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Autobiographical writing
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ETHNICITY AND MY CITY
I always liked the line from Moliere’s Bourgois Gentilhomme (?) where he discovers that he is speaking prose. This came to mind as David is working on a paper about Jews and blacks and Italians in New York and other urban centers. What David is reading about is in many ways what I lived, like speaking prose.
Growing up in the Bronx in the 30s, I used to laugh when Jews were called a minority. In my neighborhood, we were the majority and everybody else was a minority. Through the 30s, 40s and 50s, it was estimated that the Jewish population of NY was 3 million out of 7 million. Jews predominated in large sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx as well as Manhattan, and there was an increasing number of Jews in Queens. I had a cousin who lived in Astoria and then moved to Forest Hills. The only borough without a meaningful Jewish population was Staten Island. Lenny Bruce was right: if you were from NY, you were Jewish. We shaped the life of the city.
When they became successful, the Jews of the Bronx moved to Westchester; the Jews of Brooklyn moved to Long Island and the Jews of Manhattan moved to New Jersey. There may have been minor deviations—from the Bronx to LI or Brooklyn to NJ-- but I think it generally was as I described. It reduced the Jewish population in the city, but not in the metropolitan area. The big question is with regard to the pull (to wealthier, more attractive and more prestigious neighborhoods; private homes instead of apartment houses) versus the push (from deteriorating housing, poorer neighborhood services, and especially the influx of low income minorities.)
My neighborhood, which we called the East Bronx and which is now called the South Bronx, had a minority community of minorities: both black and Puerto Rican, and a sprinkling of Italians, Irish and exotica like Finns and Chinese My guess is that the Dawson St. area which was a black neighborhood constituted less than 10%, as well as another small pocket of Puerto Ricans. Our Assemblyman when I was a kid was Felipe Torres, and his son Frank went to school with us. Our junior high school was fed by my elementary school PS 62, which was almost all white, and by PS 39, which had black and Puerto Rican students, mostly in the "slower" classes. The few black students in 52 were in the slower classes, while there was a good representation of Puerto Rican kids in the faster classes. It should be noted that they were all American born. My graduating class, 9BR, in 1942, had 27 Jews, six Puerto Ricans and three "others."
The neighborhood began to change after World War II. There was an influx of Puerto Ricans, and a growing number of blacks leaving Harlem for the Bronx, much like the Jews in the 20s. By the 50s, more and more Jewish families left, but mostly for the West Bronx. Families could afford the higher rents of the Grand Concourse area, and the Jewish families that had been living in the West Bronx began moving to Riverdale, Yonkers, Scarsdale and other Westchester communities. The pull. Two phenomena contributed to the push: non-discrimination legislation and rent control. Black and Puerto Rican families moved into previously all-white apartment houses, and many white families concluded that it was time to leave. And the rents didn’t go out of sight. I believe the landlord was only able to raise the rent by 15% on turnover. The rents were low to begin with: $40-$80 a month for a two or three bedroom apartment. And the landlords started cutting back on repairs and services, especially painting—from every year to every three years. And fewer janitors.
A commonly held theory with regard to neighborhood changeover is that blacks and Puerto Ricans felt less hostility in Jewish neighborhoods than in Italian and Irish neighborhoods. They were not welcomed by the Jews, but neither were they threatened. And when the Jews left, the Puerto Ricans and blacks took over their Synagogues, and it was both sad and amusing to see the many churches in my old neighborhood with Jewish stars in their windows.
In 1956, Sylvia and I, with a new baby, returned from the Army to our apartment on Fox St. The neighborhood had changed. I guess one third of the apartments were occupied by Puerto Ricans, and one quarter by blacks. The rest were mostly Jewish and elderly. There were no young white families moving in. We had a two room apartment in which I had been living since 1933. The rent then was $25 a month. It had been raised to $28, and finally to $33, $2 of which was for a TV antenna which we did not have. We did not feel uncomfortable, though we did not establish a relationship with any of the neighbors. Our friends had moved to the West Bronx and to Queens. A few friends had apartments in Manhattan, and we spent months looking for an apartment on the upper west side without success. Finally we decided to look in Brooklyn, and in the spring of 1957 we found an ideal apartment—four rooms, elevator, near the subway—on Sterling Place and New York Av--in Crown Heights. What kind of a neighborhood? It had been, and in some respects still was, a Jewish neighborhood, but it had a growing black population. And an established young, progressive white and mostly Jewish community. Crown Heights is located between Bedford Stuyvesant and Flatbush. It fulfills Saul Alinsky’s definition of an integrated neighborhood: "That moment in time between all white and all black.
In the late 50s and early 60s when Carol started going to school, the neighborhood elementary school, PS 138, was predominantly black.
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application/msword
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Ethnicity and My City
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Jacob Schlitt
Date
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2007
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application/pdf
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en
Type
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text
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1930s-70s_Ethnicity
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1930/1970
Description
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"I always liked the line from Moliere’s Bourgois Gentilhomme (?) where he discovers that he is speaking prose. This came to mind as David is working on a paper about Jews and blacks and Italians in New York and other urban centers. What David is reading about is in many ways what I lived, like speaking prose."
Bronx
Jewish Identity
New York City
Race
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07ca93ecf57f87e5fe846b237987be67
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Title
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Numbered memoirs
Text
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# 33 A Page from my Working Life:
The Newspaper Division of the NY Public Library
In September 1942, I entered Stuyvesant High School, and since Stuyvesant ran on a split session, it meant I could easily hold down a part-time job. I had graduated from junior high school the previous June, and after looking for a summer job for a month and a half, finally found one at a millinery factory for the last three weeks of August. I had my first taste of paid employment--at $8 a week. Now, at 14, I could work part time with the blessings of the US Department of Labor and the NY Board of Education.
Freshmen and sophomore students at Stuyvesant attended the afternoon session, from 12:45 pm to 5:30 pm. Juniors and seniors were in the morning session, which ran from 8 am to 12:30 pm. Those of us from junior high school entered as sophomores, which meant we were in the afternoon session. Early the next morning, after my first day of school, I headed for the Employment Office to check the job postings. The one that caught my eye was for a page in the Newspaper Division of the New York Public Library. It sounded classier than the errand boy and clerk jobs, and it was located at 137 West 25th Street. Stuyvesant was at 345 East 15th Street, less than a mile away—10 blocks north and five blocks west. I could walk there in 20 minutes.
I filled out the Employment Office forms, was given the 3 x 5 card with the job information, and headed for West 25th Street: Up 14th Street to Union Square, then right on Broadway to the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street and 5th Avenue, then up 5th Avenue to 25th Street and west to 6th Avenue to the nondescript building that housed the New York Public Library’s Newspaper Division. I expected some distinct architecture. All the libraries I knew had impressive entrances, columns, large doors and windows, something proclaiming that it was a library. This was a factory building, no different from any of the others on the street. I opened the door and on the inside wall was a directory which indicated that the Newspaper Division was on the second floor, and the Library for the Blind was on the seventh floor. That was it.
I rang for the elevator and told the elevator man that I wanted to go to the Newspaper Division. I felt silly taking the elevator for one flight, but there was a locked gate at the bottom of the stairs. The elevator man wore a powder blue uniform, short jacket and slacks. I later found out that his name was Lester. There was also a freight elevator operated by Ben who did not wear a uniform. Over the next three years, the elevator men, Ben and Lester and I became very good friends. I exited the elevator onto a reading room which contained two rows of four long oak library tables with four oak arm chairs on each side. Two of the tables had the centers built up so that large volumes could rest against them. There was a long counter to the left of the elevator and a man was standing behind it. I went over to him and asked for the director, Mr. Louis Fox, explaining that I was applying for the job that was posted at Stuyvesant.
I was directed to Mr. Fox's office in the rear of the room. The office contained two desks, several chairs, a large work table piled with books and newspapers, and lots of boxes. Mr. Fox greeted me and said that he has always been pleased with the responsible young men who worked for him who came from Stuyvesant. After a brief interview, I filled out a NY Public Library job application form and was told about the hours, the wages and what was expected of me. I was to work from 9 am to 12 noon Monday through Friday. If all went well, I would work from 1 pm to 5 pm when my classes switched to morning session. My starting salary was 37 1/2 cents an hour. Minimum wage was 40 cents but the library, as a non-profit institution was exempt. The difference came to 37 1/2 cents for the week. Big deal! Working for the library was a lot more impressive, and more "intellectual" than running errands and sweeping up in a factory. I was introduced to the assistant director, Mr. Abramson, and to the man at the desk, Mr. Falco. The entire staff of the Newspaper Division consisted of three "librarians" and three pages.
My job as a page was to bring the bound volumes of newspapers from the stacks to the readers in the reading room who requested them. After the readers had finished with the volumes, we picked them up and returned them to the stacks. That didn't seem complicated. I soon learned that it was. The Newspaper Division had newspapers from all over the United States and the major countries of the world, dating back to the eighteenth century. They were bound in volumes—one, two or three volumes per month, depending on the thickness of the newspaper. And the volumes were stored on metal shelves—the stacks-- on six floors of the library. The volumes were heavy and awkward to carry. We had wooden library carts on which we put the volumes, and they were in constant use.
When I was hired, the Division had one other page working part time in the morning and one page working full time. I officially started work the next day and Joe Bello, another Stuyvesant student who had worked there the previous year, showed me the ropes. There were charts which described where the different newspapers were located. The ones most frequently requested were on the second floor, arranged chronologically. It took me a while to learn where to find the hundreds of different newspapers from across the country and the world. I don’t remember if there was any logic to their placement. There certainly wasn't a Dewey decimal system for these volumes. I believe foreign newspapers were on the 11th and 12th floors arranged alphabetically by country. And we had every major American newspaper scattered over another three floors. Bound volumes would be received from the 42nd library every few weeks and they were added to the stacks. I used to wonder what would happen when they ran out of stacks.
The procedure was as follows: a reader would fill out a call slip which Mr. Falco would review. Then he would click a little metal cricket to call a page. If we weren’t stacking volumes of newspapers, we would be in the back doing homework or reading the comics. We would pick up the call slip, get the requested volumes and bring it to the reader. (Once in a great while you might get a tip.) You would then file the call slip and return to whatever it was that you were doing.
If the call slip had been filled out by someone I thought was famous, I kept it. I still have call slips from Mrs. Irving Berlin of One Gracie Square dated Jan. 5, 1944. She wanted the Herald Tribune of Oct. 15 to Nov.1 1929 for "research for a novel." Also Westbrook Pegler of 230 Park Av. (Aug. 24. 1943) who wanted the NY Times and the NY Evening Mail of June 1917 "to check quotation." The call slips explaining why it is "…necessary to restrict the use of bound volumes of newspapers. One is the rapid deterioration of modern newspaper stock. The other is the difficulty of finding space in the newspaper room for accommodation of readers who come for purposes of research in fields where newspapers offer the only or primary sources." Therefore, no reading for "amusement or pastime."
Occasionally, a reader wanted a copy of an article. In 1943-4-5 it was a big production, There were no Xerox machines, but there were photostats, and the photostat machines were at the 42nd Street library. It required a page to take the volume to the 42nd Street library with an order form and the fee. I always wanted to be asked. Mr. Fox knew that it was prized and spread it among the pages. We would get out a half hour earlier and be given five cents carfare to go from 23rd Street to 42nd Street. (I would usually walk if it was good weather and save the nickel.) The Main Library was a beautiful building, and I loved running up the stairs between the lions on Fifth Avenue. I entered the building with the feeling that it was MY library. I would go to the Photostat room, leave the volume and the envelope containing the order form and the money, and walk around the library, examining the reading room, the exhibitions, the paintings and sculpture and the stamp collection on the first floor. On a few occasions when the Newspaper Division was closed for brief periods, the pages were sent to work in the Reading Room stacks.
I fell into a routine that became second nature after my first year at school and at work. School—8 am to 12:30 pm; lunch and a quick walk to work—12:30 pm to 1 pm; work—1 pm to 5 pm; subway home, dinner, homework, radio, occasional visit with a friend. And then the same the next day.
I spent three years following that routine. At the library, when I wasn't getting or stacking newspaper volumes, I managed to read all the comics we had, and then moved on to reading the newspapers describing different historic events. (Mr. Fox was not oblivious to how the pages spent their time. He frequently toured the stacks to sneak up on us, and to see what we were doing. We were convinced that he wore rubber soled shoes expressly for this purpose.) I learned to hate the sound of the cricket, interrupting my reading, and I learned that the reason newspapers from before the 1870s were in such good condition and the newspapers after were not, was because the earlier newspapers had rag content and the later papers were manufactured from wood pulp.
I also learned to love newspapers, the source material for tomorrow’s history books. During this period, New York had seven daily newspapers (in English) and four in Yiddish. Carrying a newspaper was a political statement, and I carried PM. Also, the New York Times (on Sunday) and the New York Post, from time to time. The truth is, whenever I could, I picked up whatever paper was left on the subway.
Lifting the heavy volumes, I convinced myself, was good exercise. However, the accumulated dust on the infrequently called for volumes, wasn't particularly healthy. We were given masks to wear when we retrieved the dusty volumes, but no one wore them.
There wasn't much camaraderie among the pages. We each did as little as we could, but the work got done. The papers were brought to the readers, and were returned to the stacks. I didn't give much thought as to whether I liked my job or not. It was a job. I got paid. The few dollars I brought home was important. It covered my carfare, lunch money, spending money and added to the money my mother earned. Though most of my classmates worked, there were some middle class kids that didn't, and I always thought it was funny that they would ask me for a loan. I had money and they didn’t. I never hesitated, knowing they would pay me back.
There was a moment when I thought that being a librarian would be an interesting job, but thinking about it some more, I felt that too much of the time would be spent away from people, and you would have little impact on the world around you. Teaching was more relevant, I concluded. None of the Newspaper Division staff was much of a role model—not Mr. Fox, Mr. Abramson and certainly not Mr. Falco. The fact is, I felt closer to the two maintenance men—Ben and Lester. They really were my friends during the three years I worked at 137 West 25th Street. When no one was around, they let me run the elevator, and we talked about sports and politics.
In June 1945, I graduated from high school, and I said goodbye to the Newspaper Division. That summer, I got a job as a junior draftsman at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but that is another story.
Original Format
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application/msword
Dublin Core
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#33 A Page from my Working Life:
<p>The Newspaper Division of the NY Public Library</p>
Creator
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Jacob Schlitt
Date
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circa 2006
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application/pdf
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en
Type
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text
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1942-5_A_Page_in_the_NYPL_Newspa
Coverage
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1942/1945
Description
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"In September 1942, I entered Stuyvesant High School, and since Stuyvesant ran on a split session, it meant I could easily hold down a part-time job."
Jobs
New York City
New York Public Library
Stuyvesant High School
-
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04a96428579d7299a16cf8060d959552
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Title
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Numbered memoirs
Text
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# 45 From Door to Door or From Generation to Generation
An article titled "Door to Door Deception" in the October 2007 AARP Bulletin caught my eye and brought back a memory I had almost totally forgotten. It described how a young solicitor, named Heather, knocked on the door of a woman near Des Moines Iowa, saying she was a soccer player at Iowa State University raising money to buy books for children in need. The woman gave her a contribution, and was given a receipt from Quality Subscriptions Inc. of Buford, Ga. for magazines she never ordered.
And now, my experience. It was the summer of 1946. I had completed my first year at CCNY and had worked part time at Reich and Schrift, a stationery store near the school. For the summer, I wanted something completely different, and scoured the Sunday New York Times Help Wanted ads. And then I found it: An ad for college students looking for summer employment with the potential to make hundreds of dollars a week.
First thing Monday morning I went to the address listed in the ad. It was on West 42nd Street in Manhattan. When I arrived, there were several other young men seated in the outer office. We were given applications to fill out, but I had no idea what kind of work was being offered, nor what the kind of business it was. None of the other applicants seemed to know, either. But if you could make hundreds of dollars a week, I was certainly going to stick around to find out.
As I was waiting, someone whom I knew from junior high school walked by. "Hey Roy! Roy Sperling! You work here?" "Yes." "What do you do?" "I’m in sales." "A good job?" "Absolutely." I finished filling out the application, and was told that I would be seen in a little while.
After a while, I was interviewed, and then asked if I would like to start work that morning. I still didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Or how much I was going to make. In 1946, 75 cents an hour was a pretty good wage. I was told that I would make a lot more than that, but since it was a sales job, my salary would depend on how much I sold. But what will I be selling? Go with Bill, I was told, and you will find out.
Bill was a tall, good-looking fellow, several years older than me. He was dressed in a suit and tie and carried a brief case. I was wearing a suit and tie as well, but I didn't have a brief case. He walked quickly out of the building, with me following, and we headed to the subway. He explained that he would fill me in on what I had to do as we rode the subway to Battery Park and then took the ferry to Staten Island.
We found seats on the train, and he took out a portfolio which contained photographs and the names of at least a hundred magazines. He explained that what we will be doing is selling these magazines, but that the customer will not realize that he is buying a magazine until after we close the deal. I had no idea what he was talking about. He then explained to me that magazine publishers make their money from advertising, not from subscriptions. What they charge for ads depends on the size of their readership. They contract with companies that use different ways of "selling" magazine subscriptions. He explained their sales pitch when we boarded the ferry.
The magazine salesman poses as a college student who is trying to win a scholarship. He will get the scholarship if he earns a certain number of points. He earns points by having people sponsor him. People sponsor him for one or more points. He sizes up the people and tries to get them to commit to as many points as possible. When he has the commitment, he explains that in appreciation for their sponsorship, they will receive a year's subscription to a magazine, at no charge. He then produces the list of magazines available for the points to which they have committed, generally from one to five. They select one. Then he explains that though the magazine is free, they have to cover the postage, which turns out to be from one to five dollars. By this time, he has totally ingratiated himself with the individuals. They are happy to help this nice young man go to college, and they are getting a free magazine subscription. Of course they will come up with the few dollars to pay for the mailing. Our college student-magazine salesman fills out a form indicating the points the sponsor is pledging, a receipt for the postage, and an order for the magazine. And that’s how it is done. The magazine salesman gets half.
This particular summer, the sales force was working Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and I happened to have been assigned to one of their best people covering what turned out to be a poor section of Staten Island. Bill had a street map of the borough, and we went to the first house on the street he had marked out. I asked him why he didn’t go to a more affluent area. He assured me that you can make as much money in poor neighborhoods as in rich ones. You go where you are sent.
At the first house we visited, an elderly Italian woman answered the door. Bill greeted her with a hearty Buon Giorno, and started his pitch. I was amazed at how convincing he sounded. Not only was he, the son of a poor Italian family, trying to get a scholarship to enable him to go to college, he wanted to go on to Medical School so he could make poor sick children well, so that they can get an education and succeed in this great land of ours. Could she sponsor him for three points? And out of his bag of tricks he pulled an Italian proverb which translates into "One hand washes the other." After she selected her "free" magazine, she just didn’t have the three dollars for postage. Our visit ended with him settling for two dollars. It was pathetic.
There was no one home in the next several houses. It was not surprising since it was around 11 am on a Monday morning. Then we got lucky. A young black woman with a baby opened the door. Bill made kitcheekoo with the baby, then went into his spiel. This time he only asked her to sponsor him for one point. OK, but when Bill explained about the postage, she was crestfallen. She had no money. Come on said Bill. You must have some change in your purse or in a piggy bank. He held the baby as she looked all over the house. She came up with 95 cents. He generously accepted it in place of a dollar, and she was so happy that she could help him. And I was sick.
At this point, I turned to Bill and told him that I don't think I am cut out for this kind of work. He looked surprised and told me that I am passing up good money. We were just getting started. We could make $40 to $50 today. I said goodbye, thanks for the demonstration, and headed back to the ferry. The next day, I called Reich and Schrift and asked them if they could use me during the summer at 75 cents an hour. They were glad to have me back, and I was glad to be back.
10-30-07
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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#45 From Door to Door or From Generation to Generation
Creator
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Jacob Schlitt
Date
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2007-10-30
Format
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application/pdf
Language
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en
Type
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text
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1946_From_Door_to_Door_or_From
Coverage
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1946
Description
An account of the resource
"An article titled 'Door to Door Deception' in the October 2007 AARP Bulletin caught my eye and brought back a memory I had almost totally forgotten."
Jobs
New York City
Reich & Schrift
-
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Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
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COLLEGE
In 2009 it will be 60 years since I graduated from City College. Over these six decades, I have bored countless friends and family expressing my debt to my college. As a student and as an alumnus, I have spoken with pride about the school, which we used to call the poor man’s Harvard. We bragged about the many awards won by CCNY graduates, and how many went on to remarkable careers. I still believe I would not have had the life I had without "City." Thank you.
My four wonderful children had the good fortune to have had parents who encouraged them to go to the college of their choice. (The only stipulation that I made was that the school should be east of the Mississippi.) Carol chose Oberlin, Lewis--Wesleyan, Martha—Barnard, and David—Columbia. Their junior and senior years of high school were spent trying to figure out the "right" school, filling out applications, and waiting for the acceptances, rejections or wait-listings.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) I had none of that. Most of my friends in our senior year at Stuyvesant, automatically applied to, and were accepted by CCNY. A few went into the armed forces, but when they returned, they joined us at City. Stuyvesant had a fairly large middle class student body, and though about 20% of my graduating class chose City (according to our Yearbook) another 20% chose NYU, and 10% Columbia. A third expected to enter the military and the rest: MIT, Brooklyn Poly, Cornell, Syracuse, Michigan, Penn, Cooper Union etc.
Going on to City from Stuyvesant, wasn't much different from going on to Stuyvesant from Junior High School. In fact, from junior high to high school was a much greater transition. We no longer walked to school; we took public transportation. The classes at City that first year were an extension of my last year of high school: English, French, math, history. I found a part-time job. I had a part-time job during high school. I spent my free time with the same friends I had the year before. During our first Freshman Assembly, the Dean told us that college will have been a failure if we left college with the same friends we entered. I had no objection to making new friends, but I certainly didn't want to lose my old ones. The first week I did make a new friend because we found ourselves in three of the same classes. We were seated alphabetically, and in front of me sat Lennie Rubin, my new friend. But my buddies from JHS 52 and Stuyvesant continued to be my closest friends.
My undergraduate years at City were clearly the most formative, but other forces were at work. Entering college in the fall of 1945, America (and the world) had just come through World War II, the Holocaust and the slaughter of a third of the Jewish people. I had lost my cousin Gabie in the war, and knew that many of my relatives in Europe must have been murdered by Hitler as well. My mother anguished over the killings, and though she hated war, was totally committed to America’s victory. Every one of my previous 12 years of school was shaped by depression and war. Now we were entering college at a time when there was no longer a depression, and no war.
I took the trolley each day from Longwood Avenue and Southern Blvd. to 145th Street and Convent Avenue (changing at 149th Street and Southern Blvd for the crosstown trolley) and walked down Convent Avenue to the gate at 138th Street marking the entrance to the Campus. When I walked through the gate and saw the stone Gothic buildings of City College, I was transformed. This wasn't a crumbling brick building on east 15th street
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
College
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2007
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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text
Language
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en
Coverage
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1945/1949
Identifier
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COLLEGE
Description
An account of the resource
"In 2009 it will be 60 years since I graduated from City College. Over these six decades, I have bored countless friends and family expressing my debt to my college..."
Children
City College (CCNY)
Education
Junior High School (J.H.S. 52)
New York City
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Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Cousin Robert
For years, during the ‘80s and ‘90s, while watching television, I would see the name Robert Schlitt among the writing credits. The programs ranged from sitcoms to Westerns to mysteries. It was a kick to see the name “Schlitt” on the screen. The thought occurred to me that we might be related, but I didn’t pursue it.
About five years ago, my daughter Martha, was at her desk at the San Francisco Art Institute, when she received a phone call from a parent of an Art Institute student. Hearing her name, he asked. “Are you related to Robert Schlitt, the TV writer?” “I don’t believe so,” she answered. “It is an unusual name, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you are related,” he continued, He explained that he is a friend of Robert Schlitt and gave Martha Robert’s phone number. Martha called me, told me about the conversation, and passed the phone number on to me.
One evening, some weeks later, I called the number. Robert Schlitt answered. I explained to him that I am Jacob Schlitt and told him how I got his number. (I suspect it is hard to get the phone numbers of Hollywood types—whether they are actors, directors or writers.) I got straight to the point: Are we related? I proceeded to tell him everything I knew about my father and his family, which wasn’t very much.
My father was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia; left his parents and a bunch of brothers and sisters when he came to America in the first decade of the 20th century; brought over his nephew and his nephew’s wife in the early ’20; part of the Schlitt family went to Palestine after World War I, and part to Moscow in the ‘30s; my mother thought there was a cousin in Brooklyn, but she lost touch with my father’s family after he died in 1931.
Robert told me he knew even less about his family. He knew that his father came from some place in Russia. I pressed him if it was Kishinev, but he didn’t know. He did grow up in Brooklyn (aha!), But he didn’t know of any other family named Schlitt—not in Queens (where Henry, Dora and their two children lived through the ‘30s, 40’s, and ‘50s). and not in the Bronx.
We had a pleasant conversation, sharing our life stories up to that time. We had both been in the Army in the ‘50s, but he had been overseas. He had graduated from Columbia after he got out of the Army. I had graduated from CCNY before getting drafted. He told me about his work, and I told him about mine. He told me about his marriages and divorces, and I told him about mine. We talked about our children, and ended by saying that we will keep in touch.
The following year, Fran and I planned a trip “out West” to San Antonio, Palm Springs, Los Angeles and San Francisco. While I was working out the details, I came across Robert Schlitt’s phone number, I felt it was “bashert”—fated—and called him. To my surprise, he was delighted to hear from me. I explained that we were going to be in LA in a couple of weeks and wondered if we could get together. He said he looked forward to meeting me, and that I should call him the day before I planned to arrive in LA, and we would have lunch.
I had rented a car in Palm Springs, we drove to LA, checked into our hotel and began planning to see the sights. I then called Robert, told him where we were, and he said that he would be at our hotel at 12 noon the next day. I was looking forward to meeting him. Fran slept late that morning, was not feeling well, and chose not to meet Robert. I did some sightseeing , returned to the hotel, and awaited Robert. The call came from the desk. A Mr. Robert Schlitt is downstairs. I rushed down to meet a tall, handsome, prematurely gray man who could be a relative. We looked each other over, didn’t know if we should embrace or just shake hands, embraced awkwardly, and left the lobby. He commented that this was the first time that he ever had the occasion to asked for “Schlitt.” I had parked my rental car outside the hotel, but Robert, who was driving a Jaguar, insisted that he drive. It was, after all, his city, and he wanted to take me to his favorite “deli” in Hollywood. Off we went. He certainly knew his way around the Freeways. However, his favorite deli was closed, and we decided to return to a Chinese restaurant across the street from my hotel.
The conversation was relaxed. I filled him in on the family in Israel, under the assumption that we are cousins. He was fascinated. He provided me with more information about his life, his work, and his wives and children. I told him more about my children, and that we were going next to San Francisco to see my daughter and her family. It seems as if he was semi-retired, and content. We lingered over the tea. We didn’t get any fortune cookies. It was a long and pleasant lunch. We said goodbye and Robert headed back to Hollywood. I headed back to my hotel across the street. I noticed that my rental car had been ticketed. I had been parked in front of the hotel where parking was limited to pick-ups and drop-offs.
When we returned home, I “googled” Robert and read that he was born in Brooklyn in 1933, that his parents were Carl and Dorothy, and that he came to Hollywood in 1965 and wrote the first episodes of “The Monkees.” He also wrote for NYPD-Blue, Adam-12, Lou Grant, Hawaii Five-O, Matlock, Mod Squad, Perry Mason and a lot more. I wanted to call him to tell him how much I enjoyed our meeting, but I thought I might be intruding.
Last month, someone told me that they had read that a TV writer named Robert Schlitt had died, and wondered if we were related. I said we were cousins.
April 23, 2009
Original Format
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application/msword
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Cousin Robert
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"For years, during the '80s and '90s, while watching television, I would see the name Robert Schlitt among the writing credits."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2009-04-23
Format
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application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
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en
Coverage
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2004/2009
Identifier
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2004-9Cousin_Robert
California
Cousins
Family
Martha
New York City
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43cece5f4f80b27dc27f2cee1aa1dad2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
Any textual data included in the document
A Letter to the Editor
Getting a Letter to the Editor printed in the NY Times is a minor miracle. There are people who have been writing letters to the editor for years, maybe decades, but who have never gotten published. What frustration! Here you are, wanting the world to know how you feel about a local, national or international issue, composing a letter containing your carefully thought out position, and—nothing.
I have written a few letters to the editor which were published, but they were minor league: the Brookline Tab and the Jewish Advocate. On one occasion I wrote to the Boston Globe. It wasn’t published, but in retrospect, it wasn’t much.
I remember a question asked by my friend Irving Weinstein almost 60 years ago: do you write because you have something to say, or because you want to see your name in print? I answered: both. I wrote a few pieces for our literary magazines in junior high school and in high school, and proudly showed them to my mother. She kvelled. To my mother, to be a published writer, is to be immortal. I am not sure if this applies to letters to the editor, but it is a step along the way.
Which brings me to my letter to the editor. On February 20, 2002, the lead news story in the Arts section of the NY Times carried the headline: “An Extra’s Unscripted Tumble From the Stage Is Roiling the Met.” The story described how a “…$30 a day supernumerary, or extra…fell in a freak accident” during the premiere performance of Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
Even before I finished reading the article, I sat down at my computer and dashed off a letter to the editor, recounting my experience as a super at the Met in the mid 1940’s. After writing the letter, I revised it to conform to the way other letters to the editor were written: if you are writing about a story, first give the headline and the date. Then I e-mailed it to the Times.
Within an hour, I received an automated reply from the Times thanking me for my letter (Subject: Met supers, then and now), and explaining that if my letter is selected for publication, I will be contacted. Also, letters should be no longer than 150 words, and may be shortened, and must be exclusive to the Times. The letter was signed letters@mail2.nytimes.com. I was on my way. Two days later, I received another e-mail, this time from a real person, Lawrence Levi, who thanked me again for my letter, and sent me an edited version “which we hope to publish tomorrow” if I approve, and gave me his phone number, if I would like to make any changes. It looks like I really am going to get the letter printed in the Times.
I called him, explained that they took out the names of the operas and performers which gave the letter a flavor of the times, but I am delighted to have the letter published as edited. We chatted further. I asked him if he knew Sara Ivry, a friend’s daughter who worked at the Times as a fact checker, and he certainly did—they were friends. Small world. And this should certainly help get the letter in.
On Saturday, February 23rd, my letter appeared with a cute head: “On Stage and Off: My Life on the Edge,” and an even cuter illustration, showing two soldiers marching on stage as one is falling off. I concluded my letter by pointing out that in the late 1940s the Met changed managers (from Johnson to Bing, whose names were omitted) “…and the use of extras off the street was ended. In the years that I served as an extra, I don’t remember anyone falling off the stage. JACOB SCHLITT Brookline, Mass., Feb. 20, 2002”
I received calls and e-mails from friends, and letters from strangers. I was famous. I believe if you had “googled” me around that time, it would mention the letter. One of the letters I received was from Israel Kugler, a friend and former Workmen’s Circle president, who wrote that his letters about Israel and about Bush to the Times and the English Forward go unprinted. I told him that getting my letter printed was “beginner’s luck.”
A letter came from someone in Key Biscayne, Florida who shared his memories as a super in the late ‘30s. Another letter from a former super from Pleasantville, NY remembered Ramon Vinay as Jose to Rise Stevens’ Carmen. Vinay actually fell ON stage, and Stevens looked at him lying there and said, “You schmuck.” The thought occurred to me to start an alumni association of Met supers, but then I thought better of it. Stuyvesant, CCNY and the ILGWU are enough.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A Letter to the Editor
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"Getting a Letter to the Editor printed in the NY Times is a minor miracle."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2009
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
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text
Language
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en
Coverage
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2002
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
A_Letter_to_the_Editor
Culture
Hobbies
New York City
Writing
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f096fb4bd805283ffe0a92c940a47008
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
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A Roof Over Your Head
I have been thinking about all the places I have lived over my 81 years. There are lots of different ways to tell your story. Desccribing the places you called home is as good as any.
My first home was 566 Beck Street in the Bronx,. I have no memory of it. We left in 1933, when I was about five. My father died in 1931. I believe my parents moved into the apartment in the mid-twenties from Harlem. Moving to the Bronx from Manhattan at the time was coming up in the world. My mother told me it was a lovely four-room apartment. When I was in junior high school, I made a point of walking past it, on my way home to our apartment on Fox Street. It was a large apartment house with an inner court, similar to our Fox St. house. One difference struck me: Walking into the court, I noticed laundry hanging. We didn’t have that in our courtyard. And 566 Beck St., didn’t have an elevator.
Around 1933, my mother found a smaller apartment for less rent, at 777 Fox Street, a six story apartment house connected to 783 Fox Street. The building was much newer, having been built in 1927 (the same year as me) and it had an elevator. Ours was the only building in the area with an elevator, and for years I would take friends from school to my house for a ride. To operate the elevator, you pushed the elevator button and waited. If you didn’t hear anything happen, you pushed the button again. When you heard the motor, you knew something was happening. The outer door had a diamond-shaped window and when the elevator was approaching your floor, you could see the light. The elevator stopped, and you opened the door. After opening the outer door, you reached in and opened the gate to the elevator. When both the outer door and the gate were closed, and you had entered the elevator, you pushed the button for your floor. The motor started and you started to move…slowly. It was a lot of fun when you are a kid.
Our apartment, A33, consisted of two rooms: one, a combination living room, dining room and kitchen and the other, a bedroom, with a bathroom in between. The rent was $25 a month. Mr. Gordon, the owner, originally asked for $30, but it was the depression, and many of the apartments were empty, so he accepted $25. A year later, my mother saw that a similar apartment, getting lots of sun, opposite us in 783 Fox Street, on the sixth floor, was empty. She negotiated with Mr. Gordon to allow us to move there for the same price. From 1934 until 1957,from ages 6 to 29, apartment B63 in 783 Fox Street was my home. As a kid, my friends were drawn from the other tenants and from the neighboring houses: Marvin Bernstein, Eddie and Harold Handwerger, Danny Tannenbaum; and in 775 Fox Street: Larry Wilson, Miltie Greenspan and Albert Hockanen; and across the street—Danny Lala.
I have described this period of my life in some detail: my earliest friends; going to elementary, junior high and high school, part time jobs, my relationship with my mother; college, Sylvia, the ILGWU, my mother’s death, my marriage, graduate school, the army. All of this in the 23 years from 1934 to 1957.
We kept our apartment, B63, the entire time that we were away while I was in the army. (The rent had risen to the astronomical sum of $33 a month.) Returning to it in March 1956, was truly coming home. But we were coming home with a baby daughter and to a changing neighborhood. For the next year, Sylvia and I spent a great many Sundays looking for a new home. We would get the NY Times Saturday night and scour the Apartments for Rent section, concentrating on the west side of Manhattan, finding nothing that we could afford. By the fall of 1956, I had started working for the Jewish Labor Committee earning $100 a week, which wasn’t bad. We didn’t want to spend more than $125 a month for rent, but there was nothing decent on the upper west side for under $175.
In the spring of 1957, we decided to expand our horizons. Someone mentioned Brooklyn. Are you kidding? For a boy from the Bronx, Brooklyn was a foreign country. We wanted a place that was easy to get to, with a nearby subway station. Turns out Brooklyn did have it. And as we started reading Apartments for Rent, Brooklyn, we noticed that the rents were more affordable. One Sunday morning, we made our way to a section of Brooklyn called Crown Heights. We had never heard of it. The main drag was Eastern Parkway, which we had heard of. And nearby were Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Public Library, and Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum. Not bad. (We didn’t realize that this part of Eastern Parkway was also the headquarters of the Lubavitch Hasidim.)
The apartment house, which had a four room apartment for rent, was 960 Sterling Place. It was a modern building, constructed in the ‘30s, attractive court yard, lobby, and elevators.
The rent was $115 a month. The apartment was twice as big as our apartment on Fox Street. It had a large kitchen, dining area, large living room, and two bed-rooms. We signed the lease. We didn’t have to look any further.
We liked everything about the choice that we had made. The neighborhood was mostly brownstones with a few apartment houses that seemed to anchor the corners. We were on the corner of Sterling Place and New York Avenue. Crown Heights was an integrated community located between Bedford Stuyvesant to the north and Flatbush to the south. Saul Alinsky once defined an integrated community as that moment in time between all white and all black. Both here and in our next home, we were dedicated to putting the lie to that definition. (However, we were leaving a neighborhood which may have confirmed it. Fox Street and our East Bronx neighborhood was overwhelmingly white and Jewish in the ‘20s and ‘30s, but after World War II the small pockets of blacks and Puerto Ricans expanded, and the white families ran, By the time we moved, in 1957, it was considered a Puerto Rican slum.)
We made friends with other families who lived in our apartment house, and in the area (97 Brooklyn Av.). It was painful for me to have to acknowledge that most of the young white families that moved into the area were pro-Communist. “The Party” was committed to recruiting black members and noisily advocated equal rights. They could have moved to all-white sections of Brooklyn or Long Island, but they chose to live here. But I laid that aside, and we were good friends over the more than seven years that we lived there. Our two closest friends were the Zelwians and the Plotkins who lived one floor below and above us.
Henry Zelwian was an artist who taught art at Boys High School. I don’t remember what Sonya did. They had a son, Eric, who became good friends with Carol and Lewis. I was very impressed with Henry’s paintings. We bought a beautiful landscape that he did of the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, and a portrait of Sylvia. He was the first person I knew who smoked pot fairly regularly.
The Plotkins also had one son, Freddie. I liked the fact that his name rhymed with his father’s, Eddie. Turns out that Freddie was named by his mother after her psychotherapist, Frederick Wertheim. Eddie was a paper salesman, but in his twenties had been a professional musician, playing trombone with a number of the big bands. One evening, in our apartment with the Zelwians and the Plotkins, I asked Eddie if he would play a little. He was very reluctant, not having played in years. I insisted and he finally agreed. He went to get his trombone and I watched, fascinated, as he put it together. He started to play a standard jazz piece, and tears came to his eyes. He stopped, put away his horn, and left.
There was an Orthodox couple that lived on our floor with whom we became friends.
Original Format
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application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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A Roof Over Your Head
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"I have been thinking about all the places I have lived over my 81 years."
Date
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circa 2009
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Identifier
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A_Roof_Over_Your_Head
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1927/1957
Bronx
Family
Housing
Mother
New York City
Sylvia
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a8222b9a7e25e8d28958bde7b0d53b2c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
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My Career as a Substitute Teacher
In May 1951, I had “graduated” from the ILGWU Training Institute, but because I was now subject to the draft, I was not given an assignment. Arthur Elder, the director of the Training Institute urged me to go into the Army, get it over with, and on my return, I would begin to work for the union. No thanks. I was going to figure something out, and I did, but right now I needed to earn some money.
The year before, I had taken the NY Board of Education exams for a substitute license to enable me to teach Social Studies in Junior and Senior High School. I had passed them both, and in February 1951, I received my Certificate of Salary Differential, having gotten my MA in Education. This meant that I would be paid $16 for each day of substitute teaching. Not bad for 1951. Now, no longer a part of the ILGWU, I quickly got to work notifying elementary and junior high schools that I was available. I was told that it is almost impossible for a new substitute to get a high school assignment; so I should stick to elementary and junior highs in Harlem and the Bronx.
On May 8, 1951, I received my first call from PS 89 in Harlem. I gave my Substitute Teacher Service Record to the school clerk and was assigned to “HI.” I have no memory of that first class. I apparently survived, and returned to PS89 the next day and given class 3-3. On the teacher’s desk, there was a lesson plan, and the substitute did his (or her) best to follow it, I subsequently heard that many substitutes gave their students busy work and spent the day reading a newspaper.
I see from my Service Record that I had a fairly busy May and June. I taught 19 days, including four days at my old junior high school, 52, and two days at JHS 60, the girls’ junior high in my neighborhood. Though it was less than 10 years since I was at 52 as a student, the composition of the school had changed dramatically. Both JHS 52 and 60 were largely black and Puerto Rican, and most of the students were quite disruptive. Teaching was not easy, and a great deal of time was taken up with trying to maintain discipline.
At 52, there were always a couple of wise guys who would try to disrupt the class. One of the favorite devices was “nodding off.” There had been a lot of publicity about marijuana in the schools, and the kids would act as if they were high. And it was an act. Once in a while, I did get their interest and managed to teach. It seemed clear to the students and to the administrators that very little would be learned when the class has a substitute. As long as you kept them from acting up, you earned your pay.
The toughest two days I had was at JHS 60. In each class, there were several girls who were out to give the young substitute a hard time. On two different occasions, when I had turned to write on the board, some young lady called out, “teacher blows, “ and then, “teacher sucks.” I turned around and said, “pardon me?” The class laughed, and we went on. In the middle of a “lesson” a student got up and walked over to the teacher’s closet, opened it up, stood in front of the mirror and started putting on lipstick. I asked her to sit down. She ignored me. I walked over to her and she said, “If you lay a hand on me, I’ll have your ass.” I suspect she was right. I continued with the lesson, and she took her sweet-ass time to amble back to her seat. I closed the closet door.
My three days at PS 89 weren’t too demanding. I had a lesson plan for the two different third grade classes to which I was assigned.
Original Format
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application/msword
Dublin Core
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Title
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My Career as a Substitute Teacher
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"In May 1951, I had 'graduated' from the ILGWU Training Institute, but because I was now subject to the draft, I was not given an assignment."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2009
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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text
Language
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en
Coverage
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1951
Identifier
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My_Career_as_a_Sub
Career
Education
ILGWU
New York City
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3e9dd95ac9f0f40ac2e221ca98007c08
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
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A Marriage of Twenty Years (and two months)
Some time ago, I wrote about my courtship of, and marriage to Sylvia. I tried to be honest and I tried to put into words my feelings, my hopes and dreams as we were about to start our life together. I acknowledged that ours was not a story-book romance, though I saw myself as a 23 year old who was deeply in love. I rationalized that Sylvia’s initial reluctance was the way women thought they were expected to react to an expression of love and a proposal of marriage. We didn’t have a traditional wedding because we didn’t have the money for a traditional wedding. I wanted to believe that we loved each other and that life would be wonderful.
We were young, we were smart, we thought alike, we were adventurous. How can it go wrong? The world is our oyster, whatever that means. December 22, 1951 represented the start of a magical life together. We transformed apartment B63 in 783 Fox Street into our love nest. We hitch-hiked across the country the summer after we married. We worked, went to school, partied with friends, went to the theatre and concerts, and traveled. In June 1954, I was drafted. When I was sent to Camp Rucker in Alabama, Sylvia joined me, and when I was reassigned to Camp Gordon, Georgia, we packed up and made our life there.
I felt I was able to make the best of every situation. We had a lovely little home off-post. Sylvia got a job on post. We went to work together; we came home together. We took advantage of all that Augusta had to offer. When I had leave, we drove home to New York. We had it made. And when we decided to make a baby, we made a beautiful baby. Sylvia got the best medical care at the army hospital. When her water broke the morning of October 12, 1955, we drove to Camp Gordon and went to the nice OB-GYN doctor. He examined Sylvia and told her that she should go home. She hadn’t dilated, despite the fact that she was having labor pains. Sylvia went to the army library. Later in the afternoon, she called me and we returned to the hospital. Sylvia was admitted, was taken to the labor room, then to the delivery room, and at 5:25 pm, Carol was born.
We were thrilled. Our baby was gorgeous and healthy. Everything was going our way. Five months later, I had manipulated an early discharge, and we returned home to Fox Street. I returned to work and school. Sylvia was a wonderful mother, and she had help from her mother. Our friends were beginning to have babies as well. A pattern had emerged: everyone got married by their mid-20s, and over the next ten years or so had three children. My gang: 1955, 1958 and 1962. Eventually, we all left the neighborhood, but we remained close.
We moved to Brooklyn in 1957. By 1962, we had three wonderful children. We were involved in the community: the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, picketing Woolworth’s. Sylvia joined an amateur theatre group. We found a lovely summer place on Bantam Lake. We were happy. I loved my job. I loved my children. I love my wife. There were tensions, but everyone has tensions. Sylvia found a psychotherapist. Sylvia stayed out late at rehearsals.
In the fall of 1964, I was offered the position of Education Director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Washington, DC, a very exciting prospect. Sylvia and I talked it over. Let’s do it. We found a lovely house for rent in the Shepherd Park section of Washington, the family moved from Brooklyn to Washington in December, and a new life. Carol and Lewis loved their new school, and Sylvia got involved in our neighborhood organization Neighbors Inc. I felt that we made a smooth transition and that we have a good marriage. Sylvia found another psychotherapist and suggested that I find someone as well. I did, but it wasn’t a good fit. Tensions continued, but I didn’t give it much thought.
More pressing were problems at work. The job wasn’t working out, and I started looking for something with the Federal Government. First, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission which didn’t materialize; then the US Commission on Civil Rights, which did. Another pattern of the times: wives didn’t return to the labor market until their last child went off to school. We still had a few years before Martha would join her brother and sister at the Shepherd School. When that time came, Sylvia found a job with the Internal Revenue Service as a technical writer.
Vacations: Living in Washington, most people vacationed at the beach resorts in Delaware or Maryland—Rehobeth, Bethany, Ocean City. I discovered the State Parks in West Virginia which were cheaper, cooler, and to my mind, much more attractive. I loved the cabins, the lakes, the woods, the mountains. Sylvia preferred the ocean. We alternated. Driving to places we hadn’t been before was always tension-producing. I became anxious. Sylvia became annoyed. The kids became upset. As Martha became older, she took over as navigator.
As our seven years together in Washington passed, our children were growing up, developing their personalities, and their talents. We took pride in their accomplishments. (It is true that Carol picked on Lewis and Lewis picked on Martha, but that is the way of the world.) They did well in school; they asserted themselves; they made friends; they became real Washingtonians. We had moved from one “integrated” neighborhood, Crown Heights, to another, Shepherd Park. We were making a political statement, but Sylvia and I were in total agreement. I think that, for the most part, we were good neighbors and good parents.
We loved the area. After a year in our rented house, 8160 Eastern Avenue NW, we began to look for a house to buy in Shepherd Park. We found just the place: 7516 14th Street NW. My nasty little joke of the past several years: In 1966, we bought our house from a little old lady who was living there all alone. Forty years later, there is a little old lady living in the same house, all alone. I really loved that place. My first opportunity to play “Harry Homeowner.” For the next six years, I did all the minor repairs: plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, painting, and gardening. We bought tools, a hand mower, and I became a regular customer of Hechinger’s, Washington’s home supply chain store. In the last year, before our separation, and in anticipation of Lewis’ Bar Mitzvah, I finished the unfinished basement, with a little help from our friends.
As I look back over those last years of our marriage, I recall areas of disagreement, but (though I may be kidding myself) more areas of agreement. We went to the theatre and concerts. We had a wonderful circle of friends, and maintained close contact with our New York friends. Early on, we agreed that whomever feels more strongly about anything, will prevail. There was the classic division: I dealt with the big issues like Viet Nam, civil rights, and economic policy, and Sylvia dealt with the small issues like our children’s education, health, after-school activities, and the house. We did have different views about our children’s Jewish education. I wanted them to go to a Shule in Silver Spring; Sylvia didn’t want to shlep out there. Carol endured it. Lewis started there. Then we sent him to the Hebrew School at the nearby Tifereth Israel synagogue where Martha went as well.
Bickering increased. I realize now how unpleasant it was for Sylvia to have a frugal husband. I resisted spending money, always looking for a bargain. (Unfortunately, I haven’t changed.) When we went out to a restaurant and if expensive dishes were ordered, my annoyance was evident. Yet I never thought that it was the sort of thing that could precipitate the end of a marriage. I didn’t see myself as controlling. I looked on our relationship as a partnership.
In the last year of our marriage, Sylvia made it clear that she wanted out. (All this is very hazy. I can’t remember if there was a precipitating incident, or a particular conversation, though there must have been.) We may have been just hanging on at the time of Lewis’ Bar Mitzvah. I suspect we put on a good act in front of our friends and family. I may have not believed it would happen. I know that in our conversations about separating, I kept insisting that our relationship was not any worse than any of our friends. I asked Sylvia to participate in couple’s therapy. She refused.
By the late fall of 1971, the handwriting was on the wall, and it was beginning to be transmitted to legal documents. Sylvia found a lawyer, and I was advised to get one. I kept hoping this was a bad dream and I would wake up. I have two distinct memories of those last months when we were acting like a married couple, though the marriage was falling apart, and I was in real pain. We had tickets for a show. We went. We were sitting in the dark, and I began to feel very sad. I left my seat and went out to the lobby, and remained there until it was over. The other memory: Our friends, Dan and Ruth urged us to go with them to a club to hear a musician Danny liked. Again, we went. And again, I began to feel very sad. I then told them that I was in pain because our marriage of twenty years is ending. I cannot close my mind to that reality, and enjoy the music.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A Marriage of Twenty Years (and two months)
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"Some time ago, I wrote about my courtship of, and marriage to Sylvia."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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text
Language
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en
Coverage
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1951/1971
Identifier
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A_Marriage_of_Twenty_Years
Divorce
Love
Marriage
New York City
Parenthood
Sylvia
Washington DC
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add8e3f2bb4db5131db121270186d72c
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Autobiographical writing
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Text
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A & P Files for Bankruptcy
I have a new routine. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, I take the T to Boylston Street and walk over to Tufts Medical School to take part in a study. At the Brookline Village stop, I pick up a copy of the free paper, the Metro, then board the trolley. I almost always get a seat because I am carrying my cane, and there is usually a thoughtful young woman who offers me her seat. And these days, I always take it, thanking her profusely. (Yes, it is interesting that it is almost always a young woman.)
This morning, as I sat down and opened my paper, I was shocked to see a featured story headlined: “A & P grocery files for bankruptcy after 110 years.” The memories the story brought back. The formal name of the A & P is The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. When it opened in my neighborhood on Southern Boulevard off Longwood Avenue, I was around 10 or 11. I wondered how they could grow so big selling tea. It may have started as a tea company, but it has certainly come a long way: taking up a quarter of a block, and selling a lot more than tea. I had never seen such a big food store.
At that time, the late ‘30s, I was an experienced shopper. My mother regularly sent me to the neighborhood grocery store to buy bread, butter, milk, cheese, an occasional “measure sour cream,” canned goods, paper goods; to the fruit store for lettuce, tomatoes, apples, bananas, string beans, potatoes, carrots, and “soupn greens with a petrushka.” And even to the appetizing store, for lox (real lox, not Novia Scotia) and halavah and pickles and “mislinis” (black olives). My mother only entrusted me to buy “chop meat” at the butcher. She bought the chickens, meat for roasting, lamb chops and liver, herself.
We knew all the storekeepers. They were our neighbors. Many people had an “account” with the different storekeepers. They would buy something, and the storekeeper would keep a record of the amount, and every month, they would “settle up.” My mother didn’t do that. She paid for everything she bought, and if she couldn’t pay for it, she wouldn’t buy it. She gave me the money for whatever she asked me to buy. I was always impressed with how fast the storekeepers totaled up the bill. They would taker a paper bag and a pencil, which was always behind their ear, look at all the items I was buying, write down the cost of each item, and immediately come up with the total. Then put everything in the same bag. When I got home, I would occasionally, check the arithmetic. It was always correct. It was helpful to know the storekeepers because we went to the grocery stores for cheese boxes, and to the fruit stores for fruit crates. They were essential for so many of our activities. But I am digressing.
Even though it was still the depression, the neighborhood stores stayed in business and life went on. All the stores on Longwood Avenue between Southern Boulevard and Fox Street seemed permanently in place: the fruit store, the shoe repair store, the candy store, the Chinese laundry, the delicatessen, the grocery store, and on the corner, the drug store. When the economy started to improve, it was assumed that the storekeepers would do better, as well. That is, until the invasion of the monster store.
Food stores were rather small. You step in from the street, and there is a narrow aisle. On one side is a counter with a cash register, and behind the counter is the proprietor. Behind the proprietor are shelves. Under the counter is a case displaying merchandise. Sometimes on the opposite wall are more shelves with merchandise, and sometimes there is merchandise in the window. Always, there is merchandise in the back. You tell the storekeeper what you want and he gets it for you. You do not handle the merchandise. Fruit stores were different. They had boxes of fruits and vegetables on stands from the street to the interior of the store. There were prices written in large colorful numbers on paper bags stuck on the boxes. As with the grocery store, you did not handle the merchandise In some neighborhoods there were markets made up of several small stores huddled together in one larger indoor store. But then came the monster store, much larger than any market anyone had ever seen. It was a “super market.”
For the first time, shoppers found themselves in a store with lots of aisles, and with lots of shelves overflowing with lots of merchandise. And you were able to help yourself. There were carts that you would wheel through the aisles and load up with whatever struck your fancy. The prices were marked on the shelves, and on the merchandise. In the old grocery store, you asked the storekeeper for an item, and asked how much. If it sounded too expensive, you said, “never mind,” In the “super market” you saw different brands with different prices. The real bargains were the items which carried the “super market’s” own brands. That you couldn’t buy in the grocery store. The “super market” had a fruit and vegetable section where you could help yourself, so you no longer ended up with bruised, green or over-ripe produce.
The section that really impressed my mother was the meat department. She took pride in knowing her meat, and she could not get over the meat on display in the “super market’s” display cases. Not only did the meat look fresh, and just like the meat in Mr. Margolis’ display case, the prices were one fourth. It took my mother many months before she brought herself to buy meat from the A & P. It is one thing to overcome the feeling of disloyalty to the local storekeeper, by buying groceries and fruits and vegetable from the super market. It is a much greater hurdle to overcome to buy meat from a non-Kosher butcher. My mother’s rationalization: “It is better to pay Kosher prices for non- Kosher meat, than to pay non-Kosher prices for Kosher meat.” What my mother didn’t know was that the meat sold by the A & P was the same meat sold by Mr. Margolis’ Kosher butcher shop.
I have no idea how many years it took for the A & P to drive out the local merchants. The change was compounded by the changing character of our neighborhood. Following World War II, there was a transition from Jewish to black and Puerto Rican. Gradually, the Jewish storekeepers were replaced, but some of the new merchants specialized in merchandise for a specialized clientele, which the super market didn’t carry. The bodegas and carnecerias survived, but in countless neighborhoods, when the A & P moved in, the local storekeeper was driven out.
I drove by my old neighborhood a few months ago, and noticed that the old A & P had been replaced by a super market with a Spanish name. What its significance is, I don’t know. I learned from the news article that the A & P also operated under the names of Waldbaums, Pathmark, Food Emporium etc. That came as a surprise. I thought that the A & P was the A & P, and that Waldbaums was Waldbaums, not that Waldbaums was A & P. However, if here in Boston, Star Market is Shaw’s, then one retail store can be another. The article noted that A & P had assets of $2.5 billion (a lot of money) and debt of $3.2 billion (even more money). And it was the wholesale clubs that did them in. That’s capitalism.
12-16-10
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
application/msword
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A&P Files for Bankruptcy
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jacob Schlitt
Description
An account of the resource
"I have a new routine. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, I take the T to Boylston Street and walk over to Tufts Medical School to take part in a study."
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-16
Format
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application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Language
A language of the resource
en
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1938/2010
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
A&P_doc
Boston
Childhood
Mother
New York City
Observations