PaulSkolnick.com

In searching around for information about the Sruel “Israel” Strauber branch of the family for yesterday’s post, I realized that a vital piece of the story had disappeared. That bit concerns the only street we know named for a member of the Strauber/Strober/Struber family.

Strauber Memorial Highway is in Holiday, Pasco County, Florida, on the Gulf Coast north of Clearwater and west of Tampa. It is named for Henry E. Strauber, who was elected to the Pasco County Commission in November 1972, sworn in two months later, and then died in September 1973. He was attending a meeting of the Florida State Association of County Commissioners in Miami Beach, where he was elected a trustee. He collapsed after dancing with his wife at the group’s banquet. He was 75.

Henry Strauber was remembered in news coverage after his death as a “stabilizer” on the county commission, the only Democrat then serving and the swing vote between the eastern and western sides of the county. He’d established a volunteer fire department in Holiday, as he had in Bethpage, NY, where he lived and worked before retiring in Florida.

The day my daughter Rebecca and I tracked down Strauber Memorial Highway alongside a mangrove swamp and photographed the sign, we turned up some additional photos at the Clearwater Public Library—file photos of Henry Strauber taken by the Clearwater Sun two months before he died.

Henry E. Strauber in his office as a Pasco County Commissioner. (Courtesy Clearwater Public Library.)

I originally posted these photos in a family genealogy area of Google in 2008, but over time, Google didn’t have enough traffic to the “pages” area and eliminated it. I didn’t realize until yesterday that the digital memorial to Henry Strauber was no longer available. So here it is reprised.

I caught a flash on Facebook this afternoon of some old photos and managed to retrieve them. They were posted by Alan Strauber, a Sruel “Israel” descendant, who kindly consented to letting me copy them and add them to the thousand or so others I’ve been archiving.

This picture was taken in April 1946, probably in Bloomingburg, NY, at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. It shows, from left to right, Milford Strauber, and two of his brothers, Henry in the center, and Mitch on the right.

All three were sons of Sruel (Israel) Strauber, who was the youngest brother of my great-grandmother, Surah Henya (Schkolnik) Strober. I know, I know. It’s almost like you need a score card to keep track, which is why I created one.

Raymond “Ray” Strauber was Milford’s son. He was one of the early instigators, with Vic Struber, of the Strauber-Strober-Struber family tree.

This was Ray in 1946 in his Merchant Marine uniform, in a picture from his high school photo album.

And this was Ray’s sister Norma, also sometime around 1946.

And not many years later, in 1949,Ray and his wife Bernice on the back porch in Rego Park, Queens, NY.

Alan mentioned in our Facebook back-and-forth that he has his grandfather’s photo album. Can’t wait till he scans it and we begin to see more of the first generation of the family born in the U.S.

I don’t know what it was about the power lines that caught my eye as I drove alongside them a couple weeks ago. I’d been by this stretch of Sepulveda in El Segundo hundreds, if not thousands, of times before, and I’d never really noticed all of the parallel lines and sharp angles.

These suspended high-voltage lines run through a greenway on the west side of Sepulveda Blvd. While they do many things for homes and businesses, for the conduct of commerce, and for the comfort of life, I was particularly interested on this day by how they look.

Were these sentries protecting against some kind of invisible invasion? Were they signposts pointing the way somewhere? In reality, they were neither. They were merely wires carrying electrons from one place to another.

It was the aesthetics of power transmission that I was trying to capture with the camera, the symmetry and design. And what interesting geometric patterns they were making.

Hmmm. Much as I liked the interesting lines against the blue sky, there is a limit to what you can say about electricity in El Segundo. And I think I’ve arrived at that point.

The call went out a couple Sundays ago for a photo meet-up in Hollywood. The JLOP, a rag-tag bunch of people I know with cameras who sometimes like to use them, seemed a little worn down. Only four of us (not counting Chula the Dog, who didn’t have a camera) met on the corner of Hollywood and Vine for a little walking, a little talking, and maybe some shutter-snapping.

We’d been down this road before (quite literally). Of all the places JLOP has gathered, Hollywood has been the most prominent. But this night was different. Hollywood was dead. There were very few souls strolling down the boulevard. The clubs along Cahuenga, where we’d taken so many pictures on so many nights of people making the scene, were empty.

I’d opted to travel light, taking only my pocket camera rather than the larger SLRs I usually use. The advantage of the Canon Powershot G15 is that it has higher ISO settings, fancy photography-speak meaning that I can get exposures in most places without a flash. But the issue that night wasn’t the flash. It was more about not having much to shoot.

So I resorted to trying different angles on some of the landmarks I’d photographed many times before—the Capitol Records building, door locks, and signs. This isn’t exactly an inspiring portfolio.

My daughter Rebecca spotted what may have been the best shot of the night—a mostly-emtpy tequila bottle atop the traffic-signal electronics box. If we moved into an exact position, maybe we could get the street sign in the background.

It was a metaphor—but I’m not sure for what.

Sometimes when I haven’t taken any pictures in awhile—like, say, today—I push myself a little harder and find something, even something simple and ordinary, to shoot. It’s a kind of workout, but the only things that get any exercise are my shutter finger and, in the best cases, my mind.

The nearest thing I could find today was in my front yard. The roses have exploded in color bursts I don’t remember from previous springs. I thought for a minute and figured I could work on depth of field.

Depth of field is a term of art in photography, referring to how much focus is in a picture. If width is the first dimension, and height is the second dimension, depth is the third dimension. But in a two-dimensional medium like photography, that third dimension is an illusion. Shallow depth of field means only a small part of the picture is in focus. It could be the foreground, the mid-ground, or the background. In deep depth of field, all three would be in focus.

There are two ways to monkey with the depth of field. One is mechanical, and the other digital. In the mechanical manner, a bigger lens aperture will make for shallower depth of field, and a smaller aperture will make for deeper depth of field. The digital manner relies on computer software to do the focus trick.

Both methods have their virtues, and both have their drawbacks. For instance, the mechanical method has a more realistic look, but it can take some experimentation with the dials on the camera. Similarly, the software approach can alter depth of field in situations where the camera may have had problems, but it takes some aesthetic skill and a steady hand to mark the parts of the picture that require the software’s attention.

Which did I use this afternoon? A little of both.

I was somewhere around King City when I first saw the sign for Pinnacles National Park. It struck me as odd that there was a national park in California that I’d not only never been to, but also never heard of. I’ve spent the bulk of my life in California, and much of it since the Golden State granted me a driver’s license at the age of 16 in seeing its many parts. The particular stretch of Highway 101, El Camino Real, that was now inviting me to Pinnacles National Park is one I’ve been on scores of times.

A couple days later, my visit to the Salinas Valley completed, I was overcome by the curiosity of just what these pinnacles were that had been made into a national park.

They were rock spires, vastly different than the Gabilan Mountains just east of them that separate the Salinas Valley from the San Joaquin Valley. I learned at the Visitor Center that the Pinnacles had been created by seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault. The creation site was actually about 200 miles southeast of where the Pinnacles now stand, near the Antelope Valley in northeastern Los Angeles County. The Pinnacles had been pushed north in the jostling of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates.

It turns out, I also discovered at the Visitor’s Center, that I never knew about this national park because it was just over a year earlier that it had become a national park. The Pinnacles had protected status for over a century before that as a National Monument, having been designated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.

That morning my curiosity compelled me up a one-lane road east of Soledad was a warm one—over 90 degrees before noon—and I let reason take over. I didn’t have the right shoes for hiking and I also didn’t have any drinking water with me. (The rangers recommended a liter an hour for the two-hour walk through the caves.) I figured I’d have to leave for another day more detailed explorations of Pinnacles. Besides, there was a whole area of the park that wasn’t accessible without leaving the park and driving miles around to get to it.

As I was getting ready to leave, I looked up and saw the circling birds. My first impulse was to think they were some of the California condors that had been released into Pinnacles. The birds were circling at too high an altitude for a rank amateur like me to try to identify the species. Maybe they were hawks, maybe some other birds of prey.

Or maybe my curiosity had paid really big dividends by giving me a glimpse of ancient beasts in glorious surroundings.

UPDATE (April 15, 2014 1:27pm PT): Due to my editing error, one of the photos in this post was duplicated, and two of the photos weren’t originally included. The photos have been rearranged.

My travels took me deep into the San Joaquin Valley in January. Not the urban San Joaquin Valley of Bakersfield, Fresno, and Modesto, but rather the rural, forgotten San Joaquin Valley of Shafter, Wasco, and Corcoran. These are towns along California Hwy 43 where you see farm-implement dealerships and pick-up trucks. They’re the kind of places where it seems everybody’s hands are at least a little dirty with the soil that grows what America eats.

These are almond trees just east of Allensworth. In this part of the world, that’s pronounced AAA’-mund (where the “a” sound is like the starting syllable of “apple”). I’ve always been impressed at how perfectly these trees are planted, the rows forming precise lines with a perfect vanishing point. They are, as are so many fruit and nut trees, leafless in winter. Thirty-five ago, when I lived and worked in Fresno and was a relatively frequent visitor to the agricultural world, they’d flood the troughs between the trees to water them. Now, with water in short supply, they’ve switched to irrigation carried by thick black hoses and dripped onto the tree roots.

The railroad is a key component of California agriculture. It’s how many of the crops get to market. It’s what built the San Joaquin Valley into an economic juggernaut a century and a half ago, and what made a handful of men multimillionaires beyond their wildest dreams.

I took almost all of these shots within a few miles of Colonel Allensworth State Park. I was the only visitor at the time I was there, and other than a couple of maintenance people, the only person I saw for about an hour while I was in the area.

The longer I stayed at the rural railroad crossing that evening, the more spectacular my surroundings became. The sunset turned into a symphony of color, a rippled curtain of majesty.

When that happens, about the only thing to do is to keep clicking the shutter.

I braved southern California’s severe elements today. Those elements amounted to intermittent rain storms that were at times decidedly moderate in intensity. The goal was to snap some pictures with rain drops in them.

Initially, I canvassed the area to see what there was to photograph, but ultimately, I snapped all of these shots within 30 steps of my front door. Can’t beat the convenience. Lots of trees, flowers, and fruit, and hot coffee at the top of the stairs.

My daughter tells me that I’ve been a journalist way too long to see the world in artistic terms. She says I’m limited to a realistic view because of my training and my profession.

To prove her wrong, I ran all of these shots through Photoshop, and then through my new high-end effects program to enhance their artistic nature. I didn’t add anything that the camera didn’t catch, but I did throw a few vignettes on and do a little blurring to keep the focus off the trash cans and on the landscaping.

Dig those rain drops!

I guess I’m a little burned out on sunsets, so when the call went out for a JLOP gathering yesterday in the middle of the afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, my quest for variety compelled me to go.

JLOP is the name we’ve given to a loose-knit group of photo enthusiasts who enjoy getting together from time to time to snap some pictures and chat. (I’ve mentioned our gatherings here, here, and here in the past, to link to just a few.) It is not a group, in that it has no leader, no dues, and no rules. If you want to shoot, you show up.

Downtown Los Angeles is an odd area—it’s the city’s civic center without being particularly civic or in the center. In truth it’s a financial and administrative area where a few people live and a few more work. But since I’ve neither lived there nor worked there, it always feels a little foreign to me.

Lately (as in over the last 30 years or so), downtown LA has become a collection of skyscrapers, which are impressive for their size and their defiance of seismic realities. We were hoping they’d have some photogenic qualities as well.

I was particularly drawn on this outing to the reflections. There are now so many buildings with mirror-like windows that, when the angle is right, you can catch two or three buildings in one view. The glass and the light sometimes show up as wavy lines within straight ones.

The Bonaventure Hotel (now known as the Westin Bonaventure) is, I think, one of the oldest of the glass buildings. It’ll be 40 years old soon. I’m sure I have been inside at one time or another, but I can’t tell you when it was. It’s always been about the outside for me.

Behind the Los Angeles Central Library—which I have been inside many times—are a couple of small fountains. They helped to break up the photographic flow for me.

And almost before I knew it, I was focused again on the Bonaventure. We’d crossed around so we were seeing it from a different angle, and the light had changed a little to pick up even more reflections.

I caught one last look as I was driving away from the skyscrapers, across the freeway and back into the world where people live. The lights were just coming on, and I was on the verge of being far enough away that the buildings were becoming an actual skyline. If you wonder where you are, the palm trees put it all into perspective.

My daughter Rebecca told me the other day that in the few years she has been snapping pictures, she figures she’s taken a couple of good ones—and one great one.

I happen to have been there when she took the great one. Well, that’s not quite the whole story. I happen to have been the subject of the great one. I’ll show you the shot, and then tell you the story behind it.

Last June, Rebecca and I took a three-day road trip. It was going to be one day out, one day there, and one day back. We figured we could make it to Marin County under those constraints.

Tooling around the countryside, we stopped for lunch in Olema, maybe the hippest rural town in the world. It’s about 40 miles west of San Rafael, the seat of Marin County, which is on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. After lunch, we were wandering around, stretching our limbs, and relaxing. Rebecca came to where I was sitting in the shade behind the inn and told me she had found the coolest thing—a pasture with a special set of stairs to get over the fence and a herd of cattle in it—and that we should go take some pictures.

As I followed her to the special stairs that would get us effortlessly over the barbed wire, I asked what I thought was a simple question: “Are they cows, Rebecca, or bulls?”

She said, “They’re cows. They don’t have horns.”

I’m not the world’s greatest expert on bovine anatomy, but it struck me that she’d answered with information that wasn’t relevant. “It’s not the horns that make the difference,” I said. We kept plodding closer to the 50 or so animals in the herd, and it became apparent that at least one of them wasn’t a cow. It was a bull. And it left little doubt that we were unwelcome around the herd.

Rebecca skedaddled. I wasn’t as quick to move. The bull started doing many of the bull-type things I’d only seen in cartoons—pawing the ground, lowering its head, snorting, and probably a few others that I failed to notice because I wasn’t seeing a happy ending to this little pastoral sitcom. I wasn’t sure what to do. Getting gored by a bull wasn’t on my schedule for that day (or any other). I figured I was best staying exactly where I was.

And that’s when Rebecca snapped her “best” shot.

I was preoccupied with the animal in front of me and not paying any attention to the camera. Each time I took a step down the path, the bull took umbrage. Finally, after I reviewed in my mind the limited options, I made a mad dash through the tall grass. I figured the risk of abrasion from a full face-plant in the pasture, or a sprained ankle from hitting a hidden rut, was preferable to doing anything to make the bull tangle with me.

Thankfully, Rebecca chose not to document my egress.

I’m drawn to sunsets, having dragged my camera—and, by extension, my readers—to a good many of them. But when I set out last Saturday to follow the “golden hour,” I wanted to try my hand at something more than just the setting sun. I found myself at a place called Imperial Hill, on the south side of LAX in El Segundo. Imperial Hill’s great claim to fame among aviation buffs and photographers is that it overlooks the south complex of runways at the airport.

It was a particularly clear day with an onshore wind of about 25 mph, enough to keep it clear. And the control tower did its job by keeping the planes taking off into the wind.

And the setting sun did its part as its rays grew diffuse and golden against the aluminum of the planes.

Aircraft photographers are a distinct subset. They like to call themselves “plane spotters.” Many have a lot of specialized equipment—extra-long lenses, dedicated aviation radios, and some even carry a spotting glass (like ship’s captains from the 18th Century.) Some keep detailed archives of the planes they’ve photographed, their tail numbers, the weather. A few I’ve talked to claim they’ve made money mining their photo archives if a particular plane makes it into the news.

I was more interested in the action photos than in the gear. At one point, I even turned to the other end of the runway, where planes were touching down. The points of light are planes on final approach to LAX, each at a different distance and thus a different altitude.

I think the high point of my photo session was the “big boy,” a Lufthansa Airbus A340-600 that lumbered down the runway and then crept toward the sun.

 

Yup, the blog’s all different.

I know it looks pretty much the same, but its innards are all new. It’s the result of way too many hours of migrating from one form of blog software to another. And yes, there was a point to all this.

Among the things you can now do is look at the blog from a mobile device—a phone, a tablet, or anything in between the two—as well as a desktop or a laptop. In other words, the page will show up well on any device you might be using. It will be legible. The pictures will be large enough to see. And there’s a special menu to help you get around, whether you’re on Ios, Android, or Kindle.

Those who have followed my faltering efforts in the past to write computer code and have it work as intended may wonder why the investment of grief and sweat.

Have a look at the stats and I think you’ll start to understand. So far this month, this site has had 131 visits. Of them, 84 (64%) have been from computers, 28 (21%) have been from mobile devices, and 19 (14%) have been from tablets. During the same period a year ago, mobile devices accounted from about 9% of the visits and tablets 7%. In other words, mobile and tablet visits to this site have more than doubled in a year. And there’s every expectation to think the traffic will continue to grow at a rapid pace.

And here’s the best part: you don’t have to do anything different. Just type the same URL, and the site itself will decide (based on the size of the screen you’re using) which version to give you.

Progress!

There’s a secret covenant somewhere that when the sun rises on southern California on New Year’s morning, the weather will be glorious. But what about a New Year’s sunset?

This is the one I found tonight at Playa del Rey, just south of the boat channel to the Marina.

The picture doesn’t tell the whole story. The breeze did have a little nip to it—bringing the temperature down to somewhere in the mid-60s.

And this, I suppose, is why it’s called “the Golden State.”

Happy New Year!

The kid-who’s-almost-not-a-kid-anymore and I raced west last night in hopes of catching the sun drop into the Gulf of Mexico. We made it!

We were in one of our usual spots—Indian Rocks Beach, straight west of Tampa—and the sunset was glorious, as it so often is in this part of Florida.

The camera was a little cumbersome for Rebecca, since her left arm is in a cast, the result of trying to learn to surf a few weeks ago on Florida’s East Coast. But she figured out a way to maneuver the zoom ring and was all-in for the shoot.

There was a bit of unexpected drama on the sand, as we found ourselves steps from a marriage proposal in progress. It was quite the scene, when just as the sun dipped below the horizon, a glittering ring materialized and the couple kissed. Maybe a hundred people on the beach to watch the sunset broke into applause. Even though no one was close enough to hear the words, we all got the upshot.

I am in Florida to celebrate (a few days early) an important milestone in Rebecca’s life, her 18th birthday. It’s startling for me to realize that next week, she will achieve the “age of majority.” She keeps telling me she doesn’t feel like she’s 18.

I have to keep silent. The only responses I have available are all cliches.

Here’s to adulthood to my little girl.

I don’t want to say that life is a little slow in the House of Romance, but we’ve recently spent some evening moments marveling at the return of the Orb.

For those not up on the seasonal changes in domestic life, the Orb is a common garden spider in most places in North America (Argiope aurantia). It works by night, weaving a large web with characteristic cross-strands of silk, and hides by day. We see them most commonly in late summer on our front porch.

The orb that has taken up residence in our eaves the last few days is especially large. Its diameter spread-out, in full web-weaving and insect-consuming mode, is about an inch and a half. (Previous orb visitors to our porch have had diameters anywhere from the size of a quarter to the size of a dollar coin.)

Its remarkable to watch the single-mindedness of its web-weaving, the speed with which it gets to a trapped insect and wraps it in silk, and how deliberately it devours the insect.

Given the baseball blackout we’ve been suffering through this month, the Orb is the best entertainment ticket in town right now!

Over the weekend, I turned 60. It’s a milestone, to be sure. It ends in a 0. It also means I’m now old. Officially old. Inarguably old. Incontrovertibly old.

I’m not the kind of person who is struck with deep thoughts at key moments. Those tend to come later. And they usually arrive as vague realizations of what transpired.

Truth be told, I didn’t awaken on my 60^th birthday with any particular feelings other than noticing that it was a nice, clear summer day. I didn’t pinpoint any new aches and pains, but the ones that have been creeping up on me for the last several years were still very much there. And I really didn’t take any time during the day to take stock of where I’ve been and give some thought to where I might be headed.

But there are certain realizations I’ve come to over time that might be the wisdom of age. Of course, they might just also be pithy phrases that appealed to me. I figured I’d share some of them with you.

• Robert Benchley was right: don’t mix scotch and gin.
• Just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should say something.
• Having a loving partner is a blessing.
• Asking forgiveness isn’t as hard as it seems.
• My father was right: there’s therapeutic value in hard work. Just not as much as he said there was.
• Friends and family are wonderful things.
• Kids may be even better.
• There’s no sin in driving the speed limit.
• It’s okay to ignore a ringing telephone.
• Bad news always finds you.
• The greatest hitter in baseball had a career batting average just over .400. That’s two for five. Don’t expect to do better than that in life.
• We all know the destination. Life is about how you get there.
• Life may be tragic, but it’s not necessarily serious. (Thanks for that one to Stu Chalfin.)
• Try not to retrace the same steps. There can be big rewards to returning a different way than you came.
• Aim high. The gravity of life will adjust your ambitions on its own.
• There will always be smarter people. The only thing you can control is how hard you work at it.
• Everything is a little softer around the edges than I once saw it. This may be more than diminishing eyesight.

As I said, I’m not a terrifically deep thinker. These are things that, for the most part, have slapped me in the face. I just happened to remember them. There’s a saying among my generation that if you remember the past, you weren’t having a good enough time.

So what am I forgetting?

My mom celebrated her 90th birthday last month, and as part of the festivities, I assembled a slideshow of selected pictures of her life. Many people saw it, but I figured it would be a good way to extend the slideshow to others who haven’t yet seen it to post it here.

So enjoy Ethel Skolnick’s first 90 years.

[portfolio_slideshow id=2512 size=medium centered=true loop=true]

It’s hard to believe. My dad died on this day 11 years ago. I don’t know if it ever really gets any less painful, but there’s a day when his absence went from being a source of anguish to just another fact of life.

My mom, my brother Elliot, and I visited the cemetery on Sunday. It’s an annual ritual for us, a physical place to connect the many memories and emotions for a short time. It was Elliot’s idea to leave the Dodger can insulator.

I’ve written at some length of my dad, and of his death. Last year at this time, I wrote a few words and added a few that my cousin Jim Ostroff had sent me remembering my dad. I’ve also posted some of his pictures, including a photo album he kept during the war and just after.

It’s been more than 4,000 days, and the one hasn’t come yet where there isn’t something I wanted to tell him—a joke, an anecdote, a development in one of the esoteric fields he always seemed to know a lot about.

EDITOR’S NOTE: My cousin Jim Ostroff sent this to me a few weeks ago and asked me to post it here. Among other things, this page has become a repository for family information and memories. We both gave a lot of thought to the sensitive issues involved, and Jim especially came down on the side of sharing these at times painful family stories in the interest of truth.

Grandma Clara lived with us forever. Or so it seemed. Clara Skolnick Rosenblum, mom’s mom, was there—always there—tending to me and the twins, Matthew and Ellen.  Grandma cooked and cleaned and got us dressed in the morning, as both mom and dad left early for work in the city.

Actually, grandma came to live with us in July 1953, when mom, dad and I moved from Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn to Douglaston, Queens, one of New York City’s five boroughs. The twins were born in October. We lived in a two-bedroom garden apartment, decidedly cramped quarters for three adults, two babies and a not-yet-three-year-old boy.

Grandma Clara gave up her apartment in Brooklyn for reasons I never learned. Perhaps it was just time. Perhaps she no longer could cope, alone. Her husband and my namesake, Jacob J. Rosenblum, had been gone 10 years. The move out of Brooklyn came nearly 40 years exactly after Clara, Jacob and baby daughter Rebecca (later Virginia) left Austria-Hungary forever.

By the summer of ’53, all the daughters were long married: Virginia to Joe Altman, Charlotte to Phil Greenfield and my mom, Theodora, or Thea, to Herb Ostroff.

Perhaps grandma came to us by default. Virginia, Joe and Jay lived in a Brooklyn apartment, as did Charlotte, Phil, Lynn and Jeoffrey. Our Beech Hills garden apartment in Douglaston wasn’t much bigger, but my parents accepted her.

Moving to a three-bedroom apartment in the summer of ’54 made our lives marginally more comfortable. Grandma Clara slept on the living room sofa. All the rooms were small by today’s standards. There was one bathroom.

As a child it didn’t matter. That’s all we knew and most times all the kids would be outside playing some game on the street, or hailing down the Good Humor man. In winter, if I wasn’t out sleigh riding (sledding), sometimes I’d watch in the kitchen as grandma baked the most incredibly-tasty yeast-cinnamon pasty horns; sat rapt as she spun stories of her privileged childhood, the daughter of a wealthy brewer in Jazlowiec, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Pomortsy in Ukraine.

Most times I was “Jimmy,” but many a time grandma would call me Yankele, after her husband. It was a heady mix, the swirls of yeast dough scents, bubbling chicken soup, percolator coffee and stories Grandma Clara would relate about growing up virtually a princess on a farm estate licensed by no less than the Court of Emperor Franz Josef.

The yarns grandma related about private tutors, servants, stacks of money in drawers, bulging bookshelves, miraculous folk remedies and being courted by a bevy of wealthy young men, were but fairy tales to a child who had just learned to read Andersen and Grimm, and even less believable.

One day, when I was about eight, I asked grandma why she insisted on telling me these stories. She covered a bowl of rising dough with a towel, sat down next to me at our small kitchen table and explained: “Yankele, I want that someone should remember who we are. I want someone to know where we came from,” she intoned in a thick, Germanic accent that rendered w’s as v’s.

The seemingly enchanted existence crashed hard after Clara left the old country in March 1913. Life with Jacob and three girls in a Brooklyn tenement was trying. Though Jacob was a talented men’s clothing designer, with a degree from a prestigious Vienna school, the U.S. market for upscale men’s clothing makers was limited. His boutique store failed.

Jacob went to work in the schmatah trade, working long hours six days a week in a sweatshop, until the Depression made regular employment problematic.

Come the 1930s, Clara was said to have “nervous disorders,” a catchall for maladies doctors otherwise couldn’t diagnose. The doctors’ directives were similarly generic: go to the country for a few weeks in summer.

Somehow, they did, perhaps with the help of family. Photographs were a luxury and there are few of my grandparents after they posed for the obligatory ones upon arriving in America. An early August 1943 snapshot shows Jacob reclining on an Adirondack chair somewhere in the Borscht Belt, looking worn and beaten down at age 55.

Jacob collapsed at home two weeks later. The family doctor was summoned. He diagnosed a heart attack, but could do nothing. Jacob J. Rosenblum soon breathed his last, but not before murmuring, “I don’t care anymore.”

By the time Grandma Clara came to live with us in ’53, her medical problems mounted. As so many in her Skolnick family, she had heart disease. I recall times I walked with grandma about one mile “down the hill” to a local shopping area. Invariably, she had to stop and put a tiny pill under her tongue. Once, I asked grandma what she was taking and the answer shocked me. “Nitroglycerin,” she said. This greatly troubled the mind of a seven-year-old. I thought she’d blow herself up.

There were many other things I didn’t understand. Grandma Clara talked about having severe pains in her face. Grandma told me she got “nerve blocks” from doctors, administered via “long needles,” which she said was why her face drooped.

In the summer of ’59 grandma left us for several weeks. I thought that she went to live with Aunt Charlotte, Uncle Phil and my cousins, who had just moved to Syosset, Long Island, N.Y.

I did miss my grandmother and persisted in asking where she was, always getting puzzling non-answers from my parents, maybe the best they could do with an eight-year-old. One day they took me to see grandma, except I was not allowed to see her.

We drove about 20 minutes to a state mental hospital, Creedmore, located at the city line between Queens and Nassau County, L.I. If ever there was a place out of a nightmare, this was it. Thick bars girdled windows of the squat buildings. Huge trees overhung every inch of ground, bathing everything in shadow. Not a ray of sunshine.

Mom and dad said they were visiting grandma, but I couldn’t. Each took turns waiting with me in a lobby area that was open to the wards. It was a dark expanse with walls painted a drab brown-green. A white-uniformed woman sat at a desk. She gave me chocolate Tootsie Roll pops. One went in my mouth; the other two in a pants pocket.

I did not know of Bedlam, but this was a close approximation. People ranting, howling, screaming. Others drooped limp in wheel chairs, or flailed away in spastic hand jerks. The air was permeated by a urine scent.

I could not get out of there fast enough. When we finally did, I threw away the chocolate Tootsie Roll pops and never again could even look at one.

A week or so later grandma came home. I was told not to disturb her because she needed to rest. Showing an inclination that perhaps foreshadowed my career as a reporter, I kept asking questions, especially about why grandma wore a kerchief.

My mom told me but it didn’t make sense. Something about grandma being shocked. Years later I surmised that she likely underwent ECT at Creedmore.

No one attempted to explain any of this. Perhaps my parents thought it would be too much for a child to understand, or maybe they wanted to shield me at a young age from life’s harsh realities.

All I knew was that Grandma Clara loved me, would tell me endless stories and would take endless pills. I remember bottles and bottles of pills she’d keep in an old purse and that the walks on which she’d ask me to accompany her to the Deepdale pharmacy increased in frequency as the ’60s wore on.

So, too, did the times she’d sleep during the day, or frantically scrub the kitchen floor or wash down the walls.

Vague but distinct memories, as well, of my grandmother, who was very soft spoken, yelling at times on the phone. I didn’t understand the snippets that I heard. “Doctor! Pills, more. Need. Now!”

I never knew what grandma took, but thought she must be really sick, because by early ’63 she asked me to pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy when I got home from school. I did not understand why she didn’t walk there and back as she used to, or wait for my parents to come home from work at about 6 p.m.

Grandma explained that I could “run fast” and she needed the medication. Though just 12 at the time, I began to have an inkling that Grandma Clara—this proud, educated, smart, multilingual woman—had spiraled into drug addiction, abetted by doctors.

No one should take umbrage at the retelling of this human descent. Grandma was not weak of character or spirit. Nor did she intentionally seek refuge in mind-numbing pharmaceuticals. Her experiences are far more an indictment of a time and a system that marginalized women, attributed a bevy of ailments to “female hysteria” and wantonly prescribed drugs with no regard to their dangerous effects. Grandma Clara was one of a countless number of victims.

The departure

Late October ’63. It was a little before 5 p.m. Another boring session of Hebrew school was nearly over when my friend Harlan came in the classroom, said something to the teacher and then rushed over to me. Grandma Clara was very sick and I had to come home. We both ran six blocks down the steep hill to the apartment, where Harlan’s family lived upstairs from mine.

What I came home to was beyond the ken of a 12-year-old. Grandma was greatly agitated and super-hyper. She was talking a mile a minute. It was all gibberish. I was scared.

My younger brother and sister, Matthew and Ellen, were home. They were very scared.

All I could think of was that this was something out of a horror movie about aliens possessing humans. Was it a disease? Would we catch it and go crazy?

Our parents got home about 6 p.m., but it seemed forever.

Mom and dad took grandma into their bedroom and this is the only time I ever remember my dad screaming.

I never learned what had happened to Grandma Clara, what seemingly possessed her. I suspect that she inadvertently took an overdose of some amphetamine or other drug that caused her to be wired.

Grandma was her old self the next morning, but my parents stayed with her. When I returned home after school grandma was not there. My dad told me he had taken her to stay with Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Phil at their home in Syosset. Made sense. Grandma had stayed with them for a week or so a couple of times a year.

Weeks went by and she hadn’t returned to us. I asked if we could visit grandma in Syosset. My mom said we could not, because grandma wasn’t there. My understanding, gleaned from talking with my mom and relatives long afterwards, is that Aunt Charlotte committed her mother to Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood, Long Island.

The dream

A few days later my mom told me of a dream that had awakened her that morning. Mom said she was in an abstract, formless place. There was total silence. She looked up and saw her mother, Grandma Clara, standing slightly above her.

I remember distinctly sitting at the kitchen table as my mother related that she called, “Ma. Ma!” There was no reply. Grandma spoke no words, my mother said, but extended her left hand and showed my mother a white, square card.

Grandma tilted the card and on it was written 10. She rotated it a quarter-turn to show 26.

My mom related, in her dream, “Ma, what are you trying to tell me? What is it? What does it mean?”

Mom said that grandma remained mute, gazed intently at her and then vanished, prompting mom to wake in a sweat from this bizarre dream.

This was late October of 1963, a few days after grandma left us forever.

The puzzle

Mom had to figure out what it meant, for she was sure these were not random numbers. Though not very religious, mom believed the Kabalah were on to something; that there was a meaning to numbers if only one could discern their hidden meaning.

I well remember, though just 12 years old, huddling at the kitchen table with mom as she wrote out the numbers, arranging them in different combinations to find “something” that would have greater meaning.

She added the two numbers: 10 + 26 = 36

She added the constituent integers: 1+ 0 + 2 + 6 = 9

Mom tried adding the first and the last two, individually: 10 + 2 + 6 = 18

Mom thought she might be on to something when she added up all three possibilities: 36 + 9 + 18 = 63.

She tried other combinations, such as reversing the numbers: 62 + 01 = 63

Both ways she came up with 63, which was the year of the dream. So?

I recall her saying maybe the numbers 36 and 18 meant something reversed: 63 and 81. Nine is the same either way so perhaps it didn’t count.

Still, none of the numbers or combinations seemed to mean or point to anything, so mom tried a completely different approach.

Perhaps 10 26 should be thought of as 10 to 6, as in 10 minutes to 6 o’clock, or 5:50. Dad had been trying to get a job with a company at 550 7^th Ave.  Could this be a sign that he’d get it?

This seemed farfetched, even for a dream. She again focused on the numbers, looking for a pattern.

Mom came to think that somehow, the 9, 18, 36 numbers all were linked to 18. The number 18 has a special significance in Hebrew, as it is synonymous with חַי —Chai—life.

Mom didn’t ask Grandma Clara about this the last time that she or I saw her. It was July of ‘64. Mom and dad, along with Aunt Virginia and Uncle Joe, visited grandma at Pilgrim State. She was in no state to talk.

Grandma Clara seemed drugged up. I went to grandma to give her a hug. “Yankele, do you have cigarettes?” she said in an urgent tone. Huh? “No, grandma, I don’t smoke!” I said, asking her why she wanted cigarettes, since she never did. “For the nurses so they’ll be good and won’t hit me.”

Grandma Clara died the next month of pneumonia, I was told. She was buried next to her beloved Yankel in the Rosenblum family plot, Beth David Cemetery, Elmont, NY. Over time, I came to learn that everything that grandma told me—all those seeming fairytales—were true.

Mom’s efforts to interpret that dream, to find some significance in it, to find meaning in 10, 26, 18, 81, 36 and all the other combinations, came to naught. Eventually, she dismissed it as nothing more than a bizarre, meaningless nocturnal mash-up.

My dad didn’t get that job at 550 Broadway.

Still, for years dad would place small bets on the Irish Sweepstakes and later with New York’s Off Track Betting and the state lottery, using combinations of the dream numbers every which way. I don’t think he ever won a dime.

Questions

Years later, after mom died, I helped dad with the very difficult task of getting everything in order: collecting my mom’s clothing and shoes for donation, and helping him with paperwork.

There were scads of paperwork related to everything from her job with NYC’s Police Civilian Complaint Review Board, to St. John’s University, where mom was nearly done with her PhD, 9 years after she started college, taking night courses after work.

There were many long-time friends to be notified and acquaintances, such as John Lindsay. Mom wrote to Lindsay often when he was New York’s mayor and for years afterwards at his legal practice. Lindsay always replied, including to me in a condolence letter after mom’s passing.

Virtually everything had to be written out as an original. I couldn’t bring myself to use the typewriter on which mom had for decades churned out letters to family and friends and on which she worked, pro bono, as a consumer advocate for other people who had problems with products or services.

I filled out the forms, hour after hour, until my hand hurt. To save time and my hand muscles, I began to abbreviate the required information. Home address: 57-56 244 St. Employer: NYCPCCRB. DOB: 1/5/19. DOD: 10/26/81.

10 26. A shiver went through me….

What do I make of this? Nothing.

I think that if we look for numbers, for combinations, we will find them. In my life 222 has cropped up often. Grandma Clara was born February 22, 1892. Mom and dad were married Feb. 22, 1942. I was Bar Mitzvahed on Feb. 22, 1964, my parents’ 22^nd anniversary. Wendy and I met on Feb. 22, 1975. Our Arlington home zip code is 22206.

All of these are simply coincidences with no greater meaning.

Besides, I couldn’t live my life thinking that there is a power that determines our future, our fate, our very lives. External forces can affect us, but it is by our actions, decisions and choices that our lives are roughly hewn.

That mom died on 10/26 in ’81, nearly 18 years to the day after grandma came to her in that ’63 dream must be a coincidence. It has to be. Right?

 

“There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

—William Shakespeare