Big Jack & Son

by James Kearns

I could never tell when my father would blow his top. One minute he’d be in fine feather; split second later, I’d better duck and run if I knew what was good for me. As my mother would say, “Only God himself knows what side of the bed his nibs will wake
up on.”

It’s a bright, sunny Saturday afternoon in the not so merry month of May, 1962, anno domini. Next Sunday is a big one for me on account of I’m receiving the sacrament of the Eucharist with the rest of my catechism class; so today’s the day we’re picking up my first holy communion suit at S. Zalkind & Sons, Fall River’s oldest and most popular clothing establishment—“Proudly serving the community for 50 years.”

My dad runs his own three-person advertising company in the Granite Building downtown—J.W. Herlihy Co-Ink, he loves to call it, accent on the CO-INK, pleased as punch that he, a man with only a high school education, could rise to such heights as to one day have his own incorporated company—and make a pretty nice buck at it to boot.

For years now, my father has created all the newspaper ads for Sid Zalkind. One-stop shop, soup to nuts, you name it, we do it: designs, layouts, proofs, galleys, everything but the kitchen sink, I’d hear him say as he gas-bagged on the phone half the night with clients and friends.

Every Thursday, Big Jack, as everyone calls him, got the word out to weekend shoppers by placing full, half, quarter-page advertisements in all the area papers: Fall River Herald, Providence Journal, Taunton Gazette, New Bedford Standard Times, Boston Globe, all of them offering one sale after another: half-day-only, one-day, two-day, only one hour left, buy two get one free, drastically reduced, final clearance, everything must go, each and every item…and then there were the holidays: Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Back to School, Out of School, Christmas, Easter—eee-yi-yi—with everything on the cheap, I have no idea how his nibs made one measly little buck, never mind this bundle he was always talking about.

Today’s Spring Sale was no exception. “Banner day,” Sid said, backslapping my dad as we entered the store, brushing past the swarms of shoppers pawing over the merchandise. “Suits, shirts, belts are flying off the racks,” Sid cried, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes or his luck.

“Gotta hand it to you, Big Jack, that 30-percent-off-select-items ad of yours worked like a charm. Ran out of merchandise five minutes after the store opened. Who knew?”

And then Sid leaned in to my dad to confide, “A couple of customers even accused me of false advertising.”

To which my dad replied, “All advertising is false advertising. You want the fish to bite, you gotta bait the hook. Yessirree, Sidney, my good man. Your old buddy Jackie Boy here makes a pretty nice bundle lying for a living.”

I never understood how my father, a devout Catholic, a Knight of Columbus, St. Gregory, and Malta, acting secretary-treasurer of the prestigious, all-male Catholic Clover Club, in the first pew every Sunday at nine o’clock Mass, would choose to go into a business that involved breaking the Eighth Commandment on a regular basis. As for Sid and his sons—there weren’t any. He and his wife, Cecile, had two of the wildest, wickedest twin girls in town. And as his nibs was quick to point out, “Who the hell’s gonna shop at a store called Zalkind’s Daughters?”