PaulSkolnick.com

It occurred to me, as I was heading to Florida a couple weeks ago, that there was something I could take pictures of that’s much easier there than here.

Clouds.

Yup, we don’t have that many of them that often here on the Left Coast. But in Florida they’re abundant—profuse, even—almost every day. And on the photo forays I had while my daughter Rebecca was studying, I had no trouble bringing them into focus.

The first place I headed was a seaside strip mall south of Clearwater Beach, a place called Sand Key. It sits on the west side of what’s known as the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which meant that I’d have an unobstructed view of the eastern shore of the waterway. That’s where the clouds happened to be hanging.

Downtown Clearwater, with the bridge that goes to Clearwater Beach, was a long stone’s throw to the north, and it, too, had a pretty impressive cumulonimbus build-up. I’d been reading and watching tutorials for the last several months about exposure and editing techniques to bring out the best in clouds.

I also wanted to try my hand at depth-of-field maneuvers, and ways to create interplay between the foreground and the background.

The far shore has Morton Plant Hospital (the cluster of large, white buildings) and some very expensive water-front property in the cities of Belleair, Belleair Bluffs, and Largo.

And wherever I moved along the boardwalk, I was followed by this guy.

But then, it’s every bit as much his cloud as it is mine, isn’t it?

It seemed like such an obvious thing to take pictures of—Endeavour, the last space shuttle, making its last flight, right over southern California. I tried to think through the photographic issues—the optimal viewing spot, how best to avoid the crowds, how early to get into position—but they seemed a lot more academic than emotional to me.

And then, just a few minutes later than advertised, Endeavour was right overhead.

Much to my surprise, I felt a lot of emotion. The crowd atop the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, many of whom had walked up a killer flight of concrete steps to get the view because there wasn’t enough parking for everyone on top of the hill, spontaneously broke into applause. It was  a large crowd, exponentially bigger than anything I’d seen before on the crest, and it was a diverse group. Here, people who had nothing in common gathered for the spectacle of an aircraft unable to fly under its own power passing overhead.

My own memory was jogged back 31 years, to the first shuttle landing. STS-1 had been diverted for landing from Florida to Edwards Air Force Base north of Los Angeles by bad weather. That April day in 1981 was cloudless across much of California. As the shuttle crossed the coast at Big Sur and descended for the dry desert lake bed, shuttle pilot Bob Crippen exclaimed, “What a way to come to California!”

And on this warm Los Angeles day, the last full day of summer, the shuttle had found another, equally impressive way to come to California.

So what was it that brought so many out all over California? Could it have been that space flight has gone in a generation from being a fantasy to repetitious? Or that the Shuttle Age, which began a few weeks after the attempted assassination of President Reagan, was now museum material? Or was it, possibly, that our curiosity is still in full force over things than defy gravity?

I don’t know why it was such a powerful moment with complete strangers on top of an otherwise overlooked hill on a hot day, but it was. And I’m sure glad I made the effort to be a part of Endeavour’s arrival.

More than 70 years ago, many members of the Strauber-Strober-Struber family gathered in a banquet hall in Brooklyn, NY. It appears there may have been about 80 guests. We don’t know who organized it. We don’t know who sent regrets. In fact, we don’t know much about it, expect that there’s a photo.

For a long time, this image was up on our GoogleGroup site, but then Google went all “textual” on us and all the graphics files had to come down. In the years the photo was up, we managed to identify (at least tentatively) almost everyone there. There are a few we still can’t quite place—feel free to click on either picture to enlarge it and try your own hand at putting a name to a familial face.

The photo is almost as interesting for family members it doesn’t show as for those it does. The descendants of Mendel “Max” Struber seem to be well represented in the gathering, as are the descendants of Chaim Groinem Strober. And there are descendants of Israel “Sruel” Strauber there. All of them were children of Yoinaton Folic Strober, and grandchildren of Abraham Aaron Strober. (And yes, there is a scorecard to help you follow along.)

Yet, the descendants of two other children—Surah Henya (Strober) Schkolnik (my great-grandmother) and Schmeel Hirsch Strober (who was the only child of Yoinaton Folic not to have come to the United States). Why weren’t there more? Was it a financial issue? A rift of some sort between the families? Hard times for other reasons?

A handful of those there could trace their lineage to Isaac Strauber, who (we believe) was a brother of Yoinaton Folic. Yet, others we now believe to have descended from other children, or possibly nephews, of Abraham Aaron are absent. Some were still in Europe, steeling themselves against the horrors of a war that was already well underway in their native towns and shtetlach. Some, perhaps, lived too far from the Brooklyn banquet hall. Maybe others had no desire. Yet, a half-century earlier, they’d all lived in shtetlach that were a stone’s throw (at most) from one another.

The mysteries are many. But what we do know is that scores of Strauber-Strober-Struber relatives did show up that spring night. And for at least the click of a shutter, they seemed to revel in each other’s company.

I was feeling a little house-bound the other day… and my shutter finger was badly in need of exercise. But I couldn’t decide where I wanted to go or what I wanted to shoot. I ended up a couple miles from home—just north of here, in fact—at a city park I’ve passed by many times, twice daily for some long stretches of my life, but where I’d never bothered to stop.

Holmby Park is so seemingly inconsequential that the city’s Recreation & Parks website doesn’t even post a picture of it. That’s odd, since the full city block set in the midst of what is arguably LA’s most exclusive neighborhood is a gem. Besides having a lawn bowling area, a playground, some impressive shade trees, and vast expanses of lawn, Holmby Park actually contains an 18-hole, 3-par, pitch-and-putt golf course.

The golf course is tiny. And there, amid homes whose prices are often in eight digits, it costs three bucks to play a round. (Weekends and holidays, it’s much more expensive—$4.)

My interest in the place was not at that moment chasing a white ball around the grass, but rather in challenging myself to take more and better pictures. The park didn’t disappoint in that regard, either.

I’ve recently been trying to understand some of the aesthetic underpinnnings of photography—things like composition and exposure—and to work at mastering some of the software that helps make photos more expressive.

Holmby Park offered ample opportunities to practice both.

I know I made a lot of strides around Holmby Park—I circled the place once for exercise and at least once more looking for good shots—and I think I also made some strides toward improving my craft.

It’s impossible to go the entire distance in a day, but since discovering this gem so close to home, I expect it to be a frequent laboratory.

It had been quite some time since the Justice League of Photographers (JLOP) had been out hunting shutter snaps. But when the call went out to gather Friday night in Hollywood, almost everyone seemed otherwise disposed.

Not me, however. And not Bryan Frank. Which is pretty much how the two of us found ourselves wandering Hollywood Boulevard, Vine Street, and Cahuenga just before and just after midnight last Friday. The crowds seemed substantially smaller than the last time we’d strolled this area a year or 18 months ago, but there were still images to capture.

The goal of these outings, besides camaraderie and conversation, is to motivate ourselves and each other to find the shots not so easily taken, to see with a fresh set of eyes some of the scenery we’ve been over many times in the past.

Seeing with fresh eyes isn’t as hard as it may seem. The last time we’d seen this newsstand, on the east side of Cahuenga just south of Hollywood, there were actual periodicals on the wall rather than the bare painted plywood that’s there now.

There are also the landmarks that haven’t changed, like the Capitol Records building. It has been there since my childhood. The cars that pass on the streets around it have changed, but the building itself looks pretty much like it always has.

The corner of Hollywood and Vine is celebrated on screen and in song, but when you’re standing there, it’s just another place where cement and asphalt meet. Southern California mythology suggests that this is one of the places where “magic” happens; reality is that it’s not one of those places, and there’s probably no “magic,” and if there is, it’s certainly not here.

The shot I kept trying to capture all evening was shoes, and this is as close as I got to realizing the vision. I think I got into the neighborhood, but not to the exact place I needed to get to for this one to really pop.

And then sometimes, there’s the stuff that just jumps out at you while you’re standing on the street corner.

The whole time, I don’t think Bryan and I were more than 25 feet apart, although looking at his snaps for this outing, I’m wondering if we were even in the same city!

My pal Bryan Frank and I hit the Santa Monica Pier one evening a few weeks ago. Nominally, we planned to take some pictures as the sun was going down. But the “buddy” system carried with it something a little stronger, the no-need-to-say-it admonition that we had to try for something more than cliches. Bryan’s term for it is getting out of our comfort zones.

It should be the goal every time I pull the camera out of its case to try something a little different, a little harder, a little less cliche. And it is my intention. But sometimes it’s just plain hard.

It’s especially hard at the Santa Monica Pier, which has been photographed at more angles, in more kinds of light, and in more of just about every kind of circumstance there is. Put the words into Google, click “images,” and you get back 4,690,000 pictures.

But I tried. Some of the snaps were a little lamer than others. I picked a spot on the Pier’s north side, which gave me a view of curve at the north end of Santa Monica Bay, and the Santa Monica Mountains in the background. From that vantage point, the sun actually sets behind the mountains rather than over the ocean.

The elements vary a little from season to season—how many people are near the water’s edge, how much clothing they have on, and whether the lifeguards are in their towers. But in many respects, there’s little variance at all—the waves are always crashing, the birds are always floating, and there’s usually a pretty good breeze.

And then there’s the sun. Sometimes you can watch it set. Often it’s hidden by clouds, what’s known in these parts as the “marine layer.”

But this was a day the sun did its magic.

Jenifer Novik promised she’d send me photos of her family, and I must admit I was stunned when the FedEx envelope arrived with almost 90 prints of four generations of her family.

It has taken me a couple of months to scan all the shots and then to re-touch them and re-size them for posting here. You’ll have to admit, it’s quite a display.

Jenifer descends from Berl Strober #100—as he’s listed on our genealogy chart. This was a branch that Scott Strober, in our GoogleGroup conversations with a man in Tucson he’d been in touch with, Stanley Strober, kept insisting had to be related—same surname, from a shtetl not far from Jazlowiec, where the families we then knew about were from. I wasn’t so sure.

It’s clear today from genetic testing and Kristie Weiland Cohen’s laborious efforts that the families are related, but we still don’t know the precise link between Abraham Aaron Strober, my great-great-great grandfather, and Berl Strober, Jenifer’s great-great-great-grandfather. Were they brothers? Father and son? Uncle and nephew? We still don’t know enough to answer that.

What do we do know is that Jenifer has provided us with photos that chronicle seven decades in the history of her immediate family—of her grandparennts, Ralph and Pauline (Strober) Novik; of her father, Jack Novik, who died in 1988 at the age of 42 and whose New York Times obituary details a stellar career as a public-interest attorney and legal scholar; her mother, Sallie Isaacson, who is a member of our GoogleGroup discussion; her uncle, Neil Novik, and his children; and of her own son, Jacob, who became a few months ago a member at of the GoogleGroup discussion group in his own right—our first participating teen.

Enjoy Jenifer’s photos.

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My dad in the mid-1980s, probably "sitting" for a portrait in an adult-education photography class that he taught for decades at Lynwood High School.

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my father’s death. I did all the things to remember—on the weekend, my family and I visited my dad’s grave; yesterday, I marked his death with the religious observance of lighting a yahrtzeit candle; and I spent a good bit of time over the last several weeks thinking about him, the relationship of children to parents, and fatherhood in general.

Late last night, I received an email from Jim Ostroff. Jim—known throughout the family as “Jimmy”—is my second cousin. Our grandparents were siblings. And our grandmothers were the closest of friends. Jimmy’s mother and my father were the same age, and they had been close growing up. Jimmy writes for a living, and has his entire adult life. More than anyone, he embodies the career aspirations of both his mother and my father, who hoped they might someday possibly earn a living from putting words together. They never did; Jimmy has for almost forty years.

With his permission, here are the amazing words he sent me late last night:

Today was a rather mundane day.  I arrived at work early to catch up on paperwork, did several batches of R&W, filed stories, did more paperwork and got home late.

It was a blur like many a day.  I will not be able to recall what I wrote, with whom I spoke, or what I ate for lunch five days from now, little less five years hence.

Yet, today is a special day; one that caused me to pause and think and reflect many times.

For you see, as the month of May rolled around I realized that its end also would mark the passage of 10 years since your dad died. Even now, it’s very hard for me to mentally utter that last phrase.

Yes, one day often is as nondescript as the next one, but some who pass through our lives have an outsized affect and leave a legacy that knows no bounds of time.

I won’t attempt to wax rhapsodic.  Saul Skolnick would not approve! (And probably engage in word play & needling to indicate his distaste for such praise.)

Your dad, Shullie, was rather revered in my family for his quick wit, writing ability, determination and pluck in striking out on his own course, and sticking with it. As a child, my mom often would use her cousin as an example for me to emulate, walking me through the progression from “bad kid, bad student” to witty, popular guy and A-Student–ehh, even if he declined the Arista because “it gave him indigestion.”

Mom emphasized that regardless of what we are given, a few like her  cousin Shullie found ways, by dint of determination, to go far beyond what people “expected” of them, to achieve goals that seemed impossible. So, in ways that no one would have any inkling, Mr. Skolnick helped to spur me on in life.

Though your dad and I had but sporadic moments to chat one on one, I so much appreciated the times we did. Ohhh, he could be short and a tad cranky, sometimes, but in perspective, I think there was a method to his needling.  I never detected animus. Bottom line is that if he nibbled around the edges it was to spur you on and hold your feet to the fire as if to say, “I know you can do better.  Try.  Don’t quit.”

Over the years I had a small number of teachers like that.  They were demanding, tough as nails and wouldn’t brook excuses.  They also were the ones who did push me to excel where I might have been content to bob along.

I think your dad was of the same ilk and proof of that came time and again during his life and afterwards in the form of comments by former students whose lives’ he affected in a most positive way.

Paul, the superb eulogy for your dad was right on in noting our tradition holds that whatever just rewards we deserve come during our lifetimes.  I think, looking back now from this perspective, Saul, Shully, Shelly Skolnick was richly rewarded in the affections and thoughts of many, many people. That is why the mention of his name continues to bring a smile to countless faces and will for years to come.

This is his legacy to us all. I’m smiling now.  Ear to ear.

I stopped by a few weeks ago to pay my respects to Larry Fine.

Fine was, of course, one of the original Three Stooges. His grave was the one I hadn’t yet been to on my odyssey of Stooge cemeteries.

It was important to me to get there before the publicity from the new Stooges movie tries to obliterate the memories of these original clowns.

Larry is entombed at Forest Lawn Glendale in a huge building at the top of a hill called the Freedom Mausoleum, in an alcove called the Sanctuary of Liberation. It was a little difficult to find, since the building has several layers of marble corridors and tomb alcoves, and the map the guard gave me at the front gate didn’t say on what level I’d find Larry. After descending a few flights of stairs and traversing enough hallways, I finally found the spot.

It was, as you can see, a plain marker. It had his stage name, rather than Andrew Louis Feinberg, the name he was born with. And it had the year of his birth and the year of his death.

That’s it. No mention of all the laughs he brought by taking the brunt of Moe’s theatrical brutality for so many decades. Nothing about his great poker face when Curly was working the shtick for humor.

Curly is buried in LA’s oldest Jewish cemetery, with his given name as Jerome. Shemp, who was born Samuel and who was Curly’s and Moe’s brother, is in a mausoleum in the same cemetery  under his stage name. Moe is cross-town in the same Jewish cemetery as Al Jolson and many other entertainers, also entombed under his stage name. And Larry is in a non-sectarian cemetery with a decidedly Christian stained-glass scene shedding light on the brass letters that make up his name.

Larry was an accomplished violinist, I’d read, a result of his parents trying to engage him in activities that would strengthen an arm burned by acid in his youth. Larry’s signature frizz, I’d read somewhere else, came when he auditioned for Ted Healy’s vaudeville show with wet hair that dried oddly during his interview.  Still, somewhere else, it said that Larry was getting ready to go on stage with the Stooges in Rhode Island when he learned that Mabel, his wife of over 40 years, had dropped dead in Los Angeles in 1967 of a heart attack.

One of the most surprising things I discovered is that Larry’s only son, John, died in an auto accident at the age of 24 in 1961, which is about the time the Stooges enjoyed their greatest popularity, the result of the relatively new medium of television needing material to fill the time and Baby Boomers looking to be entertained. John is buried beside Mabel, who is buried beside Larry.

How could he go on being funny after something like that?

But he did. Or at least he tried. A series of strokes left him confined to a wheelchair for the last five years of his life. A stroke ended his life in January 1975.

As I did on my visits to the other Stooge grave sites, I found a spot to sit and reflect on the life of a man I’d spent hours watching, but didn’t really know. I’m not the kind of person who’s hit by great insights in these moments, but there’s some solace to me in trying to put the often contradictory pieces together. Usually, they don’t fit very neatly.

So what I’m left with is the laughter I’ve known for decades whenever I see the Stooges perform. It’s not much to distill a man’s whole life to a guffaw.

But that was the point of his career. It worked. And I wanted to show up in person to thank him—to thank all of them—for that.

Vic Struber, who’s been at this genealogy stuff for decades now and whose detailed notes on every discovery have been invaluable in linking the family tree, emailed the other day to say that I had an incorrect ID on one of Kristie’s photos.

We thought the Struber in this photo was Sam Struber, who is also seen in other photos as a WWI doughboy in France.

Vic says the Struber in this photo, taken (we think) five years before the WWI photo, is actually David “Dave” Struber. (He’s the second one from the left in the front row.)

Dave was six years younger than Sam.

Vic also sent along this 1975 picture of Dave’s oldest son, Norman, and his wife Eudice, at a family wedding to show the resemblance between Norman and his father.

 Dave’s other son, Arthur, who was five years older than Norman, was at the same 1975 family wedding with his wife Roz.

CLEARWATER, FL—I’m in Florida visiting Rebecca. In talking through our plans for the weekend, we figured the most fitting way to start it off was with a sunset photo shoot on Thursday. I let Rebecca pick the spot.

She wisely selected the Belleair Causeway, mainly because its elevation (a much-sought-after quality in this very flat part of the world) would give us a spectacular view of two bodies of water—the Florida Western Intracoastal Waterway, which you’ll see in the foreground, and the Gulf of Mexico, which is in the background.

Sometimes, when the sunset is this stunning, you have to cut back on the words to make more room for the pictures!

I drove over to Dockweiler State Beach late yesterday afternoon. Dockweiler is the beach you see out the airplane window as you’re taking off from LAX. It’s an open stretch of sand that runs for four miles.

I had an idea for a video for one of my other blogs, Shoreline5089.com, which is a chronicle of my quest to see the more than 5,000 miles of ocean coastline in the continental U.S. But as long as I was up on the bluff making a video of the sunset, I couldn’t come up with a reason why I couldn’t also be using my trusty DLSR.

It was a little cold and windy on the bluff (at least for a Californian), but I was on a mission. And nature didn’t disappoint me.

Just north of where the sun was sinking, there was a huge flock of birds. They seemed to be making decent progress against the crosswind, but I really couldn’t tell where they were headed.

If you’d like to see what this scene looks like in motion, have a look at it here.

Kristie Weiland Cohen appeared just as several Strauber-Strober-Struber relatives were beginning to discover each other online. Her first contact was through a genealogy message board with several of us who listed ourselves there as looking for information on our family. Is it possible, Kristie asked, that her great-grandfather William “Bill” Struber was part of our Struber family?

Those more knowledgeable than I in these matters quickly deduced that William Struber, Kristie’s great-grandfather, was the second child and first son of Mendel “Max” Struber, a son of Yoinaton Folic, who was a son of Abraham Aaron Strober.

Kristie was “in the club”… and lucky for us. She has proved herself to be an ambitious and skilled researcher, often making connections when those of us with more cobwebs in our heads couldn’t see them. And she also discovered a treasure-trove of photographs in the basement of her grandmother, Catherine (Struber) Weiland. Here are some of those pictures.

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I wasn’t much into the game, so I made my way instead to Signal Hill to see what the sunset might have in store. It didn’t disappoint, that’s for sure.

There’s been so much chatter from my last post about the Catskills that I decided to post several pictures from Carol Strober. Carol’s grandparents owned a rooming house in Ellenville, NY known as Campbell House. And for a large part of the Strober family, it was a country destination they remember. So here are Carol’s pictures, in no particular order.

Harry "Tzvi" Strober and Louis Strober in barn of Campbell House, the family's guest house in Ellenville, NY, probably in the 1930s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Harry "Tzvi" Strober and Pauline Strober, brother and sister, probably near the family's guest house in Ellenville, NY sometime in the 1920s. (Collection of Carol Strober).

Harry "Tzvi" Strober and his wife Pearl in 1939. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Harry "Tzvi" Strober and his son Steven in approximately 1948. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Steven Strober and his grandparents, Louis and Bertha Strober, in 1945. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Louis and Bertha Strober circa 1910. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Louis Strober and his son Harry "Tzvi" on a park bench in 1940. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Louis Strober and grandson Steven Strober walking down street circa 1948

Harry "Tzvi" Strober and wife Pearl, with Harry's father Louis and Harry's younger brother Emmanuel "Manny" Strober, probably about 1940. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Jack Novik, center, with Sam Dagan and his maternal grandfather Louis Strober, probably in the 1940s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Carol Strober, in the arms of her mother Pearl Strober, in front of the family's music and TV store, Ellenville, NY, in 1949. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Pearl and Harry Strober at the Campbell House lift in Ellenville, NY, in the late 1940s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Pearl and Harry Strober on the lawn at Campbell House in Ellenville, NY, in the early 1940s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Harry Strober (third from left) and Pearl Strober (fourth from left) with friends, probably in the 1950s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Pearl Strober with her son Steven, behind the family home in Ellenville, NY in 1945. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Steven Strober with his mother, Pearl Strober, in 1947. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Carol Strober, in the arms of her mother, Pearl Strober, while Carol's brother Steven looks on in 1949. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Carol Strober and Steven Strober, mid-1950s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Steven Strober with his younger sister Carol Strober and grandmother Bertha Strober (in background) in mid-1950s in Ellenville, NY. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Pearl Strober on the lawn in front of Campbell House, Ellenville, NY, probably in the mid-1940s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Harry and Pearl Strober, probably in the 1970s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Pearl and Harry Strober, photographed in the 1960s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Pearl Strober in the garden of her home in Ellenville, NY, probably in the early 2000s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Pearl Strober at the home of her son Steven in Tucson, AZ in the mid-2000s. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Steven Strober with family friend Doris Summer (in background) in Ellenville, NY in summer of 1944. (Collection of Carol Strober)

Again courtesy of Jim Ostroff’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of family history, here are three more postcards sent by his grandmother Clara (Skolnick) Rosenblum to his mother Thea (Rosenblum) Ostroff. These are from the summer of 1948, when Clara was in Swan Lake, a few miles southwest of Liberty in Sullivan County, in the Catskills. This evokes an age now long past—a time when those who could got out of the hot city in the summer for the slightly cooler mountains a hundred miles outside New York City.

If the penny postage wasn’t a tip-off that this age is long past, nothing will be. Postcards were in that day, before telephone tolls got so inexpensive that cellphone companies stopped tracking them, the most efficient and economical way of keeping in touch with distant loved ones (about the same distance as New York is from Philadelphia, or Los Angeles is from San Diego).

One other thing: Jim tends today to use every available space on a piece of paper. He and I have corresponded for more than a half-century, and I know that whatever is typed in the body of a letter is only a part of the message. The rest of it will be written longhand across the bottom and usually up at least one side margin. His mom, Thea, who may have been one of America’s epistolary greats, did the same thing. So when I saw his grandmother’s postcards, I could tell this wasn’t a new habit. It’s undoubtedly a genetic one!

It’s largely because of my cousin Jim Ostroff that I’m at all interested in genealogy. Jim is two years older than I am. Technically, he and I are second cousins (we share the same great-grandparents). But we have been close friends all of our lives, share a profession, and an alma mater.

But there are some areas in which our interests diverge. I tend to be pretty scattershot. I get interested in things in bursts of energy, and then move on to something else. Jim has always stayed focused. He seems to remember every conversation he ever had with his grandmother about family, and probably has detailed notes from the ones after he was about three or four. By contrast, I have trouble remembering which shoes I’m wearing right now without looking down to check.

A few weeks ago, Jimmy (which is what his family calls him) emailed me a pile of pictures from decades ago. I don’t know how this stack eluded him this long, because I thought he’d already scanned all of his pictures. But they make for pleasant viewing. And as an example of the power of photographs to keep us connected.

*8:30pm PT two corrections in one of the captions: Thea was the middle daughter of Jacob and Clara (not the youngest, as I said), and Jacob’s postcard was sent two months before he died.

A postcard from Jacob J. Rosenblum (Jim's grandfather) to his middle daughter Thea and her husband Herbie (Jim's parents), postmarked Monticello, NY, on June 16, 1943, slightly more two months before Jacob died.

Text of the postcard from Jacob J. Rosenblum: "Best regards to you and husband. Be good and well. J." Postmarked in Monticello, NY, on June 16, 1943.

Photo of Charlotte Rosenblum, Joe Altman, and Thea Rosenblum. (Charlotte and Thea were the sisters of Joe's wife Virginia.) Note on back indicates it was taken at 1935 Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn, which is where Joe Altman and Virginal (Rosenblum) Altman lived.

Note from Jay Altman to Jim Ostroff on previous photo. (Jay is the son of Joe and Virginia Altman, and Jim's first cousin.)Note is dated June 17, 2009.

Picture postcard of the Sunrise Hotel in Livingston Manor, NY.

Text of postcard dated July 13, 1941 and postmarked July 14, 1941 in Livingston Manor, NY. From Herb Ostroff to Thea Rosenblum. ("Thea Ross" is a pen name Jim's mother sometimes used.)

1935 photo of Virginia (Rosenblum) Altman with friends, presumably in Brooklyn, NY.

July 1959 photo of Virginia Altman with Ostroff kids, presumably in Douglaston, NY. L to R: Jim Ostroff, Ellen Ostroff, Matthew Ostroff, Virginia Altman.

Virginia (Rosenblum) Altman with her sister, Thea (Rosenblum) Ostroff and kids, presumably in Douglaston, NY. L to R: Thea (Rosenblum) Ostroff, Virginia (Rosenblum) Altman, Herbert "Herbie" Ostroff, Matthew Ostroff, Ellen Ostroff.

Virginia Rosenblum and her sister Thea Rosenblum, circa 1935.

The Rosenblum sisters, circa 1938. L to R: Virginia Rosenblum, Thea Rosenblum, Charlotte Rosenblum.

I was sitting around this afternoon pushing a bunch of words across a computer screen. I had one eye out the window the whole time, wondering how I could pass an 80-degree cloudless January Saturday afternoon and have nothing to show for it.

I made myself a cup of coffee in a to-go cup and headed for the beach.

My friend Bryan Frank is always saying you have to get out of your photographic comfort zone, and the whole way to the beach I wondered what I might do differently today than I’ve done on all the days in the past.

Well, I figured, I could get under the Manhattan Beach Pier. I’ve never done that with my camera.

It turns out it was the perfect day for something new. A woman who showed up with her camera and a tripod right after I arrived told me this is one of three days when the setting sun would cross right in front of the end of the pier. So not only was the weather perfect, but it seems the circumstances were, too.

Some days, everything just clicks. I think this was one of those days.

Yup, some days it just clicks!

I promised, after my visit to Curly’s grave in Boyle Heights almost a year ago, that I’d make it to the rest of The Stooges’.

Today, running around town taking care of errands, I passed right by the entrance to Hillside Memorial Park on Centinela. Ordinarily, I zip by on the freeway with a nod to Al Jolson, in whose memory there’s a landmark mausoleum with a waterfall. But today, there I was at the front gate with a couple of extra minutes in the schedule.

The guard directed me to Moe Howard‘s tomb, but I wasn’t able to find it, so I headed for the office. The woman there was kind enough to point me in the right direction, give me a map, and a bottle of water.

It was a short walk from the office to the Alcove of Love. And the crypt was right where the woman told me it would be—C-233.

I sat down for a few minutes on one of the benches in the Alcove and pondered this man I didn’t know and about whom the marker said next to nothing. Born Moses Harry Horwitz, he had an incredible show-business career. A high-school dropout, he supported himself for almost a half-century doing schtick with his brothers (Curly and Shemp) and their friend Larry Fine. His career was buoyed along by technological changes—when Columbia Pictures stopped making shorts in the late 1950s, those shorts found a market in the emerging television medium. They also found a whole new audience in Baby Boomers.

Was making people laugh a fun career? Did it make Moe happy? No telling. I didn’t know the man. According to Wikipedia, when show-business evaporated for Moe in the 1970s, he went into real estate. Would you buy a house from this man? He was married for more than 50 years to the same woman, and had two children. That’s an accomplishment!

As with my visit to Curly’s grave last February, I came away from the Alcove of Love without any deep thoughts, no great insights on the Meaning of Life. What I saw was an unadorned monument to a man who spent 77 years on the Earth. I don’t know if he met his own expectations in life. But he has given me hours and hours of laughter. And that is a greater marker than can ever be made of brass.