Celebrating the Life of Steve Gutman
It has been a few weeks now since my father, Steve Gutman, died from heart failure just shy of his 81st birthday. I have been struggling with the loss, and finding myself thinking of him at the oddest moments — lying in bed trying to fall asleep, or while watching an episode of Seinfeld, or just the other day when I was flipping through Facebook. I feel like his life can’t really be over, and the fact that I’ll never get to talk to him again is heartbreaking. He was a really amazing father.
One of the ways I cope is by writing, and recently I thought it might be nice (and therapeutic for me) to jot down my thoughts about the man we called Big G. If you’ll indulge me…and if you have some free time on your hands…feel free to read along if you like. Honestly, even if nobody ever reads this, it’ll be nice to know it’s out there in cyberspace for all eternity.
Steven Bruce Gutman was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 30, 1942 to Gertrude and Sol Gutman. He grew up in a row house in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn where he lived with his parents and older sister Sheila. His early life was filled with candy stores and stickball and stoopball and egg creams and bagels with lox and matzo brei. He was a second-generation Brooklyn jew who loved sports and food (with a heavy emphasis on food). He was an overweight kid who was the spitting image of Spanky from the Our Gang show. His friends called him Gutty Gutman.
Despite his weight (which he would battle his entire life) he was a great athlete who won the Brooklyn Boys League Softball Batting title as a 17-year-old. Sports meant everything to him, and in fact, he grew up going to Ebbets Field to watch his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. He told me often that my grandmother took him to games on Saturdays during the summers when it was “ladies’ day” and she’d get a ticket for just 10 cents. When my dad couldn’t afford a ticket he’d join the other members of the famous knothole gang and watch the game through a hole in the fence. He worshiped Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, and of course Brooklyn-born fellow member of the tribe Sandy Koufax. Baseball would remain a part of him throughout his life, a love he passed down to me.
My favorite Dodgers story from those days took place on October 3, 1951 when the Dodgers faced their rival New York Giants in game three of a three-game playoff to determine the winner of that year’s National League pennant. The Dodgers took a 4-1 lead into the ninth inning, and it was 4-2 when Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson came to the plate with two runners on.
Gutman family lore says it was at this moment my father decided to utter the fateful words (and I paraphrase): we’re going to win as long as Thomson doesn’t hit a home run.
Of course, baseball fans know that Thomson proceeded to launch one into the lower-deck stands near the left field foul line for a game-ending, three-run home run (known as The Shot Heard ‘Round the World). While Giants announcer Russ Hodges yelled the famous call “The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant” over and over again, legend has it my grandmother grabbed the closest weapon she could find, in this case, a frying pan, and chased my father down Herzl St. in Brooklyn vowing to kill him. Many years later my aunt met Thomson and relayed this story to him and the next time they saw each other she brought a frying pan for him to sign. I inherited that pan, which includes Thomson’s signature and the line: “Hi Steve, thanks for putting the jinx on the Dodgers.”
Perhaps the most important story from my dad’s teen years in Brooklyn, however, revolves around his time attending sleepaway camp in upstate New York. Like most New York Jews, my father attended summer camp in the Catskills. When he was around 17, he became a junior counselor at the camp and it was that summer he met a 14-year-old camper and aspiring dancer from East Meadow, Long Island named Lynne Brody. She would become the love of his life, and his wife for nearly 60 years. Of course, this is important because had he not met Lynne at camp I would never have been born. In fact, family legend has it I was named in part after that camp — called Camp Lenni-Len-A-Pe.
I don’t know much about my parent’s courtship, but I do know my father graduated from high school in 1960 and with designs on becoming a physical education teacher headed off to college at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. That said, he certainly had a lot of reasons to keep his mind in New York between my mother still in school at East Meadow High and his family and friends back in Brooklyn. Ultimately, while I don’t know all the details surrounding the decision, my father dropped out of Miami and went back to New York where he enrolled in Brooklyn College and eventually married my mother while she was still just 17 years old. Again, family lore suggests the decision was driven in part by the Vietnam War and my dad’s desire not to get drafted since married men were ineligible for the draft at that time. Regardless, Lynne and Steve got hitched sometime in January 1964 in a civil ceremony and later did the whole thing again with friends and family in attendance at a synagogue in Brooklyn on Halloween night 1964. Why did they get married in a civil ceremony first? They likely did so to keep my dad from getting drafted to Vietnam so they held a civil wedding and then planned the “real” one for later in the year. Ultimately, the marriage deferment ended in August 1965 and after that, you needed to have a kid to get a deferment — not coincidentally, given my date of birth of June 21, 1966, I was likely conceived in October 1965 only a few weeks after Johnson’s announcement. Clearly, my father was determined not to go to war.
By 1966 my parents were living in an apartment in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, and my dad was working for my grandfather at his shoe stores. I was born in June of that year, and not long after we moved to Valley Stream on Long Island. Valley Stream was an easy ride into Brooklyn for my dad, though often the 20-mile drive could take an hour or more. I wish I knew if my father was happy, working as a shoe salesman vs being a gym teacher, but he never talked about it. Frankly, he didn’t talk about his feelings much at all until he was an old man. I have few memories from Valley Stream aside from playing in the woods nearby and attending preschool at a local synagogue. In 1969 my little sister Jodi was born and I guess the house in Valley Stream was too small for a family of four so soon we moved to a large house in North Bellmore, further out on Long Island but still in Nassau County. The house in Bellmore must have seemed like the American dream to a kid from Brooklyn like my dad. We had a large backyard, a huge basement, and safe streets in the neighborhood in which we kids could play. My dad’s commute was longer, and even though the distance was still only about 30 miles the drive could take 90 minutes or more, especially if there was snow. My memories of Bellmore are pretty idyllic. We were close to Jones Beach, we often visited major parks, school was within walking distance, and the neighborhood was full of middle-class New Yorkers who had escaped the city. It was our own little version of The Wonder Years.
Not long after we moved to Bellmore my mom’s parents left Long Island for San Diego, California where many of my grandmother’s relatives had settled after World War II. I suspect this left a huge void in my mom’s life, but little did I know their move would lead to a major decision by my mom and dad that proved to be life-changing for all of us. We visited my grandparents in San Diego and it must have seemed like paradise to my parents. By 1974 my dad’s father had died and my father was running the shoe store along with his cousin Evan. The commute was taking a lot out of him, New York was cold and crime-ridden (my dad’s store had been robbed more than once), and with my mom’s parents in California, the long-term future in New York must have seemed difficult if not impossible.
Looking back, it seems like an easy decision to me, but what my mom and dad decided in 1976 must have felt like a hell of a risk despite the possibilities. My father sold the shoe store to his cousin, sold the house in Bellmore, and we packed up and moved to San Diego. 3,000 miles might have well have been 30,000 given the difference in culture between Long Island and California, but some of my parent’s friends made a similar decision around the same time.
My father moved his family to San Diego with no job, no prospects for work, and no place to live. It was a leap of faith that I am still thankful for today nearly 50 years later. Honestly, it was heroic. We settled into cramped quarters in my grandparent’s apartment on Trojan Ave. near 54th St. and El Cajon Blvd. and my sister and I were enrolled at the nearby elementary school. My dad set out each day to find a job, and before long he landed one selling shoes at Streicher’s Shoe Store in Mission Valley. It must have been hard for him to go from owning two shoe stores to working at the mall like some pre-Married with Children Al Bundy. Nevertheless, it was what he had to do to provide for the family in this new golden paradise.
We moved out of my grandparent’s apartment into our own at Lake Murray Terrace (The LMTs) at the intersection of Lake Murray Blvd. and Navajo Rd. in San Carlos. My dad sold shoes, and my mom stayed home and did her best Peg Bundy impression (crazy clothes, high-heeled shoes, cigarettes, and all). We were living the California dream.
It’s hard to overstate how much moving to California changed our lives. San Diego was, and still is, a great place to live with the best weather in the country and so many outdoor activities to explore. I took advantage of everything the city had to offer, from skateboarding to swimming at the beach to exploring nearby lakes and mountains. I loved the pace of life in California and quickly adapted to my new surroundings.
My father worked in the shoe business for the next few years and was quickly promoted from retail salesman to regional buyer for the chain’s many stores across California. He seemed to enjoy the freedom of driving around Southern California from store to store and meeting with distributors, and this lifestyle enabled him to always be there for my activities. I remember my father showing up at my Little League practices to hit fielding practice, and he made pretty much every game I had whether on a weeknight or weekend.
We eventually bought a house in San Diego, but my folks never cared much for yard work or taking care of a big house and we eventually ended up in a condo in La Mesa. By the time I reached late high school, however, the economy toughened up and I think my father felt empty in his job at Streichers and had moved into selling home improvement products (I think the first job was selling textured coating, a spray-on product to refinish the outside of a stucco home backed by Sears). My parents never spoke about money around my sister and me, but they must have been struggling because, by the time I entered my senior year of high school in 1983, my father made another fateful life decision that at first appeared to be the second biggest move of our lives.
My dad couldn’t find a job that suited him, but a friend of his from New York offered him a job at his roofing company in New York City. My parents made the difficult decision to separate until I graduated high school with my father moving back to New York and the rest of us staying in San Diego. I can only remember witnessing my father cry three times in his life, and the first was on the day I drove my father to the Amtrak station in San Diego to put him on a train back to New York. My father, who was afraid to fly most of his life (or at least until he discovered Xanax), must have felt like a failure getting on that train because as he said goodbye to me on the train platform he hugged me long and hard and began to cry. Those four days on the train were probably very difficult for him, but not nearly as difficult as climbing up a ladder on a New York City skyscraper to inspect the roof — not the best career choice for a man terrified of heights. His friend had assured him the inspections would be easy, but he definitely didn’t count on my father’s severe acrophobia. A few days after “moving” back to New York my father returned to San Diego, ostensibly with his tail between his legs and now unemployed.
Had the job in New York worked out, I may have ended up at college back east and my sister would have gone to high school somewhere in New York. I can’t imagine what that would have been like, because after almost a decade in California, I couldn’t imagine fitting in back in New York. I ended up going to college in Northern California and my sister finished high school in San Diego and ended up at San Diego State University. If you ask me today, I’ll tell you I am much more of a West Coast person than an East Coast person. I may have been born in Brooklyn, but I’m all laid back San Diegan.
Meanwhile, my father was in a career crisis. He couldn’t go back to selling shoes, but he was certainly a born salesman. My father always had a friendly and outgoing disposition that immediately put others at ease. Truthfully, he was a born salesman. Looking back I believe he truly cared for people, which is why he was such a great salesman. I watched my dad close a deal and I don’t think the people that bought from him ever felt like they were being “sold” anything. His personality was his gift, and if you knew him you’d surely agree. Everyone liked my dad.
Through some friends (I think maybe folks my mom met at one of the many poker rooms in San Diego where she played cards on a daily basis before the tribal casinos came to the forefront), my father was offered another sales position — this time selling room additions. The job enabled him to set his own hours, and he’d go out on leads six or seven days a week. Eventually, this morphed into a position selling re-stucco products for San Diego Stucco, the job that I’ll always associate him with. San Diego Stucco refinished homes with trowled-on stucco vs spray-on paint with rocks mixed in like what he sold at Sears. The product was very good, and my dad flourished as a salesman. San Diego Stucco became a part of his persona, though always cautious of anti-semitism, he used a pseudonym so customers wouldn’t know he was Jewish just by his name. San Diego Stucco had a salesman already, and his name was Steve also, so my father became Bill Hunter. It was not unusual for a Jewish person to change their name to avoid antisemitism (famously, Mel Kaminsky became Mel Brooks, Issur Danielovitch Demsky became Kirk Douglas, Winona Horowitz changed her name to Winona Ryder when she started acting, and Rodney Dangerfield grew up as Jacob Cohen for example). But it still took us a long time to get used to answering the phone to someone asking to speak to Bill. One time my father went on a lead that turned out to be at the home of my high school English teacher. He had to pretend he was my uncle. Oy.
My father was very successful at San Diego Stucco. My folks started to put away some money, and eventually they realized their dream to move to Las Vegas. I honestly don’t know what the appeal of Las Vegas was to my folks, but they sure enjoyed the Vegas lifestyle. As a kid my parents would take us to Las Vegas, hand my sister and me $20 each, and drop us off at Circus Circus for the day, returning later to pick us up for dinner. When they weren’t in Las Vegas, they’d drive to Lake Elsinore to play cards at the casino there. Or they’d go to one of the seedy card rooms on El Cajon Boulevard. At one point in time, my mother became a part owner of a card room, and I also remember her bringing home “strays” who needed a place to stay. Years later, as the local tribes built full-fledged casinos, my parents spent much of their free time gambling at Sycuan, or Veijas, or Barona.
So it wasn’t a surprise that my parents wanted to move to Las Vegas after my sister and I flew the nest. I remember one day my parents simply announced they had purchased a condo in Las Vegas to use as a home away from home when they went to Las Vegas. A few years after that, they announced they had sold that condo and purchased a small house in an active adult community just north of the Strip. The house in Sienna was their dream home, and they made a decision to move to Las Vegas full-time. Looking back, it was probably premature, but a dream is a dream. My parents loved that house, which was in a gated community on one of the region’s best public golf courses. They enjoyed going out to eat, hanging out by the luxurious pool with the other mishpocha, went out to shows with friends, and of course spent time gambling. My dad played golf at Sienna every chance he had.
During the early years in Las Vegas, my dad continued to work for San Diego Stucco. The man who wouldn’t fly began commuting by plane to San Diego, flying in on Thursday mornings, running leads all weekend, and returning on Saturday or Sunday night depending on how busy he was. He stayed with friends in San Diego, and probably enjoyed his time away from my mom. The crews at the Southwest Airlines counter at McCarren Airport and Lindbergh Field began to know my dad by name. As I said, he was a people person, and his ability to relate to people of every stripe was a gift.
This jet-setting lifestyle got old after a few years, so my father looked for a sales job in Las Vegas. I don’t remember which came first, but at separate times he sold patio covers and replacement windows. If it was for a home, my old man could sell it. Every lead was a Glengarry lead when my dad went on a sales call.
And so life went on for my parents in Las Vegas, but as the 2000s emerged things were about to get hard. The first hit turned out to be a heart attack for my father when he was 59. Again, I don’t know all the details, but it was serious. I recall a hospitalist telling my mom and dad that his heart was really damaged and that there was nothing they could do. My parents threw the poor guy out of the room and told him not to come back. They reached my dad’s regular cardiologist, according to family lore while he was on a ski vacation in Colorado, and he supposedly cut his vacation short to return to Las Vegas to treat my father. He said the hospitalist didn’t know what he was talking about, and while it was risky, he could patch my dad up. He was one of the only interventional cardiologists in the country at the time that was doing bypass surgery on patients without putting the patient on a heart/lung bypass machine which was very risky. He performed the quintuple bypass on my dad’s beating heart. The next day my father was sitting up in a chair with a new lease on life. Unlike his father, and his father before him, my father survived because of advances in medical science. My grandfather died of a heart attack at age 58. My great grandfather at 53. My dad would eventually outlive his own father by almost 22 years thanks to science.
My father was a smoker when he was younger, though he gave it up in his early 40s. He was also overweight most of his life and battled diabetes. His heart attack may have been inevitable, but it did not slow him down. After a while he was back on the golf course, and back to enjoying life. But his health would continue to challenge him for the rest of his life.
My father really wanted to retire after his heart surgery, but despite having worked his whole life my folks didn’t do a great job of saving for retirement. Like many Americans, they lived at their means rather than below them and never saved much. They owned the house in Las Vegas, and had some money in retirement, but their lifestyle in Las Vegas was quite lavish given their means. Nevertheless, my father wanted to stop working.
I think what my parents did next was the beginning of the end of their truly happy times. Hindsight is a bitch, but looking back they should have concocted a different plan. Instead, they sold their dream house in Sienna and moved in with my sister in Arizona. And while the following two decades were filled with quality time in Arizona seeing my sister and me, plus three grandkids, they always looked back at what they had in Las Vegas with sadness having given it up. They also thought they could save enough money living with my sister to ensure their golden years, and that being away from the Vegas casinos would help them stop gambling. They were wrong on both counts — my mother was unable to quit smoking and that had been a promise to my sister as a condition of living with her, and the draw of tribal casinos in and around the Phoenix area was too difficult to ignore (maybe they were addicted to gambling…maybe not. But they sure loved it).
My parents rented a house in Sun City, not too far from my sister’s house and close enough for me to visit often. A few years later though my brother-in-law got laid off from his job and ended up taking a job 100 miles away in Tucson. He commuted for a while, but eventually my sister put in for a transfer with her state job and they moved to Tucson permanently. My parents didn’t confer with me about it, but they decided to move to Tucson as well. They rented an apartment and settled into life in the Old Pueblo as it’s called. Soon after, my mom’s younger sister and her husband moved to Tucson as well, and they lived next door to each other in a nice apartment complex near the (mostly dry) river.
Without going into too much detail, the next few years were difficult. My father suffered from severe peripheral artery disease, complicated by diabetes. My mother, who never stopped smoking until her last days, developed COPD. My father had a severe stroke, which we thought was going to be the end of him. But he continued to fight. He had to have two toes amputated from his peripheral artery disease. He started to suffer from occasional confusion likely a result of the stroke and was diagnosed with vascular dementia. Then in 2022 he had what we thought was another stroke but turned out to be a seizure which put him in a coma-like state for three days — three days in which we thought he might never recover.
I’ll say this about my father: he was a fighter. You can trace it throughout his whole life. He wanted a better life for his family, so he moved us to California with not much more than the clothes on our backs. He came back from a major heart attack and bypass surgery. He got a new hip. He came back from a stroke. He played golf even after losing two toes. But the seizure really took the spark out of him. and with my mom deteriorating, and his dementia progressing, and his kidneys and heart failing, things didn’t look good. On top of all this, my folks had also quite literally run out of money. Until they died earlier this year, my sister and I were trying to get them approved for Medicaid so they could live out their days in an assisted-living home paid for by the government.
But when my mother died in March of complications from COPD that resulted in her going into septic shock, it was too much for my father to handle. He always said that if my mom died he’d follow her shortly, and he reminded us of that right after she died. A few weeks after her death, something may have happened to his already failing heart, and 42 days after my mom died my father followed her into the dark.
He was everything you wanted in a dad. I still don’t believe he’s gone. But I’ll leave you with some factoids and anecdotes:
He was, like me, a generational “tweener” born at the end of the Greatest generation but before the Baby Boomer generation. He never fit into either category.
He was a gentle, kind-hearted man who despite sometimes putting on a tough New Yorker mask was always a soft-spoken friend of all kinds of people.
He was a lifelong Democrat.
His superpower was being able to discern what famous actor or actress was the narrator of any particular television commercial.
He hardly ever drank. I maybe saw him drink six beers in his whole life. Yet he kept a stocked liquor cabinet for friends.
He once chaperoned a trip to a Padres game for my entire Little League team. At least a dozen of us piled into his work cargo van, with no seats. On the way home after the game, probably due to all the junk food we ate, one of us upchucked in the back of the van. The stench started a chain reaction and more kids puked. My dad simply pulled over at a gas station, hosed out the van, and we went on our way.
He loved gangster films the most.
Between sales calls, he could often be found at a nearby mall sitting on a bench watching women go by, or if he was close enough, at the beach doing the same.
He believed in God, and even though he didn’t practice he remained a proud Jewish man his whole life. He wore a necklace with a chai on the end and it never failed to start conversations with fellow members of the tribe and attracted many close friends over the years.
He was working at his shoe store in Brooklyn when he heard they were shooting an Al Pacino film nearby. He walked over on a break and found himself in a crowd of people behind a police barricade yelling Attica. Attica. though we never really knew if that particular cut made the film. Nevertheless, he always watched Dog Day Afternoon if it was on TV.
He loved Chinese food. I can’t tell you the name he called it because it was racist. But he wasn’t racist. In fact, he could relate to anyone of any station in life.
Among his childhood friends from the old neighborhood were members of the band Jay & the Americans. He was so proud of the connection and loved their music.
He claims one night at a New York Rangers hockey game he was sitting behind the goal at Madison Square Garden and he reached up to catch the puck after an errant shot and his watch went flying off his wrist. He never got it back.
He was a Seinfeld fanatic who always had a knack for quoting the perfect Seinfeld line at the perfect time. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
At sleepaway camp he was close friends with Ron Rothstein, who grew up to play basketball at Rhode Island and later was the first-ever head coach of the Miami Heat and coached for a variety of NBA teams. He followed Ron’s career his whole life.
His favorite song was I Am…I Said by Neil Diamond because it was about a guy who left New York for California. Well I’m New York City born and raised, but nowadays I’m lost between two shores
He was living proof that you could take the kid out of Brooklyn but you could never take Brooklyn out of the kid. In his later years, he connected to old Brooklyn pals on Facebook. He never lost his New York accent. He repped his Brooklyn Dodgers with hats, jackets, t-shirts, and online passwords all his days.
Here’s a video I made for his 80th Birthday in 2022. If you attended the party in person or on Zoom you’ve already seen this, but if you haven’t I think it tells a nice story about his life.