He facetiously called himself “City Father” or “Town Father” and indeed he was… but he was much more than the Mayor of Lexington, SC….much more. His name was Elias S. Mack, Jr. and he was known by many titles to many people. He was recently laid to rest at the age of 84.
First and foremost, he was a devoted dad to Delle Marie, Donna, Debbie and Eli and a grandfather of five and great grandfather of seven, uncle to scores, brother, cousin, husband who touched the lives of thousands of Lexingtonians. He was Uncle Bubba Junior to me and scores of others. And for me, he was also a surrogate father.
From the earliest I can remember, I worked in his grocery store bagging groceries as a child at the age of five. As I grew older, I grew into other roles and was allowed to peddle groceries on the store bike to his many local customers around the town of Lexington, SC.
In those days, we delivered. His store might have been named Mack’s Cash and Carry but it might have just as easily been named Mack’s Credit and Delivery because nearly every customer that came into the store at one time or another “put it on the tab.” Times were tough and many people, especially teachers and county workers, were only paid once a month, so Mr. Eli and his brother Arthur had to carry them until the end of the month.
He and his brother Arthur never charged a nickel’s interest on that money either, another token of good faith to the community of Lexington.
Mack’s Cash & Carry was known for many things. The jovial “fat guy,” Eli, also known simply as Junior, was ever present in the meat department. About the only thing more constant than his role as the meat cutter was his constant good natured jabbing that he did with every customer and those of us who worked there.
Poor Jack Gable, another mainstay at the store, was the victim of most of Uncle Bubba’s fun and frolicking. It’s a wonder that Jack never got to him during their Saturday evening ritual of verbal jostling.
Rituals were the norm. Every morning he would send me over to Rawl’s Restaurant with two eggs and a tomato for Roy Rawl to prepare his breakfast, scrambled eggs and sliced tomatoes. Till this day, it remains my breakfast of choice.
Every Saturday night also was a cause for celebration. He would cut a steak for himself and his brother Arthur and send it over along with a hamburger steak for yours truly for our end-of-the-week meal.
He was the son of another icon Elias S. Mack, Sr., who himself was a Mayor of Lexington in the late forties. They called his dad “Jew Mack,” and not only did he inherit his nickname, but forty years to the day after his dad was elected Mayor of Lexington, he himself was also elected, by the same identical vote (203-112). Nobody moved in or out of Lexington, SC for 40 years. Go figure.
Like his father, “Junior,” as he was known to many, was a merchant and a businessman. Like his father, everyone loved “Jew Mack Junior.” No, neither was Jewish, but in the old deep south in those days, you were one of three things- a white man, a black man or a Jew. We were too light to fit in one category and too dark to fit in the other, so they called us Jews. My grandfather was Lutheran by faith and Lebanese by blood line. How you get a Jewish person out of that I’ll never understand.
The Mack boys were surrogate fathers to many of us, not only in my immediate family but in the extended family community of Lexington. Dozens of youngsters worked there over the years, and he treated them all with the same paternal love and patience, always taking an interest in what was going on in our world, whether it was the world of sports, writing or speaking.
I started writing when I was 11 years old when his father “Jew Mack Senior” gave me a book. I opened it only to find it was empty. It was a journal. I suggested that it was empty and had no value. My grandfather’s response, “What you put into it will make it valuable.”
That journal was the first of some 300 I now have in my possession where I chronicled the events of my life over the years. I also developed the habit of writing something almost every day, which led me to author six books along with my weekly column that now appears in over 400 newspapers in 22 countries.
Eli Mack, Jr. and his father fostered those habits early on in my life. I called my grandfather by the Arabic word, Jiddo. He died at the age of 60; it was as if Eli Junior understood that he should take over the role of being a mentor to me and others.
He would encourage my writing and suggested that I join the newspaper staff in high school, where I served as Sports Editor of “The Wildcat.”
By my junior year, I was a stringer for a half dozen area newspapers. Uncle Bubba would often review my articles and give me suggestions, never criticizing but encouraging me along.
Both father and son were politicians and I understood why they were so successful. Both had the gift of gab and the ability to communicate verbally and articulate their ideas fluidly. With both having served as Mayor, naturally I was drawn to the political world.
When I ran for the House of Representatives in South Carolina in 1980, I was asked why I was interested in doing so. My only motivation was that I could recollect was that I had the benefit of being a witness to two great politicians- my grandfather and my uncle.
I got my clocked cleaned in my first and last attempt at political office. He told me afterwards, “If I didn’t have any more friends than that I’d carry a gun if I were you.” Thanks a lot Uncle Bubba! I have since found that it’s cheaper to buy a politician than it is to be one.
When I entered high school, he encouraged me to enter the Oratorical Speech Contest for the school, something I had never considered. Fair enough, I gave it a shot and won not only the school contest but the State Oratorical Speech Contest as well. Little did I know, he had planted the seeds for what would become a career path.
After high school, I got involved in Toastmasters and eventually won the World Championship of Public Speaking in 1978 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
That led to a business career that has taken me all over the world and allowed me to be on the platform a President even to enjoy a private audience with the Pope. Those seeds of my career were planted by “Jew Mack” when I was but a child bagging groceries at Mack’s Cash and Carry.
The Mack boys were always there for those of us who worked in their store over the years. Most of our parents held two jobs just to make ends meet, so my own father never saw me play an athletic event ever. He was always working to raise 11 children.
Eli and Arthur became surrogate fathers. I fondly recall on Friday nights they would close the store a tad early so they could be at the high school stadium to watch us play. We would relive those games the next day in the store, play by play. If we won, we would celebrate. If we lost, we would still celebrate. It was the fact that they cared enough to take an interest in what we were doing, surrogate parenting.
I’m selfishly sharing my own story but make no mistake, many could write similar testimonies to the man who always called me “Pal” or by my nickname “Yogi” after his favorite baseball player Yogi Berra, whom he though I resembled. He also thought I looked like Alfred E. Newman, the guy on Mad Magazine, because I was missing a front tooth as a youth.
“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” suggested Shakespeare. True enough, the pain of losing a loved one is great and the greater the man, the greater the pain. His funeral Mass was a celebration of the good things my dear sweet Uncle Bubba Eli did for me and others over the years.
One of my fondest memories was that of the Mack’s Meat Heads, the Pee Wee baseball team his store sponsored on which his son Eli, III and I played. We were undefeated as a team and had tons of fun being called the “Meat Heads.” What else were you supposed to nickname a team named after a meat market?
The memories of those glorious days of my youth, which I enjoyed so much, were enriched by the love of the man they called “Jew Mack Junior” or “City Father” or “Mr. Eli” or “Uncle Bubba” or “daddy” or “Jiddo” or whatever your relationship was to this great man.
When I am sitting in a lonely hotel room on the road giving a speech, I sometimes have trouble falling asleep at night. I only need to recall the wonderful memories of growing up in Lexington in the shadows of a great man for sleep to come. It’s those cherished moments that I recall as I fade away into the night.
Eli Mack was my mother Alice Aun’s brother. She once told me if I wanted greatness in my life that I should walk hand-in-hand and side-by-side a great person and greatness would come unto me. My uncle was that kind of man.
The 17th Century poet, John Donne, once wrote: “No man is an island, entire to himself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… as if its promontory were as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am a part of mankind. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
The bell is tolling for Uncle Bubba Junior. He is in heaven to join the senior “Jew Mack” and his grandson Scotty and his brother-in-laws Pete Asmer and Michael Aun, Sr. Thank God “Mama Alice” is there as well to keep the peace because you know that crowd is driving God crazy right about now.
