A Memory of Ben Olinsky

Ten years ago, I had no idea what a blog was.  If I had, I'm sure I would have published this at the time.   This Monday morning, October 31, 2011, I was cleaning up in my office and came upon a CD on which I had archived old documents from a computer that had long ago been recycled.  I had been on the lookout for years for a copy of a story that I had written in November of 2001.  It was on this disc.   If there was a point when the groundwork had been laid for putting together the Trenton Jewish Project, this was probably the it.  I've done just a little editing, changing some present tense sentences to past tense and updating the information about my kids.  But 99% of what you about to read was written a decade ago.

It was a sad time, for 9/11 had happened just two months earlier and there was much uncertainty.   The weather was changing.  Another winter was approaching and with it, an inevitable case of Seasonal Affect Disorder.  I had also just gotten some very bad news.  Someone who I had met only once, but made a lasting impression on me had just passed away.

A MEMORY OF BEN OLINSKY

                                                             By Ed Alpern

     If life is a game, then the measure of your accomplishments should be able to be totaled up shortly after your death.  The final buzzer sounds and the score is up there on the big board for all to see.  The tally includes all the people who you touch along the way and the impact that you have on them and your community.  This is the story of a man who won big.  He gave and touched and he deserves to be remembered.

     I didn’t meet Ben Olinsky until he was 82 years old.  By then, he was having trouble walking.  I only met him once.  We spoke for a little over an hour.  Almost a year to the day later, I attended his funeral.

     I first became aware of Benjamin C. Olinsky while doing a community service project at the Jewish Community Center of the Delaware Valley.  Both of my sons had attended Ring Nursery School at the Center and my oldest, age 8 at the time, was intensely proud of the 12 trophies he earned through the sports programs that were run year round.  After years of walking past yellowing and faded photos stapled to a bulletin board, I decided that these pictures needed to be preserved.  There were 226 of them.  They spanned the decades, beginning in the 19-teens with activities from the Trenton YMHA (Young Man’s Hebrew Association) and ending in the 80’s.  Most were black and white, many were ripped, almost all had neatly typed captions with names of people who had played basketball, wrestled, swam, played baseball, organized dances, supported soldiers, taught children how to play sports and be good sports.  It was a collection that demanded attention.

     As I removed the staples and faithfully made piles for the different decades to which the photographs belonged, I couldn’t help but wonder who these people were.  One face kept staring back at me.  I first noticed it in a 1933 picture of a basketball team.  There, in the center of the back row, was a handsome, skinny man, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a very faint smile.  “Wait a minute,” I said to myself.  “I’ve seen that face before.”  

I rifled back through the 1930’s pile, then the 40’s pile.  The skinny kid had put on some muscle and before I got to the end of the 1940’s, it was clear that Ben Olinsky was some kind of a gym rat. He must have lived at the Y. 

     At the top of the 1950’s pile I started seeing pictures of Ben Olinsky, not as a player, but as a coach.

And then I came upon a photo from 1955, there was a picture of five women who were members of the Dance Committee.  On the far right, the caption identified a Muriel Olinsky.  She didn’t look like a sister, but maybe a wife.  

Muriel Olinsky on the far left.

 It turns out that in the late 1940’s a woman named Muriel came to Rider College.  She played basketball and found her way down to the Y.  The athletic director of the Y at the time, a Scotty Mosovich, worked with Muriel on her free throws and happened to introduce Muriel to the gym rat.  An 82-year old Ben Olinsky described it as “the worst decision that Scotty ever made.”  The mating ritual was far from typical, but what else could you expect.  Ben challenged Muriel to a free throw shooting contest.  She won.  “I beat him at his game and he had to marry me,” remembers Muriel.  The match lasted 54 years.

     The 1950’s pile also provided me a more personal link to this mystery man, Mr. Olinsky.  From 1954, there was a picture of a an adult handing a basketball to a couple of boys who looked to be 7 or 8 years old.  The caption said one of the two kids was named Tal Brody.  

 It was a name that I knew from my teenage years.  I went to Israel in 1973 for six weeks with the summer camp I attended.  We went to the opening ceremonies of the Maccabiah games (The Jewish Olympics).  At my aunt’s apartment in Jerusalem, four of my friends and I watched as this same Tal Brody led the Israeli team to a spirited win over the United States team in the gold medal game.  Now, I held in my hand another picture.  One that made this public service project even more compelling.  Tal Brody, who grew up in Trenton, became a star at Trenton High, was an All-American at the University of Illinois, played on the U.S., then Israeli national teams, was a member of the ill-fated 1972 Israeli Olympic games and later became a national hero in Israel, and Ben Olinsky had crossed paths.    The photo brought a flood of my own memories of that summer of 1973.  We played many a basketball game that ended with one of us hitting a jumper from beyond the three point line (ABA rules, back then) as time ran out and another of us screaming…”Tal Brody at the buzzer…it’s good!!!”

By the bottom of the 1950’s pile, my man Ben was the guy giving out the trophies to the kids.

  He had started a program called the Biddy League, and he was now its president.  The Biddy League was the place where hundreds of kids, starting at the ripe age of 7, got their first chance to learn about and play the game of basketball.  One of the rules of the Biddy League was that everyone played at least a half.  When I finally met Ben in November of 2000, that rule was one of the facts he made sure to tell me. “Everybody got to play at least a half.  Whether they were good or bad.”  Tears actually started to well up in the eyes of this strong man who could swear like a sailor (he was one—Navy 1940’s) when he told me, “That was what I was the proudest of, I felt noches (yiddish for pride) when I saw the kids learning how to play.”  Tal Brody was one of those kids.  By the time I met Ben, Brody was a middle-aged insurance executive.  The man who is still considered Israel’s Mr. Basketball has lived a charmed life because of basketball.  I found Tal Brody's telephone number and interviewed him in 2000.   Brody told me, “I started playing basketball at the Y in the Biddy League, that was really where I got my start.” 

     Brody isn’t the only one with fond memories of the man and the program.  To this day, many of them still keep in touch with each other, sharing a link they forged as kids on the basketball court.  One was a weatherman in Israel and another a stock analyst for Robertson Stephens in San Francisco.  There’s a lawyer in Lawrenceville and a Rabbi in Jerusalem.   In fact, there are hundreds of people whose lives were touched by Ben Olinksy.  And I guess that’s the point.  Even though you won’t read about someone like Ben Olinsky in the pages of People Magazine or see his story on a TV magazine show, he was a man who gave of his time and volunteered so that future generations would have a positive experience and a love of sports.  So, I really wasn’t surprised on that bright and sunny day in November 2001 when the chapel at the funeral home was packed and more than 100 people came to say goodbye to Ben.

     I didn’t meet Ben Olinsky until he was 82 years old.  In November 2000, we sat and talked with a video camera rolling for a little more than an hour.  In the middle of the interview, a client called and I had to rush off to a meeting. We didn’t get a chance to talk again.  Almost a year to the day later, I ran into his wife at the local supermarket.  I asked how Ben was doing. “He was hanging in,” Muriel said, but knee problems were hobbling him physically and Alzheimer's was robbing him of his mental agility.  I promised to get her a copy of the interview.   It would be ready on the following Monday when Muriel would be at the Golden Age meeting at the JCC.  My wife dropped in to give her the tape as promised.  Muriel wasn’t there.  One of her best friends informed my wife that Ben had passed away on Sunday, four days after I ran into Muriel. 

     Ben Olinsky was 83 at the end of regulation.  I met him almost a year to the day before he died.  The seats were full at his funeral.  There might as well have been a big scoreboard at the end of the chapel where the rabbi spoke.  His friends and at least one acquaintance had come to celebrate a life that was a lopsided victory.


A side note---Last week, I included a color picture of the Saperstein brothers sitting on a bench.  One of our readers, Mary Lou Byer recognized the setting instantly as Ahavath Israel.  Not only that, but Mary Lou knew that the bench had made the trek from Ewing to Lawrenceville when Ahavath and Adath merged earlier this year.  Well, a little bit of detective work uncovered the wherabouts of that bench and a matching one.  In the synagogue offices at Adath, the benches have a home.   The benches are inscribed with a plaque commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Albert & Anne Hirsch.   Case solved.

A tribute and a Family History

 When I started this blog nine months ago, my hope was that it would start a buzz and get people thinking and talking about the Trenton in which they grew up.   There were (and still are) thousands of pictures in the archives down at the Trenton Public Library that needed to be identified.   We’ve made some progress there and you’re invited to look at the archives linked to this blog and add some more ID’s.  I hoped to interview a number of current and former Trentonians about their memories of the city’s Golden Age.  I’ve done some, but time restraints have limited the number.   But to make this project really work, I needed the readers to provide material to research and that has happened, too.

This blog entry is different from many of the past ones and I hope the beginning of a new chapter here.   After reading my article about the Butchers of Trenton, Stanley Saperstein, who I met at the first meeting at Adath Israel in March, sent me an e-mail, promising that he was going to work on a history of the Saperstein family and that it would take him about a month to put it together.   That was on October 19th.   On October 21st, I received the family history.   That’s fast turnaround, but it wasn’t all that surprising to me. 

Which leads me to a personal tribute before we move on to Stanley's family history.

Once you set your mind to doing something like this, the words just seem to fly on to the computer screen.  It wasn’t always that way for me, but if you’ve followed the news at all, you know that Steve Jobs of Apple fame passed away a couple of weeks ago.  I used to struggle to write.  Sitting at a typewriter was absolute torture.  Where to start? Where to end? what to put in the middle?  I was haunted by the need to organize your thoughts and then type them, almost perfectly, or rip up the paper and start over.  Sure, we had onion paper and then White-Out, but to produce a relatively neat final draft was almost impossible.   It wasn’t as much writer’s block as it was the incredible waste of trees and the mechanics of putting word to paper.   That all changed in 1984.   I was working at the CBS Morning News and one of my responsibilities was to work with Dr. Bob Arnot, who was incredibly young, very smart, but didn’t know much about writing video scripts.   He had one of these new computers called a Macintosh.   I watched in awe as he was able to highlight, then drag and drop letters, words, phrases paragraphs.  I remember asking him if I could touch the mouse and try it for myself.  My sister was in college at Penn and she was the real impetus for me to buy a computer of my own.   For $1700, I bought a Macintosh Plus.   It was a small one piece unit, with an even smaller black and white screen, 1 MB of internal RAM memory (today's come with at least 2,000 times more memory), a floppy disk drive (a relic), and no hard drive (today you can buy a terrabyte of memory-1,000 x1,000 megabytes for about $70).  By today's standards, that little computer is the equivalent what a Model A is to a brand new Mercedes-Benz.   It came with a word processing program and it worked.     I still have that Macintosh Plus at my office (along with a few newer models).   After Steve Jobs died, I took the old computer and plugged it in.  I wanted to see the smiling Mac that displays at start up.  

 Of course, I didn’t have the system disk, so all I got was the question mark on the screen.  But it was still enough for me.  It was my homage to the man and the device that really changed the way I write.  I throw words on the screen as fast as I can, then move them, remove them, edit them, drag them, organize them and no trees die in the process.   It’s a freeing experience to write now and all I can say is thank you, Steve Jobs.

I trust that Stanley wrote his family history on a computer and that the speed with which he was able to write it had something to do with word processing software. 

The Saperstein Family

The Saperstein family is one of the original Market/ Union Street families. Meyer Saperstein and his wife Anna arrived in Trenton sometime around 1900. Meyer had a cart and horse that he collected metal scraps with. He started a scrap yard on New Street off of Union Street sometime after 1900. By 1915 he was wrecking old cars for parts and metals. Trenton Auto Parts was born around this time. Meyer sold used auto parts along with scrap metal. The business eventually went to my father Samuel and my Uncle Jacob called Jack. Jack was the elder born in 1904 and my father the youngest of seven brothers born in 1913 and one sister. The Brothers were Albert the oldest and owner of a pool hall, Simon who started his own scrap metal business, Joseph known as Jumbo was a bootlegger in the 1920s era and then a bookie. (Editors note:   Stanley tells me it's OK to let you all know that he still has Uncle Joe's gun.   "It is a 32 caliber Colt commonly known as a Saturday night special."   He had a luncheonette on Market Street. Edward married into a Maine lumber family and built up a very successful building supply business in Waterville Maine. Solomon was called Spotty because he had a white spot in his hair before he went bald. He and his wife Estelle owned Kalen’s Fine Arts, a Framing and Art studio, a Trenton landmark,   Ester was the Sister.

Here are all the brothers and sisters minus Albert, who had died of diabetes.
From left to right. Sam, Sol, Joe, Ester, Jack, Si and Ed 

Trenton Auto Parts was taken over by my father and Jack after Meyer died in 1950. Both of them entered the business at a young age. My father at 16 and Jack around the same age. The business did well in the 1920s. Both my father Sam and Jack learned how to rebuild parts. How they did this I never figured out. Jack specialized in transmissions and rears. He could fix any kind. Sam rebuilt carburetors generators alternators and other small parts.


During the thirties they almost starved in the great Depression. My father used to tell stories of how they ate spaghetti every day and were lucky to get it. WWII led to boom years with scrap metal bringing big prices and with no cars being manufactured, the parts business boomed. From that time on the business did well.

Sam Saperstein at the Civil War Monument in Cadwalder Park Trenton. 1940.
The cannons were still there when I was a kid and we played on them many
times. They were 12 pounders-Napoleon style. The carriages rotted away and
the barrels are now in the National Guard museum in Lawrenceville NJ

 My father opened Five Points Auto Parts on Warren St. but it was destroyed in a fire in 1957. In the sixties the Urban Renewal Project of Trenton took the business on New Street which by that time was half the block and part of the alley that ran perpendicular to New Street.

 Left to right:  Bob Saperstein, Stan Saperstein (the author), and his father, Jack Saperstein 1961

 The Saperstein Brothers;  Top: Jack, Joe, Sam Bottom: Si, Sol "Spotty"

I spent the summer of 1966 helping move the business to Southard Street where it remained until it closed with Jacks death at age 86 in 1990. My father had been disabled by a stroke a few years before. He died at the age of 79. The business at that time was the oldest auto parts store in Trenton.


When I was old enough to go the Yard short for Scrap Yard and get filthy playing among the old wrecks I was in heaven.  My cousin Jean Finkle, Jack’s Daughter, said she did the same thing. She is about 15 years older than me. Jack had four daughters.
Jack and my father were business opposites Jack was a no nonsense business man and my father would give the store away. Between the two they tempered each other. Jack was very generous to the family. He would do anything for his daughters and treated my brother and I like sons. He took me fishing many times  ( see photo) and when my brother Bob showed an interest in pool Jack took him under his wing. Jack played pool on a pro level learning in his brothers Al’s pool hall. Jack was also a antique glass collector. My father was a table tennis champion and taught my brother who to this day is a national ranked player. He also coached all our sports teams at the JCC and was voted Man of the Year.

Bob and Stanely Saperstein-Akiba Team Basketball-JCC Photo-1957-1958

My Uncle Spotty took over Kalen’s Fine Arts with his wife Estela when her parents passed on. The store was on South Broad Street. They sold high end art and did much of Trenton’s framing. They expanded the store to Princeton at Palmer Square and to Morrisville. As Trenton deteriorated they closed the Trenton store. They closed the Princeton location as they got older and ended up with the Morrisville store just before they retired. My brother learned framing from  Spotty and I learned to restore Gesso frames.



Thank you Stanley for taking the time and effort to write this family history and find these pictures.      Stanley also reports, "I am encouraging my brother –in-law do a similar article on the Popkin Brother Fruit and produce business. His grandfather started it and his father and uncle continued it. On his mother’s side his grandfather had a grocery store and were  involved in the Workmen’s Circle."  I hope this entry has also inspired others to sit down, right what you know about your family and share it with your family and with us.