Schnips

     I never thought much about Cousin Stan.  Not much of him either.  Pleasant guy, I guess, father to that fat girl in the taffeta dress and all.  I only knew one thing about him and that was that he was an executive at a big retail chain whose founder was a famous anti-semite.  Stan was Jewish, which made his career there ironic if not actually iconic. But they would not have known that because his last name was Vespucci, taken by his parents when they came over because they thought that Amerigo had founded their new country.

     In fact, I only saw him at weddings until that one time, at his house for some holiday or other, he took me aside and said he wanted to show me his collection.  I tried to get out of it because Stan was a notorious schnippet.  Don’t bother looking that up; I am sure it is a family word.  It means someone obsessed with details, tiny parts and pieces, all the little schnips of life.  Someone who turns their pickiness into your agony.  A hoarder of things or facts.  I therefore assumed that he wanted to show me his stack of yarmulkes from a life of Bar Mitzvahs or a deck of cocktail napkins from the happy hours of a lifetime.  But no.  This was something, he promised, that would interest me as a writer.

     Okay, I thought, how bad could it be?  So I followed him down into the basement which was finished with cheap laminate and smelled like bleach.  There he turned on the light to reveal shelves and shelves of leatherette covered books.  Hundreds of them, with numbers on the spines, lining all the walls.  As though an encyclopedia had infested the basement like mold.

     I assumed that they were his collection from the Book of the Month club or perhaps the collected works of the Bard in all the Romance languages.  No again.  This was his own personal archive; his collected papers so to speak.  What Stan had done was take every single piece of paper that passed through his hands throughout his working life – every scrip and every scrap – and had them bound into volumes by year.  Everything.  I know because I actually looked through the books…out of politeness at first, then curiosity, and finally some kind of morbid awe.

     There on the custom-made shelves, neatly preserved, was every memo, teletype, note, jotting, idea, agenda, letter, flowchart, and fax that he read or wrote as a Vice President for Personnel for the East Coast from 1942 through to 1985.  Here, for example, was a memo to Charles F. Ferguson, Esq. on November 19, 1967 noting that the document “in question” was being hand-delivered to his offices having been notarized as “previously indicated.”

Schnip schnip.

     Deadly stuff as you can imagine but I did notice one thing.  Many of the letters he had written where to people he wanted to hire but could not get approval for from his bosses.  “Mr. Pincus, in spite of my recommendation…;” “Miss Steinberg, disregarding my suggestions, this company has decided not to…;”  “Dear Mr. Roth, I regret to inform you that even though I have tried to…”

     He must have cut quite the figure over there in personnel as perhaps the worse hirer ever; the company never seemed to take his advice.  Embarrassing I thought, yet Stan stood over me as I perused these and I was sure I could detect some pride in his silence, as though the trifles of a life – even the foibles for that matter – could be amassed and bound and somehow amount to something.  So I perused, yawned, tried to be polite, and got back into the light of day as soon as possible.

     And there it would have ended as a simple play on the humdrum ephemera of modern life.  But it did not because in fact this was the opening of a three-act melodrama.  The second act came ten years later when Stan passed on to the greater personnel office and I got a call from his daughter who had shed the weight and the taffeta and who informed me thinly that she had called the Smithsonian Museum to see if they wanted the collection.  I laughed, but they did not.  The museum decided to take the whole shebang for their new American Business archive.  Here after all was an entire generation of documents capturing the day-to-day workings of that greatest of American artforms…the corporation. 

     But the best was yet to come. 

     The final act, ten years after that, took place when a lawsuit was filed against the company for its history of anti-semitic practice.  You can guess what happened.  Cousin Stan’s archives became a key player in court.   Remember those notes to all the people the company would not let him hire?  The names of the unwanted he had so carefully documented…Pincus, Steinberg, Roth, Epstein, Markowitz, and all the rest.  Taken singly, a sad note here or there.  But all together…a symphony of proof that the company had refused to hire Jews for 40 years.

     At the donation ceremony – there was none actually but should have been – I would have proposed a toast to Cousin Stanley Vespucci who had somehow managed to schnip himself right into history.