Gerald “Jerry” Gordon (1912–1987)
The Business Teacher from Cranston High
Jerry Gordon as a young man. Family papers.
His full name was Hyman Gerald Gordon, but he never used Hyman. He went by Gerald, and everyone called him Jerry. He was the second husband of your great-grandmother, Phyllis Jean Tracy. He wasn’t related to you by blood, but he was the man who raised your grandmother, so he belongs in our story.A Boy from LynnJerry was born on October 30, 1912, in Lynn, Massachusetts, a shoe-factory city on the coast just north of Boston. His father, Morris, was thirty-two, and his mother, Sarah, was twenty-eight. Here’s something you might not expect: the family name wasn’t Gordon at first. It was Gardonitzky. Lots of immigrant families in those years shortened or changed their names to something easier to spell and say in America, and “Gordon” grew out of “Gardonitzky.” By the time Jerry married for the second time, in 1963, his marriage papers listed his parents as Morris Gordon and Sarah Miller (Miller was her maiden name, the name she was born with), said both of them had been born in Russia, and noted that his father had died. We don’t yet know exactly when or why the name change happened.Jerry grew up in Lynn in his parents’ house. The census finds him there in 1920, in the city’s Ward 5 (a ward is just a voting district of a city), and again in 1930. A 1935 record still places him in Lynn with his parents, so even as a young man finishing school he was living at home.
Jerry Gordon. Family album.
A Teacher at Cranston HighJerry trained to be a teacher at the State Teachers’ College at Salem, Massachusetts, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Education. A teachers’ college was a school built especially to train teachers; that one is now Salem State University. By 1940 he was teaching at Cranston High School in Cranston, Rhode Island. The 1940 yearbook lists him as “H. Gerald Gordon,” the H standing for that Hyman he never used. That year he taught salesmanship and helped coach basketball, baseball, and junior-varsity football.By 1952 the yearbook shows him in Cranston High’s Commercial Department. The commercial department taught the skills people needed for office jobs, back when offices ran on typewriters and paper files instead of computers. Jerry taught typing, personal shorthand (a fast way of writing with symbols, so you could keep up with someone talking), filing, and business machines like adding machines. He kept learning too, with further study at Harvard, Bryant College, and Rhode Island College of Education. In those years Cranston had only one high school. Cranston West opened in 1958, and we don’t yet know which school he taught at after that.A First FamilyOn May 22, 1937, when he was twenty-four, Jerry married Lillian Bloom in Dover, New Hampshire. She was born in 1917. Our family tree also shows a second marriage event for the two of them on September 3, 1937, in Billerica, Massachusetts. We honestly don’t know what that second date means. It might have been a religious ceremony held after a quick civil wedding, or a record filed again in another place, but nobody has found the paper that explains it.By 1940 Jerry and Lillian were living in Cranston, and the census lists him as the head of the household. They had three sons. The oldest, George E. Gordon, was born on June 3, 1940. His two younger brothers are still living, so we’re keeping their names off this page. After twenty years together, Jerry and Lillian were divorced on October 24, 1957, in Providence County, Rhode Island. We know that date for certain because Jerry wrote it on his marriage papers six years later. George died in 2011, and Lillian died in 2013.A Second FamilyPhyllis had been one of Jerry’s business students at Cranston High back in the 1940s, and that’s where they first knew each other. On February 7, 1963, they took out their marriage license. It tells us that Jerry was fifty, still a teacher, and living in Warwick, and that this was the second marriage for each of them. On February 18, 1963, they were married in Cranston. It wasn’t a rabbi or a minister who married them, though. On the license, the line where the officiant writes his religious denomination seems to read “Associate Justice,” which means a judge performed the ceremony. Jerry was Jewish and Phyllis was Christian, and a simple civil wedding before a judge was probably the most natural way for the two of them to start out together without choosing one faith’s ceremony over the other’s. Two witnesses signed the paper, and one of them was probably Phyllis’s sister, Maitland. We still have a certified copy of that license in the family papers, and you can see it on Phyllis’s page. After the wedding she took his name, Gordon. Her daughter, your grandmother, was about nine, and from then on Jerry was her father in every way that mattered, all the way into adulthood. His own three sons from his first marriage became an important part of our family too.
Jerry’s Scottish Rite certificate, 32nd degree, May 29, 1974. Family papers.
A Thirty-Second-Degree MasonJerry was a Freemason. The Freemasons, or Masons, are one of the oldest brotherhoods in the world, going back to the stonemasons’ guilds of the Middle Ages. Today they’re a fellowship of men who promise to live honestly, help one another, and support charity in their communities, and they hold their meetings in “lodges.” After a man finishes the first three degrees, he can go on to the Scottish Rite, a branch of Masonry that teaches through a series of numbered steps called “degrees,” numbers 4 through 32. Each one is a lesson in morals, history, or philosophy.Among the family papers is Jerry’s Scottish Rite certificate, issued on May 29, 1974, by the Supreme Council of the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction in Boston. It names “Brother Gerald Gordon” a Prince of the Royal Secret, the 32nd degree, and a member of the Consistory in the Valley of Providence. (In the Scottish Rite, a “valley” means a home city.) The 32nd degree is the highest a Mason can earn by his own study and work. The only step above it, the 33rd, isn’t something a man can apply for. It’s given as an honor for outstanding service. Jerry was sixty-one when he earned his 32nd degree, which tells us he was still learning and committed to something bigger than himself late in life.His Last YearsJerry and Phyllis made their later home in Warwick, Rhode Island, and they were living there by 1985. They were married for twenty-four years. Warwick was still home, but near the end Jerry was in Wareham, Massachusetts, where his son and daughter-in-law were caring for him, and he died there on October 7, 1987, at seventy-four. He is buried at Pawtuxet Memorial Park in Warwick, the same cemetery where Phyllis rests. There’s still a lot we don’t know. He was the right age to have served in World War II, but we haven’t found any record that he did, and we haven’t found his obituary. If you ever turn one up, you’ll be filling in a page of our family’s story.