You must have been a beautiful baby cause all babies are beautiful; but, baby, look at you now.

Clean cut kid. Every teacher’s favorite from K through 12. National Merit Scholar. Phi Beta Kappa at Oberlin College. On to law school at U of Chicago. Illinois Bar, California Bar. Handsome at 40 with a rich crop of Murray hair.

A perfect world comes crashing down, drowned in a sea of vodka. Alcoholic. Bottom out. Find AA. Find Liska. Sober up. Temptation everywhere but not a drop to drink for 28 years. Four kids. Will, athlete of the year at Laguna Beach High.Yale grad. Sweet Laska, Wooster BA. Sohomore bass playing Robert at Willamette. Monika, freshman at Skidmore. Miraculous.

Turned your life around. Administrative Law Judge, adjudicating unemployment compensation claims for the great state of Illinois.

Quit drinking, Quit smoking, but not eating. Working out. Weigh in at 255 net.

Liska wheeling and dealing in commercial properties far off in Vienna.

Retiring at 64 and moving to Mozart’s city to lend Liska a hand. In our aging years, we will miss you. Go in peace with our blessings.

My son, my son. Our pride and joy for nearly 64 years. Pianist. Student. Great choral singer. Reader. Communicator. Standing with you through tough times and good times. Life’s a roller coaster. Big time winner. Big time loser. Now captain of your soul, master of your fate. We give you eternal and unconditional love.

Mom and Dad

For eight years, I lived in the little house on Grove Street in Elizabeth, New Jersey with my oldest sister Anna, her husband, Phil, Phil’s three children of his first marriage, Phil and Anna’s two sons, Nathaniel and Martin, Papa, my older sisters, Dolly and Goldy, and my big brother, Matthew.

At first I went to P.S. # 7, a small, red brick school on Grier Avenue, about six blocks away. I walked to and from school with my best friend, Jean Ettinger, who lived in a large mansard roofed house next door. Like me, Jean had a much older sister and two older brothers. She did not have a father living, I did not have a mother living.

After school and on weekends during the summer, spring and fall, we rollerskated on the street in front of our houses. We played hopscotch, jumped rope, played with dolls and made cardboard shoe boxes into doll houses. We built tables, using empty thread spools for the base with a round of cardboard for the table top. We made cardboard chairs for the tables, built cardboard beds and sewed dresses for the little celluloid kewpie dolls we placed in the houses. We also played various games with a ball about the size of a tennis ball. Anna and Phil bought a swing for their back yard. It had a frame and seats facing each other. I haven’t seen this type of swing for many years, but I can still remember sitting on one of the benches and pumping with our legs to make it swing back and forth. Sometimes, Anna made chocolate pudding and brought it out to us. She put the pudding in beautiful decorated little cups.

In the winter, after it snowed, we built a snowman, and joined the boys in building snow forts and making snowballs which we threw at each other.

When P.S. Number 19 opened we transferred to it for the fourth to sixth grades. Jean and I still walked to school together and spent our spare time together and created an imaginary world in which we were grown up young ladies, working as secretaries in a large firm. Although we did not recognize it as such, in effect, we created our own soap operas. By this time, our homes did have a telephonesand in time, radios. The first radio in our house, inside a beauty wooden cabinet with double doors, had three dials which had to be turned just so in order to hear the programs. It had a battery in addition to using electricity. By this time, Anna had a washing machine in the cellar. The first washing machine, the make was Easy, had a top loading drum turned on its side. It rotated first a quarter turn to the left and then a quarter turn to the right. After the clothes were washed, they had to be put through a wringer first into one tub of rinse water and tehen into a second tub of rinse water before going through the wringer a third time and into a wicker clothes basket. Then, some of the clothes had to be starched. Anna taught me to mix the cornstarch and water in a big pot, bring it to a boil, stirring it so it did not have any lumps, then letting it cool before carrying it to the basement. The sheets and towel , pillowcases and tablecloths also went through a bluing rinse to accentuate their whiteness.

The next school we attended, Theodore Roosevelt School number 17 when we finished the sixth grade. Now the school system changed and instead of graduating from elementary school after eight grades, we would attend Junior High School for three years followed by three years of highschool. In Junior High, instead of spending the entire school day with one teacher, who taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history with a special visiting teacher for music, now we had a different teacher for each subject and marched from classroom to classroom. Junio High School also featured a cafeteria where we could buy lunch and no longer had to carry sandwiches from home.

At this school, I scored highest on the Intelligent Quotient test, a record which remained unbroken for many years. I also wrote a poem for the school year book and felt thrilled to see something I wrote in print. This began my love affair with writing.

While in the seventh grade, I suffered with rheumatic fever and could no longer go to school. I stayed home for the next two years. The school system did not have any visiting teachers or home taught curriculum at the time. But, I loved to read and could lose myself in them.

During this period of my life, we moved to the new house Anna and Phil built at Union Avenue. Here, for the first time since moving in with Anna and Phil, I had my own room and bath, my own bed on the third floor of the new house. This house had thee ful bathrooms and two powder rooms.

After my thirteenth birthday, I enrolled in Alexander Hamilton Junior High School in the seventh grade. A good student, my name always appeared on the High Honor List which meant all my grades were 90 or above.

Now, I found a new best friend, Bernice, and we walked to school together. Bernice, also motherless, lived with an older sister as I did. Bernice loved to sew and could take a sleeve or bodice from one pattern and combine it with the skirt of another. We bought yard goods and made our own school dresses.

While in the ninth grade the schools dropped the midyear terms and went to one term a year. In order to accomplish this, we had to do the entire year’s curriculum in one semester. I enrolled in a commercial course and studied typing and bookkeeping. I answered all the questions on the bookkeeping exam correctly but almost failed typing, I made too many errors. I still remember that we typed to the music of a victrola which played a piece called Valencia. It had a definite beat and could be played at a slightly slower or faster speed as we progressed.

Our class enjoyed a boat rrip on the Chancey Depew on the Hudson River, and we bought either a class ring or pin with the number 33 for the year we graduated 1933.

Now I attended Battin High School. By this time, my best friend Ruth Shield and I walked the mile from West Jersey Avenue where I now lived. After several weeks of school I again had a bout of rheumatic fever and missed several weeks of school. I transferred from the commercial course to a college preparatory course and did four years of the required courses in three years. I still made the High Honor Roll and enjoyed working backstage in the Drama Club. Latin, foreign languages, algebra, geometry, physics and chemistry were required as was American History and three years of Physical Education.

Only girls attended Battin High School, boys went to the newly built Thomas Jefferson High School located in the business section of town. Later, a co-ed vocation High School enrolled both boys and girls.

Before graduating, thirty-fifth in a class of 350 students, I applied for admission to New Jersey College for Women in New Brunswick. My brother already attended Newark Law School, he and I would be the first of our generation to attend college.

Memories Part III

Petey was just one week old when I celebrated my third birthday. The best present of all was a brand new doll carriage. It was shiny imitation wicker, tan in color, and had tiny chrome hubcaps and a hood that went back and forth. Inside laid a life-sized dolly with curly blond hair just like mine, and blue eyes that opened and closed. Her body was soft cotton and she came dressed in a beautiful pale blue dress with smocking on the front. The most exciting part was what happened when you pressed her chest. She would cry, “Ma-ma, Ma-ma”. No little girl could have had a more perfect gift. (Much later I came to realize how difficult it must have been for my parents to purchase such an expensive present, especially with a new baby in the family.)

I was a very curious child; always insisting on knowing how things worked and why. It was very important to know what made the wheels go around on my new carriage, how my dolly’s eyes opened and closed, and why she said “ma-ma” when her chest was pressed. One afternoon when Petey and Mother were asleep, and I was supposed to be napping, I proceeded to disassemble my entire doll carriage, bit by bit, starting with the chrome hubcaps. Then, off came the dolly’s clothes, the dolly’s rubber head (POP!) And finally, the “ma-ma” box from her torso.

Now it was time to put everything back together again. This presented a problem. Try as I might, I could not get those pieces back together. At this point, in came my mother. I was sitting there with a guilty half-smile on my face. Mother didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She tried to reassemble everything before Father got home. But the doll carriage was never the same. The wheels always wobbled after that. And as for my baby doll – her “ma-ma” was just a croak from then on.

PRACTICE

“Pick a card, any card,” I asked Dad for the thousandth time. “And remember what it is but don’t let me see it.”
I usually asked Dad or Ma to help me with my tricks because the twins were too young and didn’t understand that I was learning to be the next greatest eight year-old magician in the world. When I asked my older sister Helen, she ended up making me play fifty-two card pick up every time.
My too small hands clasped the deck of blue backed Bicycle playing cards as I tried spreading them into a fan but the cards would not go along and fell from my grasp and on to the floor.
“Okay which card should I pick?” Dad teased me, as he reached for the cards and help me straighten them out.
“Any card, Dad,” I replied. “But remember not to forget it because that’s important to the trick.”
“You told me Bob told you not to call it a trick,” reminded Dad.
I had forgotten what my magical mentor and neighbor, Bob Creer, had told me was one of the many rules of magic. “Sorry Dad, I messed up."
I was, again, trying to fan out the deck. “Now Dad, please take card and don’t forget what it is.”
Dad pulled a card from the center of the deck but yelled, “Wait, wait, I don’t want that card, I want another one.
I started to close the deck, but being flustered by his change, I dropped a few cards to the floor. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah,” replied Dad.
I replaced the cards and re-spread the fan, not dropping any cards, and he put it back. Before he had a chance to grab another I squared off the cards and told him, “ I have to “shiffle” the cards, the reason I say shiffle is I don’t know how to say shuffle.”
I smiled, gloating to myself that I remembered the patter or magical words that Bob had taught me. I again re-fanned the cards and told Dad, “Take a card, any card, but don’t show it to me.”
“What else do I do?”
“Ah,” I was lost for a moment.
“Should I memorize it?”
“Yeah Dad, that’s what you do,” I was really excited that I could continue the trick.
“Look at the card closely and remember what card you’ve chosen.”
He joking stuck the card to his forehead and explained, “I’m burning the image into my brain.”
“Good thinking, Dad,” I congratulated him, and then spread the cards and only dropped one. “Put your card back and don’t forget to remember it,” I tried to perform the secret move to place his card to the top of the deck but, in so doing, my small hands lost purchase of the cards and they slipped and spread all over the floor.
“Darn it,” I cried, in near tears.
“Don’t worry T.J. Just keep practicing,” cajoled Dad.
I gathered the cards but believed I could do magic so I said, “By reading your mind I will read the identity of the card from your brain. I feel your card is the top card. It is the ten of clubs.” I turned it over and it was the ten of clubs. Is that’s your card?
He didn’t answer right off.
That’s your card, right Dad?” I nearly begged.
Dad, always the sport, smiled and said, “That’s incredible, how did you do that. T.J.”
I remembered that another oath of magic was to never tell the secret. I smiled at Dad and told him, “You know a magician never tells his secrets.”
“Right, I forgot,” answered Dad.
The screen door slammed and I heard Ma yell, “Hello, somebody come help get the groceries from the car.”
I was excited to hear Ma’s voice so I ran to the back door and yelled, “Hi Ma, pick a card, any card.”

Tears streamed down my face as I wrapped my arms around Lil’s legs and sobbed, “Take me with you. Don’t leave me here. I don’t want to stay here. You always take me with you.”

My sister, Lil, bent down, gently freed her legs and then kneeled and put her arms around me. “Sis, I can’t take you with me this time. Nick is my husband and we are going away for our honeymoon. That is what people who are just married do. And they do not take a little sister with them. You’ll be fine here in Anna’s house, and Papa, Dolly, Goldy and Matty are here, too.”

But, I continued to sob even after she and Nick left with people throwing rice at them. After Mama died when I was less than two years old, the family decided that sixteen year old Lil should be the housekeeper and take care of Matty and me. Matty started school. After he and Goldy and Dolly left for school. After Anna and Belle went to their jobs, Lil would put me in my stroller and go to the nearby kosher butcher shop to buy the meat for that night’s supper. She was the only mother I knew. The prettiest of my sisters, the only one with naturally curly hair which she combed into ringlets, after a while, young men came to court her. I sat between them on the couch. She could not go out at night until I fell asleep. It is a wonder she did not hate me.

At about this time, from stories I heard my sisters tell, my father wanted to remarry. My four older sisters vigorously opposed this. They feared a new wife might mistreat their four younger siblings. In fact, Anna drove to the Bronx and took the four of us home with her and told Papa she would not let them live with him and the new wife.

My father did not remarry and eventually he, too, moved to Elizabeth to live with us there.

It was not a very large house and we were twelve people by the end of the third year when Anna and Phil’s second son was born. It had only one bathroom.

Situated on Grove Street, the house occupied the front of the lot with the garage in the far corner in back. That was where the stable usually stood to get it as far away from the house as possible to minimize odors and flies. When people had automobiles it was stabled in the same place. Only many years later did it move to become part of the house itself.

The cellar held a big coal furnace, a coal bin filled through a window and using a chute, the dumpt truck delivered the coal. The two concret wash tubs, and a gas water heater and in addition to the inside stairway to the cellar, there were two doors covering an outside stairway. Another stairway from the second floor led to the unfinished attic.

Looking back, I marvel at how hard my sister worked, without all the modern conveniences, and her many talents. She scrubbed the wooden kitchen floor on her hands and knees, washed clothes on a scrub board, wrong them out by hand and carried baskets of wet clothes up two flights of stairs to hang them on a clothesline on pulleys from the upstairs sunroom to a pole at the far corner of the lot.

She ironed the cotton dresses for three little girls, and cotton shirts and pants for four little boys, using a sad iron before the advent of electric irons. Her hands blistered and then developed heavy calluses. She sewed clothes for me and her stepdaughters, gave the three of us piano lessons, cooked and cleaned, kept the books for her husband’s business and breast fed her two sons.

Phil went into the business of installing pumps and tanks for the gasoline stations which sprung up like mushrooms after a rain as more and more people bought automobiles. Papa bought the stock of Phil’s hardware store and opened a little neighborhood store where the nails were measured by weight and were stored in wooden kegs, he cut window glass to size, and the putty stood in another wooden tub. All this before the age of our current super discount stores.

Phil’s business boomed and prospered. He also built four-plexes in the Polish section of town.Papa and he bought some rental units as partners. He and Anna built a huge new home on Union Avenue, the swanky part of town near Pingry, the private school.

This house had six bedrooms, two full baths and two powder rooms, huge living room and dining room as well as a breakfast room, office for Phil and front and back stairways to second floor. and I had one of the third floor bedrooms with a dorner window and a large white tiled bathroom.

Phil and Anna finished this house even after the stock market crash in 1929. They did not have money invested in stocks.At first, they did not not feel the changes caused by the depression which followed the stock market crash. Eventually, so many people were out of work, they could not pay rent, new gas stations no longer multiplied, and eventually Anna and Phil could no longer afford the taxes, insurance and maintenance of this home.

We moved to a rented fourbedroom, one bathroom, home on West Jersey Avenue not far from Elmora. Here, my bedroom occupied the unfinished attic. My father died while I was away at Girl Scout Camp when I was fifteen years old. My other sisters contested his will and for many years a bitter rift existed between Anna and her other sisters.

I know Anna thought it was best for her to provide a home for her widowed father and her siblings. But, looking back on what dysfunctional family we were, I sometimes wonder if we would all have been happier if my father had hired a housekeeper and maintained his own home for himself and the four youngsters. I know my life would have been far different if he had done so.