Reflections on an Ordinary Life

Reflections on an Ordinary Life


My mother never did anything extraordinary or newsworthy. I just want to record some memories here of her life now
that she has died.

She was born on July 23, 1921, the second child in her family, and named Dora. Her family lived in the Morisania
neighborhood in the Bronx.

When she was four years old, a dog attacked her on the street. A neighborhood girl, Rosalie, age five, who lived in
the same building, pushed the dog away. She and Rosalie remained friends for over 80 years, until Rosalie's death in
2013. An unfortunate effect of this incident was that my mother had a lifelong fear of dogs and would never allow us
to have a pet dog when I was growing up.

When she entered kindergarten, in 1926, the principal told her mother that "Dora" was an old-fashioned name and that
my mother would be better off with a modern American name, so she was registered in school with the name of "Dorothy"
as suggested by the principal. She used that name from that time onward.

In 1938, as a 17-year-old senior in high school, my mother went to a party with three of her friends in the Bronx. She
met a 20-year-old student at CCNY (City College of New York) there and they liked each other. The young man asked for
her telephone number and they began to go out on dates. By 1940 they were engaged to be married.

My father (who was the young man) was drafted during peace time and had to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey for
induction into the US Army on October 3, 1941, for one year of service. They spent the day before that together,
at Yankee Stadium, attending the second game of the World Series. History records that they saw Whit Wyatt pitch a
complete game victory that afternoon as the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the NY Yankees, 3-2. I have their ticket stubs from
that game; they paid only $3.30 each for admission, the 30 cents being NYC tax on sporting events.

The next day, in pouring rain, my father went down to Fort Dix in New Jersey and became a private in the United States
Army. After the attack on Pearl Harbor two months later, my father was informed that his service was "extended for the
duration of the War plus six months."

After basic training, early in 1942, he was trained in the use of radar and sent to Miami, Florida. There he was part
of the staff of a radar base which looked for Nazi submarines and airplanes in the South Atlantic and called in the
US Army Air Corps when they found any.

In March 1942, my father obtained a nine-day furlough and immediately sent a telegram to his fiance in New York City.
He traveled by train for three days from Miami to New York City and they were married on March 21, 1942. After a
three-day honeymoon in a hotel in Manhattan, they both went back by train to Miami where there was off-base housing
for married soldiers. My mother had been attending Hunter College (majoring in mathematics), which was then an all
women's college, but dropped out to get married.

As a young woman who had grown up in the Bronx, my mother would later tell stories of the culture shock she experienced
in the Miami of 1942. It began with the sight of White and Colored drinking fountains in the train station when they
arrived. She got a job as a clerk in the office of a factory near the army base. There was no airconditioning in those
days, and in the summer when it got very hot and muggy she went to work with bare legs. The office manager told her
that she must wear stockings because the sight of a white woman's bare legs would inflame the black factory workers
with lust. Driving past a fancy hotel in Miami Beach, the McFadden-Deauville Hotel, my parents saw a sign on the front
lawn that said "No Dogs" on the first line and "No Jews" on the second line.

When my mother told me about that sign around 1970, I asked her why it didn't also say "No Blacks" or worse using a
racial epithet. She told me that any black people who were even near the front door on Collins Avenue, where the hotel
was located, would be arrested, taken to the local police station, and severely beaten for going where they were not
welcome. All the fine hotels on Collins Avenue had a service entrance in the back where the maids and janitors could
enter for work, she explained. She ended the discussion by telling me that "You just don't understand what things were
like in Miami then." That was an understatement.

Until the spring of 1945, my mother followed my father to various army bases where he was stationed. The worst was
Fort Riley near Junction City, Kansas. There they lived through the coldest winter that they experienced, before or
since. In that spring, my father was sent overseas to the Philippines on a troop ship from San Francisco, California.
My mother went back to New York City to live with her parents while awaiting his return.

My father, after being first in the Philippines and then in Tokyo as one of the occupation troops, returned to New
York City in January 1946. He was a Staff Sergeant at the time of his honorable discharge. My brother was born in
October 1946 and I was born in March 1950. Our family moved from the Bronx to Bergen County, New Jersey, in 1957.

During my childhood, through 1959, my mother stayed at home and took care of my brother and me. That year, she went
back to Hunter College, by then coeducational, and finished her B.S. in mathematics. She took a job as an elementary
school teacher but did not enjoy teaching. She then found work as a full-time bookkeeper.

My parents believed so much in education that they took no expensive vacations for years but instead saved money. They
paid for most of my undergraduate education and for my brother's undergraduate education and his four years in medical
school. (I got a National Science Foundation fellowship for my PhD in mathematics, so their expenses for us came to an
end without paying for my graduate study.)

In 1983, my mother persuaded my father to retire when he was 65; she also retired at 62 and they moved to central New
Jersey to a retirement community. She was very active there and, among other hobbies, became president of the
community's duplicate bridge club.

In 1992, my brother and I gave our parents a one-week cruise to Bermuda as a 50th anniversary present.

My mother had taken up bridge and smoking cigarettes after marrying my father. She gave up smoking for health reasons
in 1971, but was never able to get my father to quit smoking. She warned him constantly that it would kill him
eventually, and she was, very sadly, correct. My father died of emphysema in 1997 at the age of 79.

My mother was lonely as a widow, but was proud of living independently. She stayed in good health until 2007, past her
86th birthday. By 2008, it became apparent that her short term memory was failing and that she could no longer drive
or live alone. That year, she moved into a three-step facility with independent living, assisted living, and a nursing
home section. She began in the independent living section, but, in 2009, fell and broke her hip. She required surgery
for it and was not expected to survive.

She surprised the medical staff there by surviving, although she never walked again and was in a wheelchair
thereafter. She was transfered to the nursing home section of the three-step facility.

Over the years, her memory problems became worse as she forgot major events in her life. One horrible day,
she asked me why her sister had not called her recently. I could not bear to tell her that her sister died by drowning
back in 1992 and had been dead for 20 years, so I changed the subject.

It has been my practice to visit her in the nursing home once a month, taking Amtrak down to Baltimore from New York
City for that purpose and staying in my brother's house in Baltimore. The last time that I saw her alive was in mid-
October, but she was confused for the whole time that I was with her and her conversation made no sense. The last tine
that she was lucid when I was there was back in August. As I was about to leave, she grasped my hand in both of her
hands and she said, "The most important thing to remember when I'm gone is how much I loved you."

I cried when she said that and I am crying now that I have typed it. Yes, I will remember that most of all, Mom.