Random Rochester Memories from Childhood, July 2006, R 1/20

Stu was born in 1937, I in 1939, and Jim in 1944; during all of those years we lived at 42 Girard Street, between Harvard Street and Park Avenue in Rochester. I remember watching German prisoners of war marching by on the way to and from their barracks near Cobbs Hill ice skating and boating pond, a former barge turn-around of the original Erie Canal– -they had to be the happiest and luckiest German soldiers of World War II.

I recall the air raid drills and the model cardboard planes so we could identify fighter and bomber planes; the collection of metal and silver from homes to be used for the defense effort, with Deed being in charge of the collection in our neighborhood, and being amazed at the valuable silver people would put out to go to the effort, and which he wishes he could have bought but of course didn't take a piece; the huge snow storm of 1944, and Deed pulling us up Park Avenue from Girard Street on our toboggan to the store near the corner of Berkeley Street; seeing a salmon that filled David Rosenbloom's bathtub across the street which he brought back from a fishing trip to Alaska; walking to #1 School across the bridge over the subway line, now a super highway, and Dickie Rosenbloom, later a judge, then a seventh-grader, holding me out over the bridge on the way to school one day, when I was in kindergarten or first grade, causing me to run home crying, and probably the cause of my life-long fear of height by me, justified of course.

That same snow storm caused our street to be the last one in the city plowed because Dave Rosenbloom had left his car on the street and the city wouldn't plow if there were any cars, so he had to have men from his furniture store come and shovel his car out all the way to Harvard Street. I recall missing a fire down the street, and all the fire trucks, because Mommy wouldn't let me go out without a shirt, and I couldn't find one; photos being taken and none showing Stuart's eyes open, since he always reacted to a flash in advance; a couple of dogs as pets, each of which lasted no more than a week; my father shoveling coal into the furnace in the basement.

I especially remember the shared backyard of the eight row units on Girard and Harvard, frequently being littered with dog poop from a neighbor's dog, causing my father to methodically create six signs on wooden posts which he carefully placed appropriately near the poops one day, the signs reading: "Clean Up Here", "Here Too", etc. I remember the dog's owners coming home and yelling and screaming at each other, but there was no more dog poop in the common yard; visiting the Geib Estate, at the end of our block, a huge gracious country home on a large piece of land, owned by a prominent surgeon, whose children Peter and Wanda were friends of Stuart and mine respectively. The Geibs once had a decorative fish pool on the property until another child of theirs wandered into it and died, and it was promptly filled in. Wanda and I remained friends for many years, and I was always in awe of her parents' art and antiques, and I remember being impressed by the Dutch door at the kitchen, which split at waist-level, so that you could open just the top to take deliveries.

Berkeley Street had its own memories: moving into it in 1946 before the carpenters did all their work, completely reconstructing the entrance hall, stairway, living room and dining room, to make it imaginatively an open space of three-quarters of the first floor, and loving the smell of fresh wood being cut by the carpenter; the large screened front porch, filled with a sisal rug and wonderful white wicker furniture; Stuart and I always racing to see who got the big wicker chaise lounge, but it wasn't bad to settle for either of the two big wicker rocking chairs, all of those pieces being upholstered in a light green leather or plastic which would stick to your bare legs on a hot day; badminton in the backyard, often interrupted by the summer kitten wanting to play and join the fun; of course it was a summer kitten, because my father would get a new kitten each summer, which would live in the yard or on the porch, and then be given to my father's twin sisters, Pearl (Pally) and Bessie, to add to their small collection of grownup cats. Deed held his own with us in badminton, of course.

I remember loving rain storms making noise on the porch roof on both Girard and Berkeley streets and I would turn the wicker furniture over and build a fort in which I could hide from the mist; sharing a bedroom with Stuart in both homes that had twin tiger maple headboards and posts, and neither of us being smart enough to want those extraordinarily beautiful beds when our parents moved out of the house on Berkeley Street in about 1975; our bedroom also had a wonderful print of the famous harness racing horse Maud S, along with a terrific print of a famous Indian warrior; reading the autobiography of Mary Jamison, a white woman who had been captured by the Seneca tribe as a child, was raised by the Indians and married one of their chiefs or warriors; the traditional Sabbath dinner every Friday night, at the dining room table, which was only used for the Sabbath and holidays, with a full fancy dinner which always included chicken, or meat of some kind, and our favorite, standing rib roast, and we used our parents' silver and china.

Mommy and Daddy sat at opposite ends of the table, and in the dining room Stuart had a long side all to himself, and Jimmy and I as the younger brothers shared one side; eating all other dinners in the kitchen, my father at one end, Jimmy at the other, I sat next to my mother along one side, easiest for her to get to the food to serve, and Stuart across, again, on the long side; we seldom had fish because my father didn't like it, but every meal had to have some kind of meat and potatoes; wonderful Thanksgiving dinners, and we would generally try to play tricks on our favorite Uncle Less, one day spending much time trying to coat two or three pieces of soap with chocolate (against our Mommy's wishes), and inserting them in a box of candy, in hopes that Uncle Less would take one and bite into it, which he of course did, to gales of laughter from us; another Thanksgiving, we served him a turkey separately, a fairly large size brown paper bag shaped into a turkey and colored appropriately, and to his credit, he enjoyed every minute of attention from his nephews, as Less and Bess had no children of their own.

Stuart joined us for many dinners while going to pre-med courses and medical school and regaled us with stories that involved blood, causing me to insist that Deed tell him to shut up, or I would leave the table, and Deed finally telling him to do so; and I remember well the squirt gun fights as the three of us would run through the house and into the large yard firing at each other, with my mother finally banning squirt guns from inside the house; the house had an upper back porch above the kitchen, and we would occasionally lock each other out there, and then go get my father's two-foot high WWII fire pump, and pump it with our foot while holding the three-foot hose, and appropriately wet the poor sucker who got locked out on the upper porch, sometimes it being me.

We got a television set around 1949 or 1950 in the upstairs den, and we would all gather there to watch the usual 1950s shows, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Ed Sullivan including the one with the Beatles, Friday night boxing and Saturday might wrestling with Gorgeous George and Ivan Rasputin, reputedly married to a relative in Deed's extended family, and Edward R. Murrow, including the great evening in which he destroyed Joe McCarthy, watching the Army-McCarthy hearings live on television, and seeing the great skewering of McCarthy by Joe Welch; watching the 1952 Republican and Democratic conventions on television, live, during the day, at a time when the conventions did not have pre-determined results, and were not just television events, and observing the excitement during the convention involving the close-fought battle between Eisenhower and Taft for the Republican nomination, with a vain attempt by General McArthur to also be considered. He received only a handful of votes.

The Democrats had no natural candidate on the retirement of Harry Truman, and settled on Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, who certainly captured me with his eloquence and intellectual passion; I attended an Eisenhower rally at the train station in Rochester, back when whistle stop tours were the norm, and I proudly carried a Stevenson sign!, the only one there, with no problem with the "I Like Ike" folks; and did the same at the whistle-stop rally for Stevenson as well, and once a few years later going to a speech he gave at the Seneca Hotel and appearing in a picture as he sat in a convertible as he left.

I was a relatively slow learner in early school years, with a modest speech impediment of some sort, leading to a #1 School teacher suggesting to Mommy that she should reconcile herself to the fact that I probably was not going to be very good student, and Uncle Mendy telling Mommy the teacher was wrong; and Mommy and Miss Nolan at #23 School working with me to overcome the problem. I didn't like #1 School very much (Kindergarten through second grade) or classes, but did like playing out in the vast playground there, which included an immense (it appeared so then) tree with a huge trunk on which three of us could sit at one time; and which I have visited occasionally when returning to Rochester.

However, I remember #23 School with great fondness: in those days, and for several years, the teachers would require news groups, where each day of the week five students would report on different aspects of the news, requiring us to read the papers. I would invariably seek to report on national or international news, and for many months we talked about the 1951 case of the Reverend George Hetenyi, an Episcopal minister who was found guilty of murdering his wife.

In those days we graduated elementary school in seventh grade, and then went to Monroe High School, because there was no separate middle school. Eighth grade took place in the high school, and then the real high school courses began in ninth grade. During the eighth grade year, a school psychologist, Dr. Burnsides, a great-granddaughter of the General Burnsides who was famous in the Civil War and who initiated "side burns" as a hair style, was a brilliant, tough, older woman with a deep southern drawl who was charged with developing an "honors program" for a small number of students in each class. She interviewed and tested many students for ability and aptitude, and then selected twelve or thirteen from each of the eighth through eleventh grades, to create a mixed class honors program, so that ninth and tenth graders took classes together, and eleventh and twelfth graders.

The honors program was an example of the 1950s style of education, grouping people by perceived ability, and developing a rigorous and challenging curriculum for the best students. It quickly became known as "The Special Classes" not without a twinge of jealousy. The program however was extraordinary, with certain courses being developed just for us, that were not available for other students, including one on public speaking, and more rigorous courses in literature and history than offered to others. We also had the best teachers in the school----we remember them all: Miss Carragher for world history; Miss Leary, Latin; Mr. Sliker, public speaking; someone for art history whose name I forgot; and especially, among the best teachers I ever had, Jenny Stolbrand for English and literature, and Lucille Bowen for American history (who was so impressed with Chief Justice John Marshall, that whenever she would mention his name, she would raise both hands up to her shoulders and say “The Great John Marshall") ; and Carl Lang for a special course designed only for us as seniors, named American Studies, and Mr. Lang brought us each a copy of the New York Times each morning.

One drawback was the rigidity of the schedule, which meant that if I were to take chemistry and physics in my junior and senior years, then I would not be able to take French I in my junior year. At one point we had to choose a second language to take and because of the schedule, I could take German I but not French I. I could have gone to summer school for French I before my junior year (Honora was smart enough to do that!) but I chose to have a no-school summer and worked for money. That was a terrible decision (!) that I have always regretted since Mommy was an extraordinary French teacher, and in two years of studying French in high school, while practicing homework with her while drying the dishes (we three took turns doing that each night in the years before we had a dishwasher), I really could have learned language relating to my favorite country to visit!