On Tuesday evening and Wednesday of this week I will observe the 50th anniversary of the passing of my father, Sidney Pomerantz, of blessed memory.

Memorial days often are times not only of remembrances about the loss per se, but also a time to reflect on the lessons learned from the life lived with the person whose memory is being recalled.

My dad was a manufacturers’ representative, the modern title for a salesman, in the commercial stationery industry. In those days that meant tags, labels, loose leaf indexes, ledger binders, files, clipboards and the like. Actually, many things that were later made obsolete by the emergence of the computer society in the mid-1960s.

But he did not have a computer. Rather, each night when he returned home from his rounds, he would sit at his desk until late in the evening meticulously recording the purchases of each customer, by hand, on 3 by 5 inch index cards which formed the backbone of his records system.  At the age of eleven I started assisting him in that tedious effort........

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