It was pretty normal for people to get a little goofy at Taffy’s. My father and his friends would come after school and camp it up, in their best Broadway attitude. At this point in the business, Taffy’s was still at the old Arcade and they were ‘legit’ (which I gather means they weren’t selling pasties to strippers anymore, or at least not in the front room).
Taffy has a copy of this photo up in her apartment.
Taffy and Harvey, 1942
In World War II, Harvey (pictured left) was in the Air Force as a navigator. He was terrible at math, and Taffy pretty much did his homework for him. Taffy (pictured middle) worked on base as an accountant. I have no idea who the guy on the right is. I’m not sure if this is pre-or-post the Taffy Tucker incident. I’ve always had this idea of two different Taffy’s. There’s Harriet, whom I don’t know at all, and then Taffy, who is this amazingly inventive, creative, passionate and driven person. Somehow, I think that the haircut didn’t so much create Taffy as set her free.
I can’t tell you how much I love my boys for taking her out. Dennis and Normal used to live next door from Taffy (they moved, she didn’t) and their dogs were brothers, so naturally they became family. Now every time I’m in Cleveland, I see my boys.
I spent many years being driven around by Taffy. Part of this was the traditional grandparent/granddaughter relationship, but also I didn’t get my license until I was 32. That meant, until recently, most of the time I spent with Taffy in a car was with her driving. To keep me entertained, Taffy would hand me the garage door opener and I would pretend it was a communicator. When I was old enough (and finally tall enough) to sit in the front seat, we’d talk about Cleveland, and family and, yes, stories.
I remember driving past a graveyard, where the park next door was being torn down.
“My father taught me to play baseball there,” she said, pointing. ”Taught me to field a ball.”
My great-grandfather, Julius, was not a big guy, and the idea of him teaching anyone baseball was funny to me. He was also the parent of three girls, and I suppose at that point he had to teach baseball to someone, and of his daughters, Taffy was it.
“Every time we hit a foul ball, it went into the graveyard, and my father would boost me up over the gate so I could go in and get the ball.”
I thought about that for a while and then asked the obvious. ”How’d you get back over? Did you … climb on a gravestone or something?”
Taffy was quiet a moment and then laughed, “You know, I probably did.”
“You know, this is my golden anniversary!” Taffy announced at dinner. ”I’ve been divorced for fifty years!”
At dinner the other night, Taffy asked me if I remembered my 7th grade history project, where I had to interview my living grandparents. One of the questions was ‘What is the most impressive achievment you’ve ever made.’ And did I remember what she said?
Not missing a beat, I grinned. ”Yeah, I remember that one. I got in trouble.”
The dinner guests were surprised. How would this lovely, crazy, woman get a 12 year-old in trouble, they asked? I explained that we had been making our family trees, and talking about remembering the past, and we were supposed to read them aloud to practice public speaking. Everyone else’s grandparents had said things like ‘When my son was born’ or one ‘When I made enough money to bring my grandparents to the US from the old country.’ You know, all that real romantic book crap. ”But no, not Taffy,” I said, and then gestured to her. I wasn’t going to steal her thunder!
At that, Taffy smiled and leant forward. ”I told the kid, that it was being able to have affairs with four men at the same time, and none of them ever found out about each other! The trick to it was that none of them lived in Cleveland!”
Every now and then. I make a weekend trip to Cleveland to visit the old bird. She claims it’s so I can ‘fix her computers and TVs’ but I think it’s because I’m her favorite granddaughter (I’m her only granddaughter). I always listen to her stories, even the ones I’ve heard a million times, and I always try to fix whatever I can around the house.
Last night, she called me while I was in the air (my plane was late) and left a message saying ‘I though you were on the ground.’ and then proceeded to give me the highlights of the Indians vs White Sox game. Which sucked (8-2, White Sox won). As it happened, on the taxi ride in, I asked the driver to turn on the game, so we were listening when a barehanded double play happened. Yeah, we lost, but we had the best play. The moment I got in, Taffy and I started shouting about the play. Hugging, cheering, and so on. As with most nights, this turned into a sit and kbitz time. How were we, how was life, how was work. Not that we don’t talk every week, but now it was face to face, and that’s important.
Things Taffy didn’t know about me:
Taffy used to be very tech-smart, but it’s been years since she had to care, so this whole Twitter thing is annoying and amusing. I told her she doesn’t have to care a bit, but she should know we can ‘talk’ on the internet. I explained it was like email, only in real-time, and she said ‘Oh, like the old messages we sent on the terminals my Stevey made!’ It took me a minute to remember she meant the old IBM green-text terminals (3270s, which curiously, we use in emulation mode at work!) they had at Taffy’s. I didn’t know we’d had a messaging app, until I realized she probably meant the old BBS. I had to tell her “Oh sure, like that, only anyone in the world can talk.” She leant back in her chair and said, simply, “Wow. Isn’t that amazing.”
Talking about Stevey, my Dad, she went on to tell me about how she was so proud of him, and wished he got recognition for being smart in the US, instead of just in Japan. His old school pretends to ignore him, and Dad claims he doesn’t mind, but I think he does and so does she. Then she says the kicker of the night.
I was so proud of him, the way he went to Japan and helped and stayed there, after the earthquake and the salami.
That’s Taffy, folks.
Anyone who knows Taffy knows that her birth name is Harriet Hermaine Gombussy, and her legal name is Harriet Epstein. Of course, she doesn’t answer to anything but Taffy Epstein, and even her apartment complex gave in and put Taffy on the doorbell list. Once, when we were traveling to New York, Taffy had to produce her passport to get on the plane. It turned out that while her ticket had been issued to Taffy, her drivers license said Harriet, and the new flying regulations insisted she prove who she was. Thankfully her passport had Taffy listed as her legal alias!
I’ve never called Taffy ‘grandma’ or any such age defining title per her request. In school and later at work, this caused no end of confusion to my friends, as I’d tell them I was going places with Taffy. One coworker, having met my girlfriend, asked me outright if I was having an affair with this Taffy person.
These are my favorite stories of Taffy’s name ever. Both of these tales, I’m quite sure, have been embellished a few times in the retelling, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I consider them the apocryphal tales of Taffy.
In the mid 1990s, Taffy had bypass surgery to clear up obstruction in her arteries. At the time, Taffy smoked considerably, drank nothing but white wine, and ate little but red meat. It really shouldn’t have surprised anyone, but the only reason we found out was that Taffy had gotten winded climbing up the stairs while visiting Susan in New York. Of course, Taffy hadn’t been sick a day in her life, so she had her own thoughts on the matter.
At the hospital, there was a small mix-up in the meals, and a steak dinner was delivered to Taffy’s room. Knowing that Taffy was supposed to eat low fat and low cholesterol foods, my father and aunt took the onerous duty of disposing of the inappropriate meal in the most gastronomically pleasing way possible. They ate it for her.
The surgery itself went well for Taffy, then in her 70s, and a few hours after it was complete, it became the duty of one poor man to sit and wake her up. The method by which this was done was to have the fellow repeat her name until she woke up. While current statistics say that 100 people a day wake up during surgery, Taffy wasn’t one of them. She also wasn’t one of the people who wake up right away out of the fog of anesthesia, and the nurses at the hospital told her that the young man who was supposed to wake her up had been there for a long time.
Finally, one of the other nurses who had met Taffy before walked by and noticed his problem. Taffy was breathing just fine, her heart rate was fine, and by now the anesthetic should have worn off. In short, there was no reason for Taffy not to be waking up right away. The fellow wasn’t worried, though, since sometimes it just took a while for people to wake up from surgery.
The nurse, on the other hand, realized he had a problem: he kept asking ‘Harriet’ to wake up.
“Why don’t you try Taffy instead of Harriet,” she said.
“Taffy?” said the fellow back.
“Yes?” said Taffy, waking up.
Taffy’s niece, Kahana (who passed away far too soon), had a favorite story about Taffy that takes place right after her bypass surgery. The doctor was talking to Susan and told her not to worry, and that her mother would be back in the kitchen cooking “very soon.” Susan replied “that would be a miracle, because she never did that before the operation.”
This was told to me by my grandfather Harvey, Taffy’s ex-husband, and was retold by my father on numerous occasions. True or not, over-blown or not, this story serves to explain the one question everyone asks.
How the hell did Harriet get the name ‘Taffy?’
Lots of people I know make jokes about the candy, or taffy apples. The name has nothing to do with food. It’s all because of Milt Caniff and an unfortunate hair-cut one summer in Reno.
My grandfather was in the Army Air Force as a navigator during World War II and, naturally, Taffy went along to his posting in Reno with him. In addition to her job as an accountant, Taffy would go out to the air base and pick up the various flyers to drive them to where everyone lived. Given how Taffy loved to drive, I can see her enjoying not only the trip but all the men hanging around her. One thing the boys always wanted to see when they got there was the latest Milt Caniff strip — Terry and the Pirates.
Popular rumor at the time said that Milt Caniff had an uncanny ability to predict where and when our boys would be sent next. Naturally everyone wanted to read the strips to see where Terry and Pat were, so they could be prepared. Regardless of that rumor, Caniff also had a way of writing that was so pure and honest that you couldn’t help but feel like he not only knew what was going on in the soldiers’ minds, but that he was there with them.
A great example of Caniff’s ability can be seen in the October 17, 1943 strip, where Terry has been newly commissioned as a fighter pilot. His instructor, Flip Corkin, takes him aside and gives him a speech on the responsibilities he must now shoulder. This strip was so received that it was read aloud in the U.S. Congress and was even added to the congressional record.
One of the other things Taffy often did on the base was get a hair cut. All the pictures I’veseen of Taffy from that era have her in a short, near shoulder-length bob. On the left is a picture circa 1948 with Taffy and my father, Steven. I never actually saw her with this hairstyle, as by the time I showed up, she’d gone to an efficient, short cropped style that looked just as perfect on her as any hairstyle.
That fateful day in Reno, when the heat was up and Taffy’s temper was too, she told the fellow to just cut it short. Depending on which story you believe, Taffy either asked him to cut it all off, or the fellow was so used to cutting crew-cuts for the service men than he just buzzed her hair short. Either way, Taffy ended up with an incredibly short ‘do.’
At this same time, Flip Corkin’s character was dating an Army nurse. In one rather remarkable episode, she was kidnapped by cannibals and in preparation for making her their dinner, they shaved off her hair.
Well.
Out of the canteen come all the service men for their ride back to the base. There in the jeep sits a real live woman with a short hair cut. “Hey, Taffy Tucker!” shouts out someone, and the name stuck. Fifty years later, you can’t even wake her up without using Taffy.
I wrote this in college for a creative writing class. As much as I’d like to edit it, at the suggestion of my Aunt Susan, I left it alone. The word limit in the class is the only reason I didn’t mention things like Lollie and the bathroom (‘big old long thing’ will make anyone who knows that story laugh), or Fuzzie and the stripper (I was not supposed to be in the room), or a hundred other anecdotes. I remember, and love, all of you.
My grandmother always told me to be observant, look for details, and to keep my mouth shut. I have trouble with that last one, the same as she did. We prefer to call it ‘hoof in mouth disorder,’ and there is only one cure. Patient and careful thought before you speak. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years, and I’m much less blunt. This probably only goes to fit me into the norm of society, where people bottle up their feelings until they’re screaming, like a boiling pot. This is, I think, why we have wars, people bottling things up too much. So I still say what I think, and deal with the boiling water as it splashes me.
My grandmother taught me many things when I was small, and nothing she ever taught me have I found to be worthless. She taught me how to add and subtract. One Saturday I did the account books for the “small” dance wear business that she owned and ran. It was not out of kindness, no, it was so she could make me French toast. I couldn’t have been more that six or seven, and I knew that she was pleased that I had done them, and promised to give me the desk she worked at. She took me to the art museums, to see the paintings, mummies and the knights in armor. The knights were always my favorite.
I used to sit and look at them. The Cleveland Museum of Art had them all lined up. First knights on horses, the metal glistening and shining, lances held up by the disembodied armor. Behind them were the ranks of pike men, in their half armor. Helms with nose guards, peaked tops, which seemed ridiculous at the time, but altogether overly fascinating. I adored the knights, but the mummies scared me, and when the real Egyptian sarcophagi came with real mummies inside, I was petrified and wouldn’t go in the room.
Those were my Saturdays. Friday my grandmother would pick me up from elementary school, or one of her employees would, and we would go to Taffy’s Warehouse. See, Taffy was my grandmother, and the warehouse was the head quarters for her small line of dance wear stores which she opened in the 40′s. Mind you, this was back when single mothers didn’t do this sort of thing, but Taffy did. All of the stores were named Taffy’s, even the one on Broadway in New York. I remember my Aunt telling me about calling Taffy and saying “You’re up on Broadway, mom.” And now all the stores have been sold to a larger dance wear store, Capezio, and renamed to that, but still the memory of playing up and down the aisles of the warehouse lingers.
Everyone was my aunt or uncle. There was Eileen who would build me a house out of used cardboard boxes, cut my hair, and let me answer the telephone for her, look at the pictures of her grownup children while she answered the phone, or draw on her blotter. Mary-Lou always had a variety of sweets in her drawers. Twinkies, Ho-Ho’s, all the things your parents never want you to eat, and if I asked, I was allowed to have some. The inventory stacks were my private playground. I could be scout, slipping through the woods to find some secret information for my troop. But mostly I ran messages, letters and envelopes back and forth between the various sections, diving through aisles as if my life depended on it. I was the Tsar’s personal courier, I was Michael Stroganoff, the best and the only chance to get the important documents.
Of the warehouse, my favorite place of all was the sewing room. Grandmother Taffy (Just Taffy to everyone, even me) believed in having her outfits handmade by people. There were lines and lines of women at old-fashioned machines, churning out various costumes for companies like the Rockettes and Disney. Perhaps there could have been better ways of working the assembly line but at Taffy’s, there were always smiles. I can never remember anyone being overly upset. E, the head seamstress and designer, used to make me my Halloween costumes, let me help her, and play with her Scottie dog, or read the books she had in her office, just for me.
As I grew older, and eventually moved away to San Diego, California, I never lost touch with my friends at Taffy’s. My father used to bring me on all his business trips, and when ever they were near Cleveland, we would stop by to visit Taffy. Sometimes, when the winter sun was rising, and the ice covered buildings were quiet and sullen, trapped in their frigidness, my father and I would drive with Taffy to work, and open the warehouse for business. In the silence of the immense building, I would sit on reams of cloth and look around, imagining the noises and faces of the people I knew, and amidst the frost, things were warm and full of joy.
I remember taking inventory was a game for me. Lolli would read off what we should have, and I would clamber up the stacks and tell her what we did have. Work was a giant game, and all of my extended family enjoyed having me play with them. I like to think that I helped make their life more enjoyable, by simply having fun, and helping them not have to be studious, and serious adults all the time. Fuzzy sent me on errands, zipping up and down the rows to the offices, in and out of the mail room window until Taffy or Judy brought me lunch from Wendy’s or McDonald’s, and I sat with Taffy’s wire-haired dachshunds beneath antique Virginia Slim’s posters. “You’ve come a long way, Baby.” Then off to the computer room to watch Scooby-Doo on the ten-inch, black and white TV.
Now Taffy’s is Capezio’s, and the people I knew no longer work there, and the family I had, my aunts and uncles are gone. No one is there to pass the children through windows, build them castles, teach them computer games, or let them become the biker babe on their Honda motorcycle. I miss it, but I can revel in the memories of being the Captain of the USS Savior, with the warehouse as my intrepid starship, and the employees as my crew. It was my home.
I mentioned before that sometimes it’s just hard to come up with a story. Either because people don’t have a lot of individual ‘me and Taffy’ stories or because they can’t come up with one that feels right, people decided to send short ‘excerpts’ of Taffy that came into their lives.
Maria Di Dia is one of Susan’s best friends and, through Susan, has gotten to know Taffy. When Taffy and I went to NYC in 1993, Maria got us tickets to a (then) little known performance group, with a show off Broadway called The Blue Man Group.
I don’t really have any Taffy stories as I have not had the privilege of spending a lot of time with her. However, recently, after her eye surgery I called her one evening. She was her usual chipper and loving self. I’d been having a difficult time at my business and I was bitching about it! She sort of laughed, that deep throated Taffy laugh, and said “Reach for the moon…if you fall it’s into stars.” I had an epiphany on that summer day in NYC! Since that day I entered that quote into my Palm Pilot and it is there for me every day! A special gift from her that she probably doesn’t know meant the moon and the stars to me!!
Taffy’s also pretty good at malapropisms. She’s old now, can’t hear well, can’t see well, but she insists on being in the middle of everything so she can keep up. ”Don’t talk louder, e-NUN-ciate!” she complains. Her hearing loss has affected the upper-register mostly, so mostly she can’t hear female voices. Ironically, perhaps, Taffy’s never had a lot of female friends, so she isn’t missing all that much.
Since she can’t hear well, she can’t hear you pronounce new words to her, and thanks to the Internet, there are a lot of them. When I was teaching her how to email (yes, I did that, sorry), she asked me what the “CC” and “BCC” lines were for. I told her “Taff, you know this! Carbon Copy and Blind Carbon Copy!” Taffy turned and glared at me, “How the hell do kids today know what the hell carbon copy is anyway!?”
In my aunt’s room is my father’s favorite chair (and one day, he knows I will steal it, as I’ve coveted it my entire life). On that chair are two cushions that sum up Taffy’s outlook on life.
“My idea of housecleaning is to sweep the room with a glance.”
and
“Never economize on luxury.”
While my idea of housecleaning is to clean on an OCD level, heaven help me, I don’t go for the cheap stuff when I want to get something special.
