Month: February 2016

My Mother Steps Up To The Plate

When I was a sophomore at Taylor Allderdice–it was 1965–a special program was planned for selected students. It was to be a combination of art and literature; Mrs. Wuchnick and Lloyd Welling would be teaching it; it would be the very first time that everyone would get an “A” as an experiment to reduce anxiety. This would be given over both semesters.

I wanted to get into this special program so badly; however you had to have a certain IQ and mine was one point below that.

I told my mother this and she didn’t think it was fair; she saw how upset I was. So she made an appointment with the school counselor and told her about me. In the end I was allowed to participate. Other than being involved with “A” choir and Mrs. Lewis, this was the best high school experience I’d had. And the proof of it is that I still remember most of what we did there. It became a part of me.

Mr. Welling introduced Dylan Thomas’ poetry to us and Mrs. Wuchnick encouraged us to make collages. We were given cameras and the best colored papers–called Color Aid paper–to work with. We worked in pairs which turned out to be beneficial. My partner was Andee Rubin and she told me years later that she had kept her portfolio of projects and materials. I’m sure that everyone who was fortunate enough to be there remembers our experiences.

I

The Piano Recital

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it means to be a Jew. I’ve read about my racial heritage and talked to others about it. I have a great deal of affection for the rules and regulations of being Jewish but also what it means to be part of the Jewish culture.

This is not always true, but a lot of Jewish children are encouraged to learn a skill outside of what they learn in school. Certainly in my case all I had to do was mention my desire to play the piano, and my parents scraped their budget to save up for a second-hand piano for me. I think Jewish parents like their children to be 1) self-confident and 2) well rounded.

Every year my piano teacher gave a recital. I dreaded this but I didn’t protest; it was just something I had to do. I practiced and practiced my recital piece and I never goofed up once in a recital.

One year my father was asked to go to Boston for a week for business and my mother wanted to go with him. She had almost no experience in seeing other places than Pittsburgh. But my piano recital was scheduled during that week.

My mother had made arrangements for a corsage to be sent to me in the late afternoon before the recital.

Because of the corsage I don’t remember feeling very bad about this. My grandmother was staying with us; but the thrilling part was that MY WHOLE FAMILY came to hear me play. My Golding grandparents came, my aunts and uncles.Afterwards my grandfather told me that because he was so proud of me, he would buy me anything I wanted. There was a special book I wanted that could only be found in Kaufmann’s book department, so he took me there and bought the book.

How could I even have been aware of this? But to them, the adults in the family, not only was I Leslie, I was a symbol of something. I was the eldest on both sides of the family, and the fact that I could get up and play a piano piece in front of everybody and not miss a note was a sign that life was proceeding as it should. My parents had done all they could for me and I was growing up into a “young woman” who was poised and talented. It was something nice for the generations who came before me.

There was something else about my grandmother that I adored.

She was a “fussy eater.” Her diet included about 10 foods. She ate a lot of Velveeta cheese, fried salami and eggs, and canned Chinese food.

I was also a “fussy eater.” I couldn’t stand to eat anything “slimy” or “sticky.” All I really liked was plain, dry food. I was squeamish and lots of times, when my parents demanded that I eat what was on my plate, there occurred a few kinds of disgusting scenes, not something I’d care to write about.

My grandmother made wonderful pies. However, when she made an apple pie or berry pie I wasn’t able to swallow the “slimy, wet” fruit. So my grandmother made something special just for me. She would keep aside small bits of pie crust, then spread them with only a touch of the fruit filling. Then she placed another small piece of dough on top. So I could enjoy her wonderful pie crust and not feel left out. These, she called “bupkes.” I was told that word meant “nothing.” She said she called them that because they were no trouble to make and it wasn’t a big deal. But it meant a lot to me!

My grandmother had a few names meant just for me and you would not believe how often I think about them. We also shared secret words and phrases and had private jokes. My husband has heard these so often that he could say them while asleep.

“Shanekeit” was her favorite word for me. I am told it is from Yiddish, meaning beautiful spirit. I named one of our cats that.

She also used to say: “I’d kill a pig for you, babe.”

Mainly we laughed a lot and thought a lot of things were funny. I have a photo somewhere that shows my grandmother, me, and my sister all laughing. Everybody should have a grandmother like I did; either a grandmother or somebody in the family who thinks you’re the greatest person in the world.

This is another of my treasured stories that my mother told me. I love this. I went bonkers when she told it to me.

My parents were 20 and 21 years old when they met; my mother’s cousin, Bryna, because of her outgoing, funny personality, always had a group of young men hanging around. These were nice, Jewish boys who liked to listen to music and relax together. One of these was Sherry Golding.

Right from the beginning my mother fell in love with my father. He was tall, had a head of wavy black hair, came from an educated family, was a college graduate. He wasn’t one of the most talkative young men; he had dignity even then. He was a foot taller than my mother and, in every way, she “looked up to him.” She never lost her sense of adoration for my father. Over time it grew stronger.

Then one night, after a date, he said to her: “I want you to be my wife. Will you be my wife?”

My mother said that she was not expecting this–she was bowled over with a kind of joy that she had never experienced. Of course she said yes.

She was sleepless from excitement and finally woke up Bryna and said: “Sherry Golding just asked me to marry him!!!”

My comment was a question in which I asked: “Mom, you mean you had no idea that he was on the verge of proposing to you?”

“It was only in my dreams. I truly thought that I wasn’t quite good enough for a Golding, especially him.”

There was pain there that came from the persistent nagging feeling of being not quite good enough.

I must have heard this 1000 times: Les, I loved your father more than he loved me.

GAKK! Finally I said: “Mom!! You give Daddy credit for being so intelligent. He chose you. So if he’s as smart as you say, it means you are as good as he was!!”

My mother, no matter how much I tried, would not give up this idea. She was haunted.

When the two young people told their families the news they met up with certain obstacles. My grandfather wanted his son to have an advanced degree in chemistry before he went into the working world and got married. He said he would pay the fees for my father to go back to school.

So here we have two very young people, somewhat unsure of themselves, each having to stand up to a dominating parent. This could possibly have been the first time my father went against his father’s wishes but he said no. He wasn’t going to do that. He wanted to get married and he already had a job in his field.

So the two got married at the Orthodox synagogue at the corner of Murray Avenue and Hazelwood Street, then flew to New York City for their honeymoon. My mother said this:

“I got on the plane with Sherry and I said to myself–my mother has stepped in my way but not this time. This is what I want.”

1

SCHOOL PICNIC, 1959

 A Memoir

 by

 Leslie Golding Mastroianni

 School picnic, school picnic, school picnic. The words ran around in my head like a frantic freight train as I lay trying to sleep.

School picnic, schoolpicnicpschoolpicnicschoolpicnic. Schoolpicnicicicicic.

When I—when everyone on our street— heard the blast from the steel mill, we knew it was midnight, just as we knew the morning blast meant 8:00 am (hurry up or be late for school), and the afternoon blast meant 4:00 pm (homework/chillout/play outside).

I heard the midnight blast and I couldn’t sleep. The best day of the year was coming. The best day of the year would come in the morning. We would spend the whole day at Kennywood, our beloved, cherished amusement park. And on a weekday, a school day. After nine months of blackboards, chalk dust, See Jane bark and hear Spot run, dusty gray teachers and standing in line and absolute silence as we sat at our desks filling in a hundred thousand million ink-smelling mimeographed work sheets, we would get our reward. Paradise.

Kennywood was paradise and paradise was Kennywood, where you could get the kind of food your mother never, ever cooked, hotdogs on sticks covered with fried corn meal, French fries dripping with oil, whorls of cotton candy, all washed down with lots of Coke. Normally I was allowed one glass of Coke a week. If I finished my meat and vegetables.

Kennywood cracked when the bumper cars crashed into each other and buzzed when somebody got a hit at pokerino. Kennywood sang out of tune when the carousel that we called the merry-go-round brayed out nice old songs like “Moonlight Bay”, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon”, and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”. But most of all, people screamed at Kennywood. Kennywood screamed when people got shook up and turned upside down and right side up again on the fast, scary rides. People screamed the happiest and loudest, though, on the Jack Rabbit, the roller coaster not for babies and old people.

Little kids and babies sometimes screamed on the merry-go-round, and sometimes they threw up, which disgusted me and my friends. We were made of stronger stuff; we were cowboy cool. We could devour all the junk food we wanted and ride the Calypso and the Seaplanes and never get sick. Not us.

Throwing up and crying at Kennywood on school picnic day was bad, but worse than that was being old at Kennywood. Our parents were old. All they did on school picnic day was remind us to meet them at a certain time and place, tell us not to make ourselves sick, and could we please take our younger brothers and sisters to Kiddyland to ride the safe boring little rides. We may have been dutiful 1950’s children the rest of the year, but we always drew the line at Kiddyland, and our parents, strict 1950’s parents, oddly let us off the hook.

The grandmothers were the worst. We felt sorry for them, though. They sat on the green benches under the shade trees, nodding and gossiping, arms crossed over their jutting abdomens. If we ran past the grandmothers’ bench on our way to the arcade, we’d wave and call hi to them. They would wave back and smile tolerantly, crumbling monuments to a time long gone.

The grandmothers ate their meals in the restaurant where you had to give your order to a waiter, and they ate things like chicken or pot roast on plates!  At Kennywood!?   This is the part we couldn’t understand. They didn’t want to walk around with a melting orange popsicle dripping down one arm and a candy apple clutched in the other hand, like we did. We didn’t understand why they came to Kennywood on school picnic day at all.

We would watch the lovers at Kennywood with a mixture of curiosity and scorn. They were high school kids who went to the big high school, Taylor Allderdice, where we would go someday. The lovers strolled through Kennywood with their arms around each other. Sometimes, pairs of lovers went out on the little lake in rowboats, and again we were puzzled. Why inch around the lake in a rowboat at Kennywood when you could ride the Jack Rabbit?  When they did ride it, the girls would scream and burrow their faces into their boyfriends’ chests. After the ride ended, the girls would simper and look into little mirrors and try to fix their hair. This really made us laugh. The purpose of the Jack Rabbit was to get your hair messed up. The girls looked stupid, and we swore, just as we would never sit on the grandmothers’ bench with our stomachs sticking out, we would never grope around in purses to find little mirrors after riding the Jack Rabbit.

At dusk on school picnic day, Kennywood changed. Families with young children packed up the sticky babies and tired, weepy toddlers and left. We begged out parents to let us stay longer and they usually gave in because they were too tired to move. They sat on at the picnic tables, the fathers uncomfortable in their business suits, having come straight from work, the mothers grey with fatigue, their blouses and skirts and dresses pulled and wrinkled.

My friends and I ran free for one more hour, dancing in the colored lights, using up our remaining ride tickets on the merry-go-round.

Sometimes our parents and grand mothers would come over to the merry-go-round to watch us ride on the moving, painted horses. When the bell rang to end a riding period, there would be a scuffle and a scramble for places. My friends and I grabbed our horses, the ones that moved up and down, the ones that were the hardest to mount. We watched all the Westerns on television, so we knew how Little Joe Cartwright and Matt Dillon mounted their horses on Bonanza and Gunsmoke. They were cowboy cool. Putting one foot into a stirrup, they leaped and almost flew onto their backs. I knew ahead of time that every year on school picnic day I would give myself a painful pull in the groin from repeatedly throwing one leg over a wooden horse; I suspected the same of my friends but nobody ever complained. It wouldn’t be cowboy cool.

Our merry-go-round didn’t have a brass ring and we loved it even more because of that. No brass ring meant that nobody competed with anybody else. We pursued our individual fantasies unhindered.

Since we were nine years old and, after all, not used to staying out late, we caved in at this point, having been riding the merry-go-round for an hour. We  agreed with our parents that yes, it was time to go. The sky glowed black behind the colored lights. Occasionally, one of us would attempt a plea—“Let’s just stay for one more ride, please?”—However, the plea would be cut short by a quick, severe look from a parent which would speak volumes. Obviously we exhausted all of our leeway today, and we were indeed going home.

My friends and I enjoyed the ride home from Kennywood on school picnic day, but we would never admit it. We lived on the same street, several doors from each other; the block was commune-like, and it didn’t matter who rode with whose parents; parents were interchangeable, and they trusted each other. We squeezed onto the back seat of a parent’s car, too crowded but unwilling to part company until the end. The ride home from Kennywood was enjoyable to us in the way that a millworker enjoyed knocking off from the steel mills after pulling a double shift with his buddies. Tired, but satisfied, sticky, dirty, and sporting a scraped knee or elbow each.

As the car began to roll over the Homestead Hi-Level bridge that crossed the Monongahela, we exchanged glances and simultaneously drew a breath. We never breathed while crossing bridges—that was bad luck. Once over the bridge we arrived quickly home. I knew that if I had indigestion and told my parents about it, I’d be in for a dose of Kaopectate. I hated Kaopectate so I kept my mouth shut and endured, as did my friends. Cowboys don’t complain.

I enjoy thinking that the afterlife is Kennywood on school picnic day, and nobody has to go home. It’s a thought welcomed by my occasionally overworked brain. It’s a thought that cools a boiling-over engine like water. If Kennywood on school picnic day is the afterlife, then unlimited quantities of fried and sweetened foods flow out of a mystical cornucopia; you can ride the Calypso, the Jack Rabbit, and the Seaplanes free and forever; little children ride, safe and secure, in Kiddyland; and parents willingly agree to any request to stay just for one more ride.

2

I wrote this piece about school picnic day at Kennywood over ten years ago. I was just starting out, trying to find my own way of describing things that meant something to me.

One summer day my mother woke up early and drove my father to his car pool friend’s house. Then she told us to get up because we were going to Kennywood.

My sister and I looked at each other, truly dumbfounded. In Yiddish the perfect word is farblunget…hit on the head with something so heavy that you stagger around senseless. Today wasn’t school picnic day; then why were we going to Kennywood? We never went there on any other day except school picnic day. My mother proceeded calmly, trying to make us calm, too. She didn’t know why, except it just occurred to her that we should go to Kennywood. With our grandmother.

There may have been a few photos taken on that day; I’m pretty sure they were in one of my mother’s photograph albums. It doesn’t matter because I can see the whole day perfectly despite that it was over 50 years ago.

But the funniest part was, to us, the magnitude of the power of adults. You can make a decision to go to Kennywood and JUST GO??

Well, that’s what we did. Kennywood was deserted in the late mornings. There were a few other people there but we had our choice of rides. And my mother and my grandmother stood, smiling so happily, watching me and my sister surrender to the joy of just being there for no particular reason other than pure pleasure.

 

The Book of Esther

My mother had two sisters; I’ve already told stories about my Aunt Maxine. Now it’s time to write about my aunt Esther.

There were some kind of strange family dynamics with this. My mother was 11 years old when Esther–the youngest–was born. My mother told me stories–and I witnessed this for myself–about thinking of Esther as her “baby sister.” They loved each other deeply and gave each other the greatest support possible. My mother adored Esther from when she was born, brought her gifts when she got a job after high school. Then, during our family crisis, with the baby being born and then dying and Herb having to be physically removed from the hospital, my mother took over Esther’s rehabilitation. My father played a quiet role in this–he was involved, did a man’s job extremely well, could be counted on, always.

When I was 3 Esther was 17. It felt as if she was my older sister. For a reason that only God knows, my intense love and admiration of Esther hurt in some way. It was my heart expanding, I think; I just could not get enough time and attention from her. Later, when I dragged myself back to Pittsburgh from Hartford, demoralized, I came to depend way too much on Esther and this brought trouble.

However–here is a nice story about all of us. When Esther graduated from high school she got a secretarial job at “Carnegie Tech” as it was called then. She was able to take courses  there at night for free. Also, because she loved the piano, she would practice on one of the school pianos after her work hours. She longed to get a piano of her own. She still lived in the Morrowfield with her mother, and my grandmother let Esther have the single bedroom.

My aunt had been secretly saving money to buy a used piano. This one little part of the story is vague–either she told my grandmother she was doing this or she didn’t tell her until the piano arrived. But the piano did arrive and, according to my mother, my grandmother fell apart, and there was screaming and more screaming. First of all, there was the fact of the piano being there and second, once the delivery men came with the piano, they couldn’t shift it so that this piano would fit through Esther’s bedroom door. My mother was called immediately and rushed over there but what could she do? She tried to calm the pair but then–and, boy, did my mother tell this with gusto—“I DECIDED TO CALL SHERRY.”

My father’s name is Sherwin; everybody called him Sherry.

“But Mom, why did you call Daddy? He was miles away at work; what could he do?”

“Your father always knew what to do. My guess is that by using the Yellow Pages he found some place that moves furniture and especially knows how to take pianos apart and put them back together.” Simple.

So that’s what happened; a man with several helpers came to the Morrowfield, took the piano apart, moved the parts into Esther’s bedroom–done.

This is one of the many stories my mother told me as she was fading from this world. Fortunately I have a good memory for things like this and I know I’ll never forget them. What a legacy I received!

 

 

We were princesses.

My grandmother was quite anti-social. She stayed within the bounds of the female clan of which she was undisputed queen. My poor mother–always trying to get her mother to leave the Morrowfield and enjoy life. It was difficult. I never thought about that. I liked my grandmother to be where she was. The only thing she did outside the family was play poker once a week with some friends. But that’s all she did; these “friends” were not really friends in the way we see it. They were just people who liked to play poker.

One summer–can’t remember exactly, probably around 1959–my mother made arrangements to take us on a “farm” vacation. There was a place in Ohio where a couple who operated a real farm opened their home to people like us, from the city. Somehow she got my grandmother to come with us. My father stayed at home and went to work every day; most probably he was relieved that he wouldn’t have to put with this farm environment. A nature lover he was not.

My sister and I flung ourselves into the pleasures of farm life. We explored the barn, the hayloft, we rode horses, went on a hayride, swam in the pond. This was the first time I saw a floating lily and I went into raptures over it. Still it remains my favorite flower.

My grandmother quickly found a place where she could fit in there; she chose a chair near the house that was her chair. One of the farm cats loved her and always sat on my grandmother’s lap if she was sitting there. This fact, that one of the cats was entranced by my grandmother, made her, in my eyes, even more regal and full of strength.

There were fields of daisies there, acres of them. My grandmother told my sister and I to go and get an armload of them and bring them back. Then she showed us how to make daisy chains, after which she put one on each of our heads, making us princesses.

I think that everybody has a joke or a funny word that makes them laugh, even over a period of years. I have two.

To understand this first one, you have to look at family dynamics. My grandmother and her sister Lil lived on the second floor of the store in Woods Run. For some odd reason, although my grandmother was the youngest sibling, everybody turned to her for advice. You just couldn’t do something or buy something if “Aunt Nettie” said no, that’s not the right way to do things. She was a very strict mother.

Money was tight then. Easy to understand when my grandmother and her brother Harry never held a job. But my grandmother even had live-in help and didn’t do housework. When my mother told me this story I always asked: What did she do all day? With no house to clean, dishes to wash, laundry to wash? My mother always said the same thing: she went food shopping and made dinner. Other than that she lounged around, smoking–everyone smoked then–talked to her sister and played poker with Harry and the next door neighbor.

When money was very tight there were family meetings. Something had to be done. Lil had a job at Mercy Hospital at night, sitting at the switchboard and answering calls. All that was left was the store downstairs. Then my grandmother said–“Oh well, I guess I just have to go out and FIND A JOB.” Then the young ones, Bryna, Audrey (Maxine’s mom) and others would literally stand up and cry out “NO! NO! Aunt Nettie ! Not that! Something will work out! Please…” Oh how we laughed at this.

I can’t tell you how many times I heard this. When I was young she told it to me because I was so curious about family. But when Alzheimers crept in I got to hear it many times over. The two of us always laughed; my mother always cried a little too. I think she cried because of the force of emotions of the past but she laughed at the absurdity of the situation. My grandmother was a healthy woman who didn’t have to worry about day care. She could have taken the bus to downtown Pittsburgh and worked in a department store. But she was queen of the clan and working was something she didn’t do.

***************************************************************************

As everyone knows my father died suddenly at the age of 44. I have so many memories of sitting shiva with my family and friends. Emotionally, all of us were “hot.” By this I mean that being closed up together for a week, with people coming and going, it was exciting in a way. If my knowledge of Judaism is correct, that’s the exact way the sages, rooted deeply in the past, wanted for the family who was hurting so badly. For a week it was party time and the food was WAY beyond decadent. The kitchen was flooded with fruit baskets, platters of kosher coldcuts, loaves of wonderful bread, and boxes of cookies and cakes from Rosenbloom’s.

Every night, when people went home, the nucleus, the closest family members, would linger on. This was story-telling time and it is quite impossible to convey how hard we laughed. It was hysteria.

The Reidbords either didn’t show up at all, or maybe came once. There was a break that occurred between Louis–my grandfather–and his brothers. They had government contracts to make uniforms for soldiers in WWII and got rich quick. One of the brothers, named Zeleck, was the worst according to my mother. He grabbed all the money and pushed my mild-mannered grandfather Louis out to the sidelines. So other Reidbords had a lot of money but not my mother’s family.

One night during sitting shiva my mother said: Uncle Zeleck took me on an airplane to New York City after I graduated from high school. He took me to Macy’s and said I could choose a gift. I was timid and shy then so I took a bracelet. That was all.”

There was a silence in our group for half a second and then my aunt Maxine said: I would’ve bought a gun and shot him.”

Words cannot convey how that remark brought down the house. I was laughing so hard that my sides ached; we were all hysterical. And even now, after decades, I still laugh.

 

 

My aunt Maxine 2

There was another story about my aunt Maxine that I was looking forward to write. It’s about a lovely experience I had at her house, every Wednesday when I was 15.

My aunt had Kathy and at this point Kathy was able to sit up in a high chair; my aunt had totally regained her shape. God, she was gorgeous. On Wednesday nights my aunt wanted to go out with her friends and kick up her heels a little and my Uncle Jack always worked very late. So after school on Wednesdays I’d walk to Bartlett Street from Allderdice, have dinner with my aunt and Kathy, then my aunt would make herself beautiful and leave me with Kathy. My aunt really knocked me out when she got ready to join her friends–she had poise, superb fashion sense, had even taken a course on modeling and learned how to stand correctly to show off her figure.

During that year Kathy never woke up. Never! So I would sometimes watch television after I did my homework–I think that night was the Beverly Hillbillies–but I would also talk on the phone for hours to my friends. My aunt and uncle were laid back about a lot of things and that made the whole experience fun. My parents ran a tighter ship.

I would come into the house, drop my schoolbooks, and go back to the kitchen. Kathy would be in her high chair and my aunt would be feeding her. The atmosphere was warmly enveloping–all female, all related, all in a clan–and my aunt wanted me to tell her things about what was going on in my life. Just as it was with my grandmother and my other aunts. She always had plenty of time for me. This is making me cry a little…sigh. She’d always have something very good for me to eat, something she knew I liked.

My aunt’s house had a staircase leading to the second floor; however, there was a landing half way up. Lots of times I’d lay on the floor of the landing with the telephone by my side, my feet up against the wall, and I’d call all my friends. Nobody minded; my aunt and uncle thought I was cute.

They loved me.

My aunt stayed out very late on those Wednesday nights; my uncle Jack came home first. We loved those late nights, he and I. We would make bologna sandwiches and talk until midnight! This would never, ever happen in my house! But this is what aunts and uncles are for. Just like everybody else in my family, my uncle liked to sit and talk to me. When I look back on this–I don’t know–I just feel like crying, it was so beautiful.

I slept on the third floor where there was a bed, ready for me. In the mornings I’d walk up Bartlett Street to where Janet Berger lived and we’d walk together to Allderdice.