February 25.2022
“I don’t care if it did happen that way. Change it. It’s boring.” – My sophomore creative writing teacher.
I don’t know if this story is true. In retrospect, I doubt it. It’s not so much that I made it up as that I reached a conclusion, a long time ago, and forgot that the conclusion was not, in fact, a fact.
Dan Shiman, Grandpa Dan, was a jewelry manufacturer. His company, Shiman of Newark, made costume jewelry, of good quality. Gold-filled and fourteen-karat. In WW Il, it made all of the stars for 5-star generals. (not that this was big business.) I remember many things about him that were true- his visits to Chicago for thanksgiving, carrying “the line”-two file cases filled with examples of his products. His occasional dirty joke – “The best thing about breast milk? The packaging.” That he eschewed caffeine, but ate a Hershey bar with almonds as a daily afternoon pick-me-up.
Now to the apocrypha.
I’ve long told a story, perhaps a childhood fantasy, that we three Shlaes children, bored while visiting the factory (and not yet knowing that the Scientific Model Company shared the building, and the other side of the wall of his office held untold numbers of high quality ship models!) we were left in an empty office with a putty gray desk and a supply of beeswax to play with. This detail must come from being shown the real beeswax forms used to cast his jewelry.
In my memory, We made things-a little doll, a bear, a ray gun out of the sticky gummy wax, and Dan whisked them down the hall with a little grin… and then off to lunch. When we returned, he disappeared again, and came back with our creations tucked in his fist. A 14-karat gold bear, doll, and ray gun, lost wax castings of our morning’s play. We marveled at them, played with them, a gold doll shooting a gold bear with gold rays from a gold ray gun. Then we went back to the house at 2 Woodland Road for dinner, and the doll, the bear, the ray gun went to the hopper to be melted into rings, and cufflinks, and general’s stars.
It didn’t happen that way. It didn’t happen at all. but the daydream is born of Dan showing us the wax models of “findings”‘- metal jewelry pants -and the casting process.
I also knew for a fact that play did occur at the factory. Mom had described her job sifting pearls. They went through a series of sieves, familiar to any child or parent of the Fisher-Price era as the Colored Bead Sorter. Once in a while he sent boxes in the mail full of damaged semi-precious stones too small to be re-cut. Big agates, tiny sapphires. A sapphire had to be pretty small, Mom said, before they wouldn’t re-cut it.
Other memories, while true, have acquired a burnished It’s a wonderful Life kind of glow. The employee, an Italian, whom Dan discovered had been stealing gold from him. His uncle and father wanted the man jailed. Dan drove to his house, knocked on the door, and asked his wife if he could see the man. Let’s call him Mario.
Mario emerged, reluctantly, from a back room. Dan looked him in the eye and asked “What kind of trouble are you in? Because you’ve been a good man, a loyal man, as long as you’ve worked for my family. If you’re stealing from me, you must be in some kind of trouble.” Mario looked up, his eyes full of tears, and told of the medical bills, the car, the whatever it was, and Dan said. “Well then, you need to get back to work. I’m giving you a raise, and you can pay back the debt over time, but you can’t afford to lose your job at a time like this.”
Mario stayed with the company until its doors closed.
(A moment to acknowledge the nameless creative writing TA mentioned in the epigram. I didn’t like her-she was perky, singsong, and not a lot older than I was at the time. She’d assigned us to pick something and describe it as vividly as we could. I was bored, cocky, and wanted to shock her. I made up an unnecessarily vivid description of scraping up a dead raccoon that had been on the pavement a while. The following week she handed it to me and asked me to read it aloud to the class. “Now this is what we’re after.” She’d concluded that I was describing personal experience, not my imagination of the summer job from hell.
She inspired me to turn it into the short story “Raccoon” of which I am still proud. In short, she inspired me to be a writer – the most a creative writing teacher can hope for. Thank you, miss whoever you are. )
And now to the story in question.
Dan had a heart condition. He carried nitroglycerin pills to take if he ever had a heart attack. (The very idea of this fascinated my preteen self – high explosives in Grandpa Dan’s pocket?!) But he’d hated the pill bottles and vials usually used for this.
In my memory, the story is this- disgusted with the paltry pill-carrying offerings out there, even from his own company, he went out at lunch and bought a bag of peanuts. Back at his desk, he spread them out and chose the best. He sent it down the hall, and had his craftsmen work up a casting, and a mold, of a perfect sterling silver peanut, hollow, and threaded. This is what he kept in his pocket.
I’d seen it. It fascinated me, the way whimsy in serious people fascinates me. Pink socks with a business suit, my former group leader’s fascination with Star Trek. Grownups who still hold a child inside.
The peanut is real. The memory is vivid. So I was surprised, decades later, when I searched for a Shiman Silver Peanut on ebay. I found the peanut alright. But not from Newark- from Taxco, Mexico. It seemed to be a common item.
In retrospect, the peanut story probably formed in my head the moment I saw it. I’d never asked. Or I asked my mother, and she imagined it for me. Dan had spent time in Mexico, the “Mexican” cabin in Maine had a lot of souvenirs from his time there. But it wasn’t a Shiman product, and he hadn’t bought the peanuts nor picked one.
Still, there’s truth in it. It’s a Dan story. I still tell it, and don’t intend to stop, though I sometimes explain its semi-truth.
Yet there are truths that emerge even when we don’t know them. When Dan died, and we were at his apartment for the Dividing Of The Stuff, I asked Mom to find the peanut-I wanted it. After all, he’d made it. (or so I remembered.)
It was not there. Instead I received a small pen knife, inscribed “To Daniel A. Shiman, Welcome to the Old-Timer’s Club.” Presented by his father after 10 years at the company. But it disappointed-the blade was from some company called ESEMCO, not his company.
Years later, again trolling on Ebay for Shiman stuff (mostly presentation boxes) up came a picture of the very same knife (unengraved, of course.) But how? Why?
Of course. ESEMCO. Shiman Manufacturing Company. He had made it. I did have something he made.
Found a peanut.