam War, less Jewish men or women were signing up to begin with.

Seeskin:  Yeah.  Less are signing up to begin with, period, not just Jews, but percentage-wise even, the Jews dropped way down, down in their belonging.  So, there’s no new blood coming in.  I won’t say none, but there’s little new blood coming in to the organization.  I can tell you from my, my experience with Jewish War Veterans and some other temple-like activities, young people are not joiners. The times are different.  They’re just not joiners of things.

Interviewer:  Or, if they’re joining, it’s other types of things.

Seeskin:  Well, I know a couple that for instance, have joined B’nai B’rith Bowling League. Okay.  It’s a social sportsman-like outlet, okay?  It’s not a service organization although B’nai B’rith is supposed to be, but they’re just not largely joiners.  So, like I say, times are different.  Okay, it is 2:25.

Interviewer:  Okay.

Seeskin:  So…

Interviewer:  You had said you wanted to talk about your other volunteer.  I don’t want to forget that.

Seeskin:  So, okay.  I retired a few years back.  I was 69 and I’m 75 now so about six years ago I finally gave up the ghost on work. I was increasingly feeling in work like a dinosaur.  I was involved in technologies, computing.  I was no longer able to keep up with the changes and they were rapid and huge and I just felt like, ‘you know, let’s get out while I’m still, got my sanity,’ and I retired.  I quickly became bored with retirement.  You know, how much books can you read?  How many, how many TV shows can you watch? How much Solitaire can you play? So, I looked for something to do.  I did become at Temple – I had previously taken on their library as their Library Committee Chair.  Their library, when I joined Temple Beth Shalom, was in, there was lots and lots of books, lots of volumes but they were not organized, not identifiable, not quickly identifiable as belonging to a category or something like, different, you know, libraries will organize, so, I asked if I could take it over and I was aware of a computerized program that I had used for my own personal technical library and then I could catalogue their library.  Well, I did that. I used that software.  I catalogued the library that was some, that turned out to be, I don’t know, twenty- three, twenty-five hundred volumes.  I think today there’s about 2800 volumes in the library.

Interviewer:  Wow, that’s a lot.

Seeskin:  Yeah, and I catalogued them all, electronically, and anybody in the world can get on the computer and look up our catalogue and find books by subject, by name, by author, you know.

Interviewer: Wow. That’s a lot of work.

Seeskin:  Yeah. It was, but the software helped, a lot.  So, so, I volunteered to do that and I’m still the chairman of the library there.  I looked for something else and I found through a friend of mine that the AARP, Association of American Retired People, does volunteers, has volunteers they train to do tax returns, federal tax, federal and state tax returns for, well, they targeted senior citizens – it’s their audience – free of charge. So, we were volunteers, not paid, nor did the recipients pay for the service.  Well, I took the class.  It was a week-long class. I took the class and annually I go back for a full day of refresher training, and I’ve, ever since have been doing taxes.  Now that’s a, I just completed my fifth year of doing taxes, and I do it for the AARP and I also do it on a lesser scale, but I also do it for the United Way who owns, like I say, AARP targets seniors, the United Way targets lower income people, free, and it’s also volunteer, unpaid, so, that is greatly satisfying.  I wished, for me, I wished it lasted more months of the year, although I’m exhausted by the time April 15^th comes around.

Interviewer:  Right. Right.

Seeskin:  And I don’t even, I don’t work that hard at it.

Interviewer:  …like any good accountant.

Seeskin:  Yeah, but I don’t work the 80-hour weeks they work,

Interviewer:  Right. Right,

Seeskin: …but, anyway, I really, I really enjoy it.  I get great satisfaction out of it, great compliments from the people we serve and they are really grateful and that feels great.  Let’s see, I do some other volunteer activities.  I mentioned Jewish War Veterans, the two tax okay, you want to cut it off.

Interviewer:  Yeah.

Seeskin:  Okay. So, we’ll just end it by saying I really enjoy the volunteer work.  It keeps me busy.  It keeps me occupied.  It keeps the old noodle working, so, that’s that.

Interviewer:  Well, Steve,  I mean, just in listening to everything you’ve said today, I mean, from being in school where you felt like you didn’t do well and you had trouble sort of bringing yourself to the table, you know, just hearing the journey that you’ve been on, you’re a very generous soul and you’ve taken, you know, you’ve grown into different things and I’m impressed with how generous you’ve been, you know, over time and…

Seeskin:  Well, thank you.

Interviewer:  …yeah, in so many different ways, it sounds like you, whatever you did, once you got on board you gave a hundred percent.

Seeskin:  I pretty much tried to and I tried to enjoy it, too…

Interviewer:  Yeah.

Seeskin:  …not just let it be work and occupy my space in time but also to enjoy doing what I do.

Interviewer:  Well, on behalf of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society I want to thank you for contributing to the Oral History Project and this concludes our interview, and I want to thank you.  I really learned a lot about you during this time.

Seeskin:  Well, Thank you.  I enjoyed it as well and it’s a great program.

Interviewer:  It really is.

Seeskin:  I encourage you to keep it up and learn more about other lives in our Jewish community.

Interviewer:  There we go. Let’s see. Recording.

Seeskin:  Feel free to call me if you have any questions.

 

Transcribed by:  Linda Kalette Schottenstein