[Editor’s Note: This is the second of two parts of a tribute the actress, who starred last Saturday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in her long-running one-woman show, “The Need to Know,” wrote last December about Jerry Schnitzer, a Culver City activist, one month after he died on Nov. 11. Part 1, “The Only Way Their Love Could Die,” ran yesterday. Keyword: Schnitzer.]
Toward the end of Jerry’s life, our conversations circled around one subject: forgiveness. I told him that hauling around resentments about others was like walking around with pebbles in his shoes. The last month that Jerry was alive, he showed me his tired feet, “Pebble free!” he said.
The inoperable cancer excavated Jerry’s body for a year and a half. Dignified and quiet, at 10:15 a.m. on Veterans Day (2007), Cpl. Jerry Schnitzer gave his final salute.
His personal fight for peace and justice in our world, his daily concerns about Veterans and immigrants ceased; but his dogged determination to raise awareness about these issues lives on.
Loyal Friends After All
At Jerry’s memorial service, people turned out in droves. In addition to being a lifelong activist Jerry was a stubborn chap who occasionally hurt people’s feeling with his spot-on unsolicited advice. But it turns out people loved him for his brutal honesty, and they showed up to remember their old friend.
Fellow cabbie Mel, also known as Cab#K65, read a letter to him, thanking him for introducing him to his wife. Prior to driving a cab, Jerry sold real estate in the ‘50s and ‘60s; back when it wasn’t really popular to sell homes in certain areas of town to ethnic folks, Jerry did it anyway. He was determined to create an integrated group of people on his block. One house at a time, Schnitz built a multi-cultural, diverse community that showed up in full force at his memorial. One woman thanked him for teaching her how to drive (“Don’t drive defensively, drive paranoid!”). His goddaughter thanked him for always sending her little fake trees for her dollhouse.
Jerry had an FBI file as thick as a New York phone book. Included in the file are letters from field agents to J. Edgar Hoover about the meetings at his Dauphin house in the ‘60s, his interest in the Industrial Workers of the World, and a subscription receipt to a Socialist magazine. They began to classify him as potentially un-American.
Jerry was a union man who organized the Independent cabs in Los Angeles, stood up daily for Veterans’ and immigrants’ rights, Karen Bass, preserving the land for the Vets at the V.A., and was always on the look out for the young Vets returning from Iraq to give them a hug and a handshake. Jerry rallied at the famous WTO protest in Seattle in 1999, and he was shot in the behind with a rubber bullet. His grandson, Zach, called his Grandpa Jerry, “a soldier for the people.”
Wasn’t It Supposed to be Easier?
It’s been difficult lately.
Both Jerry and I didn’t believe in anything but keeping our word and the power of the people. No god. No supernatural entity watching over us all; just everyday folks doing what they promise.
But I have to admit, these last few weeks, since Jerry’s been gone I’ve found myself dropping to my knees praying, weeping and begging that he can hear me or for some sign that he’s crossed over to that big crossword puzzle in the sky where his bowel movements are regular, people are kind and just, soldiers have nothing to fight but a smile, and where there’s chopped chicken liver as far as the eye can see.
I guess I thought this would be easier. Jerry and I had plenty of time to say good-bye. But even with all that advance warning, I was not prepared for this gaping hole, this devastating emptiness that persists due to the absence of one human being, who, on his worst day, like most of us, didn’t think he mattered.
Well, he did. Jerry Schnitzer mattered and he will never be forgotten.
Good night, Schnitz. Good night, Mensch.
I interviewed Jerry for Storycorps on NPR in2006. Contact April Fitzsimmons at true2selph@aol.com
Originally published on Dec. 12, 2007, at www.MadasHellClub.net and its authors
