Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz
on Oct. 26, 1911, two days after Orville Wright flew a glider for almost 10 minutes in North Carolina, the father of the modern passing offense breathed his first breath and screamed his first scream. His parents named him Sidney Gillman—they decided against burdening him with a middle name—and they bestowed upon him the Hebrew name of Yisra’el, the same name given to Jacob after he wrestled God’s angel.
Sarah spent the rest of her life, which cancer cut short at 52 years old, as a homemaker and the spiritual head of the household. Like the vast majority of families of the time, David earned the money while Sarah made the family run smoothly at home. She went through many low points—her father, Louis Dickerman, deserted the family when she was a young girl; she suffered through the death of Leonard; and she experienced the anti-Semitism that plagued Minneapolis like a horde of locusts—but she had strength and she had wisdom, and she made sure the family was well cared for at all times. “She was a doll,” Sid said. “A sweet lady.”
The Gillmans weren’t overly religious, though they belonged to the Beth El temple, where the men sat downstairs and the women were segregated to the balcony. The Gillmans acknowledged the Jewish holidays, but in the end, he didn’t think much about studying Torah or listening to the rabbi’s sermons and the cantor’s prayers.
Instead, he was into sports. Really, really into sports. For Sid, life was about athletics and very little else. From the time he was a little boy and discussed his future as a baseball player with Irving as they slept in the same bed until the time he graduated from North High School, his spirituality was tied to a baseball, a football, and a basketball.
“I didn’t belong to the French club,” Gillman said. “I didn’t belong to the debating club. I was a football, basketball, baseball player, and didn’t care about anything else except North High rah.”
His mother, Sarah, didn’t accept that. She didn’t want a boy who cared only about the crack of the bat in the spring and of the shoulder pads in the fall. She preferred a more well-rounded son. A son who could read the books she could not and one who could fill the house with beautiful music in which she could bask.
When Sid was 7 years old, he was introduced to the piano and to classical piano lessons, and for the next 10 years, he dutifully practiced on the family spinet. An hour a day, oftentimes mind-numbingly dull, the grandfather clock near him ticking away ever so slowly. Eventually, he became quite a good player. Good enough to earn him plenty of money in high school and college, thanks to well-paying gigs, and to keep him as one of the best-dressed students at North High.
He was the ringleader of a small combo of jazz players. Sometimes, five players. Sometimes, four. Sometimes, six. They called themselves Sid Gillman and his Red Hot Chilis, and they’d play your bar mitzvah, your Sweet 16, and the reception after you made your marital vows.
“We played practically every wedding in Minneapolis,” Sid said. “If you wanted to get married, it was to our music.”
Music was a passion he’d hold the rest of his life. His collection of jazz records was legendary, and until his hands and old age forbid it, he continued to play the piano whenever he wasn’t studying football. Yet, while his mother wanted to instill the arts in him—keep him as well-rounded as possible and take sports off the brain for at least some of the time—Gillman resisted. As Gillman got older, he practiced the piano, and afterward, he rushed out the door to play football with his buddies. The arrangement, though, didn’t always work for Sid. So, he turned devious, and one day when Sarah wasn’t looking, he set the clocks in his house ahead 20 minutes.
“One afternoon, the gang wouldn’t wait, so I cheated,” Sid said. “Mother let me go after that. She figured anyone who wanted to play that rough game of football that badly should have the chance.”
Never again would there be a conflict between music and football. Football, in Gillman’s mind, was always No. 1. His Red Hot Chilis were No. 2.
But life changed for Gillman one day when, while playing a Sweet 16 party, he glanced over from his piano and gazed at the pretty brunette who had just arrived with a suitor. That’s the day his priorities shifted. Football was still No. 1—more or less, it always would be—but his Red Hot Chilis were about to fall to No. 3 on his priority list.
Isaac Reisberg was born in the Ukraine in 1895, and he immigrated to the U.S. not knowing what he could or even wanted to do. He learned one thing very quickly, though, upon his arrival at Ellis Island. Americans liked to make it as easy as possible when it came to foreign surnames.
When Reisberg showed the customs agent his documentation, the agent took one look at the Reisberg moniker and proclaimed, “You don’t need that much name.” The man standing in front of him now would be forever known as Isaac Berg, and that man slowly emerged into his new world.
Berg eventually met and married Regina Frankenstein—the two were wed at the Polish childhood home of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister—and they made their way to Minneapolis, where Isaac worked at a dry-cleaning plant with some friends.
As influential as Sarah Gillman was in Sid’s life inside their house at 1008 Sheridan Avenue, Regina was just as dominant in the raising of her daughter, Esther Berg, who was born in Minneapolis on June 12, 1912, and grew up two miles from Sid.
“She was a beautiful person,” Esther said by the time she, herself, was an old woman. “She was a little person with a big mind. She was one of the smartest women. She had a wonderful philosophy about life and about people that has carried on to us. She always thought there was something good in everything, and my kids say the same about me, that I’m a Pollyanna. But that’s the feeling she imbued me with. It made it easy for me to love.”
While Sid thought about little else but sports, Regina and Isaac opened up a world of culture for Esther, a world with limitless horizons. Isaac, whom Esther described as a dreamer, introduced the family to the arts. They attended lectures. They took in the theater, where one day, they watched future Academy Award winner George Arliss star in The Merchant of Venice. Regina dragged Esther to ballet lessons, though this was an interest that soon faded away. Her parents, though, tried to make her well rounded, and she loved them for it.
“They filled us with that,” Esther said.
Esther remembers herself as extremely shy, and whenever a stranger approached, she hid behind Regina’s skirt and whimpered until she had been left alone. But by the time she reached kindergarten, she had asserted herself as the official “teacher’s helper,” and her personality bloomed. No longer would she hide in her mother’s clothing. Instead, she sparkled.
By the time she reached high school, the outgoing girl already had played the lead of Mimi Mayflower in The Return of Hi Jinks, participated in another play that was performed solely in French, taken over the French Club presidency, and made her mark on the debate team. Because the family didn’t have much money and because she was so petite, she could wear greatly discounted sample clothes, and eventually, she learned to knit and sew (many years later, she created the wedding dress for her oldest daughter). Every Sunday, her family of six (she had two brothers and an older sister) would pack lunch, climb into a streetcar headed for Lake Harriet, and spend the day attending band concerts. “There was,” Esther said, “always something with music.”
Esther, though, loved her sports. Really, really loved her sports. She got that from her mother, who would sit next to the radio and listen to baseball games every day. Sometimes during the evening, Regina would board the streetcar with Esther and her brother Ted, and they’d set sail to watch the Minneapolis Black Hawks play hockey. On the weekends, Regina and Esther listened to big fights on the radio, like the night of September 23, 1926, when Gene Tunney beat Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship before 120,000 spectators in Philadelphia.
“I cried for days when Dempsey lost,” Esther said. “He was my all-time hero.”
Naturally,