"Slominsky" A Dad Story

This is a very short one. And I am sure true for Dad used to help the men and women around his apartment, a haven for the elderly. This took place in the days before cell phones, clearly, when you had to find a place to call, a booth, a business. Dad was probably older than the woman he helped as it turns out.


She was diminutive and old, very old. 

She handed me a badly rumpled piece of paper on which there was an almost illegible address and telephone number.  I could not help.  She was about to leave, a pitiful figure, distraught, the translucent skin on her face allowing wide red blotches to come through--perhaps because of the unusually cold snap, or perhaps a physical problem.  I stopped her.  "Why don't we call," I suggested. She looked about in total distress. 

"Where?" she asked, looking about.  There are no phone booths on Fairfax Avenue.  Generally, these accommodations are abundant in areas where the young men array themselves, listening for the beckoning sound of their state of the art beepers.  I led her into the Wells Fargo Bank and solicited one of the Assistant Managers seated behind a desk.  He assented, and I called the number, and handed her the phone.  The accent was strong, but her English was fluent.  "The name is Slominsky.  I'm looking for a cousin of the same name, and I was given this address.  Is there some way you can come to me?" There seemed to be a difficulty.  I took the phone, introduced myself as a passerby trying to assist, describing the lady as old, "perhaps eighty or eighty-five."

"I'm sixty-five," she corrected.

"Where can I reach her," said the woman on he phone.  I solicited the information and reported, "The Shalom Home" and gave the address, familiar to me since I live in an adjoining building. 

"It's not that far," said the woman.  "Tell her I'll call her later this afternoon."

Outside, I dared to inquire further on the matter, despite the cardinal error I had already made in estimating her age as eighty or eighty-five.  On further examination, in the light of a noon California sun, I privately thought the guess an underevaluation. 

"Are you Russian?" I asked, the most frequent background of the elderly in this area these days.

"Lithuanian," she replied.  Further probing revealed that she had taught school in Boston and New York, that the Slominsky she was seeking was "a great writer" who she last saw in Lithuania years ago. He was one hundred and one years old.

I asked what he had written. She handed me an article from an unidentified newspaper, which she quickly retrieved before I could read it.  Nevertheless, I had caught part of the headline, "Slominsky 101. . . ". The rest I cannot swear to, but I caught the words, "Writer, Musician."  It was a lengthy article. Clearly Slominsky was still alive. Yesterday, George Burns reached 100.  What can I say?

I suppose "Mazeltov" is as succinct as I can put it.

Colorama and the Stork Photo Studios--A Fragment of Days Long Gone By

When I was a kid, the only time I ventured into Brooklyn, was when my father took me to his office, a photography plant at 115 Myrtle Avenue, known as "Colorama", a part of Stork Photo Studios.

I have vague memories of the interior; none of the exterior.  I was given something like 25 cents to stamp envelopes with postage, or names or something, I don't remember which, and sometimes I helped with the stock room. I used to love to watch the ladies--they were always ladies--in the color room. This was the days before color photography and color meant quite literally, people with cotton balls and q-tips giving a patina of the rainbow to baby faces in a windowless room. Thinking of that time from today's perspective, it is pretty pre-Flood stuff. 

By the time I was going there, Dad had been there since just after World War II, so I am guessing close to 20 years. He sure looks like someone important in the Mad Men suit. I didn't know what he did there. But he seemed pretty important, and it was all right for me to be there, helping or sitting in the dingy conference room with a coke machine that brought out the kinds of bottles that are kitsch today.  

On the other hand, there is something disconcerting that he was categorized with "Some of the People You Never See". I understand though. He wasn't a salesman, so he wouldn't be seen by the parents of the children seeking (or being pressured into)  wallet size shots and plates covered with their children's faces (yes, they put you on a plate; I still have one of mine).  

The "President" was Charlie Shapiro, here calling himself Charlie Sharp, for reasons no doubt related to the reality of prejudice that hamper human nature.  I am assuming this publicity handout was done sometime in the 1950s, as it refers to a car from 1954, that might be a used car--I can't tell.  But one thing is true; this is all I have that is tangible of the place. I know it went out of business around 1965, because my father, then getting close to fifty years of age, had to start looking for a new career. I also know that the original building is gone--at least according to my Google Search, replaced by something shinier in 2002.  

As places, and people, seem to flicker into the past, I find myself ever more nostalgic. 

The modern gnostics will tell you that those days were not good; that now, with all the nasty bickering and posturing, is better, more enlightened. There was, I keep hearing, nothing good about the good old days. 

It was imperfect, because people were imperfect; evils were done.  Evils have been done since the day Adam and Eve got kicked out of Paradise. And though--as many of us believe, but clearly fewer and fewer than in those days gone by--we have had our relationship to God restored--now mankind has to decide to accept that relationship instead of deeming itself a godhead.  It's not looking good.

Personally, I am not that crazy about the times in which we are living. I sound like my father. I suppose it comes to all of us. 

Three Identical Strangers: Food for (Moral) Thought

I don't know why I don't remember the early incarnation of the story of these three young men from New York in about 1980. I mean, I was still living in the State, but perhaps, just out of law school and newly licensed, looking for a job, I was so pre-occupied, and I just missed it. Three boys, identical triplets, had each been adopted by different families. Though they each knew they were adopted, they had no idea, nor did their parents, that they had siblings.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Nor, as it turns out, were they or their adoptive parents told they were part of a troubling, and still largely secret, experiment about nature versus nurture.

It all started out looking like it would have a happy ending. Robert goes to his first day of class at a community college in Sullivan County, New York. Everyone seems to know him. Everyone calls him "Eddy". This Eddy would be a sophomore, except one of Eddy's friends knows that Eddy isn't coming back to school and that this newbie isn't Eddy. But physically, he is his doppelganger.  He figures right away, he must be Eddy's twin. Robert and Eddy are introduced, and, unbelievably, the story of the twins runs in the New York papers and reveals, a third boy, David.

Identical? Yes. And no. One, seems to me was shorter than the others. And although features were much the same, as you begin to see them in photos and home video and in old television shows (they were on all of them), you see they have different expressions. They definitely had different upbringings, one in an upper class home, one in a middle class home and one in a lower middle class home. They shared certain traits, body movements, tastes in food and drink, and style, as well as some interests, which the public craved seeing as something of a circus magic. It was all very harmless.

Except it wasn't. As the families sought more information, specifically on why the boys were separated at birth by the Louise Wise Adoption Agency (now defunct, it specialized in the adoption of Jewish children)--they were told that it was because they believed no one would adopt all three--it became clear that there was a buried truth. A sinister truth? Certainly the consequences seem sinister, whatever were the motives of the agency, and the Jewish Board of Children's and Family Services and The Neubauer Child Development Center who were conducting some kind of longitudinal study on the development of the three boys and approximately thirteen other pairs (not clear if there were other triplets). There were mysterious home visits from time to time by agents related to the adoptions. The families were told generally that it was being done in all adoptions to follow up on the adoptees. Nobody in those days, the early 1960s, asked questions. These were the people who looked after you right? They wouldn't lie to you, right?

When the boys were presented to the world, things about them looked relatively normal. Well, normal, except that one of them had gotten into legal trouble in an incident where someone was murdered--but his tangential involvement had not resulted in imprisonment. But now the boys were inseparable. They were inseparable until they started a business together, a restaurant, and then the differences in their personalities began to manifest themselves. They didn't know one another, not really. They hadn't grown up together. Robert left the partnership.

And then Eddy, who was ultimately diagnosed as manic depressive, was even hospitalized at one point, shot himself in 1995 leaving behind a wife and child.

Whatever this study was, it was never published, but over the years things leaked out--for example, it seems that some if not many of the birth parents had mental illness of one kind or another. And, each of the boys had in their teen years psychological struggles. Not all of the parents could handle it. Eddys adopted father speculates that there must have been something he failed to teach his son.

Whatever it all was about, none of the people consented to being subjects of the experiment, of the study. The leader of the study, Dr. Peter Neubauer, was a student of Anna Freud, born in Austria, well renowned child psychiatrist, never spoke of the study. He died in 2008 in his 90s. A couple very tangential individuals, one a psychologist and the other a woman who had been an assistant of the doctor, had little to offer, other than notes and a slight discomfort at the ethics of the whole procedure, and perhaps a sense of irony that the experiment was largely performed under the aegis of Jewish institutions. And there is the added stipulation by Neubauer, upon his death and the bequest of his papers, including the raw material of the study, that nothing be released until the year 2066, which has to raise hackles and all kinds of theories, none of them cheerful.

Since the release of the movie, and the naturally intense questioning of the conduct of scientists and caregivers, documents have been made available. They provide some information. But since none of it was put together in a cohesive form, conclusions as to purpose and outcome remain ambiguous. And then much was redacted.

Really, there aren't any answers, I suppose. Only questions. Were they harmed by the uncompleted study?  You can answer yes, easily. Or no. The two remaining siblings note, in articles about the film, that they have had relatively normal lives. But what if they had been raised together by one set of adoptive parents? Would Eddy still be alive today? Or was his genetic disposition too much to overcome? Or was his having a perfection driven adoptive father one of the triggers for his inability to cope with his manic depression?  Would Robert be so sad?

What bothers us? What bothers me? Powerful people took and held secret control over aspects, if not large dimensions, of many lives.  More than that. These were people who thought of themselves as good. They probably were "good" in all other aspects of their lives.

But that's what we fail to understand. Human beings, all human beings, regardless of race, color, or creed are capable of victimizing others. There is never a good reason. But there are always justifications.

Back to Monticello

There's a lot not to like about Facebook. However, it sometimes provides something precious. One is the chance to reconnect with people who truly made a difference in your young life, but from whom paths diverge. And then, something flashing back to the days of childhood, when our minds considered nothing of the future except the next day of summer play is gifted to us on those pages.

My Aunt Rita, and Uncle Ben, had a little summer cottage in Monticello, New York, just off Sackett Lake Road. Every summer, as long as I could remember, they would take about two months of summer and go there. It was only 90 minutes from the City, but its dominant bucolic environment, trees, dirt roads, the lake, farmland was a stark contrast to the dominant concrete and tar of the Bronx, punctuated by anemic trees planted into some sidewalks.

On many of those summers--I actually can no longer remember which ones, my mother would allow me to spend several weeks with them. Though I tended toward homesickness, the freedom granted to me by my Aunt, who didn't expect me to behave more as an adult than the child that I was-- as did my mother--more than compensated for it.  It's not that I couldn't run and play in the apartment courtyard and sidewalk but that my mother preferred me to be neat and intellectual. My hair, tortured into perfect curls (actually not unlike Nellie in Little House on The Prairie, it occurs to me as I write), each bobby pinned precariously such that too much movement would dislodge them didn't allow for unbridled running. And I had perfect white sneakers that would get scuffed, requiring a paint job with some white polish. Being careful was always the guidepost. I wasn't always, even in the Bronx, but in Monticello, I could run to my heart's delight, jump, be messy, without even the hint of a recrimination. My Aunt once found me polishing my scuffed sneakers, and grabbed them and said, "You don't have to do that. We'll put them in the washer!"  Liberation! And my hair? It was either pulled  back into a pony tail or in pig tails. My mother would never have considered pig tails. 

There were several houses in the line off Sackett Lake road, that led to a complete dirt road, that itself led up to the imposing house on the hill.  There was the green house of Dottie and Jack, mid sixty-ish retirees, and then the Bernsteins, and then the Oppenheims. The Oppenheims just happened to have three kids the right age for me, my cousin Barbara, and my cousin Carol. James, Anthony and Stephanie. They had the best "stuff" I guess we'd call it today. There was a fort, yes, it was a fort, big enough for several of us to be inside of and to jump off of. There was the brake-less Surrey, that fit four of us, which each of us would drive in turn down the hill, filled with holes. Dangerous? Sure was. But boy was it living. It was in Monticello that I finally learned to ride a bike. It was low enough for me to keep my feet on either side, but it had no chain, and somehow, going down Hemlock Lane and back up Sunset Drive, I found myself balancing perfectly. I was a little older than the others. I had to keep up.

I was never a morning person, even at the tender age of say 10, but my cousin Barbara would insist that I get up at the crack of dawn and go to the porch--always chilly at that time of morning--and watch the sun come up while she did her puzzles or did her coloring. She was very meticulous at both, while I was impatient and ready to go back to bed.

All these memories flow again because the gift was of photos posted by James recently. Oh, yes, I remember that day in 1964!

It was Anthony's birthday. There's the triangular monkey bars. I can see the hill that we took the Surrey down. It doesn't look quite as imposing. The monkey bars were an orange brick wood color, and wood. I loved climbing on them. Once when I was alone, I got my leg caught at the top and was hanging down for a while, spraining my leg. I somehow managed to right myself, but I never told anyone about the pain in my leg. I was afraid that if my mother heard, she'd be angry at me for being so foolish. And I didn't want to be any trouble because of my own mistake. Oh, and that day, Anthony's birthday, there were ponies. I had ridden ponies before, in the zoo, or some commercial location, but never at someone's house. There we are, Barbara, Anthony and me. I must have been vain, even then, because I was horribly nearsighted, and I didn't have on my glasses for the shot, which may account for the vacant look. I couldn't see anything.

That sweater. I hadn't thought of that sweater in over 50 years. Red and white stripes. It was a favorite. Anthony is wearing one of a couple of outfits I particularly remember. The other was that of a ringmaster, you know, as in the circus. He would often come down with his sweet black lab Buffy, wearing that outfit, to our little place. Buffy would happily sit on any available foot.

I was impressed by James, perhaps a year or a few months younger than me, who had his own photographic dark room and was learning to play the guitar as we all got older. But I was a little intimidated by him. As we wended into the late sixties, and the days of Woodstock (which was very near our summer haven), James was cool, and I was, well, what I suppose I still am, a little square. And clueless when it came to boys. (I went to an all girls Catholic School, and the only kid close to my age on our block was a juvenile delinquent; whom truth be told I fancied). James made an uncharacteristic visit down to my Aunt's place and asked me if I wanted to see "MASH".  Not realizing he was actually asking me out (my dating radar never did improve) I declined. I was swimming in the Oppenheim pool when his mother said something like, "James likes older women." 

Oh, there are stories galore I could write. Spending a day, alone, at the Concord Hotel, with Barbara, Carol and a friend named, Alyse, I think, whose mother owned a store at the hotel and whose grandmother had an imposing edifice across a field from us. Being allowed to steer Mr. Oppenheim's motor boat on White Lake. Spending many a day at the 125 acre land of Richard Jansen, the land on which he was born, with several man made lakes and log cabins, and fresh vegetables. Picking blueberries. And blackberries. Playing GHOST with Dottie and my Uncle as the sun went down and the mosquitoes attacked, Dottie chain smoking with her leg swung over the arm of the Adirondack chair. She was a lot like Katherine Hepburn in her manner. A New England Yankee.

What did Dean Martin sing? Probably no one of this generation remembers. Memories are Made of This.