“My mother really pushed me,” he remembers. The young designer finally gave in and after three weeks, called Bertha to set up an al fresco reunion on a bench in Central Park. They patched things up and were engaged shortly thereafter.
Bertha, left, Milo, center, and Charlotte Kleinberg.
mother had died in childbirth, leaving the newborn baby girl alone with her father. As was not uncommon for a widower to do in those days, Friesner married his sister-in-law, Hedwig, so she could take care of him and little Bertha. Together the three immigrated to America, sponsored by relatives in Newark, New Jersey. Kleinberg asked Bertha on a date a few weeks after that first car ride, and they dated for several weeks—until, that is, he got cold feet and broke it off, much to the chagrin of his mother and Bertha. 18
M I LO K L E I N B E R G A N D M K DA : S I X D E C A D E S I N D E S I G N
The wedding took place on November 26, 1950, in a Hungarian restaurant called Little Hungary at 257 East Houston Street, with a small group of relatives present. The newlyweds started married life in a small apartment on West 184th Street in Manhattan. It wasn’t a great neighborhood, and Kleinberg had a very long walk to the subway station he needed to get to work. Their son, Jeffrey, was born three years later, on January 20, 1953. It happened to be the day of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration, thus earning the new arrival the nickname “Little Ike.” With living space suddenly at a premium, the family moved to a larger apartment on 238th Street and Greystone Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. It was a one-bedroom, junior 4. “It was a newer building, but the rent wasn’t much more,” Kleinberg recalls. It was also a shorter walk to the subway and near Van Cortlandt Park. “It was like going home to the country,” he says. The youngest son, Michael, was born October 19, 1956. Kleinberg, meanwhile, continued to work for Max Gerstl and the business thrived. Office construction and the local economy were booming throughout the 1950s,
