Eldorado
My Childhood During the Great Depression
by
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We had house guests once, who brought their cat “Flinty”, named for the city of her birth, Flint, Michigan. She was a regal longhaired Persian who did not associate with our cats and stayed indoors. The flypaper caught her attention one day and she thought it might make an interesting plaything and jumped off the buffet to grab that intriguing spiral which was twisting over her head. Big mistake! Cat and flypaper became hopelessly entangled. It took four adults to separate the yowling and clawing cat from the flypaper.
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About the Book
This is the story of my childhood, approximately from 1928 to 1943, which is also the time frame of the Great Depression. My parents came to America with my sister and me from Germany to find a better life. At first they did. Everything was wonderful and they had great success, but this was promptly replaced by failure, due to the unavailability of employment after the Crash of 1929. A whole new revision of our lives was necessary. My father purchased a very small farm on the eastern shore of Maryland, as a life-saving back-up. We could grow our own food and always have something to eat! This is the story of the life on this farm as seen through the eyes of a child. Many things were new and strange to my parents and me. Especially to me, because to a six-year old, everything is new and strange! This is the story of those six years, and the subsequent years when we had returned to New York and had come back to city living. Some of these experiences were sad and others were kind of funny. I have tried to stress the humorous aspects. I hope I have succeeded.
About the Author
After graduating from Cooper Union in 1947, I was employed by a number of display firms, fabricating displays for department stores. The most interesting of these was designing and producing papier mache clothes for six-foot tall pre-formed papier mache bunnies. Display work was very seasonal, however, so I felt that I would be better off with steadier employment. I became a bookkeeper instead, as I had taken a commercial course in high school, and eventually became office manager. After I married, Julius and I moved to Long Island, where we lived for twenty-two years. After my mother passed away, we moved to Florida, along with my Dad, so that we could be close to my sister in Tamarac. We relocated to Key Largo after both of them passed away. We continued to live there for nearly twenty years, until my husband died and I moved to Century Village, here in Pembroke Pines. This is a very nice retirement community and I enjoy being here. I have a splendid view from my fourth floor condo, overlooking the golf course with its lakes and the many birds that live there. I keep very busy, making friends, attending classes, and being a member of the Camera Club. Another plus is living so close to Julius’s sister, Dorothy. Once a week I volunteer at Adopt-A-Stray. I take care of the cats and welcome visitors who are interested in adoption and give them an opportunity to react with the cats. (See picture) My previous writing experiences consist of “ Letters to the Editor” and my monthly contributions to “The Coopa Guardian”, our Century Village paper.