The Family Takes Over - featuring Aunt Mary, Uncle Sam and Mark

I have received some lovely encouragement regarding my musings about the earlier generations of the family and on the basis of that I am going to dig into my messy files and see if I can continue to reveal the Blumenthals in all their glory.  My brain is not of its usual tacklike sharpness tonite so I will coast along and try to let the pictures do most of the talking.

Incidentally....I think it is ironic that I received no encouragement from family members directly or as comments on my blog.....but nooooooo......that would be too simple I guess.  One lovely bit of stroking came via email from Mary, a friend of my cousin Bruce Morton (Goldman), Aunt Mary's grandson.  She is a wonderful and remarkable lady who apparently takes more interest in Bruce's family than he does and I am tickled to be able to feed her interest and curiosity.  The other shout of  "more, please" came today from my cousin, Shoshana, who is granddaughter of Aunt Jenny's Bud and Great Granddaughter to the sainted Aunt Jenny.  She also happens to be the mother of the firstborn of the newest generation ***........Shosh and Mike Di Bennedetto have produced Max who was just 1 year old a bit ago and who happens to have been the first baby I have ever held in my long and adventurous life.  I must look for that photo of me holding Max to see if I can publish it here some day....such a milestone deserves to be preserved.  If I have lost it I hope that Shosh can supply me with a new copy.

The picture on the right is Aunt Mary and Uncle
Sam Goldman, either at the beach in Atlantic City or at a fake beach in some photographer's studio.  Don't know if they were already married or just courting, (I notice the rather proprietary arm of Aunt Mary draped across Uncle Sam's manly (or rather bony)  thigh so I suspect married or almost) but there they are for all to see.......in their bathing costumes yet.

Below on the left is Aunt Mary..........she was the prettiest one of the girls....I don't think anyone will argue about that and she had a sweet nature with a teensy bit more wildness than either Jenny or Mamie....I said just a bit.  After she and Uncle Sam married they moved to Atlantic City.....reasons unknown......and were not such frequent visitors as the members living in Philly, but A.C was only 60 miles away so they were present for all holidays and important occasions. Uncle Sam was an accountant....I do not know much more about him...... and they produced two children, first Selma and then Marcus  (Later to become Mark Morton).  One of the most enormous family tragedies occurred when Selma, on her honeymoon, contracted Spinal Meningitis and died after only a brief illness.  Aunt Mary never completely recovered, though she did quite well and thereafter poured all of her adoration into Mark.  He was a maverick like me.  First, he was absolutely gorgeous (unlike me).  Then he got hooked on body-building long before it was any kind of sport or lifestyle.  While a teen-ager in Atlantic City he became a Lifeguard and began lifting weights.  Then he took himself off to New York City to go to college at NYU..........acquired an equally gorgeous buddy named Hank and the two of them went about layering on as many muscles as a body could comfortably support.  They were really something to behold and I can only weep over the bodies of (figuratively) slain womankind that they surely left strewn in their wake as they swashbuckled around New York and Philly.  Somewhere around this time Aunt Mary and Uncle Sam moved back to Philly, a few blocks away from us and Aunt Mary would get all excited whenever Mark was coming home for the weekend.  "I've got to go to the Butcher, Mr Singer on 60th Street and get a big Pin Bone Roast.....Mark will be here for the weekend and he won't eat anything but roast beef," she would mutter.  (I still don't know exactly what a Pin Bone Roast was.....maybe a cross between Prime Rib and Sirloin)  Anyway.....Mark always got his beef.  Aunt Mary was a good cook and often would bring pans of some delectable doughy stuff to our house, put in on the radiator covers to rise and bake scrumptious goodies in our oven.  Oy, I can still smell it....... and taste it.......heaven.  She also made a mean Sponge Cake and some incredible muffin or bun type things that were savory not sweet, filled with ground meat, onions and spices.  Sigh, Gasp, Slobber.

Mark played the field and we wondered if he would ever find anyone he wanted to marry, but he happened upon the gorgeous Ruth.  It would  be easy to say that it was just the combination of beauty, brains, charm that did him in, but I heard that her parents owned a deli and it is my hunch that the lure of all that corned  beef may have had something to do with it too.  That pairing produced two lovely boys, Ken and Bruce.......the very Bruce whose pal, Mary, has encouraged me to write more about the family, so, Mary, consider that this is for you and Bruce.

On the right is a picture of the three sisters, Mary, Mamie and Jenny in their teens or perhaps early twenties.  When I said that Mary was the prettiest I forgot that in this picture Aunt Jenny also looked lovely........after all, she and Mary, though not identical twins, were twins nevertheless.  My grandma was not a beauty but she had all the family warmth and kindness.

This photo above is a rare and wonderful one.  It shows 3 generations of the Blumenthal women including a younger generation of offspring.  The younger generation includes my Mamma- Edna Kauffman, Selma Goldman, Charlotte Blumenthal (Uncle William's daughter) Mark Morton Goldman and Bert (Bud) and Lewis Kapnek - Aunt Jenny and Uncle Bill's boys.

Back row from left to right:
Selma Goldman, Charlotte (Uncle William's daughter), Aunt Rae (Uncle William's wife), Aunt Mary  Goldman.


Middle row:  My Mamma Edna Kauffman, my Grandma Mamie, GreatGrandma Sarah, Aunt Jenny Kapnek holding baby Lewis.

Seated in front are Mark Morton Goldman and Bud Kapnek. 

This is the only picture that has nearly the entire Blumenthal matriarchy and most of the children up to that time which I am  guessing was around 1920.  As you will  notice, my Mamma, Selma and Charlotte were much older than the Goldman and Kapnek boys.  I am guessing Mamma was about 14 here, Mark would have been around  7, Bud about  4 or 5 and Lew under 2.  The 3 girls of my Mamma's generation were tragically ill fated.  Selma, as I mentioned died on her honeymoon while in her twenties, Charlotte died of cancer in her early 30's and my Mamma died of cancer in her mid -fifties.  The rest of the family was remarkably long lived, most of them into their 80's and 90's.  One never knows what's in store for you and that is undoubtedly a good thing.

Now I must go and weep a few gentle tears for all of my beloved ancestors.

***Footnote: I was dreadfully mistaken when I said above that Shoshana had produced the first of a new generation.  I apologize abjectly to Bruce Morton whose adorable and remarkable son Evan is about 16 at this moment in time.  He was so far ahead of the new babies that I nearly forgot about him....but not for long.
Please forgive my lapse........Oy....so much to remember.....

Someone Said There Are No Coincidences

This is meant to be just a quickie....I wanted to pass on this idea while it was still hot in my brain and before I lapsed into that dreadful...."hmmm, what did I come in here for" condition that seems to come upon me from time to time these days.

There are some life lessons that are so powerful they seem to bubble up in minds scattered all over the place.  I have always felt that there are a certain number of important truths we are meant to learn in our lifetime.......we learn them not always in the same order and some of us don't learn many of them at all.   In fact, I believe there are too many to be learned in one lifetime.   My hope has been that we get other chances to learn the ones we missed this time around, but I guess  all we can do is the best we can.

Anyway, one of life's secrets came to me in a blinding flash during one of my most miserable times...... that that there are two words or concepts that can make the difference between a life of relative joy and one of pain and misery........very simply the ideas of ACCEPT and LET GO ALREADY.  Sounds easy.....NOT.....but, oh my, the difference it makes when you finally get it.  In fact, even knowing that it is the secret to happiness doesn't mean you can always keep a firm grip on it.....it has the habit of being elusive sometimes until you can unclench your teeth and your fingers and allow some long clutched but faulty idea to drop from your clawed fingers.  Then the relief can set in again.

Affirming the same idea, I found a wonderful quote on another blog today.......the writer is a gal named Lyn and her blog is called "Minny Blue".  Here is the quote:

               "Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past".

Which brings back the memory of my Eureka moment above and that of a friend who had hers around the same time.    She was also a gal named Lynn (actually Marlyn), a childhood friend,  lost for years and then re-encountered when we were in our 30's.  The whole story about that will make a blog of its own, but that is for another time.  We were sitting in my studio and comparing notes on the parts of our lives that had transpired while we were out of touch and she looked me piercingly in the eye and said,

     " Don't laugh but my biggest insight during the time I was in Therapy was when I finally realized and accepted that I would never have a Happy Childhood."

I didn't laugh.......I just got up and hugged her. 

The photo was taken on

my 13th Birthday in the back yard

of our home in Philly.  This was my

childhood gang of BFF's but the only

relevant ones are the girl 3rd from the right, back row....that is Marlyn whom I quote above.  For the record, I am  the pudge seated in the center of the front row.

More Family Stuff

I am going to try to bring forth from my files a newly scanned document using my new Canon Printer (which seems to have been a lucky find, so far at least).  (see previous blog for my rant about printer malfunctions.)

This is a handwritten record of Sarah and Louis  Blumenthal's childrens' birthdays plus the awesome statement: "1890 May 27 - Came to America".  My Grandma Mamie wrote it and I found it in an old purse of hers when I was tidying things up after she left us at the ripe age of 95.  In examining the birthdays I came to the conclusion that my great grandparents must have only had sex in either May or August of any given year since all their children seem to have been born either in May or in February.  Of course, that is purely idle speculation.

If they all came here together, then the boys were grown men or teen-agers and the girls were still tender sprouts of 10 and 7.

On the right are the Matriarch and Patriarch, Sarah and Louis Blumenthal.  I think these must have been taken in Philadelphia after the family came to America from somewhere in Russia.  I am just guessing but I would think they are probably in their 50's or 60's here.  I love these photos.

The photo below appears to have been taken in the kitchen, probably in a house in the neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion......I think it was near the Art Museum and the River Drive..........Great Grandpa has hand resting on what looks to me like a pillow...I suspect he may have had a stroke........of course it could also be a small table top....I can't really tell for sure.  (my Mamma always talked about living on Euclid Avenue in Strawberry Mansion and I would guess that most of the family members had houses in the same neighborhood.  I think they probably all moved to West Philadelphia around the same time too..... My Mamma and Grandparents to 6106 Christian Street and Aunt Jenny and family including Sarah and Louis to 62nd and Christian Street.  At this point I think my Mom was in High School (Girls High) and I suspect that Sarah and Louis needed to be taken care of so Aunt Jenny volunteered to have them live with her and Uncle Bill.  I think Bud was probably a toddler and Lew was not yet born.  He was born about the same time that Great Grandpa died.

Great Grandma lived well into her 90's and was an invalid devotedly cared for by the blessed Aunt Jenny.
She was still alive when I was born and when I was a toddler I remember my Mamma taking me by the hand and walking me up the street to visit her in the back bedroom of Aunt Jenny's house........she was bedridden, but still knew who I was and used to shoo me to the windowsill where there was a box of sugar cubes for me to help myself to a sweet treat.  I remember thinking that she must have been a gazillion years old........tiny, frail wrinkled and wizened but with a sweet smile still.

I do not know what business my Great Grandpa was in......I think it may have been Retail in some way.  I have been told that they were quite well off until the Depression hit in 1929 and then they were much poorer.  Uncle Harry was at this point in New Bedford Mass. with a department store called Bloomingdale's.  (He changed his name to Bloomingdale when he moved to New England probably because Jews were not particularly welcome there........and, when he married he chose a lovely Goy.....a wonderful lady named Essie who was a fine addition to our family regardless of religion.)

Uncle Barney was a Cutter in the Fur and Menswear  business....I think he may have even been a pattern maker.  I have no idea what Uncle William did for a living nor Uncle Jake who had moved to New York and was rarely seen.

All of the above is for benefit of my cousins and is probably boring the hell out of anyone who is not interested in the family history.  However, to jazz things up a bit I will mention that the black sheep of the family came from Uncle Jake and His wife (also a Sarah, I believe).....besides their daughters Ruth and Sylvia they had a son named Marcus who apparently had what they called light or sticky fingers.  I used to hear whispered stories of rings and various pieces of jewelry disappearing after Marcus had visited and, apparently after he honed his skills with practice on the family he took his nimble fingers elsewhere to work on richer strangers and ended up in jail for theft...(the family, of course, would never report him to the police).....I do not know if it was of the petty variety or Grand Larceny but he provided a bit of titillation for sure.  Every family needs a jailbird, I figure and I am grateful to Marcus for the whispered stories I used to overhear while I was hiding under the kitchen table to eavesdrop when my aunts visited us.  The rest of the family were Heart-warming Chicken Soup........Marcus was the spicy Sweet and Sour Cabbage Rolls.

New Rating System for Absolutely Everything Electronic

In skipping merrily around the blogosphere I notice that many bloggers are impelled to vent their spleens via their blogs........there is quite a bit of ranting and raving going on and I think that is possibly a good thing.  The human race desperately needs an outlet for its rage that doesn't harm the environment, animals or, I guess, humans.    And on a more personal level, I, particularly, need an outlet for my rage because, not having a husband or children to take things out on, and not wanting to harm my precious kitties, I seriously require some way to keep from bursting a blood vessel in my brain and having a stroke or a seizure.

I say this because I am "mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more!"   Yeah, yeah, so what are my options???  Screaming it out the window does not seem to satisfy me any more, and, sadly, each day that passes brings more insults and blows to my delicate sensibilities......so what's a poor infuriated person to do?
I am proposing a new rating system to be appended to the price and description of just about everything even remotely electronic...........and I am calling it the FFFF rating..  That stands for the Fucking Fear and Frustration Factor. (the fear part comes from the fear that if you can't immediately get your hands around the throat of the imbecile responsible the top of your head is going to blow off)   No longer can manufacturers hide behind low prices or 4 Star ratings.  Once it is revealed how much fear and frustration their products inflict on us they may have to consider changing their miserable ways.  An item that is tagged with an FFFF rating might just as well be branded as loaded with lead, full of the Ebola virus and friendly to Hamas and the Taliban.

What brought this particular rant on is the fact that after several years of faithful and sterling service my Dell 942 All-InOne Printer lost a piece of its color cartridge bracket and, though it continued to print in black I got fed up with having to give it permission to do so every time I hit "Print".  All my fixit methods failed and I innocently decided I would spring for a new one.  Only trouble with that approach is that they don't MAKE the 942 any more and I was given a choice of bigger, bulkier more complicated units, none of which appealed to me in the least.  In desperation I picked the one that seemed the simplest (and the least expensive) and ordered it.  After receiving and installing it I quickly discovered that I had purchased a large mechanized package of horse dung.  The control panel was so complex I could barely figure out which button to push in which sequence, the screens which offered me various options were poor and the options were even worse.  And, even the simplest print request took forever for the order to be translated into Swahili or something and forwarded to the various elements which required goosing to cause the page to actually be printed. In addition. about every 3rd request to Print caused a snotty message telling me that my ink cartridges were not properly installed and I should immediately reinstall them. My heart was heavy, I can tell you, when I realized what I had lost........much like the stalwart lad your young foolish self  dumped because he was a bit unexciting and whom you longed for wistfully for the rest of your life.

However, the unkindest cut of all came when, after just a brief time of usage I noticed that my printed pages were becoming paler and paler till they finally consisted of nothing but a few blue streaks. Both ink cartridges had run out in a mere twinkling.   Grrrrr.  Sigh.  Time to get out the ink refill kits and the rubber gloves.  For years now I have been refilling my ink cartridges from a DIY kit and have been hugely successful, thereby saving at least a gazillion dollars if not more.   (One of the things which makes me totally livid with rage is the ridiculous price of those cartridges.......how dare they ?!!!)  Snapping the refilled cartridges back into their brackets I attempted to print a test page only to be advised by some supercillious piece of software that the cartridges were no longer virgins and were unacceptable to this persnickety piece of junk daring to call itself a Printer. 

I have been stewing about this situation for several days trying to decide what to do.  Because I hate this unit with a passion I decided there was no use spending the small fortune to buy new cartridges.....I would just as  soon put the money toward  a new unit.  Two days of research on my computer led to little enlightenment......I read the user reviews of all printers in my price range and found that even the ones who got mostly rave reviews also got a few pans which indicated the presence of quite a few faulty Lemon-y machines out there.  Finally in desperation I settled on a Canon AO1 from Walmart ....on Huge Special.....which hardly cost more than the price of replacement cartridges.....I may live to rue the day, but I figured it was worth a try.  Hardly anything can be worse than the Dell that I am relegating to the trash barrel..........did you all get that....
                              
                     Dell V515w ........ rating FFFF on Lois' Fucking Fear and Frustration Factor scale.

Take that you rotten manufacturers of shameful, ridiculous  garbage !!

There.....I think I feel better now.

Family Photos and Some Boring Details

I promised to put some of my precious collection of family photos into my blog and I am doing my best to keep that promise.  Trouble is, my photo files are so disorganized that I can't find anything, but I was lucky today and found at least one or two pics that I want to share.

The family starts with my Great Grandma and Great Grandpa, Sarah and Louis Blumenthal.  I will try to copy their pics into my photo file later today.

Meanwhile, this is one of my favorites ......a photo of the 3 young Blumenthal daughters at the beach in Atlantic City.

Left to right are Aunt Jenny,  my Grandma, May (Mamie) and  Aunt Mary.  Married they became Jenny Kapnek, Mamie Kauffman and Mary

Goldman.  (This is so that my young cousins on the Kapnek and Goldman sides can identify their Grandmas or Great Grandmas.)

Aren't those outfits smashing?  I was hoping to add another pic, but I am having trouble placing it under this image so I think I will simply save it for another posting.  Incidentally, the two older aunts were twins, but during Aunt Jenny's lifetime it was forbidden to mention that because she insisted that she was younger than Aunt Mary.    I think that was because she was older than her husband (Uncle Bill).  Aunt Mary, on the other hand, didn't give a damn about age but she was a good sister so she went along with the harmless ruse. 

Incidentally, the girls were not the only children of Sarah and Louis......there were four surviving boys, Jake, Harry, William and Barney, all older than the girls, and it was an incredibly close knit family.  They all lived near each other in the same West Philly neighborhood and were constantly in touch and appearing in each others homes to gossip or help.  No, that is not quite accurate.....Jake moved to New York City at a young age and Harry moved to Massachusets, changed his name to Bloomingdale and established a department store in New Bedford.  (I would love to be able to say he was the begining of Bloomingdale's of today, but I doubt if that is true.....just a coincidence I fear)    Of the 7, only Jake did not visit regularly.....in fact I never met him...... but one of his daughters, (Ruthie, of the chicken soup which got strained down the drain)  picked up the flag and was very close to the rest of us.....in fact, when my parents and I moved to California,  Ruth was the only person we knew here and the only family out here.  Her presence saved my Mamma and me from dying of Family Deprivation.

This generation of the family was one of the most potent forces in my life because I realized at a very early age that they were an amazing entity and I felt so lucky to be a part of it.  They really CARED about each other and the spirit and connection among them was so strong that you felt enclosed in a warm, tender, healing embrace just by being with them and observing their love for each other and for all the family members, even the young sprouts.........I can still feel the warmth to this day even though it is over 40 years since I have seen any of them. (they are all, of course, long gone)

What a fantastic inheritance ! 

My Excuse for Blogging

Now you must understand, this whole blog thing was meant to be more than a casual and frivolous indulgence....when originally considered it was intended as a kind of legacy to describe and explain the older generations of the family to the younger ones and, in another way, my only chance at a kind half-assed of immortality.

Should any of the newly born  (my youngest cousin, Noa Belle) or even so far unborn ever ask, "Who was cousin Lois?", these fragments of musings and occasional  bits of family history  (if preserved) will, I hope, be able to provide a somewhat 3 dimensional flesh and blood picture of me, the family worshiper, booster, cheerleader, defender, historian and the Family Oddball  (if I do say so myself). It is intended also to provide some real idea of who the older generations were and what they were like as real people, not just names and funny old photos.  (I will produce some of the funny old photos in due time. and lots of narrative too, I promise.)

The very sad fact is that I am the last of my generation and sadder yet is the fact that I have no offspring so I am the end of this particular branch of the family.  (When I chose to not have any children I did not think about those ramifications....though I know I could never have managed to raise a child just for the purpose of continuing the gene pool.  And the choice was not purely selfish....I was definitely considering the well being of the potential  child as well.   I joke that never having been able to be a child I have no basis for relating to them now.....I hope that is not too off-putting to my readers......I am not an evil person....I do not HARM   children.....I just can't bring myself have anything to do with them until they are at least about 25, self supporting, with decent table manners and in full comand of language and particularly of logic. 

If that be a character flaw, so be it.  I try to make up for it by being extra kind to the environment, all  animals and some adults.  You must admit that a person who can clean 6 kitty boxes daily while singing "Sunny Side of the Street" cannot be all bad.

As I often promise at the end of  my emails...........More Later.

Just Your Every Day Front Door.....NOT

In an effort to brighten up my offerings with a picture or two I have gone into my disorganized files to see what I could find and, sadly, I have not been able to find any of the smashing photos I was looking for, so I finally settled on these two which you must admit are
not your every day photos.
In fact, I defy you to come up
with another blog displaying pics
of a front door.   Oh, hell...I guess there very well may be one somewhere.  But not like mine!!

This happens to be what I consider one of my greatest design     achievements.  I have mentioned in an earlier blog my inability to conquer my character flaw of                  Packratting.This is a prime example of same along with a demonstration of what can be achieved by putting  together a bunch of disparate collectibles and salvaged items into a unique production.   By the way, I am totally at a loss to control the placement of the type in this effort........I do not know where my next word will fall and it is extremely disconcerting so forgive me if I end up with a page that is an utter horror.                                                                

Anyway, the story that goes with these illustrations is that when I was having a bit of remodelling done on my beloved house I decided that I wanted a front door that I could see out of rather than just a lovely slab of wood.  That the balance of the wall in which the door was set consisted mostly of glass was beside the point.

I started  to cast my mind over items that were living in my garage just waiting to be resurrected into some thing of beauty and remembered a set of wooden shutters that I had built to close off a door to my living room  in  an old apartment.  When I dragged them out and dusted them off I found that parts of them     would  do wonderfully well but there was not enough to make a complete door so I did what any red-blooded  packrat would do....I went to Ebay and found a few wonderful wrought  iron items to complement my fragments and came up with what you see above.   I have rarely been so happy with one of my revamped creations and folks have been known to come from blocks around to view my magnificent effort.    

Of course things like this are what make it all the more difficult to give up packratting....just one success can set you back months or years in your efforts to break a                                                                                bad  habit.   Sigh.                                                              .