My Father, Jesse Solomon.
My father, Jesse Solomon, passed away unexpectedly on Friday, February 23. For those who did not know him, he was a man’s man. An avid outdoorsman, sports enthusiast, golfer, legendary thoroughbred handicapper, he could reel in a rainbow trout, shoot a quarter out of the sky with a shot gun, skin a muscrat, and change your car’s oil in the driveway. He was an easy conversationalist, a good story teller, and funny as hell.
My father, Jesse Solomon. In the summer he hit pop flies to his kids and played ‘pepper’, bunting grounders and line drives to Lisa, Greg, and I with a fungo bat. He taught my brother how to throw a curve and kick his leg up high (like Juan Marchel), the better to intimidate the batter. He built a horse shoe pit in the back and we played horsehoes until our fingers were calloused; his horse shoe pitch was a thing of beauty, floating in a soft gentle arc, flipping at its apex and heading dead-on for the stake: a ringer.
In the fall I’d wait for him to come home from work to play football, him teaching me to run button hooks, down-and-outs and post patterns through the trees, lobbing long, skyward passes to run under, diving with arms outstretched…to a kid, this was pure unalloyed joy. Later he built us a basketball court, erecting a hand-sawed backboard atop twin wooden poles anchored in cement. We’d play H.O.R.S.E and ‘Round the World, him with his George Mika two-hand set shot and pushing me to dribble and spin like Earl the Pearl.
The turgid upstate winters did not shut down my father’s wide world of sports. When the thermometer fell below freezing he built us an ice skating rink, spraying a garden hose back and forth in the frigid air while Lisa, Greg and I took turns towing each other on tobaggons to smooth out the snow and forming a layer of ice.
There’s more: my father sawed, sanded, and painted a gigantic piece of plywood and with two A-frames he erected a ping pong table in the garage. We learned how to slam the ball down our opponents throat and how to serve the ball with a duplicitous back spin. (There’s a vicious side to ping pong.) If we tired of ping pong my father found another indoor sport: boxing. He built a wooden scaffolding-like rig to hold a speed bag and taught us how to jab, jab, jab with your left and hook with your right, and he’d step up to the speed bag and throttle it like a machine gun. We’d watch in awe.
I could go on — playing chess on the dining room table, teaching us rummy and poker and Solitaire. Jesse loved the spirit of competition. Pitching pennies, tiddly winks, card games, skipping stones on the lake, picking a winning horse, it didn’t matter. He loved games, loved competitions.
My father, Jesse Solomon. He could fix anything. If he couldn’t fix it himself, he’d call in his “cousins”. After I opened my first restaurant, when things went wrong — a sink backed up, a refrigerator running hot — I’d call my father. He’d show up with Bobby, Dickie, Otsie, Nick, Roy, tool boxes in tow. They assessed and reassessed the situation and my only job was to stay the hell out of the way. If I offered to pay I was met with a look of disgust. Cousins did not take money from cousins (unless it was poker or pinochle, in which case they gleefully took each other’s money.)
My father, Jesse Solomon. After raising a family and spending a career teaching vocational printing to at-risk kids, my father retired and moved to Vegas in the early nineteen-nineties where he continued to pursue his passion for competition, games, and well, horse betting. He was the Albert Einstein of horse betting. In Vegas he might have missed his Myers cousins but he had my sister Lisa, brother Greg, his nephew Drew (and occasionally Riad); moving to Vegas extended his life by decades. In the end he was surrounded by the love of family and friends. He lived the life he chose.
My father, Jesse Solomon. He will be missed.
