My friends and colleagues

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

The first Jewish family I remember as a little boy was that of Leonard Bay* when we lived in Troy, Ohio. Mr. Bay operated a couple of junkyards. One of the connections to our family was this.  

Mr. Bay came to my dad to make a bronze chain and decorative post system to put around Mr. Bay’s parents’ gravesite. Dad was known for his handiwork, and Mr. Bay had come to him, asking him to make this for him.

Later, when I was in school, Mr. Bay’s son went to our school. He was a year or two younger than me. I felt sorry for him; his parents made him wear a tie to our very public school. He was harassed – not for his heritage – but for his tie. I suspect he grew up tough.

In those days, Troy had a toy and sundry store operated by a Jewish family. The University of Cincinnati has a large East Coast Jewish contention. Many of them were friends in my college days.

When Elaine was born in 1978, she had an internal birth defect. We lived in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and there was no neonatal center there, so it was off to Barnes Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. Dr. Bell was Elaine’s surgeon. You could just tell how he loved the children.  

As Elaine grew and we went back for checkups, he would just glow when he saw her. Dr. Bell is Jewish. And Elaine is 45 and has never had a problem with the corrections Dr. Bell made, a surgery that did not even exist 10 years before she was born.

I have had both my shoulders repaired for dislocations. I used the same orthopedic surgeon each time, and he was Jewish.

I had early onset cataracts and had to have my lenses replaced by, you guessed, my Jewish ophthalmologist. 

For the last 35 years, my career has been centered on financing paper mill projects. This means a lot of time on Wall Street and in other financial center cities. The banking industry has many Jewish employees and managers, and many have become good acquaintances.

Now, one of my companies has a senior adviser who is a great addition to our team. And he is Jewish.

And then there is the owner of the paper company that has consistently hired me for 30 years as a senior consultant on special projects. This relationship has been the financial foundation of the last half of my career. It is a privately owned company, and the owner is Jewish. The company was founded by his father and uncle, who both escaped from Poland in 1938. 

I can look back over my 73 years and say there have been Jews touching my life almost continuously. They have been and are friends. One with great skill, Dr. Bell, saved Elaine from an extremely serious birth defect.

I have never thought of any of these people as Jewish. They are just people, like all other people with whom I have encountered (including the al-Wazir family I mentioned last week).

And not until I sat down to write this column had I considered compiling a list of all the Jewish people that have impacted my life. The list is staggering and all encompassing. I can truly say my life would have been much poorer, in many respects, without them.

So, who makes us enemies? It clearly does not happen on the one-on-one, person-to-person level. I lay this issue at the feet of politicians worldwide.

(*Leonard Bay is not his real name.)

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press. He may be reached at jthompson@taii.com.