Masked intruders beat Jack Waxman so badly he lost an eye and had to dial for help with his tongue. His son is searching for answers 45 years later

During the war Jack served in the RCAF as a Flying Officer Bombardier, flying in the front of the plane dropping bombs over Germany. He flew more raids than was required. His captain considered him their lucky charm, believing that as long as Jack was on board, they would make it through." - Hamilton Jewish News

The past returns in unexpected ways.

Ricky hadn't thought of the notorious name in a long time, but when he saw it in the article it took him back, to blood and tears and masked figures brandishing hammers.

This was last summer, when Ricky Waxman had laid out his morning newspaper at Osler House bed and breakfast in Dundas.

He was visiting Hamilton from Southern California, returning home for the first time in 17 years.

It had been a fine journey so far. He had written a letter to the young couple living in his old family home on Robin Hood Drive in Dundas' Pleasant Valley. They invited him inside to walk around, feel the memories.

And then, in the Spectator, he read a story that referenced the name of infamous Hamilton mobster Johnny The Enforcer" Papalia.

Just like that, Ricky was down a memory hole: 45 years ago, 1977, he is 20, and his father Jack Waxman lies in a St. Joe's hospital bed, head wrapped in bandages, peering through the one eye that survived the vicious attack on him, and recounting how he used his tongue to dial for help on a rotary phone.

Later, Jack told his son that another visitor came by his room: Johnny Papalia.

Jack Waxman's father, Morris, emigrated from Poland and worked as a junk pedlar in Hamilton, living to 108.

The family lived on Railway Street, near Bay North and Cannon.

They would walk to worship at the nearby Adas Israel synagogue. A Tim Hortons now occupies the corner where the synagogue once stood, with its distinctive silver-painted domes.

In his teens, Jack worked at Hamilton Auto Supply next door to the synagogue.

He fought the Nazis as a bombardier for the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War.

My dad sat in the glass globe at the front of the plane; he would yell now!' and they would drop the bombs," says son Ricky. He talked about the war, he found it exhilarating. And he was incredibly handsome and had many girlfriends. He said he had a blond waiting for him on church steps in England."

After the war, in 1946, Jack returned to working at the auto parts business in sales. A few years later, he met a woman who was visiting from London, Ont. named Pearl.

They twirled on an outdoor dance floor at a club at Main Street and King.

Pearl had previously broken off engagements with three other men.

My dad said, will you come back next weekend? And she said if you come to London and pick me up, I will. So he did. They went to the same dance floor, and he proposed that night."

Pearl told him up front that she could never have children. In her teens she had a hysterectomy after she was hit by a car.

They married and adopted two newborn boys: the oldest, born in 1957, was Richard (Ricky).

Jack ultimately bought Hamilton Auto Supply along with two silent partners.

When the synagogue moved out to Westdale in 1961, Jack bought the building, kept the silver domes, and used it to store auto parts. (We had the holiest tailpipes in town," he told the Spectator's Paul Wilson.)

Ricky worked summers at the shop in shipping and receiving. He loved his parents, but life was hardly idyllic in his teens.

There was pain awaiting a carrot-topped adolescent in the early 1970s, who did not fit in with most of the other boys; not in the dressing room, or most anywhere else.

Around 1980, at 23, he told his parents he was gay. They were supportive. Jack suggested Hamilton was not the best place for him, and he should think about moving to Toronto, joining some groups, going to clubs, to find a better life in a more cosmopolitan city.

On Wednesday night, Nov. 9, 1977, Ricky was still living in Hamilton, on St. Joseph's Drive, when he got a call from his mom. She said Jack was in the hospital and hurt bad from a beating.

Ricky ran to the hospital. His dad was going to live, but they said Jack would be in hospital about a month.

A rabbi gave a sermon at the synagogue asking the community to pray for Jack.

He made it out in two weeks, but the bone around his right eye socket was shattered and he lost the eye.

Jack rarely talked about that attack, but he did tell Ricky and Pearl what he had seen and heard that night.

As was his pattern, Jack had locked the doors at Hamilton Auto Supply and worked late, doing paperwork in a second-floor office above the machine shop. At about 7:30 p.m. he heard noises from down below, like a door handle rattling - not from the main door on Cannon Street, but a side entrance off Bay.

Two masked men appeared before him. Jack was standing, and stepped back.

There's a safe behind you," he said, and also offered them his wallet.

Jack saw the end of a hammer whipping toward his face. The second man hit him with a steel bar.

They ripped the phone cord and business machine cord from the wall and tied his arms and legs. They wrapped a bed sheet around his head.

Jack thought they would kill him. He lay limp, playing dead.

They left.

The nearest working phone was on the first floor.

Mr. Waxman had to manoeuvre down a flight of about 25 steps to reach the workshop," wrote reporter Doug Foley in the Spectator the next day. It took him more than an hour."

When Jack reached a black office rotary phone, he used his tongue to dial the operator for help.

Beaten man dials help with tongue," read the headline.

The story said two attackers took Jack's wallet, $1,000 from the business, and proceeds from a charity raffle operated by the synagogue.

Odd, Ricky says, because the morning after, a Hamilton police detective showed him what he said was Jack's wallet.

Ricky spotted blood and hair on the wallet. He cried on the spot.

The detective asked me to look through the wallet and tell him if anything was taken from it. I said I wouldn't know, I never looked through it before."

For Ricky, to this day, the crime doesn't add up. He believes it was no simple robbery.

He was targeted, it was planned really well. Something very odd happened that night."

The men had not broken-in through the front door, but a side door where there was no signage, and they knew how to wind through the machine shop to get to the upper office.

There had been talk of unionizing the business and Jack was against it. Was that motive?

The business employed 25 mechanics and about 50 employees in all.

But Jack was known as a kind and generous man in the community.

Everyone loved my dad. My mom was tough, a disciplinarian. She was like an early Judge Judy. If she didn't like you she told you, and if she liked you, you were in."

Jack was fitted for a false right eye.

No one was ever charged in the assault.

Jack eventually wound down the business and sold the land to the city in the early 1990s.

In 1991, Ricky moved to the U.S., ultimately settling in Palm Springs.

In retirement, Jack and Pearl spent three months a year in Arizona, and Jack volunteered at McMaster hospital and sold poppies around Remembrance Day at Fortinos on Dundurn Street.

He was on a waiting list for heart surgery when he died in hospital, Nov. 13, 1997, at 76.

A friend named Harry Perell wrote in the Spectator: Jack was a wonderful Hamilton-born hero."

A stone in Adas Israel Cemetery in Hamilton was unveiled the following summer. Pearl joined him there when she died in 2005.

Pearl's funeral had been the last time Ricky was in Hamilton, until last summer, when he visited the plot twice, laying small stones atop the memorial, a Jewish custom, to show to the deceased you visited.

And he read the story in the Spectator that was in part about Johnny Papalia.

Ricky comes off on the phone gentle and affable; he founded and runs an animal assisted therapy business in Palm Springs called Paws and Hearts.

But there is no mistaking his intensity in trying to find answers.

He contacted a Spectator reporter about the assault case, and emailed a sketch he drew from memory of the layout at Hamilton Auto Supply, diagraming the break-in.

He contacted Hamilton police and requested the investigative file on the attack. No luck. Old case files of that vintage have been destroyed.

Ricky hopes someone reads about the mystery, and has some information to offer.

The Spectator contacted four long-retired Hamilton detectives. All recall the case from 1977, but no specifics.

Jack Waxman had no mob ties, Ricky says, nor had he racked up gambling debts. Jack and Pearl went to Vegas once in a while, but he was not a high roller.

The Waxman name has been prominent in Hamilton - the conflict between brothers Chester and Morris Waxman was covered at length in the Spec - but Jack is a distant relation, not one of the" Waxmans, says Ricky.

Jack was not a tough customer.

But he had known his share.

One of the silent partners in his purchase of the auto parts business had been Morris Lax: Holocaust survivor and philanthropist, and a hard-nosed scrap metal dealer who was beaten to death with a two-by-four in 1992. No one was ever convicted for his murder.

And then there is The Enforcer; Mafia don Papalia, who was shot in the head on Railway Street one spring afternoon in 1997.

Jack told Ricky and Pearl about Papalia's visit to see him in the hospital in 1977.

Papalia had come to see him, not because of a mob connection, says Ricky, but one from childhood.

The two men had grown up on Railway Street and been good friends. They played a lot of stick ball together.

When Johnny visited Jack at bedside, The Enforcer told him: We will find out who did this and make them pay."

No one ever saw a courtroom over the assault on Jack.

Perhaps rougher justice was delivered.

It was Pearl, not Jack, who reached for the Old Testament when talking about how it should play out.

It should be an eye for an eye," she said.

Jon Wells is a feature writer at The Spectator. jwells@thespec.com