Twenty Years Ago Today

Temperatures modulated in the mid-50’s in White Plains today. How different from this past weekend when wind chill temperatures dipped below zero. How different from conditions 20 years ago today when a blizzard dumped 10 inches of snow, stranding me in New York, preventing me from flying down to Orlando for the annual SPECS conference produced by my magazine, Chain Store Age. 

For six hours that Friday morning I sat in the Courtyard Marriott in Rye waiting for an airport shuttle to trudge its way through the snow. None came. All around me vacationers and business travelers expressed their frustrations. One couple vented they had planned three years to fly to New Orleans to partake in the following Tuesday’s Mardi Gras festivities. The blizzard was sure to deprive them of their once-in-a-lifetime experience, they lamented. 

Ordinarily, a delay traveling south would have been an inconvenience easily overcome the next day. But more distressing news happened that day 20 years ago. When I called Gilda to inform her I was returning home she told me my mother had passed away that afternoon in a hospital in Washington, DC, as she awaited surgery to amputate a second leg below the knee because diabetes and smoking had impeded circulation to her limb. She was 78.

Twenty years. I look out my kitchen windows and the memories of my mother are slowly melting away like the remnants of the snow on the grass in our yard. Our children were 17 and 14 when she passed away. How much do they remember their grandma, who, sadly, suffered from mild dementia her last few years? Dan recalls he loved her chicken soup. As a young child, he knew whenever we went to my parents’ home in Brooklyn he would be fed well. And he always knew when they would be visiting our home for, miraculously, cake appeared on our kitchen table. 

As a light snow trickled down Monday I queued up a tape my brother Bernie recorded of our mother 30 years ago. With each passing sequence another of our treasured family stories tumbled into the realm of folklore, assuming, of course, that the testimony I was viewing was the real history and not her memory of the moment.

We had always been told the first time our father eyed my mother, in his store on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he fell off a ladder, not because of her beauty, but at the sight of her wild and frizzy hair. Not so, Mom related, though she did not disagree with the description of her hairdo that day. 

Nevertheless, Kopel walked her to the subway station and secured a date for that Friday night. When he rang the doorbell of her family’s apartment, he failed to recognize the now dolled up Sylvia. That part of the story rang true to form.

The next part contradicted family lore. We had been told they went to see Die Fledermaus, an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II. Perhaps not. According to the tape, they went to a production of a different Strauss operetta—The Gypsy Baron. 

During their whirlwind courtship—six weeks from first date to a Sunday, September 6, Labor Day weekend wedding, with two weeks or more apart due to separate vacations they took over the summer—a favorite story of our mother was a time our father took her to a friend’s apartment. 

Speaking Yiddish, his friend asked if they would like to be alone, to which my father replied, also in Yiddish, “No, this one I am going to marry.” Unbeknownst to my father, Sylvia was fluent in Yiddish. Only on the tape, Mom said they spoke German which she also understood. 

A story about one of Mom’s late teenage boyfriends also came under revision. She’d often tell us that after her father moved the family to an apartment on the Grand Concourse in The Bronx, a beau stopped calling on her. Years later when she met him by chance, the fellow, an apprentice linotypist, explained the Grand Concourse address had placed her above his station in life. 

An interesting commentary on social status, but the version on the tape had Mom relating that the move that sabotaged their relationship was to an apartment on West 99th Street off Broadway in Manhattan.

Elsewhere on the tape, Mom’s laudatory stories about my high school days evoked no corresponding corroboration within my memory bank.

What isn’t in doubt is the positive influence she had on the lives of her children. When most wives stayed at home, our mother worked full-time as an equal partner with our father in their factory that produced half-slips and panties sold mostly to chain stores across the country. At the same time she actively participated in PTA programs and other social groups while also cooking family holiday dinners that could serve as many as 40 participants.  

She taught my brother and me to play ball. She made sure we went to Broadway shows and the opera. She took us to the Catskills. She enrolled us in private Hebrew schools and eight week sleepaway Jewish summer camps. She made our house the center of activity featuring Friday night poker games with my brother’s friends. 

She opened our door to overnight guests, prompting her to call our home Malon Forseter, malon being the Hebrew word for hotel. Her dinette table was never too full. Unexpected guests were met with the standard retort, “I'll just add another cup of water to the soup.”

Sylvia was a confident, independent woman, best exemplified by travel to Israel and Europe by herself in the mid 1950s when she was just 40. 

I looked over what I wrote two years ago in a Father’s Day tribute to our mother and thought I’d conclude with the same last paragraph: 

My brother, sister and I don’t dwell on the last decade or so of her life when she no longer was the vibrant source of our family life. It is enough to know that together with our father she molded us into the people we are today. And we are happy with the results.

A Father's Day Tribute to My Mom

Having just read Timothy Egan’s tribute to his father in The New York Times (http://nyti.ms/SRE4HZ), I considered writing one for my dad. But it occurred to me that when I write about my parents it is mostly about my patrimony. So, with the comment my mother used to make, that without her Kopel Forseter would not have been a father, here's a posting about my maternal heritage.

The second of four sisters and an older brother, Sylvia Gerson came to New York from Lodg, Poland, in 1921 when she was four. Her father, Louis, was a jeweler, successful enough to move his family to an apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx that cost her a boyfriend. With an air of upward social mobility she enjoyed conveying, my mother would relate that the boyfriend stopped calling on her because, he explained to her years later, she had attained an address status beyond his station.

A mutual friend set up my parents. Perhaps the story's apocryphal, but the way she told it, my father fell off a ladder in his store when he first saw her. It wasn't from her good looks. Rather, it was her wild and frizzy hair. They agreed, nevertheless, to go out that Friday night to a performance of Die Fledermaus, a comic opera. When Kopel came to her family apartment he didn't recognize her. She was all dolled up and beautiful. They were married six weeks later, Labor Day weekend 1942.

If six weeks seems like a whirlwind courtship, consider this. For several weeks they were apart because Sylvia went on vacation. During one of their times together my mother garnered one of her favorite stories.

Kopel took her back to an apartment he shared. Speaking Yiddish, his roommate asked if they would like to be alone, to which my father replied, also in Yiddish, “No, this one I am going to marry.” Unbeknownst to my father, Sylvia was fluent in Yiddish.

Their union was also a work partnership. As a full charge bookkeeper Sylvia ran the one-person office while Kopel ran the factory where they produced half-slips and panties sold mostly to chain stores across the country. For a little more than four years Sylvia stayed home to raise their three children. I propelled her back to work with my poor eating and an exasperating habit of flinging peas off of my high chair tray. Funny. Today peas are among my favorite vegetable.

Sylvia taught my brother and me to play ball. She made sure we went to Broadway shows and the opera. She took us to the Catskills. She enrolled us in private Hebrew schools and eight week sleepaway Jewish summer camps. She made our house the center of activity. Friday night poker games with my brother’s friends. Passover seders with as many as 40 participants. Overnight guests that prompted her to call our home Malon Forseter, malon being the Hebrew word for hotel. Her dinette table was never too full. Unexpected guests were met with the standard retort, “I'll just add another cup of water to the soup.”

Though I wrote earlier that my poor eating sent her back to work, truth is Sylvia was a woman ahead of her time. Not just a homemaker and club woman—head of the PTA and active in temple and social groups—she also was an accomplished businesswoman not content or fulfilled in a stay-at-home mother role. Because of their business my parents could not always vacation together. My mother was confident and independent enough to travel to Israel and Europe by herself in the mid 1950s when she was just 40.

These are memories from my youth. As she aged my mother's joie de vivre deteriorated. She chain smoked. She was diabetic. She suffered bouts of congestive heart failure. A little dementia. She had one leg amputated below the knee because of her diabetes. A few years later on the eve of an amputation of her second leg she died of cardiac arrest.

My brother sister and I don't dwell on the last decade or so of her life when she no longer was the vibrant source of our family life. It is enough to know that together with our father she molded us into the people we are today. And we are happy with the results.