Arnold G. York
Bon voyage, Rosie
Three months shy of her 100th birthday, my mother, Rose York, passed away. Despite her age and her fragile condition, her death still came as a surprise. You had to know my mother to understand why we all thought of her as immortal. She was a feisty little lady and we were very close. We, of course, argued from the time I was old enough to speak until the time she was too old to listen.
But no matter what your age, when your mother passes on, there is always a deep sadness and a sense of a void-a hole in your personal universe.
The story of her life is the story of the 20th century.
She was born in 1907, in the lower East Side, in what was then the great Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York, and what is now the very fashionable and expensive East Village. My mother was a Greenwich Village kind of a gal, but remained appalled at the rising rental prices for apartments they couldn’t wait to move away from.
When she was born, Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, followed by Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. And although she voted religiously in every election, she found it near impossible to pull the Republican lever. Finally, she wanted to vote for Rudy Giuliani for mayor. She called me, anxious about her party disloyalty, and I had to grant her special dispensation so she could vote for Rudy. She, of course, in time, came to regret that vote.
To be born in New York in 1907 was to be born into a world that was to see a century of scientific change so profound it would almost eclipse the thousands of years of civilization that came before it. The year 1907 was only three years after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. The automobile was still a new concept and horses were pulling trolley cars in New York. Food was kept in an icebox and burly men came to deliver the ice, wrapped in burlap, to each apartment. Rose was the child of immigrants and she told me stories of going to fundraisers in the Yiddish theaters to help raise money for what they called “ships cards” -tickets to help relatives come to America. Every immigrant family had a chaise lounge where the new arrivals would sleep until they found a job and got their own room. Family was the center of everyone’s world, and even wildly distant cousins could park on your “chaise,” as it was known, for weeks, or even months, until they got settled.
Rosie lived through World War I, the jazz age, with a flapper dress and a hairstyle that was tailor made for her kinky hair, and then through the great Depression. She and my dad married in 1932, in the midst of the Depression and against my grandmother’s better judgment; she was appalled that my mother was marrying a “greenhorn.” My father was raised in Paris, which made him a decided risk, according to my grandmother, although she later came to forgive him his origins. During the Depression they lost their little two-family brick house in Brooklyn-my folks were scarred forever and could never chance buying another house.
She lived through the 1930s and the rise of fascism and communism, and worse yet, the Skinner box period. Skinner, a psychologist, was the liberals’ answer to fascism. Liberals could be disciplined also, so babies were fed on a strict schedule. And, my mother, being a modern woman, put me on a strict schedule. I, of course, screamed bloody murder and my grandmother said Skinner was nuts, but my mother held firm as was her wont.
Then came World War II, and I can actually remember that period as a very small child. We were in our neighborhood Chinese Restaurant having a Sunday lunch, when the Pearl Harbor news flash came on the radio. I can remember my mother and father talking in some scary grown-up way, and the Chinese waiters clustering around the radio, all looking grim. My father was too old for the service, but the rest of the men in our apartment house in Brooklyn vanished, except for occasional leaves when they came home in uniform. Everyone worked for the war effort and my father worked in a defense plant. And then my sister Matti was born.
After the war, Rosie was 38 years old, and America was booming. She went back to work for the New York City School System as an assistant school clerk and eventually became the head school clerk and the principal’s secretary. She was of that generation of women who ran America. They had no law degrees or MBAs, and they were all assistants to someone, but they ran it all nevertheless, and you crossed them at your peril. Although my mother lived to see the telephone become commonplace- as well as jet travel, man walking on the moon, refrigerators, TV, talking pictures with color, automatic washing machines and dryers, computers and the Internet-her favorite invention of all time remained the mimeograph machine, which was in every public school office, and by which she controlled the flow of information to all the classrooms and ran her little junior high school empire.
Even after she retired from the school system after 30-plus years, gave up smoking, became widowed, discovered organics, beat breast cancer, continued taking senior education classes at Brooklyn College, read voraciously, went to the theater and did the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, she still never lost her lust for life.
A series of small strokes finally took its toll, and piece-by-piece her mind slipped away. Over the last seven years there was a little less of her every time I went to visit, until the mind was gone, and all that remained was this little tiny energizer bunny of a woman, who took one small baby aspirin every day and nothing else. And yet it took almost 100 years for that life force to wear down.
She left a very big hole in my universe.