Fred Burton snorted. “Generation-gap nonsense. What the girl needs is discipline and a dose of reality”

September / October 1964

Yeruchum Freed had no problem staying occupied on the seven-hour coast-to-coast flight to San Francisco. He kept his eyes firmly on the pages of his small Gemara, ignoring the narishkeit on the movie screen at the front of the plane. Fred Burton, though, was restless. He’d brought a galley of a novel that was being prepared for print, read a few pages, and put it down. He fumbled with his seatbelt, scanned the headlines of the New York Times without much interest, tried watching the movie flickering on the screen, wondered why the airline had picked such a turkey to show its passengers. He ordered a small bottle of whiskey from the stewardess and guzzled it down in less than a minute, picked up the galley again, put it down in disgust.

Finally, after hours of frustrated inaction, he gave his seatmate a slight nudge.

“Rabbi Freed?”

Yeruchum took a swift glance out of his sefer. Thankfully, the screen had gone dark, and he turned his attention to Mr. Burton.

“How are you doing, Mr. Burton?”

“Call me Fred. And I’ll tell you how I’m doing. Lousy.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“And you know why I’m doing lousy? Because of that daughter of mine.” His tone, primed, perhaps, by the liquor, grew louder, more aggressive. “I don’t like flying. I don’t like throwing money, loads of it, at some inefficient private eye who couldn’t find his lost daughter if she were playing ping-pong in the basement of his house. I don’t like hippies, I don’t like my wife crying half the day. And when I get my hands on Marjorie....”

Yeruchum fingered his beard, lost in thought.

“What that girl needs,” Burton continued, “is a good talking-to. She’s always been undisciplined, but this takes the cake.”

Finally, Yeruchum broke in, his voice calm and deliberately soothing.  “Mr. Burton — Fred — I was also once the father of young people. And I had a rabbi, a wise and kind rabbi —his eyes lit up at the memory of his rebbi, Reb Leibush, now undoubtedly learning with other tzaddikim in the Olam HaEmes— “who taught me to speak with them, not at them. To listen to them, understand them, and accept them, even with their follies and mistakes.”

Fred Burton snorted. “Generation-gap nonsense. What the girl needs is discipline and a dose of reality.”