Sam "the Alchemist" Proler created his American Dream from nothing more than ambition, sweat, and chutzpah-and this is his story. Born to poor, newly immigrated parents in 1917, Proler is a first-generation American who made the most of the opportunities he found and created. With only an eighth-grade education, he became one of the best-known twentieth century entrepreneurs and inventors in his field. At twelve, he helped his father in the family's backyard junk business. Soon, the motivated teen parlayed that into the foundation of his future empire. By his eighteenth birthday, he was running the business. Over the next forty years, his vision became Proler Steel, with associated plants all over the world. Sam Proler's inventions and processes, copyrighted, trademarked, and patented, revolutionized the entire steel industry starting in 1955. Some of his processes are still used to this day. These memoirs are also about Sammy Proler, the family man. After retirement, Sammy the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather has devoted the rest of his life to his wife and large family. He insists that his grand- and great-grandkids call him "Sammy", so they could always enjoy life with him as their friend. Caution: You're About to be Prolerized! shares not only Sam Proler's life, but also his philosophy. Feel free to laugh and cry as you experience his mysterious aura, and you become Prolerized!
Caution: You're About to Be Prolerized
The Memoirs of Samuel ProlerBy Alan B. BerkowitziUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Alan B. Berkowitz
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-5164-9Contents
Dedication.............................................................viiiAcknowledgments........................................................ixSecret of Genius.......................................................xiiiIntroduction...........................................................11 The Early Years.....................................................52 Ben and Rose........................................................133 The Education of Samuel (NMN) Proler................................194 Recycling, Before It Was Green and Chic.............................235 Not All Marriages Are Made In Heaven................................336 The world is at war Again...........................................417 The Remarkable Vision and Talents of Sam Proler.....................518 Who really invented The Prolerizer™?..........................639 The Importance of Trust: So, what else is Neu?......................7510 Love is lovelier the second time around.............................7911 Has Sammy Proler ever really retired?...............................8512 Through the eyes of his progeny.....................................89Nina (Proler) & Joe Brown's Family.....................................90Joyce (Proler) And Hon Arthur Schechter's Family......................110The Children Of Marie Proler...........................................128Friends Of Samuel Proler...............................................14513 Judaism, Israel and a Second Bar-Mitzvah............................15314 Did I tell you the one about the....................................16115 "It's my book Let me get in a word or three".......................177The Proler Family And Friends Album....................................183About The Author.......................................................193
Chapter One
The Early Years
Snow settled on what should have been grass on the narrow streets outside the cracked bedroom window. Ben, Rose, and their 2 year old daughter Sarah, lived in a small, two-room, cold-water flat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. On February 1, 1917, Samuel Proler entered into a world closed off to him for the past nine months. Eyes sealed shut, the baby screamed his little lungs out, no doubt wanting to return to his earlier environment and its warmth. He calmed down when he found himself in his mother's bed cradled in her warm arms and welcoming breast. Few were born in hospitals at that place and time.
This new place was nothing like the quiet of his last home. This place was cold and the people around him were alien. Later, he would be called Samuel, or Sammy, or Schmuely. Sometimes he was called "Tatele" just to add to the confusion in his new life. At that moment, all Sammy yearned for was the warmth of his birth-mother protecting him from the strangeness around him. Sister Sarah, in the adjoining room, played with an old rag-doll she had found around the corner of the house three months earlier. That was before the white blanket covered her outside playground. Rose Proler was exhausted by her laboring struggle, but she found a new joy and tenderness in embracing the newborn babe in her arms.
It was colder inside than it was outside; The snow blanketed the roads, while the cold-water flat was just plain winter-cold. Big sister Sarah was wrapped up in woolens, and Rose had the inner warmth of childbirth and a hand-knitted coverlet to protect her. Sammy squirmed around in this newly found strange place. He was comforted in this odd new world by his hostess and caregiver for the last nine months. As is Nature's will, the transition from womb to breast is quick and accommodating.
Rose's husband, Benjamin, worked as a laborer at Simon Dunie's Junkyard. He had gotten the job due to his relationship to the Dunie family as a distant cousin. At the Dunie Yard, Benjamin separated incoming assorted junk into its various categories: Metal was separated from glass products, leather from seats, etc.; It was a job. Benjamin knew this wouldn't be permanent. Yet, despite that fact, he saw the junk business as being profitable. He strived for better. Neither the Prolers nor the Dunies ever Anglicized their names like many of the Jews had done at the time of their immigration to America. Some of Rose Saperstein's relatives shortened their name to Stein, for example. Cohen may have been changed to Cone, Coen, Corn, Cahn, or Kahn.
A famous Yiddish tale relates the confusion of Anglicizing names. An old Polish Jew was advised by his relatives to change his long name, Moishe Kapuyitcz, to an "American" name when he arrived in the States. He was told it would make it easier to find work. They decided on his new name; It would be Morris Capp. Upon his arrival at the Immigration Office in the U.S., a large Irish-American clerk asked for his name. The old Jew was so nervous and flustered, he answered in Yiddish, "Oy, Ich hub shoin fergassen." ("Oh, I forgot it.") The Irish-American clerk entered his new name into the record of his arrival:
SEAN FERGUSON.
Rose Saperstein came to America from Russia. Benjamin Proler's family originated in Jonava-Kovno, Lithuania. There was no need in Ben's case for a name-change, as there had been Prolers in the United States since the early nineteenth century. However, many of the Saperstein family shortened their names, some to Stein.
Ben Proler met Rose Saperstein in New York City, where she was working as a seamstress in the garment center. She was 18 at the time; Ben, two years her junior, arrived in New York by way of Baltimore, Maryland. He worked as a stage hand at the Yiddish theater on Houston (pronounced HOUSE-ton) Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues on the lower east side of Manhattan. Many New York immigrants gathered at the Yiddish theater to be entertained by plays and other performances in the language they all shared. Ben met his future wife during intermission one day. He had finished his part of the job and sat in an empty seat to enjoy the show he helped to set up. The young lady seated next to him was with a group of her co-workers, but at intermission between acts, Ben sidled up to Rose and started to chat with her. She was shy at first, and somewhat perplexed by the attention he was giving her, since she was one of several women from the sewing factory who went to the theater to get away from the long hours and harsh conditions of the sweatshop-like workplace. Ben had inherited the Proler gene that triggers the "never quit" circuitry in the brain, so he set out to find out all about Rose that day. Soon, they courted, as was the proper way for young Jewish people to behave.
The marriage union of Ben Proler and Rose Saperstein was not arranged as was the marriage of their parents (and some of their children), but it was performed according to the laws of Moses and in the Orthodox Jewish traditions of those who came before them. They were united in a Shul (Synagogue), through the ceremony performed by an Orthodox rabbi.
Over the next several years, changes came about in the Proler family. Looking back over ninety-four years causes events that took place in their own time to speed up when expressed in historical periods. In Europe, Germany provoked the start of what would be called "The War to End All Wars." (History records it as World War I.) President Woodrow Wilson, an isolationist, waited until the last minute...
