As my mother clawed her way from welfare to nursing, she dragged me along with her, and when she sensed that her young teen might need more structure and guidance than she could give him, she asked the woman whose house she cleaned to intercede on my behalf. The timeline is murky in my memory, for the woman got me a job at the University of Pittsburgh when I was about 13 years old, and an unpaid internship with an architectural firm when I was older. I think that at one point, I was earning money at the library and learning life at Sam Jamron’s firm. Sam was a sad-eyed architect of whom Mrs. Byers had implored to “keep (me) busy.” I’ll never know what he expected of the budding artist, or to do for him, but I came to the firm of Jamron and Keegan and sat down to draw.
Sam taught me the rudiments of drafting, to turn the pencil as I drew a line, and to letter in all capitals. He gave me an old drafting table, one that I would learn was an antique Peerless table, with a black cast iron base. Sam spoke quietly to me as he instructed me on the use of the Koh-I-Noor lead holder that I used to draw the lines on drafting paper. When I was employed as an artist for an electrical contractor at the Marble Hill nuclear power plant, I did not utilize lettering techniques learned in art school to create the charts that tracked the installation of electrical cable, but the architectural lettering method taught to me by Sam Jamron. When I returned to Pittsburgh to visit family after some years in California, Sam and his wife invited me and my bride to visit his house. I grew to love Sam so much that my bride and I asked him to be godfather to our first child. It was not until we understood what “godfather” meant in the Jewish community that we accepted his rejection of our request.
My mother helped me attain exposure to a multi-ethnic world, an exposure that started in my high school, an integrated institution in a segregated city. In the closed stacks of the library at the University of Pittsburgh, I heard many languages being spoken, and saw interesting, bright and wonderful clothing. When I was an art director for L.S. Ayres’ advertising department, I traveled to New York City for photo shoots, and would often stand on the streets outside the studio just to listen to the many languages being spoken by the passing crowd.
I reject, out of hand, blanket calls to fear: “those people are stealing your jobs,” or, “these people are less than human,” or, “they are different, and you must beware!” I’ve learned to be artistically and intellectually curious about all cultures and all lives. I refuse to accept the characterization of an entire group of people as “rapists” and “bad hombres.” I am a graduate of Fred Rogers’ neighborhood, who invited us all to come to enjoy a beautiful day, just because we are who we are.
Forty-eight years after I left the city of Pittsburgh and left Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, my heart lurched when, at the other end of Wilkins Avenue from the firm where I learned to turn a crisp pencil line, a man murdered 11 people in the synagogue that I had traveled past since I was a teenager, punched a deadly, divisive hole into that solid, dignified presence in Squirrel Hill.
I mourn those lives, the erosion of civility and the creation of divisions.