Black Market Cheese

My grandparents, Buddie a.k.a. Beelzebubbe and Zadie, are both from very poor families. Zadie leaves school after sixth grade in Chicago so he can help support his mother. He likes to tell us how he once sells a newspaper to a man who takes it over to a car with Al Capone sitting in the back seat. Zadie's main income as a kid is from selling sandwiches to prisoners in the local jail, splitting the money he makes with the guards, greasing the wheels even then. He meets my grandmother not in the jailhouse as certain wags suggest today, but on a job-seeking trip to San Antonio, Texas. Courtship leads to marriage and before he knows it my grandfather is borrowing his father-in-law's bread truck every day at the crack of dawn to make milk deliveries before the bread comes out of the ovens at the bakery.

Zadie is a humble milkman. A mere fifteen years later he has his own thriving cheese and dairy company that grows to the point of being one of the largest distributors of store-labeled cheese in the business. That means his cheese is rarely sold under his company name but instead is packaged to be the Safeway brand, the Kroger brand, or in Texas, the H.E.B. brand; H.E.B. being the most dominant grocery chain in Texas, initialed after its founder, Howard E. Butts, though a Jewish friend of ours gleefully points out that H.E.B. can be construed as standing for Heeb, and I can't think of it any other way now.

How Zadie gets from rags to riches remains murky, though he does admit that one of his biggest breaks is figuring out how to sell black market cheese during World War II, when rationing is in effect. He boasts that the government never bothers him because he always pays taxes on whatever he makes, even the cash that comes in under the table. There are also some incredibly well-timed stock transactions that might now be called insider trading. By the late '40s they are rich. If he were to know now how the business will fall apart years later at different times under the care of his sons, he'd die all over again.

The loss of the business under his descendants might be shocking to him, but he probably would not find it surprising. He avidly enjoys turning to total strangers in restaurants, telling them, "My sons are chemists. They make shit out of money." Later it is our turn, and he says it about the grandkids, much to our annoyance. He is right but we all hate hearing it.

Buddie and Zadie come from nothing and make something of themselves, financially at least, and they see one another as true partners where the money is concerned, neither begrudging the other much of anything, particularly since they are both actually quite frugal a lot of time. Much of her more valuable jewelry comes from Zadie foreclosing on personal loans he makes to people they know, and keeping the jewelry he is holding as security. Imagine the small talk at Hadassah when Buddie flashes a jewel on her finger that everyone there knows actually belongs to some other financially strapped mahjong partner.

Buddie probably gets a big kick out of waving her ill-gotten rocks under their noses. She likes to cackle and then confide to me in her deep baritone, "There's nothing I hate more than a bunch of women."