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Jan. 26, 2007 William Levinsky was an engineer, my occasional employer, and my personal friend between 1957 and 1980. Originally, he was part-owner of a small engineering firm in downtown Chicago. In 1957, I had been on the work-study program for a couple of years, alternating semesters of college with stints at work. I had been working for American Bridge Company in Gary, Indiana for a year or so, but the long commute was too time-consuming, so I took a job in the Loop. Levinsky and one of his partners, Joe Wyatt, were Jewish, and the third, Tom Manolis, was a Greek-American. Manolis was the man who made the contacts, a friendly, outgoing back-slapper and cigar-passer. Levinsky and Wyatt were too introverted and shy to sell anything. Their forte was the technical end, about which Manolis knew little. The first time I worked for Bill, starting in 1957, I was truly impressed with his technical knowledge and with his dedication, as he worked 55 or 60 hours a week when he might have worked 40. Later I would come to realize that Bill's expertise was not so phenomenal after all. He was competent to be sure, but no tremendous whiz really, as I had first thought. What kept Bill from the sales end of the operation was mainly the fact that he stuttered. Moreover, he was slight and not very imposing. And he had a tendency to have avant-garde, bohemian, arty tastes, which I shared with him at the time actually, but most of his clients were baseball-watching, church-going, Sinatra-listening WASP's, who liked Bill no doubt, but had little in common with him. I was laid off in the recession of 1958, but resumed employment in 1959, working for Bill till 1960 or so. After that, I worked at some other small engineering firms in downtown Chicago, and also for Inland Steel Company, then a major steelmaker. At some time during my absence from the scene around there, Levinsky and Wyatt broke off with Manolis, because he had been diverting some small contracts he had gotten in their name to his own little secret staff operating out of his house. The break-up was unfortunate, because neither Levinsky nor Wyatt could make the business go. When Wyatt died, the firm folded for all practical purposes, though Levinsky kept it alive nominally as a one-man engineering firm. He was next door to a larger engineering firm that supplied him with work. He might as well have closed up his office and worked as an employee of the other firm. But he wanted his radio, with its Bach and Mozart, and his lithographs of Picasso and Van Gogh on the wall, so he maintained his own office. I worked for the larger engineering firm from 1974 to 1978, and at that time I was in daily contact with Bill, as we worked together on some of the same projects, like Byron and Braidwood Nuclear Power Stations, making drawings and calculations. We had a computer terminal, but it wasn't what they are today. I used to write computer programs and run figures for jobs we had, while supervising 30 men. Bill never changed. He still liked his avant-garde pastimes, and I didn't fault him for that, but by 1974, I was more production-oriented, ridding myself of almost anything not related to getting the work done. All those years Bill had worked long hours, and he didn't spend much money. He had a very simple apartment, where he lived with his wife, Claire, and his daughter, Sharon. I was there a few times. I was shocked at the almost austere furnishings. He just kept putting his money in the bank, and must have been worth several hundred thousand dollars. Most years, Bill didn't take a vacation at all. Once or twice in those 20-plus years, he had visited Israel. He was an amateur Hebraist as well. So in 1976, when I began studying Hebrew, largely because my nephew was taking Hebrew in high school, Bill and I often compared notes, and I asked him a lot of questions. He helped me somewhat, but was the first to admit he was no authority. In all the years that I worked for and with Bill, we never had the slightest trace of a quarrel. I admired him and he seemed to like me too. Many a time, we went to lunch together, sometimes at his favourite nearby delicatessen. He liked kreplach, knedlach, knishes, blintzes, pastrami and all that stuff, and it was fine with me too. Then in 1979, I moved to Atlanta, and we lost touch for a while. In 1980, I wrote a letter to him in Hebrew. Even my name was in Hebrew, though the address on the envelope and my return address inside the letter were in English, of course. I got a reply several weeks later from his wife, with my name in Hebrew, which, like many American Jews, she couldn't read. She merely copied it on the envelope along with my address in English. She explained that Bill had passed away, and wondered who I was. So I wrote back telling her I was Thomas Keyes, whom she knew perfectly well, and that I had written the letter in Hebrew just for a lark. I offered my condolences and inquired after Sharon, but before I got a reply, I had moved to Houston. So that was the end of a very warm friendship. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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