M
y father, Melvin S. Landow z”l, grew up impoverished, in a tenement in Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood.
From the age of nine, he worked to help support his family, offering his services first as a shoeshine boy, then delivering newspapers, then as a “barker” at the famed Coney Island amusement park. (His trademark “bark” was, “Give me a nickel, I’ll guess your weight.”)
The local non-Jewish kids would regularly chase him and steal his hard-earned money, and over the years he became so good at running away from them that he was accepted to college on a track scholarship. But before he could start college, he was drafted into the US Army, at the age of 18, while World War II was raging.
He was stationed in the Philippines, and before Rosh Hashanah he was invited, along with all the Jewish servicemen in the area, to attend High Holiday services on a nearby island.
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