Father, Son Retain a 60-Year Phone Ritual : Norman, 76, and Sam Corwin, 110, Continue to Reach Out

WINTHROP, Mass. — Once a week, the tenderness travels across the telephone lines:

“How’re you doing, Pa?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. I have a lot to be thankful for.”

There is the briefest of pauses. Sam Corwin always wants to make sure his son Norman is working up to his capacity:

“Are you doing something to keep your mind and time occupied? Are you staying busy?”

It is a routine they know well, normal enough stuff for fathers and sons. But in that Sam Corwin turned 110 last Christmas Eve, and Norman is 76, the Corwins have had somewhat longer than most to refine the ritual.

“I call him at least once a week,” Norman Corwin reported from the apartment where he does most of his writing in West Los Angeles, “and I have done so for the last 60 years.”

“Even now, Norman calls me every week,” his father concurred from his home in this waterfront town just north of Boston. “He’s called me from all over the world. No matter where he is, he always takes the time to call.”

Loving Relationship

Pere et fils , the Corwins concede there is something special in their relationship. Indeed, Norman Corwin confesses he speaks to his father far more regularly than he does to his 32-year-old son, Anthony, who lives almost shouting distance away, in nearby Hawthorne.

“I don’t believe any father could enjoy a relationship as I do with my sons or daughter,” Sam Corwin said one frosty morning not long ago. He smiled. “There must be a reason.” Another smile from the tiny man clutching his cane and poised by the phone. “Love, that would be a good word.”

In Los Angeles, screenwriter, producer and longtime journalist Norman Corwin hastens to stress that “I don’t want to exaggerate the closeness of my relationship to my father.” The elder Corwin has slipped a bit these last five years, after all, showing short-term memory problems that hinder complex discussions of current activities. The phone calls have shrunk, his son said, compressed from 15 minutes to around five.

“He knows he has short-term memory problems, and he doesn’t want to repeat himself,” Norman said. “It used to be that our conversations were a kind of gazette of the week’s events. But now he’s astute enough to realize that he may repeat a question, or an answer.”

Or a theme. Education, for example, is a topic on which Sam Corwin loves to discourse.

“I was crazy about education, and I never had one,” Corwin said, his pale blue eyes brightening behind thick eyeglasses. “I know that education means a great deal to anybody. Tom, Dick, Harry--it doesn’t matter who you are, an education can make you somebody. When people ask me what matters, how I feel about things, I always give them one answer: Education.

“I left school after the seventh grade, grammar school,” he said, his voice even, but a trifle softer. “I feel bad that I didn’t follow up. I always thought that if I’d had an education, I’d have been somebody.”

But listen to Norman Corwin as he talks about his father, listen as the filial fondness fills the deep, gentle voice so familiar to radio audiences of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and there is no question that he has always been somebody, a major somebody at that.

Hand-Operated Press

“My father was a printer,” he said. “Not the kind we think of when we speak of printers today. He operated what is known as a plate printing press. Each impression was individual, a method that had come down unchanged from the Renaissance.” Sam Corwin specialized in greeting cards at the McKenzie Engraving Co. in Boston. “It was hand-operated, with a wheel six feet in diameter,” his son said.

Sam Corwin was born in London, “to a poor family with a lot of mouths to feed, right out of Dickens,” Norman Corwin said. “I figured out that my father was born 50 years after Thomas Jefferson died.” To put that fact in its proper historical perspective, “That’s how old my father is, and how young the country is.”

Arriving in Boston at age 7, young Sam went to work immediately, landing a job as a newsboy on the horse-drawn streetcars of Boston. But early on, the youngest of his three sons suspects, he was probably holed up, feasting his eyes and mind on anything he could find that happened to be adorned with the printed word.

“In all that time that he was working, in all these years, I can’t recall a moment that he loafed,” Norman said. “He was always reading.”

Often, what he read were the offerings of his three sons, for “at one time,” Norman recalled, “both brothers and I were newspapermen simultaneously.” So was sister Beulah Corwin Belkowitz, at 72 the baby of the brood and a veteran of the classified ad department at the Boston Globe.

At 22, Norman Corwin took his first newspaper job, working for three years as a reporter for the Daily Republican in Springfield, Mass. “That was my university,” said the man who went on to write, among other well-known works, “Lust for Life,” the film depiction of the life of Vincent Van Gogh.

A Rare Typewriter

But the push toward reading and writing began far earlier. “The single act that I remember most from my childhood,” Norman remembered, “was that when my father saw in me some proclivity for reading and writing, he bought for me--at a time when typewriters were as rare as, let’s say, holograms are today--a typewriter.” Tall and slender, his full head of smoke-colored hair clearly a gift from his father’s side of the family, Norman Corwin strained momentarily as he thought back on that event.

“An Oliver, an Oliver, that’s what it was called,” he said, suddenly seizing on the name that had eluded him. “The typewriter was called an Oliver.”

In quiet armchair-coach fashion, the fatherly support continued. Norman Corwin left newspapers to work in radio in 1938, stepping aside briefly to work as a public relations man for 20th Century Fox Films in New York. Writing was his passion, but the film job had an unmistakable allure: “It upped my salary, from $35 a week to $50!”

Working later as a writer/producer/commentator for CBS radio in New York and Los Angeles, Corwin found himself among the early generation of bicoastal airline commuters. “My first flight across the country was on a DC-3, the American Mercury. It left LaGuardia at 5 in the evening, and arrived in Burbank at 8 the next morning.” With stops to refuel, of course, more than a few: “Nashville,” Corwin said, “Kansas City and either Albuquerque or Tucson, I can’t remember which.”

Meanwhile, Corwin’s career was soaring. He wrote and narrated series after series for CBS radio: “Words Without Music,” “They Fly Through the Air,” “Ballad for Americans,” “Pursuit of Happiness,” “26 by Corwin” and others. He graduated into film and, in addition to writing for television, hosted a show for Westinghouse called “Norman Corwin Presents.”

Honors tumbled in, and when in 1946 Norman Corwin was named winner of the Wendell Willkie One World Award, he found himself embarking on a 40,000-mile tour of 37 countries that circled the globe.

“Dear Folks,” the long typewritten letters he sent home would begin.

Always Wrote Home

“Can you imagine?” Sam Corwin asked. “Think of the places he was, all over the world, and he always took the time, Norman did, he always took the time to write home to me and his mother.”

And there are the letters, neatly pasted up now alongside post cards, luggage tags, telegrams that chronicle Norman’s campaign for world unity. “He made himself a librarian,” Norman said as he thumbed through the giant black scrapbooks his father was secretly assembling for him. “Unbeknownst to me, because I was traveling and working at a tremendous clip, he would write to my secretary and say, ‘Would you send me all the CBS releases about Norman’s trip?’ ”

Three thousand miles from his father, Norman leafed through the pages, filled with photographs--Norman with Groucho Marx, Norman with Hedda Hopper--yellowed newspaper clips, transcripts of speeches, printed programs from dinner appearances. “It turns out now that these things are the only records I have,” Norman said. “All the time he was doing this, I didn’t know a thing about it.” Rabid about learning, a collector by nature, Sam did not confine his anthology assembling to the triumphs of his youngest son. For each child, later for each of the eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, there was a binder-style book filled with inspirational quotes paired with humorous illustrations, often clipped from the comics pages.

“Grandpa’s Thoughts for the Day” is how one grandchild, Cyma Kaiser, took to dubbing the messages Sam sent her each day while she was in college.

“Those quotations,” Sam said, beaming as he turned the pages of one grandchild’s collection, “those quotations were an education in themselves.”

Many Marriage Offers

To his enduring sadness, Sam’s artist wife, Rose, died when she was 80, more than 25 years ago. “After she passed away, I had many, many offers of marriage,” he said. And why not? “I was not a bad-looking person, although I was not too bright.”

“He’s one of a kind, a real Boy Scout, always thinking of everyone else, always involved in his surroundings, he’s incredible!” Beulah Belkowitz said.

His children point to his obsessiveness about health and fitness: “I’m still nuts, so to speak,” Sam all but boasted, “about the food I eat. Nothing pickled, nothing fried, nothing greasy.”

And they marvel at the constant energy of the man praised as the “cheer chairman” of the local synagogue. “His desk is always full,” his daughter said. “He’s never idle. Never.”

After a fall that frightened him as much as it injured him five years ago, Sam finally opted to move into a nursing home just around the corner from daughter Beulah. That same year, Sam celebrated his 105th year by attending a baseball game--his first.

Leaving Fenway Park, a reporter stopped the man still hailed as the oldest resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. How, he asked earnestly, had Corwin enjoyed the Boston Red Sox?

“The game?” Sam responded. “The game? Wait, let me tell you about the hot dogs and beer.” A hot dog with mustard was what he wanted to talk about, and “two bottles of beer.”

Family Comes First

Finally, baseball is unimportant: “I don’t even remember who won.” What Sam wants to talk about is family. “A father should not forget his children, and children should not forget their father,” he intoned. “I know of families where children have broken away, but my children, I feel, have been exceptional.”

What it comes down to, Sam Corwin maintains, is this: “There’s a nice Jewish word--do you speak Jewish? Nachas . It means pleasure. It means love. That’s the secret. That’s what matters.”

Afternoon was sneaking in, time for Sam’s sherry, a six-to-eight-ounce dose each day. In his burgundy suspenders, his shirt and tie and vest, he looked every inch the paterfamilias, enthroned in a chair that all but engulfed him. The phone was right beside him. Any minute now, Norman would call.