Get married, and you inherit another whole family. There are distant cousins, great-uncles, people you hear about but never meet. Newlyweds may find that their holiday greeting card lists have doubled.
At Christmastime in 1982, my first as a Muhlstein, my husband pulled out an address book. While I sent cards to close family and friends, he kept giving me names.
There were two aunts, Doris and Dorothy. I couldn’t keep them straight, but my husband had been close to both as a child. There was a cousin, a pal he’d had as a kid in Los Angeles.
Dutifully, I added to our list. Every year, all these people received our cards from Everett. I’ve continued to send them since my husband’s death.
I was intrigued by one distant relative, because he and my husband shared the same first name. James S. Muhlstein of Santa Rosa, Calif., was a cousin of my husband’s late father, David Muhlstein. He was nearly 60 when we married, and no one in the family had seen him in years.
My husband’s father had Jewish ancestry, but his mother was Catholic, and he married into a large Irish Catholic clan. My mother-in-law’s maiden name was Noreen Sullivan.
James S. Muhlstein, though, was Jewish. A UCLA graduate, he had worked for the city of Los Angeles and had been director of the nonprofit Great Books Foundation in Chicago.
Year after year, I’d send a holiday note, never having met him. Early one summer Sunday, we were asleep when our doorbell rang. I answered in my bathrobe. There on my porch was a gray-haired man, tall and urbane.
I’ll never forget what he said: “I’m Jim Muhlstein.” The only Jim Muhlstein I knew was in his 30s, upstairs and still asleep. I wisecracked, “Sure you are. Who are you really?”
This lovely person on my porch wasn’t some scam artist. He was James S. Muhlstein, en route to a vacation in Canada.
Our phone number is unlisted, and he had only an address from our Christmas cards. We sat down to coffee and a fine conversation. He’d lost touch after my husband’s father, David, died in the 1960s.
From that visit on, our holiday notes got longer. In November, I had the longest letter ever from James Muhlstein, eight handwritten pages. It begins: “Dear Julie, Here’s some info on the Muhlstein family I promised you long ago.”
After my husband died, James Muhlstein had asked if I wanted to know about the family’s Jewish side.
This already being a tangled tale, I’ll spare you every detail of Nettie and Shalom Muhlstein, who came to the United States in the 1870s from Brest, near the Russian-Polish border. They paid for their passage by toiling in Colorado gold mines, and settled near other Jewish families in Denver.
They had eight children. One of them, Sam Muhlstein, was my father-in-law David’s father. Another was Harry Muhlstein, the father of James S. Muhlstein. Cousins David and James, each an only child, were friends. When his cousin was at UCLA, my father-in-law was at Stanford University before studying journalism at the University of Missouri.
At Thanksgiving, I shared with my kids a picture that accompanied the letter. Dated 1924, it shows a young Sam Muhlstein, who was slightly built but tough looking.
“Sam was a semipro boxer who fought under the name of ‘Jimmy Duffy.’ With that name (taken, I suppose, to conceal his Jewishness) and his blue eyes, Pat probably took him for Irish,” the letter said. Sam Muhlstein’s wife, Pat, was an orphan raised by Catholic nuns, according to the letter.
My children were fascinated by the story of Sam, their boxer great-grandfather. Their grandfather, David Muhlstein, is described as “a dynamo” in the letter.
“David earned a degree in journalism and worked in that field, print and radio, all his short life,” James Muhlstein wrote. “You may know that he set up and established an all-news radio station from Baja California, broadcasting to all of Southern California.”
I did know that. Our kids were always impressed by a 1960s picture of their grandfather with Elvis Presley, taken at a radio station where he worked.
James S. Muhlstein is 80 now. I’ve seen him in person only that one time, when he showed up on our porch.
Soon, I’ll send out cards. When I write his, it will be hard to express the depth of my gratitude. My children were so young when their father died. They never knew the grandfather who shared their name.
In writing eight pages to someone he barely knows, James Muhlstein has given an incomparable gift.
Sending a card to some distant relative may seem meaningless. I’ll forever be glad I didn’t shorten my list.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein julie@heraldnet.com.
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