Written and delivered by Bernice at 25th Wedding Anniversary party of Leonard & Ruth Meyer
December 26, 1951.
I’ve heard a lot about that wedding 25 years ago. A big blow-out at the Roof Winter Garden of the Hotel Richmond. Dad says he was crocked. Mother says he knew very well what he was doing. Anyway, it was the culmination of a three-year courtship: Mom trying to get Dad where he wanted her, and Dad knowing perfectly well where he was at but trying not to let Sam Brown find out.
Of course, I personally can’t possibly know all the details of those honeymoon years. I suppose they decided early on that Dad was to make the decisions on all major matters and Mom on all minor ones. Can you believe that in 25 years the need for a major decision has never arisen?
I do know that Mom was up on the latest ideas of family life since I was born two years, two months and eight days after the wedding because Mom planned it that way. She told me so. Father, on the occasion of my birth, lost $10 because he miscalculated my sex. I understand the taker of this bet still holds the IOU.
No doubt Mother was an ardent subscriber to Parent Magazine in those days: I was fed at 10, 2, and 4 and no thumbsucking allowed! No wonder I was a behavior problem who used to get back at everybody by yanking out cousin George’s red hair by the handful and holding my breath till I got a little attention – or a good kick in the abdomen!
I don’t remember anything of those days we and the Frank Meyer Family lived together in a house on Idlewood Avenue and an apartment on Cary Street, and I shared my play pen with George and Beverly Green; or the outings I used to get on Sunday afternoons, Dad’s only half-day off from 17th Street. But there are snapshots that show us in those years.
I do remember some of the days in the Idlewood Ave. apartment across from Byrd Park. Mom used to play tennis there or let me fish in the pond while she sat beside me knitting a red dress.
They let me get to age 3 1/3 and then decided it was about time for Buddy. (This no doubt was another minor decision.)
It seems that after Buddy was born Dad stopped hauling me to the stock yards on Sunday mornings and started taking me to Sunday School instead. After Sunday School I’d get taken by Daddy either to 19th Street for dinner with Grannie Annie and Aunt Mildred or to Clay Street to eat with Grandma and Grandpa Radman and the half dozen medical students that room-and-boarded in their house in those days. (The medical students must have made a big impression on me, even at age 5.)
You can’t combine a girl like Mom with a guy like Dad and not expect an explosions once in a while. My first memory of an argument was one evening when I was being got ready for bed. Maybe I was 4 or 5 so I don’t know what the shouting was about. I just recall that Dad was yelling, Grandma Radman was pouting and Mom was crying and wiping her eyes with my underwear.
All of a sudden, in (I think) September 1936, Great Depression and all, Dad bought the house, way out on Monument Avenue. I say Dad bought it because Mom didn’t know it was in the wind and hadn’t even seen the place. (A truly major decision!) He paid (I later learned) $6500 cash for it and took us all out to see it in the middle of the day. To my 7-year-old senses it seemed miles away from everything I had ever known. I thought we were moving to Charlottesville!
Mom had her own way of paying Dad back for that little trick. She has since spent 75% of the man’s yearly earnings fixing up the place, installing drapes, furniture, carpeting and Rees’s antiques. (Another source for shouting matches at monthly bill-paying time.)
For a while there weren’t many neighbors and Buddy and I had the woods all to ourselves. Mom and Dad seemed to have been busy with a game called bridge. Characteristically Dad mastered the game and then decided to go back to nature – the Union Stock Yards!
These were what might be called the middle years of the 25 which were spent keeping Buddy supplied with dogs, nursing us through our childhood diseases, joining organizations and battling the meat business. I will always remember the noise of the bill-posting machine on which Mom used to “do the books” late every Saturday night. It was located in the alcove of my bedroom. Mom eventually turned that alcove into a study corner for me, complete with desk, shelves and cabinets.
Gradually new houses got built and neighbors moved in. All went well in the beginning but during the war (WWII) they started to complain about the noise Dad made in the early hours of Sunday morning operating a tractor in his Victory Garden, which occupied the entire empty lot behind the house.
About that time, too, Dad decided to raise chickens. At one point the garage held 500 baby chicks. We settled for keeping about 35 hens and a rooster, collected eggs in abundance enough to sell some. We kept the chickens in a coop in back of the garage and it was my job to give them fresh water and feed every morning before going to school, not such a nice thing to have to do in winter. I filled the five-gallon water jugs at the outside faucet, hauled them to the coop and up-turned them into the trough. Periodically the hens “flew the coop” which meant rounding them up from neighbors yards. Financially, the enterprise was lucky to have broken even.
By the time the war ended Boss was making plans to build a new meat-packing plant. (It opened in 1948.) More than once the phone would wake Mom at 6 a.m. and Dad would say, “Bring me a suit, socks, shoes, shirt, handkerchief and a change of underwear right away. I’m flying to Chicago in an hour to see the architect.” He’d return the next day by supper time.
Mom got to be president of the synagogue sisterhood and the Jewish Women’s Club. Dad went through a raft of hobbies: automobiles (from boyhood on), bowling and roller skating, furniture-making (after the chickens disappeared he installed a workshop in the garage), raising roses (after the Victory Garden was plowed under).
A screwy thing about Dad: he is always “pleading poverty” yet without batting an eye he will bring home a radio, a TV set, a new car, or a dozen pairs of underwear. A screwy thing about Mom: she has never darned socks or sewn on buttons. She has been known to wear Dad’s underwear when she gets low on her own.
This mini-manuscript of memories concludes with thanks to the good Lord who has enabled Mom and Dad to reach this day. They and we are many times blessed.