Mimi Sheraton's Boyfriend

Mimi Sheraton did not hook up with a Village "degenerate" as her mother feared. Instead she met Irving Hochberg, the son of a garment manufacturer from Yonkers. He was a senior. She was a sophomore. His folks were well off enough for him to have a car and to rent a furnished room in one of the rooming houses off Washington Square for $5 a week, where he and Mimi sometimes hung out between classes.

Irv made Mimi's sophomore year an exciting one and they became engaged, although she continued her correspondence with two men in the service. Irving somehow had a military exemption although there was nothing obviously wrong with him. Men were in short supply on campus during the war and in many ways Irv was a catch, a big man on campus, charismatic, energetic, an operator and fast talker who made friends easily. He gambled on just about anything with friends and strangers in the student lounge at Lassman Hall and was a regular participant in a crap game that met in the basement of a candy store on the south side of Washington Square. And Irv was a big spender who took her out to nightclubs and restaurants. He had a lot of ways of making a buck from selling black market blouses to turning his position as business manager of the campus humor magazine into a paying gig by collecting kickbacks from the magazine's printers and advertisers, supposedly with the collusion of the faculty adviser. He also sold jokes to radio comedians. Irv and his cronies had their own special lingo; Irv liked to use a Charlie Chan accent. Sometimes they all went to the radio quiz shows where they had friends who worked as producers. These friends would arrange to have some of the gang chosen as contestants, feeding them the answers before the broadcast.

Sheraton was both appalled and fascinated by Irv and his crowd. Her mother was simply appalled when Mimi told her of Irv's enterprises, branding him a "Communist," which probably reflected her assessment of his behavior as more befitting the lower class hustlers of Brownsville and the East Bronx than a nice boy from a nice family. But a Communist? If anything he was the epitome of the capitalist entrepreneur not hindered by a highly developed sense of ethics. Sheraton writes of him fondly in Eating My Words, noting that he became a successful clothing company executive in later life.