http://sh1.webring.com/people/wg/genessa/warisdumb.htm

Jack had no middle name. His Hebrew name was Yankl.

Jack loved to drive, loved to dance and loved to play cards, particularly blackjack. He was fond of music, especially the blues (he said he once dated a woman to whom he confessed this fondness and she replied, "Oh yeah, I love 'Rhapsody in Blue'!") He had hypoglycemia (which along with his later heart problems severely restricted his diet -- and he sure did love to drink Yoohoos and eat malted milk balls!) and poor enough eyesight that he was considered dull by his teachers and even his parents, until it was discovered that he needed eyeglasses, which he then wore for the rest of his life. As a child he sold the eggs laid by the chickens his household kept. An animal lover, he was especially fond of cats, but as his wife, Ada, disliked cats, the family raised dogs, even trying their hand at breeding toy poodles. He adored the dogs. He did finally get to live with cats as an adult when he "inherited" some from his daughters.

Jack met Ada on a blind date. The family tale is that when she opened the door, her crossed eyes looked past him, his crossed eyes looked past her, and they never even really saw one another. He brought her a gardenia corsage and she happened to be wearing gardenia perfume. When they danced, she thought he was light on his feet; in fact, he was passing out from all the gardenia fumes.

When they married, they were informed that if they had a hundred kids, they would be buying a hundred pairs of glasses a year.

For many years, Jack worked nights at a Philadelphia post office, sorting mail. In the days before zip codes, he brought home flash cards with the postal codes of the time, and his daughter, Gail, helped him to memorize them. She also accompanied him on his trips to deliver new phone books to selected Philadelphia neighborhoods. He began, in the early sixties, also to work as a substitute teacher in the schools of Southern New Jersey. He may well have begun working part-time as a social worker before moving the family to Maryland in order to work full-time in that capacity at the Department of Heatlh, Education and Welfare. He enjoyed social work but kept getting promoted, and found himself in a managerial position instead of in the field. This he enjoyed less, so he made a dramatic move, leaving HEW for the private sector, in order to learn and practice computer programming. (One computer took up a whole room back then, and there were no display screens.) He worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles in Glen Burnie, Maryland, and also NASA in Greenbelt (citing anti-Semitism in the workplace as his reason for leaving the latter). He went back to HEW as a computer programmer and later became a computer specialist. When Jimmy Carter became president, the government offered an early retirement option to civil servants and Jack accepted the option. He moved the family to Florida, where he did not retire but worked in private industry, including a university, as a computer specialist.

(In his late forties, he had confessed a secret dream to go back to school and study law. It never happened.)

Jack suffered a heart attack and underwent triple bypass open heart surgery in June 1982, in Las Vegas, NV. He and Ada and his sister, Mollie, were returning from a driving tour of the United States and had just visited his daughter, Gail, in Los Angeles. Ninety dollars up at blackjack, he felt ill and had to leave the table. Back in the hotel room he collapsed. Technically, he died that evening, but the paramedics revived him. He spent a month in a Las Vegas hospital.

Despite the successful surgery, he never regained the full use of his heart.

In 1989, Jack traveled to Japan to help his younger daughter, Katie, who was staying there with his older daughter, Gail (who lived in Japan), awaiting a visa for her to-be-adopted daughter, Emily. In Japan, he was so delighted to find a KitKat bar with Japanese writing on its wrapper that he called Ada, internationally, to tell her what he had found! Om 1997, two years after his death, when Ada died, their children found that somewhat squooshed KitKat bar in the refrigerator.

On the night of Friday, March 10, 1995, Jack said "I feel so sick I could die." Ada rushed him to the local E.R., where, despite the fact that Jack had just turned 71 years old six days earlier, and was a heart patient, an EKG was not performed. He was told he had the flu, and sent home. The next day he was too ill to accompany Ada north (to Jupiter, Florida?) to the flea market at which they both worked on weekends, selling watches, jewelry and other accessories. (Jack, always a shy man, loved working the flea market; it gave him a context and an excuse to chat with strangers.) Trusting the doctors, believing Jack only had the flu, she went without him. Around noon, his younger daughter, Katie, came to bring him chicken soup and found him dead in bed. She called 911 and was walked through CPR but it was too late.

Jack was buried on Monday, March 13, but his older daughter, Gail, was unable to attend, as she was still in Japan, although she was in the process of moving back to the United States (and did so on March 27). But his story doesn't end there.

Eleven months after his death, his headstone arrived... with a cross on it! Ada was furious. She called the Veteran's Administration, who'd arranged for the making and delivery of, and paid for, the stone, and railed at them. The clerk was sympathetic. "Oh yeah," she said. "It says right here, STAR OF DAVIS!" The VA accepted return of the stone and recarved it.

When Ada died, and the gravediggers went to prepare for her funeral, they found that Jack had MOVED and was now taking up both spots! They had to find a new location for Ada, and moved Jack's infamous, slightly-more-deeply-carved than normal headstone to the new location, as there was no time to move Jack himself. Hopefully he has since been moved to her side!