JM: When did your parents marry?

Bloom: In 1941.

JM: Did they have any other children?

Bloom: No.

JM: Did your mother work?

Bloom: Yes, but after they divorced. That was about 1952.

JM: How did that change your relationship with your father?

Bloom: I was even closer to him. I got to spend every weekend with him. He didn't have a lot of money. He was just a body and fender mechanic after the war. The most fun I had with him was when we just went out and did nothing. We would go to the Sears tool department on Friday nights.

JM: Mechanics love places like that.

Bloom: I did, too. He had a brother named Paul, who had a phenomenal garage that had all kinds of tools. His name was really Solomon, or Saul, but he was called Paul. Lou and I would do anything that was cheap. We'd go to old movies. We had about as close a relationship as you can have. Lou also liked to watch old trucker movies. The other boy in the picture, Morris, was called Mike. He died the earliest of the kids. Lou worked for Mike. He drove an old truck hauler across the country, picked up old cars, and brought them back for Mike.

JM: You called him Lou?

Bloom: He was always Lou to me.

JM: Did Lou remarry?

Bloom: He married Dorothy in 1962. I didn't know her very well.

JM: Did he talk to you much about his younger days?

Bloom: When I was studying about the Great Depression in school, I asked him if he was hurt by that. He just said that he always had money and always had a job. He was apparently the breadwinner for the whole family for a while. He told me that in the 1930s, he worked in the water mines, in the Cabazon area, near Palm Springs. They were bringing the water to Los Angeles. I imagine that he was a mechanic rather than a driller. And then he worked at a chocolate factory for a while, also in California. He used to talk about rats falling into the vats of chocolate. In the 1930s, he and Mike got a patent for making the first self-adjusting brake.

JM: They did this for an employer?

Bloom: No, on their own. Studebaker eventually got the patent. Those brakes are on every car in the world now. They could have been millionaires many times over, but they never made any money from it. They didn't have the money to renew the patent, so Studebaker just waited for it to expire. After the war, they invented a machine that made the kind of concrete block bricks that have two holes in the vertical portion. They never got a dime out of it.

JM: Did he try to sell it to big companies?

Bloom: They didn't know how. In the late 1950s, we went to Sears one time, and he turned ashen. I asked him what the matter was. He had seen a socket wrench, with a little magnet that fits inside it with a circular halo. It was made out of plastic. Lou also invented that, and he had given it to a patent attorney, who apparently swindled him. He looked at me and said, ‘I will never invent anything again.'

JM: Was he bitter about it?

Bloom: No.

JM: Did he ever invent anything again?

Bloom: Oh sure. He always made stuff. In his last years, he got tired of mechanics, and also got tired of punching a clock. So he opened up a secondhand antique and wrought iron manufacturing company, a one-man operation. He did everything by hand. Just before he passed away, he got a contract with Busch Gardens to fabricate all the parrot cages for their entire facility.

JM: He must have made some money from that.

Bloom: He might have made a little. But he always lived a meager existence.

JM: What kind of houses did he live in?

Bloom: When I was growing up, we lived in rentals. He lived upstairs in his shop for a while when he had the shop, before he married his second wife Dorothy. After they married, they rented an apartment.

JM: In 1948, he was living at 2143½ Brooklyn Avenue, according to the LA city directory.

Bloom: Right. My grandmother lived at 2161. She was Lou's mother. I remember that we used to walk to her house a lot. She made cherry wine, and we'd always come back with some of that.

JM: In 1954, your father is listed as no longer married, and he's living at 3137 Perlita Avenue.

Bloom: I know where that is. It was a little single-family residence. It was right next to Glendale. It's gone now. I went by there one day, and I remembered that we had frogs. We went down to the LA River and caught a bunch of tadpoles and brought them back and raised them.

JM: In the 1910 census, your father is listed as living in Lancaster, Nebraska. They are Yiddish-Russian. Max's wife is named Rebecca, and they married about 1898. He's a junk peddler. They have four children, Morris, Rose, Sophia and your father. In the 1915 Iowa census, the family lived in Sioux City. Your grandfather was a fruit peddler. In the 1920 census, they are back in Dallas. They had seven kids with them at the time, Morris, Sonya, Louis, Moses, Solomon, Frieda and Sarah. The last four were born in Colorado.

Bloom: Sophia was Sonya. I don't know anything about her. I saw Rose about 10 years ago, shortly before she died. We talked for a few hours. She wound up in Galveston. She met a football player, and she said he was the most handsome man she ever met. They got married and stayed in Galveston. Frieda wound up in Hollywood. She was called Fritzy. She was a very successful hairdresser. She did Ava Gardner's hair, Lucille Ball's hair and Barbra Streisand's hair.

JM: There are no other records of them in Dallas, except the Hine photo. So we know that they were in Dallas in 1913, and after going to Iowa and Colorado, they returned to Dallas. There was a wave of Russian Jews who came to Colorado and surrounding states. Most of them spoke German. They were called Volga Deutsch, because they were from the Volga area of Russia, but they spoke German.

Bloom: They were German. Their name in Russia was Shictkman, but they changed it to Shuman. My family was thrown out of Germany in the 1870s. Catherine the Great offered the Jews land in Russia, but then the family was thrown out of Russia in the early 1900s by the pogroms (large-scale attacks on Jews). My grandfather was a rabbi in Russia, and he also served in the Russian Army. As I understand it, my grandfather once knocked out the commanding general of the Siberian Army because he made a pass at my grandmother.

I think my grandfather came over a couple of times, and that he had money at the time. When he came over on the boat from Russia, he met a guy, and they became good friends during the trip over. He wanted my grandfather to be a partner in a cosmetics business he was starting. My grandfather told him, ‘I don't see why anyone would use rice flour on their faces.' The guy's name was Max Factor. The family was in Philadelphia for a short time. While they were there, they had a baby son who reached for a pot of hot milk and it scalded him to death.

JM: What else can you tell me about Lou?

Bloom: He was a writer and composer also.

JM: So he was a musician?

Bloom: No, he never played any instruments. The songs just came out of his head. He wrote down the words, and he just sang them. There was one he wrote in the mid-1960s. He was very much a patriot. It was during all the anti-war stuff. It was called ‘Strike Up the Band.'

JM: The Gershwins wrote a song with the same title.

Bloom: This was different. I have a whole book of his writings. I still cry when I see the stuff.

JM: When did your mother die?

Bloom: About two years ago. She was 88.

JM: What kind of relationship did she have with your father after the divorce?

Bloom: They talked every once in a while, but that's about all.

JM: Your father fled Russia with his parents when he was a little boy. They moved from Nebraska to Colorado to Texas to Iowa to Colorado to Texas and finally to California. It must have been an incredible struggle. Did your father ever talk about that?