Mom (Madeline Sophie Lawless) and Dad (Lester Samuel Stern) married on 27 June 1926. She was 23 and he was 22. It was a little over three years later that the Great Depression began. Dad lost his job, but Mom continued her work as a secretary for quite a while.
Before marriage Dad had been living at home with his father, mother, two brothers, and his mother’s sister Carrie at 695 St. Nicholas Avenue (near West 145th Street) in Manhattan.
(His young sister Hazel had married two years before him and was living in Brooklyn with her older husband.)
Mom had been living at home with her father, mother, and two, next-youngest sisters (Anna and Edna) in their apartment at 1504 Amsterdam Avenue (near West 134th Street) in Manhattan.
(Her brother, Harold, had an apartment in the same building where he lived with his wife and three young children.)
Although the distance between where Mom and Dad lived before they married was only a 15 minute walk, it was in another neighborhood; they didn’t know each other until meeting one day on a Hudson River Day Line trip to Bear Mountain.
The Bronx was growing rapidly in those days, and the new apartment houses with their modest rentals were attracting a lot of people from Manhattan.
A few years later found Mom and Dad living in their own apartment in the Bronx at 2476 Webb Avenue, where I first lived after my birth at a nearby clinic.
They were only a couple of blocks from the apartment at 2470 University Avenue, where Dad’s parents, two brothers, and aunt Carrie had recently moved.
(His mother’s brother Bert was living nearby at 2418 University Avenue with his wife, her father, and their daughter in his father-in-law’s apartment.)
Mom’s mother died at the beginning of 1933. Dad’s father died at the end of 1933, a month after my first birthday; his mother died three and a half years later in 1937.
I can remember her a little, but the only grandparent I really knew was Mom’s father. He lived with her older sister Helen and her husband, but he visited us occasionally and vice-versa. He died in the beginning of 1946.
Dad’s aunt Carrie never married, although she was very attractive when young and had a significant relationship. She lived with her parents until their deaths, and later moved to a small rooming house in a nearby neighborhood in the Bronx.
She often stayed with Mom, Dad, me, and my sister in later years—a sort of regular visitor with long-term visits.
My Dad’s sister Hazel and her husband lived with us for a while when I was very young. They later moved into their own apartment at 2492 Devoe Terrace in the Bronx, around the corner from where we then lived.
In the difficult years of the Depression period it was a common thing for family members to share an apartment for a while until they could get on their feet again.
Other relatives moved to the Bronx. Dad’s uncle Ira (his mother’s brother) and his family lived further east. Mom’s eldest sister Kitty lived with her big family several blocks away. (Her sons used to baby-sit me.)
During the war, Dad’s youngest brother Harold served as an Air Force bombardier-navigator in Europe. His wife Joy lived with us for a few years while he was overseas.
Home always was a welcoming place, family used to be nearby, and relatives would often come to stay!
24 May 2021