By Bill Simons

Ida (Demsky) Sahr was a baseball fan and an active member of the Schenectady Jewish Community Center. On November 20, 2008, I gave a lecture on Jewish baseball slugger Hank Greenberg at the Schenectady “J” and remember some vibrant, older Jewish ladies. Perhaps Ida was one of them. During my research on the Demskys, the current owner of Ida’s childhood home permitted me inside the property on 46 Eagle St., Amsterdam, giving me a connection to the family. 
To pay my respects to Ida, the last of her generation of Demskys, I attended her April 2, 2024, funeral at Gates of Heaven synagogue in Schenectady. Family eulogists painted a warm and loving picture of Ida. Healthy, a prodigious eater and snow shoveler nearly until the end, Ida died in her own home, at the age of 105. Greeting customers with a smile, Ida’s gregarious personality made her an iconic presence at the checkout counter of Loblaws Super Market, and she was proud of her rise to the middle class. Ida felt blessed as wife to Hy, mother to Janet and Marilyn, grandmother and great-grandmother. 
When Ida and twin Fritzie went to summer camp on scholarship, they were glad that their absence would give their siblings more food at the kitchen table. Although the seven Demsky children – six girls and a boy – experienced poverty, hunger and a tavern-brawling father, Ida had warm memories of her Amsterdam youth, making her adult home in nearby Schenectady. In contrast, her brother Izzy inherited a legacy of anger from his youth that propelled his ambition to leave Amsterdam and find success. When Ida finally got to see a ballgame at Yankee Stadium, the camera, scanning the crowd, put her on the scoreboard, prompting her to exclaim, “My brother is not the only one on the big screen!” In Hollywood, Izzy found stardom in the movies as Kirk Douglas. If Izzy was the ragman’s son, Ida was the ragman’s daughter. 
On the day that Ida was buried at Beth Israel Cemetery in Rotterdam, the PBS program “Finding Your Roots” broadcast an episode exploring the genealogy of the Demsky family, featuring host Henry Louis Gates Jr. and guest Michael Douglas, son of Izzy and nephew of Ida. Gates revealed to Michael that in 1911 his grandfather Herschel Danielovitch (Harry Demsky), father to Ida and Izzy, fled the Russian town of Chausy for America to avoid imprisonment after running afoul of Tsarist law. 
Izzy Demsky/Kirk Douglas died at age 103 on February 5, 2020. His fifth yahrzeit is a time to reflect upon his life. 
Michael Douglas said of his father: “One of the things that I find most incredible about dad is the third act of his life.” Despite a heart attack, plane crash, stroke and loss of his son Eric, Kirk Douglas remained active and relevant during his extended bonus round. After the age of 70, he wrote several books, acted, guided philanthropic projects, studied Torah, celebrated a second bar mitzvah and remained at the center of a multi-generational family. Exceeding the biblical allotment of “threescore years and ten” by more than three decades, Douglas savored the gift of a long and robust life. 
He was also a realist. Rather than allow the end of his leading man days on the big screen to keep him from his passion for acting, Douglas turned to television. As a major star with his name above the title, he had played the protagonist in many iconic films, “Champion,” “Lust for Life,” “Paths of Glory,” “Spartacus,” “Lonely Are the Brave” and “Seven Days in May,” amongst them. He did not allow past triumphs, however, to deter his path forward. As a senior, Douglas invested his talent in a number of television productions. 
The 1994 television film “Take Me Home Again,” later distributed as “The Lies Boys Tell,” is a dramedy. It reflects Douglas’ own feelings about aging, mortality and a life well lived. He plays Ed Reece, a frail and sick man with a very limited amount of time left. A retired salesman who trafficked in office supplies, Reece had spent many years on the road covering a big territory. Ed’s children and grandchildren join his wife Sylvia in the family home for a death watch, urging Ed to remain in bed to conserve energy. Ed experiences chest contractions, fatigue and unsteady balance, but he has no intention of dying just now and not in this bed. 
Ed sends for his prodigal son, the rebellious Larry (Craig T. Nelson), whom he has not seen for 20 years. Larry comes and helps his father flee the concerned but constraining endgame run by the rest of the family. Ed’s intent is to revisit his old sales territory, locate a special person, tilt with windmills, chalk up some more adventures, reconnect with Larry and die in the bed that he was born in. 
So, Ed and Larry, father and son, transverse about 2,000 miles from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast in a secondhand van, and they do have some memorable times even as they fight, laugh and reconcile. Along the way, Ed prevents small-town toughs from beating Larry by firing a pistol in the air. After going 47 miles above the speed limit, Ed fast talks his way out of a ticket. In a diner with the jukebox playing, Larry arranges for his father to dance with Sada, a lively lady who had a memorable affair with Ed years before. And Ed gives Larry the confidence to win a golf bet with pretentious duffers. Reluctantly, the rest of the Reece family resigns itself to Ed’s wishes and catches up with him. At trip’s end, Ed does die in the birth bed of his boyhood Oregon home, but not before a glorious last chapter to a rambunctious life. With guffaws, tears and good counsel, “Take Me Home Again” is part of Douglas’ legacy. 
John Naple, a native of the Demsky’s Eagle Street and helpful in so many ways, shared with me a John Steinbeck passage that captures the essence of the journey of Izzy, Ida and the rest of the Demskys: “We are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous.”