I want to tell you a story.
It would take one hundred years to tell the whole story.
I’ll give you the short version.
It is a story in three acts, with an epilogue.
These are my best recollections, and I’ve tried to be
accurate.
ACT I
Henrietta, Mom, Grandma was born on March 25, 1919, in Harlem,
to Henry and Carrie Lutz.
Her mother was the former Carrie Solomon. As
descendants of a Solomon, I think this is why most of her children, grandchildren,
and great-grandchildren I predict, score high on SATs.
Henrietta had an older sister, Josephine (who was a
twin—the other twin was stillborn).
The two girls were raised non-religiously.
Their father was Lutheran, and their mother was
Jewish.
I discovered later in life that some of the things Mom
made or enjoyed or had in the house, such as potato pancakes, herring for New
Year’s Eve, chocolate coins in gold wrap, or Hungarian goulash had Jewish
roots.
Henrietta was very close to her father and mother.
Every night Henry would come home from work at Karl Ehmer’s, the well-known meat supplier,
and give Carrie a kiss on the neck.
Carrie taught her how to knit, crochet, tat, and bake,
but she has said many times that she never really learned how to cook until she
got married because her mother did all the cooking.
We still have a blanket that mother and daughter made
together—Carrie crocheted the squares, Henrietta sewed the squares together
into the blanket. I might have that backwards.
Henry was also an amateur brewmeister during
Prohibition, like many other Americans, with a setup under the kitchen sink,
brewing just enough for the fellows in his pinochle game.
As a young girl she used to sit in as a fourth when
the game was short one hand.
The family of four moved from Harlem to Chelsea in
Manhattan and then to Chauncey Street in Brooklyn. That’s where Jackie Gleason
placed Ralph Kramden’s apartment, which he also said was in Bensonhurst, which
we know isn’t true.
She was afraid of the water and even got a doctor’s
note excusing her from swim class in public school.
Speech class also terrified her, which makes her later
accomplishments in Act III all the more remarkable.
Henrietta remembered seeing the first talking picture,
THE JAZZ SINGER with Al Jolson. Before that, she lived across the street from
an outdoor movie house where you could see silent movies on the big screen from
her apartment window.
Her New York City public school education was
excellent.
She knew a lot of Shakespeare.
She was a member of the Arista Honor Society.
Only a few years ago, we were discussing some
disastrous national event, and I said, quoting a line from JULIUS CAESAR, “The
evil that men do . . . .”
Without missing a beat, she finished the quote, “. . .
[the evil that men do] lives after them.
The good is interred with their bones.”
I thought, this is pretty good for a 97-year-old.
Mom said that during the depression, City College had
layoffs; some instructors went to teach high school, and one of her own
teachers wasn’t called “Mister”—he was called “Professor.”
This was in Richmond Hill High School, for which she
had to take a special test to gain admittance.
She took the commercial sequence and became an
excellent typist—whenever you mentioned someone’s typing speed in words per
minute, she always said you had to deduct words for each mistake.
Another graduate of that school was Yankee 2nd
baseman [BB1] Phil Rizzuto, whom Mom met many years later at a grand
opening of The Wiz electronics store.
When she told the Scooter that they were in Richmond
Hill High School at the same time, he said something gentlemanly like, “That
can’t be!”
Some time later she wrote to him and asked if he would
send an autographed picture to family friend Father Lewkiewicz.
Which Father Lewk did.
Mom loved the New York baseball Giants.
She was the only Giant fan in an office full of
Brooklyn Dodger fans. (We’ll hear more about her office job in Act II.)
She was a big fan of the great Giant pitcher Carl
Hubbell.
She wrote to him in his retirement in Scottsdale,
Arizona, when she heard he wasn’t feeling well. He wrote back, thanking her for
writing and remembering him, and sent a nice autographed post card.
She and her mother would go to the Polo Grounds, and
pay the Ladies Day admission of fifty cents and then upgrade to box seats.
Their box seats were in the same section as New York
high society, such as the Vanderbilts.
This was many years before luxury boxes.
As she entered her senior year of high school in 1936,
the Great Depression was in full swing.
Even with good marks and skill as a typist, there were
no jobs to be found after high school. and that takes us to . . .
ACT II
The 1930s. No jobs. What to do? Henrietta enrolled in night
school to learn how to operate the comptometer—a mechanical calculator with a 9
x 9 grid of keys numbered 1 to 9, up and down, and across, and a row of little
zero keys at the bottom, on which you could add, subtract, and even multiply
and divide! Some claim that it was faster than an electronic calculator as you
could press multiple keys at the same time.
Armed with a certificate of completion of studies, she
found a summer job as a comptometer operator at Domino Sugar in Williamsburg.
The summer gig led to full-time employment that fall.
She said the job was like being a junior accountant.
She used to tell me that that if she hadn’t gotten
married and had children, she might have ended up as a vice president of Domino
Sugar.
Every time I see a bag of Domino, I think of Mom.
Brigid and her wife Mattie named their cat Domino in
her honor.
She finally ended up leading a two-woman department with
Henrietta in charge of an assistant.
Accuracy was important, with each column of figures was
counted twice.
1939, the country slowly crawling out of the
Depression. She saw a live stage show before a screening of THE WIZARD OF OZ,
featuring the stars of the movie (minus Judy Garland).
World War II came and dragged on, and everyone in the
office had to go down to the sugar refinery and warehouse to get a pass for
working on the East River docks.
The women received a lot of catcalls when they
reported to the warehouse for their passes—it was rare for a woman to be in the
warehouse.
Henrietta knitted watch caps for the sailors in the
Pacific theatre—Macy’s gave the wool away for free.
She also donated so much blood for the War effort as
she became a member of the Gallon Club, that she became anemic.
And that’s how she helped win the war.
(Many years later she also donated blood to her grandson,
Robert, who was having a heart operation.)
She bought hundreds of dollars of US War Bonds and
cashed them in when my two brothers and I were kids—opening three accounts at
$300 each, five percent interest (this was the late Fifties/early Sixties).
She remembered lights-out air raid drills in the
office (and some giggling in the darkened office).
She loved theatre, and she and I saw many musical
shows together in later years.
I was amazed when she talked about seeing the original
OKLAHOMA on Broadway in the 1940s (like
seeing HAMILTON today); she saw THE BOYS OF SYRACUSE with Ray Bolger; she even
went down to Greenwich Village and saw a nightclub revue featuring men in drag.
Her favorite singer was still Nelson Eddy (she used to
do her high school homework while listening to his radio program). Her favorite
actor? Jimmy Stewart—she liked people of the highest morals.
The war ended.
She had made a few good friends from the office; one
was named Mary.
Mary’s father died, and Henrietta went to the wake,
where she was introduced to Mary’s brother.
The brother was a handsome Irish widower with jet
black hair and a great wit, who came to America on a boat in 1922, when he was
almost 13 years old, on a ship with his mother and siblings; his father had
come over first, made some money, and “sent for them” as it used to be said.
She didn’t date much up to that point.
She went out several times with the chief engineer
from the Domino Sugar warehouse, a man named Arthur.
Nothing serious developed—she said there was no
chemistry.
Eventually her fiend Mary asked Henrietta if she was
still going out with Arthur—“No,” said Henrietta.
Time passed, Mary got engaged to
Arthur, and Mary and Arthur set the date.
Henrietta had an acquaintance at the office—she said
they weren’t really friends—who insisted on going out with her to buy a dress
to wear at Mary’s wedding.
It turned out to be a nice black dress, very
contrarian for a wedding reception.
Henrietta met Mary’s brother for the second time at
the wedding.
Mary’s brother, Thomas Black, was smitten—after dancing
with her several times at the reception, he asked her for her phone number, to
which she replied, “It’s in the book.”
Their first date soon followed, and it lasted all day.
Other dates followed—including the race track at
Elderts Lane on the Brooklyn/Queens border and a long day at the beach.
After the beach she got a terrible sunburn and
scandalized the older ladies in the office when she wore a sundress to work.
They were in love and got engaged.
Henrietta was raised non-religiously, as I said earlier.
She converted to Catholicism to marry Tom.
The night before the wedding Tom showed up at her door
at 11 p.m. with a bag of shrimp.
It was a Friday night, June 19, 1953 (Catholics
couldn’t eat fish on Friday, and you had to fast from midnight to receive Holy
Communion.)
The next day, June 20th, they got married;
the reception was held at the back room of the Welcome Inn in Glendale.
She recalled many of Dad’s family taking her up to the
bar in the front for a drink.
The not-so-young couple (in 1953 on the day of the
wedding he was 42, she was 34) started their life together, moving a few times
from Cypress Hills to Woodhaven and finally back to Cypress Hills. Along the
way they had four children. That’s Act III.
ACT III
Mom said, and I quote, “If men could have all the babies,
there would be one child in each family.”
Nine-and-a-half months after they got married, Mom had
her first child, Brendan, on April 2, 1954. She celebrated her first Mother’s
Day, she used to say, before her first wedding anniversary.
She had her second child, Dennis, on September 24,
1955—the day President Eisenhower had the first of seven heart attacks.
I was born on March 25, 1957, on Mom’s 38th birthday.
People would ask if I felt bad that I had to share a
cake with my mother—I didn’t: it made me feel special.
And then one day in church, Mom saw another mother
with a baby girl and said a prayer that she would some day have a girl.
Her only daughter, Marianne, was born in a blizzard on
December 12, 1960. They had to climb over a curbside snow bank to get home with
the baby basket in single-digit weather, over 15 inches of snow.
Mom said many times that we should pronounce the first
part of her name as “Marry” as in marriage, and not Mary Ann.
Mom used to sing to her the calypso song made famous
by Harry Belafonte: All day, all night, Marianne / Down by the seaside sifting
sand / All the little children love Marianne / Down by the seaside sifting
sand.
Mom told her three little boys that they couldn’t run
around the house in their underwear or get dressed on the couch anymore now
that we have a little girl in the house. I remember looking up at the baby
basket on the kitchen table when they came home and said, “Is that all you got
from the hospital?”
Mom was almost 42 with four kids under seven years
old; Dad was 50—they more than made up for a late start; Mom called herself
“Myrtle the fertile turtle.”
We settled in on Pine St. in Cypress Hills, moving at
one point from 101 Pine to finally 97 Pine St. in the middle of the block.
One of old neighbors still lives there, Gary Louer of
96 Pine St.
She kept a beautiful garden in the backyard, including
roses, hibiscus, Rose of Sharon, and silver dollar plants, and a beautiful
grass lawn. (My father kept a mulch garden in the back.)
There were even wild peas in the backyard, and one of
the next-door neighbors, one of the Canadian Ryan boys, would come through the
fence and eat peas right out of the pod.
In the backyard of our old house at 101 Pine St. there was a rhubarb patch; one year Mom
asked the new owners, the Brundas, if she could get some of the old rhubarb to
make rhubarb pie.
Sounds like Mayberry.
There was a tree in front of our house on Pine St.
The tree was dying, and Henrietta called the Parks
Department and asked for advice.
This was a block full of lush maple trees, and a
blight was running through some of the trees that summer in the city.
The Parks Department advised her to water the tree
every day and add fertilizer.
If you do a Google Street View of Pine St. today you
will find there is one tree left standing on the block—it is that tree in front
of our old house.
For Dad’s birthday, Mom was making a leopard print
robe for Dad on the Singer sewing machine.
I remember her feverishly hiding it away when he came
home early one day.
She made customized designer birthday cakes for the
children, including a hockey rink and football field for Dennis and a cake with
a radio tower made of toothpicks for Brendan. Marianne asked her to make the rainbow
cake with Jell-o, Brendan also like Boston cream pie.
She was creative. I used to play canasta when I was
very young, with Mom and Aunt Audrey, but my hands were too small to hold the
15 cards in the opening deal. So Mom made a card rack from two wooden slats of
a set of old Venetian blinds.
She handpainted a white sign with red lettering, which
was in the garden in the backyard, and each kid had their own name over their
section.
“Your father wanted children,” she told me—Tom’s first
wife had died after twelve years of marriage in the 1930s and ’40s: there were
no children.
When my mother told me that my father always wanted
children, I had proof that we were wanted and loved.
Mom called our father’s friends, “The Jolly Boys”—Dad liked
showing off the kids and invited his pals to see us running around.
The Jolly Boys visited Dad when he was sick in bed
with phlebitis for a week.
His boss, Mr. Sacco, waited at the bottom of the stoop,
and Mom waved him to come in too.
She read us bedtime stories about “Wopsie,” the young
guardian angel who was always getting into trouble himself and helping children
with their problems.
In the 1960s there was a King Tut craze, and I would
ask Mom, “Make me a mummy,” and she would tuck in the blanket around me,
neck-to-toe.
She used to be a substitute teacher if one of the
teachers at Blessed Sacrament School called in sick.
Henrietta was the first female lector at Blessed
Sacrament Church.
One day after Mass an older female parishioner came up
to her and said it was so good to see her up there (there had been some
resistance from the old male guard).
Henrietta was the accidental president of the Rosary
Society—she had been the secretary. The president resigned, and the vice
president turned down the job.
She was the publisher and editor of the Rosette, the
newsletter of the Rosary Society, writing a monthly message to the members, and
she created Word Search puzzles that greatly impressed the pastor, Father
O’Connor.
This was the same era when Gerald Ford became the accidental
President of the United States.
She entered a contest in one of her crossword puzzle
books—this was during an election year, and the object was to place the names
of the states on a blank grid, counting the electoral votes of each state as
your points.
She finished high in the contest and won a bar
magnifier as the prize: it was exciting to see her name in print in the book as
one of the winners.
She switched to mail order crosswords when she had to
stop going to the candy store—she was shocked by the other printed material
that the store was starting to sell in the 1970s.
She was offered the job of cook at the parish rectory,
which she turned down.
In all the years we went to grade school, only once
did we not eat lunch at home; that
single day, we ate at Mrs. Weimer’s, a friend of the family.
Every other school day for eight years we ate at home
and watched Jeopardy! on Channel 4 at noon, heading back to school at 12:30.
Some of my friends who didn’t get along with their own
mothers liked my mother and developed a nice relationship thru visits and
correspondence.
The four Black children grew up, got married, and had
children.
She has 11 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.
The many hours, days, and nights that she spent with
Margie and me helping us take care of the newborn twins, Matt and Tom, and
little Brigid, were the happiest days of my life.
She was 70 years old in 1989 when the twins were born.
She said that helping us with the kids kept her young.
Margie called her Mary Poppins.
Margie and I, and our children, were lucky enough to
see the real Henrietta in everyday life.
Everyone in the family got a cupcake with their
initial on it for Christmas at her place. She might have taken awhile to warm
up to new people, but when a new member of the family joined us by way of
marriage, this was her way of saying, “Welcome to the family.”
Epilogue
I remember her scrubbing the linoleum under the washing
machine on the day Mom, Dad, and Marianne moved from Pine St. to Bensonhurst
(upstairs from Brendan) trying to get a spot out of the floor where the new
family would probably put their own machine.
She spent more years on her own after Dad died in 1985
than she spent with Dad.
Marianne helped her all those years after 1985 with
unwavering devotion.
After our father died, Mom kept busy in creating
things: 400 cookies every December for family and friends; Christmas tree
ornaments; Mom knitted booties for the mothers, and blankets for the babies, for
a place in Coney Island called Rachel’s Joy that cares for single mothers.
One of the last two things my father said to me was,
“Take care of your mother.”
The other thing he said was, in talking about Mom,
“She was good with the children.”
I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the
right time to help out in the last few years.
When Marianne and I nursed Mom back to health from one
of several pneumonia scares, a Russian nurse named Yevgeniy Bashmashnikov said
to me, “You and your sister have done a good job.” It was the greatest thing I
ever heard.
I would say to her on the phone or in person at Maria
Regina Residence “I love you Ma.” She would sing in reply, from GUYS AND DOLLS,
“I love you, a bushel and a peck.” She used to sing that when were little,
going to bed.
At the party for her 100th birthday, the
birthday cake had three candles: a one, a zero, and another zero. I was afraid
Mom might not have enough breath to blow out the three candles at the same time,
so I borrowed an idea from Sen. Mitt Romney and picked up the candles one at a
time. She blew out the zero, then the other zero, then the one.
Goodnight Ma. We know that you are with God now. Now,
you belong to the ages.
Mom’s
98th birthday in 2017.
[BB1]My
brother Dennis fact-checked this as I took a pause later. Rizzuto played
shortstop.
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