Some of you may already know parts of what I am about to tell you, but in order to begin this story, it is well for me to start at the very beginning. That is, how the Morgenstein family evolved into a family of nine children.

My mother, Sarah Bessie Hurwitz Brodie was very young when she immigrated to the United States. It's a moving story that tells you more about my mother than I ever could.

Sarah Bessie Hurwitz was born January 14, 1879 in Vilna, Lithuania. Her parents, Zevulon and Malka Hurwitz, were a very strict orthodox Jewish family. As was the tradition at the time, at a very young age, Sarah Bessie was betrothed to a man chosen for her by her father. The man who was to become her husband was an old man who owned a grocery store. Making matters worse, he was not in good health. When he died of asthma only a few years later, Sarah Bessie, little more than a teen herself, was already the mother of two young boys.

Sarah Bessie probably would have stayed in her village and made a life for herself and her family, but her father decided that she had been single long enough and was insistent that she should be married, as was the custom and the law. He took it upon himself to arrange another marriage.

Again he chose a very old man, this one older than the last. And to make matters worse, he arranged this marriage without her consent. Believing that one unhappy marriage to an old man was one unhappy marriage too many, and that she had paid her price for freedom, she found herself forced to take things into her own hands. She sold the little grocery store she had run with her husband, packed up her few belongings, and took her two sons along with her nearly-marriageable 12 year old sister, Rose, and headed for America, where an older brother had gone many years before.

She and her little family traveled in the overcrowded "steerage" class, which may explain the on-board death of her infant son, who was buried at sea and whose name died with his mother. Some time around 1903, Sarah Bessie Hurwitz Brodie, her four year old son Hymie Brodie (who would be known as Harry) and twelve year old Rose Hurwitz, arrived at Baltimore Harbor.

I have always admired the courage it must have taken for this very young woman to do this. Imagine being little more than a teenager, leaving your family and all that was familiar, knowing you would never be back. Imagine taking two very young children, including an infant, with you. Imagine understanding that when you arrived in this new country that spoke a language you didn't yet know, you had to find your way around, and then find food and housing for your young brood, as well as find a job to keep food on the table.

Her older brother, Hyman Hurwitz, had emigrated to Baltimore years before. It was Hyman and his wife, Epsa, who helped Sarah Bessie and her little family when she first arrived in this country. With their help, she found a rooming house in Baltimore. She rented a sewing machine and supported her family by sewing collars on shirts.

There was a shirt factory nearby, so Sarah Bessie sent Rosie to the factory to pick up bundles of shirts and collars. Sarah Bessie would attach the collars to the shirts and send them back to the factory to get another bundle. This is how she made her living and how the little family survived until she met Harry Louis Morgenstern.

Harry was a baker by trade. He was a widower with two daughters, Lilly, age four, and Fannie, age five. How he came to be a widower, I have no idea.

Harry Louis Morgenstern was born June 2, 1876 in Lemberg, Galacia. He was the fourth of six children. He served in the Prussian cavalry before coming to the United States. The mother of his two children was Ruth, but we know nothing more of him than this, and we have never seen pictures of his parents.

The family story explains that when Harry's older brother, Hyman Morgenstern, arrived in the country a few years before, the immigration officer mistook the "r" written in script, for an "I", and dotted it. From that day on, he was officially known as Morganstein.

No one knows how they met or the circumstances that brought them together. They were so busy in the business as we were growing up, that they never had much time to tell us any stories that I long to hear today. How I would like to know more of their meeting, betrothal, and wedding!

However it happened, on January 1, 1906, Harry Morgenstein and Sarah Bessie Brodie were married with a ready-made family of three children.

Exactly nine months and twenty-five days after the wedding, the first child of the new union was born. I believe it is fitting that I, Mary Yvette Morgenstein Newman, should be giving this narration, being the eldest of the new family.

The newly married couple struggled to make a living, with Harry working as a baker and Sarah Bessie taking care of the family. With a lot of hard work and a lot more scrimping of pennies, the day came when they could establish their own bakery. That would have been sometime around 1908.

I remember the building. Located at the corner of Bond and Mulligan Streets in Baltimore, it was a long, red brick, two-story affair. The store, a combination grocery and bakery, was on the corner, with the front entrance at an angle to the two streets. The building extended back for about a third of a block along one of the streets.

On the second floor, running the length of the building, along the street, was a wooden veranda. The doors from each bedroom led out onto this porch.

On ground level, protected from the elements by the overhead veranda, also opening to the street, was an entry foyer that led into our living quarters. Behind that were the dining room and kitchen, each with doors opening flush with the street. But the kitchen also had a door in the rear wall. That door led to the stable where we housed a horse and wagon.

In the dining room, on the inside wall, was a door opening to a stairwell that led up to the bedrooms on the second floor.

The baking area was in the cellar, reached from outside, by pulling open two iron doors, which, when shut, were flush with the sidewalk. Six rickety wooden steps led down into the cellar containing the bake oven, workbenches, and all the equipment.

I remember Mama and Papa working side by side at all hours of the day and night baking their wares. They had to do it themselves because they couldn't afford to hire extra help. The only times I remember their not working was Shabbos.

Friday night and Saturdays, which were kept holy, the bakeshop and store were kept closed. However, as was the custom in those days, typical Saturday dinners were eaten in the middle of the day after services.

I remember Friday nights in our neighborhood. Many of the Jewish housewives brought their pots of cholent to the bakery before sunset. Cholent is a dutch oven filled with raw beef, lima beans, and potatoes. We would put the cholents into our large, wood-fired bake oven to slow roast until the next day, the fire in the oven having been banked low.

After services on Saturday, there was a steady stream of children knocking on our dining room door, coming to pick up their Sabbath dinner, each one recognizing his or her own pot by recognizing its shape, color, special chips and marks and worn spots. They would bring tablecloths folded over in squares. We would set the hot pot in the middle, knot the four corners of the cloth to make a handle, and they would carry the hot Sabbath dinner home.

For each one of these pots with accompanying knocks at the door, someone from our family had to go outside, open the heavy iron doors on the sidewalk, and go down into the bake cellar. Then, using the peel, that person would carefully retrieve the hot pot and gingerly hand it down to be tied up to be carried home.

This was a "no charge", courtesy of the Morgenstein Bakery, as a family, and neighborly gesture that continued through the years into other neighborhoods and other bakeries.

How well I remember the tantalizing smell of those roasting cholents. And I also remember taking keen delight in trying to remember whose pots were which. The yellow one with the black stripes, or the black iron one with the food stuck on it and other baked-encrusted pots of mouth-watering smells.

One day there was an excavation in the cobblestone roadway in front of our house. The huge hole was dug during the day while Papa was out making deliveries. The delivery routes were so well known, the horses knew them by heart. They could have made the trip without being led, but on this evening, Papa was driving them. He came around the corner just a little too fast, not knowing that the roadway had been dug up that day. Everyone and everything landed in the hole with a loud clatter.

At first it was funny. The horse landed in the hole on all fours. The wagon was tilted on its side a bit, but Papa was thrown onto the ground. His leg was broken. They sent for a doctor, meaning that someone ran to find one, which was how it was done in those days. He set the leg on the kitchen table. It was all so exciting! The horse had to be lifted out with block and tackle, but it was unhurt.

Then there were the hucksters. Their voices were magnificent ¾ worthy of any opera. I'm guessing from their dress and appearance, that they were Italian, but I'm really not sure. They sold fruits from their horse-drawn wagons.

They came at night, with large flares, like torches, attached to their wagons, lighting up the whole area. So much of the street was lit from these torches that they could see the stairs and we could see their wares.

As they went up and down the street, they'd sing out in loud tenor or baritone voices, to the tune of some Italian operas using the words that I wish I could recall in their entirety.

One Friday night, the family was sitting around the dinner table, having the traditional Friday night Sabbath meal. I remember that the candles were already lit. I remember that because even at that young age Shabbos dinners had an impact on me.

It was summertime, and the dining room door leading to the street was open. Suddenly we were pelted with pebbles thrown by some small black kids.

With that, Harry, who was then probably about nine or ten, jumped up and ran after the boys, getting into a fistfight. The entire family ran to the door to watch, but Mama went out onto the street and got right in the middle of the fray as she tried to stop the fighting. In what seemed only a few moments, but must have been much, much longer, along came the horse-drawn police wagon, called the "paddy wagon" or "black mariah". Mama, Harry, and the young boys were hauled off to the police station in the paddy wagon. On Shabbos yet!

By the time they were taken away, a big crowd had gathered to watch the excitement. That made it much more horrifying for me when I saw my own mother being put in the paddy wagon and then riding to the police station on Sabbath, violating one of the most basic of Jewish laws. "Certainly", I thought. "She would have walked if they had only asked her!"

Because this all happened when I was about two, and we left Baltimore when I was six, my conclusion that the traumatizing anti-Semitic story and the move to Washington DC were connected was probably an innocent childhood error.

One thing that did happen before we left Baltimore for Washington, and with the advantages of age and hindsight, I can assume that this probably had a lot more to do with the move than the incident with the paddy wagon and the little black boys.

A fire down in the baking cellar engulfed part of the first story of our home. The fire quickly traveled into the dining room where the only staircase was located, trapping the entire family in the second story bedrooms.

I am told that I was thrown from the bedroom down to a net held by firemen, and I believe Annie, the baby, was too. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exciting exit from the building. Rather, I remember the adventure beginning across the street in the home of a black family who lived there. This family had a Christmas tree, and it was all decorated with stars, tinsel, and colorful balls. Under the train were a railroad track and a train. There were so many toys. My only real memory of the fire itself is the fun I had in the neighbors’ house.

I have memories from after the fire. That fire was so intense, it melted a good bit of the silverware in the dining room buffet drawers, and the silver tea service on top of the buffet. It had become nothing more than an ugly lump of melted silver.

Perhaps it's because Mama and Papa worked most of the time that I was never weaned while we lived in Baltimore. I loved my bottle and hated to be separated from it. I was even sent home from kindergarten because I wouldn't go unless I could take my bottle. Obviously, I was also a bit stubborn.

One evening, my father and my uncles were playing poker in the kitchen. I wanted my bottle! I cried for it and threw a tantrum, but Papa wouldn’t stop playing cards. I was sitting on a sofa we had in our kitchen. My folks called it "the lunch". I decided that if no one would get me a bottle, I would get it myself. So I got off that lunch looking for my bottle. Since I couldn’t find it, I opened the cupboard door and moved a big bag around. When I moved it, the flap opened. Something popped out of the flap and hit me in the eye, and did I scream! The bag was filled with Mama's kosher salt, used to kosher her meat.

I raised such cain that the poker game finally had to stop, and Papa had to make me a bottle and placate me with a pillow under my head so that I could enjoy my bottle.

The family moved to Washington D.C. in 1912. This was no small endeavor.

Mama, Harry, and Fannie, along with two-year-old Al and baby Yetta left by train loaded down with suitcases, bundles, and crates.

Papa, Lilly, and I traveled by horse and wagon, taking the entire day to travel from Baltimore to Washington, a trip that now takes about an hour. The wagon was loaded down with most of the family's possessions, sleeping gear, and valuables. I was assigned a tiny space behind the driver's seat, where pillows formed a bed where I could sleep. I didn’t sleep much, though. I spent most of the time sitting beside Papa, watching the horses' tails swinging 'round, and 'round, and 'round, for hours on end. To this day, I can still see images of those tails going around and around and around.

In those days, there weren't many first class restaurants on the road, so all I remember is that at every stop we made, there seemed to be a tavern with a long, polished counter, a brass rail close to the floor, and brass spittoons spaced here and there. I was served milk. Papa got beer. I don't know what we ate.

We reached our new three-story home on 7^th street between M & N Streets in northwest Washington at dark. The rest of the family was already there.

Our new baking business prospered enough on 7^th street N.W. for the family to look for better quarters. That's when we moved to a more modern facility at the corner of 6^th & G Streets, S.W. Here we were part of an established Jewish neighborhood. It was this Southwest neighborhood in Washington, D.C. that I will always think of as "home". It doesn't matter than I wasn't born there, or that it doesn't even exist any more today, but to me, it will always be a thriving, vibrant, close-knit community. Most of my friends today are friends from "Old Southwest". Our children's children know about the families of "Old Southwest" so that when a group of Jews get together, it's like a family reunion. If we don't know someone, we know their parents or grandparents, and now that I am 97, I can say that I even know some of their great and great-great-grandparents.

Soon after moving to Washington, we bought our first Ford truck. Papa had to learn to drive it, which he did well enough, but every time he stepped on the brake, he would call out "Whoa!" and we would hold our breaths to see if he remembered to put his foot on the brake to make the truck stop.

That truck took the family on many picnics and outings. We went to Rock Creek Park and "The Speedway" in southwest Washington. The "Speedway" is now known as East Potomac Park, or Hains Point. Given the cars of the day, "Speedway" was hardly an appropriate name, as speeding wasn't even possible, but it was called a speedway anyhow. People went there to ride in their automobiles.

Another place we went was a daylong trip out to the country ¾ - all the way to Olney. Now it is all four or six lane highways and very, very busy, and even with the heavy traffic slowing us down, it only takes about an hour to make the same trip. But back then, Georgia Avenue was a lazy country road. We would go to the Dairy Bar in Olney to get an ice cream, and then go back. That took the whole day, and it was a great way to cool down on a hot summer's day.

Once we tried going all the way to Chesapeake Beach. The preparation for this outing was tumultuously exciting for the kids, complete with the prospect of going swimming.

A great big washtub was filled with ice, where cooked chicken, hard boiled eggs, tomatoes, pickles, fruit, bread, cold drinks, and whatever else was needed, were kept chilled. All of the kids were stashed into the enclosed body of the delivery truck, and Mama and Papa were on the driver's seat, making it possible for we kids to invade the tub quite frequently. I presume that the older children remained home to "mind the store", because it only closed on Shabbos, and someone had to tend it.

We never made it to the beach. We ran into a tree when Papa failed to negotiate a sharp left turn. We ended up with a flat tire and other problems. I remember the picnic we had by the broken car. We ate all the food. We did manage to get the tire changed, and we got home after spending an entire day on the road.

As soon as we were old enough to help, we joined in the bakery's business with the rest of the family. One of my jobs was to deliver bread in the morning before going to school. I would get on my roller skates to do that. I would also go home from school at lunch and my sister and I covered the store while my mother went in to help in the bakery.

After working very hard as a family, we had prospered enough to be able to buy our own building and set up our own bakery. The address was 613 4 ½ Street. The bakery was "The Morning Star Bakery". We named it that because the German name Morgenstern translates into "morning star".

Most of my memories are from this time forward.

During our hard times, when I was still very young, Mama and Papa helped Uncle Hymie and Aunt Esther move down from Canada with their family. They stayed with us for about six months - Uncle Hymie, Aunt Esther, and all of their seven children. There were so many of us, we slept sideways in the beds.

When they first came, Uncle Hymie worked for us in the bakery and he drove a truck. Often, my cousin, Charlie, who was a little older than me but in the same grade and the same class as me, would have to make the very early morning deliveries with his father.

The teacher would call me up and tell me very quietly: "Please tell your mother that your cousin, Charlie, isn’t getting enough rest, and he comes to school very tired. He falls asleep." We knew the reason why. I never did tell my parents.

Many a day, when Mama was busy working in the bakery, Annie and I would mind the store. In mid-day, that would be at lunchtime, we’d spend the morning at school then come home for lunch and tend the store. We'd wait until we heard the school bell and then yell "Mama, we’re going back to school".

When I was in about the fourth or fifth grade, I had a teacher who made a tremendous impression on me. She was a great big, buxom woman. Her name was Miss Outwater. She loved our rolls, especially our kaiser rolls.

At a quarter of twelve, she would call me up, crooking her finger toward me and I would know what was coming. She’d give me a quarter and say: "Please go get me a dozen of your kaiser rolls. I need them for lunch."

I would run all the way home to get the rolls, and I probably even brought her change as I ran back.

I don’t know if she ate all the rolls, but she looked like she could have eaten all 12 at one time, she was so big.

We opened a second bakery and learned how to make Passover cakes. The bakery was a block away. The overseer made it all kosher for Pesach. We made lots of macaroons, honey cakes, sponge cake, almond cakes, and all kinds of kosher-for-Pesach-treats. We used to take frosting tubes filled with macaroon batter and squeeze them onto brown paper. Then we would bake the macaroons right on the paper. It took so many rows of macaroons to make a pound, and that’s the way we knew the way to weigh our products.

In order to make our house kosher for Pesach, we had a lot of cleaning to do. Everyone who is Jewish does cleaning for Pesach, and everyone agrees that it is hard work, but not everyone who is Jewish lives over a bakery. Since the smallest little crumb of bread or flour in the house would certainly be "chometz", we used to scour the walls, the ceilings, the floors, the chairs, and the tables. Everything in sight had to thoroughly be washed and cleaned.

I remember setting up two galvanized wash tubs. One with sudsy water and another with blue water, which means clear water with liquid laundry bluing added. This would make the glassware, dishes, and crystal sparkle.

We girls devised a system for doing all the many pieces of china and silver in the china cabinet. We had a way of unloading the china cabinet, washing them, rinsing them, drying them, and putting them on the long dining room table with a fresh tablecloth covered over them. Then the china closet itself was scoured and cleaned out and the glass panes were cleaned with Bon Ami. Then everything was set back into the china cabinet, ready for Pesach.

After the cleaning for Passover came the cooking for Passover, and that was absorbing as well. We started preparations many, many days before as we bought food.

To keep the food fresh, we set up washtubs full of ice. Many bunches of celery, boxes of tomatoes, and all kinds of vegetables were in those tubs. Live fish were swimming in other tubs, so that we could make the gefilte fish a day or two before Pesach. At least one whole crate of eggs was on hand for Pesach.

Mother made the fresh horseradish on the brand new kosher-for-Passover shredder. Tears would be flowing like crazy because the horseradish was fresh. It had to be peeled, shredded, and then bottled or put into a jar.

For the gefilte fish, it was always our father’s job to go to the wharf and buy fresh carp and other fish like heck or white fish to be mixed with the carp. Always live fish. And we kept it live until we were ready to prepare it for the Seder.

You can’t imagine how many raw onions we had to cut to put into the bottom of the great big pot or cauldron to be held down with a platter to keep them from floating to the surface. We would heat the cauldron of water and onions, and begin preparing the fish.

Still alive, we’d take a big fish and put it on the board. We would stick the ice pick through its tail so it wouldn’t flap about, and we'd club it to stun it before we cut the head off. Then we would start skinning it at the tail by carefully putting the point of the knife under the skin and cutting that way, first on one side and then on the other, and lifting off the whole skin, scales and all, being careful not to tear it, until it was entirely scaled and peeled off. The skin was then set aside to be used later.

After opening the "peeled" fish, we washed it and cleaned it thoroughly before taking out the fleshy meat portion. We ground the meat with ground onions. We chopped and chopped and chopped that mixture in a wooden chop bowl until it was as smooth as silk. Then we re-filled the chopped fish meat back into the skin we had so carefully preserved. When the fish was stuffed, we sliced it, and dropped the slices, one by one, into the boiling water to make the gefilte fish.

It would be boiling for hours and you could smell the gefilte fish odor all over the neighborhood. Such lovely cooking odors wafted through our Jewish neighborhood as everyone prepared for Passover. The Seder menu consisted of not only gefilte fish, but also delicious chicken soup with matzo balls, roast chicken, perhaps a kugel or tzimmes, and a compote, which was a mixture of dried prunes, apricots, pears, and pineapples.

I must say, the work was enormous but the pleasure was equally enormous. How my mother did all that she did, I can never understand, but she was truly a woman in a million. Even though she did have many helping hands in her daughters, she still had the burden of it all herself.

Papa was a religious man, a very orthodox and observant Jew. Well -- almost. There was one particular straying from Jewish law that Papa just couldn't avoid …

…Papa loved crabs.

The fish man would regularly come through the neighborhood with his cart. Sometimes, when Papa thought Mama wasn't looking, he would follow the cart until it and he were out of sight of the bakery. Then he would buy some of the traif delicacies and savor a special treat.

He never fooled Mama. She would really fuss about it, but Papa loved his crabs, and Mama couldn’t make him stop.

Close to Christmas time once, Mama had made an awful lot of good sponge cake. They were baked in large loaves, like five or ten-pound sheets. A man came in, pointed to the sponge cake and said: "Is that pound cake?" My sister, Annie, who was just learning to tend the store said proudly, "No, that's five pounds, but I can cut you a pound" ¾ meaning that she had just learned how to cut a pound by sight.

Later on, Papa got enamored with a doughnut-making machine which we installed in the window of our store at 609 4½ Street. The manufacturers of the doughnut machine taught him how to use it. He had a lot of fun cranking out the doughnuts into the hot oil and lifting out the finished doughnuts and letting them drain, all the while wearing a white apron and a great big baker’s hat. What a sight he was in the front window. He had a ball, and the whole street smelled of doughnuts everywhere you went.

When the United States entered the first World War, my brother Harry, who was still only in high school, but a big help around the bakery, had a brilliant idea.

He went to the nearby military bases. Camp Meade, Fort McNair, Fort Belvoir and whatever others were around at the time. Harry thought the military should have kosher bread for the troops, especially challah for Sabbath. "Yes", the commander said, "but we also need sliced, wrapped, white bread for all the troops. Can you furnish us that as well?", the man asked Harry.

"We sure can!" Harry announced with great assurance, though he had never seen a slicer and we never bagged our bread. That had always been wrapped as it was sold. More than that, we had never even made a single loaf of "goyishe" bread in our lives. But, the contract was signed, and a new slicing machine and wrapping machine came into our lives and we learned how to use them.

This military contract changed our lives. The extra money meant more freedom. My folks were finally able to afford to hire help and we bought a couple more trucks.

I created a real mess once, but it turned out OK:

My job was to order supplies and do other paperwork and correspondence. At one point during the war, sugar and other commodities were rationed. Even the bakery's supplies were rationed. In order to get ample supply for our business, certain forms had to be filled out and approved by the Government.

Filling out a form one day, I made a tremendous error, and wrote down the number 100 instead of 1,000. We had a terrible time trying to fix it so we could get our quota of sugar to fill the military orders. It required Papa's having a personal interview with Herbert Hoover, who, at that time, was Food Administrator, and in charge of the rationing system. Mr. Hoover told Papa that he needed to speak to the person who filled out the forms.

Scared to death, I was hauled before him. I explained what had happened as best I could. He patted my head as he listened to what I had to say and said, "Not to worry", and that it could be corrected. He took us to the proper office, got the form corrected, and we got our sugar.

That's how I had the pleasure of speaking personally to the man who later became the President of the United States.

The war caused a shortage of many, many things, like paper and rubber and tin and so forth. We began saving little pieces of tin foil from cigarette wrappings and rubber bands that were still good. Well, I remember we used to make beautiful balls that bounced way past our heads by just saving the rubber bands and wrapping them around a little core of paper to make a great big ball out of them.

We also saved the tin, and believe me it was something to save a teeny, itsy little piece of foil from cigarette wrappings because at that time, you didn’t buy tinfoil in packages like you do today in modern days. So it took us quite a while, and we would make a great big hard ball of tin and we would give it to the Army over in the station wherever they collected it and they used it for the war.

Also, we had the bright idea of helping soldiers in the World War by giving them something in which to pin their little straight pins. So we would save the cardboard covers of quart milk bottles and wash them. Then we would sew covers on them and sew two of them together like a sandwich. That would make a space for the pins to go in between the two covers. We took them to Walter Reed Hospital and we gave them out to the soldiers to keep as souvenirs of the war.

When it came time for me to graduate from grammar school ¾ on graduation day, my folks were so busy, they couldn’t even come to my graduation. But by that time, my brother Harry was married, and my sister-in-law, Mae created a wonderful dress using a skirt and a white chef's blouse. It sounds strange, but I thought it looked great – like a real dress.  She combed my hair with a pretty curl across my shoulder and put a big white bow in my hair. She came to the graduation and had my picture taken with the diploma.

But could you believe that not long before I had to go to my graduation exercise, I had to deliver a special order of rolls to a lady way up on 9^th Street between E and F Streets. She kept calling and calling to be sure that her order would get there on time, and she promised me a bouquet of peonies for my graduation if I brought her the rolls on time. I rushed like crazy, not only for her to get the rolls on time, but also so I could get back home and get dressed for my graduation.

She never did give me the flowers.

One Pesach, when things were a little better for the family, economically, that is, my mother engaged a dressmaker, if you please. She bought some beautiful silk. Annie and I had our first custom-made dresses for Passover. We thought we were swell!

Our Synagogue was the E Street Synagogue. It was a typical European shul, with a balcony for the ladies, who were to be separated from the men, as required by Jewish law.

One year, my sister Annie decided to fast for Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur fasting requires abstaining from both food and water. She was so dehydrated, she got light-headed and fainted right there in the balcony. She made such a clatter when she fell. The sounds echoed through the Synagogue. The women laid her out on the bench and brought her to. Mama then made her drink some water.

My sisters and I were very much involved in the building of the new Hebrew Home on Park Road between Georgia Avenue and 13^th Street, N.W.

This picture is from a newspaper clipping telling about the banquet where Annie and I, the Rosenberg girls, and some other Jewish kids, daughters of Papa's "buddies" in the Chevrah Kedushah Society waited tables at the grand opening.

The women cooked the meal. We girls wore pretty aprons. The master of ceremonies even pointed us out to the gathering and remarked about our lovely "uniforms".

When we first moved to 4½ Street, we didn’t have central heat. We heated with gas heaters. Though it was added later, we were the first Jews in Southwest to have steam heat. We had indoor plumbing and hot baths as well. The baths were another one of Harry's brilliant ideas.

At that time, we did not yet have hot water upstairs in the bathroom. So, one day Harry said: "I know how we can get hot water into the bathtub." He then set about creating his great invention.

In order to make bagels, the dough has to boil in rapidly bubbling water. After they have boiled, you take them out, let them drain, and only then do you put them into the oven to bake. Well, Harry built a big outdoor-like bar-b-que pit inside the bakery for the bagels. He brought the water to boil in a great big black cauldron.

He then connected a pipe from a steam collector over the hot cauldron in the bakery, up to the second floor bathroom where he used a brass-looking screw-type connection to connect the pipe to the faucet. He then connected about three or four feet of ordinary black garden hose to the faucet and let that lay in the tub.

When you wanted hot water, all you did was fill the tub with the cold water from the tap, and turn the hot spigot on. Then a guy in the bakery would get the cauldron boiling. Steam would travel up the pipe and through the hose that was lying in the tub of water.

When the steam was really going hard that hose danced around the bathtub. It made really loud and strange noises as it bounced all over the tub, banging against the bottom and the sides of the tub, while releasing its steady stream of hissing, sputtering bubbles as the steam came into contact with the cold water and immediately looked for the freedom of the surface of the water before it cooled back into liquid form. It was quite a sight. It was even more quite a sound, but eventually the steam heated the water. We could then turn off the steam and take a nice, warm bath. It was really quite a marvel and a real luxury.

There’s one particular thing I want to describe now, because you young ones will not know what I am talking about. It is the Yiddish word "gribbines" which is the end result of rendered chicken skin and chicken fat. And this is how it was made:

Before the chicken was cooked, the skin was removed along with all the extra fat from the chicken. It was cut up into small pieces, and a small onion was cut into it, and the fat was rendered on a small light and the solid became liquid.

In the meantime, while it was on the burner, the skin would crystallize. It would become crisp and it smelled heavenly and tasted delicious. Of course, there was nothing better than gribbines on rye bread or anything, but who eats gribbines today without consciousness of cholesterol and weight watching. Nobody even bothers to render chicken fat any more.

As the bakery prospered, we could afford to hire help. First we hired a black boy named Cory. He could speak Yiddish and he was a great help. Later there was another black boy named Arthur. But, before these boys came, I used to help my father on the truck. Harry used to help too, but when Harry started high school, I took over that job.

We would get up around four or five in the morning, and we would have a whole list of customers who wanted some bagels, two kaiser rolls, one challah and other baked goods. Papa drove the truck. I read the list, put the order in a bag, jumped off the truck and put the bag by the door. I'd run back to the truck, jump on, and we would go to the next customer. When we did that, we'd say we were going to "jump truck".

But on Sunday, it was my chore alone to go and collect for all this stuff. We kept track of what we delivered, and I would go on my roller skates from door to door, following the delivery route, to collect the money.

It was a very different time then. Now the streets are dangerous places, and no one would think of sending a young girl through the streets of Southwest by herself, let alone carrying a bag of money! But in those days, there was no reason to fear that anybody would waylay me or rob me or do anything else unspeakable to me, because that type of thing was unheard of in those days.

No matter how busy our parents were, and no matter how tired they were, it seems that our house was headquarters for any Jewish stranger that came into town. Anybody coming into town knew to look up the Morgenstein family. They knew we would put them up or find place for them somewhere, and introduce them to the people they were looking for.

And, by the same token, they took on a lot of charitable work. I remember Mama would go out collecting for a new widow or because somebody’s child was in the hospital or someone had to pay a bill. Mama was the one who started the ladies’ auxiliary of Papa’s shul, and she would always go out collecting for fundraising for the shul. And she would get raffle tickets to sell, and do all kinds of nice things for the shul.

As a matter of fact, Mama befriended a young lady who came to town and looked us up and was totally alone and looking for her sweetheart she came to marry in Washington, who had taken a job for the government. Mama felt so sorry for her and liked her so much, she decided to make the whole wedding for the girl, including a chupa in the dining room, and the long table in the dining room, set like for a wedding, with a real holiday meal the same as you would have for any holiday or a wedding. A real "chussinot".

Our father, too, was very generous with his time and money. He would always befriend out-of-towners and would trust them and would even sign notes for them and get stuck for the payments for them and such. Papa was a very compassionate man.

Some years later we built the new house at 613 4½ Street, and it was very modern, so that the young teenage girls like me and Annie, (Faye and Lillie had already been married and were out of the house), so that we teenagers could have parties and entertain once in a while.

There was a dining room, a foyer, and a living room on the second floor, and even a small kitchenette so that we could entertain. Al used the small bedroom, and the whole bedroom wall was covered with parking signs and street signs from the city traffic department.

It seems to be a passing fancy of a young school kid at that time to find or snitch parking signs and use them as decorations in their rooms.

When we got sick and tired of all that stuff in his room, we packed it all in a burlap sack and had him take it way out somewhere in Rock Creek Park and dump it to get rid of it.

 
Mama was very plucky. I remember Rabbi Hurwitz was overseeing the baking of our cakes and his wife walked in. Mrs. Hurwitz asked something about it's being kosher. Mama picked up her head and said: "Who’s the rabbi here?"

I don't remember exactly when we moved to 613 4 ½ Street. The building had been a used furniture store. The house was big. It was three stories tall with an oven in the back on the first floor. Behind the house was a garage that was probably once a stable.

In 1924, Papa bought the next door property at 609 4½ Street. The first thing he did was build a building in the back for the bakery. Then he connected the bakery to the rear buildings, and installed a new general oven. The bakery was prospering, and we were expanding.

In 1927, Papa built a beautiful, three-story home in the front of the area. It was the most modern home in Southwest. At least we believed so.

Beside the house there was a little duck alley. We called it a duck alley because you could duck into it and hide. It was no wider than about a yard wide, and it went all the way to the back of our bakery. At the end of the duck alley was a peanut factory and it smelled heavenly! We could smell the peanuts being roasted, and for one penny you got a great big bag full of roasted peanuts that were delicious.

Next door, at 607 4½ Street, there was an orthodox synagogue, the "Olev Shalom". That was not our synagogue. As I said before, we attended the E Street Synagogue, "Talmud Torah".

The first winter at 609, was a brutally cold winter. The year was 1927. The following summer was as hot as the preceding winter had been cold.

When the elders of the synagogue Olev Shalom came into the store that summer, and complained about our ovens giving off too much heat, especially on the Sabbath when the banked ovens were filled with the entire neighborhoods’ cholents, Mama asked them if they were too warm in the winter as well.

"Oh, no," they answered. "In the winter, we appreciate the heat. It's wonderful"

Mama thanked them for informing her, then told them that next winter she would be sending them a bill for heating the shul. She sent them on their way to consider the matter.

Needless to say, in the baking business, we needed a telephone. We had the first and only pay telephone on the whole block -- on the whole street for all that I know -- because anyone that had to use a telephone came into our store to use a telephone and all it took was a nickel.

Well, the boys learned how to use the telephone without a nickel. What they would do is take the receiver off the hook and take the end that was connected to the wire and bang it against the coin box that collected the nickels and that made a signal to the operator to answer. She said "Operator please". And they gave her the number to dial. (That was before people dialed the number themselves.) That's how they got away with getting a free telephone call.

I’m sitting here thinking of the time when we were little. I was young and it was hard work to prepare a meal. I didn't like it at all. Let me tell you about how hard we had to work to prepare a typical Sabbath meal.

If we wanted chicken ¾ chicken was a traditional thing for Shabbat dinner ¾ we had to buy a live chicken. We went to the grocery store, the butcher shop, or, sometimes, we went to the Central Market that was located at Pennsylvania Avenue and 7^th Street NW. We'd go to wherever there was a coop of live chickens strutting around on the sidewalk. We would pick out the chicken we wanted for dinner and carry it away.

On the way home, we had to get it killed.

Well, we had a shechet (the Hebrew word for kosher butcher) one block away from us. This butcher was Al Jolson’s father (who was also a rabbi and cantor and mohel). We called him Rev Jolson – but we pronounced it Yoelson. He would slit the throat of the chicken after he tied its legs. When it was dead, we were able to carry it home where we proceeded to prepare it for cooking. That was no easy task either.

First of all, we had to protect ourselves. We’d either take a tablecloth a or a towel or something big enough to protect us. We would tie it around our head to protect our hair and then we covered our clothing.

This was a job done outside. We went into the yard, put a big bag in front of us between our knees, put the chicken's head down into the bag, and holding the chicken by its legs we would start pulling the dry feathers up all the way from the neck to the feet. First the breast, then the wings, then the back. Once we got all the big heavy feathers off and then the molt feathers, we tied the bag up and threw it away and the hard work really started.

It was time to "schmalley" the chicken. That's when we seared the pinfeathers off the chicken. The only way we could do that was to light the gas range. If you didn’t have gas, you had to light the wood stove and let the heat burn off the pinfeathers. And then we had to pull all of the tiny little pinfeathers that we missed by the fire. This step is done one feather at a time

When all the feathers were gone, we had to eviscerate it. We cut it open and pulled out all the insides. We saved the pupic, the heart and the liver. We cleaned that chicken thoroughly -- inside and out -- and then we would soak it for a certain number of minutes, I think a half an hour, to make it kosher. After the soaking, we put it on a board and salted it to continue the kashering. Only then was it kosher and ready to be cooked.

Believe me, it was hard work, but it really was delicious. We really appreciated eating the soup and the roasted chicken after all that effort.

I want to get back to Mr. Jolson’s family. They had a daughter, her name was Eva, I believe. There was a younger son who was my age -- George. He became a pharmacist. I never knew Al Jolson.

The Jolson's family originated in Baltimore, and so did we, so I imagine our folks probably knew them even in Baltimore

Well, somehow we came to learn that the reason we didn’t see Al around the house was that he ran away from home to become an actor. His parents were furious with him because at that time people looked down upon actors. It was thought to be beneath the dignity of a Jewish boy to be an actor.

Anyway, Al did become very popular and he became a good singer.

After that, Al and his parents made up. One day we heard that he was coming back to visit his parents. Well, you would think that the President of the United States was riding down 4½ street because everybody and his uncle came outside to stand at the curb to wait for him to come by. As he came by in his long limousine with his wife, he waved to everybody. It was some thrill.

Really, it was just thrilling to see him.

When I was a child, we couldn’t get granulated sugar for Pesach in the stores. We had to order it from Palestine. It came wrapped in black paper shaped in the form of a cone, and it was quite tall. It looked like a megaphone wrapped in black paper. It was all one big lump of sugar. We had to granulate it ourselves.

First we would break it up in pieces. Then Mama would put in under a cloth on the cutting board and pound it until it was granulated. Then we could put it in our sugar bowl.

I've told you about Pesach, but I would like to tell you about some other holidays.

I’m thinking now about Chanukah. When Chanukah came along, we kids were excited because we knew then that we were going to get some money. How much money? Each one of us got from my Mama a penny, and from my Papa a penny, and what do you think we did with the pennies? You know that every good Jewish home had a tzedukah box on the kitchen wall or the dining room wall. Into that box went all of our pennies. And we all would love to tinkle the money by hitting our fingernails underneath our metal tzedukah box and hearing the coins rattle.

Another holiday was Sukkot. We did make a suckka in our back yard. The yard was little, as I told you. That's where we plucked the chickens and stored the big galvanized tubs we needed for preparing for holiday meals. Well, we would clean that place up spic-and-span and make a little ceiling of boards, and then get pine branches and cover them over the boards. We children could have fun hanging things from the boards, like corded paper chains and fruits like apples, pears and bunches of grapes. We had room to put a table – not a small table – enough for all of us to sit around and have a meal. And we did have dinner there – maybe even lunch once in a while.

Now comes to mind Purim. And of course, the kids had to show off that they knew the story of Queen Esther and Haman and all that. We liked Purim very much because it was a quick holiday and Mama used to make special humentashin for the family. The ones that were made in the bakery for the public were a different kind. As you well know, homemade is different form bakery made, and I can tell you that.

At some time, I can’t remember the year, but I know I was in high school and it was summer, Papa got the bright idea that we should branch out even more. We needed more delivery trucks and we needed more space. We decided to rent a counter in a grocery store which really was a butcher shop named Brotman’s on Georgia Avenue somewhere close to where the Giant’s first place opened up on Georgia Avenue.

Lo and behold, I was the one to manage that counter. I went there every morning with the truck. Somebody drove the truck, of course, and unloaded all kinds of bread and rolls. Some of them were given in orders the day before. People living in the Petworth area, which at that time was pretty uppity, thought that it would be pleasant if they could have an order in advance from the bakery. So I had orders to put away in packages. And I had customers come in and they wanted bread or rolls or whatever, and I was in this store until I sold everything out or it looked as if nobody was ever going to come in for anything else. So whatever was left ¾ and that was usually two or three loaves of bread, sometimes not at all ¾ I’d put them in a bag and take the streetcar and go home. I was very tired at the end of that duty, but it was an education to me to see the Jewish people come into the butcher shop where Mr. Brotman would cut his meat, and his wife, darling little lady ¾ I’ve forgotten her name ¾ would treat him like he was a baby.

Toward the end of the war, Papa became very ill and the doctors did not know what was wrong with him. They called it neuritis, but they had no idea how it started or what to do for him.

One doctor told him that he thought it was because he had some bad teeth in his head, so my father called the dentist. He was in bed. He couldn’t even stand up he was so weak. He’d lost a great deal of weight.

The dentist came and pulled every single tooth out of his head, thinking that it would make my father better. Well, I don’t think that did ever make my father better, but at least he had the peace of mind to know that he didn’t have any rotten teeth in his mouth.

When Papa was sick, I handled all the paperwork. I maintained the inventory, paid the bills, and saw to the correspondence. Thinking nothing about it, I would pick up a bill, write a check for the amount, sign Papa's name to it, and mail it out. It was quite customary. I could sign Papa's name almost as well as he could.

One day, after this had been going on for quite a long while, I went to the bank to cash a check payable to cash. I presented the check. The lady left the counter and brought someone back with her. I was asked some questions, then told to bring my father. They told me someone had to verify the signature.

"Why should he come?", I asked in my naiveté. "He's too sick to come; and besides, I'm the one who signed the check, so I'm the one who should verify it."

This upset the poor bank people. "What did you do?" they demanded in what I thought was an overly dramatic tone.

"I've been signing his checks ever since he's been sick. He's too sick to do it himself." I replied haughtily.

Only then did I learn that I had been "forging" checks. I didn't get into trouble for it, but I did stop forging his name.

Mama and Papa sold the bakery to two men from New York in December of 1934.

Today, southwest Washington is a whole lot different than it used to be when we lived there. In the first place, our street is no longer 4½ Street. It is now known as 4^th Street, S.W.

For years now, they’ve had the Arena Theatre, not too far away, and all of the old houses have been razed or refurbished. Some of the old houses have been torn down and new ones rebuilt. It was certainly easy for us to enjoy the cherry blossoms when we lived there, because it was within walking distance, and we surely did enjoy that as well as the Tidal Basin that was a swimming area when we were in our teens.

When we lived down in Southwest, there were a lot of Jewish people living there then too. Slowly, a lot of them moved into other neighborhoods in Northwest Washington, mostly into Petworth areas and to Georgia Avenue and so forth. However, a lot of the Jewish history of Southwest Washington is recorded by pictorial displays at the Jewish Historical Museum located on 3^rd Street, Northwest, near E Street. The building had been an old Synagogue at 6^th and I Streets, N.W. before it became a museum housing the Jewish Historical Society.

In that museum, if you go there, you will see pictures of our bakery on 4½ Street, some of our trucks, my father, and some of the artifacts of my father’s synagogue, the Congregation Talmud Torah.

Well folks, I hope you have enjoyed this much of my story. I will write more as I recall more of it and I will touch upon some other times in my life, when I was older and I was a mother of two wonderful children.

I would recommend that you make notes about your lives as well. Accumulate them as you go along so that your children and your grandchildren can learn of the history of the Morgenstein family, and be proud of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents. I just know some beautiful things will be recorded hereafter and shared amongst all of you.

Please carry on the tradition.

With Love,

Mary