Family Life
Frances Koral
— I was born in the Bronx. I lived for a little while in Queens and then we moved back to Brooklyn. I was born in 1925.
My father was an iron man who made fire escapes and gates. He had his own little shop. It was a business in the basement. It was on something like 21st Street and Third Avenue. Above him was an optometrist's store and you went down into the basement. I don't know what materials he needed but he was a very skilled and honest artisan, and he was able to support his family fairly well. We were never hungry and we were never cold and we all were able to go to college, although my brother went to night school.
My mother was born in Pittsburgh. She had one year of high school. My father was a self-educated man, but he had no school in this country. My mother was a homemaker. I was one of three children. I had a brother nine years older and a sister five years older, and we were all Brooklyn College graduates.
Father was an anarchist atheist.
My mother was a very typical ... she was not a secular Jew. She believed in the high holidays. And although my father was violently opposed to religion, he respected my mother enough not to violate any of the rituals of the house.
Although we're all very conscious of being Jews, not one of us grew up to be religious. And my father was not a young man. But it was a loving family. It was a hard working family. We lived in a two family house. That part I remember where my mother was like the custodian.
Elliot Levine
— I was born at a very early age, strangely enough, in Flatbush, Brooklyn on November 16th, 1924. We ... I remember my father built a house on East 51st Street, Brooklyn, off Linden Boulevard. My earliest memories are from there. We didn't stay there very long. The house was too much work for my mother. In those days they didn't have oil burners and she had to stoke the coal furnace and remove ashes and things of that that sort, so we moved to 1060 Union Street near Eastern Parkway and Franklin Avenue for a couple of years, and then finally to Brighton Beach. I think it was in the fall of 1930. And I remained there until years after my parents' death and finally gave up the apartment.
Phyllis LeShaw
— My father worked, of course. He wouldn't let my mother work. In those days you didn't let your wife work. How do you like that?
My father worked for the National Recovery Act in 1933. And then he wound up to be the General Manager of Popular Dress Manufacturers Association. He was right under David Dubinsky who was a Union leader.
My grandparents were religious Jews, orthodox. It did not seep down to their children so the only thing we got from Judaism were the rituals which were wonderful— Seders every year with my grandfather in a white satin robe and a white satin crown and the immediate family, which was about thirty people. We would all get together at Passover for Seders. And then there was Succoth. You know about those little huts? The little huts outside. We used to feed my grandfather through the window, through the opening in the Succah. And oh, it was such fun. We just loved it.
Marjorie Brockman
— I came from the East Bronx. My parents were born in this country, of Russian and Polish origin. My father, who had been in World War I, was a very taciturn sort of strange man I guess, but a nice guy. And from him I acquired a passion for baseball. We used to go to the Catholic protectory which before Parkchester, that huge metropolitan project was built in the Bronx, that was the Catholic protectorate, famous because the Lindbergh kidnapping money had been exchanged in that area, and also famous when I was growing up because the House of David and the Negro Baseball League used to play there. I'm probably the only person in your archives who saw Satchel Paige pitch before he joined [the major leagues].
My mother was a dissatisfied housewife. She'd been a legal stenographer before she married. I was an only child for nine years and then they had another child, my brother.
My father worked in the restaurant equipment business. He worked with his brother-in-law. He was a salesman and during the Depression he used to collect what was owed to them in goods. Mostly he serviced restaurants in Sheepshead Bay and we had lots of lobsters when I was a child 'cause he would come home with sacks of them. And when I was a child people used to boil their clothes so they had large copper pots that sat on the stove. And he would fill that with water before my mother came in from wherever she was and drop the lobsters in it. He was a salesman. and their place was right opposite what used to be Wannamakers, which is now K-Mart, where the Astor Wine and Liquor Store was. It was called Atlantic Restaurant Equipment Corporation.
My grandfather, when he came to this country he started a small manufacturing business. You probably don't even know the word any more. He manufactured mitty blouses. Do you remember mitty blouses? They were white broadcloth shirts with a V-neck and a square collar with a dark blue star in either corner in the back design. And people wore them to school. It was the school uniform, a dark skirt with a mitty blouse and that's what he manufactured. He was not a terribly successful entrepreneur.
I used to tell people that he was a militant atheist and my grandmother was a militant snob because she wouldn't meet anybody who was an immigrant and who spoke with an accent. and they lived in the Bronx and she managed to avoid anybody in her building. But she was, in her way, a charming woman.
We went to a farm in a little town called Holcut Center which was about a hundred and forty-five miles from New York City and we boarded with a ... a family that was mythical. It was really a nineteenth century English and Irish origin farm family named the Griffins and the Reynolds. And I learned how to milk cows and pull carrots and square dance and do all the things you did up there. I ... I was mad for that place and it went on for a long time. So that was a very powerful influence on my youth.
Marion Greenstone
— I was born on March 30th, 1925. I was born in Brooklyn.
Newberg was the big town and Beacon was the little town, Duchess County, in case you're not familiar with that part of New York State. And so when I was eight years old we moved up there and I went to a little South Avenue school, walked to school, and had a nice childhood. Belonged to the Girl Scouts, played baseball, softball. Tennis was my real love.
My father was not involved in the business in Beacon and he got tired of commuting. And the business wasn't doing too well and my grandparents were getting and I guess we sold it, I think. I don't remember now. And so we moved back. [My father] was a salesman in an interior decoration company and a designer as well. He was a very talented man but he never got the education he should have. He didn't even finish high school. but he was very verbal and literate and had a wonderful sense of humor, and it was a pity that he didn't get more education.
[My mother] finished high school and I think maybe she had a little bit of business school. I don't remember anymore. But her brothers went to college. One became a doctor, the other became a dentist. But girls didn't have to go to college. Things have changed a bit.
My grandparents were sort of religious and when we live with them my mother observed ... Well, she was more religious. My father was totally non-religious. And I am not religious at all. I mean, I'm an atheist. I said it.