The last time I saw Phil Newman was at his grandson Dov's wedding last year. Hundreds of men wearing black hats and an equal number of women on the other side of the dance floor watched as Mr. Newman threw a wine bottle in the air.
I held my breath as he put his hands out to catch the full bottle. Like the baseball player he had been all his 92 years, he caught it and let out a yell that could be heard over the band. He was wearing a new double-breasted suit and a gray fedora. He looked like a million bucks. His son, Rabbi Yitzchok Newman, and a trio of grandchildren helped him walk back to his table. "Harold!" he yelled. "How the heck are you?"
"Nice suit, Mr. Newman. It must have cost you at least twelve hundred bucks."
He pulled me closer to put the finishing touches on our routine. "Seventy-nine bucks. I got it on closeout."
"And the tie?"
"You want the tie? Take it!"
That was the last time I saw Mr. Newman, and one of the few times he didn't actually give me a tie or a watch. His grandson told me recently that he had moved from Long Beach to a kosher nursing home in L.A. and wasn't doing so well. Phil Newman died Wednesday at the ripe old age of 92. Services were held last night at Congregation Lubavitch in Long Beach. Burial will be this morning in Boston, where he lived most of his life.
Phil Newman was born in Boston on March 12, 1910, the son of Reb Dovid Newman, a Jewish educator. He graduated from Northeastern Law School and practiced law for 64 years. Along the way, he went into the asphalt driveway paving business, because "I couldn't stand lawyers. Thieves! All of them!"
As he became more prosperous, he moved his family from the old Jewish neighborhood in Boston to the suburbs.
His wife, Miriam, persuaded him to move back.
"My colleagues couldn't believe it!" he'd say at the numerous community functions where he always had a word to say and said it loudly. "Here I was a big-shot lawyer, and I'm living back where I started when I didn't have a nickel to my name."
Phil and his wife had four children: Rabbi Yitzchok Newman, dean of the Hebrew Academy Lubavitch in Huntington Beach; sons, Yehuda Leib and Moshe, who are rabbis in New York; and a daughter, Batya Esther Palace, who is married to a rabbi and lives in Los Angeles.
Before raising a family, Phil played semi-pro baseball in Boston. "I'd be wearing my tsitses (fringes worn by Orthodox Jewish men), and the other players would come over and touch them for good luck."
Even when he was well into his 80s, Phil could be seen playing ball with the students at Hebrew Academy picnics, a baseball hat covering his yarmulke.
At Congregation Lubavitch, where his son Yitzchok is the rabbi, Phil opened the doors well before the 6 a.m. minyan began. Never reluctant to express his thoughts, he was the synagogue's Zaide (grandfather): "You're davening (praying) too fast," he'd admonish whoever was unlucky enough to be cantor that morning.
There was only one reason why Phil would miss a minyan - morning, afternoon and evening - and that was because he was traveling the country attending brises, bar mitzvahs and weddings of his 48 grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren.
"So, Mr. Newman," I'd ask on Friday evenings, just before Shabbos services. "How many grandchildren and great-grandchildren do you have this week?"
"Aw, I don't know," he'd say, closing his eyes, "but I'll tell you one thing. I know where every one of them is tonight," he'd say, bursting with pride.
And he was right. The little man in the black fedora and $79 suits who always looked like a million bucks was the proudest Zaide in Long Beach.
All his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were in synagogues around the world, or at home lighting candles, keeping the Sabbath.
"You can take all the big-shot lawyers and all the politicians and all the millionaires in the world, and they don't have what I have," he'd confide in me: "Yiddishe naches (good fortune)."
It was his proudest achievement.
Shiva, the traditional seven days of mourning, will be observed at his son Yitzchok's home in Long Beach.
