Dorothy Vine, Vice-President at Eaton during the time Max worked there also remembered him as a very thoughtful man:

“I think he had a way to relate day-to-day things to the bigger picture. He was very oriented towards values. He didn't look like a businessman. To me he looked more like a professor. There's a certain kind of authoritativeness that comes from age. I had a lot of respect for him as far as his mind went. He was a real smart man. He was always interested in sharing his ideas and his thoughts about really any subject.

“Max loved to get into conversations. He didn't push himself on people, but if you showed any interest at all, 'Let's talk.' He seemed to really enjoy just being connected with people. He wasn't one to bury himself in his office.

“I think Max really was concerned about humanity as a whole. And it was almost like we should be able to do something about it. He may have been a person who would have been happier living in a different period, in the old type culture where scholarship and family were honored and religious values were dominant. He carried that around with him, the value system he inherited. He tried very hard to understand the time he lived in.”
 

Judy Gass, Paul's first wife and the only daughter-in-law Max got to know, had warm memories of those years:

“When he came to work in the business in the later years, he and I came to know each other very well. He used to come in and sit in my office and chat. And so I had a chance to understand his dreams, where he had come from and where he had wished to be.

“I think the years that he worked at Eaton were probably his happiest because he wasn't his father's son, and he wasn't his wife's husband. He was Max. And the people in the business loved him. He would get his tea with his lunch and he would have his yarmulke on his head and he was hard of hearing, so he talked loud and everybody else talked loud. So you would hear these conversations, and people really liked him.

 “He would float into my office and sit there and we'd have a kibbitz and it was nice. He loved to tell puns. You knew that he appreciated the turn of a word. He smiled and you could see that twinkle in his eye, if you were on the same wavelength with him and you picked it up. He was always willing to give people little Talmudic anecdotes and interpretations.

“And when he'd come to the holiday party we'd have each year—he never went to restaurants—he felt self conscious about going out and putting on the yarmulke, that people were going to look at him. But when he got his invitation to the Eaton party, he came, no question. And people came over and they introduced their spouses, 'This is Max.' At the Christmas party he wore his yarmulke and he felt very comfortable.

 “I really worried about him when he was coming to work. He lived in Winthrop and he used to take route 9 to Framingham, the old road, because he did not want to drive fast.

“One day I was sitting in the office, Paul was out of town, and people came running in, 'Judy, Judy, Max just fell down the front stairs.' His glasses were bifocals and I guess he looked down and everything gets very out of focus. Anyway, he tripped and flew down those steep marble stairs and banged into the glass door at the bottom. So we called 911, and the fire department sent their ambulance.

“I took a look at him, and he didn't have a bruise, nothing. He wasn't hurt; it was amazing. So they put him on the stretcher and told him to lie still, and he says to me, 'I hope there aren't any photographers around; this won't be a good thing for the company's image.' He was worried about the bad publicity for the company, not about himself!”
 

Paul Gass felt that Max had a premonition of his own death. Paul remembered walking with his father to pick up tuxedos for Max and Adele's fiftieth anniversary party. Max had difficulty walking and was thinking out loud about what was happening to his body. Suddenly he stopped and said, Oh, I understand. When they came to the car he came over to hug Paul, unusually demonstrative for him to do out on the street. At the party that night during the filming of a video, Max made a speech on camera, holding onto the floor as if he wanted to leave some final thoughts to his family.

His granddaughter Leslie remembered the last time she saw him at the party:

“He was looking everywhere for me, and then I found him, and he said this long goodbye and gave me a kiss. I had such a warm feeling from him that night. It's strange—sometimes I think he knew he was going to die.”

In 1987, soon after their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Max traveled to Israel with Adele. While in a Jerusalem hotel he died suddenly of a heart attack on a Friday while preparing for dinner.

Lisa and her sister Leslie remembered Max as an affectionate grandfather, gentle and kind. He loved to dance with his small granddaughters at celebrations, Bar Mitzvahs. They would stand on his feet and he would dance. They used to play Mashie-Pashie, a traditional Yiddish card game, with him for hours.

Leslie recalled:

“He taught me to play chess when I was eight and now I have his chess board and pieces. He was kind of solitary when we were young—he'd go upstairs a lot to read and pray. He became more liberal as he got older. I remember after he died that we found all these liberal books in his library and it was a big surprise—things I wouldn't think he would be reading.”
 

Lisa recalled:

He always called me Tovah, which was my Hebrew name. I told him I hated it, but he would say, But your name is Tovah, you are Tovah. It was important to him that I identify with my Jewish heritage.

     
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