Max Dressler, my paternal grandfather, was born in 1907 on the lower east side of New York City to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents. For four years, starting in 1990 when I was 25 and he was 83, I taped his life story and the "off-color" jokes that I had heard hundreds of times growing up. He died in 2003 at the age of 95.

Max was an incredibly smart, complex man and a fantastic raconteur. One word would launch him into one of his "off-color" jokes, a Yiddish song or a story about the past. He was a trademark and patent attorney and his jokes came from phone conversations with colleagues across the US. His stories came from his childhood and his professional experiences. Some of my grandfather's biggest clients in the 1950s and 1960s were McDonald's, Johnson & Johnson, Playboy, Texaco Oil, and Colgate/Palmolive. Among the hundreds of great stories he told me the ones I enjoyed the most were about his meetings with the McDonald brothers, Hugh Hefner and George E. Johnson, Sr. who was responsible for introducing hair relaxer to African Americans on a large scale.

Though he excelled in his professional life, his personal life was difficult and painful. In 1972 my uncle Philip, my grandfather's youngest son, killed himself with a revolver. He was 24 and had just graduated from UCLA. Then in 1989, my aunt Julie, the middle child, committed suicide by jumping out of the John Hancock building in downtown Chicago at the age of 44. My father, the oldest, is a psychiatrist and a Jungian analyst. Click here to listen to Max's stories and jokes.