Turn Every Page: Hidden Greatness
A tailor, a lawyer, and a golfer, and the many stories left untold
Martin Greenfield learned how to sew in a concentration camp. But the look and feel of his suits would not let you know that he began his tailoring career while spending time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald for 14 months. After being sent to work in the laundry, he accidentally ripped the collar of a Nazi guard’s uniform. The head tailor, who was also Jewish and spoke Yiddish, taught Greenfield how to sew and to repair the collar. That was his first apprenticeship in tailoring, and the lessons he learned would last a lifetime.
Greenfield was 15 years old when he entered the camp. In the sorting line, his mother and siblings were sent to the gas chamber while he and his father were sent to work. It was the last time he saw his mother and sisters and his baby brother. After he and his father were sent to the barracks, his father explained that the best way for them each to survive was to split up and not act as father and son. It was devastating for Greenfield—that was the last time he saw his father—but he obliged. Later, after the camp was liberated by the U.S. Army, Greenfield found out that his father had been killed only weeks before the liberation. These experiences shaped him—his work, his sense of morality, his love of the United States. But these memories also haunt him to this day. As Greenfield recounted fully in his book, The Measure of a Man, and briefly in an interview: “The pain is still in my heart about my family, I still dream about my family like they’re alive, but on the outside you will never know.”
“On the outside you will never know.” Martin Greenfield has been the tailor for celebrities, at least four U.S. Presidents, and countless others who can afford a bespoke suit. I’ve never owned a bespoke suit, but any man who has will tell you that the suit not only makes him look great, they instill a sense of confidence and dignity that an off-the-rack suit cannot bestow. Greenfield learned this early on. When he obtained a shirt in the concentration camp that was not his striped prison garb, he said, “The day I first wore that shirt was the day I learned clothes possess power. Clothes don’t just ‘make the man,’ they can save the man. They did for me.” (15)
Reading Greenfield’s book, however, I wondered whether clothes were, for him, a way of hiding what was on the inside. Did Greenfield focus so much on the external so that no one asked about the internal? Talking about his first American suit, Greenfield said, “I felt bad the family spent so much money on me. Until, that is, I put the suit on. It draped my body beautifully. I looked smart and sharp. If I couldn’t speak English, at least the suit would speak for me.” (99)
How often do we focus only on the external and do not get to know people more than on a surface level? There are two people in my office who seem perfectly ordinary from the outside. One is what many lawyers I know aspire to be—a retired lawyer. He actually hasn’t practiced law in a long time. Before retiring, he was the CEO of a company, and its General Counsel before that. But that is not too remarkable. What is remarkable is that after law school at Notre Dame, he was a law clerk on the United States Supreme Court. This humble, quiet, simple man officing next to me clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren in Warren’s last year on the Court.
Three doors down is another remarkable person. As many people know, I am a big golf fan and I love to play. So when I saw some golf-themed things in his office as I walked by, I asked about them. I found out he attended Oklahoma State University, the home to many PGA players. He did not play on the PGA Tour himself, but he was a tremendously good amateur player. So good, in fact, that he placed high enough in the U.S. Amateur Championship to earn a spot in the Master’s not once, but twice. He played both in 1974 (when Gary Player’s winnings totaled $35,000) and 1976. While I and other golf fans long for the week when Jim Nantz and “Augusta” are the soundtrack of our lives—“a tradition unlike any other”—my office neighbor probably remembers every shot from those rounds.
So, a Supreme Court Clerk and a Master’s competitor. Those are two good neighbors. But you wouldn’t know anything about their interesting lives solely from the outside. Their daily business casual outfits don’t clue you in on their past, so we make certain assumptions about them. How many other people are like that? What life story do you think the person on the street could tell if you just asked? I’ve often wondered that myself, but I’ve always been too timid to ask.
Another Substack page, Chris Arnade Walks the World, profiled Phoenix recently. It wasn’t pretty. In fact, Arnade labeled Phoenix “an expansive hell on earth.” Those of us who live in Phoenix would say, “Of course you had a terrible experience—you took public transit to a hotel at 27th Ave. and Indian School and walked around the worst neighborhoods in the Valley.” How different would his trip have been if he Uber-ed to north Scottsdale? How favorable would his review been if he had merely stayed in a better part of town?
What I liked about Arnade’s story is that he met real people where they were. John, the opioid-smoking homeless man that Arnade met—What was his full (and real) story? How did he end up in that situation? Where was his family? I’m sure that people in situations as bad or worse than John have very interesting stories to tell simply because they are human. But we rarely ask. We only look at the outside, and make the fatal mistake of judging a book by its cover.
Whether great or tragic—and most often, both—we all share in this adventure called life and we each express the beauty of being human in different ways. Just like we need to open a book’s cover to experience the riches within, how can we uncover the greatness in those around us?