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“I still don’t know where that gumption came from, I had never talked like that before,” Asner wrote in his 2019 autobiography, “Son of a Junkman.”

So just how good was Ed Asner, this down-to-earth son of a Kansas City junkman who broke free from his parents’ towropes of heavy skepticism by becoming an A-list actor?

At a Whole Foods in Jericho, Mr. Stepanian, a scruffy 36-year-old with piercing blue eyes, wheeled a hand truck through the labyrinthine corridors of the store’s backstage like a junkman of old, stopping at Produce and Dairy and Prepared Foods and calling out greetings to familiar faces.

He recorded two of the poems — “Autobiography” and “Junkman’s Obbligato” — with the Cellar Jazz Quintet of San Francisco on a 1957 album with Rexroth called “Poetry Readings in the Cellar.”

Of my brilliant mother, midwife and entrepreneur; of my eccentric father, junkman and zealot.