What is it with this belt buckle and fate?

Or, the search for the mysterious Hans Jordi

Welcome to The Brown Barge! I’m Spencer. We’ve had more than 200 new subscribers join in the past week or so. For folks who are new, welcome! Many of you joined after Substack Reads recommended my essay Unlocking the Mystery (Show). That essay is the first in a six-part series about a short-lived podcast called Mystery Show, which is about solving mysteries that can’t be solved online. 

The first essay in the series explored memory and a disappearing video store; the second essay explored our interconnectedness and why Britney Spears read the three millionth most popular book in the world. You don’t need to read either of those parts to enjoy this essay. All you need is the curiosity to ponder a question:

Were you always meant to be here, reading this essay?

Fate—that is the central theme of the third episode of Mystery Show called Belt Buckle. As the title suggests, our third case revolves around an ornate belt buckle. The belt buckle is a work of art, one you would expect from a work commissioned by the man whose family owns the world’s largest collection of Rembrandt paintings. This last detail is a bit of a spoiler, so if you want to preserve the intrigue of this case, then just keep that in the back of your mind and don’t Google.¹

Inscribed on the front of the belt buckle is the name Hans Jordi. I think we can all agree that Hans Jordi is an objectively cool name. I don’t think it is possible to have the name Hans Jordi and not live an interesting life—the universe simply won’t allow it. Without giving too many spoilers for the case, Hans Jordi is a 6’6” Swiss chef with a “stride wider than the wingspan of a small aircraft.”

My name is less interesting than Hans Jordi. I am a 5’8” American writer with a stride as wide as a drone. 

Were Hans and I fated to live different lives because of our very different names? And what does a belt buckle have to do with fate?

As we explore the mystery, Hans becomes more and more heroic. Before we get to the mystery, I want to talk about the most heroic person I know in my life and his quest to turn a lost object into a work of art.

A hero and a horse

Since starting this Substack two months ago, I’ve written two essays that revolve around my mom, her illness, and how my relationship with her has impacted my life. But I haven’t talked at all about my dad. My dad’s name is Ross. He is kind, creative, and incredibly resilient. 

My dad comes from a long line of enterprising Jews, those late 19th and early 20th century hustlers who left Eastern Europe with nothing and built something in a new land. My dad’s grandfather, Isadore Silverman, was born in 1895 in a town about 200 miles southwest of Kyiv. At the time of his birth, the town was called Proskurov and it was part of the Russian Empire. Today, the city is named Khmelnytskyi. It is in Western Ukraine and was targeted last month by Russian drones. 

Izzy, as most people called my great-grandfather, left his home at 18 to come to the United States. At 18 I was daunted at the prospect of taking a 350 mile trip to go off to college, so I can’t imagine what it felt like to leave everything that Izzy knew behind and move to a new country, where he didn’t speak the language or have any real prospects. But I am glad that he had the courage to make that journey, because if he hadn’t made that trip then I wouldn’t be alive. I mean this both in the sense that the specific set of circumstances that led to my birth wouldn’t have happened, but also in the sense that Izzy would likely have not made it past the age of 24. You see, about six years after Izzy left Proskurov the town was ransacked by a group of soldiers who killed at least 1,500 Jews in what is known as the Proskurov Pogrom. 

I never met my great-grandfather, but I did pick up plenty of lore about him. Silverman wasn’t Izzy’s original last name. In Russia, his last name was Kutin. As part of his fresh start, Izzy wanted a new last name. Although he didn’t speak much English, he knew a few words, amongst them gold and silver. Izzy was apparently set to pick the last name Goldman—but the man in front of him at Ellis Island chose that name. Izzy didn’t want to be a copycat, so he picked the next best thing to gold and became Isadore Silverman.² 

Here are some other facts about my great-grandfather: he was a dapper dresser and always walked around with cash in his pocket. He made his way from New York City to the Florida Panhandle by dressing mannequins in clothing stores, stopping at various points on the journey to save a bit more money before moving to the next location. Either during this journey south, or perhaps from his earlier life in Russia, he picked up a fondness for horses. He had a small stable on the outskirts of my hometown and he even kept a few horses at his downtown house well into the 1960s. 

Horses are majestic creatures, but they can also be dangerous. My dad experienced this danger first hand when he fell off one of Izzy’s horses at the age of six. The fall was severe. My dad was unconscious for three days straight. At first doctors thought that he would never walk again. This was the mid-1950s and the closest neurosurgeon was 50 miles away. The neurosurgeon wanted to operate on my dad, but my grandmother refused. A second opinion took them to Duke, where my dad spent several months in the hospital relearning to walk. My dad sometimes jokes that he spent enough time at Duke that he should be considered an alumnus. 

I’ve heard the story of my dad falling off the horse a few times, but it didn’t really click until writing this essay exactly how strong and resilient he must have been to overcome that physical trauma at such a young age. Sure, he came from a line of folks who had some genetic propensity to pack up and risk it all in the new world. But if my dad hadn’t fallen off that horse and learned to walk again I wonder if he would have known that he had the strength to care for my mom when she got sick, while also raising me and my brother.

Was my dad, in some sense, fated to fall off this horse just so that he would have the resilience to navigate a completely unprecedented situation 30 years later?

This question rolled around in my head as I listened to Mystery Show’s third case.

What’s in a name?

My dad gave me my first name. Apparently it was between Spencer and Zachary. I don’t know that my life would’ve been that much different if I was named Zachary instead of Spencer, but I am pretty sure that my life would’ve been way different if I was named Hans Jordi or Bob Six, the two central characters in the most intriguing case that we’ve encountered on Mystery Show yet.

Here are the facts of the case:

Starlee Kine, our host and detective, has a friend named Carson. Carson grew up in Phoenix in the 1980s, where he had a cool and slightly mischievous friend named Jimmy Turk. Our mysterious belt buckle entered Carson’s life thanks to his friend, Jimmy. I’ll let Carson tell it: 

One day, I went over to Jimmy’s house, and he showed me this belt buckle that he had found in the gutter. That was what he said. He went for a walk and he found it in the gutter. And, it is beautiful. On the front of it, there is a chef's hat, front and center, flanked by a corkscrew, a pan of eggs that are frying and a toaster. The pan of eggs—the eggs are painted very carefully with some kind of enamel—so they are yellow and white. This is the coolest part of it. Ready…There is a tiny tiny switch and if you flick the switch, the toast pops up…Yeah little tiny toast like as big as your pinky nail. They have a crust and bread texture on the bread, and then you can push them right back down. It is the coolest belt buckle I have ever seen.

Determining the origin of a custom made belt buckle with tiny fingernail-sized pieces of toast would be an impossible task—if not for two clear clues etched on either side of the belt buckle. On the front, the belt buckle has the name Hans Jordi. On the back it has another inscription: 

In appreciation, Bob Six.

So we have two clues in the form of names. Starlee starts the case by searching for Hans Jordi. Her first result, a newspaper article about a San Diego art class, leads Starlee to a conversation with an art teacher named Donna. Hans took some of Donna’s classes. Donna fills in a few details about Hans—he is interesting, classy, and looks like the actor Armin Mueheller-Stall—and also gives Starlee a free lesson on how to draw the horizon.

This is an interesting conversation, but it doesn’t really open the case. Searching for another lead, Starlee comes across a blog post from April 14, 2010 on a food blog called “The Sated Epicure.” The post reads: 

In 1986 I was on my internship at a casino in Lake Tahoe and tasted my first classical beef daube prepared by Chef Hans Jordi. At 6'6", Chef Hans was so tall that he had to take his chef hat off to walk around the kitchen. His stride was wider than the wingspan of a small aircraft and he spoke as fast as he walked." 

Starlee manages to get in touch with the author of the blog post. After filling Starlee in on some more details about Hans—a mythical “cowboy, slash chef, slash superhero, slash manipulator of space and time”—Starlee asks the anonymous writer of “The Sated Epicure” blog whether he thought that Hans would be the type to wear a belt buckle with a chef’s hat, pan of eggs, and toast that pops up. In answering this question, our anonymous Sated Epicure brings the question of fate, a question that had previously hovered unspoken above this entire mystery, out into the open. 

So we're sitting at the bar after we got our paychecks, consuming our three free drinks, when we see Hans. It's like reverse Superman, you know, Clark Kent coming out from the booth after changing into his regular attire. We didn’t recognize him at first. I remember saying to Burns, "hey Mike, that's Hans." "That is not Hans." "Mike, I swear to God, that's Hans. He's going to walk towards us." He is in this white sort of Stetson-y looking shirt. He’s got cowboy boots and jeans. And he walks towards us, kind of nods and then keeps going and I said, "oh my god, he is a Swiss cowboy”…There is a reason I saw him then and it’s 30 years later that I know why. If we didn’t catch him coming out of that door that one time. I would have been no use to you. Isn’t that funny?

And it turns out that this encounter with Starlee is not the only time that Hans Jordi set the wheels of fate in motion for Sated. Sated needed to earn an A from Hans Jordi to maintain his scholarship at culinary school. Despite not feeling that he earned an A—and despite the fact that, according to Sated’s advisor, Hans had never before given out an A—Sated ended up getting an A from Hans and saving his scholarship. The next year, Sated met his wife at school. 

Starlee: So you might not have met her if you hadn't gone back to school?

Sated: Oh, I would never have met her. That's the whole point. It's one of those either-or events in life that we experience everyday. You either get it all, or you get nothing. This one I won. It happened. I got it at all. I didn't just meet my wife, she is my soulmate; really unusually great marriage. If I hadn't earned an A, that wouldn't have happened. Ever. There's no way. And Hans was that piece.

Fate, it seems, surrounds every move that Hans Jordi makes. After listening to this section of the podcast, the question swirled again, even stronger, in my head: was my dad fated to fall off this horse just so that he would have the resilience to navigate a completely unprecedented situation 30 years later?

A brief philosophical interlude

My dad is a loosely religious person; the type of Jew who attends High Holiday services and believes in God, but doesn’t center his life around religion. His grandfather, Izzy, was a much more religious person. He served as the president of his synagogue and was known for giving to Jewish causes, mostly at the urging of his wife Mamie. If we’re going to talk about fate, about how events in the past may have made my dad ready to step up in a time of need, then it makes sense to dive into Jewish thought on fate and free will. 

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate what I mean is through another podcast–Chutzpod.³ Co-hosted by the extremely kind Rabbi Shira Stutman, it explores the texts and wisdom of Judaism through a modern lens. In an episode from earlier this year, Chutzpod explored the story of Exodus, specifically the “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.” For the most part, Jews are very big believers in free will.⁴ This belief in free will manifests most clearly in relation to the moral choices and actions that we take, but it extends more broadly to choices that we make to influence the course of our lives. This idea is in tension with a pure belief in fate or predestination. Rabbis have found various ways to reconcile the idea that humans have free will, but that God is also omniscient. 

Philosophers have also tried to reconcile free will with determinism, the idea that all events are completely determined by preexisting causes. This doctrine, known as compatibilism, dates back at least to the Stoics and includes famous enlightenment champions, like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes, as well as contemporary philosophers, including Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett.⁵

Scientists have also put forth their own hypotheses. For instance, Einstein’s theory of relativity suggests a four-dimensional space-time continuum called a block universe where everything is decided based on the initial conditions of the cosmos. As Einstein wrote just before his death: “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” 

This view, which is also known as eternalism in the parlance of the philosophy of space and time, can be interpreted to suggest that all of our actions are predetermined, though not necessarily fated to occur.⁶

How do we reconcile these competing theories, and what do they have to tell us about the mystery of the belt buckle and the chain of events that led you to read this essay?

I have a working explanation, but we have to get back to our case first, to see how fate continues to play out in the case of the mysterious belt buckle. 

The belt buckle of fate

Fate rears its head again in the case of the belt buckle when Starlee takes a trip to Phoenix to meet Jimmy Turk, the man who found our mysterious belt buckle more than two decades ago. Jimmy takes Starlee to the exact spot where he found the belt buckle, “a sidewalk next to a busy, four-way intersection, on the outskirts of a Phoenix subdivision.” As Starlee remarks: “Who would’ve thought an object this unique could be found on a street this aggressively familiar.”

Something else interesting happened on this aggressively familiar street. It turns out that Jimmy received two separate injuries on that very block, necessitating two sets of stitches. The thing that makes these particular sets of stitches interesting is that according to Jimmy: “My grandpa, my dad, my uncle and I. We all have two sets of stitches up under our chin.”

Starlee can only respond with a quip that gave me the title for this post:

What is it with this belt buckle and fate?

While my family doesn’t possess a long-lost belt buckle or an intergenerational curse of stitches, my dad did unearth a lost relic that is in the midst of taking him to a very interesting place. 

A lost musical treasure

My mom got sick pretty early into my parent’s marriage, at a time when they had two young kids—I was six and my brother was two. If you took a snapshot of my family immediately before my mom’s illness you would have said that we were living the American Dream. My dad went to work in the family business—the sort of funky family business that enterprising Jews like my great-grandfather built in cities and towns around the country. My dad carved out his own little slice of the family business when he started a bar called the Sun Ray Oyster Shop in the lobby of a beachfront motel that Izzy owned. My parents met at this bar when my mom came in during the day with a friend who was diabetic and in need of some food. Just like Sated Epicure and his wife, my parents wouldn’t have met without food as an intermediary. 

The bar and restaurant business wasn’t easy, but my dad made a pretty nice living. My mom had a degree in social work and occasionally worked as a fitness instructor, but mostly she was a stay-at-home mom. We had a three-bedroom ranch home with a basement, a rarity in Florida, that nestled up to a small creek. 

My mom’s illness changed everything. We had health insurance, but this was the early 90s. It didn’t cover the insane medical bills that piled up during a three-month hospital stay, brain surgery, and extremely expensive medication. We basically sold everything: the bar and our house. It didn’t even come close to covering it all, though my dad was good at not letting us know how much financial strain we were under. 

We still had to pay the bills somehow, but my dad also needed a job that would provide flexibility—he was after all both the primary parent for me and my brother and primary caregiver for my mom. At first, my dad started a small music studio. That lasted a couple of years and included a few highlights, like when I got to meet Eddie Van Halen when he came to my dad’s studio to try out a prototype of his amp, the 5150, before a concert that aired during MTV Spring Break 1995.⁷

But it was hard making a living running a small music studio, so my dad started doing other things in the music industry, which is how he came to be a children’s songwriter. For many years he wrote music for McGruff the Crime Dog and he also created his own characters, like the Safety Ape and Eco the Butterfly, which companies would occasionally license for advertising campaigns or events. While writing this essay I came across an amazing relic, a song called Cool It, Talk It Out, Then Walk Away that my dad wrote for a 1994 album he produced called McGruff & Scruff and the Crime Dogs.

My dad retired a couple of years ago, but he has continued making music. He wrote, sang, and produced a very ear-wormy kids album called Happy Songs for Kids. But the sweetest thing that he’s done is to contribute his musical talents to a charity called Songs of Love, which started in New York in the 1990s to provide songs for kids and parents dealing with significant illnesses or life challenges. My dad did his first song for them back in the 90s. In 2018, he started writing songs for them again, and since then has written and produced 546 individual songs to bring joy to kids and their families in times of difficulty. 

Which brings us to my family’s lost treasure. 

While setting up his home studio in 2018, my dad came across an old folder. Inside the folder were several sheets of song lyrics and a treatment for a musical that my dad conceptualized in 1987. The musical, Waiting to Be a Waitress, is about a huge Broadway star who is tired of fame and longs for her simpler days waiting tables. My dad is a prolific songwriter and he remembered the chords and melody to all of the songs, but he needed a partner to write the book for this musical. After asking around, he got connected with a friend’s brother who runs a theater in California. They started collaborating and wrote the book for the play. 

As I’m writing this article, my dad is getting ready to produce the play with three dates in August in Pensacola to benefit a charity called Gulf Coast Kid's House, which works to end child abuse in Escambia County, Florida. 

One lost piece of paper has set in motion a series of events that add a bit of kindness and good to that side of humanity's ledger. 

So what ever happened with the lost belt buckle? Did its retrieval also add a bit of goodness to the world?

The part where we meet the famous Hans Jordi

After returning to the spot where the belt buckle was found, Starlee continues her quest to meet Hans Jordi. On her way, she meets a charming coterie of European expat chefs that seem to form the core of the Phoenix culinary scene. After an encounter with a chef whose last name is Bland, Starlee finally sits down with our elusive Swiss cowboy, Hans.

When Starlee finally meets Hans, she says: “Hans is exactly as everyone has described. He’s tall and lean. If I had to sum him up: typical Swiss.”

Our typical Swiss cowboy turns sentimental when Starlee brings up the belt buckle, and after Starlee returns this long-lost treasure Hans starts to cry. You see, this belt buckle, which was stolen from Hans, was a gift from an old friend named Bob Six. Starlee, reasonably, assumed that Bob Six was a nickname. I mean who is actually named Bob Six? 

The answer: the longtime CEO of Continental airlines. 

According to Starlee:

Bob Six ran Continental Airlines for 50 years. He was married to Ethel Merman and then later to Audrey Meadows, who played Alice on The Honeymooners. From the day he and Audrey were married, they never took a flight without one another. Bob Six’s ancestors were from Holland where they were pawnbrokers. In the 16th century, a struggling artist pawned some of his work and never came back to reclaim it. And that's how the Sixes wound up with the largest collection of original Rembrandts in Europe. Bob Six was pals with John Wayne and kept a collection of six shooters. To unwind, he would practice his fast draw. He loved gimmicks and stunts. In the 70s, he hired magicians and Playboy bunnies and baseball players to entertain the passengers on flights too short to show movies. He once received, as a gift, a little jaguar cub, from a Continental pilot. Bob Six named the cub Whiskey and brought him to work with him.

Hans met Bob because every summer the Continental airlines staff went on a retreat at a ranch in Wyoming. For 10 years straight, Hans served Bob and the rest of the Continental crew six meals a day. At the final dinner that Hans served them, Bob called Hans out and gave him the belt buckle as a token of his appreciation. Hans thought that the belt buckle—his only remaining link to a lost friend—was also gone for good. 

But we still haven’t answered the central question: was this entire episode written in the stars?

Sometimes the answer flies right in front of your face 

After listening to Mystery Show’s third case I took a long walk around my neighborhood searching for a way to weave the threads of the belt buckle, my dad’s lost play, and my mom’s illness together. Eventually, I turned to enter Rock Creek Park.⁸ As I started down a rock-laden path, a butterfly flew right in front of my face. 

I had my answer: the butterfly effect.

Somewhere in the world a butterfly flaps its wings, somewhere else in the world this causes a tornado. This is the famous butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is associated with chaos theory. Chaos theory sounds like the name of a 1980s punk band, but in this specific instance it refers to an interdisciplinary field of scientific study that focuses on the underlying patterns and laws of dynamic systems. 

The specific phrasing—of a bug flapping its wings—likely originates with a 1950s story by the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. In 1972, the bug was turned into a butterfly when the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz described observations of weather models that he had created and used the butterfly as a metaphor to illustrate how the exact formation and path of a tornado is influenced by even the smallest prior conditions, such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings weeks prior. At its core, the butterfly effect illustrates an idea that can be traced back to the French mathematician Henri Poincaré—the idea that small changes can cause large effects later in the causal chain of events. 

The butterfly effect gives us one way to conceptualize the causal chain of connection in our world. A causal chain so marvelous that it links my dad to my mom through a fall from a horse and a diabetic friend; a casual chain so marvelous that it links a podcast detective to a Swiss cowboy through a custom-made belt buckle; a casual chain so marvelous that it links you to me through 4,754 words on a website called Substack.

1. And if you happen to have the fact of who owns the largest collection of Rembrandt paintings as an easily accessible fact in your mind then, congratulations on your Jeopardy prize winnings, you’ll still enjoy this mystery as it unfolds.

2. I wonder how different his life would’ve been if he became Isadore Goldman instead.

3. My partner is Chutzpod’s production associate! Give it a listen.

4. There are exceptions to any rule. For instance, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner, a 19th century Hasidic rabbi, believed that all human actions are absolutely under God's control, or as Rabbinic discourse would phrase it, by "hashgacha pratis."

5. Being that we are talking about philosophy, there are any number of responses, alternate theories, and competing ideas. A couple worth mentioning are hard determinism, which holds that determinism is true, that it is incompatible with free will, and therefore that free will does not exist, and incompatibilism, which holds that free will and determinism cannot logically coexist and typically goes hand-in-hand with a belief in free will. It is worth noting that even hard determinism is different from fatalism; fate is arbitrary, determinism is based on the cause-and-effect relationship of preceding events.

6. There are also many alternative scientific hypotheses. The first one that comes to my mind is the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (and just Quantum Mechanics more generally). But there are many others, if you have a favorite drop it in the comments.

7. As part of the deal for hosting Eddie, my dad got backstage passes and floor seats to the show. Despite only being eight, he took me along, so I can say that Van Halen was my first concert. I didn’t remember much of the show until going back and watching the linked video. I had no idea that Jon Stewart was there too!

8. It was named the third ever National Park in 1872, prior to Yosemite. In 1933 it was demoted and folded under the Capital Parks system of the National Park Service, who operates it today.