Phil Ball

Up From Ocean Avenue: Phil Ball's story as told by Maxwell Klausner

In 1935, Phil Ball's bankrupt father moved his family from the familiar Jewish world of Newark to the immigrant-rich melting pot of Jersey City, where the family would work and live inside a dimly-lit candy store. Just as his forebears fled the Shtetls of the Old Country for a new life in America, Phil would soon come to know a new world, full of varying tongues, complexions, and faiths. But through the trials of a Depression and a World War, young Phil kept his head up and his mind on the prize: Easy Street, a proverbial time and place his father believed was just around the corner.

As Phil took his first steps into a post-war adulthood, he would be swept up by the grand sense of optimism that was coming to define America. Like so many of the first and second-generation kids from his old block, Phil would rise above his candy store roots to become his family's first college graduate, an animated salesman, and ultimately, a prosperous businessman-with no shortage of missteps along the way.

But Phil's story, full of warts, humor, and self-reflection, isn't his alone. The spirit of his ancestors, the faith of his parents, and the chutzpah of his Jersey City crowd all play a role in this journey from Ocean Avenue to Easy Street (if there even is such a place).