Jack Ranz

His nephew Lloyd Brass writes:

I've always felt fortunate that I had an eccentric uncle to love. Actually, I have a few, but we're talking about Uncle Jack here. He walked his own path and was decades ahead of his time in some areas. Although he visited us while we were living in California, I really remember Uncle Jack first when he came to see us in Baltimore. I was about 8 then. He came in complaining bitterly about "those filthy smokers" on the bus and how they filled the entire bus with disgusting smoke that everybody had to breathe. As a kid in the early '60's, I thought that point of view was really quirky. I mean, my Dad smoked, everyone smoked, and I had never heard anyone complain about it. It seemed weird to me that someone would pick smoking of all things to get bothered by. See why I say he was ahead of his time?

Uncle Jack was a fresh air fanatic. That first night, it was pouring, so he couldn't camp outside. He laid his sleeping bag out on the kitchen floor and propped the door open so he could get his air. "Mom, does he really get to DO that?!" This was better than having a misbehaving kid as a guest, because HE WAS AN ADULT, so he could misbehave and get away with it!

The next night he set up his tent. Of course, tents are kid heaven. For me, it was about the coolest thing I had ever done. I think it was some type of army surplus deal, heavy dark green cloth with 2 poles. Flashlights, no set bedtime. And, since I was the oldest, it was just me& Uncle Jack - no little kids. In fact, this may have been my first camping experience.

A few years later, Jack came to see us in Florida. During this trip I became very interested in his philosophy which included pacifism, communism and natural ecology and healing. We started a written correspondence which lasted more than a year. He sent me tomes of poetry, philosophy, just reams of stuff. I would try to read it, but a lot of it was beyond me... and a lot of it was beyond the fringe. I seem to remember railing against the system, and especially war. Jack really hated war and the military. This, evidently, did not make him a popular guy in the '40's. (Oh, Jack would love the Internet, believe me! I can just see his homepage now, brimming with conspiracy theory, poetry and tips on how to screw the IRS.) This stuff was not typewritten, but commercially printed (this was before laser printers and PCs, remember). I asked him about this and he said he had published several books which he was excerpting and copying for me. I remember being most impressed. I think my Mom later told me he had published these books himself because he felt it was important to get these ideas out.

Before he left us, he promised to get me a ring. "What color do you want?" "Definitely Blue." "OK, I'll send it to you through the mail." Well, my parents, who were very kind to Jack, told me that he might not "follow up" on this particular promise and that I shouldn't count on it. But I knew Jack. I knew he wouldn't promise then not deliver. So I waited like a kid waits for something in the mail: "It's been 3 days, where is it?!" And I waited. But, eventually, the ring DID come. And it was all wrapped up in a weird little box with layers and layers of paper and string, but inside, sure enough, was a great little ring with a deep blue stone. And I still have that ring today. It always has a place of honor on a shelf wherever I've been.

The last time I saw Jack, he was ending his days stroked out in a nursing facility. I went with my Mom and, I think, my Grandmother, Ethel Lunin (Ranz). He kept saying, "Please! Please!" and we were so upset that we couldn't discern exactly what he wanted us to do. But I brought my guitar and I played him some songs. And I think he knew who I was, or at least that he was getting some kindness from other humans. We talked about what an outdoorsman he had been and how homeotherapy, doing no harm, camping, smoke-free environments were all part of his world long before they became part of the Big World. I really miss Jack, I do. I think if he could visit me here in this beautiful, forested state and walk the mountain passes and coast trails, he would just love it. I hope we meet on the Mother Ship.

The following narrative was added by Robert Brass: Uncle Jack had a solar powered radio, a reel to reel tape recorder that used wire instead of magnetic tape. He would camp in our back yard. He was the best, he taught me how to throw a boomerang and mobilized all the kids in the neighborhood to play an organized game of baseball. He gave me a blue safire ring, which I lost (the ring he gave Lloyd was square, and mine was round with two small diamonds). He once got very angry at a kid playing with a toy gun, the kid thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. The only thing in return for all these kindness was that we would have to sit and listen to his poetry. I loved Uncle Jack - he really was the best.

Clearly Jack Ranz made quite an impression on several generations of male family members. Here's Allen Ranz's memories:

Uncle Jack Ranz, or as many of us called him, Uncle Jake, was a frequent visitor to our house in Ozone Park, Queens. If two weeks went by without a visit from Uncle Jake, it meant that he had either had a fight with my father, which would soon be forgotten about, or that he had absconded to Puerto Rico to read his poetry to high school students and drink beer with poetic old men on Luquillo beach. I'll always remember Uncle Jack opening the backyard fence, often with a bottle of Paisano wine as his contribution to the family festivities. He would be dressed in his current interpretation of his own style, which could only be described as rugged individualist. One day he would show up in overalls ("sharecropper pants" as my father derided them), another day in an expensive old-fashioned suit with a bow tie and Converse All Star sneakers. After dinner he would park himself in a canvas folding chair and discuss deep subjects with whomever happened to be around, including the kids, whom he talked to with total respect just like regular human beings.

Uncle Jake was eccentric, and his unconventionality earned him the affectionate title of Jake the Meshugenah, a nickname which I think was originally bestowed upon him by my mother, Rose Ranz. For one, Jake had never been married, and in those days all normal people were expected to get married. Jake lived in a crumbling hotel room in Brooklyn Heights cluttered with all the possessions that a mature gent can accumulate over the course of a lifetime. He had no car and rode the subway everywhere. Instead of watching television like a normal person, he spent most of his time writing free verse poetry about things like love, war, and being a salesman. One day, I received a small envelope with the return address of Jake's hideaway in Puerto Rico, which contained a five-foot strip of toilet paper bearing a lengthy poem in his inimitable spidery script. He was the author of a self-published volume of his own poems, Whisperings and Whimperings, published in 1944.

Uncle Jake was a man of vehement, though never violent opinions. He did not believe in cigarette smoking, warfare, or modern medicine, in particular drugs and surgery. He preached his spiritual/philosophical brand of communism to everyone who would listen, even to the Archie Bunker types in Ozone Park bars, who may have tolerated him because he was as liberal in buying drinks as he was radical in his viewpoints. Jake was very eclectic and often mixed religion with his leftist political views. He sometimes attended the Community Church in Manhattan, whose pastor, John Haynes Holmes, expounded non-violence and an enlightened, unsuperstitious Christianity. One day he went to mass at the Catholic Church across the street from our house, and claimed that he loved the incense and the priestly robes, and that he was as much a Catholic as he was a Jew or anything else. He would often talk to me about something called theosophy which I could never get the hang of.

Uncle Jake bought me a subscription to the Weekly People, which was the newspaper published by the socialist group that his own father, Abraham Ranz, had belonged to years before. He also brought copies of the Catholic Worker, Soviet Life, USSR magazine, and all sorts of vegetarian and naturopathic propaganda from California. You could say that Uncle Jake was the first of the beatnik or hippie pinko types, although he pre-dated all of these labels by many years.

Jack Ranz had always earned his living as a salesman--in his early years he was a traveling salesman throughout the South. When I knew him, he was a real estate agent and worked out of his room in the Hotel St. George where he had three phone numbers serviced by three old rotary telephones that were usually buried in his bed linens. When I talked to him on the phone, I'd hear one of the other phones ring, and he'd talk or sometimes argue with one of his clients; I once remember him telling somebody, "No I don't want to do business with you anymore because you tried to screw me out of my commission." I don't think he ever filed income tax returns.

As far as I know, Uncle Jack Ranz was born on April 27, 1897, and was the second son of Abraham and Sarah Ranz. He went to public school in Brooklyn, but found the old fashioned school system stifling. As he wrote in his poem, "The School Boy Speaks"

"Chains of desks

Chains and chains of chained desks,

With miles of iron feet

To bind my feet

To bind my speech,

To bind my soul,

Bound fast to iron rule--

I hate you, Public School"

Jack was very close to his father, who was an intellectual and a "free thinker." When Jack was a child, his father saved him from being ridiculed by classmates by trimming off his payeses (Orthodox Jewish sidelocks) which his highly religious, traditional mother was forcing him to wear. When he was 14, he quit school and went to work as a wagon driver, and helped support his family by various odd jobs. When World War I was declared, young Jack made the decision to go into hiding rather than be drafted and "kill his brother man" as he often phrased it. The way I heard the story, he fled to the Ozark Mountains to avoid the draft.

It was down South that he began to develop his career as a salesman and entrepreneur. In those days there were a large number of traveling salesmen who would hook up with distributors in the big cities, get some samples, and wander from town to town visiting stores and making deals. It was a job for a total extrovert, and Jake was certainly one of those. As he wrote in "Whisperings and Whimperings":

"I sell.

I've sold everything from Buttons to Buildings.

Children's wear,

Men's Wear,

Women's hardware.

And I've sold them too.

I am a salesman.

I like to

Sell everything."

Instead of focusing on one item, he would shift from one kind of merchandise to another, though I know that he sold jewelry because he told a hair-raising story about having forgotten a sample case with over a thousand dollars worth of diamonds in his hotel room in Charleston, South Carolina sometime in the late 1920s, remembering it only when he was miles away on a train. The owner of the jewels could have had him thrown in jail if he came back without them. He had to get off the train and catch another train back to the city, then race back to the hotel. There, he ran up the stairs to what had been his room and found the sample case sitting on the floor unopened, with the diamonds still inside.

Jack also tried his hand, with varying success, in other occupations. He was the owner of a "health bar" in Coney Island, and another near Bryant Park in Manhattan, which sold papaya juice and coconut milk. In the 1940s, Jake went to school for four years and became a Doctor of Chiropractic. He had gone to night school and gotten his high school diploma a few years earlier. He later ran a chiropractic office in East New York, Brooklyn, near the brownstone where the rest of his family lived, until he took on a critically sick patient whose problems went far beyond anything that could be done by massaging the spinal column. The man did not get better, and when he finally died, his family tried to sue Jack for all he was worth, forcing him to flee the city and return to his Southern meanderings. He should have stuck to selling in the first place.

Mahatma Gandhi was a favorite of Uncle Jack's. In fact, with his almost hairless head, thick moustache, and wire rimmed glasses he bore a resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi. When somebody around him would attempt to swat a fly, he would admonish the person that they were killing a "member of the universe." When I was a teenager he gave me a calendar put out by the War Resisters' League called "Days of Gandhi" which included text on all of the great events in Gandhi's life. He was a keen opponent of the Vietnam War and took me to my first anti-war demonstration in 1970. Jack even made up his own stickers that said things like, "Don't Go To War" and "Don't Kill Your Brother Man," and put them up all over the city. He even took the trouble to put his phone number on some of them. When somebody called him up and threatened to put a bomb in his hotel room, he assumed that it had to do with the stickers, though he also had endless problems with his landlords at the Hotel St. George, so that could have explained it also.

I visited Uncle Jack in the Hotel St. George a number of times. He lived there from the early 1950s until he was disabled by a stroke in 1974. The place was fascinating in a sleazy sort of way, about fifteen by fifteen feet in size overlooking a ledge large enough on which to take a sun bath, which was one of Jack's favorite pastimes. The only plumbing was a small sink in which Jack washed his dishes and dentures; the toilet and shower were down the hall. Uncle Jack was not a wonderful housekeeper. There was beach sand all over the place, and newspapers were mulching their way back into nature on the floor. He never made the bed; indeed he conducted most of the office work for his real estate business right in his bed, with leases and other legal documents hanging from lines of string strung across the room. Most prominent in the room was a tent and other bulky camping equipment which didn't quite fit in the closet.

Uncle Jack believed that it was important to be close to nature. He spent day after day at the beach, usually on Rockaway or Coney Island. He had an improvised beach umbrella made from a regular black rain umbrella attached to some kind of stick, and, his most prized possession, a rare solar-powered AM/FM radio that went with him everywhere. He told me that he'd paid over two hundred dollars for it: to this very day I've never seen anything like it in any electronics store. Jack's traveling kit also included a venerable army surplus knapsack which was his trademark, an air mattress with matching pump, and a thermos in which he carried hot coffee from a coffee shop near the hotel. He would also go camping in Puerto Rico and in a campground way out on the end of Long Island, where he would recite poetry and commune with the boys and girls of the hippie generation. Always, we would receive a stream of letters emanating from the woods.

Although Uncle Jack claimed he would live to be 110, he really only had 77 good years. His avoidance of doctors had apparently kept him in the dark about a perilous blood pressure problem, and he suffered a crippling cerebral hemorrhage in 1974. There's not much to be said after that, but if I had to spend my last years in a nursing home, I could only want to look back on a life as interesting as Uncle Jack's.