Our Stories Our Lives, Eisenberg Assisted Living, Vol. Three

Our Stories, Our Lives

By the Members of the Eisenberg Writers’ Roundtable: Ethel Abramoff, Florence Blatt, Alberta “Birdie” Chase, Cindy Crohn, James Demetry, Sidney Dorfman, Herbert Keilson, Natalie Maynard, Sue Stafford, and Esther Wittner. With a special afterword by Melissa Baughman Lucia Zaucha Knoles, Editor

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TABLE OF CONTENTS OUR PUBLIC READING FOR FRIENDS AND FAMILY .................................... IV ETHEL ABRAMOFF .......................................................................................3 HOW I MET MY HUSBAND: THE CHASE .................................................................... 4 A MEMORABLE NIGHT ........................................................................................... 9 MY FATHER-IN-LAW THE BOOTLEGGER .................................................................. 13 WHO IS MORRIS KATZ? MY FATHER'S JOURNEY TO AMERICA .................................... 15 A NEWSPAPER AD................................................................................................21 FLORENCE BLATT ...................................................................................... 27 SOMEONE WHO MADE A DIFFERENCE.................................................................... 28 MARRIED SIXTY-THREE YEARS: IT WAS VERY, VERY LOVELY .....................................30 BIRDIE CHASE ........................................................................................... 37 THE GOOD OLD DAYS ..........................................................................................38 LET’S BE REAL .................................................................................................... 46 ONCE A GIRL SCOUT ALWAYS A GIRL SCOUT .......................................................... 48 CINDY CROHN ........................................................................................... 53 MOVING TO CORPUS CHRISTI................................................................................ 54 ROSEBUD SALVE ................................................................................................. 60 COLLEGE: THE FIRST STRUGGLE ............................................................................ 65 NOT ORDINARY TIMES .......................................................................................... 73 THE WATCH ........................................................................................................79 GRANDMA POTTER AND THE CHICKS ......................................................................83 EXPECTATIONS ....................................................................................................91 ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN LAVENDER? ............................................ 93 JAMES DEMETRY ..................................................................................... 123 SPRINGSIDE AVENUE: A RAISIN IN A BOWLFUL OF SOCIAL PUDDING .........................124 UNCLE GEORGE ................................................................................................. 134 AUNTS AND ELEPHANTS .....................................................................................140 THRIFT, INDUSTRY, AND DEVIL DOGS ...................................................................146 DANDELION TEA ................................................................................................ 153 MUSICOPHILIA ................................................................................................... 156 REFLECTIONS ON PARENTING .............................................................................. 163 TURKEY TRENDS AND TRIBULATIONS .................................................................... 173 THE EDIFICE COMPLEX ........................................................................................ 181 MY DAD’S GREAT ROWING ADVENTURE ...............................................................192

WHAT’S IN A NAME (DAY)?..................................................................................196 FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD ..................................................................................... 201 WEIGHT, WEIGHT, DON’T TELL ME ..................................................................... 204 EXPECTATIONS .................................................................................................. 207 DAD’S COCKTAIL................................................................................................ 211 SIDNEY DORFMAN .................................................................................. 217 THE TWO DOLLAR BILL .......................................................................................218 MISPLACED VIOLIN............................................................................................. 221 PITCHING ..........................................................................................................225 THE LIFE STORY OF A DAY DREAMER ................................................................... 228 HERB KEILSON ........................................................................................ 235 POSTWAR SMALL AIRLINES: THE UNTOLD HISTORY .............................................. 244 MY SISTER, THE SWIMMER ..................................................................................252 A STRATEGY FOR WHINERS ................................................................................. 255 MY TIME BEFORE A GRAND JURY ......................................................................... 257 OUR LUGGAGE TAKES A VACATION ..................................................................... 268 THE CYCLES OF RELIGION IN MY LIFE .................................................................... 273 WWII VET TAKES HONOR FLIGHT FOR ‘UNBELIEVABLE’ EXPERIENCE .......................... 275 THOSE WHO SERVE: WWII YEARS LAUNCH LIFELONG PASSION FOR FLYING ............ 279 NATALIE MAYNARD ................................................................................ 289 FAMILY SECRETS ............................................................................................... 290 CRIBBAGE! ........................................................................................................293 HOW WE COMMUNICATE ................................................................................... 296 BAKED BEANS AND BROWN BREAD ..................................................................... 299 WEDDING EXPECTATIONS .................................................................................. 303 COPING WITH DEPRESSION .................................................................................. 312 HOW LONG, O GOD?.......................................................................................... 315 KEEPING BUSY! .................................................................................................. 318 CHRISTMAS REFLECTIONS ...................................................................................320 SUE STAFFORD ....................................................................................... 329 MY ITALIAN NONI .............................................................................................. 330 PRAYERS AND EXPECTATIONS.............................................................................. 334 THE CHALLENGE OF MOM ...................................................................................340 THINKING OF DADDY THINKING............................................................................ 351 THANKSGIVING .................................................................................................. 353 ESTHER WITTNER.................................................................................... 365 A CONFIDENT WOMAN .......................................................................................366 HER STORY, HER LIFE .........................................................................................369 MELISSA BAUGHMAN .............................................................................. 379 MY EXPERIENCE AT EISENBERG-SUMMER 2017 ......................................................380

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The stories in this book were written in the summer of 2017 by members of the Life Stories Roundtable living in the Eisenberg Assisted Living Residence in Worcester, MA. The classes were moderated by Lucia Knoles, who is a professor of English at Assumption College.

The Life Stories Roundtable is based on the following principles: •

Everyone has a story.

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Everyone’s story deserves to be heard.

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By writing our stories, we preserve joy, deal with loss, and find meaning.

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By exchanging our stories, we create a community.

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By passing on our stories to loved ones, we offer a priceless legacy to our friends, loved ones, and other readers.

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Our Public Reading for Friends and Family Nov. 16, 2017

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Above, left to right: Sid Dorfman, Herb Keilson, Lillian Goff, and Cindy Crohn.

Below, Vita Hirsch (reading one of her stories from Vol II), and Sue Stafford.

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Above, left to right: Sid Dorfman, Herb Keilson, Lillian Goff, and Cindy Crohn.

Below, left to right: Birdie Chase, Natalie Maynard, Ethel Abramoff.

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On left: Sid Dorfman (reading), and Herb Keilson

Below: Lillian Goff (reading), and Cindy Crohn

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Above, left to right: Cindy Crohn, Sue Stafford.

Below, left to right: Sue Stafford, Jim Demetry, and Lucia Knoles

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Birdie Chase looking on while Natalie Maynard reads.

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Lucia Knoles enjoying listening to Herb Keilson reading one of his stories.

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Above, left to right: Lucia Knoles, Sid Dorfman, and Herb Keilson Below, Birdie Chase reading and Natalie Maynard listening.

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Figure 1A big thank you goes to Vita Hirsch for sharing one of her stories from Vol. 2 at the reading.

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Ethel Abramoff

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How I Met My Husband: The Chase

I was a young girl about 18 or 19 years old. I was starting my first job, and this was in the office of a wholesale beef company on Grafton Street in Worcester.

The office that I worked in was a square room with two desks that were together, so that people had to walk around the two desks to go out the door. And next to the door where you entered was one of those cashier windows where the salesmen would come, and they would leave their paraphernalia or whatever they had on the shelf. That way they wouldn't have to come in to see us.

So one day I had just started there, and I was supposed to try to see who was at the window and take the money or the paper or whatever and do what I had to do with it. So I went up there and there was this young man on the other side, one of the salesmen. He started to give

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Ethel’s Son, Larry Abramoff, Reading this Story at Eisenberg Life Stories Public Reading, Nov. 16, 2017

me some money and some papers, and he looked up and said, "Oh, what a cutie-pie! I have to give you a kiss!"

So he came in the door, and he started to chase me around the two desks--around and around and around until he caught me and kissed me. And all the men, the butchers and everything, they all saw this and were laughing, laughing. No one thought to stop him.

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But they were laughing because they all knew him.

And then the next time he came, he did the same thing. He would come into the office, chase me around, and then kiss me. And I was very upset because I was just a kid.

This went on for some time, and then what happened was Pearl Harbor. He was drafted and sent to Florida for the coast artillery to protect the coast against the Japanese U-Boats. And it was pretty miserable down there.

My oldest sister was a good friend of his former bosses; he didn't work there anymore once he was in the army. And they knew the story about my being chased around and around, and they talked about it.

And my sister said to me: "Ethel, write him a letter.

He's a poor soldier, and he's lonesome and he's in a real hell-hole. Write him a letter."

And I said, "No I won't."

And my sister said, "Ethel, write him a letter."

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"No." Well she nagged me and nagged me to write him a letter. And I got so disgusted that I said, "If you want so badly for me to write him a letter, write it yourself."

And she did. But she signed my name.

By this time he was overseas. I don't know where it was. He went through England, France, and then finally into Germany. Anyway, he finally started writing me letters because he was so thrilled to get my letter. And I started writing HIM letters--my own letters, not my sister's. And we corresponded for the whole war.

Finally, the war was over, and he came home. We dated for a very short time, and then we got married. We had a lovely wedding, and the rest is history.

I never told him that it was my sister who wrote the first letter. And he never found out.

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Ethel and Murry Abramoff

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A Memorable Night

I’m one of ten children, eight of us still living at home. We lived in a big three decker house with my parents in one room, my sisters in another room, and the rest of us in the large room in the middle that was sort of a dormitory. I was about seven or eight years old, the ninth of ten children.

One night, in the middle of the dead winter, I woke up crying. I smelled smoke. I got out of bed and ran into my sisters’ room to wake them, but they just turned over and said, “You’re just dreaming, go back to bed.” I tried to calm down and go to bed, but I couldn’t and I was crying. I went back to my sisters’ room, and this time I wouldn’t let them go back to bed. I said, “I smell smoke and something’s wrong.” This time I really succeeded in waking them, and they got out of bed realizing something was wrong in the house.

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Ethel's family with eight of the ten children

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They got out of bed and saw the smoke, and one of them called the fire department while the other one woke my parents and the other children and the family that lived upstairs. The firemen came and wrapped the little children in blankets and put us out on the porch of the house next door and proceeded to put out the fire that was raging in the cellar. The house was indeed on fire.

After the fire was out we all went back to bed, and the next day we got up and went to school as usual. The next day when I went to school —I was in the third grade in the Providence Street School—the teacher, Miss McDonald, called me up in front of the class and told the children about the fire and how I had awoken the family.

And she bent over me and sniffed and said, “Yes, indeed, I can smell the smoke!”

That evening my picture was in the paper and the caption under it read, “Young Heroine Rescues Family from Fire.”

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Ethel’s husband.

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My Father-in-Law the Bootlegger

Now this story was told to me by my husband. It was during the days of prohibition. My husband’s family lived from hand to mouth. His mother was a dressmaker and made a small living at her trade. His father, on the other hand, was a dandy, a very handsome man who cared only for himself. He wore the best clothes, was always very careful about his fingernails and his hair, and didn’t seem to care what happened to the rest of the family. The wife could never get him to do a day’s work. One day when things were really at their worst he decided to put a still up in the attic of the house. They lived on Pleasant Street, the house was right next door to the Jewish Home.

He taught his two sons how to run the still. They were very young—eight or ten years old. And he had a white belt that he used to wear under his coat where he could put the bottles of whiskey into. Then he would go around to his customers and deliver it. That was called bootlegging.

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One day while the boys were taking care of the still a fire started. The fire station was very close to where they lived, and the firemen were very prompt in putting out the fire. They saw that the boys were standing by terrified, but when the firemen saw that it was two young boys running the still they were very understanding and they put out the fire and never said a word. They put out the fire and they left. The fire was never reported, and a word was never said to either one of the boys.

The younger boy was my husband, only a little kid at the time. But later he told me about the story—and I knew the father, he was always in and out of their lives, he hardly made a living and only cared about how he looked.

And his father used the money from the bootlegging to dress himself and take care of his personal needs. My husband never accused him of anything, and when we would go to the cemetery he would always go to his father’s grave and put a stone on it, to pay respects. But I knew that his father was only a bootlegger, that’s just the kind of man he was.

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Who Is Morris Katz?

My Father's Journey to America

When my father was just 13 years old, he was kidnapped off the streets of Riga, Latvia and sent as a conscript into the Russian army. This was a wrenching thing for a boy of 13, but it was not uncommon. He was expected to serve for 15 years, a longer time than he had been alive until that point.

When 15 years had gone by, the Russo-Japanese war broke out, and they chose to keep him another year to be sure that they had the army they needed. At the end of 16 years he managed to return to his family's home in Riga.

However, the army still needed personnel to fight their War, so they tried to recruit him again. Army personnel came to his parents’ house and told him that the law stated that Jews who didn't live in cities for five years had to move to the pale of settlement. Since he was in the army during those five years, and not living at home, he 15

would have to move. If he wanted to, though, he could go into the army again instead of moving.

This was an impossible choice for my father, and he chose to leave the country and go to America instead.

Traveling was a difficult thing for Jews at that time.

He did not have a passport or any kind of papers that he would need and he had very little money. He Ethel's mother and father.

managed to get a passport from a

deceased person whose name was Morris Israel Katz, and so that was the name he adopted. His brother also came to America with him, and took the name Louis Katz. They

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stowed away on a ship that went to England and then to America.

Perhaps he was nervous about having a stolen name, even in America, or was concerned about Something happening to his family. Whatever the reason, he chose to tell no one - not even his children who asked and asked what his real name was. So, it is impossible to search for our family in Latvia because we do not know their name.

Ethel's great-grandsons.

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Ethel

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A Man Who Knew How to Handle Crises Ethel Abramoff

Let me tell you this story.

When our children were very young, we used to take them every summer down to Cranberry Meadow Lake that our friends and relatives the Friedmans owned. There were three cottages. One of them the Friedman's lived in, and they had eight children. And the second one was another family. And then the third one was my family, my children.

One Sunday I started to take one of my children to see my brother. While we were gone my husband was very tired because he'd been working days and night and everything. He worked for Snyder Brother's beef company. So he was upstairs taking a nap. And while he was sleeping and I was gone, all of the children who were playing outside came running up to the house shouting, "Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Abramoff, your car is in the

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lake." He had parked his car right near the water on a little bit of a slope. They had to yell a long time because he was sleeping. And finally he woke up and went downstairs, and he said: "You're right, the car is in the lake." And he went back upstairs and went back to sleep.

There was nothing he could do. The car was in the lake. It was a Sunday afternoon. But the next day he sent his mechanic down to drag the car out of the water. The mechanic drove the car up to alongside the lake, dried it off, and the car was as good as new.

Ever since then when I've seen one of the Friedman children they've always laughed and said: "Remember the car in the lake?" And even the day after my husband died, when the oldest Friedman son came over to say goodbye to one of his cousins and saw me sitting there, he turned and said: "Remember the car in the lake!"

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A Newspaper Ad

Worcester had a paper, The Jewish Civic Newspaper.

One day there was an ad in the paper looking for information on my mother, Fannie Katz. So, I answered it. It turned out to be an ad from a family in Russia who wanted to immigrate to the United States. This was a cousin of my mother’s, Lydia Shullyek. The cousin, her husband, Lev and 2 children wanted to come to America.

So, I sent pertinent information to the organization requesting the information. As a result, they came to America and landed in Boston. I sent my son, David and a cousin, Sylvia Rosenthal to pick them up at Airport.

David was wearing a pair of jeans at the time with a hole in the knee. They thought he was a servant!

The family stayed with me for a while. They brought five different dictionaries to learn the language.

The children did well in school. Lydia got a job working

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Ethel’s Mother, Fannie Katz

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for the Boy Scouts of America. The father was an inventor. He decided to learn how to fly and took lessons in aviation. One day he was flying and another plane landed on him and he was killed. The daughter is now a physician in New York. The son, Igor is in the oil business Lydia now lives in New York, near her daughter.

She just moved into an assisted living, but Lydia and her son came to Murray’s funeral.

This all came from a random add in the paper: The Jewish Civic Leader.

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Ethel with her eldest granddaughter

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Florence Blatt

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Someone Who Made a Difference

I was a volunteer worker with the Jewish Community Center for over 20 years. I would serve lunch at a senior citizen housing, which is Bet Shalom located at 475 Chandler Street.

Many years ago the lunches started at the JCC, as the years passed by, it was transferred to Temple Emanuel.

Eventually, Bet Shalom was selected because it has a large kitchen and community room.

During that time, I worked with many, many different volunteers, male and female, but I met one person whom I love and I valued her friendship. She is the kindest, most generous and thoughtful person, always doing favors for other people. She has a husband who is just as kind and wonderful as she is.

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During the turbulent years, when my husband was hospitalized at Brigham & Women’s Hospital for heart surgery, I called my friend one day to ask her if she knew of anyone who was a driver that would take me into Brookline, Mass. She said she would call around and let me know. She called back shortly and said, “We will drive you out. Be ready in an hour.” I protested, but she insisted. That mattered to me.

I’ll never forget how kind they were. They did numerous favors for me. We are still very friendly. As a matter of fact, they came to visit me last week.

They made a difference in my life. I will always treasure their friendship. People like that make a difference in the world.

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Married Sixty-Three Years: It Was Very, Very Lovely

I was married a long time: 63 years. But I don’t know how to get into it. What sentence to use to start.

My husband and I were childhood sweethearts. We net in junior high school we met to a graduation dance, and so it as just casual, the whole episode because no one did the things they do today. So it just progressed, dating occasionally, not even a date, going for a Sunday or something like that. He was from our neighborhood and school.

He was very nice-looking and he was built very nicely and he was a good person.

When I graduated high school he gave me a rose gold watch from Sharfman’s. And so we were just dating like that, go to a movie at the Palace or wherever, and then we’d end up getting ice cream Sundays on water

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street at Broadway’s ice cream parlor. It’s still on the corner of Water St. and Harrison St., still there.

And then in 1943 he enlisted in the Navy because the war was going on. We were dating, and I would go to visit him with him mom, we’d go to Newport Rhode Island where the ship pulled in. There’s a big park there and we would just stroll, walk around, and then we’d sit on the benches, and his mom was there.

In those days you married when you were younger too than now, probably at 19 he got me a beautiful diamond ring. And he was still in the navy, but he’d come back and forth. He’d be gone six months or eight months on a transport ship. The SS Arisa. While he was away they traveled to all different countries in Europe bringing in equipment and supplies. I worried why he was gone because in those days everyone had a flag in the window and if there was a black star on it someone had passed away, so that was always number one on your mind.

I got married April 30, 1945. He was on a two-week leave of absence. In those days everything was fast and

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quick because everyone was in the service, mostly every fellow in the neighborhood. It was a simple wedding.

There was no time to do anything so it was really was held in our home. Afterwards we went to New York City. We went to stage shows, we went shopping. Of course in those days, the streets were flooded with servicemen in New York. You couldn’t even walk. It was very exciting; a lot going on. It wasn’t even two weeks really. And then after, he went back to Newport on the ship.

It was very happy when he would come. We would have nice dinners at his parents’ home or my home. He looked so very handsome in his sailor uniform. He’d come in sometime from Cuba with his white uniform and all tanned up. He looked very lovely.

He was honorably discharged in 1945, I knew I had to have an apartment but it was very hard to find one. So I was very young, and there was a sign in a grocery store that a man sells property. So I went in and talked with him and he said, yes, he sells property, he had lovely houses, three deckers. That was the style then. I don’t know who I went with but he took me to this home, this 32

three-decker house. And it was very lovely. It was steam heat and everything for the three families. So I don’t know whether I communicated with him or he was discharged. I went up with him to look at the three family, and it was very, very lovely and we liked it. So we started to apply at the federal savings bank. And then we bought that three-decker house and we had to evict the people on the second floor. And we moved in. It was terrible to evict a lovely family. In those days when you moved someplace you stayed for years.

We had very happy years in that home. It was a lovely neighborhood with wonderful neighbors. It was across from Vernon Hill Park on Providence St. I fixed up my apartment so beautifully, and I enjoyed keeping it always cleaning and changing curtains and ironing everything. That was my pleasure.

We had three little girls during those years, and I really enjoyed being home with them and just doing the normal things: cleaning, and cooking, and banking, and taking them into the park, swimming, associating with the

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lovely neighbors. Interacting with the lovely neighbors. It was very, very lovely.

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Announcement of Florence's Engagement

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Birdie Chase

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The Good Old Days

My father was born in a small town in Russia called Slutz. Some years ago we were pleasantly surprised to find it on the map. It was a farming community known for its cucumbers.

In those days there was no running water or electricity in the homes, nor was there any railroads in town. So the emigrants had to travel by horse and buggy until they came upon tracks ad crossed Russia and Germany to Rotterdam, Holland (975 miles) where they embarked on the Ryndam. They arrived at Ellis Island, New York, on September 15, 1903. My father claimed his birthdate was September 15th. Now I know why he had that date in his mind.

After doing some research I found that there were many versions of what was required to enter the United States. One place stated “steamship lines were responsible

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Birdie’s father would have stood in line like this in the Great Hall of Ellis Island to be processed by immigration authorities.

Once he passed through this final desk, he was on his way out the door to his new life in America.

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for screening all passengers for physical and mental deficiencies before sailing.� However, one manifold stated that people were rejected at Ellis Island for trachoma (a contagious eye disease) and were sent back to the place of origin. The immigrant supposedly had to state an address to go to. However, some folks passed through without any papers and luckily were not caught and deported.

Immigrants Being Examined for Trachoma at Ellis Island

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My grandparents, Joseph and Dora Brevdeh (or Brevora or Broide) came over in steerage and paid thirtythree dollars per ticket (in 2010 dollars that would be eight hundred and two dollars!)

There were seven surviving children out of ten: Margaret, Stephen, Albert, Saul (my father), Sophie, Ruth, and Irving, born between 1888 and 1902. The trip took ten days and everyone was seasick except Sophie. Joseph and Margaret were listed as hat makers and were fairly resourceful as they were able to pay everyone’s fare rather than have a relative help. Albert and Ruth passed away and thus my maiden name—Alberta Ruth Brown. Two other passengers were Margaret’s fiancé, Israel Berkowitz (changed to Berow) and another young girl, Rachel, aged eleven.

I wish now that I had asked more questions as my dad loved to tell stories. There was a fire chief back in Slutsk named Entropofe. I imagine he looked like an American Santa Claus, but I really don’t know. And I can’t remember any incidents why my dad would even tell

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me about him.

However, I do recall my dad trying to teach me to count in Yiddish from one to twenty. We laughed a lot as some of the words came out quite funny-sounding to a child.

My father became a citizen when he was inducted into the United States Navy in 1917. He learned to speak English—never had an accent—and had nice penmanship.

Certainly better than mine!

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The naturalization papers Birdie's father received when he enlisted in the U.S Armed Forces.

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Birdie as a baby.

Birdie at a dance recital.

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Birdie's Brother 45

Let’s Be Real

I believe all young people are idealistic. If only this were changed or that reversed this would be a better world.

As a young college student I had a writing assignment about what we thought our first job might entail. What expectations did we have for our future, what locality would be likely to settle in, anything really just to begin thinking about a career.

I wrote that I would probably stay close to home, as I was already engaged. But I clearly remember I wrote that if there was a policy in the company I did not agree with, I would resign.

I wish I had that paper as I don’t recall the mark (it was approved), but I do recollect I was asked to be a little 46

more realistic. Come back in five years and see if I still felt such a move would be wise at that time. It did not take more than my first position to see the light.

Things are not always as we dream them to be perfect. As time goes on, as we age, even after almost 70 years later, I realize that one must bend a bit, compromise, and even bit our tongues so that something we may regret later is never uttered.

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Once a Girl Scout Always a Girl Scout

I joined the girl scouts when I was ten years old and am now a seventy-year member. We met at the former Temple Emmanuel building at 111 Elm Street. My first leader was Mrs. Putnam. In the first few years we did crafts (which I was not good at), put on skits and earned a few badges. My next leader was Mrs. Rose Singer who was my idol for many years. We began to do volunteer work. My first assignment was at the old City Hospital on Queen Street. I was perhaps twelve but had never been in contact with elderly sick women who were in a ten bed ward. I was told to feed these ladies their supper. Not having any younger siblings or grandparents in my life I was totally unprepared. There was no supervision. I did the best I could. No one choked; neither did anyone ask for more. I was glad to leave the room but was terribly shaken. These folks were frail and had to be spoon fed.

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The next week I volunteered to scrub the hallway on my hands and knees and wash the windows on the door.

That was ok. Time to go home. My dad came to pick me up on this typically cold winter day and my coat was in a locked closet and no one seemed to have a key.

Eventually my coat was retrieved. Needless to say, that was the last of City Hospital!

World War II was on. We were asked to knit caps for the soldiers. I picked up the yarn and brought it to my mom who was a beautiful knitter. She had a job for many months and I went on to other projects.

Since I have been at Eisenberg I have slowed down quite a bit. However, I am on the Caring Committee for my temple which entails weekly calls to local hospitals to check on any ill congregants. There is also a monthly meeting. Occasionally I help with the mailing of the bulletin.

In this facility I visited one of the residents on the 3rd floor and wrote a story of her life. She has recently moved somewhere in Shrewsbury for more care, but I will keep in

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touch with her daughter and son-in-law whom I have befriended. I also help at our Friday evening religious service and lend a hand Saturday morning, if need. I have always helped activities people with any drives we have had. St. John’s Food Pantry, grammar schools in need of supplies over and above what the city supplies, and the Postman’s annual food drive.

Four of us meet monthly to write notes to servicemen and women. The Worcester Senior Center packs up care packages and encloses greetings.

Last act: Last week some of us had a box supper in the café after having been taken on a two-hour viewing of holiday lights in our area. Needless to say, everyone did not pick up all their leftovers, so I did my duty and even washed down the tables.

I wish I could do more.

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Cindy Crohn

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Moving to Corpus Christi

We were driving straight into the setting sun in south Louisiana and I was exhausted. It was hot, of course, but nevertheless there seemed to be something promising about the landscape even though it was flat and desolate.

Or maybe that was just my hopes finally overcoming the travails of the last two years. This was a new place for us.

In this town, surely we would be able to find a normal life, defending ourselves from prejudice and threats. The wind, blowing through the open windows was damp, and I noticed that it felt somewhat cooler. The children, now that they were filled with hamburgers, milk, and a variety of junk food, were finally settling down in the back seat, Jennifer with her book, Debby sucking on the corner of her blanket and holding the ear of the stuffed dog. Maybe, I hoped, they were more comfortable now.

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“It’s beginning to cool off,” said Harris. “This landscape is pretty dull, but just wait till we get to the bay and the bridge, the water and all the lights.”

My husband often talked excitedly about many things, a fact that often caused people to doubt him. The truth is, he really didn’t often exaggerate, and he was right more often than not, so it was not wise to dismiss him.

“It does sound beautiful,” I said. “When will we get there?”

“Oh not for a few hours,” he replied. So I tried to relax and be patient.

A few days earlier Harris had driven the U-Haul, filled with our possessions, from my parents’ house in Vicksburg to Corpus Christi, to find a place for us to live.

It wasn’t an easy task. For some reason the town was uncommonly crowded, and there was nearly nothing available in our price range. But Harris had found a house with two bedrooms in a decent neighborhood that we could afford for now. Things were looking up.

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I read a story to the children and Debby grew even quieter. Jennifer began asking questions about our new house. She wanted to know what it looked like and if there would be other children to play with and if they would be nice. I also hoped for these good things and tried to be optimistic. Soon after sunset both girls settled down for the night and within a short time they were both asleep.

They were exhausted.

Now that the girls would no longer interrupt I also began to ask Harris about our new house. Yes, it had central air conditioning, he said. There would be no more summers like those in Rochester where we would have to struggle with the heat in a hundred year old house with nothing but shade and hope to keep us cool. In fact, Harris said it was a brand new house, one that the builder wasn’t able to sell yet.

Finally, we headed across the coastal plains of west Texas where the land seemed ever lower and flatter. With no moon and few stars. There was little traffic; it made me wonder if everyone else knew some dreadful secret about this place that had been withheld from us. Perhaps this 56

was the road to nowhere or maybe it led into the sea without warning, I thought. What had we gotten ourselves into. It was too dark in the car for Harris to know the expression on my face, but he must have sensed my anxiety. From time to time he offered reassurance, “Just wait till you see the city.” I wasn’t convinced, but on the other hand, we knew people who lived there, and they certainly seemed ordinary. I only wanted one thing, to get there.

It must have been about 3 A. M. when we first noticed a bit of light in the distance, and the road began a wide curve inland. Finally, as we rounded the last obstructing clump of Mesquite trees, the Corpus Christi Bay bridge rose like the hump of a light-spangled dragon over the black horizon and presented a glowing welcome.

The Chamber of Commerce didn’t need to tell me why they called this town the jewel by the sea. Before we saw a single house, before we met anyone, before knowing anything about real life there, I knew we were home. We spent no time looking around but drove to our house. We pulled into the carport, put the mattress on the floor for the 57

children and settled them, but Harris and I didn’t bother to find anything else. We fell asleep on the hard floor, grateful to have arrived.

The following morning Harris and I made coffee and something to eat before he dressed and went to Del Mar College to meet Gene and the department head, leaving me to begin making order out of our belongings. I put the first load of clothes into the washer and returned to the kitchen to continue unpacking. I peeked around the end of the counter to check on Debby. She was crawling towards to hallway when I wondered where she thought she was going. I heard happy baby noises, oohs and squeaks, baby exclamations of delight and was immediately suspicious. I reached her just in time to sweep her up away from the river of raw sewage pouring down the hardwood floor from the hall straight to the living room. The plumbing had backed up through the toilet bringing filth and havoc to most of the house. I went into emergency mode, calling Harris and the landlord, while keeping an eye on the children.

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As I went about my duties I realized that this new phase of our lives was very much like the events we’d already experienced. There were surprises enough to keep us on our toes, but I soon learned, also, that the Jewel by the Sea was indeed a good place for us and our children to live.

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Rosebud Salve

One of my favorite childhood memories comes back to me when I get a small scrape or cut, which seems to happen more frequently these days, and I think how I miss Mama Duff and what a strong influence she had on my life. She was my mother’s mother and to me Mama Duff with her daughter Ruth

she was a tower of strength. She had to be to others as well. Grandpa

Duff died several years before I was born, even before my parents were married, and Mama Duff had to take on the raising of six children and running Duff Produce all by herself.

It was a wholesale business that bought chickens, eggs, geese, and other kinds of poultry from farmers and sold them to restaurants and other establishments that

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needed large amounts to serve their clientele. She had always been a business woman, working beside her husband, keeping the books for the store and running the cream station which tested the amount of butterfat in milk brought in by local farmers. It was understood that she had to have servants at home, cleaners, cooks, and child tenders. In fact, it was well- known that Bessie could barely boil water and could cook nothing.

Back row: Mama Duff holding Lee Potter, Reich, Clara Potter holding Elaine. Bottom Row Left to right, Ailene, Albert, and Lynn.

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To her children she was strict, and her disapproval was strong. But she rarely brought out the yardstick, and I think any blows were not so very strong.

She was equally strong when a child hurt themselves.

She would come running when she heard them cry out after a stumble over the brick steps, or an encounter with concrete, inquiring as she ran. Scrapes and cuts had to be tended, of course, but we had few medications to protect and heal. I was always afraid someone would try to apply Mercurochrome or iodine, those terrible orange medications that probably killed germs, but when applied to broken skin, it hurt worse than the original injury. But if you had already cried out, you had to endure whatever the grownup prescribed. So it was a wonderful thing when Mama Duff could produce some Rosebud Salve from the mantel in her bedroom. It was soft and soothing and smelled of roses. When I was old enough to read, I learned that it contained cotton seed oil, 62

and a couple of other generally soothing things in a petrolatum base, which I assume was some other kind of oil. All medications contained mysterious things so I didn’t question it.

At some point Rosebud Salve disappeared. I don’t know why, and I doubt there was any news coverage when it happened. Occasionally, in our house, someone would ask whatever happened to Rosebud Salve and no one knew. Some of us felt the loss. But that wasn’t the end.

About two years ago I saw a special ad in the local newspaper in Belchertown where I lived. No special qualities were claimed for the balm, but the article mentioned that Rosebud Salve was available in a store in Northampton. I made sure to buy several tins. I still have a few left. It still promises relief from chapped skin, detergent burns, rough cuticles, and 63

rough hands. For children it gave the promise of the kiss of recovery. Nowadays it can also deliver the sweet memory and loving touch of a strong grandmother.

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College: The first struggle

Throughout my years as a faculty wife I have been in a position to observe young people as they prepare themselves to leave home and set off for new circumstances. Parents usually try to guide them, for better or worse, and financial conditions often shape the territory to be explored. It’s a difficult time with many doubts and fears. Sometimes though, in spite of everyone’s plans, life itself leads us, pushes us, entices us towards what, in retrospect, seems to have been inevitable.

In my own life choices may have stemmed from, of all things, a movie, entitled, Music for Millions which I saw with my fifteen-year-old piano teacher when I was about eight years old. Even seeing the movie at all was an unlikely experience. But since I had practiced enough that

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week, my teacher, Margaret Ann Byars, treated me to the picture show as a reward. No one in my family would have noticed the show at all. It was filled with exquisite music performed by some of the best classical musicians alive at that time. It had a sweet story about musicians who were, one by one, drafted for the war, and the music soared through the room and brought a joy to my small being that I’d never even dreamed of. The memory of that experience stayed with me for years.

I didn’t realize that it had affected me so profoundly until years later when I heard other gorgeous music performances that brought me great pleasure. Finally, when someone asked me when and how I knew I wanted to become 66

musician, I had to search my memory, and I can’t be sure, but I’m pretty well convinced that that movie and the great music I heard that afternoon kindled a desire I didn’t know I had, and that lived in me for the rest of my life.

By the time I graduated from high school, my parents and I agreed that I should go to college, but we had not discussed what I should major in. I think both of them thought of college as a generalized extension of high school with no particular focus, but now that the date was approaching decisions had to be made, applications mailed, and auditions arranged; we had to sit down and make plans. And that’s when I realized that none of us had the same expectations about my future. Since my dad was a wholesale drug salesman, he had imagined that I would become a medical technician. He had worked in hospitals clinics and doctors’ offices where women had jobs in laboratories drawing blood and collecting other fluids, then measuring and storing the information in order to support doctors who could diagnose and cure human ills.

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Clearly, they were smart, capable, and well respected. It was good work for a woman. I don’t think he knew that I had maneuvered my credits so that I was able to graduate from high school without having taken a single science courses, and that I had never mastered the metric system.

There was no way I was prepared to major in science and become a laboratory technician.

Mother, on the other hand, had had enough schooling to be able to file and type, and keep financial records for a small business, but nothing close to the level of expertise needed to be an executive in the bank, as she and Grandpa Duff had planned. I think Mother realized that I wouldn't be happy doing that either.

When I told them that I wanted to major in music Daddy was astonished and even Mother, who knew how

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Cindy as a teenager

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much I loved music, was disappointed. Daddy’s first words were, “How are you going to make a living doing that? You’ll end up being an old maid school teacher. And anyway how do you know you’re good enough to be a musician? Why, when I was growing up there were people who could just put their hands on the keys and play. They didn’t even need a teacher, and you still can’t do that.”

My heart sank.

Since my piano teacher had died that spring, there was no one who really knew my abilities or potential. We didn’t have any other unbiased judge to help us determine what my educational path should be. Finally, though, Daddy hit upon a plan. Since I was scheduled to go to Hattiesburg that weekend anyway to accompany some of my friends in their auditions. I could go ahead and audition myself as well, and if the judges would give me a scholarship in piano, I would be allowed to major in music.

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Somehow, my memory of that weekend is almost totally blocked out. I did go to Hattiesburg, I played the pieces I had prepared, I accompanied the clarinetist and someone else, but I don’t even remember who the other student was or whether she was a singer or instrumentalist.

I don’t know whether I played well or stumbled around the keyboard, but somehow I managed to get through all the music that I was supposed to play.

And I don’t remember how I learned my fate. Maybe they told us the outcome immediately, or it might have been that the judges sent a letter to my parents. It’s all blacked out of my memory. It was only gradually that I realized that I had been given a scholarship, and that it would cover all the additional tuition required to major in music, and I had been assigned to have piano lessons with the chairman of the piano department.

The movie, Music for Millions, is not easily available these days, but it can be obtained. Even so it may 71

be too old fashioned to be believable by today’s young people. I can only hope their experiences provide the guidance they need to find a fulfilling life’s career.

It’s still a harrowing time in their lives.

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Not Ordinary Times

Sometimes life presents obstacles that we think are too difficult to overcome. Sometimes they would not be so onerous if the pressure just didn't continue so long. Other times the challenges would not be so difficult if they just didn't come so thick and fast with no time to recover before the next ones appeared. Sometimes the solutions can be gotten through without too much anguish, but at the end of my senior year had to face a problem that seemed to require maturity and wisdom I was not sure I had.

For some months Harris and I had been planning a marriage in which each of us would keep our own religion. We thought we could bring up our future children to experience both religions without prejudice or pressure from either of us, and then when they felt a need to choose one of them they could do so without pressure from us. By that time, at least, I thought that knowing both sets of beliefs, and the backgrounds of both groups, they would

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be able to choose which suited their experiences and what made sense for each of them. We knew it would be difficult for us, no matter what we decided to do, but since time was not an issue, there was less pressure than there might have been otherwise.

However, Harris finally admitted that he didn't think a mixed marriage would work, and so he asked me to convert to Judaism.

Suddenly one day I realized that I hadn't really faced this issue honestly, but rather had left it to simmer and stew in the back of my mind. I suppose I hoped the solution would just happen by itself if I didn't worry it to death. Besides, there were other things I had to attend to.

Final exams, of course, would be coming soon. In addition, as a piano major, I had to play half of a recital. I had also promised to accompany a singer in his recital as well, and a chamber music recital was expected, and by the end of the school year my parents hoped I would have found a job. There was no time to recover from any of

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these responsibilities before the next one was due to happen. So I asked Harris for some time to think about it.

But I had no right to make him wait too much longer for an answer.

Since Reconstructionist Judaism was the aspect of Judaism Harris and his family espoused, Reconstructionist ideas and philosophy, as understood by Harris, were presented to me first. The concepts of this more-liberal branch of the religion held no problems for me. It didn't take long to appreciate that it emphasizes life and how one lives it rather than focusing on one's beliefs, or the fear of death, and its aftermath. A person's private beliefs concerning deity and the supernatural could remain private, and within Reconstructionism didn't pose a threat to the very foundation of the religion itself. Still, I felt threatened. What did this mean for who I was or who I might become? It seemed that this was the crux of the matter. But having thought about it and worried about it for a long time I simply couldn't think about it any more. I had to let it go.

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Soon afterwards I was walking across campus on my way to the dorm one day, and I had the kind of epiphany described by Rollo May, and others. It has been been burned into my memory with a luminosity more vivid than any other event of my life. I crossed the street, and as my foot stepped onto the curb on the opposite side I realized that no one was asking me to be anything other than myself. I could remain as I was or become a Jew, but I would remain myself. This choice and many others pertained to the way I related to the world and the way I would be perceived by the world, but I would remain the same person, and my inner life was mine, secure and inviolate.

I told Harris I would study Judaism and if I didn't discover something which I couldn't accept, I would convert. I arranged study with Rabbi Mantinband and in the months ahead he and I explored customs, ideas, and philosophies from many different eras and countries, but there was no longer any fear or doubt that I could deal with any aspect of Judaism chose.

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About twenty years later I read a book by Rollo May, The Courage to Create. In it, he describes an event that happened to women who were worried about their children who were in trouble. Their experience of coming to peace with their decisions was the same as mine, but the outcome was almost certainly different.

The result, for me, was marriage that was very strong, with both of us respectful of each other's needs, with laughter and a sharing of beauty in music and literature. Occasionally there was anger and resolution as well, and sometimes a need to stop worrying and take a step upon the curb.

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Harris' and Cindy's Wedding Picture

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The Watch

My grandmother's jewelry box opened without a sound. It held the pin made of pearls and diamonds in a spray pattern that all of us wore years later when we got married. And here was her watch that Grandpa gave her when they got engaged. She wore it on a chain around her neck. The girl was from the old college grounds, now a hospital. Her mother was a nurse. I was told I shouldn't take anyone, ever, into Mama Duff's bedroom. And I don't know why I did it this time.

I just don't know. I also don't know why I opened the jewelry box and showed the girl the watch.

Other people, those who evaluated jewelry, would not have thought it valuable, unusual, or special in any way. But to my grandmother it was priceless because it was what Albert gave her when they became engaged. Not

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a ring, but this watch. All of my family knew how precious it was to her.

But I showed it to Mary.

I don't know when Mama Duff noticed it was missing. Maybe even the very next day. She always wore it when she got dressed up, when she went to church, and when the Association of Business and Professional Women met.

I told Mother how I had taken Mary into Mama Duff's room and, of course I asked Mary about it. And of course Mary denied everything. She said she didn't want any old watch anyway.

I didn't even like Mary. Sometimes I hung out with her because there was no one else, but she was weird.

After a while the family stopped talking about it except occasionally to say something like, "Mary couldn't have done anything with it anyway. Nobody would buy it from her. I mean, they'd ask her where she got it. Twelve year olds just don't walk around with gold watches to sell."

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Then we finally stopped even speculating about it.

But no one forgot.

Especially Mother.

Finally the hospital went out of business and the main building and the nurses' dormitories fell into disrepair. Eventually the corporate owners began to tear it all down. They even destroyed the ancient Magnolia tree near the street.

Mother made one final trip to the mound of decay where she had spent so much of her life. She had gone to elementary school in those buildings. Many of her friends lived there as boarding students. Then after she went away to Blue Mountain College for a year and a half, Grandpa Duff died and Mother returned to this school to finish her last year of college. Later it became the hospital where my brother was born and where Mary lived in the nurses’ dormitory with her mother, a nurse.

One day when most of the walls of the old buildings were broken and removed, Mother went back to the

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dormitories one last time and started to dig into the walls a little bit, past the wall board and between bits of plaster.

The watch was no longer whole. There were just parts, small wheels, tiny stems, a bit of glass. The gold case was not there.

Years later Mother found a watch that was very similar to Mama Duff's and bought it for her, and Mama Duff loved it, but it was never the same.

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Grandma Potter and the Chicks

Betty Jean didn't get any pink and green and blue baby chicks for Easter like I did. She got lots of regular eggs and candy eggs, but no baby chicks. I heard Mother say to Mom-Maw she wasn't sure little baby chicks ought to be made different colors. "Baby chicks should be yellow, just yellow and fluffy," she said.

Mom-Maw Said, 'Aw, it don't hurt 'em none. They just put a little food coloring on the pin feathers. Then when their permanent feathers come in, they'll look just like regular chickens.�

I could see that Mother still had her doubts.

Everybody said I couldn't pick them up and play with them, so who cared what color they were.

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I watched them all scrambling around the cardboard

Cindy as a "Chick" 84

box trying to get out, but it wasn't much fun if you couldn't even touch them.

When it began to get dark, they huddled together and made squeaky sleepy noises and went to sleep. I wondered if they were cold, but I didn't pick them up to try to keep them warm.

Next day I went over to look at them in their box and it was all wet and dirty where they had gone to the bathroom all over it. Well, what else were they supposed to do, they didn’t have a potty.

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I picked up the pink one and Mother was suddenly behind me. “Don’t hold it too tight. Here! Why don’t you put that one down for a while? You can’t love them like that. They aren’t people, you know.”

“You mean I can't play with them?"

"Not till they get bigger. Now come on and eat your oatmeal before it gets cold. You don't like cold oatmeal.”

Later that day I found one of the chicks all huddled down in the box. Mom-Maw came and took it away and I was told again that I couldn't hold the chicks. I was puzzled. I knew I didn't hold that chicken too hard. I was very, very gentle.

Over the next few days all the chickens died, one by one, except the blue one. Daddy said they were too young to take care of themselves. It was a good thing I have Mother and Daddy and Mom-Maw to take care of me, and

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I can hug them all I wanted and it don't make them die. At least I don't think it would.

The next morning the blue chick was dead too. So now I didn't have any chicks. I guess my Easter gift didn't last very long. It just died.

Mom-Maw told me to take the blue chick outside and bury it. She gave me an old spoon and I went out to the edge of the vegetable garden and dug a little hole and placed the blue chick in it. I made a little raised place like a pillow and left its head sticking out so it could breathe.

Even colored chickens needed a way to breathe.

It was later on in the summer that my great grandmother, Grandma Potter, died. She was very old and I guess she was sick for a long time. I didn't see her very much. She was thin and wobbly so I had to hug her gently.

I liked it when we went to her house. It was on the other side of Happy Holler, and probably looked older than it really was because it was one of those houses that never had been painted, so they always looked old. The best thing about going there was that her house always smelled

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like peanut butter and pound cake. The moment we came inside, that delicious odor got into me and I'd say, "I'm hungry." Mother said I embarrassed her, and that Grandma Potter must have thought I never fed her. But how could you not be hungry when the whole house smelled so good!

Grandma Potter had a box full of pictures for me to look at when I visited. They were okay I guess, but they were only old greeting cards, pictures from seed catalogs, and sometimes the labels from cans of food. But back in the olden times, people used to say that children should be seen but not heard, so I think these were supposed to keep me quiet.

Later on, in the summer, I was told that Grandma Potter had died. Everybody was very sad, and that made me sad too. Then Mother told me that on Sunday we would go to Grandma Potter's funeral. So we got dressed up and went to the church at Cherry Creek. Other people were all dressed up in their best clothes too, just sitting there listening to the organ. Mother found a chair at the end of a row and let me sit on her lap. She kept muttering

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to herself, saying things like, “I don't know. Maybe we should sit closer . . . or in the back . . . � Finally the preacher got up and welcomed the people and told everybody that they would keep the casket open a few more minutes so that people who wanted to could come forward and say goodbye to Grandma Potter while the choir sang another hymn. So the organ started to play again and the choir began to sing, and people lined up and walked up to the front of the church, real quiet and looking sad.

Some of them were crying and sniffing. Mother and I waited till almost everybody had come to the front of the church where she said Grandma Potter was in the big box she called a casket.

Finally the choir had just about finished singing and seemed like no one else was coming, and we got up and walked down front. Mother picked me up so I could see inside the box where Grandma Potter was lying on a beautiful blue bed with ruffles all around the sides and she

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had on a real pretty white gown and her head was on a soft blue pillow. It looked like she was taking a nap, just like my blue baby chick. I wanted to give her a hug, but I didn't get to.

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Expectations

Bessie’s father, Will, was sometimes a school teacher, but he certainly didn’t want any of his children to enter this career. “Hardest work I ever did,” he claimed.

His daughter, Bessie, apparently didn’t want to do that either. She wrote poorly, eschewing capital letters, and didn’t bother with periods at the ends of her sentences.

You just had to figure it out for yourself when you had reached the end of one thought and the beginning of another. Sometimes the sentences just trailed off because she was interrupted. Seems like she would have been a poor role model if she were a teacher.

In those days, the late nineteenth century, a place like Pontotoc, Mississippi, decided a great many things, apparently, because its citizens just knew how things ought to be. People who worked in the grocery store and those who measured fabric at the mercantile store were 91

hired or not because the owner knew their families, knew which ones were known for their honesty and respectability. In a town of two thousand five hundred people everyone knew each other and knew each other’s business even better.

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Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Lavender?

Cindy Wardlaw (later Crohn). (The Southerner [yearbook], Mississippi Southern College, Hattiesburg, MS, 1957.)

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The story below was published by OutHistory.org, a website devoted to recording stories about the lives and relationships of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual people in the belief that history can help others work towards a better future. You can find the story online at: http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/crohn/story

Introduction: The events narrated began at Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi), in Hattiesburg, in the late 1950s, a time now known as The Lavender Scare. Although I was a student in the college at that time, I was not present at any of the episodes described. Since I graduated and moved away to teach in another town, I didn't hear about these events right away. Years later my friend, Anne Nunnally, who was directly involved, told me the story, and said I can publish it as a tribute to her dear friend, Brock A. Loper, now deceased, who was expelled. While I changed some names, and imagined scenes and conversations, this

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historical fiction chronicles real episodes and actual people.

For the reader's information, I was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, halfway between Oxford and Tupelo, in 1935, and brought up in the Southern Baptist Church. During World War II we moved fairly often throughout the state.

In the early '50s we were living in Vicksburg and I graduated from high school there in 1953. After that I went to Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg, majoring in music, more specifically, piano.

In 1955, a young Jewish man was hired on the faculty to teach piano and coach and conduct opera.

Within a short time he asked me to turn pages for one of the other teachers in a recital they were to give. Soon, after rehearsals began, he asked me out for coffee. The rest of 95

our relationship could have been predicted. But we had to sneak around, because he could have been fired for dating a student. We were married in 1958, a year after I graduated.

By that time I was pretty well acquainted with the insanity of the Music Department, and the general underhanded methods of the college administration. We had to watch ourselves at all times and make sure no one overheard our opinions about politics or anything having to do with segregation. My husband began to work on another degree, a Doctor of Musical Arts, at Eastman School of Music, to help us get out of Mississippi. A couple of years later we did.

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Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Lavender?

Cindy Crohn Anne was scared before she ever entered the office of Dr. James Switzer.

Nobody liked him; he never did anything good for anyone; you only heard from him when someone broke a rule and was in trouble. How ironic that his Anne Nunnally, Southerner (yearbook), Mississippi State College, 1959

title was Dean of Student Welfare.

“Hello, Miss Nunnally. Have a seat. I’ll be right with you,” he said while closing the top of his pen and stacking some papers. His large desk crowded the office and he looked very small behind it.

“Miss Nunnally, I called you in because the administration has been made aware of a disturbing 97

situation on campus. You see, there are a number of homosexuals in the college, and their behavior is making them conspicuous. Of course, it’s nothing new, but it seems to be getting worse, and we in the administration are responsible for guarding the reputation of the college.”

His pronunciation of the word, homosexual, was strange.

It sounded as though he was going to say “homogenize” or “hominy” but changed his mind halfway through. In any case, even now, in the late-1950s, the word was not part of ordinary conversation. People used to call them “queers,” but somehow it became known that the word, “homosexual,” was preferred. Anyway, people didn't go around talking about sex. It just wasn't considered polite conversation.

He continued, “And they are not trustworthy.

Yesterday I had a visit from the parents of a young woman who was a mathematics major last year. She had married a fellow student. After the wedding she found his little black book with names of some of his homosexual lovers and was shocked and horrified. Naturally, her parents are very upset. They feel the school has not upheld its duty in loco 98

parentis, and that the college should be held responsible for this situation. Of course, we are not responsible, because they got married after they graduated.� His face reflected a sense of satisfaction.

Dean Switzer.

(The Southerner [yearbook], Mississippi Southern College, Hattiesburg, MS, 1957.)

Anne’s breath was becoming short. He had spoken so abruptly she felt attacked and it was hard to think, but at least she knew the situation had nothing to do with her.

She was dizzy, and wanted to leave. It took all her concentration to control herself and think calmly.

Everyone in the music department knew that Amy and her 99

boy friend had gotten married. It was also common knowledge that he had sex with men, and most people, if they thought about it at all, assumed Amy knew as well.

Marriage of convenience between straight women and homosexual men was not unheard of in the music world.

Some of these were common knowledge, in fact rather famous. But on further reflection, Anne realized that a young sheltered college woman from Mississippi might not suspect a thing.

Dean Switzer continued, “And of course, we also began to worry about you. We know that you and Brock Loper are friends and spend a lot of time together.”

Of course he wasn’t worried about her or Brock; he had already admitted the school officials only wanted to protect themselves.

“Yes, we are very good friends,” she replied cautiously. “I admire his voice and his talent a lot. Since I still live at home here in Hattiesburg, Brock spends a lot of time at our house, and we often sing duets and accompany

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each other. His family is very musical and highly cultured.

He has taught me a lot about art and poetry. He even eats supper at our house several times a week, and Mother considers him like the son she didn’t have.” She smiled.

“He graduates on Sunday and I’ll miss him when he goes off to graduate school. I still have one more year before graduation.”

“Miss Nunnally, you must be careful. If he wants to marry, you must not allow yourself to be seduced.”

Of course we don’t plan to marry, you idiot, she thought. She didn’t even try to answer him.

“Another thing we’ve learned is that there is a group of medical doctors from town who send cars onto campus throughout the weekends to pick up young boys for homosexual parties at their houses. Do you know about that?”

“No, I don’t.”

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Actually she had heard of it, but so far as she knew, it was only another rumor.

“Dean Switzer, I don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.”

“Yes,” he replied, drawing the word out. “Well, since you know Brock and seem to know a number of his friends, we would like to ask for your assistance. You see, if you can give us names of anyone else you know or suspect to be homosexual, it would be a great help.”

His words felt like a slap. She was cold in spite of the Mississippi heat and wanted to bolt out the door, but her feet didn’t move.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with me,” she repeated.

“That’s why we are asking you to tell us who the others might be.” His voice was taking on a slimy quality. He mentioned two names and asked if they were homosexual.

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There really was no time to think about anything, to try to understand why he wanted the information. What was he planning to do? What if she didn’t answer his question? Was he planning to embarrass her? Was it a crime to be a friend of a homosexual? Indignation rose in her throat like nausea. Well, she wasn’t going to rat out anyone.

Barely achieving control, she replied sweetly, “Dean Switzer, I don’t know." He mentioned two more names and she replied again, "I don't know. He was about to name someone else, but she interrupted. “I don't have any such information, and I can’t speculate. I couldn’t give you names unless I saw them in the act. It would be wrong to name someone and bring trouble upon him.” She was rattled, but realized that resisting him brought a little relief.

She gazed all around the room trying to avoid eye contact, finally slumping in her chair, and looking down at the floor. That’s when she saw it there in the kneehole of

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the desk. It was one of those new-fangled tape recorders, both its reels turning silently, recording their conversation.

Brock (left), Anne, and friend.

(Anne Nunnally Collection.)

“Dean Switzer,” she said, “do you know your tape machine is running?”

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“Uh, no. I must have forgotten to turn it off." He was now the one who was embarrassed and flustered: she had no doubt the recording was deliberate.

He came around to the front of the desk and, reaching down, turned it off then told her she could leave.

Anne went home and tried to call Brock in his dorm, but was unable to contact him.

On Friday the Dean of Student Welfare sent out 200 letters to faculty and students who were believed to be homosexual informing them they were expelled and/or fired for moral turpitude. They were no longer welcome on campus and had twenty-four hours to leave the college.

Those expecting to graduate would not receive degrees and should not appear at the graduation ceremony on Sunday.

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Brock A. Loper. (The Southerner [yearbook], Mississippi Southern College, Hattiesburg, MS, 1957.)

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***** Brock spent Friday and Saturday moving out of the dorm. He took his possessions home to Jackson, returning late Saturday night in order to attend graduation ceremonies on Sunday. Many other students had also moved home including most of his friends. The dorm was nearly empty.

Sunday morning he shaved and dressed in suit and graduation gown and repacked his change of clothing.

Looking at himself in the mirror one last time he tried to smooth down his shock of curly blonde hair, without success. Some things simply refuse to be controlled.

He had done it! He’d made it through all four years of undergraduate college; he’d kept his mouth shut when he knew things the art history teacher didn’t; he’d tried earnestly to sing in such a way as to blend with the College Chorus, and most of the time his strong baritone voice didn’t stick out, but remained part of the integrated sound. When it was important to do so, he had even

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managed to remain below the radar of Mr. Marsh, the Music Department Chairmen. If anyone suspected his sexual orientation, it hadn’t been mentioned. And he had been accepted into graduate school at that amazing, prestigious music department at the University of Indiana!

Just thinking about it made him feel he was floating.

Indiana produced three or four operas each year as well as workshops, thereby giving students opportunities to learn entire roles and become skilled as actors as well as singers.

The roles became a part of their repertory, a foundation to draw upon in the future. With a Master’s degree from Indiana he’d be ready to try his wings in New York, where vocal opportunities proliferated.

On the way to the big auditorium where graduation was to take place, he stopped at the campus post office to get his mail one last time. Along with a couple of notices he pulled out a letter from Dr. James Switzer, Dean of Student Welfare, and went outside to read it. It took a few moments for its significance to penetrate.

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Someone walked past him going into the post office and said, “Hey Brock, you better hurry. It’s nearly time to march.” To which Brock answered, “Yeah.”

How could they expel me, he wondered. I have high grades in all my classes. I earned those credits! My dad paid for them! They can’t take those away! Can they?

Well, who cares anyhow. I’m leaving here now. But what about Indiana? Will I still be admitted there? Is this the end of the career I’ve worked so hard for? Will everyone hate me? Will my friends be afraid to associate with me?

And now that I’m accused of being homosexual, will I be admitted to any school at all? Am I going to be a total outcast? I haven’t broken any laws, he thought. His brain felt as though it had glue in it. It was so hard to think.

He returned to his dorm to wait for his family, and they left campus before the graduation ceremony was over. At least they knew all about him; they had homosexual relatives, and this cushioned the blow when his parents learned about him. The drive home was mostly silent.

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A few days later Brock and Anne finally found each other by phone.

Anne said, “I’m so sorry I couldn’t reach you before you got Switzer’s letter. I knew you would be shocked and hurt, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“It really was a huge shock.” he replied. “But I know you couldn’t get in touch. I can’t believe that jerk questioned you about things that were none of his business, and, in fact, were none of your business either.

How many other people were expelled? Do you know?”

“I don’t know. Natalie said there could have been as many as 200. The really odd thing is that they didn’t purge everyone. For example, the two homosexual teachers in the piano department have not been dismissed, and there are others. I wonder if it’s because they have been here so long and both have tenure.”

“That’s anybody’s guess.”

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“Oh, Brock, I’m going to miss you so much. I wish we could have run away to New York years ago.”

“So do I, but you were right; it couldn’t have worked. We’ll have to keep in touch by phone and rob a bank to pay for all that long distance.”

She laughed. “It will be hard, but we’ll manage. In the meantime, take care."

Brock’s summer at home in Jackson had been planned for months. He had a job lined up as assistant decorator for the windows of McRae’s, Jackson’s major department store, and within a few days he began work.

All his local friends and former teachers assumed he had actually graduated from Mississippi Southern College.

Some knew about his plans to attend Indiana University, but Brock began to talk about how much he needed to earn more money; the fellowship wouldn’t cover everything.

Friends and neighbors commiserated; education was expensive.

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Of course his admission to University of Indiana was rescinded. No one expelled from one college would likely be admitted to another, especially when the cause was moral turpitude. He learned that Mississippi had a law making homosexual behavior a crime; who knew? He really was a criminal and could be prosecuted as such. He was stuck in Jackson.

Realizing that even though he couldn’t leave right now, he had to be prepared if an opportunity came along, he contacted his former vocal coach and told her what had happened.

She was sophisticated, a skilled professional teacher and mentor who had worked with people of varied backgrounds and races when she lived in other cities. He respected the fact that she studied with pianists, Rudolf Ganz and Percy Grainger in Chicago each summer, continuing her musical growth even now in her later years.

He also knew she had coached a number of singers in operatic roles for performance in major venues, in small cities as well as large ones. These days, in this town, she

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taught mostly piano students, but also continued to coach a few singers. She was aware of the prejudices of many people, and though she sympathized with Brock, there was nothing she could do about his social reputation.

She listened and consoled as so many music teachers have always done for their students. They arranged a schedule of vocal coaching sessions, and she taught him with the same professional rigor she used with all her students. They didn’t talk further about his personal problems, but their work and her respect probably saved his life.

His church was a consolation as well. His grandmother had been organist at St. Peter’s for a long time, and the church had a good choir director who demanded the singers give their best. Brock knew this was a good venue for performing high quality religious music, but that he’d have to find operatic outlets elsewhere.

The Mississippi Opera in Jackson was good, he thought, but they usually hired singers from New York or

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Chicago for leading roles, so there wasn’t much chance of getting a lead. He knew, also, that the company was not quite on a level with the New Orleans or Houston operas, and they only produced one opera each year, no more than Mississippi Southern College. “I suppose there is no way to find backing for more productions in a small southern city such as Jackson,” he thought, “I’ll have to make do with what’s available.”

Within a few years Brock was well-established in the Jackson Opera Company and learned and performed many of the secondary baritone roles of the standard repertory. ***** After Anne graduated from Mississippi Southern College, it was she who moved to New York, studied with a renowned voice teacher, and established a singing career. She and Brock managed to stay in touch, speaking to each other from time to time in spite of the expense of long distance calls. One day in 1967 he called to tell her that Southern had decided to allow him to graduate.

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“I was stunned when they sent me a letter and a diploma,” he said. “There was no explanation, no apology, just a statement that I had now graduated. I don’t know what brought that on.” “"I can't imagine," she replied. "however, they finally integrated the school two years ago.

Maybe they were afraid they'd be sued if they disallow homosexuals while accepting Negroes.”

President McCain.

(The Southerner [yearbook], Mississippi Southern College, Hattiesburg, MS, 1957.)

“You’re probably right,” he said. “I guess some things have improved, but life is still hard for anyone who 115

is too different from the ordinary. I wonder if that will ever change. Probably not in our lifetime,” he said.

“Not likely. I just recently found out there are laws against homosexual behavior in almost every state. Did you know that? Most of them have been on the books for generations, so don’t expect them to disappear any time soon. Sometimes enforcement has been sketchy, but lately the bigots have used those very laws to harass thousands of people who weren’t a danger to anyone.”

“Yeah. Well, Congress said they were trying to root out anyone who could be blackmailed into giving up security information,” said Brock.

Anne laughed. “I suppose that could be — in the case of jobs having to do with government, but do you know of any situation where a singer would have security information to give spies? It’s just a stupid excuse. They had their Red Scare and then their Lavender Scare, when all along the thing that really frightened them was the bomb.”

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Brock chuckled as well. “I was so shocked when it happened to me partly because I didn’t know that it was happening elsewhere. Did you know that in Florida they went so far as to create a congressional committee to root out homosexuals? That bunch was vicious. They took people out of class and questioned them for hours. And I didn’t know, either, that University of Indiana was spying on people and trying to trap them. Finally someone sued them —and won!”

There was a moment of silence, each realizing they were no longer naïve.

Anne said, “It’s been great talking.”

“Give my love to your mom. Let’s get together next time you’re in Mississippi.”

It was the fall of 1981 when they finally saw each other again in a suburb of Jackson. Anne came up from Hattiesburg to meet Brock, and as she drove down Main Street in the fall heat, she wondered how Brock had survived in this culture-deprived area of the world. She 117

had to remind herself that he seemed to have been happy here. Jackson did, after all, have pockets of art and music and she knew he had taken advantage of these things throughout the years. Of course, it wasn’t New York, but certainly better than Hattiesburg. They met at a small restaurant and indulged in a very long hug.

Middle age had changed them both, taking away the blush of youth, but instilling composure and grace in its place. Both of them wore maturity well.

It took a while to catch up on the events of their lives. Despite adverse conditions he had sung in a lot of operas and concerts throughout the south. But his venues were always local and temporary. Although she had continued to sing, she had been out of the country a good deal of the time. Neither of their lives had gone as planned, but both had remained musicians, giving and receiving the pleasures of that profession.

Eventually they began to talk about the hatefulness they encountered in their beginnings, now so long ago.

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They acknowledged that some things had improved, but prejudice still consumed many hearts and minds.

“This visit to Hattiesburg has been unsettling,” she said. “After living in India during the last fifteen years, it seems unchanged here. Yesterday I went over to campus to do a library search, and afterwards went into Wimpys to get some iced tea. Even that hangout is unchanged. It’s exactly the same as it was when we were in school. I was looking around for a place to sit when I spotted Dr. Switzer and asked if I could join him.

“He welcomed me and I sat at his table. He’s retired and has aged a lot. He said he was on campus to have lunch with his daughter who is a graduate student now.

We spent a few minutes catching up with news about current activities and stuff at the school. Then I just had to ask him if he remembered calling me into his office to ask me about homosexual activity on campus. Clearly it put him on edge and he squirmed around a bit. I have to admit it felt good that he was the one in the hot seat now.

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“He said, ‘Of course, I remember. Those were difficult times for the school.’ Can you believe that? For the school!

“He went on to say that expelling 200 people wasn’t his idea, that he was only doing what others in the administration forced him to do! I’m sure my mouth was hanging open. The first thing I thought was ‘just like the Nazis.’ It’s the same thing they said when they got caught!”

Brock stirred his tea and remained quiet for a moment.

“They may have done me a favor,” he said. “What if I had been at University of Indiana when they were spying on people.”

Anne replied, “You’re right. I just wish I could believe we’ve moved past all that now and that people have learned to tolerate each other, but I doubt it really.”

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Anne and Brock said a reluctant goodbye. Since they lived so far apart, both were acutely aware it would be a long time before they could see each other again, if ever; so it was hard to let go.

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James Demetry

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Springside Avenue: A Raisin in a Bowlful of Social Pudding

At the time of my birth, my family (Mom, Dad, and sister Theo) were living in a two-family house on Springside Avenue, Pittsfield, MA. The house was on a dead-end of a street, which meant that there was no through traffic; that, in turn, meant that this portion of the street was a play area of sorts.

Most houses in the area were two-family dwellings.

One family was that of the owner, the other a non-family tenant or a next generation of the owner’s family. My recollection is that the latter arrangement prevailed. It was a blue collar, working class neighborhood—neat, clean, not blighted by crime, a safe place for people and their kids. The only business in the neighborhood was a “mom and pop” bread and milk store, about a quarter mile from our house. In my pre-teen years, I was sent there often to

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buy a loaf or two of Dreikorn’s sliced bread. No artisan breads at Kalil’s, so called because the Kalil family owned and ran the store, and lived in a second-floor flat above the store. Mr. Kalil was somewhat intimidating, round of waist and heavy, as bald as a honeydew, a speaker of fractured English, and quite gruff in manner. Access to an impressive collection of penny candies balanced the risk of suffering his gruffness.

One more demographic is central to this story: the ethnic and religious makeup of the neighborhood. Most of its residents were Irish or French Roman Catholics. A few Protestants were scattered here and there. My family was the only “exotic” in the mix, as most of our Greek relatives lived closer to downtown. We were of the Greek Orthodox faith tradition, with St. George’s Greek Orthodox church as our spiritual home. The Catholics were served by St. Mary’s parish, which provided parochial school instruction through Grade 6. St. Mary’s was located just a block and a half further on from Kalil’s store.

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Young Jim (front left) with parents and sisters.

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Such was the “static” or fixed framework for my years through age 14. Now several anecdotes from those years (1936-1950) are offered to support the notion that I experienced, from my contemporaries and sometimes their elders, treatment that set me apart as the “other”, the solitary raisin in our bowl of otherwise homogeneous social pudding. (I’m not yet fully recovered from my focus on foods the two of three earlier writings!)

Given the benign nature of the neighborhood, parents felt comfortable about letting the kiddos be outside without accompaniment, but with frequent observation by an indoors parent. Warnings and rules were strictly enforced: beware of strangers, don’t stray from our houselot, don’t engage in destructive behavior or disruptive behavior, etc. This started at an age between 4 and 5 years.

My mother related to me the following little vignette: It was a warm summer day, and I was outside alone. Through an open, screened window my Mother heard Mrs. Callaghan, from our abutting lot, say to her son

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Georgie, “He’s not Catholic, Georgie, but you can play with him.” Thus began the friendships of my pre-teen years, as well as the anecdotal evidence that I was, in ways important to these peers and their families, “different” enough to be thought of or regarded as the “other”. My toddler’s mutterings in Greek didn’t help, either. As I was about to start Grade 1 at school (there was no Kindergarten yet in the school district at that time), I learned to my confusion and regret that my buddies in the neighborhood would be attending St. Mary’s parochial school, leaving me ( and the Mackey twins, Mary Louise and Rita) to attend the public elementary Rice School.

The twins eventually transferred to St. Mary’s. I became the Lone Ranger, walking to school alone as my Sister wouldn’t even THINK of walking with me. A solitary walk is not a dreadful thing, but a walk with friends is a much nicer social arrangement.

I survived the first grade with nothing terrible happening to me beyond some sore knuckles from Miss McCusker’s rapping on them with a ruler when I misbehaved. I learned from the St. Mary’s kids that their 128

teacher/nun, “The Barge”, was equally skilled in application of ruler to knuckle, but she had not used another of Miss McCusker’s delightful tools for encouraging good behavior: gripping (strongly!) the offender’s chin (mine) between her thumb and index finger, and giving my assembled parts a good shake.

Really gets one’s attention! Nowadays it would probably get her disciplined or fired, but back then it was S.O.P. As I advanced to the second of my 22 years of formal education (fear not, I don’t plan to write up each year) I experienced Miss McDonald, the extraordinary second grade teacher who cleaned every surface and object in her classroom with an ammonia-soaked cloth before she would touch it. Also at this time, I learned that I was about to embark on a parallel educational track— Greek School!

Greek School was the church’s way of holding onto as much as possible of the language, history, and culture of the Hellenic tradition. At the time, most of the students, me included, were not happy that for three days of each

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week we had to march from our respective public schools to church. We were thus deprived of the playtime between regular school and suppertime. But, from the point of view of my middle age and senior years, this was a valuable experience to have had. The Greek language is a rich base upon which to build an English vocabulary.

The teacher, who was our parish priest, lost no opportunity to point this out to us. It was one of his several strategies for building in us a structure of pride, high regard and respect for the cultural riches of Greece in the present and especially so for centuries past. My spouses (serial!) and I have been dedicated travelers, and on many trips to Greece I’ve been able to communicate well with my almost primitive but nonetheless effective Greek.

There is a good reason for carrying on at this length about Greek School. Please bear with me. The Greek Orthodox clergy in North America at this time (the 1940s) were almost exclusively immigrants from Greece and the products of its seminaries. Their grasp of spoken English was minimal and skills for teaching “GASL” (Greek as a Second Language) were not part of the seminary 130

curriculum. (Nowadays, the Greek Orthodox Church has many American-born priests, products of the church’s seminary in Brookline, MA.) Our priest/teacher’s approach was to have us read with him, aloud, the many stories of Greek Mythology written for contemporary readers. He always emphasized how proud and privileged we should feel about the ancient gods, the heroes of Troy and Mycenae, the grandeur of Periclean Athens, and the art and architecture of the age. At some point in his glorification of the Greek culture and history, the priest took a giant leap: in a class discussion about saints and sainthood, he told us that St. Patrick, yes, that St. Patrick, was a Greek. I rushed home, anxious for the opportunity in the next day or two to share with my mostly Irish neighbor buddies the wonderful news about St. Patrick being a Greek. That was big mistake! They didn’t rough me up too badly. For the next chapter of his “Famous Historical Figures Who were Greek” saga, the priest breathlessly revealed to us that Christopher Columbus was, you guessed it, a Greek too. Fortunately, there were no Italians in the neighborhood. My buddies now

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chuckled with me at the apparent fantasies that the misguided priest wove for us.

In the years that followed, through 1950 when my parents moved us to a single-family dwelling, I grew into an easier relationship with my neighborhood buddies, one where ethnicity and religious differences mattered less to us. After Saturday afternoon movies at the local stickyfloor cinema, we all trooped over to St. Mary’s, where the Catholics saw to their weekly confession and I sat in a pew, enjoying the quiet and solitude of the sanctuary.

Athletic prowess, however, was another challenge for me.

I was, and remained, a clumsy klutz and was routinely picked last as we formed pick-up teams for our frequent softball and baseball games. As I moved on to the higher grade levels in school, I found that friends could be made with those who didn’t necessarily live in the neighborhood and who were more varied in their ethnic and religious roots than were those in my neighborhood. I studies with Italians, Jews, Yankees, and immigrants, Catholics and Protestants. “Otherness” rapidly dissolves in that kind of mix.

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I look back on those years with no bitterness about my treatment as an “other” or outsider. I learned a lot about diversity! At the same time, I wouldn’t give up a single bit of my Greek heritage, save for the religious aspects, which for me have evolved from Greek Orthodoxy to rational humanism. I’m Greek in my DNA, in my fractured linguistic skills, in my regard for Greek history, Mediterranean cuisines, music, drink , and dance.

Yasou! (To your health!)

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Uncle George

My parents were married in the early 1930s, a marriage “by arrangement”; a practice which to some extent persists to this day in many societies and cultures.

My Dad, born in 1903 in Asia Minor (western Turkey) and his two brothers and mother fled Turkey in the late 20s, escaping harsh treatment at the hand of the Turks.

My Mom was born in Pittsfield in 1913, the penultimate child in a brood of seven, half of whom were born in Greece prior to the family’s immigration to America.

Details of my Dad’s younger years in Turkey are sparse; he wasn’t given to sharing much about what we surmise was a difficult childhood in a peasant-level family. One of my greater regrets is my failure to have sat him down in his elder years, in front of a recorder, and gently to coax from him a record of his childhood. We do

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know that his education stopped at the 4th grade. He was functionally literate in Greek, and managed fairly well in English, though with some hilarious pronunciations, (“Be patient” came out as “Be passionate”). In his early American years he stubbornly resisted assimilation, holding to a set of attitudes and values grounded in his language, cultural, and religious differences.

The experiences of my mother’s early years in Pittsfield were not unlike those of many immigrant families. Some of her siblings were born abroad, the rest in Pittsfield. This in-house diversity became a rich field for cultural conflict, with Mom responsive to the pressures for assimilation, and half of her brothers and sisters more attuned to the expectations of the Old Country culture. She was traumatized by her forced withdrawal from high school in the 11th grade; the family needed more income in those difficult days and she was put to work in the local coat factory. The disappointment stuck with her for all her life.

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A few years into his residency in the States, Dad wound up by chance in Albany NY, working in the State House restaurant, operated by one of my Mom’s cousins, At the same time back in Pittsfield, my grandparents were fixin’ to get my mother married off – so the word went out. The cousin in Albany responded with news about Steve Demetry, this handsome (and he was!) young kitchen hand who met two or three of the most important criteria; a real Greek, (not the domestic kind), employed/employable, and no police record. The deal was struck.

Their engagement was marked by just a few casual dates, always accompanied by one of Mom’s older sisters doing chaperone duty. I’ve formed a durable mental image of one of those dates, as related to me by Mom. (She was fond of telling this story.) She and her betrothed were rowboating on Pontusuc Lake, my Dad rowing and (huge!)

Aunt Margaret doing chaperone duty, weighing down the bow of the boat lest it levitate.

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This kind of “courtship”, in which the betrothed couple start out as perfect strangers, guarded and restrained by their guards, is hardly the way to get to know one another. Competent contemporary Internet matchmaking agencies would never have suggested this match. It was fraught with challenges. Though they shared the same ethnicity, they were worlds apart in their respective cultural and social backgrounds. It was old country vs. new, a chasm that was to heavily influence the family life of the Demetrys.

Mom’s family, in their vetting process, didn’t learn about Dad’s propensity for dominating behavior and its expression through acts ranging from verbal bullying to the edge of physical abuse and a bit beyond. Mom was caught totally by surprise; naïve, young, inexperienced with the rougher sides of life and especially of men. It did not take too long for word of my father’s macho behavior to reach her family. They were appalled.

The older of two men in Mom’s family was my Uncle George, the protector and Secretary of Defense for

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the family. Acting in that capacity, he confronted my father about the bullying and abusive behavior, saying in effect, “Cut that out, or I’ll re-arrange the landscape of your facial features.” My father took Uncle George’s words to heart, and though never turning into a marshmallow, he mended his ways to the extent that he was no longer a threat to Mom’s physical wellbeing. He remained a strong figure, clearly an “in-charge” guy, but refrained from outright abuse for the rest of his days. I loved my father – he had some endearing qualities, but I also feared him into my early teen years. Stories of some of the events that transpired, events that had indelible effects on wife and kids will perhaps be told in future chapters.

Uncle George made a difference, not in a sweeping macroscopic way, but in the microcosm of a single family unit. I hold him as a model advocate for the health and welfare of his extended family in the face of threatening and adverse forces and events. I hesitate to think of what might have become of our family had Uncle George not intervened. He was gentle man, thoughtful and caring, a 138

favored uncle. To this day, the smell of cigar smoke evokes images and memories of this fine man.

It hasn’t been easy to put these words to paper. I must note that all the persons mentioned in this piece are deceased, except for the author, of course.

This history was related to me by my mother, shortly before my father’s death. They had lived many years of enjoyable retirement in San Jose, CA. Dad took great pleasure from the absence of New England winters, and from the climate and soil of the Santa Clara Valley, a location that allowed him the pleasure of growing modest patches of his favorite flowers, fruits, and veggies, things he had not seen in the ground since leaving the Mediterranean climate of the Old Country.

By his senior years, Dad had mellowed considerably.

He and Mom were wonderful grandparents, treating my three daughters like princesses without spoiling them.

Uncle George had made a difference.

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Aunts and Elephants

Aren’t elephants amazing! I had occasion recently to watch some National Geographic videos of elephants in the wild, displaying behaviors that can only be described as highly intelligent and socially sophisticated. One video focused on the extended family support structure evident in the protective, nurturing and helpful activities of members of the herd, directed to newborns and toddler elephants. The herd consists of related females; the new mother, her older sisters, (aunts of the baby) and various and sundry cousins. The males join the herd only in the mating season.

Watching this cohesiveness and dedication to family welfare brought to mind the very similar structures and functions of my growing-up extended family. (My wife forcefully warned me not to suggest any physiological similarities between the elephants and my aunts, even though the latter were “ample�.) That extended family

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included my Mom’s four sisters and their spouses, her two brothers and their spouses, many cousins, and of course my Mom, Dad, my sister, and me. Of the four sisters, two lived out of town. The in-town families enjoyed, for the most part, (there were a few friction points) very cordial relationships, cemented not only by family, but as well by their church community.

My strongest memories of the of the larger family come from shared meals, especially at the home of Aunt Lopa (my Mom’s sister) and Uncle Nick. Aunt Lopa was a few years older than Mom; they shared a closeness as kids that endured into all of adulthood. She was a stay-athome mother. Uncle Nick was a mobile produce vendor who, except for the winter, drove his produce-laden truck into the wilds of southern Berkshire County. There he called at the homes of wealthy New Yorkers occupying their “summer cottages” in Lenox, Lee, Stockbridge, Great Barrington, and other towns boasting high per capita incomes and tastes for high-quality produce delivered fresh to the “downstairs” entrance. Aunt Lopa and her

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family lived in a big old home on a hill overlooking the Boston and Albany rail yards in Pittsfield.

Back to those shared meals. The foundational elements of our larger family life, besides shared DNA, were food and energetic conversation. The chatter was rich with gossipy stuff inspired by church and family, and serious talk about FDR, the war, rationing, etc. (Aunt Lopa was pretty rigid about the use of sugar; if one preferred sugar in his/her coffee, it was SHE who measured out one very level teaspoon into the heavy mug.

No self-service for sugar.) She and Uncle Nick were wonderful cooks in the tradition of classical Greek cuisine.

The chicken in their oven sent waves of yummy aromas throughout the house.

Their roasted potatoes were crusty on the outside but had inside just the right combination of firmness and yield-to-the-tooth tenderness. The roasted leg of lamb was exquisite. They were wizards with the simple and basic flavorings of eastern Mediterranean dishes; oregano, basil, rosemary, lemon juice, garlic and olive oil. Their tossed

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salads sparkled with flavor and crispness. It would have been most impolitic of me to say, especially with my parents present, that Aunt Lopa and Uncle Nick’s cooking was so much better than theirs, but it really was. My sister concurred.

Another memorable feature of these gatherings was Uncle Nick’s white wine, home-made in the cellar. As a produce person, he had easy access to bulk purchase of grapes. Every fall, he made two large barrels of white wine, which he served at dinner meals and generously gifted to family. He also regularly insisted that the youngsters (age > 10 or so) be offered a (small) glass of wine with dinner. My Dad would frown and object, but Uncle Nick would prevail, asserting that it was better, from early in life, to regard wine as a tasty nutritional adjunct to meals rather than a “recreational” beverage. We youngsters had no argument with that; wine with dinner made us feel a little “grown-up”.

When my parents on occasion had to travel away from home, but without kids, Aunt Lopa was more than

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pleased to put my sister and me up for a few days. She was a loving and gentle kid-sitter. I soon came to call her and regard her as my “2-Mommy”, my second Mother. So fond was I of this woman that upon her passing, I flew back from California where I was teaching and studying, to Pittsfield, for her funeral.

I’ve focused on my family activities with Aunt Lopa and Uncle Nick because, frankly, they were my favorites in a very close competition. But the other aunts and uncles were similarly warm, generous, and welcoming in their extended family gatherings. (I’ve written, in a prior piece, of my dear Uncle George’s intervention that spared my family the domestic misfortunes that might otherwise have developed.)

Thus it was that my family’s protective and nurturing phalanx of aunts (and uncles, too, who were there for us 24/7, not just during mating season) was brought to mind when I viewed those videos on elephant social structures. Truly amazing animals, and a truly amazing group of close family who left with me much of

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what I value, and much material for warm reminiscences of my youth.

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Thrift, Industry, And Devil Dogs

My parents were models of thrift and industry—Dad was a very blue-collar worker for G.E. in Pittsfield, chasing splatter pimples and slag from the welded seams of huge electric transformer tanks (in the years well before the protections of OSHA). It was brutally hard and hazardous work, work at which he suffered traumatic injuries and permanent damage to his hearing. He worked hard at home too, especially in summer when the garden

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demanded digging, planting, weeding, and lots of T.L.C. to deliver a good harvest.

My Mom worked at Rice’s Silk Mill after my sister and I had entered grade school. Her work involved the processing of the nylon cords and fabrics used in parachutes. The mill machines were powered by a system of long, ceiling-mounted shafts and pulleys, driving the floor machines through wide leather belts, open and unguarded. In addition to her work at Rice’s, Mom carried the bulk of home-making chores: cooking, cleaning, and washing.

They practiced thrift in every aspect of our home and family life. Meat was a minority component of our meals, which were nonetheless nutritionally well-crafted using garden produce, our own canned goods, and generous quantities of beans, lentils, grains, and pasta. Dad was a smoker, unfortunately, and made his own cigarettes using a simple rolling machine. Every other day, in the evening hours, I would sit opposite him at the kitchen table and watch him load the tobacco, lick the glue on the paper,

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insert the paper, and press the rolling lever. Out popped a cigarette which needed only a hair-trim on each end to make it look almost commercially made.

Thrift ruled in their spending and in saving and investing as well. This was well before the advent of computers and credit cards. Deposits to savings accounts were entered by clerks, by hand, no electronics whatsoever. But it all worked. Family borrowing was limited to the home mortgage. The kind of financial discipline they practiced, though influenced mainly by very modest income, was impressive.

They were good models for my formative views of thrift and industry. I got a very paltry “allowance”, just enough for the Saturday afternoon movies (6 cents), an occasional comic book, and one ice cream cone, $0.25 in all. The notion of money being “good” and that later could be turned into money, and money could be turned into desired goods was a no-brainer. There were few jobs available for early teen-aged kids, but newspaper delivery was one of them. After family discussion, I opted for a

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Sunday, rather than a daily, paper route based mostly on the marketing attractiveness of delivering newspapers to customers who would be less inclined to travel out to buy their own paper on a day off from work.

Door-to-door visits, offering my delivery services for the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Boston Advertiser, and the New York News, yielded a customer list of about 30, all within a quarter-mile radius from my home. I visited the Berkshire news Distribution Office and arranged for delivery of my order every Sunday morning.

Getting up early for papers on Sunday morning was a challenge, especially on winter Sundays. Snowfall on weekends meant that the distributor’s drop-off of my papers was delayed by messy roads. Snow also made pulling my paper wagon impossible, so I experimented with a sled. Only marginally better. On truly bad snow days, I prevailed upon my Dad to haul me and my papers around in the Buick. His “grump factor” was moderate - a “4” on a scale from 0 to 10.

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Now, to collection. You can’t waken customers early on Sunday morning to get paid for the paper. Some would leave money in an envelope inside the storm door.

For all others, I’d have to visit sometime later in the week, preferably early, so that I’d gather enough to pay the distributor’s fee. In some cases, I’d have to make repeated visits to get the money. Ideally, all customers paid promptly. From the proceeds, I would pay the distributor, turn over an agreed-upon sum to my Mom for the savings account, and keep the remainder for myself. Being “out and about” with money in my pocket slowly incubated a real bad habit.

At that time, I was entering my teens, starting a growth spurt, and developing a taste for Devil Dogs.

Remember them? A chocolate edition of a hot-dog bun, i.e., two slabs of chocolate-cakey stuff encasing a creamy filling, a material which must have been the early precursor of the Twinkie filling. I found myself strongly attracted to this “delightful” confection. That money in my pocket and the Devil Dogs on the shelves of Mr. Kalil’s mini-grocery augmented this attraction in way that 150

wouldn’t need a quantum physicist for its explanation. As I walked about on my walks or bicycle trips for collection of paper moneys owed me by customers, I would stop occasionally at Kalil’s and buy a Devil Dog. The occasional stops slowly became more frequent, and inexorably I drifted into an addiction.

I won’t go into the details of the cash flow problems that developed along with this addiction. Suffice it to say that I’m no stranger to Fiscal Cliffs, Debt Reduction, and Deficit Spending. I had two regular transfers to make; the distributor came first, the sum to be paid to my Mom for deposit to my savings account came second. My pocket money went last and fast - - I was over-spending it on my

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addiction and other purchases. So I started shorting the share that went to Mom, giving her the convenient excuse (lie!) that nobody was home when I went to collect. But the distributor always had to be paid.

The deficit grew, as did feelings of approaching disaster. I’d eventually have to tell my parents; I dreaded the speculations about how it would go, what measures they’d impose as punishment. It came to the point where I was having trouble sleeping at night.

I finally bit the bullet. My parents’ reaction was totally unpredictable. They simply said “Well, it was your money, son, not ours. If you want to p---s it away, that’s your problem.” We talked it out and worked our way out of the mess. It wasn’t, after all, the demise of Lehman Bothers. An enormous burden came off my shoulders; and it was a most instructive learning experience, Thrift and Industry 101.

I don’t remember ever eating another Devil Dog since then.

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Dandelion Tea

“Junk/Fast Food” was yet to be coined as a term in America’s culinary purse. Even if it had been, my family in the 40s would have had no part in it. Solar eclipses occur far more frequently than did our dining at a restaurant. We had peasant roots, not very far back, and our diets were necessarily thrifty, basic, and not far from the garden. Vegetable gardening was a big part of our family’s life in the decade of the 40s. Our home on Springside Avenue bordered on city-owned park land, rough and not in any active use. My Dad saw no harm in using a small patch of it for planting a victory garden, one that was very productive of a wide variety of table foods: tomatoes, corn, squash, eggplant, peppers, beans, cabbage, beets, carrots, and more, in quantities sufficient to preserve for the winters ahead.

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Our thrift and attention to basic nutritional practices meant looking to nature for “free food”. Among the freebies were wild blueberries, abundant in the Berkshires in the small towns northeast of Pittsfield. Blueberry pie at Christmas, though from our canned rather than fresh berries, was nonetheless delicious. Another was lawn dandelions for which I was the designated/conscripted harvester. Our modest majority species; I

lawn had them as a spent many hours on

my hands and

knees, clipping the

tops. Dandelions,

when boiled, drained,

and dressed with

olive oil and lemon

juice, were mildly

bitter but OK as

boiled greens go. The water in which the greens were boiled, however, was bitter as sin; it seems that the act of boiling served to extract the bitterest of the plant’s bitter components and to concentrate them in the “tea” left behind. This potion was cooled and stored in jars in the refrigerator, to see the light again the following morning as a breakfast drink, replacing canned orange juice (no frozen concentrate back then) as the morning beverage.

I’ll say it plainly: to be required (!) to drink this stuff, for 154

breakfast already, was an act of culinary child abuse. It was awful!! My Dad insisted that it contained all sorts of good things - -that it was a cure or preventative for all sorts of ills and dreadful maladies. I obediently drank it as directed, all the while sharpening my skills at swallowing without tasting.

I’ve done my due diligence for this piece, meaning of course that I’ve used Google to harvest information on dandelion tea. Yep, it’s true, the folk /plants-as-medicine assertions are supported by countless search items, praising the virtues* of dandelion tea in its various forms.

I couldn’t find one that mentioned the word bitterness, but several mentioned, obliquely, that one might wish to take this tea with sugar.

-- Jsd 1/21/13

*Not verified by any scientific studies or standards established by the FDA

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Musicophilia

I’d like to meet Dr. Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and author of many books (among them Musicophilia and A Leg to Stand On). I’d talk with him about my love of music, how I sensed its beginnings, how it has developed over my lifetime and about one of the few deep regrets I’ve been harboring over many years. I’d also compare notes with him about paraplegia, a condition both of us have experienced; his was temporary and mine appears certainly to be permanent. Dr. Sacks wrote about his paralysis in A Leg to Stand On. If musicality is inherited, I owe mine to my Mother.

I can’t recall ever hearing my Father utter a musical sound or listen to anything on the radio but Gabriel Heater or Walter Winchell, or show any interest whatever in music, modern or medieval. Mom, on the other hand, knew a lullaby or two, loved to sing, and really belted out the numbers with an Ouzo or two in her tummy and an 156

accomplice or two in the party. And she had a nice voice.

She also owned a harmonica, and without instruction (I wish she’d had some!) she succeeded in mutilating many tunes to the point of unrecognizability. Her harmonica was not easy listening, but she loved it.

My first memorable exposure to the “classics” was in fourth grade, where once or twice Miss McDowell played classical music on her record player as part of “Music Appreciation”. It’s hard to describe my reaction or feelings about the music other than to say that I liked it - - it evoked an emotional response, a sense of wonder and awe at the harmonies and dynamics.

Not long after this intro to the classics, we were all at a family dinner at Uncle George’s. We kids were excused to the living room after dessert, while the adults lingered over coffee and conversation. We were given permission to use the radio, which was powerful and sported one of those greenish “magic eye” tuning indicators. I found a station that was playing classical music, a violin concerto replete with virtuosity and passion so characteristic of the

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instrument and music of that period. Dr. Sacks would probably give us a neurology-based explanation of what happened next. I can only surmise that the violin concerto must have set a whole bunch of neurons into a cascade of resonances tuned deeply to the senses of beauty, emotion, harmony, and rhythm. I was transfixed. So powerful was the effect that silent tears streamed down my face. It was an extraordinary experience.

My Mom had witnessed the tail end of my near mystical experience. In the days that followed, we talked about it. I felt strongly that I wanted to play the violin, and Mom felt that, with her employment, we could afford to buy a violin and pay for violin lessons. She was consistently generous and responsive to requests from my sister and me that involved our personal and educational development.

Mr. Kingman was the violin teacher, a friendly older man who got around with a cane and smoked cigars. We located him by “word of mouth” and advice from my sister’s piano teacher. No, my Sis didn’t have a

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transcendental experience like mine. Mom had offered lessons out of her maternal generosity and her affection for music.

The violin is a most demanding and difficult instrument to play really well. In a piano, one needs only to strike the key, and the corresponding tone sounds. For the violin, the tone is determined by pressing a finger against the string. Now the finger is a rather mushy instrument, and the tone that emerges is critically dependent on getting that mush in the just the right place.

My sense of pitch is pretty sharp, so it wasn’t that hard to achieve a good accurate note from the instrument.

Bowing is a very different challenge. Bowing technique is so multi-dimensional: speed, pressure, angles, place on strings where the horsehair lies, avoiding bowing on two strings, not playing too close to the bridge, all elements of muscle control and agility. It’s much worse than simultaneously rubbing your tummy and patting your head.

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I tried. I practiced. I slowly improved. I wanted to make good sound, consistently, and when I did, it made me feel good. I did this for two-plus years, whereupon I hit a plateau. I’d had to change teachers. Mr. Kingman grew unable to keep up his teaching load, so he suggested I move my lessons to another teacher, a woman whose name has been irretrievably lost to my aging memory. I didn’t hit it off too well with this teacher—our “styles” didn’t match. At about this time, I entered that wretched time of life known as the “teens”, wherein social pressures and peer expectations can create havoc. They did just that.

My practice discipline started suffering and I went into a decline of commitment and dedication. A chat with my Mom was the final step, and we decided that I should take a hiatus. Here again my Mom exhibited her knack for avoiding censure and scolding. I suspect she’d had enough of that in her own youth.

The hiatus never ended, my violin days were over, and I never played again. But my special love of violin music has never abated. The concertos of Bach, Mozart, Mendelsohn, Brahms and many others are indelibly 160

planted in a secure (I hope!) part of my brain. When I hear them performed, I can play along “in my head”, and whistle along, at least until wife or daughter pleads for audio mercy, and I back off to internal play only. My violin heroes are Itzhak Perlman and Joshua Bell, and every time I hear or see them performing, I silently chant that mantra of extreme regret: There (or at least partly there) but for the foolishness and stupidity of adolescence, would I have gone.

My musicality, however, never died. What did survive was singing, of most kinds. I’ve never missed an opportunity to sing in a church choir, a community chorus, or small ensemble, e.g. a madrigal group or barbershop quartet. My voice falls short of soloist quality, but it’s a solid group choral voice with accurate pitch, dynamics, and rhythm. Singing, for me, is a most enriching enterprise. It offers the challenges and spiritual satisfactions of harmony and dynamism not unlike those of violin playing, but without the daunting demands of fingering and bowing. It also offers the opportunity to

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interact with others of similar musical proclivities, and to form friendships and community.

My paralysis since spinal surgery has left me with mysterious collateral damages, one of which is some vocal impairment. I’m doing my best to sing through them. I’d still like to meet Dr. Sacks, however, and talk with him about the manifestations of neuro-musical interactions he’s identified. I’d also like to know more about how paralysis is linked to vocal quality.

Jsd 3/1/13

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Reflections on Parenting

Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it. -- Russell Baker Parenting is hard, demanding work. It is work for which there is little preparation other than the experience of having been parented. Ideally, when we approach parenting as adults, we reflect upon how our moms and dads raised us, and sort out as best we can what worked well and ought to be emulated, and what didn’t work so well, or left you with sour or unpleasant memories - - the latter presumably will be no-no’s when we raise our kids.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course, because we’re all the products of nature, nurture, and social environment. If this all worked flawlessly, however, we’d be noting that every generation would be substantially “better” than its predecessor. Back to that notion later.

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I start with my own experience. My Father was a strong, dominant, controlling person. His word was law, and he enforced that law with a leather belt; not often, only for serious transgressions. Often enough, though, to leave temporary impressions on the butt and permanent impressions on the brain and spirit. He was not a chatty person; even as adult to adult, we discussed mostly household things, cars, fishing, food, gardens etc. He was sensitive about his shaky grasp of English and lack of education. He had Affection Deficit Disorder, and rarely used expressions of love or pride. I both loved and feared him, well into my life.

Now, for the good stuff. My Dad was a very responsible “family” person. He worked hard at his various jobs, kept us well fed and decently clothed, drank very little, kept a good roof over our heads, and was at home when he wasn’t at work. He liked fishing and gardening and engaged me in both. Our extended family activities suited him fine, and he found pleasure in food and cooking. My love for woodcraft and construction, (my Edifice Complex, next writing piece) as well as machines 164

and mechanical things I trace directly to his encouragement and tutelage.

There was one issue in those years that was the biggest source of anguish, conflict, and stress within our family--fierce opposition to social assimilation of the kind that might ultimately lead to, heaven forbid, a mixed marriage, opposition that was not uncommon in many European immigrant communities at that time. This meant that “dating”, parties, or other social activities that featured too much boy/girl mixing were suppressed and strongly discouraged. My sister was reported (by the local Greek community CIA) as having had a sundae with a boy, Bob, a non-Greek classmate, at the Sugar Bowl on North Street. Pretty innocent wouldn’t you say? It rang up as a Class A Felony! Relating episodes of this kind to my present family evokes the “He didn’t know any better-that’s the way things were done in those mini-cultures at that time.”

That may be so, but my Mother’s views as an American-born Greek, were very different from my

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Father’s fresh-off-the-boat values. Thus arose the conflict, stress and anguish noted above. No amount of pleading by my Mom, my moderate, gentle, and semi-modern Mom, would get my Father to relent. They disagreed sharply, a conflict that soured our family environment for days at a time. My sister went head-over-heels for Bob, and they continued to see one another in school and out, always mindful in the latter case that they were subject to the Greco/CIA surveillance. My Dad was determined; his attitude was, simply put, “you’ll marry a non-Greek over my dead body”. My sister was bitterly resistant to this kind of pressure.

After much discussion, counseling, and negotiation, my sister caved, and reluctantly agreed to be exiled, after high school graduation, to Port Chester, NY, to live with our Aunt Sparta. The 100-mile separation effectively ended her romance with Bob. There she worked as an accountant in a local hospital, a job she really liked. She returned to Pittsfield 2 ½ years later, got a secretarial job at GE, where she met (and eventually married) Jim, an advertising specialist. (All four members of my family, 166

Mom, Dad, Sis, and I, worked at GE that summer - - I had a summer slot, on vacation from college.) Jim was a bright, creative, quite personable, fun guy. By this time, my Dad had embarked on an ever-so-slow journey on Mellow Road; reluctantly at first, but with admirable resolve, he welcomed Jim into the family.

Dad had to go through another cycle of stress and disappointment when I announced, from California, that there was another mixed marriage coming up, my own, to Sally. (Sally passed away much too soon, in 1993, a victim of breast cancer.) My parents grew quickly to embrace her, and the rants against mixed marriage vanished from my Dad’s view of life, religion, and ethnicity. What a transformation Dad underwent over the years of the Great Mellowing. I suspect that the arrival of three adorable, bright granddaughters (mine and Sally’s) and four bumptious, energetic grandsons (Jim’s and Theo’s) had a lot to do with it.

I’ve not said too much about my Mother in this part of my life. She was warm, cuddly very affectionate,

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caring, forgiving, guiding, straight-talking - - hard to say anything bad about her. (Well, maybe her harmonica playing.) The burden of placement between her husband and her children took its toll on her; she spent much time in psychotherapy and suffered from “night terrors�. The word Trust is branded into my prefrontal lobes; trust, she said, was to her the most important value in all human relations. She wanted to know that she could always trust us, and to know that we trusted her, unconditionally.

I turn now to my own parenting, which I must note was tempered and shaped, fortunately, by Sally, whose skills as a mother and mate were off the charts. Her birth family was much more Americanized than mine. Its roots were in the Great Plains, way back, and Austria/Germany closer to now. The twin blights of religious and ethnic sectarianism were mostly missing from Sally’s life, and her parents, aside from the unfortunate fact that her Father was a staunch Republican, were a kind, gentle, and industrious couple who did a great job of parenting - good role models.

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Sally and I had our first daughter two years into our marriage. We each found ourselves reaching back to our kid days and recalling the models presented by our respective parents. I recalled what was unpleasant and flawed in my upbringing, and did my best to avoid those behaviors, not always 100% effectively. I’ll admit to having been a bit controlling, and quick to raise my voice.

When it came to issues of how our kids spent their time and energies, we found plenty for them to do, and were persuasive as to the importance of these activities. Among them were newspaper delivery routes, raising livestock (sheep, goats, et al) and grooming animals for show at 4H Fairs and other competitive venues. We used our large parcel of land to build and run a hobby farm. We harvested cordwood from our forest to avoid using oil and

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Jim and Sally 170

raised a wide variety of vegetables in our manure-enriched garden. I’ve heard it said that if you want kids to develop a sense of responsibility, get them involved in paper routes or raising animals. It seems to have worked remarkably well for us.

The girls really got engaged with the livestock and developed enduring friendships with neighborhood kids who were also 4-Hers.* The daughters didn’t have much time to spend on less-deserving pursuits. They stuck to friendships in which academics were important, and “dating” much less so. There wasn’t that much discussion of dating issues, but the nuances of our semi-stated policies on the subject were apparently understood. I’ll never know if they were 100% compliant; at this point, I really don’t want to know.

No parents are perfect, but the blend of Sally’s character and kindness and my somewhat sterner controliness, coupled with genetic factors, produced what I regard as three outstanding people. They’re smart, pretty, and industrious professionals, loyal and loving to their Dad

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and Step-Mom. And to their Mom, whose memory they cherish.

Jim, Sue, and "The Girls"

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Turkey Trends and Tribulations

Our family, collectively, has been resistant to things or behaviors that fit the description “fashionable” or “trendy.” (Some of us wear recycled clothing.) For years, in the Demetry family, the Thanksgiving turkey was roasted in the time-honored way - - several hours in the oven, filling the house with the wonderful aromas of sage, thyme, and roasting poultry. One small change was mandated by a family caucus many years ago; we switched from a giblet/ chestnut stuffing to a more conventional bread-based recipe. This was a relatively easy response to the shifting tastes of the newer generations. Demographic realities, i.e. the passing of grandparents, the in-migration from marriages, etc., drove this shift. It was clearly not a “trend-induced” change.

Not too long ago, though, we caught a bad case of “trendiness,” the aftermath of which was a seismic shift in our Thanksgiving feast. We succumbed to the siren call of 173

the fried turkey. The frying method, common in the south and especially in Louisiana, was spread northward in large part by a televised cooking show hosted by the rotund, famous New Orleans chef, Paul Prudeau. We took notice of it, talked about it, and finally decided to give it a try.

This was a big-deal move for us, one that was to take us into trendy-land, defiance of tradition, and into Amazon.com on the screen in search of the proper hardware. The necessary gear, we learned, was a flamethrower-like burner with a big appetite for propane, and a pot large enough to carry a large quantity of cooking oil in which, once heated by the burner, the turkey will fry.

Frying has a lot going for it: • It’s fast, about three minutes per pound of turkey • It produces a moist, tender result • It’s kind of fun And a bunch of serious safety challenges:

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• Three gallons of corn oil (or other, i.e. peanut) at 375 degrees F has the potential to do great damage.

• Too much oil in the pot before the turkey is lowered into the pot will result in over-spill of hot oil into the flame of the burner - - get away fast! See web for horror videos.

• A twenty-pound tank of propane fuel, if too close to a hot object like the burner, is disaster waiting to happen.

These are not over-blown warnings. Nationwide, many homes have been set afire and people injured while using this turkey-cooking method.

We fried our T’giving turkeys for another two or three years before coming to our senses and turning to something less menacing than the culinary Napalm that is the turkey fry. Having taken a leap into the unconventional, and wishing still to do something new and creative, we went (where else?) to the Internet and the cooking literature and found the Turducken.

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One of my sons-law is a foodie, i.e. one who knows a lot about food and wine, enough to make him a soughtafter food critic for the local press. (He writes restaurant reviews under a pseudonym.) He didn’t have to lobby very hard to convince the rest of the family to go for Turducken. Now wild Turduckens are virtually extinct; they haven’t been seen in our woodlands for centuries.

The talented, brainy super-chefs of the country, however, got together and back-engineered the Turducken, relying on historical fragments, fossils, cave paintings, recentlydiscovered scrolls, and stories told by the keepers of oral history, down the generations, in societies near and far.

What emerged from their efforts can best be summarized by the following steps: • Obtain a large-ish turkey, a medium roasting chicken, and a small duck.

• Bone out each of the three birds, taking care to keep them in their own skins; for the turkey, make the first, opening cut, down the spine, leaving the breast without incision.

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• Pause now, and at moderate intervals offer adult beverages. This eases the demanding work of preparation. (Caution: no such beverages before boning - - boning knives are sharp!)

• Stuff the duck with dressing #1. Wrap the boned duck around the stuffing so that the duck now takes the form and shape of its original self.

• Place the re-constructed duck in the chicken fillet, along with as much of dressing #2 as can be made to stick, in ”plaster” fashion, to the duck, and as can be accommodated by the chicken as it is re-shaped to look like the “original.

• Place the chicken/duck on the flat slab of turkey meat. Surround/plaster the chicken/duck with dressing #3.

• Wrap the turkey around the chicken/duck.

Using butcher’s twine, sew up the the turkey incision so that it looks like a plumped-up

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version of its former self.

Voila, you have a Turducken. •

Finally, roast the

Turducken in a medium oven for many hours. A meat thermometer is advised for monitoring internal temperature.

Pulling off the Turducken caper was a full family affair. Rick and I handled the mechanics of boning,

stuffing , and re-assembling. There was plenty for the 178

rest of the family to do: chopping, carmelizing , sautéing, boiling, for stuffing and side dish preparation. The result was worth the considerable effort. Carving was a snap – no bones to deal with. Given the composite nature of the “engineered” mass of poultry and stuffing, it was no surprise that flat slices of white or dark meat were out of the question. Carving produced a pleasant, mildly randomized collection of white and dark meats, and dollops of the separate stuffings, all vying for honors in the savory sweepstakes. The wines had been skillfully selected, and the desserts (deferred until after a therapeutic walk in the neighborhood) scaled new heights of artistry and tastes.

Our adventure into the trendy world of the Thanksgiving Turduccken was judged to be successful in many dimensions. We enjoyed the camaraderie of collaborative preparation, and the company of family members who, by reason of geography, we see too rarely.

And of course, the poly-poultry roast was a smash hit.

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We’ve had Turducken for another Thanksgiving or two, but now that we’ve dented the bounds of tradition, we may have enabled ourselves for ventures even further into the world of less conventional Thanksgiving feasts.

Stay Tuned! -- Jsd, Thanksgiving 2012

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The Edifice Complex

The diagnostic manual for mental disorders does not contain the words “Edifice Complex.� I hope to make the case that it should, and that I present with all the defining symptoms. Spoiler Alert: EC does not lead to violent or destructive behavior but does model in a benign way as an obsessive/compulsive condition. Follow me while I relate how this disorder ultimately lead me, with the help of my family and many friends, to actually build the home that we now occupy.

My history with EC begins with the end of WWII, when rationing stopped, and it became possible to buy tools and machines for working wood, maintaining lawns and gardens, and other gadgets required for do-ityourselfers from the most casual to the most serious. My Dad and I spent much time with the Sears catalog, a real goody-book for the serious tool-seeker. Our shop was soon up and running.

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Among our early projects were: the refinement of the cellar space; setting up the shop; closing in a space beneath the rear porch to serve as a garage for our ’31 Buick sedan; a step-stool; some fencing; various cabinet and closet storage facilities; and a basket of modest household DIY projects. Common to most of these was a series of steps, e.g. finding a need, designing an object or system to meet the need, selecting materials, fashioning the parts, assembling the parts, re-doing the parts that don’t fit, and doing a final assembly and finishing.

Completing a project was almost always accompanied by a rush of prideful feelings of accomplishment and achievement. I was slowly but surely, and pleasurably, getting the early programming for what was to blossom, years hence, as a full-blown case of the Edifice Complex.

And though I didn’t fully recognize it at that time, I was getting practice in the process called engineering, practice that would shape my education and career.

Five years later - - A quantum leap in my EC gestation occurred in 1950, when my parents decided to build a single-family dwelling in the Allen Farm area on 182

the eastern side of Pittsfield. No, I didn’t participate in the actual construction, but I managed to bicycle to the site just about every day, taking careful mental notes on how the workers built forms for the foundation, poured the concrete, started framing, and marked progress on their blueprints. I watched carefully how they measured and cut the pieces, how they assembled them on the floor and nailed them together, (no air-driven nailing machines back then) and lifted them into place as wall sections. The aroma of fresh-sawn fir and spruce, the raspy noise of saws, the rhythm of hammers hitting nails, and the scale of effort needed for moving and positioning large pieces of lumber and plywood: they all took comfortable residence in the EC portions of my brain.

It occurred to me that there was a fine line between being an eager observer-learner and being a royal PITA. I made a point of not asking too many questions, and tried to contribute something to the enterprise by helping with scrap management and end-of-day cleanup. But I also made daily progress reports to my parents, and reported to them one day that I’d observed one of the workers doing a 183

sloppy, careless job of installing fiberglass insulation in an exterior wall. Energy and cost consciousness were being mentioned as early as the 50s, so my Dad talked it over with the builder, who saw to it that the sloppy work was re-done. I thereby earned several upticks on the “Owner’s- Nosy Son-PITA Index”. The house got built, it was warm and efficient, and it suited us well.

I started high school the same year as moving into the new house. The school offered an option within college prep that was designed for those interested in engineering and science. It was generously supported by GE, the city’s largest employer at that time, and the employer of both my parents. It came as no surprise that construction technology took a back seat to the physics, electricity, math, mechanics, and other topics more appropriate to preparation for engineering than “Hammering -101”. My preparation for edifice building went into a lengthy suspension as I advanced through ten years of higher education, studying electrical engineering, first at WPI, then at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California 184

Sally and I were married in 1962; I was two years away from my PhD, and she taught modern dance and physical education at Monterey High School. The honeymoon cottage we rented in Carmel was lacking in storage space, but it did have a roofed-over porch on one side, making a space that could easily be enclosed and secured as a storage space. The first sight of it pressed my EC buttons-- this little porch project would be my re-entry to the land of carpentry and construction. The landlord agreed (trusting fellow) and paid for all the materials. It came out quite well, and I was back on the track to bigger and better things.

In 1964 we bought a new home in Monterey, just as our family was blessed with its first teeny member. The house was configured in a way that begged for the addition of a new master bedroom wing, and our family plans included more kids. We retained an architect to help us with the design work. From him I learned how to draw up house plans detailed enough to satisfy the town’s building inspector and to be issued a construction permit.

We considered having it built by a contractor, but I just 185

couldn’t resist my EC’s insistent urgings: “c’mon, you can do it, what a cool project, it’ll be a piece’o’cake.” The voices won out. I convinced a skeptical bank loan officer that I was qualified to do the work, and found in the wonderful world of bookstores the several “how-to-…” resources that I’d need: how to frame; how to do plumbing for residential structures; how to wire your house so it don’t burn down; roofing for dummies, etc. As a lifetime learner, I was used to cramming, and I was doing a lot of it that summer of 1968. It went together quite well - - I learned years later, after leaving California, that the house was on the market for a cool $980,000.00, a price that was influenced by a long, county-wide water connection moratorium. I suffered seller’s remorse.

We moved from California to Holden in 1971, rented for a few months, and found an un-built subdivision lot on Greenwood Parkway. There we built a so-called pre-cut home. A pre-cut is a conventional wood-frame house, but one for which the vendor pre-cuts every piece of structural wood to the proper size and shape, then ships the pieces to the customer’s building site. We opted to have the 186

building framed by hired carpenters, leaving us with a roofed and weather-tight frame. All we had to do was finish all interior surfaces and install plumbing and wiring.

Many weeks passed before we could get an occupancy permit, and many more before we could say the job was finished. For a while, we bathed the kids and washed dishes in the same bathtub; they would point out bits of lettuce as they floated about. We learned a lot, worked hard, and settled in to plan the next adventurous dream.

The 70s were years of ferment. Sally and I chose to focus on the environmental issues attached to food and energy, at an accessible level. We couldn’t do much to budge Exxon-Mobil or ConAgra, but we could adopt a lifestyle which might influence our kids (and maybe others?) to be more mindful of these issues. My edifice complex was looking at this and seeing a grand opportunity to build; how better a way was there to honor the environment than by designing and building a superenergy-efficient dwelling? And, equally important, by finding a piece of land that would yield, sustainably, a supply of hardwood stove fuel for heating, and a plot of 187

good soil for growing veggies. Finally, there could be a piece of the site that might serve as pasture for small livestock, e.g. sheep and goats. We hit the drawing board, our construction library, the many issues in the popular and magazine press, and drew upon our increasing base of experience in construction, raising and feeding a family, and facing environmental constraints realistically. At the same time, we started the search for a suitable parcel of land. We found a somewhat troubled site, 18 acres in size, mostly backland, street access for only one house lot, a configuration that required a driveway some 1400 ft. in length with serious slope challenges, and requiring much tree removal for both the driveway and the building site.

No wonder it was priced so low! Sally, I, and my EC weighed all these factors and decided to take the plunge.

Wow, what an adventure! It took a long time, called heavily on physical and psychic resources, and would have failed without Sally’s support and that of many friends and colleagues. It is settled law: Self-building projects at this scale are infamous for destroying marriages. Any union that survives it may be regarded as 188

pretty strong. One strategy for sanity maintenance was our every-Friday dinner at El Morocco Restaurant, (now gone, unfortunately) where we dined on spinach and meat pies washed down with BYO Vino Rosso, reviewed the week’s progress, and set the agenda for the next week.

All the practice projects urged on me by my Complex in prior years had prepared me well. All the sensory and psychic pleasures poured into my body and soul in astonishing waves of measuring, cutting, nailing, inhaling the aroma of fresh-cut wood, lifting and placing wall and roof sections, painting, roofing, hearing the buzz of saws and mosquitos, and paying strict attention to the eleventh commandment: Measure Twice, Cut Once.

We first put chainsaw to tree in early March, 1976, and occupied the (not yet really finished) house in midNovember. We spent that winter, ‘76/’77, planning the next steps for realizing the dream. They were to take several years to complete, at a more relaxed construction rate than that for the house. They include: A two-story barn

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A sheep-shed A hog shed An RV shelter A one-acre pasture A 6,400 ft2 vegetable garden Over the years we raised three very intelligent lovely daughters , sheep, goats, chickens, hogs, and one horse (for a year). We harvested tons of fresh vegetables and countless cords of firewood, thereby avoiding the burning of thousands of gallons of oil. We enjoyed the isolation and quiet of living in the middle of a forest, and bore grudgingly with the chore of plowing a long driveway in winter.

I had to say No to my Edifice Complex quite a few years before my paralysis. But while I was in its thrall, I took great pleasure in building my way through life.

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*Neighbor family’s Karen and our Daughter Athena discovered that they had “Tuttles” in their respective family trees. They did some pretty impressive genealogical digging that revealed a kinship, something like nth cousins mth removed; I recall neither “n” or “m”.

The Tuttles crossed the Plains, ending up in California, joining the tree that grew into Sally’s origins.

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My Dad’s Great Rowing Adventure

In the days following WWII, when our family finally had “wheels”, we spent a week each summer at Uncle Eugene’s shorefront cottage on Lake Cayuga, one of the series of long, narrow lakes (known as the Finger Lakes) generously left to upper New York State by the ancient glaciers that did so much to shape many of North America’s gorgeous geologic wonders. My memories of those vacations are saturated with visions of fishing, frying and eating the fish, and living the love and camaraderie of kin whom we saw too infrequently.

Uncle Eugene had two boats moored at his dock: one a speedy power boat that would hit boat wakes and wind-waves with bone-jolting thuds, treating its passengers to more-than-ample spray, a welcome cooling agent on the warmest of summer days. The other was a utility boat that served mainly as a fishing vessel, and could be powered with oars or a 5-hp outboard Evinrude.

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One fine day my Dad got a bee in his bonnet - - he was going to pack a sandwich and a couple of beers and row the rowboat all the way across the lake and back. He got some mildly cautionary comments, ones that necessarily avoided calling the idea what it was - - totally idiotic.

The Finger Lakes are called that because they are long and narrow, suggesting fingers. Cayuga is fifty miles long, north to south, three miles wide, east to west. A brisk breeze easily works up sizeable waves topped by whitecaps. There was no television in those days, much less the accurate radar-driven forecasts that we enjoy today. When Dad was ready to depart, he looked at clear blue skies dotted by a few puffy clouds, and declared with Nostradamus-like confidence, that it was a fine day for his cross-lake adventure.

He left not long after breakfast; I followed him with powerful binoculars until the optics were no longer up to the job. All was well until early afternoon, when the cloud cover grew thicker and took on the dark hues that give a pretty clear signal that nastiness might be knocking at the 193

door soon. Sure ‘nuf, the knocks approached from far in the west. We call them thunder, and their sounds were carried to us by some breezes that showed the potential for surpassing the breeze classification, and morphing into threatening winds.

At this point, my growing concern matured to fear, real heart-clutching fear. My Dad was not a fuzzy, easy guy; in prior writings I’ve described the uneasy relationship we had. But the longer I scanned over the water surface with my binocs, revealing no objects but high waves and whitecaps, the more my panicky mind blocked out that unpleasantness and left nothing but the terror of becoming a fatherless child. Who would take care of us, how would we exist, would we ever find his body?

He had never learned to swim - - neither have I, and my “train has left the station” in that regard. Nor had he taken along any flotation jacket.

And then the lightning started. I lost any semblance of control over my fears, which were now being fed by precocious knowledge about lightning and how it works.

No amount of comforting assurances from the adults 194

would calm me down. Why wasn’t someone calling the police and asking them to rescue my Dad? Long story short: he survived. He tied up the boat, walked to the cottage where, soaked, exhausted, humbled, he was first greeted with expressions of profound relief.

After getting the niceties out of the way, my Mom and my uncles gave him a pretty robust chewing out for scaring the stuffings out of his family and putting their welfare at risk.

Yes, we grew up together, my Dad and I. This incident didn’t put a stop to our testy relationship, but it tempered it and put a dent in it. From my mental reconstructions of the episode, I was comforted by the recollection that all ill or hostile feelings I had for him were pushed aside. I would feel pretty badly had I dredged up anything at all resembling indifference, or worse, any hopes for a sad ending.

JSD 7-20-2017 Worcester, MA

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What’s in a Name (Day)?

We didn’t have Kindergarten when I was one of the kinder. No pre-school either, nor neighborhood collective playgroups - - women were stay-at-home Moms until the war called them into the workplace. No need for babysitting cooperatives. Thus was I prepared and “socialized” (in a cultural near-vacuum) for the start of my formal education.

We lived in an Irish Catholic enclave, part of a lower middle-class quadrant of Pittsfield, MA. All the kids in my neighborhood enrolled in St. Mary’s parish parochial school, leaving me to enter a 1st grade public school class where all my cohorts were strangers to me. I remember being somewhat baffled by some behavioral and social differences between my neighborhood kids and those in my school class. In the former, I was the lone raisin in the bowl of peanuts; in the latter, I found other raisins as well as almonds, cashews, walnuts and filberts. It was my

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introduction to policulture for the young. These changes in my physical and social climates were concurrent with some changes in my attitudes and behaviors. More on this after a brief message brought to you by Wholemark Cards.

It was the custom in the Greek Orthodox Church, into which I was born, to celebrate an individual’s “Name Day.” One’s Name Day was the day in the Ecclesiastic calendar on which the Church celebrated the life of the saint after whom the individual had been named. One’s true birthday was much less important to the Church, and in a way to the family. Name Day gifts from close relatives, Aunts and Uncles, and especially the Godparents, were generous if not lavish. No gifts were given nor celebrations held on the true birthday. Practices changed in response to the pressures of assimilation, but Godparents were slow to capitulate.

My birthday is in early September; Name Day in late October. I don’t remember any gifts or celebration on my birthday. I do recall cards and gifts from aunts and uncles, and my Godfather for my Name Day. The cards were ornate and age-appropriate; but they were also 197

BIRTHDAY CARDS! Apparently Wholemark didn’t offer Name Day cards for the Greek community, so they improvised by crossing out the word birthday and writing in name day.

The fine concept of show-and-tell had been well established long before I got to first grade. When my turn came, I asked my Mom if I could take my fancy Name Day cards for Show and Tell. She said OK, so I looked forward to giving the first stand-up presentation of my life.

A good way to start for a teacher.

The cards were passed around, and elicited kiddie ho-hums. Miss McCusker collected them and after a few minutes of looking them over, asked me if she could keep them until the next day. I later learned that she shared them with Principal Miss Pfeifer, and with that reading they were confused. My student records showed early September as my birth date, not late October. This observation started a series of calls and inquiries aimed at resolving the confusion. It took a while, but it was straightened out, eventually. My guess is that I was the

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first little Greek boy the Rice School Elementary District had ever seen.

Now, for those juicy bits about behavior. All the kids in my neighborhood had sound families, hard-working and honest, sober, religiously observant but barely tolerant of non-Catholics. All in all, not a hothouse for raising young criminals. Rice School was about a mile south of our home, toward the transformer manufacturing plants of General Electric Co., the economic engine of the Pittsfield area at that time. The neighborhoods around the school were quite a bit more heterogeneous than my own - - like my bowl of mixed nuts. The kids were a bit rougher at the edges, talked uncomfortably about their family situations, presented themselves as “different� in a variety of ways.

Student Johnny McCambridge, later that year, started his career of conflicts with authority by becoming a habitual truant. (He was to expand his repertoire to petty theft and other misdemeanors in the years to come.)

In this simmering stew of miscreant kids, I developed some bad attitudes toward authority, and started showing them in class. It would probably take many hours 199

of a shrink’s time to unravel my emotions at that time, and to understand the complex, almost turbulent process that underlaid my adoption of some “smart-ass” attitudes.

Today, most have been suppressed. Others linger just a bit .

Miss McCusker had a small but effective arsenal of behavior modification tools; I’d be happy to demonstrate them for the reader. One involved her thumb and forefinger, and my chin; grasp and shake vigorously.

Another called for smart raps on the knuckles with a wooden, foot-long ruler. It really focuses one’s attention.

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Food, Glorious Food

Festive meals shared by our extended family loom large in the fondest memories of my childhood. Because our house had a very modest dining space, we gathered most often at the home of one or another of my Mom’s brothers or sisters. We did this after church about every third Sunday, and for special occasions and events. Yes, I would anticipate good food, but right up there with food was the chance to hear interesting adult conversations in Greek.

I took guilty pleasure in favoring my relatives’ cooking over my parents’. My sister and I shared these feelings, but agreed that it would be best not to voice them too loudly to our parents. Aunt Lopa and Uncle Nick made the world’s best roast chicken and potatoes, the tastiest salads and veggies. And he insisted, over my Father’s obligatory but mild objections that we kids be served a small glass of his white wine, of which he had barrels in

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the cellar. And no, I didn’t grow up to be an alcoholic, at least not yet.

Aunt Helen was the only one who made the yummiest pasta-based dish you’d ever want to taste. We called it PASTITSO, whereas contemporary food writers put an extra “I” before the “o”. What do they know?

Pastitso offered me the chance to observe Aunt Helen’s painstaking process of assembling the dish. She would gather all the pieces and parts on the kitchen table, and arrange them for easy reach. Macaroni, (long strawlike pasta, cooked to al dente), browned ground beef, a rich béchamel sauce, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter. She furnished my observation post with a comfy chair, milk and cookies or a small bowl of fragrant fruits. I knew that I shouldn’t be too chatty, lest I mess up her assembly rhythm. But I could munch quietly on my cookies.

The singular distinguishing feature of Aunt Helen’s pastitso was the precise placement of the macaroni tubes, limped a bit by pre-cooking. She didn’t just dump them 202

into the baking pan one would for elbow macaroni. She took one tube at a time and placed it in precise parallel alignment alongside its neighbors. This took some special care, limp noodles being somewhat resistive to coercion.

She placed about an inch worth of the noodles, then spread a layer of the browned beef, seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg. Another layer of disciplined noodles, then meat, and so on until the ingredients were all used up. This is where the bĂŠchamel came in; it was pored over the top of the stack in several installments, spaced in time so that the sauce had a chance to descend into all the nooks and crannies of the several layers.

Bake, wait, cut into rectangular pieces, serve, enjoy.

The bÊchamel is firmed, almost like a custard. It was good food, and good company. Of my aunts and uncles, so dear to me, none remain. Most of my cousins have passed on, too, but memories are rich and lasting. I don’t ever want to forget the nourishment to body and soul that I took from food and family. And I took a shine to cooking that lasts to this day.

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Weight, Weight, Don’t Tell Me

I’m certainly not alone in my ongoing struggle to establish and maintain a healthy body weight. I weigh 240 pounds, a figure health professionals tell us may be classified as seriously overweight, maybe borderline obese. In my undergraduate days the scale said 180, ample but not alarming. After that, from roughly the mid-1960s, I was aboard the weight rollercoaster, or equally descriptive but less terrifying, the body-mass yoyo. It has been a challenge and a struggle, marked by alternating successes and lapses. I’ve dealt with it by using Weight Watchers, adjustments to diet, and joining (and using) the YMCA for regular exercise. It’s a story shared by many.

Events in my life switched me from well-known mainline rails to an offshoot track, unknown and menacingly-signed: Rough track ahead

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Look for possible washouts Storm debris on track is not regularly removed Weight limits are posted for bridge crossings (Ouch, that was unkind.)

Maybe I over-dramatize - - but the catastrophic nature of those events, I feel, gives license for a bit of drama. The events I speak of were medical issues, in the autumn and winter of 2011-12, that left me totally paralyzed from the hips down. No function, no feeling. In the care of medical folks, the love and caring of my family, (especially my wife Sue) and with help from effective medications, we’ve “re-invented” my life. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

I confess to not having prepared myself for what paralysis does to body condition, mainly weight and muscles. The inability to use the large muscles of the legs

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means that only the arms are available for exercise, but they’re not up to job. Result? My weight zoomed to 240 lbs, where it sits now.

It’s very difficult to achieve balance between food intake and nutrient needs. With the help of the dietician, we’ve made adjustments that maintain the status quo. It may be the right time to explore making further adjustments that would lead to a gradual reduction in weight without jeopardizing nutritional needs. It’s worth a shot. My goal is to reach a weight that makes it possible to transfer without the need for a lift. Stay tuned.

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Expectations

All of us have been shaped in part by the expectations of others. For most of us, those expectations came from our parents, with whom we shared so much of our lives over so many years. Their hopes for us were expressed by example, by their behaviors and actions.

Young minds are “works in progress�, absorbing what they see and hear like thirsty sponges.

As we grow into adolescence and the teen years, we are increasingly called on to make decisions for ourselves, using the accumulated effects of our upbringing and experiences. Prominent in these decisions are those that bear on education and career direction-finding.

In my case, there was ample behavioral guidance from my parents. They were hard-working clean-living people, attended our church and took us along, paid their taxes, and obeyed the law. A good basic upbringing, with little of the weighty trappings of social pretention. A very 207

vanilla setting, one that gave us very little exposure to the possibilities beyond the blue-collar.

That is not to say that they were indifferent to matters of education and occupation. My Dad made it clear that he valued education highly, that he didn’t want me to earn a living doing anything close to what he did, chasing weld-spatter pimples” in huge power transformer tanks. I saw what he meant when I attended an open house event offered by GE for members of employees’ families.

His job featured mind-numbing levels of noise and vibration, air full of dust and noxious particulates, and the fall dangers inherent in climbing the steep tank walls for access and egress. He did suffer two injuries that required hospitalization. In those years, OSHA was but a dream in the minds of the health and labor communities.

Parental expectations for education were understood, and I was eager to pursue them. But I was more-or-less on my own in the occupational realm. I had no legacy experience to inform my choice for college or major. I was on my own, but not without resources. Ours was a “company town” – General Electric ruled the roost, and 208

with some foresight and self-interest, they supported a competitive Engineering College Prep program at Pittsfield High School. I applied and was accepted. I was a natural for engineering; I loved to take things apart, and put them back together, mostly. The rest is history. I selected WPI, (no hint of Harvard, Yale, or RPI), did quite well, and went on for graduate degrees, followed by forty years of professing.

Two other vignettes fit into the history of my family and its expectations. One is quite funny, the other very sad. A member of my Dad’s work group, let’s call him Harris, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, also had a son my age, at Pittsfield High, but not in the Engineering Prep Program. Harris had ambitions for his son, and was not shy about sharing them with his co-workers in a boastful way. He regularly reported on his son’s progress and grades, and my Dad related his boastings to our family at dinner time. Dad claimed never to have engaged Harris in tit-for-tat, but privately gloated to us that I had far outpaced young Harris’s record in the achievement race.

True. I learned from others that he was very proud of my 209

achievements; he never shared with me, however, that pride in my record. It would have been nice to hear it.

Dad’s other, totally unfunny expectation was that my sister and I would never marry a non-Greek, and that we would not ever leave the Greek Orthodox Church. He backed his declarations with harsh restrictions and veiled threats. These were difficult times for our family - - I’ve written about this in other pieces, recalling that he relented on this attitude, became a supportive father-in-law, and lovingly adored his grandkids. Not a shabby outcome, wouldn’t you say?

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Dad’s Cocktail

Most of us will recall, from our lifetimes of enjoying motion pictures and television series, the scenes in which two or more of the characters gather in a room or office, either for social or business reasons. The host asks the guest(s) if they’d like a drink. The response is rarely anything but a “yes”. The host crosses the room, approaching an elaborate, massive mahogany sideboard, the top of which bears two or three also elaborate cut crystal decanters, stoppered by ground-glass closures and containing liquids of various shades on the tan-brown spectrum. He then arranges a few drink glasses on the table, near the decanters. I’m sure that film directors instruct their sound technicians to focus on the sounds of the pouring; the clink of glass on glass, reinforcing the notion of quality crystal, and the gurgle-gurgle of the potent liquids. Don’t you just love that sound?

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Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby in High Society

The family of my youth was Mom and Dad, my older sister Theo, and me. Mom was a “stay-at-home”, my Dad worked for GE. His job was brutally and physically demanding - - chasing splatter pimples from welded seams of huge tanks built to house power transformers. He walked to work – we had neither a car nor public bus route. At the close of his shift, I would watch him walk down the gentle slope from Brown Street, along the thick hedge protecting the Callaghan’s back yard. His stride revealed his weariness, and the smell of his work clothing 212

made very clear that he’d spent the day in the confines of a seriously industrial environment.

He would greet us as he entered through the screenporch door, then hang up his jacket. Wordlessly, he’d go to the kitchen, open the door of a high cabinet, and remove a bottle that bore the label “Jordan Club Straight Bourbon Whiskey”. He’d caress the bottle with his eyes, with his rough hands, extend his arm to view it from that distance, then slowly bring it back to both hands. This preparatory ritual, without variation and with a grace and precision suggesting the influence of choreographer Jerome Robins and practiced every working day of the year, is one of the most firmly established memories of my early years. But wait! There’s more.

The final scene, now properly introduced by the ritual described above: -- Dad would grasp the bottle with both hands, twist out the cork stopper, and tilt the neck of the bottle to his lips. No drink glass to meter the dose. But I’d wager that if the three gulps and twitches of the Adam’s Apple could be measured, there would be a remarkable consistency of volume over time. Now the 213

finale. Dad would replace the stopper, utter the words “Oh My God”, extend the arm to once again inspect the bottle at that distance, and replace it in the cabinet. This was his only after-work cocktail – he didn’t drink at any other time of the day.

Two very different cocktail styles, from two very different strata of society.

A mini-memory with a chuckle: As the level of whiskey fell in the bottle, as it approached the empty level, Dad would call out “Bess, have you been at this bottle again?” Mom’s firm denial brought a chuckle from my Dad. He knew that she drank rarely.

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Sidney Dorfman

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The Two Dollar Bill

I finished my lunch at the Portland Street Spa; I gave the counter girl a two dollar bill. Puzzled, she concluded it was a twenty dollar bill. And, accordingly, returned nineteen dollars and seventy-five cents. I left a twentyfive cent tip. Once outside the door, I marveled at the good fortune which befell me. The largess would take care of a lot of overdue bills. Plus, my wife was pregnant.

However, a late starting knowing of my better self generated. The restaurant owner was a good friend, often

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cuffing me when I was short. And even worse, the shortage was probably his profit for the entire week.

A bit of soul searching on my part ensued. My character indicated I was better than cheating a friend out of his due.

And despite the current hardship, I was young. There was a future, and many years of life left in me. Despite my current hardship, the breaks would come my way. I would not need to ever cheat anyone.

I returned to the restaurant, explained my thinking to my owner friend. The counter girl was contrite and promised carefulness.

No doubt the decision was the right one. The future, not without its trials and tribulations, turned bright.

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Misplaced Violin

I played at the violin at my father’s insistence. He’d read about eleven year old Yehudi Menyuin. I was in second grade. Now I’m in ninth grade. Still I am not sure if I’m fingering the right note. He can’t understand. In his mind, I’m the coming Menyuin.

When Mrs. Fick, my history teacher, calls my father to find out if I was available to play in a trio at an assembly representing historical periods, he was all for it.

The period was Louis XIV, and the three of us would have to wear clothing of the period: the other two being pianist Corey Plant and cellist Ben Levinson. They were already members of the Inter-High Orchestra.

My lack of music understanding drove the other two crazy. I could neither stay in tune nor play the correct notes. But we all went through the motions and finally assembly day arrived. I could see my buddy Hymie

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Goldblatt goofing it up in the audience. Boy, he’d make mincemeat of my ineptitude afterwards.

Our turn came. I sawed away. The other two, by now, somehow managed to figure out my ineptness and we performed a pretty good King Louis XIV concert. But in my heart and soul, and theirs too, it was reasonably awful.

I managed to remain invisible for most of the weekend. However, Hymie managed to find me. He was effusive. “I never heard you play the violin before, but you really made that fiddle jump. You were really good.

The other two didn’t really impress me.”

Go figure.

Despite my violin ineptitude, I loved music. Classical music, the big bands, and all of the popular vocalists are a day in heaven. On labor day weekend, a bunch of us took off for Atlantic City, and we danced to the big bands of the time.

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I sought a way as a violinist in the school orchestra at Roosevelt High School in Washington, DC--albeit second violin, an activity which opened the door ushering at the National Symphony Orchestra on Saturday mornings. Along the way, I attended operas, Carmen and Aida, I took in a Broadway show, Roberta, and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" became my theme song until forever.

They asked me how I knew My true love was true I of course replied Something here inside cannot be denied I laid my violin in its case at the start of the senior year in high school. By that time my father's realization that I'd never emulate Yehudi Menuin had sunk in. And when I moved to Worcester, Tanglewood and the Worcester Music Festival were all in my book. Symphonies beyond my comprehension captured my inner soul. Though my violin lessons never bore fruit, the music love affair soars until forever.

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Pitching

Growing up, I was the kind of guy who was not too much interested in the girls--but I did eventually get interested in the girls. One day a friend advised me that we had a date with two of the girls who had been going out with older guys. I was kind of shaky about it.

The substance of the story I'm telling is how this guy inveigled these two girls. He made a date with them to go up to his house on a Friday night and horse around. He’d taken the girl he was with into the other room and made a deal. He’d said that I could make ten bull's eyes on the dartboard in the other room. And if I did that, he’d get ten kisses, and I’d get ten kisses.

So there's a lot of pressure's on, and a lot of commotion. The two girls, they got interested: how the hell was this bum like me going to make ten bull's eyes? And they held hands and they said, "We're going to be in for a very slow night."

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They didn’t know it but among my activities I was a pretty good pitcher. Not a fast ball pitcher but I could get the ball over the plate. I had an accurate arm. So I hit the bull's eye.

Not only did I get ten kisses that night, but I also found out about the magical arousal that can happen between a girl and a boy. Well, anyway, the girls went their own way. They were in the same grade we were in. And as a matter of fact, I've got a picture of that girl I got my first kiss from.

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The Life Story of a Day Dreamer

My subject is Day Dreams. They were a certainty before I fell asleep.

I grew up in Washington, D.C. When I was seven years old my family moved to a new neighborhood. The event occurred nearly a hundred years ago.

The move turned into a ray of sunshine. Our former home grocery store was located on a dead-end street. I was the only white kid in a colored neighborhood.

Though I attended an all-white school, Washington D.C. remained segregated.

The new site also consisted of a home and grocery store. But the surroundings were up to date. The neighborhood, all white. And I occupied my own bedroom.

In my excursions around the area, I soon discovered The Soldiers Home. A stately place. My first daydream 228

was that it would become my home. In a flash, I am the occupant and owner. The grounds would be my real home, full of regal splendor. I am full of money, a bankroll of one million dollars. In one stroke, unrealities became real. The cornerstone of my entire life.

During my lifetime I’ve relished living the life of a day dreamer. I did get married, sired two children, and was aware that their care was my responsibility. To that end, I worked my head off. Monetary accumulations occurred.

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However, the bug ingrained at age seven persisted.

Day dreaming a constant. My harmless secret game.

Day dreams are not finite. Only I possess infinite control. When the Soldiers Home abruptly turned sour, new avenues took over. Marble tournaments held in the garage, to courtships with pretty girls, to lying to my mother about a bad report card.

Not so harmless when I became involved in an endeavor totally removed from my normal occupation. I discovered reality and non-reality don’t mix. My day dreaming convinced me my intelligence is up to the task of buying fuel oil futures at auction. When the auctioneer’s hammer dropped for the final time, reality struck.

Though a hole developed in my pocket, my fundamental business remained steady. And so did the day dreaming. Until...

Until I entered the Eisenberg. A transformation occurred then. My wife died recently. My daughter died tragically many years ago. My surviving son was well off.

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A study of myself indicated a pertinent point in my life had occurred.

Absolutely no need for day dreams. Perhaps solid conversation and comradeship with people near my age were the means to solidify my life. Accomplishment and societal enrichment were possible without day dreaming.

I have not subjected myself to a scintilla of a daydream since my arrival nearly three years ago.

Eisenberg activities and my own proclivities keep me going.

And I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

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Herb Keilson

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My Life in the Air Herb Keilson

I know all about the B-24. I watched it being built. I was stationed in Willow Run for a while in Detroit--where they were building these planes. And a small group of us were assigned--I don't know how we got picked--and we were each assigned to an airplane that was still on the assembly line. So I watched this being built all the way through--it took a couple of months. And in between, the Ford had engineers teaching us about the airplane and they were great.

By the time they were finished, I knew that plane like the back of my hand. It was an interesting experience, except the funny side of it was that nobody told any of us what we were supposed to do. We watched the plane being built, and I was particularly impressed by the fact that most of the workers were women. But anyhow, when it came off the assembly line the process was that Ford, and the Ford pilots transferred the planes to the Air Force.

So it comes off of the assembly line--finished--and I'm 236

standing in the doorway of the hangar. And Willow Run is a tremendous facility--it's still there making autos. And down the road there is the plane and a bunch of people standing there: pilots from the Air Force and pilots from Ford and so forth. And they have to take it up to test it out.

A Look at an Assembly line at Willow Run.

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So they go through all these papers, and I hear somebody say, "Keilson!" And I say, "I'm over here."

And they say, "Well, get your ass down here." And I say, "What is it?" And they say, "Well, you're the flight engineer, and you're going up on a flight!" I had never been on anything other than the New York subway. I said, "What do you mean I'm the flight engineer?" And they said, "Well you are, get up there!" And here I am flying in a B-24." And I loved it. After that, that's all I did, fly around in that plane. I had 1700 hours of flying. And their teaching helped me a lot with that airplane.

Well, we went through several stages after that. I was told that wherever that plane goes I have to go with it.

Okay, so I'm waiting after they removed us to Romulus Air Force Base, which is next to the plant, and we were waiting for an assignment. A couple of days passed, and no one ever said just wait. Well, a few of us went into town, went into Detroit, had a little fun, came back. And they said, "We were looking for you--the plane left."

"What do you mean it left?" I said. "No one told me anything. It had gone to St. Paul, Minnesota. And they 238

told me they'd put me on the next plane to St. Paul, because I had to catch up to my plane. They were supposed to winterize the plane there, and we never knew where it was going. Somehow it leaked out that we were going to go to Madison, Wisconsin, and fly out over Alaska and patrol to see that no planes or enemy came down through Alaska. Well, we spent a little time there and then all of a sudden the whole thing changed.

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Then they said, "No, we're going to go to Liberal, Kansas and do crew training there." So all the winterizing they'd done had to come off, and in fact we had to remove the turret. There was a big rush to get pilots who were being decimated over Germany in the early part of the war. And the problem was that this plane and that plane that were doing the bombing in Germany had any fighter cover. None of the fighters could fly as far as they were bombing. And they were losing hundreds, I mean hundreds of planes--and of course the crews. So there was a big rush to get pilots trained. We were supposed to get a crew trained to go to England, but that changed. So instead I spent the next year in Liberal, Kansas and did the training. I'd take pilots that just came out of flight school and the biggest plane they had was a piper cub that they were trained on. And the pilots trained them on the flight side. But my job as flight engineer was to tell them about the different parts of the airplane, what they had to watch for and some of the emergency procedures. At the same time, on the training flights the flight engineer's job was to keep track of the fuel consumption and synchronize the propellers because with four engines they all have to be at 240

the same speed or else there would be a problem with vibration. And then, for example, if they wanted to teach them what to do if they had an emergency they would whisper to me, "Shut off the fuel on engine number one."

So I had to shut the valve off. And they wanted to see how the student pilots would react while flying. And the way it worked, the propeller kept turning even thought the engine was off--because of the wind--but it had no power so the air speed would be slowing down. Most of the crews immediately looked out because they could feel something was wrong, but they could see the propellers turning so they would put more power to the other three engines--which was the wrong thing to do. And they would watch the cylinder pressure, and the engine would shut off and go down to zero because there's no heat being generated. But most of them didn't know what to do and couldn't figure out what was going on. So after the trainer chewed out the pilot he'd say, "If you know something wrong you've got to do something about it--don't just keep flying. We cut the fuel off!" It's like the engine failed if they wre flying--as if they were hit by a missile or a bomb or whatever--they'd have to feather the engine, which 241

means if the propellers are one way there's drag on them, but you need to feather them so there's no drag on them and you can fly with three engines. Sometimes in the test they'd shut off TWO engines--and then I'd start getting nervous!

A lot of the pilots liked the way I worked. They said, "You're one of the best engineers here--why don't you go to flight school? You'd make a great pilot." I got seven letters of recommendation, but while I was doing the paperwork, they shipped me someplace else. And the next thing I knew I was going to India. They were putting in the latest airplanes--the B-29's (like the one that dropped the atom bomb)--and they needed fuel and supplies. So they set up supply route--well, they always had it--but they put the B-24's on the supply route from India to China, mostly carrying fuel to store for the B-29's that were flying there. It was the worst place to fly. The enemy was the weather. You're flying around "the hump"-which was the Himalaya Mountains. They're 29,000 feet high, and the constant blizzards and terrible winds and snow, ice, and so on--so a lot of planes crashed. From 242

India going across to China on a clear day you could see all the planes below, and they called that the Aluminum Trail.

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Postwar Small Airlines: The Untold History

After I got out of the service and I went back to my job at Pan Am where I was a mechanic's help, I didn't want to be a mechanic. And Pan Am used to post job opportunities within the company. And they had posts for engineers, junior engineers, flight engineers. So I went to the HR department, and told them my background, what I did in the service, and they said "Oh, that's great! I think you're the kind of person we're looking for." (In the service I'd been a Flight Engineer on a B-24.)

And I went once, and they said, "Well, the job is filled. Someone had better qualifications." Went twice, same thing. So finally I said, "What's going on here? Everyone tells me that this is what they're looking for." "Well, we have all these people who come in with college degrees." "Oh, I said, well it doesn't say that. Goodbye, I'm going to go to college." So I went to

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college on the G.I. Bill, but I picked the toughest school in the country to go to, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, to study aerial and mechanical engineering. And I couldn't keep up with it.

So the first summer my sister's husband had an advertising agency and one of his clients was a little airline. Now that period of history in the airlines has never been told. After the war ended, the government said "Incoming pilots being discharged deserve something so we're going to expand the Civil Aereonautics Act, which qualified only the big airlines. We're going to have a new category for small airlines, so all these pilots can come home and start airlines. So send us a letter, and that opened up the era of the so-called non-scheduled airlines. Nobody talks about it. So the restrictions were that the new airlines were allowed to start a business but they could not fly a regular schedule--it had to be irregular==never explaining what that meant, to keep them out of competition with the big airlines. But they were permitted to get the same size airline and fly passengers or freight. (Three big ones went into Freight: Overseas 245

National, the Flying Tigers, and a third.) Otherwise, there were like a couple of hundred smaller airlines trying to make a go of flying. And the fares were lower than the bigger airlines.

So I went to work for this little airline that my brother-in-law had an account with. The second summer, there was another little airline but it was much bigger than the first. The man there said, "Hey, we like the way you work; come work for us." So I went to work for them. And then at the end of that summer, one of the owners of that airline--it was called Standard Airline--he called me over and he was a pilot as a matter of fact, and he said, "We like the way you work. We fired your boss. We're putting you in charge." I said, "Wait a minute! I'm going to college." But he was getting on an airplane and said, "We'll talk later." So I tried going back to college, but I wasn't making it. So I called him back after a month, and I said "Okay, what are you offering?" And he named a salary that I thought was a nice salary, and I went to work for them.

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And that airline, Standard Airlines--we changed the name to North American Airlines--became a competitor to the big airlines. What does that mean? We flew every day. We flew scheduled, but we rotated letters of registration. And there was nothing in the law that was enacted that prevented that. The letter of registration was Standard Airlines. But then there was another one called Viking, and this, and that--dozens of them. So these owners of Standard got four of these little airlines and called the whole combine North American Airlines. So if we had a flight on Monday maybe it was Standard Airlines but it was North American. And on Tuesday, maybe it was Viking but it was North American.

Well, the big airlines went crazy. Up to that point, the only passengers we were carrying were homecoming veterans and merchant seamen and so forth. But after that petered out, we had a big meeting and one of the owners said, “Why not go for regular people?" And so we put a big ad in the Times: "99 dollars to California." Well, that's what triggered the big airlines. They got their lawyers, and they got this and they got that. And they said 247

what we were doing was illegal. Now we had a lawyer who was a brilliant guy, and he said, "I don't know. We're not breaking the regulation." So they went to the Civil Aereonautics Board and said we were illegal and tried to put us out of business. And our lawyer said, "You can't do that. The law says you've got to hold a public hearing."

Anyhow, it carried on for ten years. Meanwhile, we're flying and we're the biggest of the so-called nonscheduled. We're as big at that time as National and Eastern--we flew to California and Miami. And we had equipment that was on a par with the other airlines.

But anyhow, going back, when we first started we opened an office in Philadelphia. I was in charge of the whole east coast. And we'd just opened the office and some guy comes in. And he said, "I got to go to California." I said, "We don't have a schedule yet, but I can book you on another airline." There was another little airline that went to California from Philadelphia. I sold him a ticket, and the next morning I come out with the guy I hired as the manager in Philadelphia, and we're walking through the office. And I said, "Who is that guy standing 248

in the doorway? It's that guy I sold the ticket to yesterday!" Sure enough, I said: "What are you doing here?" "He said, "You don't want to know! I could choke you! I got on this plane that was going from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. The first stop we made was New York. We get to New York and they said they didn't have enough passengers, they were going back to Washington. So we were in Philadelphia, to New York, to Washington, to Boston, and then back to Philadelphia, and here I am. I've been flying all night, and I haven't gotten past Philadelphia. That's what the non-scheduled airlines were like. Some of them would fly half way across the country and then tell the passengers, "We don't have enough money for fuel, so if you want to make it take up a collection."

So these stories got in the paper, and the big airlines would do anything they could to denigrate this new order of airlines. And finally we got so big that we had this big office in New York on 41st street and Broadway, and we were a big airline.

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So they went to the owners and said, "They-meaning Eastern and Pan Am and all the big airlines--we'll give you a five year lease on your airplanes. At the end of that time you can have the planes back, and the price that we'll pay you will be far in excess of anything you can dream of. Just get out of our way. And that's what they did. And the promise was that they had to give the employees jobs at Eastern--which they never did. But then I went to work for another new airline that started.

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Picture of Herb Taken for Publication in Pamphlet for Airline

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My Sister, the Swimmer

Swimming at one point was a major part of my life.

When I was thirteen or fourteen I was at Rockaway Beach one summer, and the ocean at some periods of time were huge. And my greatest enjoyment was to to under the wave, have the wave break over me, and then pop up on the other side, free and clear. But I had an older sister. I was a good swimmer; she was a great swimmer. And she had a boyfriend, and they used to go out in the ocean.

They'd go so far out in the ocean that people were standing on the edge of the beach or the boardwalk saying, "People are so far out there you can hardly see them!" A few times I tried to keep up with them but it was impossible. She was just--I can't tell you what swimmers she and her boyfriend were. They were at the channel between Rockaway Beach and Far Rockaway Beach, and to swim across that channel was like swimming across the English channel. And they used to do it all the time. The one time I tried to keep up with them, the tide and the waves and 252

everything were so big I thought I was going to drown. I thought it was over for me. I turned around to go to safety. But I just remember my older sister was an amazing part of my life. I can't describe how far out they would go--they were almost half way to England!

Impossible!

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The message Herb wrote to his wife in her high school memory book.

Left to Right: Herb's first wife, Betty; the governor of Puerto Rico, Felice Ricon; Herb; and Jorje Jiminez, the sales manager in Puerto Rico 254

A Strategy for Whiners

When I moved to Florida after I retired from American I was working with this small airline. But it was big enough that it would fly from New York to Miami mostly, and being in the airline business, even today (today it's worse than ever), you always had two planes. If one was late, delayed, the weather was bad, we'd all call the airlines. Hey, I was supposed to go, I was supposed to go to Boston, they took me to New York, I had to take a bus back. What are you going to do about it? And I noticed that the girls in reservations, mostly girls, men would try and placate these people but it was impossible.

So I used to have meetings with them. I'd say, "Look, if you get somebody on the phone who's just completely outrageous, don't argue with them. Just say, ‘Just a moment, I'll get the supervisor to talk to you.’ So if you get somebody, just call me--get me out of my office, and I'll speak to them.” So this one day we had a flight that was supposed to land in New York and instead it landed in 255

Baltimore, and it was a big problem. It wasn't our fault completely--the weather was bad. And this one girl called me over, she said, I have this terribly irate passenger on the phone, I can't talk to him. I said, let me have him. I picked up the phone and said, "Hello, this is Mr. Keilson, I'm the manager, can I help you? And he starts cursing, and screaming, and yelling. And he says, "Now look, I'm a lawyer." And I said, oh, wait a minute, you're a LAWYER? He said, "Yeah?" And I said, "Did you report that to the desk before you took off for the flight?" And he said, "What are you talking about?" And I said, "There's a federal aviation law that requires lawyers to tell flight attendants before you get on the plane." "I never heard of such a law!" And I said, "Well, that's it! I'm sorry." He stops and says, "Wait a minute, are you pulling my leg?" And I said, "Yeah, I am pulling your leg. Now if you quiet down and you want to talk sensibly, I'll talk to you. You may be entitled to some compensation. Just relax, take it easy." And I gave him a free ticket for the next time he flew.

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My Time Before a Grand Jury

One of my responsibilities as being in charge of leisure travel was charters. For some reason or other the charter rules that were set up in 1938 were never changed, and they were totally ridiculous and stupid. All the airlines that flew charters tried not to violate those regulations, but you had to do it. For example, one of the chapters in the regulations was called "pro-rata charters."

Let's say you had a two hundred seat airplane and you had two hundred passengers. The people who were eligible to charter an airplane had to belong to an organization of some kind. And you had to belong to it for more than six months, you couldn't just join and participate in the charter. It had to be like "The Sons of Italy" or whatever.

The people who organized the charter had to be members of that organization for more than six months. So they'd get a price from the airlines, let's say it came out to two hundred dollars without the hotels and the other parts. So you had two hundred people paying two hundred dollars.

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If ten of them cancelled the regulations said that they could not be replaced, that the rest of the people had to pay more. So obviously some people said "Well, I can't afford to pay more money, I'm going to cancel.� So then it's more money.

So as time wore on and everyone could see how stupid it was, the tour operator began replacing the people who cancelled. And some of the replacement steps that they took violated this regulation. But that's the way it worked for years because charters were only a small part of the major airlines' operation.

When I took over the charter department at American they were doing maybe two million dollars a year in charters. The only charters they had were like if the democratic party wanted to move some people they'd charter an airplane from one of the major airlines. It wasn't really something that most of the people participated in. But after these other little airlines were approved, all of them started getting into the charter business.

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So when I got to American I said, to my boss, "You know this is a big area of revenue, do you want to get into the charter business?" “Oh yeah, we've got a lot of planes that aren't getting enough utilization.�

I said, "great."

So we built up a big charter business. What they used to making annually was the amount we were making every month or so. So everybody was happy. And I was beginning to use planes that were jumbo jets too. We were flying mostly to Los Vegas.

Now along comes deregulation. And after that big fight they decided to deregulate the charter regulations.

So in the spring of 1977 or 1978, they put out the new charter regulations that would take effect the following January. And those established what they called "Public Charters," which meant that anybody could set up a plane with charters and sell it to anybody. It made sense.

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Lo and behold the Civil Aeronautics board sends a letter to the presidents of all the airlines saying: "Even though the new regulations go into effect January 1st, you have to adhere to the old charter regulations between now (which was something like April) and the end of the year."

So the letter went to the president of American, and he calls a big meeting that included the legal department.

And the guy reads the letter and he says, "How are we doing on regulations?" I said "Well, I don't get involved with that. My job is to get the charter, get the business, turn it over to the sales manager of whatever city it's from, and then he has to check out whether it's legal or not But between you and me nobody knows what's legal. So maybe there are some violations." So the lawyers said, "Well now you're going to have to be responsible for that."

And I said, "Nope. I'm not going to be responsible for that.

YOU’RE going to have to be responsible for that. You're the legal department. You look at every charter contract.

You decide whether it's legal or not. Otherwise I'm going to tell Crandall--who was the big boss--that we have to cancel all these charters if that's going to be the concern.

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I have a meeting with Crandall, and I said, "I'm not going to be responsible for this. There's no way that I have the time to check every charter that we're doing. So my recommendation is that we just cancel all the charters until . . . " "Well,” he said, "Well how much business do we have?” "About three four million a month." “Oh no,” he said, “I don't want to lose that much revenue. You have to figure out a way to run these charters.”

So I have a meeting with all these sale managers, mostly out of New York and other big cities, and I said "You now have to stress the legality of every charter. You sign the contract." Spring and summer go by and comes January 1st we get a letter that the Civil Aeronautics Enforcement Bureau is bringing charges against American, TWA, United and so forth for violating charter rules. And they set up a grand jury. They're going to really make an example out of everybody.

The grand jury started in January or February and American of course got concerned so they hired an outside attorney especially for the grand jury. He has a meeting with all of us. He says, "I'm going to represent everybody 261

here." He says, "Some of the grand juries are tough, I don't now how this one's going to be. I can't go into the Grand Jury room with you, I have to sit outside. So if any of you have anything you want to hide or anything, don't do it, tell the truth.” I said, “Okay.”

I get a notice from the grand jury with a date that I have to appear before them. So I go to the grand jury and I sit there, and this prosecuting attorney’s first words are: "Now you're the target of this investigation. DId you know that?" I said, “No what do you mean that I'm the target?

What does that mean?” And so I went out and talked to the attorney who was sitting outside. I said, "What do they mean I'm the target?" “Well,” he says, “that's what they do. They pick out different people as the targets.” I asked, “What am I supposed to do?" He said, "Get up there and tell the truth. So I said, "Fine."

And I go back, and the guy starts up, and he's a real SOB, and he starts saying, “Now you’ve heard of Charter Tours Incorporated.” And I said, "Yeah, they’re one of the tour operators." “So you know who they are?” he says. “Well, in your many visits to their office didn't you 262

notice that they were engaged in illegal charters?” I don't answer the question. He says, “I'll repeat the question.”

He repeats the question. The chairman or the acting judge--which is really one of the jury member--says to me, "What's the problem?" I said, 'I've never been to their office. He can't ask me a question like that.” “Oh,” he says, so he turns to the attorney and says: "You have to rephrase your question." The guys says, "What do you mean?" So he calls him up to the front and says, "He's never been to any of their offices. How can you ask him about his many visits to their offices?" Those are the kind of questions they'd try.

So the attorney got off of whatever they were trying to say in that case but then asked me all these other questions. He said, "Now you're familiar with all these charter rules?" I said "Yep." He said, "So that if a charter agent in State Island sold two tickets to the public to go on the charter that would be illegal?” I answered, "Right."

And he went through a whole bunch of these. Then we broke for lunch. When we came back from lunch he says, "Now we'll take off from where I was. Now you've already 263

admitted that you knew there were violations." I said, "Whoa!, I never admitted any such thing. You were just asking me hypothetical questions. I never said anything like that.” So he read the question back. Those are the kinds of things that they do.

The upshot was that they dismissed me from the stand. Afterwards, the attorney for American said to me, “Now you have to get your own attorney. We'll pay for it but you need to get your own person to represent you.”

And the same went for each of the other people--the sales manager for New York, and so forth. And so I got an attorney, and now every day I'm being called--I still remember his name Botacci was the prosecutor--having meetings, and the upshot was they wanted, well, during the questioning they said, "Did you have direct orders from the chairman or the president of American Airlines to violate these charters? I said, "No, I never talked to them about charters." “Do you mean to say that you never had any conversation with Mr. Crandall or Mr. Casey about charters?” I said, "No. Why would I?” So in the private meetings they said, “We want you to write a 264

personal statement that you were ordered to violate these regulations.” And that's what they wanted, they wanted the bigwigs. So he could make a name for himself. I said, “No, that's not true.” “Well, if you don't sign the statement we're going to indict you for perjury.” I said, "And if I do make the statement, what do you want me to say?" So he says, Well, at the next meeting we'll tell you.”

Months and months go by before the next meeting.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to do my job and at the same time I'm being called away. So my attorney hands me a paper and says, “This is what they want you to sign.” The letter stated that I violated the regulations on this particular charter on October 5th, blah blah blah for the sons of italy or whatever it was, and that I violated it because I was told by the bosses to just run the charter. I said, “We never had a charter on that date. There was no such thing. You want me to sign a letter on a non-existing charter saying that I knew it was a violation?” I said to my attorney to tell this guy to get lost. So my attorney had to explain that in his view they would have to go before a regular judge, and

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we'd see them in court. And we never heard another word from them after. Not a single word: nothing.

But in the meantime, I had a meeting with Crandall, the man in charge, and I said, "You know this is getting ridiculous. These people want me to lie and say you gave me orders to violate the charters. I'm not going to do it, but they keep pressuring me.” So we agreed I'd take a leave of absence, and he gave me two years pay. (I probably should have gotten more and been really covered.” And he said “You’ll always have a job here.” I got involved in other stuff, and then after a few years went by when they dissolved the grand jury he said, "You'll always have a job here." So after a couple more years had passed, I called and said “I've been consulting for a lot of people and making a pretty good living. But I'm ready to come back." He said, "Well, a lot of time has passed." I said, "Bob, you gave me your word, right? Do you have a statute of limitations on your word? He said, "You son of a gun." By this time they had moved to Dallas. I wasn't even sure I wanted to move to Dallas. He said "Alright.”

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Anyhow, I went there and met with a guy who was my original boss. He said, "Okay, you'll get a job. I'll set up the department." I called the next week: he was fired.

I said, "Bob, what happened? Mailer was fired?" He said, "Something I can't help. You'll need to talk to this other guy--a guy I couldn't understand. So I just said, “Just forget about it.�

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Our Luggage Takes a Vacation

My son Gary got married in Green Bay, Wisconsin, because his wife was from Green Bay and her family was there. So we all went from here. And my wife had packed up all our finery for the ceremony. And the flight we took was on Eastern Airlines from Miami, where we were living, to Chicago, and then Chicago to Greenbay on another carrier. We took the Eastern flight, we get to Greenbay--no luggage. Not one piece of luggage.

So we spent the next few days before the wedding ceremony having to get clothes. I mean, I spent I don't know how many hours going back to that connecting carrier, and also to Eastern, and they can't find the bags, and so on and so forth. Well, finally I had to go out and rent a tuxedo, and my wife got a dress or a gown from somebody.

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And then after the ceremony we went back to Florida. And since I was in the airline business, I knew a lot of people at Eastern. So I immediately went to their baggage department and said, "What happened to our bags? How could they all disappear?" And this lady said, "Well, we'll check. I'll give it my personal attention." And lo and behold a few days later she calls me back and says, "I don't know how this happened, but your bags went to Barbados in the Caribbean." We were going to Green Bay, Wisconsin. I said, "How could the bags go to Barbados?" She said, "I don't know but we're in touch with them and they have your bags and will ship them back. I'll call you to let you know what flight they're on and you can come out and get them."

So she called me a few days later and said, "They're going to be in here tomorrow, and you can come pick them up." She calls me back a couple of hours later and says, "No, they didn't get on that flight." And it goes on

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Brothers Gary and Robert Kielson

Herb (second from left) with sons Gary, Robert, and Jeffry (left to right) at Robert’s wedding.

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like that for two or three days. I'm saying to myself, "How is this posible?" Finally she calls and says, "The bags are coming in on such and such a date."

So I go to the airport and go out to the baggage department, and the bags were there. I picked them up and looked inside. We had a very large soft bag with a lot of clothes packed into it besides a regular suitcase. And it had a zipper on it but no lock. So I looked, you know, "Well, let me see if anything's missing. . . Well, it doesn't look like anything's missing." So I said, "Okay, so do I have to go through customs?" She says, "No, goodbye."

So after I got home, I was thinking, "That's weird.

The bags come up not on this flight but on that flight. And then when they come up, no customs?" And we had checked them in curbside, so my suspicious mind said, "There's something screwy with this deal." So I called up the FBI, and I said, "This may not be anything," but I told them the story. And I said, "Why would my bags go to Barbados?" I think I'd watched a t.v show that had a plot like this. And the thing that bothered me was because I'd worked in the airline industry, I knew that there was a 271

three letter code that goes on the bag to show what city it's going to. And Barbados was BD something, not even close to Greenbay's code. So okay, the guy took the information, and "Thanks for the information," and so on.

Months later in the newspaper in Florida, a big headline: FBI CRACKS DRUG RING! And they arrested the curbside people at Eastern and other people. When you checked in curbside, the baggage guy would check to see if there was a bag that was easy to get into. And they would ship it down to a Caribbean island, put drugs in the bag, and then the bag would come up here--no customs because the tag would go on the bag: "Lost bag."

I spoke to my youngest son yesterday, and he said: "Remember the time when you lost your luggage?" And I said, "Yeah, I remember the whole story. And I told him.

And he said, "You never told us that last part before. We all knew about the bags, but you never told us about the bags, the drugs, and the FBI."

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The Cycles of Religion in My Life

As far as the religious aspect, I went through different cycles I remember.

My father was ultra-conservative: orthodox. My mother could care less about religion, other than that she followed the kosher rules. My own experience was that on Jewish holidays and every Saturday and so on, my father tried to Herb with his mother and father.

drag me to go to services

with him. As a kid I rebelled. And yet, when my first wife passed away I spent the next year with my younger son who as home, my two older sons were in college, we went

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to every service every morning, every evening, every Friday night, every Saturday. And my feeling was that the Jewish religion was practical, because that year of mourning went by so fast that I don't know how I would have coped with it other than that.

And yet, as a younger kid I did everything to escape going to the temple. My mother and father used to chase me up and down the streets on high holy days to get me to go to the temple.

They had a situation there where because it was orthodox they couldn't write any of the donations. And my father was secretary and would get the numbers out of the box, wrap them in a rubber band, you know, in other words, I had to get the name of the person and how much, and there were boxes with the names and the numbers, and I would wrap them up with a little rubber band and put them away. But anytime that was going on, I would scoot out and go and play.

One other thing. Prior to my wife passing we moved out to Long Island, we built a new building for the temple,

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we went every Friday and Saturday: it was more of a social thing at that time. And then, after a few more setbacks, I departed a little from any connection with religion other than the high holy days and that kind of thing.

There were two things at play when I returned after my wife's death. Number one, my youngest son wanted to do it. Number two, I had a responsibility to him to do it.

But once I got used to it, it was something that I wanted to d

Herb and hisWWII first wife, vet Betty, takes on either honor side of flight the governor for of Puerto Rico, Felice Ricon. ‘unbelievable’ experience

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Patricia Roy The Landmark Posted June 12, 2014

On May 18, Herb Keilson joined 62 other veterans of World War II on a trip to Washington D.C. courtesy of Honor Flight New England, part of a national program that flies veterans free of charge to view national monuments to their lost brothers-in-arms.

The Honor Flight left from Logan Airport and landed in Baltimore. Each veteran traveled with a family member or volunteer who traveled at his or her own expense and was able to give assistance to the veteran throughout the 24 hour trip.

The group visited the World War II Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery to watch the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Korean War Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial Wall were also stops on the trip.

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Keilson was an Air Force flight engineer aboard a B-24 bomber, also known as a “Liberator” during the war, flying missions over Burma and China.

Keilson has regularly attended “The Wings of Freedom Tour” that is staged periodically at Worcester Airport, featuring various military aircraft including the B-52.

This, however, was his first visit to the nation’s capital to see the World War II Memorial that was dedicated in 2004. The memorial honors the 16 million veterans such as Keilson who served under their nation’s flag, and pays tribute to the more than 400,000 who gave their lives as well as their service.

Keilson described the trip as “unbelievable.”

“The outstanding thing to me was the reception from the public,” he said. “In Baltimore, when people saw all the vets in wheelchairs, they lined up and applauded. They hugged and kissed us.”

Wheelchair use was required by the Honor Flight organization, he said. Not surprising since even the

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youngest WW II veterans would be approaching 90 years old.

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Those Who Serve: WWII Years Launch Lifelong Passion for Flying

Posted Sep 1, 2017 at 6:00 AM

HOLDEN - When Herbert C. Keilson signed up for the Army Air Force, his mother Mary said no. His father Ben

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took another view, telling him something he would remember the rest of his life.

“My father said, ‘When you need your country, it is there for you. When your country needs you, you need to be there for it,’” he said.

Mr. Keilson, 93, served his country in World War II as a flight engineer, with a rank of technical sergeant on a B-24 bomber, flying “The Hump,” a hazardous supply route over and around extremely high mountains from India to China.

Before he went to war, Mr. Keilson grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a clothing pattern maker who struggled through the Great Depression. He spent his childhood playing stickball and later softball on the streets of Brooklyn with a big gang of friends. The highlight of the year was a family vacation in a bungalow on Rockaway Beach in Queens. Although his family, like many families, struggled financially, he has no complaints.

“I always look back at what a great life I had as a teen,” he said.

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To help the family make ends meet, as a teenager Mr. Keilson delivered newspapers for the Brooklyn Eagle, and delivered finished garments to customers for a local tailor.

As an aside, Mr. Keilson said politics have not changed much over the years. In the current election, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont has advocated that the top 1 percent of wage earners share their wealth. When Mr. Keilson was in high school, he had to cross a field every day after school to get to the subway. In the field there were often people on soapboxes giving speeches.

Their message was the same as today: Redistribute the wealth. He said his sister Harriet warned him to stay away from them.

“She told me, ‘Those people are communists,’” he said.

Mr. Keilson avidly follows politics today, and said he is more worried about the views of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump than he was about the communists in the 1930s.

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After high school, Mr. Keilson could not afford to go to college. He worked for a while as an usher at a local movie theater before he was accepted into a program that would change the direction of his life. In the late 1930s, he joined a National Youth Administration program in Eastport, Maine.

The program was aimed at giving working skills to Depression-era young adults who could not afford training. In Maine, Mr. Keilson studied aircraft mechanics.

When he completed the course, at age 18, he took a job with Pan American Airlines as a mechanic’s helper. Two friends trained with him and took similar jobs. In 1942, with the country at war, he and his two friends got together during a visit home to Brooklyn and decided to enlist.

Mr. Keilson already knew the risks. An uncle, also named Herbert Keilson, had enlisted with the Marines after Pearl Harbor. He was killed at Wake Island. In June 1942, with the blessing of his father, Mr. Keilson joined the Army Air Force. From there he traveled to Miami for training; then to Amarillo, Texas; to a Ford plant in 282

Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he and other aircraft engineers were assigned a B-24 bomber to follow through the assembly process; and Liberal, Kansas, where he received more training.

In Kansas, the plane was stripped down for speed and maneuverability, which was needed when Mr. Keilson was sent to India as part of an effort to aid in the fight against the Japanese in Burma and China. He recalled flying out of the Assam Valley of India on many treacherous trips to China through high winds, storms and other hazards. The route to China became known as the Aluminum Trail because of the many airplanes that crashed along the way. Nearly 600 airplanes and more than 1,300 crew members and passengers were lost.

With the Burma campaign winding down by the time Mr. Keilson’s crew arrived in the war zone on Christmas Eve 1944, their task became flying gasoline and other fuel to bases in China. The fuel added to the hazards already faced flying The Hump.

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“Every flight was an adventure,” he said.

Mr. Keilson remembers a few amusing stories from his time overseas. He said when they arrived in India, there was no refrigeration, thus no way to keep their beer ration cold. His solution was to take it for a flight in their B-24. At 18,000 feet, the temperature was 50 below.

When they returned, the beer was ice cold.

Mr. Keilson also discovered one of his favorite pastimes while in India. During free time between missions, Red Cross volunteers taught him to play the card game bridge. At 93, he still plays bridge three times a week at the Holden and Worcester senior centers, and at the Jewish Community Center in Worcester.

During combat operations, Mr. Keilson was never injured, but he suffered a nagging injury before being sent overseas during a stop in El Paso, Texas, to refuel. With no one available to do the refueling, he volunteered. He was standing on top of the airplane when another plane landed and took the wrong route toward its hangar. Instead of taking a taxiway, it headed directly for Mr. Keilson’s

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plane. Realizing what was happening, he jumped off, injuring his back. The plane struck his plane, but fortunately neither exploded. He returned to duty after five days, but the pain in his back never went away. After he left the Army Air Force, he received assistance from the U.S. Veterans Administration, which also placed him on disability.

After the war, Mr. Keilson worked more than 50 years in the airline industry for many different airlines, including Pan Am, American and Trans Caribbean Airlines.

Mr. Keilson married his high school sweetheart, Betty, in September 1945. When she passed away in 1972, he married for a second time. Eight years ago, when his wife Annette died, he moved to Holden to live with his son Gary and his wife, Susan. Mr. Keilson has three sons, Gary, Jeffrey and Robert, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Flying has become a lifelong passion for Mr. Keilson, and he has become a regular speaker when the Collings Foundation’s Wings Of Freedom Tour brings its B-24 and B-17 bombers and P-51 fighter plane 285

to the area. He said he will speak to visitors Sept. 23-25 when the tour lands at Worcester Regional Airport.

Of his years in the Army Air Force, he said he would do it again. He believes it is something every young person should do.

“I would not be against a two-year service requirement,” he said. “For me, I went in a boy and came out a man.”

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Natalie Maynard

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Family Secrets

While looking through an old photo album the other day, I found a picture of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, sitting in a chair out in the yard with a baby girl child in her lap. It reminded me of the story Mom told the other three of us about my older sister, Carryl’s, birth. I turned the album page and there was my grandmother again with all four of us, Carryl, my older brother, with my twin brother and myself sitting in her lap.

We were told the story when we were older teenagers that Carryl’s birth father was not the same as our Dad. That was about all she told us. Dad had formally adopted her at some time after he married my Mom. What a shock! All our young lives we never knew that Carryl had a differerent father. We grew up never knowing that so many knew the story, but had been sworn to keep the secret, including Carryl. I don’t know why I didn’t ask any more.

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Natalie's wedding day pictures with mother, father, and half-sister Carryl.

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Natalie's Class Day Picture

Natalie’s Yearbook Picture 292

Cribbage!

Once Gram, my mother’s mother sold her gas station that was on a back road in rural Connecticut, letting the three young men go that were pumping gas for her, she spent each year divided between my parent’s home in Orange, Connecticut. and my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Somerville, MA. Gram’s legs were badly arthritic and Mom and I were able to help her move every six months -the summers in Orange and the winters in Somerville. My aunt had a third floor walk-up and twice a year we helped Gram climb up and down three flights of stairs, with the help of a railing and her cane and our strong arms. She was so happy to arrive at one place or the other and sit down in her favorite chairs for a much-needed rest.

Gram was my favorite person, and I spent lots of time with her after school, either in high school in Connecticut, or in college in Medford -- a short walk from my Aunt’s house. We talked about school and friends, and

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Natalie stands by as her grandmother, Daisy Janks, cuts her birthday cake.

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problems I might be having with parents, siblings, school, friends, or work. I not only lived at home during high school but lived with my aunt during college. So, I had Gram around during the school years and vacations to be a confidant and counselor. Thanks, Gram!

What we liked to do together was play Cribbage while we talked. She was an expert Cribbage player and would play with anyone willing and available. She actually taught me the game, threatening to take my points if I didn’t claim them myself. She actually pointed them out to me, letting me claim them anyway. What a sweet Gram!

It was a legacy she left to me -- how to play Cribbage, and I have played many different games over the years, but my grandson, Nick, fell in love with the game early on, and he carries a deck of cards and a board with him in his backpack wherever he goes, for a spontaneous game anytime with anyone willing to play.

Thanks, Gram.

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How We Communicate

The way we communicate with each other has changed dramatically since my growing up years, and our children’s and grandchildren’s growing up years. As a child until I came to Eisenberg three years ago, we always had a telephone on a table in the front hall or on the wall in the kitchen. When the phone rang and we answered it, and it was often for another person in the house, we would call out, “Mom” or “Sue” -- telephone”! And if they were not home we would ask to take a message and write it down for them! Eventually a second phone was often put on the nightstand beside the parent’s bed. It was there for a nighttime emergency call, or if we needed to have a more private conversation, or a second person in on the call.

We seemed to be more accessible by phone whether we were called or we needed to made a call. And, if we needed someone’s phone number, we would look it up in the phone book; a new one delivered to our house every 296

year. We depended on the phone to keep us connected to other family members and friends, in work situations, or to contact stores or businesses, or doc.

Now, we are in the age of technology! It is a world of computers and cell phones that are found in most every family today. At least, most people have a cell phone to use to stay in close contact with family and friends.

FaceTime is an application we use to see each other while we are talking. The cell phone gives us instant communication, especially for an emergency call, especially when crises occur!

Even my six year old great grandson has a cell phone to not even call his Mom or Dad when he needs to, but there are games on the phone that any of us can be entertained by, or Facebook or photo albums to look at, or a movie to watch.

What has actually changed my world for me since I came to Eisenberg was that I can send written messages to my daughters, siblings, and friends, even group them together in one message. Folks can take or send photos to

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each other or put them on Facebook along with a written message that we can respond to. Also, I can put any call to me on speaker phone so the volume is louder, so I can hear without putting it by my ear! We can even talk to the phone, to ask directions of it, to ask it to send messages for us, to make a call for us, and much more. Wow! We certainly live in a different world now!

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Baked Beans and Brown Bread

As a child, Saturday night supper was primarily baked beans and brown bread, along with different asides like baked ham or hot dogs, also potato salad and cole slaw. I remember coming home from school on Fridays being given a large pot and two pounds of raw pea beans. I would sit on the floor and sort through the beans , looking for small stones that were in the original bags. The pan was filled with cold water and the beans were soaked overnight.

Saturday morning, the beans were strained by my Mom, put back in the pot with water to cover and cooked in boiling water, until you lifted a spoon full, blew on them, and the outer skin would start to crack open. Mom would drain them and put then into a large brown pottery bean pot and add all the flavorings -- salt pork, molasses, brown sugar, salt, and dry mustard. Stir the beans and add water as needed and slow cook them in the oven until the

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beans are well cooked. I remember that I got to be one of the tasters to be sure the beans were fully cooked.

While the beans are baking, Mom would make steamed brown bread. Mom had a triple steamer, three triangle pans that fit in a large kettle surrounded by steaming water that she had put the mixed ingredients into especially with molasses, brown sugar, raisins or currants, and we steamed the pans on top of the stove until the brown bread was done. The loaves of brown bread were then slid out on a board and cut into thick slices, ready to be served!

I remember that all our dinners were particularly formal, Dad standing at the head of the table serving the meat, and then we would all pass the plates down to Mom sitting at the foot so she could serve all the side dishes. We kids and my and other guests sat along the sides. I was relegated to set and clear the table and help wash up after, as I was the only girl most of the time. And, we never sat down to eat until Dad came home from work, usually not before 7:00. I always loved Saturday night dinners, especially the beans and brown bread, with lots of butter.

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And afterwards, we cleared the table and brought in the dessert. Sometimes the dessert was Indian pudding!!

The Boston baked beans and brown bread recipes are two of the many that were handed on to me by my Mom. They went back generation by generation to early New England cooking, even brought over from England on the Mayflower! I had all my Mom’s recipe cards, and cooked any of the same dishes for my own family. It seems that traditional Friday night suppers seemed to end during my children’s generation, as my children's family meals become more and more informal, as defrost, take out, or eat out becomes more and more popular. Now, instead of passing plates around the table, it’s more typical to pick up a paper plate and serve yourself from the buffet. But, I 301

can still taste those delicious beans and brown bread just by thinking about them!

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Wedding Expectations

I was married in mid-August of 1957, as I had just received my Bachelor’s Degree in Physical Education and completed another six-week summer job as Waterfront Director at a girl’s camp in Maine, and was preparing to begin my first full time work as a high school girl’s physical education teacher. My expectations for the job was great and I was looking forward to beginning! I had little time for expectations!

My wedding was the high light of the August social season in my home town, and my mother was taking care of all the preparation details from the time I got engaged on my December birthday. It seemed easy for Mom, as she had already done the same thing for my sister fourteen years earlier! Everything went according to social protocol; the invitations, my dress, the attendants dresses etc., the register of my silver, china, and chrystal at the upscale stores downtown, the church bulletins, flowers.

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Natalie and her husband, Herb.

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The church women planned a receiving line and reception to follow the wedding in the church hall. Mom even had my picture taken in my gown before the wedding (it is still hanging on a wall in the home we raised our kids in), and also hiring a local photographer to take pictures from the beginning of the bridesmaids luncheon to the family’s final return to my parent’s home after the celebration. Mom had high expectations that all will go perfectly! It certainly seemed to made her day perfect, and mine!

As my four daughters grew and matured, I looked forward to when they might each get married. My expectations were quite different because I had made a decision to let them plan their own weddings, if and when they were to happen. Three of the four had backyard weddings.

Linda, our second daughter, was first, as she was already expecting her first child of three. The wedding was at her in-laws home where they were going to live, and she had her older sister by her side at the wedding. They looked lovely! They had invited close family and friends 306

to be there to share her exciting day. It was a beautiful wedding and had a lovely party to follow -- just what we all had anticipated!

From left Natalie’s husband,Herb Maynard, daughter Susan, daughter Lisa , grandmother Irene Harlow, Beth and Byron Davis, Herb’s mother Celia Maynard, and Natalie

The next daughter to get married was our third daughter to get married, and chose to do so in our side yard. With her next older sister by her side, they looked lovely, and all her close family and friends were present, and the ceremony was followed by celebration, good food 307

and conversation. Again, it was their choice of where and how the wedding would take place, and not long after they bought our home from us and raised two children there.

Great expectations!

The next family wedding was my Seattle daughter, the oldest, and she was marrying another woman. They had decorated everything beautifully, themselves included, and her next youngest sister was by her side. I was looking forward to the day, as I had come to terms with the idea that she had chosen a same sex partner to marry. They prepared to adopt an Indian baby girl at birth a few months later! Things went as I expected, but sadly there was a divorce a few years later. They agreed to shared parenting living around the corner from each other, and all is going well now. Mixed expectations!

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Our last daughter lived in New York at the time she chose to get married, and she did not want to be the center 309

of attention, as a big wedding seems to do. Her choice was to just go to the office of the justice of the peace and have a simple ceremony. A little while later she chose to have a gathering of close family and friends at our home to help her celebrate the happy occasion, which we all gladly looked forward to! More happy occasions!

My expectations changed over time from my own wedding to my youngest daughter’s, from an elaborate formal day to a small simple ceremony. Since my Mom orchestrated most of mine, but I mostly let go of what the four girls planned for themselves. I helped where I could, 310

but left the rest to them. The expectations were theirs, but I too looked forward to each event with joy!

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Coping with Depression

“I am good, kind, caring, loving, happy, healthy, patient, and peaceful!�

Do you know what affirmations are? The above are what I say to myself with every stroke I take in the pool, every step I take going down the stairs, even when I have trouble trying to get to sleep. It is my way of coping with depression.

I suffered with depressive episodes after the death of my father, my mother, and my husband. It was an overwhelming sadness that enveloped me; it gets in the way of everything I try to do. Working with therapists and psychiatrists, and taking many different medications did nor seem to easily help me improve my melancholy mood.

Time helps, plus the loving care of my spouse and four children to get me back to daily living, back to working

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again. In fact, I have had a wonderful life, I had some wonderful accomplishments, in spite of, not because of!

The trigger that caused these depressions was an abduction and molestation at 16. While waiting at a bus stop for my Dad to come pick me up one night, a man in a truck stopped and told me at gun point to get in his vehicle. He drove around the small town I lived in, while I cried and begged him to let me out -- I sobbed that I would get myself home somehow. He stopped the truck in a secluded area and continue to molest me while I cried and begged to be let go. I don’t know why but suddenly he yelled at me to get out and drove off. I ran the two miles or so home and told my Mom. Her response was, “Go take a bath and go to bed. You’ll be fine in the morning!” And I did! My Dad never said or done anything! We never talked about it as a family, and my parents never told the police -- never told anyone. Another episode of keeping secrets!

It wasn’t until after each parent’s and then Herb’s death that I fell into a deep depression, and thank God,

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that I was able to work through them over time with counseling and medication. This last depressive episode came upon me while living by myself, first in Rutland, and then here at Eisenberg. What helped me the most was finally working with a female psychiatrist and a female social worker. We found a balance of medicine and conversation to help me feel good, and the social worker helped me develop some positive statements to help cope each day and night. Life is now good! But, I still have to continue to work at being my own best friend as I reach out to others.. I continue to use positive affirmations. “I am good, kind, caring, loving, happy, healthy, patient, and peaceful!!

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How Long, O God?

How long, O God, will it take me the loss of innocence to see?

How I finally started to process what really happened to me!

You believe your parents will always Be there to protect -- defend you!

All loving, filled with the wisdom to watch over all that you do.

Oh! The terror of being abducted The fear -- degradation. -- the shame!

God, will I ever forgive them?

Why did I feel so to blame?

The torture it was to keep silent to wash all the sorrow away; to feel I would always be different.

What would the good people say?

From then on I no longer trusted 315

my parents to be there for me.

I began to protect and defend myself -a lonesome way to be!

The death of. Y parents awakened in me all the grief, the pain, the despair.

The lose of the chance to recover with them The closeness that at one time was there.

O, God! Help me now to forgive them as they did what they needed to do.

For I never spoke up, tell them my need to be held, comforted, loved!

How long, O God, will it take me the loss of innocence to see?

Have I finally started to process what really happened to me?

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Natalie's daughter, Beth, created this illustration to accompany one of Linda’s favorite meditations.

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Keeping busy!

I wake each day to the thought, “What do I want to do to keep busy!�

I take a shower and ponder my choices.

Work one of the many jigsaw puzzles, Searching for just the right piece.

Knit on the pink baby blanket, Knit four, purl eight, over and over.

Crochet a soft woolen hat, Single and double crochet, row after row.

Sew a quilted lap robe, one square beside another

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Find friends for a cup of tea or a game, MahJong, Bridge, Cribbage, Rummycube.

Read one book after I’ve finished another, About people's lives from many times and places.

Watch a NetFlix, a serial or documentary.

Swim in the pool, affirming each stroke.

Walking the block, meditating on each step.

So many choices.

Keeping busy keeps me happy!

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Christmas Reflections

Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ. It is observed most commonly on December 25th as both a religious and cultural event, celebrated by billions of people around the world. In the Bible, John 1:14 says about Jesus’s birth that “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son.” The Christmas season, running from late November to early January, is synonymous with the seasons of Advent, Christmastide, Yuletide, and Epiphany. It is also called the festive or holiday season, or simply just “the holidays.” It is recognized in many Western and Westerninfluenced countries.

Beginning in the mid-20th century, as Christians became increasingly secularists and more central to 320

American economics and culture, and as multicultural sensitivity began to grow, people began omitting the word Christian and used the term “holiday season� to cover this period of the year. Winter Solstice, the shortest and often the coldest days of the year, occurs during this time as well. In the United States, by the late 20th century, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah and the new AfricanAmerican cultural holiday of Kwanzaa began to be considered part of the holiday season as well -- an end of the secular calendar year festivities. The public schools and public officials stay more secular and have maintained a religious neutrality to not offend people of other faiths.

As a Christian myself, I would like to reflect back on the Christian celebrations around the Christmas season.

The tradition of celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25th appears to date from the 4th century AD, when Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

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In the Christian tradition, the Christmas season starts with Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas, a time of expectation, waiting, and preparing. The first day of Advent is the beginning of the church liturgical year. Advent is a period of preparation for celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Churches display an Advent wreath in the sanctuary to represent everlasting life. The wreath has four candles around the outside to represent hope, peace, joy, and love. One candle is lit each of the four Sundays before Christmas. In the center of the wreath is the Christ candle, which is lit on Christmas Eve, usually at the midnight service.

In their homes, families may display an Advent calendar, which recognizes each day from December 1st to the 25th. The calendars come in different designs but the common element is that something (an ornament, a scripture passage, a candy) is revealed each day to help to highlight the anticipation of Christmas Day approaching.

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Throughout the whole season, stores, people's yards and houses are decorated with bright lights and a variety of ornaments to help display their love, hope, and joy, especially to those passing by. Many families bring either a real or artificial fir tree inside their homes and decorate it with lights and ornaments. I have a ceramic tree that I display every year in my apartment. Poinsettias are common to the Christmas season. They are beautiful plants from Mexico with primarily red and green leaves.

Exchanging of gifts is central to the Christmas holiday, and wrapped gifts are placed under the trees for family and friends to open on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. People greet each other verbally or written on cards and sent during the Christmas Season as an expression of love and goodwill, with phrases like Merry Christmas, Merry Xmas, Happy Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays. The first Christmas card was created in England in 1843. During the same year, Charles Dickens published the novella “A Christmas Carol.” Clement Moore wrote “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” in 1823,

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which ended with the common phrase, “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”

When I was a child, on Christmas Eve we usually read the traditional nativity story as a family, and children hung their stockings by the fireplace in anticipation of the arrival of Santa. Santa Claus is a popular legendary Christmas figure, also known as Saint Nicholas or Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, or Father Christmas. It is said that he brings gifts to well-behaved children, and lumps of coal to those who are unruly. Santa is a portly, joyous, and jolly man with a white beard, spectacles, and a white-trimmed red suit. His tradition is reinforced through songs, radio, TV, films, and children’s books. According to legend, Santa drives a sleigh through the sky pulled by eight reindeer--one of the reindeer was lately named Rudolph with his bright red nose to lead the way.

In my family of origin, the tree was not put up until Christmas Eve. Our family and my children’s family always had a supper of cheese fondue (yum). After that, we went to a late-night, candlelight church service where all the candles in the Advent wreath were lit, including the 324

Christ candle. Throughout the whole season, we sang one carol after another. Many churches ring their bells at the stroke of midnight.

After the church service, we went home, but before going to bed we left cocoa and cookies for Santa with a napkin, which ended up smudged with soot. Overnight, the stockings were filled by our parents with treats and small toys to open first while our parents got a little more sleep. We had a big family feast for dinner and opened more gifts either before or after.

The season of Epiphany, also called Twelvetide, lasts for the 12 days after Christmas. It commemorates the manifestation of Jesus to the Gentiles in the persons of the three Magi (also known as the three ‘kings’ or ‘wise men’) that appear at the stable to give Jesus presents of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. January 6 is the festival day. It is called epiphany because Christians have a sudden realization that Christ is alive to us. There is a related carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” -- singing of 12 “gifts my true love gave to me!”

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I forgot to mention Yuletide! This is mid-epiphany and covers December 31 (New Year’s Eve) and January 1 (New Year’s Day). There were parties and festive meals both days with roaring fires in any real fireplaces, sometimes outdoors! With the beginning of a new calendar year, we all prepared to move forward in our lives with joy and peace.

Gift giving is an essential part of the Christmas Season -- not only to family and friends, but to both secular and religious organizations in honor of the holiday.

This is a wonderful time to start family traditions, or an individual one, to make donations to those less privileged, especially in this multi-cultural, multi-racial world, because year round we see so much need right around us everyday!

Carols: “Joy to the world” and “Silent Night” Seasonal: “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas”

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“Rudolph” “Winter Wonderland

Four generations: Bottom: Daughters Susan and Linda, Natatlie, daughter Lisa. Second Row: Nick Davis, Kira Maynard, mother and child Charlie Pyliotis and Eliza Pyliotis, Beth Mayard Miller, James Miller. Top Row: George Pyliotis, Laura Davis, Andrew Pyliotis, Mark Phoebe Miller, Sander Miller.

In closing, I would to pray that we may all be blessed with God’s love. And, may God fill ours and our families’ hearts and homes with hope, joy, love, and peace. Amen!

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Sue Stafford

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My Italian Noni

My Noni was short, 4’ 8” in her senior years, and had a rather wide and flat build. When her physician asked her how tall she was, she replied, “four by four”.

And, actually she was mostly accurate. She wore wide black shoes for better occasions, such as a funeral or a visit to a new grocery store, but around the house she wore what my sister and I called her “ga-bong” slippers for the noise they made when she walked. She could never sneak up on anyone. Her hair was gray, kind of salt and pepper, and even at her oldest age of 88, it had not turned fully white. For some years she had a curly perm but then grew it longer putting it into a bun. She referred to this as “raising my hair to a puck”, but my sister and I called it her “hair-raising experience”.

I know very little about why she left her family and the farm in northern Italy, the details of her arranged marriage to my Grandfather, or any hopes, fears or

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aspirations she may have held. Her marriage lasted until my Grandfather’s death when I was 11. I remember Noni telling me how lucky she was to have been married to this man. “He didn’t beat me”, she said. He had suffered a stroke and seldom spoke. His face was not animated, and he walked with crutches. No one talked much it seemed.

When she wasn’t at work as a stitcher at the Wearwell Trouser Company, she and my grandfather raised their three children (my two uncles and my Mother), she worked in her vegetable garden and cooked. From her I learned when to pick a squash, green beans or when tomatoes were ripe enough for making a sauce. “Not yet” or “these---put ‘em in” were her guiding words as we carried her basket up and down the rows of plants. Then we’d take the yield to the outside faucet of the house.

“Vee gotta vosh”, she said while holding a bunch of carrots under the water stream. (Many of her fellow stitchers at work were Jewish, so Noni’s Italian had a distinctly Jewish accent.)

Noni could cook. There was most always a pot of tomato sauce on the stove. She favored one made with 331

both ground beef and chicken, and, of course, her homegrown tomatoes. She made pasta from scratch. With eggs.

How many eggs depended on how many men would be at the meal. (“Men, they crazy for these.”) She kneaded the dough, and rolled it on her dowel until, when she held it up to the light, it was perfectly even in texture and as thin as “a vindow shade”. She tried in vain to teach me to roll pasta. “Look to my hands,” she would say. I never did get the hang of it.

Noni was a simple person. She never went farther than third grade in school. She could read very little, but worked hard all her life. When an acquaintance asked her how she was, she always said, “Good as I can be”. She had an apartment at my uncle’s house which she loved, a pension she was proud of, some insurance, and a bank account that paid her interest. She knew she had arrived.

She was most proud of her 7 grandchildren, all of whom graduated from college. Noni once told me, “All people, really, they good. The Italians, the Spanish, the Polish, the Jewish, the Greeks. They voork hard. They good cooks.

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Like us. It doesn’t matter�. A heritage worth bringing to her new country.

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Prayers and Expectations

I came from a very structured family. I was fortunate to have two very good parents, very often strange parents, but good ones nonetheless. My Father was very dedicated to my Mother, my sister and to me. He was also a workaholic who travelled for his job and was frequently away from home for a week at a time. Mom was often left to manage the house, her two girls, her mother-in-law and whatever of her own activities she had time and energy for.

Mom was a believer in home cooking, and home baking. A box mix for anything never crossed our door.

We were served liver once a week. It was the 1950’s version the healthiest meal you could offer your family.

(My sister and I knew it would be the longest meal of the week…) “Do your sleeping at night,” was Mom’s mantra.

There was no lolling around in the morning. We had a

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Sue and her little sister.

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yard perfect for playing, a small sandbox and lots of trees to climb. If it wasn’t a school day, that’s where we went no matter what the weather. Even if we had a cold, it was a regimen of fresh air and some exercise that put us to rights. There was no TV watching during the day or hanging around indoors for us. We had friends in the neighborhood and imagination! We played hard and had fun.

Both Mom and Dad wanted us to be well-mannered and respectful, and, as my Dad often put it, women of fine character. I’m not sure that, as little girls, we truly understood what that meant, but it involved always having your shoes shined and being able to offer a firm handshake. It will get you far in life, he said. We were told to respect the property of others and this seemed to point directly to lawns. Although we could play anywhere on our own property with our friends, we were never allowed to go to a friend’s house without being invited, and when we did, we had to use only the front walk and not cut corners and wear a path on someone else’s lawn. That, we

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assumed, would have meant that we were not women of good character.

My sister and I came from a religiously mixed marriage. Mom and Dad did give some thought to our spiritual upbringing however. Mom was a lapsed Catholic, and Dad hadn’t been to his Episcopal church since, as a child, he’d been caught doing chin-ups on the coat rack by some church ladies and punished. I’m not sure how deep the conversations were regarding what to do with the two of us, but the result was we were sent off to the Congregational Church on the corner with the girl across the street. Neither of us had been baptized, which didn’t seem to worry my parents but always worried me. If I should suffer a premature death, I surely didn’t want to end up in Hell. I stayed with that church until my Confirmation at age 12. It came with a baptism. I felt greatly relieved.

To their credit, Mom and Dad believed that nightly prayers led by one of them would help our spiritual growth. Prayers usually followed our nightly bath time, so our hair was combed, our teeth brushed and we’d 337

swallowed our teaspoonful of Vipenta vitamins that were kept in the refrigerator. There was usually some argument as to whose bedroom to use, but once that was resolved, we had to settle into the bed and close our eyes. When Dad was away, Mom said prayers for us which were fine and rather short. When Dad was home, he usually read us a story first, and then began asking the Lord for blessings on the poor and less fortunate, the hungry, and blessings for all of us, our grandparents, cousins, playmates, and especially the animals (even though we had no pets). At this point, his praying seemed to morph into to some kind of lecture asking the Lord to help us to use good judgement, not wear our hearts on our sleeves, or take any wooden nickels, and not live lives of regret. It was at this point that one or the other of us lost concentration and started to poke or tickle the other, and Dad had to bring the whole thing to a close.

Now that I am an adult, I am far happier outdoors than in. I like being out in any kind of weather although sleet is certainly not my favorite. I can lose all track of 338

time when I’m in the garden. I do manage to accomplish more when I get up early. Many early mornings you can find me swimming laps at the Y before breakfast. I think I’ve been very generous with the rabbits who visit my yard. They are allowed to munch all the weeds in the lawn they’d like, but I maintain firm boundaries against their visiting my vegetable garden uninvited.

I didn’t like liver as a child, and I haven’t eaten it much since. Given its function in the body, I don’t understand why it would be good for anyone. As a second grade teacher, I did think that many of my students would have been far better off to have a caring adult in the home who would gather the family together at dinner with the firm understanding that no one leaves till the liver is done.

It would be darned good for many of them.

As an adult, I have found a spiritual home at a Unitarian church which offers thought-provoking sermons and a rich music program. During his later years, Dad visited the church on a few Sundays and felt very comfortable there. Had his health been better, I could tell he would have loved to attend more often. My church is a 339

wonderful place for me to grow in right relationship with others who share my spiritual journey. I would like to think that it, along with Mom and Dad, has helped me to be a person of pretty good character.

The Challenge of Mom

Sue (left), Sue's Dad Don, and Sue's Sister Bette

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If you were my age and had grown up in the neighborhood I lived in, you probably would have known my Mother. She and my Dad and my younger sister made up my birth family. We lived in the house that my Grandparents built, and that my Father and his siblings were born in. It had a nice back yard with five apple trees for climbing, a space for our swing set, and a driveway long enough for my sister and me to ride our bikes with friends. If you had wanted to come over to play with us, you could, but only if we were already outside playing.

Mom had some firm rules about family dinner time being reserved for “family time� when my Dad got home from work.

My Mother was a stay-at-home Mom while we were little and still in school. The Mom I knew while I was growing up was fastidious about dressing herself and her two little girls and fastidious about keeping the house clean. A trait I did not inherit from her was her zealous habit of vacuuming, especially the drapes and even the walls. She was the original dust buster!

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She loved a beautifully set table for company with candles, a homegrown floral centerpiece, special napkins and the “good” china. She never served the cream puffs she made without a paper doily on the etched glass tray.

She sewed most of our clothes and bought very few, but, when she did, one of us usually got a pink one and the other got a blue one.

If the sun was out, we were sent outside to play. If it was raining, we put on our raincoats and went out to play.

If it was snowing, out we went in our snowsuits. We had fun, and apparently she needed a break.

My job before dinner was putting the silverware on the table. My sister’s was to fold and place the napkins.

We received no allowance. Certain jobs were expected, but we could negotiate for small change.

Mom served as Junior Choir Mother at our church and made sure every child was properly “gowned” and ready to sing the service. She went above and beyond the call and laundered and mended any choir robe that needed

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attention, so all of us looked just right on Sunday mornings.

Her most infamous words feared by my sister and me were: “Do your sleeping at night”. She called us out of bed early each morning, weekend or not, and, if we slept on and were awakened by the vacuum running downstairs, the day was not going to go well.

We were raised to be respectful, polite and honest.

Mom was a “take charge” kind of mother.

As my sister, Bette and I grew into our teen years, Mom supported us in all our school activities. With our increased independence, she became more active in her Women’s Club, Garden Club, and began painting classes.

By the time I was a college senior, Bette was a freshman.

Two college tuitions drove Mom to take a part-time retail job. She loved it, thriving on the responsibility and realizing her new skills. However, when her own Mother became ill, she quit her job to care for her, and not soon after, for my Father as well. In 1993, after a lengthy illness, my Father passed away, and the three of us were

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grief-stricken. Bette and I had no idea how Mom would manage without her best friend and support. Seven months after my Father’s death, Bette died suddenly of an apparent heart arrhythmia. The days that followed were horrible. My happy little family of four was now just Mom and me. And in many instances that would follow, it felt more like Mom vs. me.

Her friends stayed close and tried to get her involved in new things. And she did. At age 76 she took up tennis.

She played bridge weekly, went on senior trips and continued to paint. She purchased a new car all by herself and knew that Daddy would have been so proud of her even though he would have hated the color. An avid walker, she would easily log 3-4 miles daily, and, priding herself on her good health, she cancelled the drug coverage that Dad had kept for her, as she had no plans to ever get sick. She maintained the house inside and out and mowed the lawn herself until she was into her 90s.

It’s hard to say when my husband and I first started noticing signs of Mom’s decline. She did get a bit more tired, began to avoid being out in the sun, the heat, and 344

then the wind. Stories didn’t add up, she often appeared angry or defensive. One year she decided not to make any stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey because she “didn’t think anyone would miss it”. But maybe she forgot. She didn’t pay as much attention to her housekeeping or her personal appearance, and had trouble cooking for herself.

She saw a retina specialist for wet macular degeneration, so it was possible that Mom just wasn’t seeing well. She covered her windows with newspaper. During a very severe winter, when she wasn’t walking due to the ice and snow on the ground, I asked her if she was getting to the post office to mail her bills. She assured me she had plenty of stamps and that she tucked the bills in her mail slot so that the postman would pick them up and mail them for her. “Besides”, she told me, “everybody knows I don’t go out in the snow to walk to the mailbox and they won’t mind if the money’s late”. I began to lose sleep. On one visit to her house, I went through some papers on her telephone table when she wasn’t looking. As I feared, she had several past-due notices. It was then I did what my Mother and Dad taught me never to do. I stole from her.

On one very lucky day, I was able to convince her to add 345

my name to her checking account. That allowed me to become a serial thief, surreptitiously stealing her bills, changing her address to mine, and getting them paid.

I connected with the Alzheimer’s Association. And they helped to draw up a care plan for Mom. But she adamantly refused to have anyone come to the house to help her in any way, with housekeeping, bathing, as a walking companion. We had now entered what I called “The Void”. Without her consent, her local elder service organization or any private agency would not come in, and I could do nothing but try to care for her myself. She resisted all of it. There were times I was so angry, I felt I should just leave her alone to get what she deserved. The rest of the time I was sure someone would put me in jail for elder abuse or neglect. I reached out to some of her friends and neighbors for their input. What they shared with me was frightening: she no longer could remember how to play card games and they were growing weary of explaining the steps to her over and over again. They weren’t having any fun themselves and would not include her any longer on card days. Mom had become confused 346

walking around the corner to her friend’s for tea and was rescued by strangers who recognized her as being lost.

Her friends were trying not burden me with bad news, but this served as a wake-up call for me. I had to face the fact that she was not safe to be at home. Her doctor encouraged me to “do my homework” to explore facilities in the area where Mom might be placed.

The scheme to deliver her to the secure facility where she now resides was invented by both the staff there and by me. Carrying it out made me not only a thief but a liar. And the staff did lots more lying than I did.

“Therapeutic fiblets” is the professional term used, but to me it’s still “lying to my Mother.” I wish I had been more brave on the day when I led her from her beloved house for the last time, the only house she had ever owned. I just couldn’t face delivering her to the facility and seeing her pain and confusion. I do have some very fine friends who volunteered to do the deed for me. I am forever grateful to them. I was an exhausted thief and liar, and, despite knowing in my head that it was the right thing to do, I felt very guilty.

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Mom has lived in assisted living for just over three years. She has recently turned 98 and is in very good physical health. She needs just two vitamins and a tiny dose of antidepressant to ease the adjustment. Yes, I’m still lying to her. I call it a multi-vitamin. Her cognition has declined. Although she’s often not sure exactly who I am when I visit, she knows I’m someone familiar and is happy to see me. She sleeps well, has gained weight from eating 3 hot meals a day, enjoys music and art programs, lunches out, field trips, and, of course, bingo.

Some of my Dad’s last words to me were “I hope someday you’ll want the house”. More guilt. I know that my Dad, had he lived, would not have been able to have done what I did. But I know he’d be proud of me for doing what needed to be done for Mom and relieved to know she is safe and cared for. Sadly, I did sell her house.

It went to a nice young couple who fell in love with it at first visit, and I’m delighted that they did.

As for me, things in the “Mom Department” are so much easier now. I sleep very well knowing Mom is safe, well fed, warm, clean, and in the company of 348

understanding and affectionate people. I do not miss the frequent phone calls from her local Elder Services telling me she didn’t answer the door when the Meals on Wheels were delivered. I do not miss calling her 8 to 10 times each day to be sure she would answer the phone and that she sounded reasonably alert. Nor do I miss the 20 minute drive from my house to hers to do a “body search” when, after the 10th call, I received no answer. I don’t miss the hours of sitting on the floor in front of her non-functioning TV while on the phone to Charter Communications trying to reprogram the television after Mom ripped the cord out of the wall in frustration at not being able to figure out the remote. I don’t miss taping all the buttons on that TV remote that she shouldn’t ever push, only to have her rip the tape off. I don’t miss making her clearly labelled homemade meals and finding them unopened in her refrigerator days later and to have her complain that I write way too big. I watched her eat crackers and peanut butter instead. I am happy not to sit in her house and visit in the dark in only one room of a big house where her dirty clothes were spread on the dining room table “to air—that’s all they really need”. I don’t miss the smell of 349

the house or the arguments when I announced a cleaning person would come. I don’t for a minute miss invading her dark, isolated, lonely world, the one she regarded as safe and secure.

I’ve never been a parent myself. But, if I had been, I’m quite sure I would not have been able to prepare my children for a challenge like this one. Life has a way of coming at you with everything it’s got , with all of its force. Sometimes it’s for the worse. Sometimes it’s for the better, and, right now, I think that’s the way this challenge looks to me. Although I haven’t figured out exactly how, I think my parents must have passed something along to me to help both Mom and me to survive this one. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

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Thinking of Daddy Thinking

Daddy, what were you thinking on Sunday nights Standing in the laundry room Rows of our shoes resting on the newspaper covered counter, paste polish applied and rubbed into their pores with the force of your index finger, waiting for the vigor of your wooden handled brush Our chins resting on the counter top, watching you as the sun set, as Mom stood over the kitchen sink, silently, as the steam rose from her soapy water.

What were you thinking as we leaned closer to you, heads against your thighs, feeling the strong vibrations of your brush against leather, watching the dull paste change to sheen, Mom’s soapy dishes rinsed and draining, the kitchen quiet.

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What were you thinking when you flicked the switch of the overhead light in the bedroom, the high cold light that shown into your opened suitcase, your two girls perched with it on the bed to watch your belongings be placed inside.

What were you thinking so early on Monday as the sun found the windshield as you drove. Breakfast for only three, waiting for Friday to come. All wearing our shiny shoes.

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Thanksgiving

The platter was enormous, so heavy that my uncle had to carry it around the table. The turkey had been carved, the platter arranged with white meat on one side, dark on the other and down the center lay slices of my Noni’s stuffing. “Give your old uncle a kiss,” he said when he came to my place. “What kind of meat do you want?” “A little dark meat and extra stuffing,” was always my reply. “You’re just like me. That’s my favorite too.” He would roast the turkey every year but my Grandmother would make the meat stuffing. The table held the Thanksgiving classics: green beans, mashed potatoes, bowls of warm gravy, but as the platters were passed, I kept my eye on the stuffing, hoping the others wouldn’t love it as much as I did and that there would be enough of it for leftovers. There was nothing I liked better than a stuffing sandwich.

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No recipe exists for Noni’s stuffing. It was somehow vastly more than the sum of its parts, with a flavor so savory and warm and cohesive that no one ingredient could be identified. It was part ground beef and part ground pork. Noni’s home-made white bread was grated into the mix, as was some aged parmesan cheese from “down Shrewsbury Street” along with some good Italian olive oil. Salt and freshly cracked black pepper, and sweated mushrooms. Maybe an egg? And many cloves of garlic. The hours of roasting inside the turkey let the bird’s juices soak in. How much of each ingredient? She never worried about that, and neither did the rest of us.

Whenever she made her stuffing, it had the same wonderful flavor. It’s a flavor that today is no more than a memory.

Some years ago, I was visiting a friend in Montpelier. She teaches at the New England Culinary Institute, and, while I was there, she introduced me to a very fine restaurant which was staffed by the chefs of the Institute. The menu was impressive. When my appetizer 354

was delivered, and I honestly can’t tell you what it was except that it was something stuffed, I took a bite and nearly cried. It was the exact flavor of Noni’s stuffing! I have no memory of the rest of the meal. I had been transported immediately, as if on a beam of white light, to my aunt and uncle’s Thanksgiving table. To the noise of the dishes clattering, people calling to my aunt: “Come and sit down and stop wiping the stove! It’s time to eat!”

To the raucous playing with my five girl cousins. To the nuts, rosy pears, oranges and tangerines piled high for dessert. To the smell of home-made wine being toasted to our many blessings: our friends, our health, our happiness, our family. And my silent thanks for stuffing

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A Job Well Done

In the spring, towards the end of the school year, school field trips are bound to happen. During one of the years when I was teaching first grade, I made the decision to take my class to the Worcester Art Museum. The town where I taught could then be considered a working-class community, and, instead of an outing to a playground or park, I felt that I could use the field trip to expose them to the world of art. A show of hands told me that none of the children in the class had ever even heard of the Worcester Art Museum, I knew I had work to do to get them ready. I wanted them to be familiar with many of the works of art we might see so they would feel a connection with what would be for them a new and very different place.

We began studying details from several of the Museum’s paintings. I made copies of several so they could paint or color them as they wished and then be able to compare them to the artist’s work in the Museum’s 356

galleries. We sculpted with clay, built mobiles, did some potato printing, made mosaics from paper tiles. We even talked about perspective, composition, and threedimensional art. They loved it and grew more excited about the trip as the time grew closer. I had no trouble finding parent chaperones. They captured the enthusiasm from their children. And not one of them had been to the Art Museum either.

I had a wonderful class that year. As any teacher knows, some students are stand-outs, children you never forget even when you’re retired, old and grey. Some you hope will be excellent scholars, gifted musicians, have fulfilling careers or become outstanding parents to their own children. And then there are children who are unforgettable for other reasons. I had one of those that year. His name was Joseph. Joseph was a beautiful child.

He had light brown hair and big blue eyes with curly lashes. He was short in stature and had chubby little dimpled hands. He still wore elastic waist corduroy pants—no snaps or zippers for him. He was very young for the grade having been born in late December, and 357

showed unmistakable signs of not being developmentally ready for the rigors of Grade 1.

Joseph had surprised his parents by being born. His older sister was already married with children of her own, and his two older brothers were well recognized by local law enforcement. His parents were the only gray haired people to visit on Parents’ Night. Although I felt he would have benefitted from an extra year of kindergarten, it was easy to sense that his parents were ready to have him out of the house for a full day of school. Joseph had ability, but spent most of his energy being contrary, oppositional, and just plain defiant. And, on one occasion, he did give me the finger from the bus window as it left school. His Mom found out quite fast about that one. I wondered how he’d behave on the field trip.

When the day arrived for our Museum visit, we were all excited. Mrs. Spear, a most wonderful docent at the Museum, was assigned to be our guide. She really knew her art and knew children. She was delighted to see some of the projects that the children brought with them and marveled at how well-prepared they were. She showed 358

them tapestry, sculptures, Egyptian reliefs, and when she showed them the oil painting “The Peaceable Kingdom”, my little 6-year-olds could explain the pairings of all the animals and the name of the artist. Mrs. Spear could not believe her good luck! On to the Early American Gallery to show them some of Paul Revere’s silver. They were captivated. The group spied a primitive painting of a little boy and led Mrs. Spear to it, telling her all they knew about it. She was thrilled to have a group so engaged in the art they were seeing.

Joseph, meanwhile, was never in the midst of the group but stayed near the back. I kept an eye out. He didn’t participate, but he didn’t misbehave either. I was enjoying the experience as much as the children were. It was heart-warming! Parents were commenting to me that their children knew things about art that they’d never been aware of. They were as happy as I was.

I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened next, and I’m still incredulous that it happened at all. Mrs. Spear led the children to another gallery and while she held the door open for them, I heard a shout. It came from the back of 359

the group. And it was Joseph. “Look, everybody!” he shouted running.” It’s the Kandinsky Abstract!” There he was in his little corduroy pull-up pants pointing to the painting he recognized. The children collectively left Mrs. Spear and RAN to the spot where the Kandinsky work hung. Mrs. Spear scurried to catch up. “Oh, my Lord!” she said as she passed me. From the 6-year-olds I could hear, “Look how big it is!” I painted my background red.

This is green” “I didn’t make mine like anything like this”.

They couldn’t get enough of it. Neither could Mrs. Spear.

We had a jubilant ride on the bus back to school.

We, each of us, adult or child, learned so much that day.

And so did Mrs. Spear.

The following week I had another surprise when the Superintendent of Schools visited my classroom. He asked the children if they’d enjoyed their Museum visit. I wasn’t aware he’d even known about it. But, thanks to Mrs. Spear, he did. She had taken the time to write a note about our visit, how interested the children were, and what a joy it was for her to have led our tour. She had never had a First Grade group so well-prepared and eager to 360

learn. I received the Superintendent’s congratulations, and he added the note from Mrs. Spear to my professional file.

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A Picture in Time Sue Stafford Father and son pose for the camera on the ship’s deck as it departs for Bermuda.

Their long woolen coats resting heavily on their shoulders, hats in hands With eyes as dull as the grey skies overhead, the two men face the camera, obliging.

They steady themselves from the ocean’s waves and shield each other from the biting wind.

Their path a dark and swirling ocean, seemingly bottomless, foreboding: their goal of warmth and rest is far from reach.

Father doing what he could to remedy all that went awry, to protect and to heal.

Son clinging to the ship’s rails.

If only Father could do enough.

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ESTHER WITTNER

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A Confident Woman

My daughter sent me a card that said: “I am because you are.” Inside she wrote, “Dear Mom, Thanks so much for being you. You are a great role model and I am so lucky to have had you and dad to help shape me into the person I am today! You are a very special person, and I am so grateful that you are my mom, love you tons, Wendy.”

You know why she could send that? Because she is confident.

She came from a loving family, but she also gave back.

She was in a restaurant enjoying the food and she said to the waiter, pack it up. And she brought it on a plane for her father because he said, “That’s his kind of food.’

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Esther and Her Daughter Wendy

Yesterday we were playing Bingo, and she came in carrying a bouquet of flowers. “Mom, would you believe it, I was just at Wegmans and this bouquet was only five dollars.”

She’s comfortable with who she is. She doesn’t have to apologize.

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Esther and the Loves of her life: her great-grandsons

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Her Story, Her Life

They came from all over.

From California, from Florida, from Long Island, they cleared schedules, booked flights and reserved hotel rooms. To understand why people would willingly, happily travel 3,000 miles to watch Esther Wittner blow out candles, one need only read these lines from her poem, “Show Me Your Way, Part Two.” Her deceptively simple writing appears in Volumes I & II of “Our Stories, Our Lives,” memoirs and essays penned by the residents of Eisenberg Assisted Living: I have no middle.

It’s either here or there.

I never accept the middle Because I never GAVE the middle.

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I either loved you or left you alone.

Esther was born in 1923 – and how a woman can reach 90 and still be considered a hipster is remarkable, but true. Her thick crown of tussled curls has not have been subjected to the weekly wash ‘n’ set many women her age consider a ritual. Her wardrobe is shabby-chic consignment – but only if it’s unique stuff previously worn by women of means – and her bangle bracelets make almost as much noise as Esther does during a card game (she cleans up like a Vegas pro). I should be this cool ever in my life, you ask? I think not, dahling. ( Hang around Esther for too long and you start sounding like her, with a classic New Yawker’s accent, ending nearly every sentence with a question mark.)

Henny Youngman would steal her lines if he were alive today. Here’s Esther’s answer when told by a neighbor that her skirt was tucked inside her pantyhose:

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“You get your dates your way, I’ll get mine my way.”

Ba-dum-bum-ching.

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Last Saturday, Esther’s daughter Wendy and son-inlaw Bob Perrone threw Esther the party of a lifetime.

That’s no exaggeration, because she kept saying: “This is the greatest day of my life,” so it must have been, because Esther doesn’t bother to lie about anything.

I suspect that she didn’t lose her filter with age; it simply has never occurred to her to be dishonest. About anything.

“My God! The food! This is unbelievable! Imagine my daughter keeping secrets from me. I’ll never speak to her again!” she threatened. Fat chance. They both talk so much they never hear what the other one is saying, so it’s likely Wendy told her, but she didn’t come up for air long enough to hear it.

Esther is a peace lover. She has the solutions to all of mankind’s problems. When her daughter and her son-inlaw had a doozy of an argument, Esther said: “Give him some fruit, Wendy. Wendy? Are you listening? Give him some fruit.”

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I heard her say it, about 35 years ago. I still don’t know what that would do to settle an argument, unless it’s just a distraction, like saying: “Oh! LOOK!” and running, but it seems to apply in a lot of situations. Esther would very likely tell President Obama to give the GOP some fruit to get them off his back about the Affordable Healthcare Act. Hey, it’s worth a try.

At Esther’s swinging bash, Providence crooner Steve Palumbo came up from Rhode Island and stood in the Perrone bocce court, singing “Unforgettable” to the nonsectarian, lending a touch of “Nat King Cole meets Dean Martin” to the festivities. Esther’s family and friends applauded as she threw kisses to the singer. That’s when I realized that Italian and Jewish families are very much alike, as I watched both sides smother each other in hugs.

There wasn’t a dry eye when she opened the quilt her niece made from “Esther memories” contributed by relatives from all over the country; even Max the dog was wailing. Verklempt – that’s what we were. Six years ago, after 65 years of marriage, Esther lost Milton, the love of her life. About that love, she writes: 373

We weren’t married yet, And my husband took a fork And bent the tines And made it into a ring In the shape of a buckle.

He wanted to give me something And couldn’t afford it So he made it for me.

That’s the caring: Not a valentine, Not a card.

Show me YOUR way that you care.

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No doubt his absence was felt, but suddenly, out came the cake – a gawjus confection topped with an edible Coach bag.

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“No! This is too much!” she shouted. When it came time to make a wish, Esther didn’t have to think twice.

“Everyone should have a day like this in their lives!” she exclaimed, handily extinguishing the candles with one blow. That’s a retired Head Start teacher for you – trying to make sure everyone feels special. She sat back for a moment and took in the crowd of adoring family and friends.

Finally, she spoke: “I showered for this?”

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Esther, wearing the bow from her birthday cake.

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Melissa Baughman

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My Experience at Eisenberg-Summer 2017

Russian immigration, screening for infectious diseases at Ellis Island, the excitement and trepidation of a young woman moving from the deep south to a new big Texas City, the delicious flavor of molasses brown bread and the rich smell of baked beans, the taste of a long lost stuffing recipe, the pain of poverty and hardship but with compassion in the midst of an accidental fire, daydreams that have abated as life’s realities have become more fulfilling, the feel of a hot summer day as a grandmother tries to protect a young child from the violence of life, the expectation of a better life through education from an immigrant laborer father, the intriguing sleuth story of lost luggage, a young man’s courage to stand up to a grand jury, the pain of a childhood kidnapping and molestation, the joy of a mother watching her three daughters marry, the deep explanation of a poem derived from a simple old picture, the frustration and indignation of realizing you

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don’t know where you came from because your father assumed another’s identity to escape a terrible country.

All of these were experiences I had as I sat and listened to the stories. These were real-life stories of people sitting in front of me. These were the real-life stories of those who appeared old, frail, struggling with memory and loss of hearing, having trouble finding the words in discussion or just quietly sitting and listening themselves. Yet, as each one read, a rich story unfolded with personal experiences that may never have before been expressed. Each read with passion and clarity to tell their story and let it be known. Each was clearly open to the gentle and tender comments of others. Each was present in this sacred circle of sharing. The circle was full of hope, inspiration and wisdom. To me, this was special. I felt enriched. I learned about things I would never have known. I laughed and I cried. I waited each week in anxious anticipation to hear the next stories.

I am not one who tends to remain silent very long. I usually have an opinion, or a comment or, more often a question. I like to get in my two cents and tell my own 381

story. But this experience was different. Yes, I do feel enriched. I feel enriched because I came to know some very special people through listening to their precious stories.

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