Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:22):
Got any partners. You're listening to Conversations with Jacob, hosted
by my good friend Jacob Waller. Make sure to check
out the podcast where podcasts are available, and check out
the video version on YouTube. You can follow us on
social media Facebook is Conversations with Jacob, Twitter is at
(00:48):
CWJ podcast, and you can visit our website Conversations with
Jacob podcast dot weebley dot com. Hey you got a
show idea, maybe a guest suggestion, email us at Conversations
with Jacob at gmail dot com. Now here's your host,
(01:11):
Jacob Waller.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
And welcome back to another episode of Conversations with Jacob.
I'm your host, Jacob. Of course, of course you haven't
noticed already, and welcome back to episode number eighty one
of the podcast. And we're kind of getting closer to
closer to episode one hundred and that would be in
(01:34):
February of twenty twenty five, and when we go to
one hundred episodes. But once again, like I said, you know,
like I said, and welcome back to another episode. Before
we get to our guest this week, I want to
do a few podcasts, a few podcast plugs and tell
you more about the podcast and another podcast as well.
(01:54):
You can check out the podcast on Facebook Conversations with
Jacob podcast. The website is Conversations with Jacob Podcasts dot
weeble dot com. You can check out upcoming guests, past guest.
I won't think about the podcast, not the podcast, but
the website is that you can go to three or
(02:18):
four months in events, see who's coming on the podcast,
because I do film these, maybe like three or four
months in events. Say you see who's coming up in
in well, it's about this time. It'll be September, and say,
if you check it about the time this drop, you
can check out who's appearing in twenty twenty five. Also,
(02:41):
you got a question, a guest suggestion, check out Conversations
with Jacob at gmail dot com. Check out the podcast
every Monday at one o'clock and make sure to like
and subscribe to our YouTube channel. There's like ninety percent
of people that are not subscribed, only like two three
or four percent that actually are. And uh so make
(03:01):
sure to like a comment on our YouTube channel. And
if you like podcasts, check out Two Chairs No Waiting
and Andy Griffith's show. Fan podcast hosted by my good
friend mister Alan Newsom and by the way, and here
us Alan Newsom to tell you more about his podcast.
Oh that's Hope, Goober, Floyd the barber.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
That's some of the names from the Andy Griffth Show
dropped by Two Chairs No Waiting the Andy griff Show
Fan Podcast, and we'll visit with some of those folks,
along with tribute artists and fans and just all kinds
of things related to the Andy Griffith Show. I'm your host,
Alan Newsom, and you can find the show Two Chairs
No Waiting at two Chairsnowaiting dot com or on iTunes.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And don't you just love technical problems on when you
want to play something as something else place? I just
love that. But it's about the way which I checked
what states and gifts our YouTube channel the most of use.
The first one is Texas with over one thousand, two
hundred and sixty eight views and California with one one
(04:07):
hundred and fifteen views, So thank you Texas and California
for the views. Anyways, and joining me this week on
episode eighty one is Calvin Schwartz. If I pronounced this
name or if I pronounced this name right, whiz, I'm
terrible with names on the podcast. Today we're going to
talk about what he does and some events that has
happened to him. So, with no further ado, please welcome
(04:30):
Calvin Schwartz to the podcast. Calvin, Welcome aboard.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Hello Jacob, good to be here. It is good to
be here. I love the fact that you're in Virginia.
You spent a lot of time in Virginia in one
of my second or third lives when I was working
as a regional manager for an eyeglass company. So one
of my favorite places to go because it's like a
(04:56):
combination of everything. You know, you got the northern Virginia
and r then you got the rural parts. And of
course I was a big fan of Virginia Tech football
when I had Frank Biemer, and I marveled at Frank
Biamer because here you took a good coach and you
put him into a school that wasn't like nationally ranked,
(05:18):
and all of a sudden, because he was so good,
he took Virginia Tech and made it into a major
national power.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Now, for people who don't know who
you are, Calvin, can you give us a little bit
description of who you are?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
Sure a real fast I'm from I'm a New Jersey
guy born bred Still I never I could never escape
to state. I'm stuck in New Jersey. So born in
New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, went to Rutgers University. That
was where my Rutgers at I got a degree, and
(05:53):
I got a couple degrees in pharmacy. I did pharmacy
for twelve years. I didn't like it, so I moved
on and I got into sales, and I wound up
working for the largest eyewear company in the world called
Exotica Group. There on Lenchcrafters and Pearl and ray Band
and basically everything in the eyeglass business. I spent twenty
five years there, loved every second that I was there.
(06:17):
My bosses, the father and son, became the richest Italians
in the world, so they were doing the right thing,
and of course I learned a ton of stuff from them.
And near the end of my time there, I had
an epiphany. A light went off in my head and
then I figured it was time to maybe start writing.
So I wrote my first novel, which is called Vishy Water.
(06:43):
It was based on the fact that I watched this
movie Casablanca, and once I wrote that. I said to myself,
it's time for a change. So and I guess, I
guess one of my big things is to reinvent yourself.
And you know we all could do that. I decided
to reinvent myself. So I wrote a novel and then
(07:05):
I became a journalist, a broadcast at a cable give
you talk show. I started teaching the Rutgers University. I
did a podcast. I worked with the Women's Health Institute.
I do all these things after I turned sixty five,
thirteen years ago. So that's my story, Jacob.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, you know, it kind of sounds like you've
done a lot wrapped there in your life altogether.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
You know, like I said, twenty five years in the
eyeglass business, it was it was kind of quiet. You know,
I can out of Virginia. I covered the Holas Coast.
I love doing that West Virginia. I mean, I loved Della.
I mean, all of that quiet. And then you know,
I wrote the novel and just suddenly everything started to happen.
(07:53):
It's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
You know, I didn't mean to interrupt you there for
a minute, but Bo, when you went to study how
the pharmacy work, oh is that something that you always
wanted to do, or did it run in the family.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Good question. It's a really good question. Actually, it really
ran in the family because my mother's brother was a
pharmacist and his two sons were pharmacists. So my mother
insisted I become a pharmacist. And part of that training
out of chemistry, which I hated, physics which I hated,
(08:35):
mathematics which I hated. So I hated the whole curriculum.
It was an effort, and it was a six year program,
so it was that real. I hated it. I didn't
want to do it because it was stuff stuck inside me.
I loved writing, I loved history, but I didn't have
a say in it. So I did it reluctantly. Play
(09:00):
I walk up and I decided to become free.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Oh what some people don't know is and that you
auditioned to play Frankinstan in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
That's right. As matter of fact. That's so interesting because
the day it's so interesting, Jacob, because the day I
woke up February nineteen eighty one, I woke up, I
looked at my poor wife who's out there in the kitchen,
and I said I'm quitting my profession. I can't do
it anymore. She's, what do you mean? We just got
(09:30):
a house. It's you were trained to do this. What
do you I just I have to quit. I'm quitting today.
And at that exact second, I told her I'm quitting.
The Edison Valley Playhouse in Central Jersey had a commercial.
They were putting on a play called Frankenstein, and they
were looking for actors. So I thought it was divine
(09:53):
intervention that here I am quitting my profession and now
I have a chance, at six foot live to become
an actor and work in a play called Frankenstein. So
I got dressed, drove up there. Never never saw a
script before in my life, but I figured somebody up
there is pulling on the strings, and and I auditioned
(10:17):
for Frankenstein. I never got the part. I'm actually still
waiting to hear.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Now, do you think your life would have changed if
you did get the part for Frankenstein? Or do you
think you or do you think that you would have
went down a different route besides going through set an eyeglasses?
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Another very good question. Well, I'm a great believe in
things are meant to be. I wasn't meant to be
an actor, although although I did, it never left me
because I guess I was unfulfilled. I never had an
(10:59):
opportunity to really act. I'm not acting now, but uh
I did. Actually, there wasn't acting. I did sneak into
a movie with Meryl Streep called One Free Thing. Long story.
It's a long story. But I actually was in the movie,
and and and and I snuck into it and and
(11:21):
I was in the Christmas scene. Uh. And then because
of that, I actually auditioned for War of the Worlds
with Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. Yes, because I auditioned
for Frankenson. I had the guts to do that, I said.
(11:41):
And I saw they were having an open call, an
open audition for War to Worlds, and it was in Newark,
where I'm from. So I said, uh, I'm gonna do it,
and and I actually drove down to NewYork and I
I and I did my little audition. There wasn't much.
It was to be an extra for a War in
(12:01):
the Worlds. And actually a couple of weeks l they
called me to be in it. I could have been
in Word of Worlds with Tom Cruise and directed by
Steven Spielberg. But I made a terrible mistake, the biggest
mistake in my life. I blew it. I turned them
down because I had to take off eight days from
work to do that, and I couldn't take off eight
(12:23):
days from work. So that's my story.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Now, Now, why did you change career from being a
pharmacy to go and sit in eyeglasses?
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Well that when I quit pharmacy that day and I
didn't get Frankenstein. I sat home for six months. My
wife was teaching in New York and I was watching
we were a young married couple. I was watching General
Hospital and One Life to Live in Ryan's Hope and
The Rockford Files. For six months, I'm having a grand
(12:58):
old time. I'm eating and I'm watching TV and I'm
not working. And I'm a young guy. I should be working.
So I had a relative who saw that my marriage
was being stressed out because I'm not working. My wife
is working, and he said to me, you got to
do something. You got to do something. You have to
(13:21):
bring in some money. You can't. He said, I'll get
your job selling eyeglasses. So I didn't want to do
it because I was pretty quiet back then. And shy,
and I didn't know if I can get in front
of people and like try to sell them. So but
it was a matter of my marriage surviving. It was
(13:41):
a matter of survival economy. I needed money, so I
did it. And it was a little sparked, yea, I said,
you know, as I started doing it, you know, like
talking to people. It's fun. And that's how that all began.
And of course it lasted twenty five years.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Now why did you just side to kind of retire
from sitting eyeglasses and what made you stay around for
twenty five years?
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Well, because it was a great It was a great job,
and also it was a pretty good playing job. And
you know, there weren't a lot of rules, and my
company was growing and exploding and they had great sunwlare
so hey, you're earning a great living. The people you
work for are wonderful. My bosses, the vice president of company, Henry,
(14:33):
these became great friends of mine. And for me, it
was unregimented, meaning, hey, if I want to sleep late
one day, you know I'm watching Jimmy Fallon or Johnny
Carson late. You know, I'll get up late instead of
get up at eight or nine I mean I made you.
You make your own hours, you do your own thing, Jacob.
And that for me, that unregimented lifestyle was perfect. So
(15:00):
that's why I stayed. You know, the income was great.
The people I worked for, their names were del Vecchio, wonderful,
amazing people, and they gave me fifty courses. They I
took fifty courses while I was there, and selling and
and and leadership and all kinds of things which helped
(15:20):
my head up here. So you know, it's the money
and the people I worked with and the people I
sell to. It was it was an actually for me,
it was an ideal job. And I had no I
had no h I had no inclination to want to
(15:40):
leave there. It was there was no reason to leave.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Now, what do you think is the biggest challenge and
set and eyeglasses, Uh.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
A lot of challenges. Another good question because it's very,
very very competitive. There's a million companies out there, and
and the challenge and one of the biggest challenges is
you you have to learn how to sell. You have
to know how to respond when you hear the word no.
You have to also have to learn how to overcome
(16:16):
objections people, people I would go to see people. I
don't want to buy Calvin. It's like, let's say it's
like July, come see me in December. So I said, well,
you know what a billet in December. Come just buy
now and I'll ship it to December. So in other words,
every every objection that you overcome, you that you get,
(16:37):
you have to find a reason to overcome. I mean,
these are challenges. It's hugely competitive. And also listen, I
remember one time I drove ake for three hours to
get to an account. I had an appointment and I
(16:57):
walk in there bring my two big sample bags, and
he says, oh, yeah, I can't see you today. I said, well,
I just drove three hours to come here and I
got I got three hours to go home, and now
you tell me you can't by I said, well, I'm sorry,
I'm busy. Goodbye. And that was that. So I got
in the car and I kind of lost it. So
(17:19):
I started driving heading. I started heading toward Atlantic City.
I figured, well, maybe I'll go do some gambling or something.
But anyway, I was going about eighty ninety miles an
hour and a fifty and I got a ticket. So
that's another challenge. Jacob. You have to you have to deal.
You have to deal with negativity. You have to deal
(17:39):
with all kinds of people and all kinds of situations,
and I learned how to deal. So it was a
big listen. Selling is a big challenge because you have
to know everything about the account you're selling, and you
have to anticipate things. You have to have the ways
to overcome them. You have to accept, and I learned
(18:03):
you know how to accept, and that's part of life
and you kind of move on. So I did learn
a lot of life lessons from those twenty five years
about people and expectations.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Now, can you tell us what happened to you in
nineteen seventy four. It was a kind of a spiritual
thing to you.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still digest that so in nineteen
seventy four, and for your listeners, a big part of
who and what I am today is a tremendous amount
of spirituality. It's powerful stuff, things that I don't even
(18:43):
quite understand, things that have happened to me. I'm a
regular guy. I go to college football games, college basketball games.
I'm a regular, regular guide. There's nothing unusual about me.
Used to hang out at Ashbury Park, the music scene,
you know, Springsteen and Clarence Clemens, and I mean, I'm sorry,
(19:06):
I'm well rounded, a regular guy, but there's this spiritual
element to me. And when I finally put it all
together and understood it, you know, I plugged myself. I
wrote this, There's a Tortoise in My Hair, A Journey
to Spirit. It got published in October. You know, it's fiction,
(19:29):
but a lot of a lot of it. Some of
it is my journey to spirit. And in this book,
I write about what happened on August of nineteen seventy four.
And there are no explanations for this other than I'm
just telling you. But I was a pharmacist at the time.
I was thirty years old, and I had just gotten
(19:52):
divorced from my first wife, and I had a little
pharmacy and I was driving home one night and I
hit a traffic light, had a little low and the
guy on the left of me in the next kind
of lane, he started to rever his engine and he
wanted to race. And I was thirty years old, and
I was a little bit crazy, and I didn't have
any fears, so he kind of gave me a finger
(20:17):
gesture and I returned it, and he peeled out and
I peeled out, and we accelerated from twenty five miles
an hour to fifty sixty miles an hour. We're going
pretty fast on the city street and it's about eight
o'clock at night August, and the road suddenly curved. He
couldn't see it, so he hit me. And when he
hit me, I at sixty miles an hour. I took
(20:39):
my Volkswagen wheel and I turned it to avoid. And
because the Volkswagen doesn't have a lot of center of gravity,
my car then lost control and started to roll over.
So now at fifty miles an hour, whatever, I'm rolling over.
So I closed my eyes and I knew I was
gonna die. Uh and uh. A few seconds went by,
(21:04):
and I did say, dear God, if you're gonna take me,
just don't rip an arm or a leg off, just
take me. And then the car rolled and rolled, and
all of a sudden there was a thud, and the
car was upside down and the car was crushed. I mean,
there's nothing left of it. And and uh. I touched
myself and I seemed to be okay, and I knew
(21:26):
I had to climb out because it was smoking. Maybe
it was going to catch fire. So I climbed out
the door, which was over my head and and I
walked over to I laand on somebody's lawn. And the
bottom line is, there wasn't a scratch on me, nothing,
nothing car completely crushed. Not a scratch on me I had.
(21:47):
I had a white lamb coat because I was a
pharmacist at the time, and I had a package of
chocolate chip cookies in the hot pocket there. Nothing was
broken anyway. The police came and you know, I asked
what happened. I lied. I told him somebody hit me
on inside was drag racing. And then the cop took
me over and he said, your car when you were
(22:08):
rolling over one between this big tree and a big pole,
and if your car six inches either way hits that
tree or pole, you're absolutely dead. And that was kind
of like wow. And then he said the most interesting thing.
And it's all provable because the tree in a pole
(22:28):
is still there and I drive by once every four
or five years to look at it. But he said,
your car appears to be wider than the distance between
the tree and a pole, so we don't know how
you got through there. So that was one of the
first spiritful things, Jacob that happened to me. And it
(22:49):
took me many, many years later, as I'm in my
present state and present day, that I begin to understand
that that somebody, you know, was kind of watching over me.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Now, now can you talk about April
twenty second, nineteen seventy, the First Earth Day, and how
did that affect you?
Speaker 4 (23:15):
Yeah, you know, it's another great question because that actually
kind kind of changed my life and saved my life.
I went to the First Earth Day in twenty second,
nineteen seventy as a young kid. I mean I was
really young, it's my twenties, but it resonated with me,
(23:37):
and it registered me that we have to do stuff
to save the planet. Environmentally, we can't and I'm not
getting anything kind of political thing. Whether we have global
warming or not. I mean, this is the hottest year
in the history of the Earth doesn't make a difference.
Things are changing, and I realized that. So I became
(24:01):
environmentally conscious and I've been that way ever since. But
a couple of years later, because I cared because it
meant something to me. In nineteen seventy five, five years
After that, I decided to stop eating everything and anything
(24:22):
with four legs. And I know that cows eat a
lot of grass. You have to water the grass. Use
a tremendous amount of water to water the grass so
the cows can eat the grass, so the cows can
get fat. So a hamburger chain can make a big sandwich,
a hamburger out of that. And then the process, the
(24:45):
stuff from the cows goes up as methane into the
atmosphere and it helps to heat the plant it up.
So I said, I said to myself, I just need
to do something. So I stopped eating everything with four legs.
And the interesting thing is, and I've been that way since.
By the way, I love I love going to Madithon
(25:06):
Square Garden. You know, hot dog, best mustard, sacrat, love it.
And I love hot dogs. I love corn beef, I
love Italian hot dogs. I mean, I love steak, but
I would not and I haven't eaten that stuff since
nineteen seventy five. And the funny thing happened a couple
of years ago. I'm friendly with my cardiologist and he
(25:30):
sent me for a calcium see two scan that's to
look at your cornary orders. They see how clogged they get.
You know, they get really clogged, and sometimes they have
to go in there and open and do a rotor
ruder thing and open heart surgery bypair surgery. But anyway,
he wanted to see how clogged up I was, and
(25:51):
he did this test. I went to the hospital. But anyway,
I have zero coronary artery plaque. It's zero, So that
means my heart's getting all the blood and my brain
is getting all the blood it needs. There's nothing stopping it.
So and you know what, nobody will be able to
(26:12):
tell if not eating meat did that, but it certainly
might have helped. So maybe a second life.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I don't know. Now you kind of answered my next
question about why you stop eating things before legs. I'm
gonna follow that up with another question. Oh oh, if
people listening and do you think that they just stop
eating a thing with four legs.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
Everybody's got to do what they're comfortable with. And again,
there is no definitive answer did my not eating meat contribute?
There isn't. In medical science, as wonderful and as advanced
it is, nobody can give me a straight answer did
it help or didn't help? I mean, I got a
good friend who's the doctor, and he says, Cavin, it
(26:58):
doesn't make any difference. And last night I was watching
this longevity thing on public television and he's saying and
he said, eat a ton of meat when you get older,
because you know the meat has fat. You need to
fat for muscles. And so, you know, it's funny. There
was there was a funny movie. It was a Woody
(27:19):
Allen movie that came out called Sleeper. And then the
movie Sleeper, he's put to sleep in the and it's
five hundred years he's sleeping and when they wake him up,
all five doctors are smoking cigarettes and it's five hundred
years into the future. And Woody Allen says, are you
gosh crazy? That's a terrible thing. And the doctor said,
(27:41):
all five of the guys who were smoking, after they
wake him up after five hundred years, they say, well,
they finally found out that cigarette smoking is good for you.
So the point being, I'll never know. I did what
I had to do, and for me, something is it genes? Yeah, genes,
(28:02):
you know a little part of it. But something worked,
and I'm not going to fix it. It worked. And
I like the fact that you know, my blood is
flowing unobstructed, So we don't know. I can't answer that.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Oh yeah, absolute, absolutely. Now for people who don't know this,
you take over sixty supplements a day since nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Yes, because in nineteen sixty nine I was studying pharmacology
and vitamins and supplements, and so with that kind of
a background and the fact that I do a lot
of reading, I assume that gentle and I call a
(28:48):
gentle supplementation because everything I take is low dose. I
don't take big doses of anything, but I know I
take just a wide variety of things. And you know,
if I read one day this is maybe not so good.
I stopped taking it, so you know, I balanced myself.
But I've been doing it. I've been doing it since
(29:10):
nineteen sixty nine, and at this stage of my life,
why fix anything because it's great. Yeah, it's working absolutely. Now.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
In July twenty first, nineteen eighty eight, and you was
three hundred and fifty and what happened that date that
calls you to lose one hundred pounds in two months
and stop smoking?
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Yeah, so I was a health freak. But one day,
actually the day right after I met my wife. I
don't know why I started smoking, but I did. It
was terrible because and when I was in pharmacist school,
I had the largest vital loan capacity. I'm a big guy,
(29:53):
and smoking was always I just never did. But I
started the smoking. I was smoking, and there's a lot.
It's a heavy thing. I mean, I had issues and
I was not happy with the world, and so my
release was smoking, and my release was also eating. And
(30:14):
between the smoking and eating. On July twenty first, in
nineteen eighty eighty nine, that day I walked. I couldn't
walk up a flight of stairs in my house the
night before because you know, a smoker for ten years,
and I weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. So I
(30:35):
walked up the steps and I couldn't even walk up
a flight of stairs. So I kind of figured that
I'm dying. And then that following morning, I woke up
July twenty first, and I write about it. I write
about it in here. I heard a voice say trust.
(30:58):
So I looked at my wife and she was kind
of sleeping, and I said, I mean I really heard
a voice say trust, just that, and she was sleeping.
I said, did you just say something to me, you said,
trust She never answered, so I jumped up and I
ran into my son's room and he was fast asleep too,
(31:19):
so I know what I heard. And then I did
some thinking and something came over me, Jacob, and I
wish I could bottle it, because if I could bottle
that piece of energy, put it in a bottle and
sell it, you know, to make a million dollars. But anyway,
something said to me, from this moment on, there'll be
(31:40):
no more cigarettes, they'll be exercised, and I'm going to die.
And it was powerful. Someone my wife fuck up. I
told her, you know, I heard a voice. You know,
I heard a voice, and you know she thinks half
the time, you know, I'm not over there, and probably
maybe i'm not. But anyway, I was so obsessed, I
(32:02):
mean obsessed. So I took my cigarettes. And by the way,
when you do this, when you're dining and smoking, you
can do one or the other. Nobody can do both.
So if you want to diet, you got to keep
smoking because that helps you kind of not eat. And
you know, if you want to stop smoking, you can't
do both. It's hard. But I did both, and then
(32:25):
every night i'd walk a mile just to do some exercise.
But anyway, I was doing five hundred calories a day,
so I was eating like five pieces of macaroni, a
little pet the lettuce, no dressing, no sugar, no this
and all that. And and I started to walk a
mile every night. And anyway, two and a half months,
I lost one hundred pounds. And I was selling eyeglasses
(32:48):
at the time. And it's kind of funny because you know,
as a salesman, I don't see people, you know, I
see them for like three times a year, so I've
seen them once every four months. So I lost one
hundred pounds. Most people didn't. So when I call hold
on some people back then and I sat in her
office and they didn't recognize me because I'd lost hundred pounds.
And some people thought I had AIDS because I had
(33:10):
walt so much weight so fast. But whatever it was,
it changed and saved my life because I never you know,
I kept that weight off. I stopped smoking. And it's
funny because two years later from not being able, this
is a great message for your listeners. So from not
(33:32):
being able to walk up a flight of stairs, by
taking care of my body and doing the right things.
In two years from that moment, I played six and
a half hours of tennis outside in ninety degree temperature, NonStop.
So I went from not being able to walk up
(33:52):
a flight of stairs to playing two and a half
six and a half hours of tennis outside in my
haunship here. So that's the power that we all have
if we put it to good use.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Now, how today, do you got a diet that you
follow or do you eat or do you eat what
you want to eat?
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Hey? Yeah, I'm always tempted, but I never cheated with
corned beef or a real hamburger or steak. At this point,
doesn't really make a difference if I do eat or not.
And when I turned seventy five a few years ago,
my son brought me a corn beef sandwich and I
(34:47):
took one bite out of it, and it's been so
many years, you know, forty years. I spit it out.
I didn't like it. So I how do I how
do I explain this? At the height of the pandemic,
We're all sitting around, we're all eating, there's nothing else
to do. And I gained like forty fifty pounds, so
(35:10):
you know, I was like sixty two seventy. I was
not happy. So I did my own research and I
put myself on my own version of what's called intermittent fasting.
And as it turns out, it's pretty healthy thing to do.
So intimate and fasting means, yeah, ten eleven o'clock at night,
(35:33):
you know, maybe have a snack, and you know, I
can cone this, that, and that's it. That's all I'll
eat till the following day at twelve or one o'clock.
So my body goes twelve hours without food. That's and
there's all kinds of things about intimate and fasting and
it's kind of healthy. I lost fifty pounds. I lost
(35:55):
fifty pounds. Interesting, you know, in the year and a
half that we were in the middle of the pandemic.
Fifty pounds. I'm down to, like I'm down to my
college weight, and I can't gain. I can't lose anymore.
But but it's intimate and fast becomes a way of life.
I just it becomes a way of life. And I
(36:15):
do it five six days a week. And and you
know I do chicken, turkeys and fish and vegetables and
stuff and a lot of fiber.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Now, now talk to is about two thousand and four.
How when you went to play tennis?
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Uh? Yeah, one of the one of the more interesting
spiritual things in my life. I was playing tennis at
the time, and I love tennis. And I got up
and it was a Sunday morning and had a doubles game,
and put out my shorts, went outside and it was
(36:58):
raining and I couldn't play tennis. So it was like
nine o'clock Sunday morning. Came back in the house. I
didn't know what to do. I had all this energy.
I was so disappointed. And then something one of my
favorite words is something something comes over me, and it says, Calvin,
(37:19):
go watch the movie Castle Blanca. And I've seen that
movie fifty times. I love it. It's just a wonderfully romantic,
wonderful movie. Takes place in nineteen forty two in Castle Blanka,
Humphrey Bogart and with Bergmann. Just a great movie. So anyway,
in my tennis shorts, I sat down at the edge
(37:41):
of my bed, I put the I put the VHS
in the machine, and I watched Castle Blanka for the
fifty first time, and at the very end of the movie,
at the very end of the movie, Humphrey Bogart shoots
the bad guys, the German guy. Bad guy shoots him,
kills him, and then Claude Raine, this great, wonderful character actor,
(38:02):
picks up a bottle of Vishi water. It's like Perier
French mineral water. It kind of looks like this, and
and he wants to celebrate the death of the bad guy.
But he looks at the label. In nineteen forty two,
anything that had the word vishy in it kind of meant,
you know, it was kind of a bad word and
meant you're kind of conspired with the Germans and stuff.
(38:26):
So he throws it in the garbage There's a garbage can,
and it takes about a second for to hit. And
when it hit the bottom of the garbage can, I
grabbed my head. I said, oh my god. And you know,
my poor wife yelled upstairs. You know, it's like Fred Sanford.
You know, hey, Elizabeth, I'm coming. You know I'm coming.
(38:46):
I said, oh my god. And I said, there's a
novel in my head. Now I've never written anything in
my life before because I studied science, so I don't
know where this came from. And and so I came
down here, right here in this chair, sat down and
outlined this this novel called vishy Water and whoops, okay, okay,
(39:12):
that's okay. Oh so it's called vishy Water. And there's
that bottle, that bottle that Claude Rains had picked up,
and my two characters are sitting on a train bench
ready to take a train. And that that was the
story that was based a little bit upon Casablanca, a
little bit. Uh and and I'll listen, I knew Jacob,
(39:38):
I knew somebody up there stuck this into my head,
because you know, this is three hundred and eighty pages,
and it just doesn't pop into your head. Popped into
my head the whole thing, like in one second. So
that then began this journey I had for ten years
while I wrote it. And and then this became a
(40:02):
vehicle for me to quit selling eyeglasses and become a journalist,
and become a broadcaster, and become a teacher at Rutgers.
All these different things that I'm doing. Was because I
did this. I didn't care if I didn't care if
I sold any of these or not. What was important
(40:22):
was I did it. I did it, and I finished it.
But it also for ten years I was trying to
come up with who, what, where? When put this novel
into my head? And one day it all came together
and I finally figured out. It's a long story. It
will take two hours or explain, I'm not but I
(40:45):
finally figured out who and why, well not necessarily why
who put this into my head? Bearing in mind, you know,
that's that bottle of water that looks like this, and
that became the cover. So that day that I figured
it all out, it was my grandfather who died in
nineteen thirty seven. I never knew him. I never knew him,
(41:09):
but he's the one for sure. The odds, the odds
were five hundred million to one of this happening, but
it happened. So the day I found out it was
my grandfather, I found the one and only picture of him,
and that's him. That's him right here on the right
(41:31):
over here. But you see what's on that table, that
bottle of water. You gotta now, this is nineteen oh
two in Newark, New Jersey. They're all from Rush of
these guys, and there's that bottle of water. No explanation,
you know, there's that bottle that what the cover became
(41:53):
a novel. So that's what he put into my head.
And when I found out it was him, and there's
that bottle of So it really is inexplicable. There are
no you know, there are no explanations other than something spiritual.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Now for people that read that book and also the
other book, and what can they take away from it?
Speaker 4 (42:20):
Well, more importantly, this is this people should read. Why
Well it's on Amazon. Why because it's there. I talk
about the fact. For me and again, I'm a regular guy.
For me, there's been so many different things in my life,
(42:42):
wonderful different things that teach me that there's something out
there beyond our understanding and we're not necessarily supposed to understand.
And each and every one of us, as I've learned,
has that gift. But most of us are really busy
(43:03):
with our lives and doing things. But if you stop
and you know, smell the roses and smell the coffee
and and and kind of realize that we're all gifted,
every one of us, we're gifted with with spiritual things.
But again, where I mean I I was lucky. I
had these things happen, and I you know, I rolled
(43:25):
my antenna up into the into the sky. And and
I've been gifted with a lot of these kind of stories,
you know, rolling over in the Volkswagen writing a novel
that came from nowhere. So I'm I'm a regular guy,
but uh, this tells a detailed story, and it forbade
(43:46):
him everything that spiritually happened to me. I stuck into
here because you know, sometimes you can't make this stuff up.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Now, growing up, you play basketball?
Speaker 4 (43:58):
I did? I did?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Did you ever played in cottage or ever go pro? Uh?
Speaker 4 (44:06):
Part of part of my growing up and now I
explore in here with my character's name is Cameron. Uh.
Part of the fact. I didn't have a lot of
self confidence. I didn't have a lot of self confidence.
My my parents were busy raising my two little sisters,
and I never knew I was a good basketball player.
(44:32):
And and actually, when we're done, I'll send you a
picture of me jumping board.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
And and you see me, you like two feet higher
than the guy I'm jumping against. I was a pretty
good basketball player, but I didn't have any self confidence,
and so I didn't I didn't make my high school team,
but I used to play against some of the guys
and one of the guys on my high school team. Well,
he was a couple of years older than me. He
went on to become a Walled State uh in in
(45:00):
My high school was one of the best teams in
the country back in those days, in the sixties, one
of the best teams in the country. Actually in nineteen
sixty seven they were the number one team in the country.
So it was a really good basketball school. But his
name was Chris and he was All State and then
he became All American at Iowa and played a little
(45:22):
provol But I met him actually last October we had
a multi year reunion of my high school. He was there.
He was always my idol, I mean god, I loved
him and I was always afraid even to be around him,
to talk to him because he was so good. But anyway,
he came up to me. We talked and he said
something really interesting to me. He said, he said, how
(45:43):
come we ever played for our high school? You were
one of the best players I ever played against. You know,
we used to play a playground ball. And I said,
you're kidding. You're telling me that now that I was
a good player. Why couldn't you have told me that
back then? So anyway, I went to school in Ohio,
University of Tilo, and before I went to Rutgers, and
(46:06):
I got there a few weeks earlier, and I just
loved playing ball and I played against one of the
assistant coaches I used to play for the Pistons, and
I did a number on him. So a few weeks
later he came to my dorm room and said, we
want you to play for the University of Tilio, but
my parents wouldn't let me. So then I transferred to Rutgers,
(46:30):
and rutgers newer coach wrote me a letter which I
keep wanted me to play for them. And then in
seventy six, I was playing ball out in Chicago. I
had a girlfriend and they saw me playing ball and
I said, we want you to travel Chicago. Bulls will arrange.
And then a funny thing happened, Jacob I broke up
(46:50):
with the girl came back to Jersey. So I never
So anyway, that's my basketball career. There really wasn't you know.
I played playground ball and played for the Newark why
and stuff. But I'll never know if I could have
We'll never know.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Yeah I would, O would you could have been an
actor a basketball player. He could have been a whole lot.
It seems like correct correct now? Uh, Now, after your
novel was published, what did you do after that?
Speaker 4 (47:24):
I mean this, I mean oh you mean Vishi water?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:29):
So once that got published, I said to myself, well, gee,
you know, hey, I'm a novelist and I don't care
if nobody buys it. I wrote a novel, not easy
to do. So then uh, I quit. I quit with Xodica,
sat home for a bit of time, and I answered
a couple of ads. There were a couple of Jersey
(47:52):
magazines looking for journalists. So I said, you know what,
I'm a journalist. And I became a journalist. I started
writing for a couple of New Jersey magazines and then
I got hooked up with a company called NJ Discover.
It's a big production company here in Jersey. Uh and
and uh I signed on with them. And and I said,
(48:15):
I have I'm a retired guy, I'm already old. How
about it I do some journalism for you. And he said,
do anything want? You know? And he was great and
he gave me the freedom. So I started doing journalism.
I started doing stuff about homelessness, and hunger and autism
and nutrition and women's health and bit and sport. I mean,
(48:36):
I just started writing a lot of articles. Then we
started uh uh, we had a TV studio here. We
started a cable TV talk show. I became a producer,
uh and the co host. So we had a show
that went out to a chunk of Simple Jersey. And
I had no I had no experience background. Yet I
was getting some some national type guests to come, you know,
(48:58):
to come to you know, our and so I did that,
and then I got involved with my alma manor. I
started doing mentoring of students about my journey and networking
and the fact that I got fifteen thousand LinkedIn, so
I was able to give back to students. And I
mean I took all this time. Again, I'm a retired guy,
(49:18):
so I have a lot of time. But I was
given back and I got along really well with students,
even though you know, I'm a half century older. But
I was able to teach, and eventually Rutgers asked me
to teach. So a few years ago I was teaching
career explorations and then I got involved with the Women's
Health Institute at Rutgers Rutgers Robbertoo, Johnson Medical School. I'm
(49:42):
on the advisory committee. I don't know a lot about
women's health, and I'm learning, so I'm doing all these things, Jacob.
Because I wrote this, this gave me the confidence and
I got involved in the Muse six scene here in Jersey,
which is rich with Springsteen and bon Jovi hanging around.
(50:06):
It's funny. I used to work out for two years
before the pandemic. I used to work out in this
gym three days a week, doing a lot of exercise.
And who used to be on the machines right next
to me with Bruce Springsteen. Pretty funny. Yeah, I wish
to merry Christmas once. We talked once. But so that's
(50:28):
my whole life change because of this. I never planned anything.
You just kind of go with the flow, and that's
what I did. Whatever came along.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
I did now as a journalist. And what are some
of your favorite stories.
Speaker 4 (50:48):
I did a lot of I did a lot of paranorial.
I loved doing homelessness and I love doing hunger and
I loved I got involved with some paranoia stuff and
I never asked for that, but I was doing paranoral
and eventually we did some paranoral investigations. Stuff stuff, hey,
(51:14):
stuff that just happened and that. Yeah, I'm I'm kind
of stuttering here because how do I tell you the stuff?
But you know, I'll tell you because you know it happened.
Nothing earth shaking. But then again, inexploicable. I was coming
back from and I used to love interviewing centenarians, you
(51:39):
know people. I did a bunch of stories on people
who were one hundred plus years old, and that was
one of the things. And it's funny, I could do
anything I wanted because you know, I wasn't CBS or
NBC or CNN, and I had no I had no
rules and whatever, and we had the TV show, so
I mean I listen, I was having I mean, I
did good stuff. What's his them? I did a lot
(52:01):
of them. Actually I did. I did AUTI with a
group from I don't know whether they were Virginia, North Carolina,
but it was a little dance troupe and they won't
like this dance competition and the kids were all artistic
and it was great and I covered it when it
was North Jersey. So I mean, I was doing meaningful things.
I was doing stories that CNN and ABC and NBC
couldn't do because they didn't have the time. I could
(52:23):
do it, and that really meant a lot to me.
Uh So, I had interviewed this woman. She turned one
hundred and three and her name was Emily Emily Cooks.
She was great and we became friends. I mean, she's
one hundred and three. We became friends. And I remember
interviewing her once and I gave her a bottle of wine,
(52:45):
you know, because she liked to drink a little glass
of wine at night. And on air, I told her
on air that, you know, I'll bring the wine to
her room and and she said, you want to come
to my room? I said, yeah, but I don't know
what you're thinking. But and she said, listen, just because
(53:07):
i'm one hundred and three doesn't mean I don't think
about those things. I said, well, I'll just bring the
wine to your room. But that's it, you know, funny story.
But anyway, from coming back from that, my co reporter,
tyr Jane McDonald Banano, she not great friends and she
was my co reporter. We were driving home, we sawt
(53:29):
this old cemetery. It was a Presbyterian cemetery and the
dates on it were sixteen sixteen seventy to seventeen fifty.
So the people who were buried there never knew America
was born. They died before July fourth, you know. So
I told Tama that park the car, let's go in
(53:51):
and look. So it was about like thirty graves no
stones upright, but they're all flat little things. It was
really interesting. So it was cold because it was like February.
It was cold, and I said, let's come back when
it's warmer, like in June. So I took pictures and
I threw it up on Facebook. Actually, a professor from
(54:16):
Rufus saw that she had done some paranormal investigations and
I hadn't done anything. She got a hold of me
and said, if you go back to the cemetery, I'd
like to come with you. So in June. In June
I contacted her. I contacted her and Tyran. The three
of us went to this cemetery at eight o'clock in
(54:38):
the morning on a beautiful Saturday June mornings, about eighty degrees.
It was nice, not a cloud in the sky. And
this woman, Grace, has a microphone and she went over
to one of the graves I mean, you know, she
went over one of the graves and you could read
the writing was faded in the writings. It was a
little girl. She died when she was twelve, and and
(55:01):
Grace held the microphone over the grave. It was a
special microphone, and she asked the little girl. She asked,
are you a little girl? And a couple other things.
And then a few minutes later, Grace and Tyrn and
me were in a little circle talking and Grace played
back the microphone and you hear a voice saying, yes,
(55:25):
I'm a little girl.
Speaker 2 (55:27):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (55:28):
And then and then again there wasn't a cloud in
the sky. And then it started terrain on us. And
there's no clouds in the sky. It's perfectly sunny. And
I said to Grace, who's I mean, she's like a pro.
I said, what's going on here? She said, there's no explanations.
(55:49):
Sometimes these things happened. So from that I went on
to do six or seven more paranorl investigations and things.
And again, you know, I go to football games, basketball games.
You know, I don't want to kind of merge the two,
(56:11):
and there are no explanations for these things. But you know,
I know, I know what happened? You know, I know,
I know what happened. Once we went to an abandoned
bank building from the eighteen hundreds. It was abandoned, and
these two guys are going to put up a pizza shop.
(56:35):
But they had told me the places like really haunted,
and they knew of my reputation that I like doing stories,
I guess. But you know, we went. I put together
six or seven people and we're in the basement and
this woman left her glasses on a table in this
(56:58):
empty basement. And while we're in this room, you hear
a noise in her glasses which were on a table,
and now on the other side of the basement, somebody
threw them there. But we were all together in this room,
So how did the glasses get from here to there?
(57:19):
So you know, you know, I mean, these were stories.
They were stories that I liked doing. I mean, I
didn't get too wrapped up in the whole pound almost
stuff because it's not my thing. But these things did happen,
and you know it did happen.
Speaker 2 (57:39):
Interesting, Oh yeah, for sure. Now can you tell us
what happened to you in twenty sixteen? Now before you
do that, Oh, I'm want to put you on the
big screens, how people can focus on you.
Speaker 4 (57:52):
Okay, all right, well put me on a big screen. Sure, okay,
we make this. Twenty sixteen, I had a very very
very bad knee. I'd been treated by a million doctor,
by a doctor for a million, for a million different things,
and my knee had gotten so bad that I couldn't
(58:14):
walk anymore, and I needed to get a new knee.
But in twenty sixteen, my wife and my sister, sister
in LAWA and cousin we planned this long, long trip.
We're gonna go to the Middle East. We're gonna go
to Israel. And I said, I can't walk. I don't
want to. I can't go. On the other hand, I
didn't want to. I didn't want to spoil the trip
(58:35):
of him. So I said, all right, we'll go. We'll go.
I'm not happy about it. I'm in a lot of pain.
I got to get a new knee, but we'll go.
So I said, the quid pro quo was if I go,
I want two days to do what I want to do.
And they said fine. So one day we're there and
we're in Jerusalem, and we went. I went. They didn't
(58:58):
want to go. I went with my sister to the
church at the Holy Sepulcher, a very very holy place.
And as soon as you walk into the church on top,
there's on the second floor that's where Christ was crucified
right there. Then you walk further into the church and
there's done some construction this particular day, and it was hot,
(59:18):
and they were allowing two people at a time to
kind of crawl through a little space and you get
into this little room where Christ's casket is, where he
was buried and where he was resurrected from. So I called.
I crawled through there with my sister and there I
am in this amazingly holy spiritual place in my hands
(59:42):
on the casket and I meditated for two or three minutes,
and I can't describe the feeling. I'm a writer, but
I can't describe the feeling. Was an amazing feeling to
be there. Anyway, the next day, my party we went
to Nazareth, where Joseph's churches and where the Church of
the Annunciation is Mary's Church, and nobody was with me
(01:00:08):
because I walked so slow with a cane that everybody left.
And I did Joseph's church and then I did Mary's Church,
and in the basement there's a little shrine to marry
and I meditate because I do that. I'm spiritual, and
I meditate and I meditated, and I started walking up
the stairs with my cane and there was a little
side door to walk out, and as I took one
(01:00:30):
step out, I yelled, Oh my God, and my wife
and sister and said, everybody came running what happened? And
I said, I was healed. The pain is all gone.
It's all gone. I don't need a cane anymore. And
so that was completely totally inexplicable. No, I can't play tennis,
(01:00:54):
but I don't need a new operation. I don't need
a new knee. So something happened that was inexplicable. And
again I said this, Jacob a few times. I'm just
a regular guy, you know, college football, college basketball. But
that happened and I had witnesses, so you know, it's
(01:01:17):
a wow.
Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
Oh yeah, it is a big wow. Now before we
wrap up, and where can people find you on the
internet and about your podcast?
Speaker 4 (01:01:26):
Sure? Yeah, And we have to talk about that because
I'd love you. We will talk about it when we
go off the air, because I have you to be
a guest. I have so people Calvin Schwartz dot com.
That's my website. That's easy to find me there. I'm
Calvin Schwartz on LinkedIn. I've got fifteen thousand connections. I'm
(01:01:49):
cal Schwartz on Facebook, got you know, forty six hundred friends.
So I'm all over social media. People get this on Amazon, uh,
you know, I can send them an autograph a little
book plate. So I'm I'm highly visible all over social media.
(01:02:10):
And finally, four years ago, in the middle of a pandemic,
I set up my own podcast called Conversations with Calvin Simmers.
You we the Species, so it became Conversations with Calvin
Weed the Species. I've done three hundred and fifty of
these things, and I've been in people all over the world.
You know, I don't talk about and talk about anything
(01:02:32):
and everything except religion and politics because you know, I
just can't. I can't. It's hard and it works out
just fine. So I've met like yourself, I've met such interesting,
wonderful people, and I love doing these interviews. And it's
a Conversations with Calvin Weed the Species on YouTube. And
that's my life.
Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
How about that? All right? Calvin before you wrap up.
I like to ask my guests in every episode if
they got to close and thought with the people listening,
and do you got to close and thup?
Speaker 4 (01:03:07):
Yeah, And I've kind of hinted at that. The closing
thought is uh uh I call us Calvin. I call
my podcast conversation with Calval Wey this species because bottom
line is, we're one species here on Earth, and we've
given we've been given so many tools and it's like
(01:03:29):
we're living in the Garden of Eden, except we just don't.
We've got to get past a lot of things because
we have to fix this planet. And and and we
are one species, and we're all brothers and sisters. Uh.
I believe that I kind of know that, and and
I've been gifted to know there's things beyond our realm
(01:03:50):
of understanding. Uh. And we all, every one of us,
has that ability to to kind of reach out and
and and and readers want to reach out to me.
I'm a very responsive guy. Hey, I'm a cordcounting member
of AARP. I'm a recired guy sitting this chare at
twelve hours a day. It's worn out, literally worn out.
(01:04:11):
So if people want to reach out. I'm always happy
to and and and uh and and I'm thrilled that
we met Jacob. Oh yeah, absolutely only enjoyed this truly.
Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Oh yeah, me too. I'm bout the way for people
that don't know this, this is our second time doing this,
so it kind of played out on the second tray.
Speaker 4 (01:04:36):
Yeah, it worked out great, perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
Oh absolutely all right, Calvin, I was gonna thank you
for being the podcast and by the way, oh, I
want you to stick around for the after show. So
so once again.
Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
Thank you, thank you, Jacob, thank you so much. In
the words of Clint Eastwood, you made my day.
Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Oh yeah, absolutely all right. Uh that wraps up this
week or Conversations with Jacob. Tune in next week for
another episode. Until then, God bless and we'll catch you
guys right here next Monday, m
Got any partners. You're listening to Conversations with Jacob, hosted
by my good friend Jacob Waller. Make sure to check
out the podcast where podcasts are available, and check out
the video version on YouTube. You can follow us on
social media Facebook is Conversations with Jacob, Twitter is at
(00:48):
CWJ podcast, and you can visit our website Conversations with
Jacob podcast dot weebley dot com. Hey you got a
show idea, maybe a guest suggestion, email us at Conversations
with Jacob at gmail dot com. Now here's your host,
(01:11):
Jacob Waller.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
And welcome back to another episode of Conversations with Jacob.
I'm your host, Jacob. Of course, of course you haven't
noticed already, and welcome back to episode number eighty one
of the podcast. And we're kind of getting closer to
closer to episode one hundred and that would be in
(01:34):
February of twenty twenty five, and when we go to
one hundred episodes. But once again, like I said, you know,
like I said, and welcome back to another episode. Before
we get to our guest this week, I want to
do a few podcasts, a few podcast plugs and tell
you more about the podcast and another podcast as well.
(01:54):
You can check out the podcast on Facebook Conversations with
Jacob podcast. The website is Conversations with Jacob Podcasts dot
weeble dot com. You can check out upcoming guests, past guest.
I won't think about the podcast, not the podcast, but
the website is that you can go to three or
(02:18):
four months in events, see who's coming on the podcast,
because I do film these, maybe like three or four
months in events. Say you see who's coming up in
in well, it's about this time. It'll be September, and say,
if you check it about the time this drop, you
can check out who's appearing in twenty twenty five. Also,
(02:41):
you got a question, a guest suggestion, check out Conversations
with Jacob at gmail dot com. Check out the podcast
every Monday at one o'clock and make sure to like
and subscribe to our YouTube channel. There's like ninety percent
of people that are not subscribed, only like two three
or four percent that actually are. And uh so make
(03:01):
sure to like a comment on our YouTube channel. And
if you like podcasts, check out Two Chairs No Waiting
and Andy Griffith's show. Fan podcast hosted by my good
friend mister Alan Newsom and by the way, and here
us Alan Newsom to tell you more about his podcast.
Oh that's Hope, Goober, Floyd the barber.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
That's some of the names from the Andy Griffth Show
dropped by Two Chairs No Waiting the Andy griff Show
Fan Podcast, and we'll visit with some of those folks,
along with tribute artists and fans and just all kinds
of things related to the Andy Griffith Show. I'm your host,
Alan Newsom, and you can find the show Two Chairs
No Waiting at two Chairsnowaiting dot com or on iTunes.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And don't you just love technical problems on when you
want to play something as something else place? I just
love that. But it's about the way which I checked
what states and gifts our YouTube channel the most of use.
The first one is Texas with over one thousand, two
hundred and sixty eight views and California with one one
(04:07):
hundred and fifteen views, So thank you Texas and California
for the views. Anyways, and joining me this week on
episode eighty one is Calvin Schwartz. If I pronounced this
name or if I pronounced this name right, whiz, I'm
terrible with names on the podcast. Today we're going to
talk about what he does and some events that has
happened to him. So, with no further ado, please welcome
(04:30):
Calvin Schwartz to the podcast. Calvin, Welcome aboard.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Hello Jacob, good to be here. It is good to
be here. I love the fact that you're in Virginia.
You spent a lot of time in Virginia in one
of my second or third lives when I was working
as a regional manager for an eyeglass company. So one
of my favorite places to go because it's like a
(04:56):
combination of everything. You know, you got the northern Virginia
and r then you got the rural parts. And of
course I was a big fan of Virginia Tech football
when I had Frank Biemer, and I marveled at Frank
Biamer because here you took a good coach and you
put him into a school that wasn't like nationally ranked,
(05:18):
and all of a sudden, because he was so good,
he took Virginia Tech and made it into a major
national power.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Now, for people who don't know who
you are, Calvin, can you give us a little bit
description of who you are?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
Sure a real fast I'm from I'm a New Jersey
guy born bred Still I never I could never escape
to state. I'm stuck in New Jersey. So born in
New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, went to Rutgers University. That
was where my Rutgers at I got a degree, and
(05:53):
I got a couple degrees in pharmacy. I did pharmacy
for twelve years. I didn't like it, so I moved
on and I got into sales, and I wound up
working for the largest eyewear company in the world called
Exotica Group. There on Lenchcrafters and Pearl and ray Band
and basically everything in the eyeglass business. I spent twenty
five years there, loved every second that I was there.
(06:17):
My bosses, the father and son, became the richest Italians
in the world, so they were doing the right thing,
and of course I learned a ton of stuff from them.
And near the end of my time there, I had
an epiphany. A light went off in my head and
then I figured it was time to maybe start writing.
So I wrote my first novel, which is called Vishy Water.
(06:43):
It was based on the fact that I watched this
movie Casablanca, and once I wrote that. I said to myself,
it's time for a change. So and I guess, I
guess one of my big things is to reinvent yourself.
And you know we all could do that. I decided
to reinvent myself. So I wrote a novel and then
(07:05):
I became a journalist, a broadcast at a cable give
you talk show. I started teaching the Rutgers University. I
did a podcast. I worked with the Women's Health Institute.
I do all these things after I turned sixty five,
thirteen years ago. So that's my story, Jacob.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, yeah, you know, it kind of sounds like you've
done a lot wrapped there in your life altogether.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
You know, like I said, twenty five years in the
eyeglass business, it was it was kind of quiet. You know,
I can out of Virginia. I covered the Holas Coast.
I love doing that West Virginia. I mean, I loved Della.
I mean, all of that quiet. And then you know,
I wrote the novel and just suddenly everything started to happen.
(07:53):
It's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
You know, I didn't mean to interrupt you there for
a minute, but Bo, when you went to study how
the pharmacy work, oh is that something that you always
wanted to do, or did it run in the family.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Good question. It's a really good question. Actually, it really
ran in the family because my mother's brother was a
pharmacist and his two sons were pharmacists. So my mother
insisted I become a pharmacist. And part of that training
out of chemistry, which I hated, physics which I hated,
(08:35):
mathematics which I hated. So I hated the whole curriculum.
It was an effort, and it was a six year program,
so it was that real. I hated it. I didn't
want to do it because it was stuff stuck inside me.
I loved writing, I loved history, but I didn't have
a say in it. So I did it reluctantly. Play
(09:00):
I walk up and I decided to become free.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Oh what some people don't know is and that you
auditioned to play Frankinstan in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
That's right. As matter of fact. That's so interesting because
the day it's so interesting, Jacob, because the day I
woke up February nineteen eighty one, I woke up, I
looked at my poor wife who's out there in the kitchen,
and I said I'm quitting my profession. I can't do
it anymore. She's, what do you mean? We just got
(09:30):
a house. It's you were trained to do this. What
do you I just I have to quit. I'm quitting today.
And at that exact second, I told her I'm quitting.
The Edison Valley Playhouse in Central Jersey had a commercial.
They were putting on a play called Frankenstein, and they
were looking for actors. So I thought it was divine
(09:53):
intervention that here I am quitting my profession and now
I have a chance, at six foot live to become
an actor and work in a play called Frankenstein. So
I got dressed, drove up there. Never never saw a
script before in my life, but I figured somebody up
there is pulling on the strings, and and I auditioned
(10:17):
for Frankenstein. I never got the part. I'm actually still
waiting to hear.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Now, do you think your life would have changed if
you did get the part for Frankenstein? Or do you
think you or do you think that you would have
went down a different route besides going through set an eyeglasses?
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Another very good question. Well, I'm a great believe in
things are meant to be. I wasn't meant to be
an actor, although although I did, it never left me
because I guess I was unfulfilled. I never had an
(10:59):
opportunity to really act. I'm not acting now, but uh
I did. Actually, there wasn't acting. I did sneak into
a movie with Meryl Streep called One Free Thing. Long story.
It's a long story. But I actually was in the movie,
and and and and I snuck into it and and
(11:21):
I was in the Christmas scene. Uh. And then because
of that, I actually auditioned for War of the Worlds
with Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. Yes, because I auditioned
for Frankenson. I had the guts to do that, I said.
(11:41):
And I saw they were having an open call, an
open audition for War to Worlds, and it was in Newark,
where I'm from. So I said, uh, I'm gonna do it,
and and I actually drove down to NewYork and I
I and I did my little audition. There wasn't much.
It was to be an extra for a War in
(12:01):
the Worlds. And actually a couple of weeks l they
called me to be in it. I could have been
in Word of Worlds with Tom Cruise and directed by
Steven Spielberg. But I made a terrible mistake, the biggest
mistake in my life. I blew it. I turned them
down because I had to take off eight days from
work to do that, and I couldn't take off eight
(12:23):
days from work. So that's my story.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Now, Now, why did you change career from being a
pharmacy to go and sit in eyeglasses?
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Well that when I quit pharmacy that day and I
didn't get Frankenstein. I sat home for six months. My
wife was teaching in New York and I was watching
we were a young married couple. I was watching General
Hospital and One Life to Live in Ryan's Hope and
The Rockford Files. For six months, I'm having a grand
(12:58):
old time. I'm eating and I'm watching TV and I'm
not working. And I'm a young guy. I should be working.
So I had a relative who saw that my marriage
was being stressed out because I'm not working. My wife
is working, and he said to me, you got to
do something. You got to do something. You have to
(13:21):
bring in some money. You can't. He said, I'll get
your job selling eyeglasses. So I didn't want to do
it because I was pretty quiet back then. And shy,
and I didn't know if I can get in front
of people and like try to sell them. So but
it was a matter of my marriage surviving. It was
(13:41):
a matter of survival economy. I needed money, so I
did it. And it was a little sparked, yea, I said,
you know, as I started doing it, you know, like
talking to people. It's fun. And that's how that all began.
And of course it lasted twenty five years.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Now why did you just side to kind of retire
from sitting eyeglasses and what made you stay around for
twenty five years?
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Well, because it was a great It was a great job,
and also it was a pretty good playing job. And
you know, there weren't a lot of rules, and my
company was growing and exploding and they had great sunwlare
so hey, you're earning a great living. The people you
work for are wonderful. My bosses, the vice president of company, Henry,
(14:33):
these became great friends of mine. And for me, it
was unregimented, meaning, hey, if I want to sleep late
one day, you know I'm watching Jimmy Fallon or Johnny
Carson late. You know, I'll get up late instead of
get up at eight or nine I mean I made you.
You make your own hours, you do your own thing, Jacob.
And that for me, that unregimented lifestyle was perfect. So
(15:00):
that's why I stayed. You know, the income was great.
The people I worked for, their names were del Vecchio, wonderful,
amazing people, and they gave me fifty courses. They I
took fifty courses while I was there, and selling and
and and leadership and all kinds of things which helped
(15:20):
my head up here. So you know, it's the money
and the people I worked with and the people I
sell to. It was it was an actually for me,
it was an ideal job. And I had no I
had no h I had no inclination to want to
(15:40):
leave there. It was there was no reason to leave.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Now, what do you think is the biggest challenge and
set and eyeglasses, Uh.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
A lot of challenges. Another good question because it's very,
very very competitive. There's a million companies out there, and
and the challenge and one of the biggest challenges is
you you have to learn how to sell. You have
to know how to respond when you hear the word no.
You have to also have to learn how to overcome
(16:16):
objections people, people I would go to see people. I
don't want to buy Calvin. It's like, let's say it's
like July, come see me in December. So I said, well,
you know what a billet in December. Come just buy
now and I'll ship it to December. So in other words,
every every objection that you overcome, you that you get,
(16:37):
you have to find a reason to overcome. I mean,
these are challenges. It's hugely competitive. And also listen, I
remember one time I drove ake for three hours to
get to an account. I had an appointment and I
(16:57):
walk in there bring my two big sample bags, and
he says, oh, yeah, I can't see you today. I said, well,
I just drove three hours to come here and I
got I got three hours to go home, and now
you tell me you can't by I said, well, I'm sorry,
I'm busy. Goodbye. And that was that. So I got
in the car and I kind of lost it. So
(17:19):
I started driving heading. I started heading toward Atlantic City.
I figured, well, maybe I'll go do some gambling or something.
But anyway, I was going about eighty ninety miles an
hour and a fifty and I got a ticket. So
that's another challenge. Jacob. You have to you have to deal.
You have to deal with negativity. You have to deal
(17:39):
with all kinds of people and all kinds of situations,
and I learned how to deal. So it was a
big listen. Selling is a big challenge because you have
to know everything about the account you're selling, and you
have to anticipate things. You have to have the ways
to overcome them. You have to accept, and I learned
(18:03):
you know how to accept, and that's part of life
and you kind of move on. So I did learn
a lot of life lessons from those twenty five years
about people and expectations.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Now, can you tell us what happened to you in
nineteen seventy four. It was a kind of a spiritual
thing to you.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still digest that so in nineteen
seventy four, and for your listeners, a big part of
who and what I am today is a tremendous amount
of spirituality. It's powerful stuff, things that I don't even
(18:43):
quite understand, things that have happened to me. I'm a
regular guy. I go to college football games, college basketball games.
I'm a regular, regular guide. There's nothing unusual about me.
Used to hang out at Ashbury Park, the music scene,
you know, Springsteen and Clarence Clemens, and I mean, I'm sorry,
(19:06):
I'm well rounded, a regular guy, but there's this spiritual
element to me. And when I finally put it all
together and understood it, you know, I plugged myself. I
wrote this, There's a Tortoise in My Hair, A Journey
to Spirit. It got published in October. You know, it's fiction,
(19:29):
but a lot of a lot of it. Some of
it is my journey to spirit. And in this book,
I write about what happened on August of nineteen seventy four.
And there are no explanations for this other than I'm
just telling you. But I was a pharmacist at the time.
I was thirty years old, and I had just gotten
(19:52):
divorced from my first wife, and I had a little
pharmacy and I was driving home one night and I
hit a traffic light, had a little low and the
guy on the left of me in the next kind
of lane, he started to rever his engine and he
wanted to race. And I was thirty years old, and
I was a little bit crazy, and I didn't have
any fears, so he kind of gave me a finger
(20:17):
gesture and I returned it, and he peeled out and
I peeled out, and we accelerated from twenty five miles
an hour to fifty sixty miles an hour. We're going
pretty fast on the city street and it's about eight
o'clock at night August, and the road suddenly curved. He
couldn't see it, so he hit me. And when he
hit me, I at sixty miles an hour. I took
(20:39):
my Volkswagen wheel and I turned it to avoid. And
because the Volkswagen doesn't have a lot of center of gravity,
my car then lost control and started to roll over.
So now at fifty miles an hour, whatever, I'm rolling over.
So I closed my eyes and I knew I was
gonna die. Uh and uh. A few seconds went by,
(21:04):
and I did say, dear God, if you're gonna take me,
just don't rip an arm or a leg off, just
take me. And then the car rolled and rolled, and
all of a sudden there was a thud, and the
car was upside down and the car was crushed. I mean,
there's nothing left of it. And and uh. I touched
myself and I seemed to be okay, and I knew
(21:26):
I had to climb out because it was smoking. Maybe
it was going to catch fire. So I climbed out
the door, which was over my head and and I
walked over to I laand on somebody's lawn. And the
bottom line is, there wasn't a scratch on me, nothing,
nothing car completely crushed. Not a scratch on me I had.
(21:47):
I had a white lamb coat because I was a
pharmacist at the time, and I had a package of
chocolate chip cookies in the hot pocket there. Nothing was
broken anyway. The police came and you know, I asked
what happened. I lied. I told him somebody hit me
on inside was drag racing. And then the cop took
me over and he said, your car when you were
(22:08):
rolling over one between this big tree and a big pole,
and if your car six inches either way hits that
tree or pole, you're absolutely dead. And that was kind
of like wow. And then he said the most interesting thing.
And it's all provable because the tree in a pole
(22:28):
is still there and I drive by once every four
or five years to look at it. But he said,
your car appears to be wider than the distance between
the tree and a pole, so we don't know how
you got through there. So that was one of the
first spiritful things, Jacob that happened to me. And it
(22:49):
took me many, many years later, as I'm in my
present state and present day, that I begin to understand
that that somebody, you know, was kind of watching over me.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Now, now can you talk about April
twenty second, nineteen seventy, the First Earth Day, and how
did that affect you?
Speaker 4 (23:15):
Yeah, you know, it's another great question because that actually
kind kind of changed my life and saved my life.
I went to the First Earth Day in twenty second,
nineteen seventy as a young kid. I mean I was
really young, it's my twenties, but it resonated with me,
(23:37):
and it registered me that we have to do stuff
to save the planet. Environmentally, we can't and I'm not
getting anything kind of political thing. Whether we have global
warming or not. I mean, this is the hottest year
in the history of the Earth doesn't make a difference.
Things are changing, and I realized that. So I became
(24:01):
environmentally conscious and I've been that way ever since. But
a couple of years later, because I cared because it
meant something to me. In nineteen seventy five, five years
After that, I decided to stop eating everything and anything
(24:22):
with four legs. And I know that cows eat a
lot of grass. You have to water the grass. Use
a tremendous amount of water to water the grass so
the cows can eat the grass, so the cows can
get fat. So a hamburger chain can make a big sandwich,
a hamburger out of that. And then the process, the
(24:45):
stuff from the cows goes up as methane into the
atmosphere and it helps to heat the plant it up.
So I said, I said to myself, I just need
to do something. So I stopped eating everything with four legs.
And the interesting thing is, and I've been that way since.
By the way, I love I love going to Madithon
(25:06):
Square Garden. You know, hot dog, best mustard, sacrat, love it.
And I love hot dogs. I love corn beef, I
love Italian hot dogs. I mean, I love steak, but
I would not and I haven't eaten that stuff since
nineteen seventy five. And the funny thing happened a couple
of years ago. I'm friendly with my cardiologist and he
(25:30):
sent me for a calcium see two scan that's to
look at your cornary orders. They see how clogged they get.
You know, they get really clogged, and sometimes they have
to go in there and open and do a rotor
ruder thing and open heart surgery bypair surgery. But anyway,
he wanted to see how clogged up I was, and
(25:51):
he did this test. I went to the hospital. But anyway,
I have zero coronary artery plaque. It's zero, So that
means my heart's getting all the blood and my brain
is getting all the blood it needs. There's nothing stopping it.
So and you know what, nobody will be able to
(26:12):
tell if not eating meat did that, but it certainly
might have helped. So maybe a second life.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
I don't know. Now you kind of answered my next
question about why you stop eating things before legs. I'm
gonna follow that up with another question. Oh oh, if
people listening and do you think that they just stop
eating a thing with four legs.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
Everybody's got to do what they're comfortable with. And again,
there is no definitive answer did my not eating meat contribute?
There isn't. In medical science, as wonderful and as advanced
it is, nobody can give me a straight answer did
it help or didn't help? I mean, I got a
good friend who's the doctor, and he says, Cavin, it
(26:58):
doesn't make any difference. And last night I was watching
this longevity thing on public television and he's saying and
he said, eat a ton of meat when you get older,
because you know the meat has fat. You need to
fat for muscles. And so, you know, it's funny. There
was there was a funny movie. It was a Woody
(27:19):
Allen movie that came out called Sleeper. And then the
movie Sleeper, he's put to sleep in the and it's
five hundred years he's sleeping and when they wake him up,
all five doctors are smoking cigarettes and it's five hundred
years into the future. And Woody Allen says, are you
gosh crazy? That's a terrible thing. And the doctor said,
(27:41):
all five of the guys who were smoking, after they
wake him up after five hundred years, they say, well,
they finally found out that cigarette smoking is good for you.
So the point being, I'll never know. I did what
I had to do, and for me, something is it genes? Yeah, genes,
(28:02):
you know a little part of it. But something worked,
and I'm not going to fix it. It worked. And
I like the fact that you know, my blood is
flowing unobstructed, So we don't know. I can't answer that.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Oh yeah, absolute, absolutely. Now for people who don't know this,
you take over sixty supplements a day since nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Yes, because in nineteen sixty nine I was studying pharmacology
and vitamins and supplements, and so with that kind of
a background and the fact that I do a lot
of reading, I assume that gentle and I call a
(28:48):
gentle supplementation because everything I take is low dose. I
don't take big doses of anything, but I know I
take just a wide variety of things. And you know,
if I read one day this is maybe not so good.
I stopped taking it, so you know, I balanced myself.
But I've been doing it. I've been doing it since
(29:10):
nineteen sixty nine, and at this stage of my life,
why fix anything because it's great. Yeah, it's working absolutely. Now.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
In July twenty first, nineteen eighty eight, and you was
three hundred and fifty and what happened that date that
calls you to lose one hundred pounds in two months
and stop smoking?
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Yeah, so I was a health freak. But one day,
actually the day right after I met my wife. I
don't know why I started smoking, but I did. It
was terrible because and when I was in pharmacist school,
I had the largest vital loan capacity. I'm a big guy,
(29:53):
and smoking was always I just never did. But I
started the smoking. I was smoking, and there's a lot.
It's a heavy thing. I mean, I had issues and
I was not happy with the world, and so my
release was smoking, and my release was also eating. And
(30:14):
between the smoking and eating. On July twenty first, in
nineteen eighty eighty nine, that day I walked. I couldn't
walk up a flight of stairs in my house the
night before because you know, a smoker for ten years,
and I weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. So I
(30:35):
walked up the steps and I couldn't even walk up
a flight of stairs. So I kind of figured that
I'm dying. And then that following morning, I woke up
July twenty first, and I write about it. I write
about it in here. I heard a voice say trust.
(30:58):
So I looked at my wife and she was kind
of sleeping, and I said, I mean I really heard
a voice say trust, just that, and she was sleeping.
I said, did you just say something to me, you said,
trust She never answered, so I jumped up and I
ran into my son's room and he was fast asleep too,
(31:19):
so I know what I heard. And then I did
some thinking and something came over me, Jacob, and I
wish I could bottle it, because if I could bottle
that piece of energy, put it in a bottle and
sell it, you know, to make a million dollars. But anyway,
something said to me, from this moment on, there'll be
(31:40):
no more cigarettes, they'll be exercised, and I'm going to die.
And it was powerful. Someone my wife fuck up. I
told her, you know, I heard a voice. You know,
I heard a voice, and you know she thinks half
the time, you know, I'm not over there, and probably
maybe i'm not. But anyway, I was so obsessed, I
(32:02):
mean obsessed. So I took my cigarettes. And by the way,
when you do this, when you're dining and smoking, you
can do one or the other. Nobody can do both.
So if you want to diet, you got to keep
smoking because that helps you kind of not eat. And
you know, if you want to stop smoking, you can't
do both. It's hard. But I did both, and then
(32:25):
every night i'd walk a mile just to do some exercise.
But anyway, I was doing five hundred calories a day,
so I was eating like five pieces of macaroni, a
little pet the lettuce, no dressing, no sugar, no this
and all that. And and I started to walk a
mile every night. And anyway, two and a half months,
I lost one hundred pounds. And I was selling eyeglasses
(32:48):
at the time. And it's kind of funny because you know,
as a salesman, I don't see people, you know, I
see them for like three times a year, so I've
seen them once every four months. So I lost one
hundred pounds. Most people didn't. So when I call hold
on some people back then and I sat in her
office and they didn't recognize me because I'd lost hundred pounds.
And some people thought I had AIDS because I had
(33:10):
walt so much weight so fast. But whatever it was,
it changed and saved my life because I never you know,
I kept that weight off. I stopped smoking. And it's
funny because two years later from not being able, this
is a great message for your listeners. So from not
(33:32):
being able to walk up a flight of stairs, by
taking care of my body and doing the right things.
In two years from that moment, I played six and
a half hours of tennis outside in ninety degree temperature, NonStop.
So I went from not being able to walk up
(33:52):
a flight of stairs to playing two and a half
six and a half hours of tennis outside in my
haunship here. So that's the power that we all have
if we put it to good use.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Now, how today, do you got a diet that you
follow or do you eat or do you eat what
you want to eat?
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Hey? Yeah, I'm always tempted, but I never cheated with
corned beef or a real hamburger or steak. At this point,
doesn't really make a difference if I do eat or not.
And when I turned seventy five a few years ago,
my son brought me a corn beef sandwich and I
(34:47):
took one bite out of it, and it's been so
many years, you know, forty years. I spit it out.
I didn't like it. So I how do I how
do I explain this? At the height of the pandemic,
We're all sitting around, we're all eating, there's nothing else
to do. And I gained like forty fifty pounds, so
(35:10):
you know, I was like sixty two seventy. I was
not happy. So I did my own research and I
put myself on my own version of what's called intermittent fasting.
And as it turns out, it's pretty healthy thing to do.
So intimate and fasting means, yeah, ten eleven o'clock at night,
(35:33):
you know, maybe have a snack, and you know, I
can cone this, that, and that's it. That's all I'll
eat till the following day at twelve or one o'clock.
So my body goes twelve hours without food. That's and
there's all kinds of things about intimate and fasting and
it's kind of healthy. I lost fifty pounds. I lost
(35:55):
fifty pounds. Interesting, you know, in the year and a
half that we were in the middle of the pandemic.
Fifty pounds. I'm down to, like I'm down to my
college weight, and I can't gain. I can't lose anymore.
But but it's intimate and fast becomes a way of life.
I just it becomes a way of life. And I
(36:15):
do it five six days a week. And and you
know I do chicken, turkeys and fish and vegetables and
stuff and a lot of fiber.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Now, now talk to is about two thousand and four.
How when you went to play tennis?
Speaker 4 (36:37):
Uh? Yeah, one of the one of the more interesting
spiritual things in my life. I was playing tennis at
the time, and I love tennis. And I got up
and it was a Sunday morning and had a doubles game,
and put out my shorts, went outside and it was
(36:58):
raining and I couldn't play tennis. So it was like
nine o'clock Sunday morning. Came back in the house. I
didn't know what to do. I had all this energy.
I was so disappointed. And then something one of my
favorite words is something something comes over me, and it says, Calvin,
(37:19):
go watch the movie Castle Blanca. And I've seen that
movie fifty times. I love it. It's just a wonderfully romantic,
wonderful movie. Takes place in nineteen forty two in Castle Blanka,
Humphrey Bogart and with Bergmann. Just a great movie. So anyway,
in my tennis shorts, I sat down at the edge
(37:41):
of my bed, I put the I put the VHS
in the machine, and I watched Castle Blanka for the
fifty first time, and at the very end of the movie,
at the very end of the movie, Humphrey Bogart shoots
the bad guys, the German guy. Bad guy shoots him,
kills him, and then Claude Raine, this great, wonderful character actor,
(38:02):
picks up a bottle of Vishi water. It's like Perier
French mineral water. It kind of looks like this, and
and he wants to celebrate the death of the bad guy.
But he looks at the label. In nineteen forty two,
anything that had the word vishy in it kind of meant,
you know, it was kind of a bad word and
meant you're kind of conspired with the Germans and stuff.
(38:26):
So he throws it in the garbage There's a garbage can,
and it takes about a second for to hit. And
when it hit the bottom of the garbage can, I
grabbed my head. I said, oh my god. And you know,
my poor wife yelled upstairs. You know, it's like Fred Sanford.
You know, hey, Elizabeth, I'm coming. You know I'm coming.
(38:46):
I said, oh my god. And I said, there's a
novel in my head. Now I've never written anything in
my life before because I studied science, so I don't
know where this came from. And and so I came
down here, right here in this chair, sat down and
outlined this this novel called vishy Water and whoops, okay, okay,
(39:12):
that's okay. Oh so it's called vishy Water. And there's
that bottle, that bottle that Claude Rains had picked up,
and my two characters are sitting on a train bench
ready to take a train. And that that was the
story that was based a little bit upon Casablanca, a
little bit. Uh and and I'll listen, I knew Jacob,
(39:38):
I knew somebody up there stuck this into my head,
because you know, this is three hundred and eighty pages,
and it just doesn't pop into your head. Popped into
my head the whole thing, like in one second. So
that then began this journey I had for ten years
while I wrote it. And and then this became a
(40:02):
vehicle for me to quit selling eyeglasses and become a journalist,
and become a broadcaster, and become a teacher at Rutgers.
All these different things that I'm doing. Was because I
did this. I didn't care if I didn't care if
I sold any of these or not. What was important
(40:22):
was I did it. I did it, and I finished it.
But it also for ten years I was trying to
come up with who, what, where? When put this novel
into my head? And one day it all came together
and I finally figured out. It's a long story. It
will take two hours or explain, I'm not but I
(40:45):
finally figured out who and why, well not necessarily why
who put this into my head? Bearing in mind, you know,
that's that bottle of water that looks like this, and
that became the cover. So that day that I figured
it all out, it was my grandfather who died in
nineteen thirty seven. I never knew him. I never knew him,
(41:09):
but he's the one for sure. The odds, the odds
were five hundred million to one of this happening, but
it happened. So the day I found out it was
my grandfather, I found the one and only picture of him,
and that's him. That's him right here on the right
(41:31):
over here. But you see what's on that table, that
bottle of water. You gotta now, this is nineteen oh
two in Newark, New Jersey. They're all from Rush of
these guys, and there's that bottle of water. No explanation,
you know, there's that bottle that what the cover became
(41:53):
a novel. So that's what he put into my head.
And when I found out it was him, and there's
that bottle of So it really is inexplicable. There are
no you know, there are no explanations other than something spiritual.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Now for people that read that book and also the
other book, and what can they take away from it?
Speaker 4 (42:20):
Well, more importantly, this is this people should read. Why
Well it's on Amazon. Why because it's there. I talk
about the fact. For me and again, I'm a regular guy.
For me, there's been so many different things in my life,
(42:42):
wonderful different things that teach me that there's something out
there beyond our understanding and we're not necessarily supposed to understand.
And each and every one of us, as I've learned,
has that gift. But most of us are really busy
(43:03):
with our lives and doing things. But if you stop
and you know, smell the roses and smell the coffee
and and and kind of realize that we're all gifted,
every one of us, we're gifted with with spiritual things.
But again, where I mean I I was lucky. I
had these things happen, and I you know, I rolled
(43:25):
my antenna up into the into the sky. And and
I've been gifted with a lot of these kind of stories,
you know, rolling over in the Volkswagen writing a novel
that came from nowhere. So I'm I'm a regular guy,
but uh, this tells a detailed story, and it forbade
(43:46):
him everything that spiritually happened to me. I stuck into
here because you know, sometimes you can't make this stuff up.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Now, growing up, you play basketball?
Speaker 4 (43:58):
I did? I did?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Did you ever played in cottage or ever go pro? Uh?
Speaker 4 (44:06):
Part of part of my growing up and now I
explore in here with my character's name is Cameron. Uh.
Part of the fact. I didn't have a lot of
self confidence. I didn't have a lot of self confidence.
My my parents were busy raising my two little sisters,
and I never knew I was a good basketball player.
(44:32):
And and actually, when we're done, I'll send you a
picture of me jumping board.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
And and you see me, you like two feet higher
than the guy I'm jumping against. I was a pretty
good basketball player, but I didn't have any self confidence,
and so I didn't I didn't make my high school team,
but I used to play against some of the guys
and one of the guys on my high school team. Well,
he was a couple of years older than me. He
went on to become a Walled State uh in in
(45:00):
My high school was one of the best teams in
the country back in those days, in the sixties, one
of the best teams in the country. Actually in nineteen
sixty seven they were the number one team in the country.
So it was a really good basketball school. But his
name was Chris and he was All State and then
he became All American at Iowa and played a little
(45:22):
provol But I met him actually last October we had
a multi year reunion of my high school. He was there.
He was always my idol, I mean god, I loved
him and I was always afraid even to be around him,
to talk to him because he was so good. But anyway,
he came up to me. We talked and he said
something really interesting to me. He said, he said, how
(45:43):
come we ever played for our high school? You were
one of the best players I ever played against. You know,
we used to play a playground ball. And I said,
you're kidding. You're telling me that now that I was
a good player. Why couldn't you have told me that
back then? So anyway, I went to school in Ohio,
University of Tilo, and before I went to Rutgers, and
(46:06):
I got there a few weeks earlier, and I just
loved playing ball and I played against one of the
assistant coaches I used to play for the Pistons, and
I did a number on him. So a few weeks
later he came to my dorm room and said, we
want you to play for the University of Tilio, but
my parents wouldn't let me. So then I transferred to Rutgers,
(46:30):
and rutgers newer coach wrote me a letter which I
keep wanted me to play for them. And then in
seventy six, I was playing ball out in Chicago. I
had a girlfriend and they saw me playing ball and
I said, we want you to travel Chicago. Bulls will arrange.
And then a funny thing happened, Jacob I broke up
(46:50):
with the girl came back to Jersey. So I never
So anyway, that's my basketball career. There really wasn't you know.
I played playground ball and played for the Newark why
and stuff. But I'll never know if I could have
We'll never know.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Yeah I would, O would you could have been an
actor a basketball player. He could have been a whole lot.
It seems like correct correct now? Uh, Now, after your
novel was published, what did you do after that?
Speaker 4 (47:24):
I mean this, I mean oh you mean Vishi water?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:29):
So once that got published, I said to myself, well, gee,
you know, hey, I'm a novelist and I don't care
if nobody buys it. I wrote a novel, not easy
to do. So then uh, I quit. I quit with Xodica,
sat home for a bit of time, and I answered
a couple of ads. There were a couple of Jersey
(47:52):
magazines looking for journalists. So I said, you know what,
I'm a journalist. And I became a journalist. I started
writing for a couple of New Jersey magazines and then
I got hooked up with a company called NJ Discover.
It's a big production company here in Jersey. Uh and
and uh I signed on with them. And and I said,
(48:15):
I have I'm a retired guy, I'm already old. How
about it I do some journalism for you. And he said,
do anything want? You know? And he was great and
he gave me the freedom. So I started doing journalism.
I started doing stuff about homelessness, and hunger and autism
and nutrition and women's health and bit and sport. I mean,
(48:36):
I just started writing a lot of articles. Then we
started uh uh, we had a TV studio here. We
started a cable TV talk show. I became a producer,
uh and the co host. So we had a show
that went out to a chunk of Simple Jersey. And
I had no I had no experience background. Yet I
was getting some some national type guests to come, you know,
(48:58):
to come to you know, our and so I did that,
and then I got involved with my alma manor. I
started doing mentoring of students about my journey and networking
and the fact that I got fifteen thousand LinkedIn, so
I was able to give back to students. And I
mean I took all this time. Again, I'm a retired guy,
(49:18):
so I have a lot of time. But I was
given back and I got along really well with students,
even though you know, I'm a half century older. But
I was able to teach, and eventually Rutgers asked me
to teach. So a few years ago I was teaching
career explorations and then I got involved with the Women's
Health Institute at Rutgers Rutgers Robbertoo, Johnson Medical School. I'm
(49:42):
on the advisory committee. I don't know a lot about
women's health, and I'm learning, so I'm doing all these things, Jacob.
Because I wrote this, this gave me the confidence and
I got involved in the Muse six scene here in Jersey,
which is rich with Springsteen and bon Jovi hanging around.
(50:06):
It's funny. I used to work out for two years
before the pandemic. I used to work out in this
gym three days a week, doing a lot of exercise.
And who used to be on the machines right next
to me with Bruce Springsteen. Pretty funny. Yeah, I wish
to merry Christmas once. We talked once. But so that's
(50:28):
my whole life change because of this. I never planned anything.
You just kind of go with the flow, and that's
what I did. Whatever came along.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
I did now as a journalist. And what are some
of your favorite stories.
Speaker 4 (50:48):
I did a lot of I did a lot of paranorial.
I loved doing homelessness and I love doing hunger and
I loved I got involved with some paranoia stuff and
I never asked for that, but I was doing paranoral
and eventually we did some paranoral investigations. Stuff stuff, hey,
(51:14):
stuff that just happened and that. Yeah, I'm I'm kind
of stuttering here because how do I tell you the stuff?
But you know, I'll tell you because you know it happened.
Nothing earth shaking. But then again, inexploicable. I was coming
back from and I used to love interviewing centenarians, you
(51:39):
know people. I did a bunch of stories on people
who were one hundred plus years old, and that was
one of the things. And it's funny, I could do
anything I wanted because you know, I wasn't CBS or
NBC or CNN, and I had no I had no
rules and whatever, and we had the TV show, so
I mean I listen, I was having I mean, I
did good stuff. What's his them? I did a lot
(52:01):
of them. Actually I did. I did AUTI with a
group from I don't know whether they were Virginia, North Carolina,
but it was a little dance troupe and they won't
like this dance competition and the kids were all artistic
and it was great and I covered it when it
was North Jersey. So I mean, I was doing meaningful things.
I was doing stories that CNN and ABC and NBC
couldn't do because they didn't have the time. I could
(52:23):
do it, and that really meant a lot to me.
Uh So, I had interviewed this woman. She turned one
hundred and three and her name was Emily Emily Cooks.
She was great and we became friends. I mean, she's
one hundred and three. We became friends. And I remember
interviewing her once and I gave her a bottle of wine,
(52:45):
you know, because she liked to drink a little glass
of wine at night. And on air, I told her
on air that, you know, I'll bring the wine to
her room and and she said, you want to come
to my room? I said, yeah, but I don't know
what you're thinking. But and she said, listen, just because
(53:07):
i'm one hundred and three doesn't mean I don't think
about those things. I said, well, I'll just bring the
wine to your room. But that's it, you know, funny story.
But anyway, from coming back from that, my co reporter,
tyr Jane McDonald Banano, she not great friends and she
was my co reporter. We were driving home, we sawt
(53:29):
this old cemetery. It was a Presbyterian cemetery and the
dates on it were sixteen sixteen seventy to seventeen fifty.
So the people who were buried there never knew America
was born. They died before July fourth, you know. So
I told Tama that park the car, let's go in
(53:51):
and look. So it was about like thirty graves no
stones upright, but they're all flat little things. It was
really interesting. So it was cold because it was like February.
It was cold, and I said, let's come back when
it's warmer, like in June. So I took pictures and
I threw it up on Facebook. Actually, a professor from
(54:16):
Rufus saw that she had done some paranormal investigations and
I hadn't done anything. She got a hold of me
and said, if you go back to the cemetery, I'd
like to come with you. So in June. In June
I contacted her. I contacted her and Tyran. The three
of us went to this cemetery at eight o'clock in
(54:38):
the morning on a beautiful Saturday June mornings, about eighty degrees.
It was nice, not a cloud in the sky. And
this woman, Grace, has a microphone and she went over
to one of the graves I mean, you know, she
went over one of the graves and you could read
the writing was faded in the writings. It was a
little girl. She died when she was twelve, and and
(55:01):
Grace held the microphone over the grave. It was a
special microphone, and she asked the little girl. She asked,
are you a little girl? And a couple other things.
And then a few minutes later, Grace and Tyrn and
me were in a little circle talking and Grace played
back the microphone and you hear a voice saying, yes,
(55:25):
I'm a little girl.
Speaker 2 (55:27):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (55:28):
And then and then again there wasn't a cloud in
the sky. And then it started terrain on us. And
there's no clouds in the sky. It's perfectly sunny. And
I said to Grace, who's I mean, she's like a pro.
I said, what's going on here? She said, there's no explanations.
(55:49):
Sometimes these things happened. So from that I went on
to do six or seven more paranorl investigations and things.
And again, you know, I go to football games, basketball games.
You know, I don't want to kind of merge the two,
(56:11):
and there are no explanations for these things. But you know,
I know, I know what happened? You know, I know,
I know what happened. Once we went to an abandoned
bank building from the eighteen hundreds. It was abandoned, and
these two guys are going to put up a pizza shop.
(56:35):
But they had told me the places like really haunted,
and they knew of my reputation that I like doing stories,
I guess. But you know, we went. I put together
six or seven people and we're in the basement and
this woman left her glasses on a table in this
(56:58):
empty basement. And while we're in this room, you hear
a noise in her glasses which were on a table,
and now on the other side of the basement, somebody
threw them there. But we were all together in this room,
So how did the glasses get from here to there?
(57:19):
So you know, you know, I mean, these were stories.
They were stories that I liked doing. I mean, I
didn't get too wrapped up in the whole pound almost
stuff because it's not my thing. But these things did happen,
and you know it did happen.
Speaker 2 (57:39):
Interesting, Oh yeah, for sure. Now can you tell us
what happened to you in twenty sixteen? Now before you
do that, Oh, I'm want to put you on the
big screens, how people can focus on you.
Speaker 4 (57:52):
Okay, all right, well put me on a big screen. Sure, okay,
we make this. Twenty sixteen, I had a very very
very bad knee. I'd been treated by a million doctor,
by a doctor for a million, for a million different things,
and my knee had gotten so bad that I couldn't
(58:14):
walk anymore, and I needed to get a new knee.
But in twenty sixteen, my wife and my sister, sister
in LAWA and cousin we planned this long, long trip.
We're gonna go to the Middle East. We're gonna go
to Israel. And I said, I can't walk. I don't
want to. I can't go. On the other hand, I
didn't want to. I didn't want to spoil the trip
(58:35):
of him. So I said, all right, we'll go. We'll go.
I'm not happy about it. I'm in a lot of pain.
I got to get a new knee, but we'll go.
So I said, the quid pro quo was if I go,
I want two days to do what I want to do.
And they said fine. So one day we're there and
we're in Jerusalem, and we went. I went. They didn't
(58:58):
want to go. I went with my sister to the
church at the Holy Sepulcher, a very very holy place.
And as soon as you walk into the church on top,
there's on the second floor that's where Christ was crucified
right there. Then you walk further into the church and
there's done some construction this particular day, and it was hot,
(59:18):
and they were allowing two people at a time to
kind of crawl through a little space and you get
into this little room where Christ's casket is, where he
was buried and where he was resurrected from. So I called.
I crawled through there with my sister and there I
am in this amazingly holy spiritual place in my hands
(59:42):
on the casket and I meditated for two or three minutes,
and I can't describe the feeling. I'm a writer, but
I can't describe the feeling. Was an amazing feeling to
be there. Anyway, the next day, my party we went
to Nazareth, where Joseph's churches and where the Church of
the Annunciation is Mary's Church, and nobody was with me
(01:00:08):
because I walked so slow with a cane that everybody left.
And I did Joseph's church and then I did Mary's Church,
and in the basement there's a little shrine to marry
and I meditate because I do that. I'm spiritual, and
I meditate and I meditated, and I started walking up
the stairs with my cane and there was a little
side door to walk out, and as I took one
(01:00:30):
step out, I yelled, Oh my God, and my wife
and sister and said, everybody came running what happened? And
I said, I was healed. The pain is all gone.
It's all gone. I don't need a cane anymore. And
so that was completely totally inexplicable. No, I can't play tennis,
(01:00:54):
but I don't need a new operation. I don't need
a new knee. So something happened that was inexplicable. And
again I said this, Jacob a few times. I'm just
a regular guy, you know, college football, college basketball. But
that happened and I had witnesses, so you know, it's
(01:01:17):
a wow.
Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
Oh yeah, it is a big wow. Now before we
wrap up, and where can people find you on the
internet and about your podcast?
Speaker 4 (01:01:26):
Sure? Yeah, And we have to talk about that because
I'd love you. We will talk about it when we
go off the air, because I have you to be
a guest. I have so people Calvin Schwartz dot com.
That's my website. That's easy to find me there. I'm
Calvin Schwartz on LinkedIn. I've got fifteen thousand connections. I'm
(01:01:49):
cal Schwartz on Facebook, got you know, forty six hundred friends.
So I'm all over social media. People get this on Amazon, uh,
you know, I can send them an autograph a little
book plate. So I'm I'm highly visible all over social media.
(01:02:10):
And finally, four years ago, in the middle of a pandemic,
I set up my own podcast called Conversations with Calvin Simmers.
You we the Species, so it became Conversations with Calvin
Weed the Species. I've done three hundred and fifty of
these things, and I've been in people all over the world.
You know, I don't talk about and talk about anything
(01:02:32):
and everything except religion and politics because you know, I
just can't. I can't. It's hard and it works out
just fine. So I've met like yourself, I've met such interesting,
wonderful people, and I love doing these interviews. And it's
a Conversations with Calvin Weed the Species on YouTube. And
that's my life.
Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
How about that? All right? Calvin before you wrap up.
I like to ask my guests in every episode if
they got to close and thought with the people listening,
and do you got to close and thup?
Speaker 4 (01:03:07):
Yeah, And I've kind of hinted at that. The closing
thought is uh uh I call us Calvin. I call
my podcast conversation with Calval Wey this species because bottom
line is, we're one species here on Earth, and we've
given we've been given so many tools and it's like
(01:03:29):
we're living in the Garden of Eden, except we just don't.
We've got to get past a lot of things because
we have to fix this planet. And and and we
are one species, and we're all brothers and sisters. Uh.
I believe that I kind of know that, and and
I've been gifted to know there's things beyond our realm
(01:03:50):
of understanding. Uh. And we all, every one of us,
has that ability to to kind of reach out and
and and and readers want to reach out to me.
I'm a very responsive guy. Hey, I'm a cordcounting member
of AARP. I'm a recired guy sitting this chare at
twelve hours a day. It's worn out, literally worn out.
(01:04:11):
So if people want to reach out. I'm always happy
to and and and uh and and I'm thrilled that
we met Jacob. Oh yeah, absolutely only enjoyed this truly.
Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Oh yeah, me too. I'm bout the way for people
that don't know this, this is our second time doing this,
so it kind of played out on the second tray.
Speaker 4 (01:04:36):
Yeah, it worked out great, perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
Oh absolutely all right, Calvin, I was gonna thank you
for being the podcast and by the way, oh, I
want you to stick around for the after show. So
so once again.
Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
Thank you, thank you, Jacob, thank you so much. In
the words of Clint Eastwood, you made my day.
Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Oh yeah, absolutely all right. Uh that wraps up this
week or Conversations with Jacob. Tune in next week for
another episode. Until then, God bless and we'll catch you
guys right here next Monday, m
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