In addition to the strain of the family’s finances, there was also a discernible atmosphere of anti-Semitism that was pervasive in the city at that time. The schoolyard bullies the boys had to push past every morning on their way to Lorne Avenue School were incessant in their torment. Particularly brutal were the Wiley family boys, the biggest being Tor Wiley, who took great delight in burying Saul in the schoolyard sandbox. The Holiff boys would spend the last two periods frozen by fear of what inventive taunts might lie in wait for them once the bell rang. The Italians had recently invaded Ethiopia, so some taunts involved strange slogans that associated Jews with Ethiopians somehow — a twist that was so bizarre Saul thought it verged on poetic. One Halloween, Esther went to answer the door and had a bag of flour thrown in her face. Before it slammed shut, Saul heard a voice call out, “Dirty Jew!”
As the boys waded through the challenges of the Great Depression, there was little time for distractions or hobbies, though they would often play street hockey until midnight, or strap on roller skates and head down Dundas Street to Queen’s Park to watch buskers entertain the jockeys as they trained their racehorses.5
Saul’s father also found time for his own small pleasures. Well-read and highly skilled at chess, Joel continually lobbied the local paper to devote more of their coverage to the game via letters to the editor and articles. “It is better than Latin for teaching young minds to think,” Joel once told a reporter, “and it will keep young men and women off the streets at night.” As president of the London chess club and one of the top players in the district, Joel played both locally and internationally, by correspondence. Forms with chess moves would come in the mail from far-off places like Belgium, and Saul would watch his father as he set up the board and logged his own moves on the sheet. When Saul was eleven, Joel invited twelve-year-old chess prodigy Daniel “Abe” Yanofsky to stay at their home, and young Saul was awestruck by the boy’s abilities. Yanofsky not only simultaneously played thirty games of chess, including one against Joel at the London Public Library, but he also demonstrated to Saul how he could read a page of the Bible and remember it word for word, a feat he explained by saying his head worked like a recording machine.
By this point, Saul and Morris had taken up serious gambling of their own with a dreidel, and were engaging in every other kind of competition they could think of: gin rummy, poker, and matchstick races in the gutter runoff down the streets. The instincts were to kill, to win, to exploit, and Morris always prevailed and pressed Saul to play just one more game — and typically came out the winner.6
Dark, awkward, and uncertain of his place in the world, Saul was regularly subject to comparisons with tall, fair, and affable Morris, which didn’t help their sense of rivalry as they entered their teens. Saul often had the impression his mother favoured him, though his father was toughest on him by far. This tendency of Joel’s was most evident in the aftermath of conflicts that inevitably arose as a result of the boys’ regular competitions. One time, while on a trip to a family member’s farm outside London, Saul tricked Morris into a barn on the property and then locked him inside. When Joel found out he beat Saul so severely he was hospitalized. Another afternoon when a fight erupted between the brothers in their bedroom, Saul suffered two broken front teeth. The punishment meted out by Joel was so severe that Saul rarely talked about it afterward; it was another of his father’s episodes that he later preferred to keep hidden. That incident was the beginning of decades of dental work and a lifelong self-consciousness that rendered Saul almost incapable of smiling. “Which seems to suit my personality anyway,” Saul later liked to joke.7
Though she moved to Sam’s hometown of Hamilton once they were married, Saul’s sister Ann continued to be a firm and loving force in his life, and provided guidance that his parents were simply too busy to offer. As Saul stumbled from childhood into adolescence, he became aware that he was not terribly happy, one reason being the realization that he was woefully unprepared to become an adult. Ann had to take him aside on more than one occasion to inform him he should be wearing underarm deodorant, and if not, he should be showering more frequently. “Clean up your act,” she advised him, and then proceeded to outline the basics he so desperately needed. It took years for Saul to understand how to operate in the world of adults, and Ann couldn’t bear to watch him flounder.
Although Saul was aware that he once had another older sister, he was never told the full circumstances of her fate, nor that of his grandmother, and as an adult he confessed in his diary that he thought they had died of diphtheria. Ann never talked about the sister they had lost, but did her best to be all things to everyone, and continued to be close to her younger brothers as they grew older.
At fourteen, Saul’s life was small, as were his joys. Hockey on the radio. Glazed honey-dipped donuts and fresh coffee for fifteen cents at the White Spot on Richmond Street, next to the shoeshine parlour. Aside from Sam Paikin, his hero was Gerry Siegel of the Siegel Fruit Company. It was a small life, but it wasn’t always simple.
As they did when they were children, Saul and Morris sensed once again that their help was needed at home. This time they planned to drop out of high school to sell fruits and vegetables door to door, but on a more professional basis like the other vendors in London. It was a difficult scenario; Saul already knew he wanted to finish school and continue on to university. On hot summer days he sat on the veranda at the Wharncliffe Road house and watched with jealousy as the long procession of expensive cars driven by well-groomed locals and out-of-towners made their way to Western University, dreaming of the day he would be a student there. It represented everything he desired in life.
Something else entered Saul’s life at this time that offered him his first glimpse of a larger world. Ann would often say their house was “so quiet you could hear a mouse,” but by the time he was thirteen, Saul had developed a keen interest in music — specifically jazz, classical, and the big band swing music that expanded in popularity just as he was emerging from boyhood. Not unlike his fascination with Sam’s family, the contrast it offered to his own life bordered on magical. Through his teenage years he ventured out to see big band leaders like Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, and his all-time favourite, Artie Shaw, who had just been dubbed “the new King of Swing.”
After the shows, Saul liked to wander the silent streets home to Wharncliffe Road and reflect on what he’d seen. One clear evening in 1939, it was well after midnight when Saul emerged from an Artie Shaw performance at the London Arena and proceeded to walk up Dundas Street. The roads were empty. On the left he passed the looming facade of Joe McManus’s Hotel London. And as he passed Muirhead’s Restaurant, Saul happened to glance in the window. He did a double take. On a stool, alone at the soda bar, sat Artie Shaw, looking completely dejected. It was unbelievable. Saul stood and studied the slumped figure for a moment.
Temperamental, brilliant, and a perfectionist, the clarinetist was often immersed in turmoil about his work and how commerce was occupying an increasingly dominant space in the world of music. Recently, he had dismissed his jitterbug-dancing fans as “morons,” though he later clarified he found it hard to understand “why kids paid for a ticket to hear the band, and then stood in front of it and yelled at the top of their voices for the whole night.” Saul, who attended shows alone, was not one of those fans. Every move Shaw made onstage or in life, Saul followed — especially how he pulled together innovative bands that combined stars like Billie Holiday and Buddy Rich, only to swiftly dissolve them again to form something new.
Saul’s ears felt warm as he pulled open the door. The bell faintly jingled. With typical chutzpah, Saul slid onto the stool next to Shaw, uninvited. The two began to chat. Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, Artie Shaw was a twenty-nine-year-old