[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 171 (Wednesday, November 1, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16511-S16512]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              REUBEN COHEN

 Ms. SNOWE. Mr. President, last week I submitted for the Record 
my personal statement concerning Reuben Cohen--the father of my friend 
and colleague from Maine, Senator Bill Cohen--who passed away in 
Bangor, ME, earlier this month.
  Today, I would like to submit for the Record several items that 
appeared in the Bangor Daily News following Ruby's death.
  The first is an article about Ruby's life that appeared 2 days after 
his death.
  The second is an editorial that pays tribute to Ruby's well-known and 
admired work ethic.
  And the third is an article about funeral services that were held in 
Bangor which contains many appropriate statements from family and 
friends about this remarkable man.
  I believe these items remember Ruby as he was--someone who brought a 
lot of life into his community, and a lot of love into his family:
  The material follows:

              [From the Bangor Daily News, Oct. 11, 1995]

                       Ruby Cohen Dies in Bangor


         senator's father ran local bakery for nearly 70 years

                            (By John Ripley)

       Bangor.--A few years ago, Oklahoma Sen. David Boren needed 
     to talk with Maine Sen. William Cohen, his colleague on the 
     Intelligence Committee who was home in Bangor. So he called 
     Reuben Cohen, the senator's father.
       ``Well, if you're chairman of the Intelligence Committee,'' 
     Cohen barked into the telephone, ``you should be able to find 
     him yourself.''
       And he hung up.
       The story is vintage Cohen.
       Cohen--baker, husband, father of three children--died late 
     Monday. He was 86.
       Reuben ``Ruby'' Cohen is survived by his wife of 58 years, 
     Clara; two sons, William and Robert; a daughter, Marlene 
     Beckwith; and seven grandchildren.
       Those who knew Ruby Cohen agree that he died the way he 
     would have wanted: He was found at 9:45 p.m. by a worker at 
     his store, The Bangor Rye Bread Co., where he had been making 
     the next day's batch of rolls and bagels.
       To many, Cohen is known best as the father of Bill, now the 
     state's senior U.S. senator. But as proud as he was of his 
     eldest son and all of his children, Cohen enjoyed a 
     reputation of his own as a man of ornery independence, who 
     wasn't above a little mischief every now and then.
       In 1974, when the U.S. House of Representatives was 
     deciding whether to impeach President Nixon for his Watergate 
     shenanigans, the press followed then-Rep. William Cohen to 
     Maine, dogging him about how he would vote.
       The young congressman shrugged off the questions with ``no 
     comment.'' Then, from the rear of the pack, came a gravelly 
     voice.
       ``Billy says he's guilty as hell!''
       It was Ruby Cohen.
       He was a throwback to the days of smoky pool halls, 
     Saturday night fights and dollar haircuts, when Bangor was a 
     cauldron of ethnic neighborhoods and when friends were 
     friends for life. Like many men of his generation, Cohen was 
     held in awe by those who watched him work 18 hours a day, six 
     days a week, for nearly 70 years.
       Hunched over and with hands like shoe leather at the end of 
     his beefy baker's forearms, Cohen would start his day as 
     everyone else's was ending.
       Work would begin around 8:30 p.m., when he would prepare 
     the dough for the bulkie rolls, rye bread, French bread, 
     Italian sandwich rolls, and bagels. Surrounded by 100-pound 
     sacks of flour, sugar and corn meal, he would work quietly 
     through the night, guided by recipes long ago committed to 
     memory.
       Early the next morning, he would pile overflowing paper 
     grocery bags into the back of his battered station wagon and 
     head out on his rounds. He would shuffle into a client's 
     store or restaurant, drop off his goods, occasionally sit 
     down for a quick cup of piping-hot coffee, and then be on his 
     way.
       ``I guess you could say he worked to live and lived to 
     work,'' Sen. Cohen said Tuesday after flying home from 
     Washington, D.C. ``He wanted to work until he died, and he 
     did.''
       With little prodding, Cohen could be lured into 
     conversation, treating everyone to his unhesitating opinions 
     on everything from the big bang theory to Celtics basketball 
     to Workers' Compensation.
       Despite the ravages of age and occasional illness, Cohen 
     could never be kept from his work.
       In April 1979, a train derailed near Cohen's shop on 
     Hancock Street, leading police to block off the neighborhood. 
     Cohen somehow was able to sneak in, grab some rolls, and head 
     out as always.
       When his son was sworn into the U.S. Senate, Cohen 
     grudgingly flew down to Washington, watched the ceremony, 
     then returned to work.
       ``That's the only time he ever went down,'' Sen. Cohen 
     said.
       Even on Tuesday, as family and friends grieved Cohen's 
     passing, the rolls and breads were delivered.
       ``When you think of Bangor, you think of the standpipe, the 
     Paul Bunyan statue, and Ruby Cohen,'' said U.S. Rep. John 
     Baldaccis, a lifelong friend.
       The Baldaccis, as with a handful of other families in town, 
     go back more than half a century with the Cohens. 
     Grandfathers knew grandfathers, fathers knew fathers, some 
     know sons.
       A lover of jazz, Cohen was known in his younger years as a 
     sharp dresser who would dance the night away at the old 
     Chateau ballroom, now the site of a renovation project across 
     from City Hall. Though not a large man, he could be 
     fearless--he once decked a man who later became a bodyguard 
     for a California mobster.
       It was at a dance hall that he met Clara, then a 16-year-
     old Irish girl. They courted, and then married in 1937--not a 
     small thing for a Jewish man in those days.
       ``I guess he wasn't too much concerned about what anyone 
     thought about it,'' Sen. Cohen said.
       To Cohen, life was about devotion to work, family and 
     friends.
       For years, he and Clara would eat dinner at different 
     restaurants with Abe and Frieda Miller, his childhood 
     friends.
       Like his own son, Bobby, Ruby followed in his father's 
     flour-dusted footsteps. Born Jan. 8, 1909, in New York City, 
     Ruby was essentially raised in Bangor, where his father, who 
     emigrated from Russia, owned a bakery. As with Bangor Rye 
     Bread, the New York Model Bakery was a family affair, where 
     everyone chipped in to bake bread in an old, coal-fired oven.
       ``It's a family of hard workers,'' Frieda Miller said.
       Cohen expected the same of his own children.
       Bobby still works at the store, Marlene is married to 
     another baker, and Bill is known to lend a hand when he's in 
     town from Washington.
       ``Billy works here once in a while . . . when he's 
     campaigning,'' Ruby once joked.
       Sen. Cohen often tells of scoring 43 points in a high 
     school basketball game at Bangor Auditorium. Expecting praise 
     from his father, Ruby instead replied, ``If you hadn't missed 
     those two foul shots, you'd've had 45!''
       Over the years, the Cohen bakeries could be found on Essex 
     Street and then on Hancock, not far from the current 
     location. Through it all--the Depression, World War II, urban 
     renewal, generations come and gone--Cohen was a fixture in 
     the Queen City.
       ``I was bred on his bread,'' Bangor restaurateur Sonny 
     Miller said Tuesday. ``Ruby was just one of a kind--just a 
     real fine gentleman.''
       At his father's 80th birthday party in 1989, Sen. Cohen 
     arranged for video messages from President Reagan and 
     President-elect George Bush, among other dignitaries. As much 
     as he appreciated the attention, Cohen was a man who thought 
     as little of pretension and ego as he did of frozen bagels.
       ``If you come out to Los Angeles and see the Dodgers,'' 
     manager Tommy Lasorda said in a telephone call that day, 
     ``I'd like to meet you.''
       ``I hope you can,'' Cohen replied.
       If Cohen's work ethic and wit were the stuff of reputation, 
     his driving habits were legend.
       ``There's an old Bangor saying that you don't know Ruby 
     Cohen until he hits your car,'' U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe once 
     joked.
       Cohen himself once told of being stopped by a Bangor police 
     officer, who didn't know that the baker's old Ford station 
     wagon could be found traveling the city streets at all hours 
     of night and day.
       Suspecting that Cohen might have been drinking, the cop 
     asked the octogenarian to recite the alphabet. Cohen did--
     backward.
       Only in recent months, as his health began to slip, did 
     Cohen relent and allow someone else to drive on the morning 
     rounds.

[[Page S 16512]]

       With their father's passing, Bobby and the others hope to 
     follow tradition and keep the bakery open, Sen. Cohen said.
       But Bangor, he said, has tasted the last of Ruby Cohen's 
     rye bread.
       ``That was something that went with him.''
                                                                    ____


                               Ruby Cohen

       For the high and mighty, the most dangerous man in Bangor 
     was the baker at the wheel of the station wagon.
       Making morning rounds with rolls and rye loaves, Ruby Cohen 
     could cut to the core on issues and people, and often did. 
     His insight, like his skill at the oven, was sharpened by 
     constant use.
       There is a fearlessness, a strength, a virtue that comes 
     from devoting 18 hours a day, six days a week to labor. It's 
     a license to speak your mind, with candor. It's courage that 
     comes from character.
       Cohen's outspokenness shocked the eavesdropper at the 
     corner market. The man from the station wagon, arms wrapped 
     around bags of bulkie rolls, would walk in at mid-
     conservation and unload on the counter and on a program or 
     politician. Those close to him respected his power, and were 
     in awe of it. One of his sons, Sen. William Cohen, a man not 
     easily flustered or impressed, was visibly on guard in the 
     presence of his father. Playing straight man to Ruby was a 
     lifelong learning experience that involved some pain.
       Beneath the crust, Cohen was a man of wit and profound work 
     ethic. His weakness as a role model for finding purpose and 
     dignity in labor is that in its pursuit he set an impossible 
     pace. Few of his own generation could keep up. To his last 
     day on the job he loved, he was an exemplar of the American 
     dream.
       Seventy years a baker, 58 years a husband and father of 
     three, Cohen was the epitome of the individual who became 
     a local institution. He could humble the powerful, charm 
     the casual acquaintance and feed the hungry with the 
     world's most perfect loaf of rye bread.
       He helped give his city its character. He is missed.
                                                                    ____


                     Ruby's Friends Offer Farewell


                    funeral recalls a bangor legend

                            (By John Ripley)

       Bangor.--Bangor bid a bittersweet farewell Thursday to the 
     wryest Reuben in town.
       Reuben Cohen, known to presidents and plebes alike as 
     ``Ruby,'' died Monday night at the place he loved most, the 
     small Bangor Rye Bread Co. bakery he had owned since 1929. He 
     was 86.
       ``In the Jewish view, if this was his time, God allowed 
     death to be a soft kiss rather than a prolonged suffering,'' 
     Rabbi Joseph Schonberger said during Cohen's funeral Thursday 
     afternoon.
       Outside Bangor, Cohen was known best as the father of U.S. 
     Sen. William S. Cohen. But within this small community, 
     particularly within the dwindling company of his own 
     generation, Cohen was cherished for his well-honed wit and 
     his iron constitution.
       On an Indian summer day, the Beth Israel Synagogue was 
     filled with Ruby's people--Jews, gentiles, blacks, whites, 
     the young, the old, the famous and the anonymous.
       And with so many funerals for colorful people, those who 
     attended Cohen's service came to weep, but left laughing, 
     grateful to have shared a slice of such an encompassing life.
       Outwardly, Cohen was a simple baker who loved dancing and 
     the saxophone, his work and his family. But as Sen. Cohen 
     pointed out, his father also was one to dismantle barriers. 
     He broke with his faith to marry his Irish sweetheart, Clara, 
     and he was well informed on the issues of the day.
       The essence of Cohen, Schonberger said, was the essence of 
     friendship itself; breaking bread together is older than the 
     ages.
       His work ethic was legendary--18 hours a day, six days a 
     week, for nearly 70 years. When his son and fellow baker, 
     Bobby, finally decided to take a vacation after 30 years at 
     Bangor Rye, Cohen asked, ``What's he going to do with a week 
     off?'' Sen. Cohen recalled.
       But as the world about him whizzed by, Ruby Cohen kept true 
     to his core; he was, Sen Cohen said, a man who knew no envy.
       ``He was an innocent in a world grown selfish and 
     cynical,'' Sen. Cohen said in a eulogy marked by moving 
     poetry and knee-slapping Rubyisms.
       At times, Sen. Cohen pointed out, his father sometimes 
     showed a knack for being a little too innocent.
       If a person expressed pride for losing 20 pounds, Cohen 
     thought nothing of suggesting a trim of 10 or 15 more. He 
     once loudly complained that Boston Celtics games were fixed, 
     even as coach Red Auerbach sat nearby, redder than ever.
       And though an honest man, Cohen ``cheated the law in the 
     little ways,'' Sen. Cohen said.
       He would envelop his eldest son in a large wool overcoat 
     and sneak him into basketball games at the old Bangor 
     Auditorium. Or, he might simply mingle with the out-going 
     crowd and walk in backward.
       If one of Bangor's finest stopped him for erratic driving--
     an occurence about as common as sunrises--Cohen would admit 
     to having two drinks. After the cop had set up a sobriety 
     test, Cohen would come clean: ``I had two, two cups of 
     coffee.''
       ``I loved him for his daring, and his wanting me to be with 
     him,'' said Sen. Cohen.
       His father's irreverence often was best expressed in his 
     relished role as devil's advocate: alimony was ``all-the-
     money''; Jesus knew where the rocks were when he walked on 
     water; and Moses probably waited for a drought before 
     crossing the Red Sea.
       Through it all, Sen. Cohen said, his father dedicated his 
     life to two loves: his family and his work. When the cost of 
     flour and yeast rose over the years, the increases rarely 
     were reflected in the prices of Cohen's products.
       ``His concern was always for the welfare of his 
     customers,'' Sen. Cohen said, suggesting that some of the 
     customers could afford a price increase or two. ``And I would 
     say, `Sonny Miller is doing OK. Bill Zoidas is doing fine. 
     Doug Brown, don't cry for him.' ''
       The future of some of these products, known to at least 
     three generations of Bangor residents, was buried with Cohen 
     on Thursday afternoon.
       Since Cohen's death Monday night, Rabbi Schonberger joked, 
     the oft-heard question has been, ``Did he make the sourdough 
     for the rye bread before he died?'' 

                          ____________________