Harold Plotkin '94 +P

Harold Plotkin (1912-1995) was an artist and businessman who lived on Greystone Beech in Marblehead, Massachusetts and vacationed in York, Maine. He began in business as an executive with Plotkin Brothers, a women's specialty shop in the Back Bay and became head of marketing at Sweetheart Plastics (now part of Dart Container, the Solo Cup company).  A graduate of Colby College, he was editor of the comic magazine White Mule and co-author-producer of the musical comedy Moon Madness (which in 1934 featured in its prophetic plot a landing on the moon). He authored Shore Road to Ogunquit in 1969, a poetry book with photographs by Ernst Halberstadt. For many years he was active in Boston civic affairs as a member of the development committee for the Prudential Center, as an officer of the Boston Convention Bureau, and as a member of the Massachusetts Senate Art Committee under Billy Bulger. (I took the picture below in the State House where there is a mirror with a plaque in his memory.) He became president of the Back Bay Association in 1951 and founded the Boston Arts Festival. He was also a member of the Boston Yacht Club and the University Club in Boston. He also happened to be my father's father, "Poppa" as I knew him (sounds a bit more like "Pupp-ah" here in Greater Boston), and a man to whom I have been linked through my personality and interests more than any other relative. The "+P" refers to his loving wife Priscilla who helped him with this painting and has helped me learn more about Poppa, a man with whom I only shared a very short time.

I wrote the following as part of a high school writing assignment 20 years ago in 1995; Poppa and I would spread out oil pastels all over the carpet and draw together for hours. Although we never wrote together we shared a love of poetry and shared the final products. The time we spent together incubated and revealed a lifelong gift of creativity within me. Before sunset he would hold my hand as I walked barefoot over the rocky beach at the dead end of the street. All of the fist-sized rocks that covered the small beach were so smooth I couldn’t fit enough of the best ones into my pocket. Years later I would place those very stones on the headstone of his grave. Occasionally I would sleep over for the weekend and stay in the loft on a small twin size mattress that sits on a giant windowsill of the window that replaced nearly the whole wall. It overlooks a placid but vivacious pond in the midst of the gray condo complexes. Even after poppa called “goodnight” upstairs to the loft, I would stay up for many more hours and watch the rippled pond water in the celestial glow of the moonlight. The longer I stared, the more sense I made of life. The loft doubled as Poppa’s painting studio and at the time of his death a nearly finished work rested on the easel. It hangs in my living room today.