Weirdoes Racists I Have Known

The lives of my Mother, and another woman in town, paralleled each other for decades.  They both got married.  They both had a baby girl.  They both got divorced.  They both lived as a single mother for ten years.  They both got remarried in 1943.  My Father was invalided out of the Armed Services, to return home and marry her.  I don’t know where the other woman dug up a man to marry, in the middle of World War II.

He was never the picture of glowing health, and I guess somebody had to stay and work in the factories – although, all three local factories produced solid-wood home furniture, not exactly crucial to the war effort.  Both women gave birth to a boy in 1944. (Me!)  In 1947 they both had another boy.

By the time I met him a few years later, he was already known to all and sundry as Tojo.  His father’s first name was Ivan, a good Russian name.  The family name was a very uncommon German name.  I suspect that the father provided the nickname, but don’t understand how a German-Canadian kid got a Japanese moniker, so soon after VJ-Day.  He kept it till he left secondary school.

He apparently also got word-usage and pronunciation from his dad.  He used phrases like, “Blacker’n Toby’s ass.”  I never learned who the unfortunate “Toby” was, or why (perhaps only) his ass was black.  Santa Claus came down his chimbley.  A large, striped feline was a tagger.  Farm birds that produced eggs, were chookens, and a dropped football was a thumble.  No-one else in his family – in the town – talked this way.

Already encumbered with a racist sobriquet, he regularly dropped another one in particular.  My neighbor wanted me to shovel his driveway, but he only wanted to pay me a

MEASLY

fifty cents, the heimy bastard.
‘Measly’ always seemed to indicate an itchy body-rash of raised, red pustules, but in fact means contemptibly small, meager, or slight: wretchedly bad or unsatisfactory:

On the other hand, heimy – or heimey – or jaime, was a racist slur against Jews, and their perceived cheapness and lack of willingness to spend money.  Unconscious bigotry like this may have contributed to Canada’s refusal to accept German-Jew refugees.

I haven’t heard/read the term heimy in decades.  Nor have I heard anyone speak of Jewing someone  down, to get a better price.  Hopefully, we’re growing out of that prejudice.  How about you?  Have you ever run into it?  Lately??  😳