Howard Barry Levin There are two types of records left by a life: facts and impressions. Facts can always be found – Birth Certificates, school yearbooks, diplomas, property records, marriage certificates, drivers licenses, etc. Each a record marking achievements, rights and privileges. Impressions are the stories generated by a person’s life and imprinted on theContinue Reading
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Howard Barry Levin
There are two types of records left by a life: facts and impressions. Facts can always be found – Birth Certificates, school yearbooks, diplomas, property records, marriage certificates, drivers licenses, etc. Each a record marking achievements, rights and privileges.
Impressions are the stories generated by a person’s life and imprinted on the memories of others. As such, they are more fleeting, lasting but a generation or two, and fading with time. Sadly, it is impressions that are the truer record of a person’s life, and how that life radiated out to others.
Howard Barry Levin, (Barry to close friends and family, Howard to everyone else), was born on August 4, 1948, and passed on December 20, 2022, leaving behind his son (Adam), daughter (Jessica), grandchildren (Davidson and Cassius), brother (Jack) and two sisters (Joyce and Ellen). He was born in Baltimore, MD, a place with which he seemed to attribute some mystical relevance. When my son Cassius was born, he said, “He is the last in the Baltimore Levin line to carry the name,” and when something would go awry, he would frequently attribute it to the “Baltimore curse.”
On a drive to Disney World when I was a young boy, dad made a point of passing through Baltimore. While I vaguely remember the city’s seaport, I have a strong recollection of driving up and down residential streets looking for his childhood home. We never found it, because the city had changed so much between his youth and our trip, and the memories of children, while precious, can be problematic, encrusted as they are in the whimsy of imagination.
While still young, his family moved to North Plainfield, NJ, into a small residential neighborhood not too far from his Bubbe and Zaide, a place that I remember from my own youth. The house in North Plainfield is small by today’s standards, but may have been one of dad’s favorite places. I do not believe that he loved the place so much as what it represented – his family, together. If I had to describe that feeling, it would be the warmth that embraced you when you walked through the door to the smell of Matzo Ball soup – both of which emanated from a very busy kitchen with a smiling Bubbe.
Six people lived in that cozy home, my Bubbe (Sally) and Zaide (Lou), Uncle Jack, my dad, Aunt Joyce and Aunt Ellen.
In school, dad wrestled and played football. He was a big man – both tall and broad, and suited to these kinds of activities. Despite his size, he had a certain agility – he was very fast with his hands. This agility also manifested in a kind of nimbleness, not only was he fast with his hands, but he was also good with them. He was incredibly talented at understanding, making and fixing things, whether mechanical or electrical, and he typically directed this talent at making and fixing things for the people that he loved, as an expression of that love.
What he might not say in words, he said with actions.
Thus, as a young man, he made Jack a “nixie” tube clock that he cherished and still remembers with fondness. He also sold Jack his first car, a ’57 Chevy purchased from a junkyard that he had fixed up. For Joyce’s first apartment, he and Zaide built a bookcase that she still owns and uses; for Ellen’s college apartment, he built stools with cushions.
I remember him always tinkering, whether it was building intricate RC cars (with which my son still plays today) or working on the old VW Bug. I also remember him fixing anything and everything that anyone close to him would bring him to repair – power washers, vacuums, card shufflers, an almost unending list of everyday items. As a boy, our garage was littered with broken things, esoteric oscilloscopes and other electronic equipment whose use I still only vaguely understand. I remember him dutifully diagnosing electrical issues, bent over some item wands in hand watching the waveforms on the screen. For a boy, it was pure wizardry.
It was this talent that sent him to trade school for a degree in Electronic Engineering at a time when computers still occupied entire rooms, and decades before personal computers would become available. He spent his life working with electronics, starting at Unisys Corp, where he met two of his closest friends, Patricia Searcy and Eleanor Dauncey, my and Jessica’s Aunt Pattie and Eleanor. While dad was quiet and reserved, Pattie and Eleanor where anything but, and regularly forced him to laugh somewhat disapprovingly at their antics. I think some of his happiest days were spent in their Riegelsville, PA home, typically fixing something, and enjoying the company.
Eleanor still considers him not just a friend, but a brother and a mentor. In her words, without dad’s help, her and her two boys (Christopher and Freddie) could have been homeless. Instead, they because part of our family, and my son Cassius still plays with some of the matchbox cars that Christopher passed to me so many decades ago.
This type of generosity is a common thread binding the stories of dad’s life, weaving together the people around him, and their memories of him across generations, as the tapestry of his kindness continues to grow. He intuitively understood and acted on a deep-rooted benevolence and tenderness. This manifested in his thoughtfulness. For example, when dropping off the stools that he had made for Ellen, he also took her out to a fancy dinner. She still remembers him dressed in his grey suit and a smile standing in her small living room, taking her arm as they walked the streets and opening doors for her.
He never strayed far from North Plainfield, even when Unisys offered him a position in California, he decided to take severance, and stay close to his family in New Jersey. Home was incredibly important to him, and he spent a good portion of his life trying to build a home for his family, a place of unwavering and eternal comfort that is (ironically) housed within. For me, this home was him, and it was a place to which I returned every week in the form of our regular phone calls, something that I will always miss.
If Bubbe and Zaide’s home conjures the sensation of warmth and the smell of Matzo Ball soup, dad’s home was hidden in his smile, perhaps the same one that he shared with Ellen on that night in Boston all of those years ago. He was always one to joke and smile, and regularly chased Jessica and I around the house with the infamous “tickle finger,” something I do to my son today.
He was always trying to make you laugh, a trait that he shared with Zaide, whose most popular joke was reach out his hand to shake, only to take it away quickly and tell you to “hang it up,” a joke that my dad still used with Cassius. It may be that Cassius will use it with his children, especially as he seems to share the desire to make others smile. This is no meager desire, especially in a world marred by misery and suffering; the gift of a smile may be one of the most powerful and meaningful things that anyone can give.
Dad spent most of his life in Alexandria Township, New Jersey, in a large house with a large yard, a place more for his children and grandchildren than for himself. He did not attribute much merit to the supposed status of things, but only to their utility. Utility, for him, included an object’s capacity to evoke memory, or to communicate it. Thus, Zaide’s watch, with “Lou” linked into the chain was incalculably more valuable to him than a Rolex, especially after it was cleaned and fixed and running.
You could call it sentimentality; he might call it heritage. Various cultures around the world have different ways of marking and remembering their forebears. For dad, this took the form of the various objects that most reminded him of the people that he loved, and his hope that Jessica and I would care for and cherish these objects, not for what they were, but rather for what they represented – a connection to the past, to those whose lives can still surround us through the stories that we tell about them. Each object is, in this way, less a thing, and more a catalyst to remember, a genealogy written in artefacts.
Thus, a deck of cards becomes a way of talking about the endless games of “May I” that dad would enjoy with Joyce and Rose. A banjo clock becomes a way of talking about Bubbe and Zaide; a ring, a watch, small everyday objects act as linkages between generations, and the stories that fill our families about where we came from and who we are, and so, heirlooms are born and traditions take root, and grow – traditions of storytelling, of passing on, of recognizing our forebears in us, and us in them; a mischievous glint in the eye before a tickle attack, the desire to make others smile, and the generosity to act on that desire.
This is our richest inheritance, one I hope to see grow in the expanding joy that we can confer, even in moments of great grief. Thank you, dad, brother, Zaide, and dearest friend, we will always love you, and endlessly miss you.
Life celebration services officiated by Rabbi Joseph Forman and interment are private under the care and direction of Wright & Ford Family Funeral Home and Cremation Services, 38 State Highway 31, Flemington, NJ.
You are encouraged to visit Howard’s permanent life celebration site at www.wrightfamily.com to light a candle of hope, leave messages of condolence, share words of comfort and recollection, and post photographs of his life.
Memorial contributions in his honor may be made to Oishei Children’s Hospital Foundation: https://www.ochbuffalo.org/foundation or to Roswell Park Cancer Institute: https://www.roswellpark.org/.
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Wright & Ford, your local, family owned & operated “Life Celebration Home”
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