Mommy, Berkeley Street Visit, July 1, 2007 R 3-20

It's Sunday morning, July 1, 2007. I have just stopped at 237 Berkeley Street to pick up a couple of stones to put on the tombstone of our parents at the unveiling taking place this morning, following on my mother's death on April 12. It is Jewish tradition when visiting a cemetery to place a stone as a remembrance, perhaps of Jerusalem. I thought it would be appropriate to bring a couple of stones from the yard at 237 Berkeley Street as we remember our parents this weekend.

We had just been there yesterday, visiting the home of Mark Webster, who has lived there since 1989. Stuart and I had visited him last summer and much of the house remains the same as it was when we were growing up.

Yesterday, Stuart, Judy, Jon, Shira, Ben, Richard, Carolyn and I all visited and took a tour. All the kids remember it as a very large house, to the surprise of Stuart and me. The first floor has a very open design through the front hall, living room and dining room all as redesigned and reconstructed when my parents bought the house in 1946. They changed the front stairway to the porch to the side from the front so they could have a large screened front porch, put in new front windows of an unusual design. I remember them as being almost square panes set in large frames at the front corner of the house and in the front of the living room. They removed the fireplace mantle and had the fireplace go to the ceiling, with a marble frame.

They also removed the wall between the living room and the dining room and the sliding door and left that space open with a three-foot high half-wall behind the sofa as a separation between the dining room and living room, with two rectangular frames above it for decoration. The dining room had a bay window, and they closed out the middle window which looked at the neighbor's house, and installed shelves for their collection of Parian ware. The staircase to the second floor was relatively open with a wrought iron railing, but they left the kitchen, pantry, and back porch the way they found it, as well as the milk box for the milkman to leave the milk in a nice cool spot in the shade on the back porch. It had one door on the outside, space to leave the milk, and a little door on the inside from which you would take out the milk bottles and put back the empties.

That of course reminds me of Monte, the milkman, popular with all the kids in the neighborhood, who delivered milk three times a week on our street, and would give us short rides up the street, perhaps only for two or three houses, as we were hanging on in the big open front section of the milk truck, as Monty drove standing up or with a high seat that he could lean or sit on.

But I digress, as always.

Our children remember the first floor of Berkeley Street as being white, but as children, it was a dark blue-green, which still shows through where the walls or woodwork are chipped, and reminds Stuart and me even more of the home of our childhood. Our children also remember the pantry, where "grandma" always had her special coffee cake or sheet cookies covered with dark chocolate and walnuts. They could always go in there and find them, and they always did.

The kitchen is new now, but back then it had a rectangular table, and before we got an automatic dishwashing machine, my mother washed the dishes every night and we three took turns drying the dishes on a rotation enforced by our father, Deed, which gave us an opportunity to practice Latin or whatever else our mother was intent on our learning for school. Too bad I didn’t take French or I would have gotten A grades and been fluent! To this day, I regret not having taken French (it didn't work out in the schedule of the Honors Program, and in those days German for some inexplicable reason was still considered an essential language because of pre-WWII scientific literature, but of course by the 1950s German was really not very relevant. Since Mommy was an outstanding teacher of French in high school, what a loss that I didn't spend my time drying the dishes while learning French.

The basement is still very much the same as it was, the small toilet room in which Deed stashed each and every issue of Time Magazine that ever came, so that I could read "history" by reading through all the old Time magazines, which he started accumulating there in about 1946.

We had a ping pong table, and perfected our skills, and of course that basement, which once seemed so large, now so small, was the site of the painting parties for Mark's campaign for vice president of Monroe, which he won, and what fun we had. Mark remembers how my mother always had cookies or brownies for everyone attending the painting parties. Campaigning for high school office in Monroe was a big deal, but more of that another time.

Mommy died on Thursday night, May 12 and the funeral was scheduled for the following Sunday. The kids could not get there because it was the end of school vacation week and there simply weren't airplane flights available from Washington, or San Francisco (for brother Jim) or Boston or even New York. Wendy drove from Boston to New York on Friday, Judy flew up from Florida. Wendy, Judy, Carolyn and I drove in together from New York on Saturday. The funeral was graveside only; at 98, there are almost no friends around to mourn, and being early Spring, many of Stuart and Judy's Rochester friends were still in Florida. We stayed with Mark and Mona and reminisced. The ceremony took place on a cold drizzly day under a canopy at Britten Road Cemetery; we spoke a little about Mommy then, about what a role model she was for so many people as an active leader in the community and someone who took responsibility and education seriously.

Her late years were not kind to her; she moved into the Jewish Home in May 2001, and it was a steady downhill struggle as she lost physical and mental ability and spent the last two and a half years without our knowing if she knew who we were; whether she smiled because it was a typical response to a smile received; or whether she actually knew who we were and wondered why we hadn't been there more often; and it was always jarring when she gave smiles to Petra, her loving aide at the Jewish home, more than she gave to any of us.

Our mother was a formidable person: smart, well-educated, demanding, a person of high standards, a leader in the Jewish community in Rochester, and a mother who always wanted her children to achieve.

She was the second child of immigrant parents, her mother, Bessie Kaplan, came to America around 1900 as a 15 year-old orphan, who then lived with her uncle and aunt Simon and Fanny Kaplan in Rochester (they too are buried in Britten Road Cemetery). Uncle "Sinai" died in the 1930s, and was a favorite of my mother. Stuart ("Sinai in Hebrew") was named for him. Bessie married Harry Eber, who came to America around 1904, a highly educated rebellious Rabbinic student, apparently from a long line of Rabbis, who did not wish to follow in the family tradition, and left for America, where he married Bessie in 1906. Their first daughter, Rose, was born in 1907, our mother in 1909, Lesser in 1910, Samuel and Manuel (Mendy) thereafter. Harry started a clothing business, and by the 1920s, he owned a department store and they lived in a large home on Hyde Park and for some time had a live-in servant.

Unusual for the time, Harry wanted his daughters to be educated, and Rose graduated from the University of Rochester. My mother went to Cornell in 1928, graduating in 1932.

With the crash of 1929, my grandfather lost his business, and from then on, the family did not have significant money, and sold the big house on Hyde Park. That house no longer stands, and was across the street from the location of the main post office in Rochester, built after the family moved out. I remember my parents pointing it out to me on occasion when we went to visit our grandparents, Grampa (Harry) and Baubie (Bessie) on Joseph Avenue in an apartment that I remember well. Harry was extremely bright, somewhat fun and gregarious, but a little scary as well. He would ask what we learned in Hebrew School, and of course it was very little, and he would express his disappointment. We would on occasion go to their home for Friday night dinner, or visit on a Sunday afternoon. Baubie (Yiddish for grandmother) was a loving, sweet, smiling woman, who took care of the family and the home, and every Friday morning she would bake puttakichel (sp?)for the family, dozens of them it seems. Puttakichel in Yiddish or German means butter cake, and I always contend that the recipe called for butter, flour, butter, sugar, butter, cinnamon, butter, raisins, butter. While I loved them, sometimes I just couldn't have any more, but I can still taste them now. I remember too that we would get a supermarket shopping bag full of them, almost weekly.

I also still remember the Seders at Passover at our grandparents' second floor apartment on Joseph Avenue, with our parents, Uncle Less and Aunt Bess, Aunt Rose, cousins Sheldon, Marshall and Donna, and of course Stuart and Jimmy. As a reward for finding the Afikoman, my Grampa gave everyone at the table a crisp twenty-dollar bill. That was in the late 1940s, the equivalent today of about $200 for each of us, including all of the adults. I remember too that the Seder was always long and traditional, with much singing, and lengthy periods of praying and praying and praying, all led by Grampa. Baubie did most of the cooking, brisket and the normal trimmings.

My grandfather did not have the funds for his sons to go to college, and Lesser went to work in retail stores after high school, as did Sam. I’m not sure they wanted to go to college; I never asked Uncle Less. Only the very youngest, Mendy, went to college, graduating the University of Rochester, serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, and then getting a Masters in Economics from Chicago.

Lesser too served in the war, as a medic, wounded in France in a cave-in of a building where he was working to rescue wounded soldiers, and he received a purple heart and a bronze star. He left the purple heart to Stuart and the silver star to me, a valued treasure of his role in World War II. I do recall Less saying how much he enjoyed being in England training for the Normandy invasion, and he was part of it on about D-Day +16, making his way all the way to Paris. He never spoke of his war experiences to Stuart or me; apparently only to our cousin Marshall, late in his life, late at night in his apartment in Florida, after drinking scotch. I'm sure he had many painful memories of trying to save soldiers, but we never learned of the stories from Marshall prior to his own death.

After returning from the Army, Lesser started a wholesale clothing business, selling work clothes, shoes, and other basics for working people, distributing them to small retail stores in the region. He soon opened one after another such retail store, in the small towns around Rochester: Brockport, Seneca Falls, Geneseo, Mt. Morris, and a couple others, and one in Rochester as well. Rosie became his bookkeeper, and in effect Chief Financial Officer as the business grew.

It never became very large, but was the same model as the discount chains that started in Boston around the same time, but concentrated in the small farming and working towns of Western New York State, well-respected and known as the Workingmen’s Family Stores.

I spent many Saturday afternoons while in high school working for Uncle Less and Aunt Rose, either doing bookkeeping work by adding columns of figures on a manual adding machine, or other simple pre-computer age recordkeeping. I also worked in the summers while in high school, helping to box shipments to go to the stores as a stock boy in the warehouse, and learning from a young black man named J.D. Perry, known to everybody as Perry, who started working for Uncle Less at the age of 18. I was perhaps 8 or 10 years younger than Perry when I started working with him.

To this day, I know how to pack books, packages, or load a trunk, in the most efficient and effective manner possible, and I give credit to Perry, who was hardworking, quiet, honest and personable. Perry’s only full time job from the time he was in high school was with Uncle Less until Less retired from the business and liquidated it in the 1970s. He had worked for Less for probably twenty years. After the company was closed, Less told me he received a call from Stromberg Carlson, asking for a reference on Perry, who had told them that he had worked for Less for 20 years. They had never met a young man like him who had worked that long at one place, and wanted to confirm it. Less gave him a glowing review. For some years, I wish I had called Perry to find out how he was doing. He was a very cordial and good person.

In later summers in high school, I worked at Less’ store on Clinton Avenue, across from the Palace Theater, and learned how to sell jeans, chinos, sneakers, boots etc., and how to get along with other workers and customers. It was very good training.

My grandparents and Aunt Rose subsequently moved to a two-family house on Oxford Street, which was on the route to and from our home and Monroe High School. Rosie and her kids lived upstairs and Baubie and Grampa downstairs. I would sometimes stop there after school to visit with Baubie, and have whatever she might have baked. I was quite close to her and liked her very much, and she felt the same way toward me.

I think that both Rose and our mother got the demanding, insistent and dominating genes from my grandfather, and Uncle Less got the gentle, sweet and smiling genes from Baubie.

My mother had saved an article from the Rochester newspaper when she graduated East High about her being one of the four students of East High School who placed 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the New York State scholarship exam in Monroe County. That one morning exam determined which high school seniors would receive a scholarship to be used at any college to which the student was admitted in New York State. The next time that happened was when four of us from Monroe High School accomplished the same in 1957.

Thanks to my grandfather's business failing, my mother did not have much money at Cornell, and couldn't socialize as much as some of her friends, but she had a steady boyfriend in my father, who never graduated high school, but was an attractive and very physical man. He would drive to Cornell to visit her, and they were married in 1932.

Mommy majored in Education and French at Cornell, and it was a period of significant prejudice against all minorities, including Jews and other ethnic Europeans. My mother told me that her faculty advisor at Cornell complimented her on her academic strength and informed her that "you are the first person of your race whom I will recommend for a teaching position." (Another version has him saying “faith” rather than “race.”)

Our mother taught in public schools in East Rochester, and during the depression, women could only hold teaching jobs if they were single, on the expectation that during the depression one job per family was the limit and the man should be expected to have the job.

In fact there were periods when my father did not have work, and my parents were married secretly in New York, in order that my mother could preserve the secrecy of the relationship and keep her teaching position. But within some months, someone had snitched on her and she lost her job.

When I was born, we lived in one of about eight row houses on Gerard Street, off Park Avenue, and I remember that home well. Stuart and I shared a bedroom, and in 1944, our brother Jim arrived. Prior to that, our grandparents lived with us for a short period of time during the war in between their other apartments. I remember the excitement of getting mail from Lesser and Mendy who were away in the war in Europe. Less trained in England and served in France. Mendy served in Italy.

I remember too German prisoners of war being housed in a barracks near Cobbs Hill Park, and I can still visualize them marching in formation, with just a few guards, along the streets. They must have been the luckiest German soldiers in the world, to be shipped on empty transport vessels back to the United States to be housed and fed until the war ended.

My mother was active in the organization called Hadassah, a women's group that raised money for and provided organizational support for Jewish social services in the United States and around the world, and later founded the great Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Mommy engaged in national training activities after her service as a successful leader in Rochester, and also was a longtime president of the Sisterhood of Temple Beth-El, a women's organization affiliated with the synagogue, to provide education and activities for women members, many of them directed toward strengthening the role of the Temple in the lives of families. My mother also served for a significant period as the Chairman of the Board of Education of the Hebrew School at our Temple, during its peak years, when it had enrollment of five hundred to seven hundred students. She was very close to the various men who served as the principal, and I remember well Saul Rabin, Max Furey, and Jay Stern, each of whom occasionally had Shabbos (as then called, now “Shabbat”) dinner with us.

We all remember how Saul Rabin had the habit of pinching the cheeks of students, but he was a very good guy and we liked him. He took a position in Miami and was succeeded by Max Furey, who was kind of pompous and didn't last long. His successor, Jay Stern, was young, very successful and very popular.

There is a picture that appeared on the front page of the city section of one of the Rochester newspapers showing the five of us in our family, all dressed up and sitting at our dining room table as an example of a Passover Seder, even though a Seder would never be so small as to only have one family. The newspaper was trying to provide positive coverage of the Jewish holy festival, and we were honored that we were chosen, undoubtedly because of our mother's active role in Jewish organizational leadership.

My father was always interested in antiques and collecting, and he sometimes scoured junkyards looking for items of value. I remember during the war, because of a combination of his age, his job, and two children, he did not serve in the military, but was a civil defense person. I still remember the air raids, although no German plane could make it as far as the United States, and I recall the collections on a regular basis of metal objects to be melted down for the war effort.

My father was in charge of that in our Harvard Street neighborhood, and he was amazed at how people would put silver trays and other valuable objects out to be collected for the war effort, many of which were much more valuable than the scrap metal use to which they would be put. He told us that it would be a crime to remove any such item and use it for any other purpose, but he saw many nice pieces sent off to get melted down for war production needs.