“My Dear Cucie Olga,” my father, Martin Weiss pencils in a four-page letterdated August 8, 1939 when my mother is vacationing in Mountaindale, New York with her mother and my oldest sister, Elaine who is eight months old. Mountaindale was a vacation hamlet in the lower Catskill Mountains that allowed working class families to escape the intense heat of New York City’s summers. My father writes of incoming business at his arch-supports store in the Bronx and of a sore shoulder that prevents him from playing soccer. In another letter one week later, he gives another business accounting and soothes my mother about a family matter involving my Aunt Clara, and Uncle Jack, Clara’s husband.
My father writes about playing billiards in my mother’s absence, soccer training at Starlight Park and a new bridge table, probably for pinochle games at home. He reassures her that he is not losing big money at cards, something that Clara and Jack seem to have insinuated. He writes, “I wish peoples would mind their own darn business and not make the other feel miserable just so that they can hear themselves talk.” He ends by teasing, “You got some nerve not to write me anything about the baby, wait I’ll fix you for that.”
I found my father’s letter in a plastic box with a green lid at the bottom of my closet.
He was born in Nágykapos, a small village in what is today Czechoslovakia. My mother’s family was from Budapest. As the youngest, she was born in New York City. I remember her having a strong sense of local history. My mother, Olga, subscribed to the Bronx Press Review, a newspaper published by the Bronx Historical Association that printed articles about different areas of the Bronx. With curly hair and green eyes, she had the perennial smile of a young girl who loved taking shopping trips to the Lower East Side. Her girlfriends called her “Ollie.” In family photographs, she is always laughing. Once she told us how she got into a fight with the proprietor of a corset shop. She required special brassieres to house her ample bosom.
“He was peeking in the dressing room and watching us try on brassieres. What an idiot. I opened the curtain and told him he’d better disappear quick or I was going to call the police!”
Mom recited poetry, and regardless of its author, attributed the poem to “Robert Louis Stevenson.” She also liked to visit the cemetery at the Joseph Rodman Drake Park in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx where we lived. Although she was far from being morbid, she frequently quoted from a gravestone in the park, “As once was I, you shall be…”
My Aunt Jeanette later wrote to me in 1984 about my mother’s family explaining now my mother’s father “was an ardent community way before communism was fashionable [during the Depression] in America.”
Mom graduated from New Utrecht High in Brooklyn. At one point before my mother met my father, she worked as a milliner, affixing fruit to the brim of hats. My green box contains her high school biology notebook with a careful sketch of a paramecium. Aside from lipstick and a box of Silent Night powder, my mother didn’t use cosmetics, always telling us that she was “a natural beauty.” My father agreed. Her single beauty regimen was to use baby oil on her face every night.
…to be continued