Thursday, December 30, 2010

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.








Saturday, December 11, 2010

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.


Saturday, November 27, 2010

Margarets Sketch Book-World War II




Sort of grim, but I liked the drawings. She sketched all the time.




Saturday, November 20, 2010

The Little Red Schoolhouse and Waverly Place


I read on another’s blog that the tuition a year in 1938 was $125.00 a year, and now it is around $24,000. WOW!

Well, my parents scrapped up the $125. and I went to this progressive private school for two years…what they called the sixes and sevens (1st and 2nd grade) The funny thing is that I remember so much about it.

We sang a lot of folk songs every day, complete with a teacher playing the guitar.. Our lunch was served in a basement a few blocks away and we had to walk hand and hand. My partner was often Spike, who had one fingernail, grown long, that he used to grind into the palm of my hand.

We did a wonderful program on the Dutch in Old New York. We pretended to live there and even made candles and soap.

I met Mickey and Lauren Tucker there and knew them for years after. Once Mickey hit me in the hand with a belt, and I still have the scar amid the wrinkles. Boys were already giving me a hard time. Mickey made up for it years later when he came to see me after my sister died and had a long comforting talk with me..

I was still going over to Greenwich House afternoons and doing pottery, art and participating in their theatrical productions at Christmas.

While we were living in our second apartment in Waverly Place my mother’s cousin Traff came to visit and brought me a pretty silk dress. Traff was the scandel of the family. He was in the Navy, and had left a wife and son in New Jersey. While in China he had met a nurse, Jane (I remember her name because I thought it was so romantic) divorced his wife and married her. After that his name was only mentioned with scorn, except for his sister, Emily and my mother. He was her favorite cousin. Oh, yes. He was really good looking in a rugged way.