I was out of high school, working for my father in the butcher shop. The hours were from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM from Monday to Wednesday. Thursday, when the Jewish women were getting ready for the Sabbath, we opened from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Friday, we closed at 1:00 PM so we could get ourselves ready for Friday evening services. Saturday, we opened at sundown after Sabbath and remained open until midnight.
One particular Saturday night, about 8:00 PM, it was quite chilly and business was in a slack time, so I told my father I was going up to the house to get a cup of coffee. The house was just around the corner, and I lingered a while in the warmth of the house. When I started back, just as I rounded the corner, I saw a crowd and police near the store. I ran over, fearing a problem, and found my father talking excitedly to the police.
You have to picture the area, quite urban and not well-lit. Our store was one of three on that block. Facing them, we were on the right end, with a grocery in the middle and a drug store on the left. It seems two men wearing hats and overcoats came in while my father was cutting up steaks with the big, long knife, making an order for delivery. One man asked for a fresh chicken. Sam pointed to the display counter and said, "Pick one out." The man pushed them around a bit and the other turned and said, "I don't like these. Maybe you have a better one in the freezer." Sam was, at that moment, rubbing the knife over the sharpening steel, so he put down the knife and turned to go into the walk-in ice chest. Then he saw, out of the corner of his eye, that one of the men was approaching and pulling a gun out of the pocket of his coat.
Sam was not a man who lost his temper or fought physically with anyone, but at that moment he saw red. He swung himself around and, with the steel, smashed the man's hand across the wrist so hard that the man fell to the floor. Sam went to hit him again but the man slithered around on his hands and knees and avoided further blows. In the meantime, his partner ran to the door and stood there yelling, "Shoot him! Shoot him!" so the man on the floor picked up his gun, pointed it at Sam's face, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. It just clicked. So Sam thought these guys were trying to scare him and he ran after them. Outside, they had a car waiting with a girl driver, and they both jumped into the car. Again, the gunman pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, but no shots.
Sam told the police the whole story and felt proud of his success. When the police left and the store was quiet again, he went back to making up his order and I went around reorganizing the chickens on display. On the corner of the shelf I found a clip of ammunition for a .45 revolver. When I showed it to Sam he turned white as a sheet. He aged ten years in the moment he realized that they really intended to kill him. We called the police again, and when they came back, they figured out that when Sam hit the man's wrist, the butt of the gun was at a horizontal angle, and the clip was loose enough that the blow knocked it out.
The irony was that there was less than $25.00 in the cash register. What they meant to do was lock him in the ice chest and take the money, but Sam could have gotten out of the chest from the inside.
The next week or so was hell for Sam. He had to go to lineups and look through picture books at the police station to see if he recognized anyone. Fortunately, the police finally caught up with the robbers and put the three of them in jail for a long time. They preyed on keepers of small stores and had killed one and wounded others. The man he hit with the steel still had a welt on his wrist when the police caught him. The police said to my father, "Too bad you didn't put down the steel and hit him with the knife."
Sam was glorified in the local press. The story was printed in True Detective Magazine and they said he chased the robbers with a meat cleaver.