Thanksgiving

When my father was a boy they celebrated Thanksgiving as well as Halloween by dressing up and parading up and down the streets.

Here is a lithograph of Thanksgiving on the Lower East Side. The children are my cousins, Mary Elizabeth and Chickie Trafford and I'm pushing the baby carraige.

This is one of my favorite lithographs.

From Little Red School House to PS41

From running around and singing rabble rousing songs to dusty rooms, frustrated teachers, and discipline.

This school was so old and dilapidated that when they had a fire in an adjacent building a lot of the parents kept their children out of school fearing that the building would collapse on top of the school. The teachers were an odd group, some old battleaxes, a few enlightened ones ( Mrs Gutowski) and one teacher that used to nip at a hip flask all day. We made fun of her, but later found out that her husband was a prisoner of war (WWII had started).

I met all the people that I knew for years after…Greta, Priscilla Perry, Marcia Langsford,.
Nancy Chandler, Emily Lapowski (later Jay Lyle), Neil Snider, Arthur Halpern and our big crush Romer Schwartz. There were many others. A small town in the middle of a big city.

I must say that I hated school…and tried to feign sickness whenever I could. Don’t know why. I was fairly popular but not an a-one student. I never got math, much to my father’s surprise. He was so good at it.

The class I remember the most was Mrs. Gutowski’s. She taught Geography and the last term, we took over a spare classroom and each month did a different country in Europe. We made history maps, food maps, painted pictures and the children brought things from home to display. It was such a success that we didn’t have to take a Geography test that year. Hurrah!

PS41 ran from K to 6th grade and still exists, except in a beautiful new building around the corner on 11th Street. Our site on Greenwich Avenue is now their playground. I couldn’t find pictures of the old school on Google. Gone forever.

Across the street from the school was a candy shop that had all the usual stuff: wax lips, candy dots on a long strip of paper, wax bottles with some sort of drink inside and my favorite, tiny candy bars. I guess I took my lunch to school most days, and went home to lunch when we moved to Perry Street. It was so close by. My parents also made a deal with a small shop down the street where I sat in the back room and had a grilled cheese sandwich and a malted milk for lunch.

When the war started we had to wear a disc around our necks with a number so we could be identified in case we were hit with a bomb. The thought didn’t seem to bother us. We had enemy plane cards. We never spotted any, and lost interest in that. Each week we bought war stamps (about a dime each) and pasted them in a book. When it was full we could buy a bond. ($25 at maturity) Years later I cashed a bond in so I could go to Ballet Theater performances every night and every matinee for a season. Great!

Of course there was a super bad boy in our class….he used to take us down the street and into an apartment entrance and tell us ‘dirty’ jokes at lunch time. These jokes were very vintage, and not very dirty. But we thought he was wonderful. There was also Romer Schwartz. We all had a crush on him. I thought he looked like Danny Kaye. We flirted, giggled and screamed and he paid no attention to us. Ah well!

Most of us went on from PS41 to PS3 (7th through 9th grades) and most of us knew each other up into adulthood.

Caricatures

My Dad as a rooster, in a gag trance, and as a painter. I don't remember having this much fun as the daughter of a supposed funny guy. Most cartoonists were dour souls and cartoon editors were even worse.

Joseph Torch Logo

The logo of the art store around the corner from where we lived on 7th Avenue. Torch on 14th street was a tiny place loaded from floor to ceiling with art supplies. Torch, an independant owner loved artists and talking to them about what they were doing and knew all about art supplies and how to get rare items.

He is probably long forgotten....but I'm saluting him here in behalf of all the artists of that period who were his customers.

7th Avenue Apartment

My version and Jack's of 7th avenue and 14th street.

My next school move was PS41, the old one, on Greenwich Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets and the next apartment move was from Waverly Place to 7th Avenue, between 14th and 15th Streets. This is the one apartment that no longer exists. It is now one of those huge apartment complexes, taking up the whole block, probably condos by now.

Across the Street was a hotel. Around the corner on 14th Street was the art store my parents used for years, Joseph Torch and a restaurant where you could take out dinner on a paper plate, with another plate on top.

My girl friend Greta lived upstairs and we would walk to school together going through the underpass on 14th Street, the biggest Street we had to cross. Greta’s parents also bought the Sunday Journal American that had all the comic strips. Of course my parents wouldn’t have that ‘rag’ in the house…only The New York Times for them. No strips, and my dad was a cartoonist? Uncle Don used to read the comics on Sunday mornings, so I’d go up to Greta’s to listen and follow along. One year they had a newspaper strike and Mayor LaGuardia read the strips to us with passion.

Greta’s father had a woodshop on 15th Street and I think that shop started my love of wood and wood chips…I can still smell the sawdust. We also had a deli on 15th Street. Barneys near 17th Street and Street and Smith publishing where my mother inked comic books freelance for a while.

Now for the apartment. I don’t remember it at all, or Greta’s. How can that be? I remember everything surrounding it. I think my father had a studio in the apartment, he usually did. My mother was unhappy about her art arrangements. As usual she was shunted off, this time to the bathroom. The bathroom was pretty large and had North light, but still.

Another Christmas Card by Jack

Christmas Cards by Jack

I have a box of sold and unsold greeting cards by Jack. This is one of my favorites I call "Christmas Shopping" Though it was done years ago, it could be Christmas 2010 without the cell phones.