 Henry and Adele Siegel at home, 15 years ago. |
The Voice of Liberalism
Few true liberals could out-Left, out-liberal, out-think or out-work Mrs. Siegel even today. She could probably make the former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark look soft, even though until recently he spoke in defense of Saddam. She despises war if anything even more than sixty years ago when, evidently by accident, she encountered a women’s activist group that was aroused by conditions even though World War II had just ended. Convinced as she is that the White House somehow was associated with the perpetration of the tragedy of Sept. 11, her tallest frustration in the last four and a half years is that she can’t bring together sufficient proof. She hates war possibly more than any concept she has heard of. But she has not been able, along with the rest of the world, to figure out a war-solving device somewhere between physical hostilities and negotiations. Those have not worked, she says, but “I can’t think of what will. There is some other option. I know there is. I can’t think of it. Maybe I will. I hope I will.”
What Cat? What Yarn?
The extraordinariness of Mrs. Siegel scarcely can be overstated or overvalued. She doesn’t park in a rocking chair waiting for her non-existent kitty cat to pitch a non-existent ball of technicolor yarn into her lap. She is too busy rounding up data to store in her bank of knowledge, the better to combat political enemies. She writes letters of protest. She and Mr. Siegel occasionally appear at City Council or School Board meetings to thump an issue they especially oppose or support. At their ages, they are publicly received deferentially, but they mean to be taken as seriously as they ever were. It seems incongruous, unkind, disrespectful, to call a couple whose ages total one hundred and eighty-three hardline militants. They are. Mellowing with age is something that happens to milk, not to the Siegels. Any budding anti-war activist could gain valuable insights simply by following Mrs. Siegel for five minutes. If any of her siblings were still alive from Cleveland days, they probably would not be amazed that she has placed herself in the front row of American activists a mere decade before her one hundredth birthday. She is the ultimate in local activists. She went on for ten minutes, without pausing for Stop signs, about perceived incursions into illegal territory by a neighbor who almost has forced her to scream in exasperation. The wall he put up. Where he parks his business truck. The second story he built. Bushes and trees he has planted, how their droppings land on the Siegel property. And the games he plays with his children in the Siegel front yard. The Siegels have lived there for sixty years, as of last March. Never, says Mrs. Siegel, have they seen such a gross spillover by a neighbor. The gentleman in question may have thought once he was living next to two candidates for senility. Culver City may grow senile before either of the Siegels.
Yours, Mine and Nobody Else’s
As you would suspect after almost sixty-nine years of wedded bliss and grist, each spouse has his or her favorite landing place in their practical living room. The chair is Mrs. Siegel’s. To her left is a soft couch that looks as if it were made for husbands just seven years short of being one-twenty-first the age of the modern world. This is where Mr. Siegel enjoys reclining — like a possum. You suspect that he has dozed off until his wife poses a question that just tumbles out of the sky. “Henry, in 1936, what day did I get here, July 18 or July 19?” With a suddenness that is nearly startling, he answers, “July 18.” Weren’t you sound asleep? Mr. Siegel.
On the dining room table, on four separate grids, Mrs. Siegel tidily has arranged a hundred family pictures. That she identified every person in every picture should win for her either a speaking role before the United Nations or least a visit to the “American Idol.” It was not as if she had memorized all identities in a certain order, pressed a button and they came rolling out. In detail that would impress a math major, even, dash it all, a Republican, she reviewed the scene and the exact conditions of each setting. And elaborated. It was like watching a silent movie — with the sound turned up.
You May Call Her Poster Girl
Lots of ninety-year-olds are poster girls, for neuralgia, for the Missing Teeth Co., for the Ace Walker Co., or for sleeping pills. Mrs. Siegel is a poster girl for political activism. She is Executive Chairwoman of the Keenest Senior Political Mind in America Society. You could draw a splash of blood from the toughest part of your body if it came into contact with the razor-sharp edge of her extraordinary mind. No matter how long she lives, it will not be long enough for her to be thought of as a harmless little, ol’ lady. She is as benign as a Doberman, as friendly as a poodle, as fresh as next week’s bread. Any astute politically liberal think tank in the country is welcome to telephone her to fill in any nagging blanks.
See You at Midnight
Suspicion lurks in the most distrusting corner of the most distrusting mind since Sherlock Holmes that Sept. 11 may have been an inside job. She trusts Washington about two degrees less than a bitterly divorced couple trust each other. She misses sleep over the state of the country. Lots of thirty-year-olds may. But at ninety? Her keen mind resembles a steel trap. Do you want to shmooze with her about today’s headlines or tomorrow’s? This is not just a small town thing. If Mrs. Siegel resided in Manhattan, she would be the most unusual ninety-year-old in New York City. She makes fewer concessions to age than a twenty-year-old.
It does not happen on a daily basis. But some nights, the most senior Progressive political watchdog in Culver City or any other Westside community — is at her computer until 2 or 3 in the morning, trolling for data. Mrs. Siegel and her ninety-three-year-old husband Henry may watch the country more closely and more critically — less erroneously, she would say — than the CIA. You don’t want to light her fire because you may not be able to quench it in the same day. If the kitchen radio were not on so loud, or if she rested a little oftener during the day, she might hear her weary body whispering in the late evening, “C’mon, kiddo. I am tired. Let’s go to sleep.”
Only prevented from running — not thinking — at maximum speed by her portable oxygen tank, the superb fitness of her reasoning apparatus would make any scholar blush. If the Congress were to impeach Mr. Bush any time in the next two and a half years, she would be pleased to step into his White House chair, with only one caveat, that she would govern from the other end of the spectrum.
Mrs. Siegel’s personal story is somewhat known by Culver City older-timers, how her parents and Mr. Siegel’s came to this country, quite separately, from Lithuania, at the beginning of the last century. His people settled in Baltimore, hers in Cleveland. Logically enough if you are Jewish, they met in the summer of 1936 in Boyle Heights, the first Jewish enclave in Los Angeles. She was twenty, he twenty-three, and there seems little doubt from the beginning that they would marry, which they did a year later. Four of their five children survive, the oldest of them being sixty-four. Their children are accomplished professionals in a range of fields. One year removed from their seventieth wedding anniversary, it is so late in the day for the Siegels that their grandchildren are accomplished professionals, too. Their great-grandchildren, still below the minimum age for earning a minimum wage, are sharpening their minds, mostly at home, in anticipation of greater academic challenges in the next several years.
Tomorrow: Adele Siegel up a little closer
