Larry & Ann

All About Arnold
Sep 9, 2018 · 5 min read
Lawrence and Ann Sandman.

I was recently told that when my grandmother Ann passed away in 1999 while on a Caribbean cruise, she left a jewelry box to my cousin that contained, amongst other things, photographs and other mementos from my childhood.

Having no recollection of Arnold’s parents and having maintained no contact with them during their lives (my grandfather Larry passed away in 1974 while still in his fifties), the photo above is the first I’d ever seen of them. And that was a little less than two months ago.

What continues to puzzle me to this day are the circumstances that led Lawrence and Ann Sandman giving up their firstborn grandchild; to make the conscious decision to never see me again; to speak to me, to include me in their lives, their simchas; their family. My family.

I gaze long and hard at the photo above — one that could have been taken of a dazzling Hollywood movie star couple at Chasen’s on Beverly Boulevard — resigned to the fact I never knew them. And they never knew me.

And when I think about the jewelry box and its contents, I have to wonder where Ann obtained these items. How did she come to possess photos, newspaper clippings and other snippets of my life when apparently she never saw me or anyone in my maternal family after I was a year or two old?

Or did she?

When asked, my mother has always insisted that there was no contact.

And then there was my maternal grandmother, Mary Lurie.

My grandmother was a social butterfly. Knew everyone, belonged to half a dozen charitable foundations, sat on boards of local Jewish women’s societies, Zionist associations, synagogue organizations and participated in mahjong, book-of-the-month and Yiddish clubs.

And she was a proud and doting grandmother.

Well, aren’t they all?


In 1994 — during my final year of graduate school at Chicago’s DePaul University — I was invited to do a poetry reading from my new book at the Northwest Home for the Aged, on California and Rosemont. The reading was organized by the events committee my grandmother was on.

As my book had recently been released, I was doing a reading or two a week, so I had been accustomed to these types of venues — homes for the elderly, synagogues, schools and local bookshops — and the audiences my readings would attract, mainly older Jews, connected well to the Jewish immigrant themes of the book.

The reading at the Northwest Home came off without a hitch as I read selected poems from my book, took questions at the end and sold signed copies of the book at a table at the back of the room.

While packing up the unsold copies and gathering my coat and hat, my grandmother came up to me and — in the most nonchalant way — told me she thought she may have recognized Ann Sandman amongst those in attendance, that she thought she may have been a board member of the home.

I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but I’ve carried that recollection around with me all these years wondering if she was there that evening.

Me, c.1965. From Ann Sandman’s jewelry box. Photo courtesy of Marne Klinsky.

So, where did the photos and clippings come from? Photos like my nursery school picture (left), the one that came in a variety of sizes to cut out for framing or to keep in one’s wallet?

My bar mitzvah notice from the “Sentinel,” June 1976.

Or clippings like the one from the Jewish Sentinel announcing my bar mitzvah in June of 1976 (below) or my book signing events, which were also published in the local papers and Jewish press?

Knowing my grandmother and the warm, personable woman she was, I can easily envision her having kept in contact with her “co-grandmother” all those years, perhaps out of a feeling of compassion for Ann or sense of kinship towards a woman who would never come to know the grandson she cast aside.

Whatever the case, I take some comfort in knowing that— at least early in my life — it appears that Ann remained interested in my welfare and made some effort to keep informed about me.

As the years went on, Larry and Ann settled in Skokie, lived in a lovely home on Pottawattami Drive and had a small, white toy poodle named Keeney.

I’ve been told that Larry died of a heart attack a month before his 58th birthday (just three years older than I am today).

I also heard that he was fiery-tempered and fought often with Arnold and Ann; the tumultuous relationship between the couple — as has been suggested — the likely cause of his untimely death.

But every family has their stories; some, perhaps, closer to fiction than to fact.

Case in point is another cousin — a first cousin of Arnold’s — with whom I have also become recently acquainted, whose recollections of her uncle Larry are quite different: “He was even tempered, quiet and sweet. He would come and pick me up in his Thunderbird and take me to the drugstore for candy. He used to tickle me until I cried.”

I wonder what it would have been like to be picked up after school by Larry on a Friday afternoon in his Thunderbird, treated to candy and then to his house in Skokie, where I would spend the weekend watching Gilligan’s Island and Tarzan, eating ice cream sundaes and playing with Keeney out back in their garden on a freshly mowed lawn, Ann bringing out a tray of cookies and lemonade.

One can only wonder.

    All About Arnold

    Written by

    Reflections of a man I never knew; a father who never was; and a lifetime of mysteries that would never be solved. By American writer R.M. Usatinsky.

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