Anyway, I grew up in the Bronx on Grant Avenue and attended
P.S. 35, JHS 22, Taft HS and Hunter College (back when it had a Bronx
campus). Perhaps this narrow Bronx life
was the reason I began traveling vigorously in my 20s. Also I majored in Anthropology, so I was
always interested in how others lived (even others outside NY and the USA).
For many years I was in publishing, nine years of that was
as an Associate Editor of Publishers Weekly and after that I was a marketing
manager at a book wholesaler and publishing company. I worked on my MBA in marketing management at
Baruch before and during the time I was pregnant with my daughter Rebecca (born
September 4, 1980). Degree: 1982. Rebecca's father (Howard Pronsky) and I were
married for 13 years and have been divorced since 1991. During the last several years I have combined
my writing and my marketing background as an independent consultant in direct
marketing and copywriting. I write
catalogs, websites, and all kinds of printed material and "direct mail
packages" that sell products and services.
I am also an art director/consultant of sorts on the projects I write
(with experience but no actual training).
Go to www.shoplifestyle.com and
you will find about 1,000 product descriptions I have written.
I work in my coop apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I
have an office. I have great views of
Staten Island, New York Harbor, New Jersey, and up Manhattan. That is despite the fact that I only live on
the 9th floor. You see, Park Slope is
primarily turn-of-the-century 3- and 4-story limestone and brownstone row
houses. In fact, it has the largest
concentration of these in the U.S. When
I was married we lived in a drop dead one-family limestone, but now I feel
better off where I am.
I am the reason this whole Freilicher family stuff got
started, although Judy Freilicher is the reason everyone can read about it and
enjoy the website. I work on a Mac every
day, but my knowledge of what I can do with it is limited to what I need to
know to do my job. My daughter was home
from college for a week. She went online
to Google and showed me that I could get family info just by putting in
"Freilicher." In 20 seconds I
got 1,000 entries. Probably 75 percent
of these were for the artist Jane Freilicher (Freilicher by marriage) and her
various exhibitions, publications, etc.
But the rest were for Freilichers I had only heard of or never even knew
existed! By the way, it turns out that
Jane Freilicher was briefly married in her teens to Judy Freilicher's father
before her father married Judy's mother.
Hence my contact with Judy, Susan and Theresa Freilicher. I met Theresa once when we were
children. But I never knew about Judy
and Susan. Susan I know is the daughter
of Julius, one of my father's first cousins.
But Judy's relationship to me is still (hopefully, temporarily) a
mystery.
I hope (as time permits) to continue my journey through
Google and let more and more Freilichers know about Judy's wonderful
website. Hope to post some photos
soon. I would love to hear from all
Freilichers: LilaPF@aol.com.
The Lessons I Learned on Grant Avenue
by Lila Freilicher, Taft High School
(published in Back in the Bronx Magazine)
To an eight year old, Grant Avenue, at 164th Street in The Bronx, was the center of the universe. During the early 1950s there was more than enough to learn about life right there in the courtyard and hallway of our walkup apartment building. Even those hallways bring back memories.
On hot summer days my mother placed a kitchen chair in the doorway, and the coolness of the hallway provided us with a welcome breeze. 977 Grant Avenue and the surrounding blocks between 161st and Jerome Avenue (on the South and West) and 170 Street and Morris Avenue (on the North and East) nurtured me from birth until I was 16 when we moved to Riverdale in search of greener pastures.
The Concourse was for rich kids, sons and daughters of doctors and accountants. Three blocks east of the Concourse, where we lived, was a different world -- for families of firemen, policemen, and hard workers like my dad, who struggled to make a go of it in his own small (very small) manufacturing business. At P.S. 35 I envied my classmates from the Concourse who came to school wearing coordinated outfits, pretty decorative collars, and cute patent leather shoes. In those days I owned two skirts and four sweaters and blouses to "mix and match." Nothing but sturdy laced shoes were good enough for my feet. And bad weather boots had to be at least three sizes too big "to grow into."
Being without a tissue at school was a criminal offense to my mother. When a skirt or dress didn't have its own pocket for tissues, she pinned on a special, handmade pocket. I wonder now if this was required equipment at P.S. 35 or if it was my mother's own creative solution. In my family we never went to a hairdresser (in those days we called it the beauty parlor). My mother cut my hair with the aid of a saucepan, which she inverted on my head. Clipping around the rim of the pot, she turned me into a dead ringer for the Buster Brown boy.
The only time my hairstyle changed was for my sister Flo's wedding when I was ten years old. Flo gave me a Toni home perm. I still remember the chemical smell that burned my eyes and nose and the excitement of my very first makeover.
I was an overprotected child, afraid of being away from my mother. Every day my mother attended the morning session of P.S. 35's kindergarten with me. But I don't remember being embarrassed to have her there. Embarrassment was what my classmate, Michael, must have felt when his mother had to come claim him because he had had "an accident."
Summer evenings on Grant Avenue neighbors sat on folding chairs, savoring the evening breeze. And I was allowed to stay up late. Playing outdoors at night might have been frightening. Instead it was Intoxicating -- feeling completely safe in the darkness under the protection of my parents and their friends.
By 9 P.M. I was usually back upstairs waiting for the jingle of the Bungalow Bar ice cream truck. My father would go downstairs for "combination cups" of 1/2 ices and 1/2 vanilla ice cream. I remember the special excitement when the flavor of the week was raspberry. Joe, the Bungalow Bar man, came twice each day. If I wanted to buy ice cream during his afternoon stop, I had to yell upstairs to my mother: "Ma! Bungalow Bar is here!" She would wrap coins in a tissue or napkin and launch them out the window toward my outstretched arms.
Actually my favorite ice cream treat was from the corner candy store. It was a mellow roll a cylinder of ice cream served on a double cone. The mellow roll came wrapped in paper. You placed the roll on the cone, and carefully peeled off the covering. Popsicles were not allowed in my family. "Too cold," was my mother's explanation. I never gave up pleading, but I never got one either. I longed for the fun of breaking the Siamese twin pops down the middle, for twice the slurping, twice the fruity flavor. But it was off limits. I tried to get my mother to explain how eating something cold could be bad for you. Why did other children get to eat them? Did they have irresponsible mothers who wanted their children to get sick? But she never relented.
From my perspective on Grant Avenue, I saw a world divided into friends and enemies. There were two "sides" to our building, separated by the courtyard. On each side was a decorative balustrade -- a concrete-covered railing supported with waist-high columns. A perfect place for pretending to ride a horse. But on weekends and evenings the balustrades became fortresses for the building's opposing forces. With chairs grouped conversationally in front of "our" balustrade, my mother chatted with her best friends, two sisters, Anna and Rose. I remember Rose best. She had a daughter who was pushed around in a stroller until she was so big that so her legs had to be tucked under her so the stroller could move.
My mother's friends spoke in hushed tones about the women who congregated on "the other side." Their self-appointed leader was Blossom, a buxom bleached blond broad, queen of the gossips. My mom said that Blossom had "a mouth like a toilet."
Mrs. MacIntyre was the building's ogre. She hated kids and was continuously poised to dump a pot of water on our heads if we were too noisy. The danger of this happening was greatest when we were roller skating. The steel wheels grated on the sidewalks, and the din echoed off the canyon-like walls of the courtyard. With the limited verbal resources of a 1950s innocent, I derided her with a nickname: Mrs. Macintosh (for the apples).
From my parents' bedroom, I could look straight across the courtyard. Mrs. Chinsky was always there looking back at me from that window. I don't believe I ever saw her outdoors. And on those rare occasions when I found her away from her post, I always felt something stable was missing from my life.
My sister, Marilyn, saw Mrs. Chinsky differently -- as a snoop. At her urging we teamed up to write the lyrics to a song about Mrs. Chinsky to a tune that (believe it or not) was popular in the fifties: "The Lord is a Busy Man." Our version was "Chinsky is a Busybody."
Josie, our super, was a mysterious, formidable creature. She wasn't fully human, living as she did amidst the indescribable horrors of the building's basement. That basement must have been truly awful because we actually bought our own washing machine for the apartment to avoid going down there. And this was an extreme luxury for a family in our circumstances. The few times I did descend below ground I can recall extreme aversion mixed with a sense of amazement that anyone could live in such a place.
Josie had an alcoholic husband who rarely emerged into the daylight. Josie did all the work. This included collecting the garbage with the dumbwaiter. What strength it must have required to hoist those ropes up and down! And what an odd luxury a dumbwaiter was for such an ordinary building.
Perhaps the dumbwaiter was important because bringing out the garbage was a lot harder then. Instead of keeping garbage cans out front as many urban apartment buildings do today, our building kept its cans in the alley. Alleys were an architectural feature of most of these Bronx buildings. Often the alley of one building connected to the next and to the next, running down an entire block. Since ours was the only apartment house on the block (the rest of the block had private houses), the alley was less accessible. But in Highbridge, where my sister Flo lived after she got married, after school the alleys were packed with kids jumping rope and playing ball.
My mother was an expert at stove top cooking. The only food she couldn't prepare on the burner was a roast, so my father bought her a rotisserie. The oven was never used for preparing meals. It was used for storage, and on the rare occasion when my mother wanted to bake a cake, it was a monumental task to remove the pots and pans.
Considering this self-imposed limitation, my mother was a pretty good cook -- in the Jewish style. But as a child I didn't appreciate foods like sweet and sour soup with flanken, stuffed cabbage, and my mother's "hamburgers" -- meat mixed with onion, eggs and matzo meal, formed into patties, rolled in matzo meal and fried. I loathed these mud-colored missiles, amazingly tasteless despite all their ingredients. And I remember the joy, years later, of discovering the mouthwatering taste of a real hamburger. After that I tried hard to prevent my mother from mixing the meat with other ingredients. "So plain. . ." she would lament. Then I would stand over her in a vain attempt to have a hamburger prepared rare. "It's not cooked!" she would cry in alarm.
My grandparents lived two blocks away -- on Morris Avenue and 163rd Street. They had something in their apartment that I coveted -- a fascinating and highly practical contraption for drying clothes. It was attached to the ceiling. To hang the clothes, you let it down, and you hoisted it back up again to get it out of the way. Their apartment was just yards away from the Fleetwood, a movie theater known affectionately to us kids as the fleabox, where you could see a double feature and cartoons for a few cents.
Food shopping with my mom was a big part of my life in those days, and I fondly remember the stores and retailers on 161st, 165th and 167th Street. There was Hymie, the butcher, with his rakish newsboy cap, who riveted my attention with his hacking and trimming techniques. Jenny, the chicken plucker, did her work at the back of the butcher shop, a much-worn apron stretched across her commodious, chicken-holding lap.
On 165th Street we visited Mrs. Teckel at her haberdashery and notions store. She was a stubby old woman who presided over one of the last places on earth to sell smocks, dress shields, and gotkyas (long underwear) under one roof.
The only non-Jewish shopkeeper I can remember was Yolanda, the bakery lady. Yolanda, at least to me, was an exotic woman with a thick foreign accent and long black hair tied tightly into a bun. My favorite treat at her bakery was a vanilla cookie nearly as big as a cake. It had a chocolate circle in the middle which I carefully ate around, savoring the center for last.
For some reason shopping for "appetizing" was my father's responsibility. The owner of the appetizing store was known to us simply as "the fisher." We went there Sunday mornings to buy lox (was there no such thing then as "nova" or were we just too poor to buy it?) as well as white fish, lox wings, and carp.
By the time I was 12 years old and a student at Jordan L. Mott J.H.S. 22, I was going clothes shopping by myself to avoid fighting with my mother over prices and styles. There was only one department store available to me and that was Alexander's. Lucky that there were two branches I could get to by bus: one on the Grand Concourse at Fordham Road and the other at 149th Street and Third Avenue (near the Third Avenue "L"), an area known as "The Hub."
At Alexander's your money went a long, long way. If you were willing to spend the time sorting through tables piled high with garments, you could get a pair of panties for 39 cents or a bra for $1.98. The table method was time consuming for shoes -- looking for the right style, right color and right size in the big pile. I was 16 years old before I knew you could try on shoes that weren't tied together.
But by then we had moved out of the old neighborhood -- to Riverdale. To a nicer apartment, cleaner streets and more trees. Though technically still the Bronx, Riverdale's proximity to Westchester lent it airs.
In Riverdale, no one ever sat outside to chat on hot summer nights. Keeping a door open had become too dangerous. And besides, now we had air conditioners. Keeping to yourself in Riverdale was a mark of status. And having lived on Grant Avenue was something to forget. Well, maybe it was for my parents, but not for me -- never for me.