2 min read

Friday, June 21, 2024

Fully-loaded baked potato, hold the strawberry preserves
Photo by Will Ma / Unsplash

Good morning and welcome to the penultimate Wolmania of June, 2024.

A portion of the office wall shows a framed black and white photo of Paul Newman, signed by him, as well plaques honoring Mr. Greenfield. One, from the department store chain Neiman Marcus, proclaims him “Vendor of the Year.”

I really enjoyed this obituary of Martin Greenfield, a WWII concentration camp survivor who made it to the United States and built quite a life.

As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment back at the boy.
After a fellow prisoner taught Max how to sew, he mended the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt, sliding it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.
The garment transformed his life.

He spent decades in the tailoring business before he found himself doing the costumes for HBO's Boardwalk Empire, opening up all sorts of new opportunities:

Other film and TV projects followed, including for the Showtime series “Billions” (2016-2023); and the movies “The Great Gatsby” (2013), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) and “Joker” (2019). The latter featured what might be Greenfield’s most recognizable creation: the crisp red suit and mismatched orange vest worn by Joaquin Phoenix, who played the title character, the Batman nemesis.
In a testament to his longevity, Mr. Greenfield dressed the early 20th-century comedian Eddie Cantor as well as the actor playing him decades later on “Boardwalk Empire.”

I suspect I wouldn't have gotten along with him - his business catering to whoever had lots of money led to relationships with all sorts of terrible people - but it's hard to argue with his enthusiasm, his resourcefulness, and his tenacity. If Donald Sutherland needs a suit, I know who he'll go see.

Item 2: a list

Fully-loaded backed potato components, ranked:

  1. Chives
  2. Sour cream
  3. Cheddar cheese
  4. Butter
  5. Baked potato
  6. Salt & pepper
  7. Bacon bits

I asked a generative AI chatbot for help with this but unfortunately it didn’t suggest anything hilarious like “concrete” or “cherry compote”. (Cherry compote slots in at #5.)

Item 3: a media recommendation

Herbie Hancock - Cantaloupe Island (Live, 1990)

Item 4: word of the week

Boffinry

He was always going around referring to his hobbies as "boffinry" but let's be honest, he was really just a Popular Mechanics subscriber with a disorganized garage and delusions of grandeur.

Item 5: a photograph

A glitched photo of Sutro Tower from far away, with the fog rolling in. There are vertical lines running on the image and a washed out blue color over the whole image.
Sutro Tower, San Francisco. Doctor Popular: "Some glitched out photos from my circuit bent Sony Cyber-Shot. All tweaks were made on camera, with no additional data-bending."

See ya!

Thanks for reading. Have a pleasant weekend and we'll meet again next week.

Published by:

Jacob Wolman

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