In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (21 page)
Read In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" Online
Authors: Phil Brown
Tags: #Social Science/Popular Culture
Women also had their “girls’ night out” when they went to the movies in town. During the 1940s and 1950s, this meant walking to town—sometimes they took a cab home, but most of the tenants were in their twenties or thirties and the walk was fun. Often, they’d go on two nights, with one half watching the other half’s children. Before coming home, a stop at a soda fountain for a frappe (one syllable) was a necessity. As the Richman’s crowd aged, the women went to the movies by car. After my father died, Mother learned to drive and would often shuttle the ladies down in two or even three trips. In 1993, when I interviewed her, Miriam Damico was still ferrying her ladies around.
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Beginning in the postwar years, first hotels and then bungalow colonies started to show movies one or two nights a week—sometimes outside, but often in the casinos or playhouses. Some owners, such as the Kassacks for whom I worked in Woodbourne, owned their own projectors and showed films themselves, renting the films from catalogs. Others would hire projector, operator, and film as a package from one of several film entertainment companies that operated in the county. In the summer of 1959, Dave Burcat, who worked with me as arts-and-crafts counselor at Kassack’s Day Camp and who became a life-long friend, moonlighted as a projectionist. If he were showing something interesting, I might go see the film—that summer, I saw a lot of films, and a lot of bungalow colonies and small hotels. Dave was married, had two kids, and was finishing dental school at the University of Pennsylvania. If it could be arranged, I would pick up his wife, Jessie, who ran the day camp’s nursery, and take her along to see the film—then we’d all go out later. The car I drove was a very distinctive, very ratty old Chrysler. One evening, Jessie and I were riding up to see Dave, and a film, when I noticed a car following us as we turned into the hotel driveway. When the occupants of the other car saw us, they zoomed away, but not before I caught a glimpse of them. They were other counselors from the camp where we worked, and they thought Jessie and I were up to no good. After the movie, we came up with some dream scenarios, including having Dave “shoot” me at flag raising the next day. We didn’t go through with it, but the next day everyone was very solicitous of Dave and very cool to Jessie and me.
The entire dynamics of the colonies changed when the men came up. For most people this was Friday night. While there was a train that ran until the early 1950s, I don’t recall anyone using it—the heyday of the train had apparently been the 1920s. Most of our tenants arrived by car or bus. As Harvey Jacobs noted, most likely they had made a pit stop at the Red Apple Rest or the Orseck brothers on the way:
On the south side of Route 17 was The Orseck Boys. On the north side, the Red Apple Rest. Two restaurants practically identical.
Both oases had outdoor stands that sold hot dogs, hamburgers, lox and bagels, Cracker Jack [sic] candy, Life Savers, postcards. Both had gas pumps and plenty of sanitary toilets with signs proclaiming them inspected safe, boiled against any kind of bacteria. Both had lines of buses parked in their lots, indication [sic] that the food and comfort stations were trusted by big companies with plenty to fear from the law.
Both had multitudes of identical customers, families, young studs, old ladies, girls in shorts, teenagers in shirts that said Taft or Thomas Jefferson in block type, occasional loners who sat chewing and watching, clusters of humans from this or that bus with an eye on the driver who could pull out without them, smaller groups from the hacks, all in motion. Inside the restaurants were huge cafeterias where everybody was his own waiter. If you had time, if you could find a table, you sat. Tables were shared with strangers, as at the Automat in New York. The difference was that here the strangers were interchangeable. A father could go and support the wrong family, or a mother nurse the wrong kids, and it might never be noticed.
All were Jews on the move to and from vacations, all except those who worked behind counters or took plates and flatware from the tables. They were locals with a pale, puzzled look of overwhelm. Their faces contrasted with the pure colors of Jell-O in tall cups, mountains capped with whipped cream peaks, the favorite dessert.
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Stop or no-stop along the way, the men were tired on arrival, but most were also young. Dinner was waiting on the table for them. Curlers were out of their wives’ hair, and they would often go out to see a late movie—and it wasn’t unusual to have eleven o’clock movies on Friday nights. But the next night was the biggest entertainment night—in many ways, Saturday night was the culmination of the entire weekend. Friday night was foreplay. By the end of the 1950s, some of the bigger colonies were even offering live bands on Friday nights. Some tenants didn’t go out, but played poker and gin on Friday nights.
Joey Adams’s view of Friday night was that “after a little sex and a big dinner the husband took over the seat vacated only a few hours before by his wife … to play gin.”
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Actually, sex was reserved for late at night, after the children were asleep. I remember hearing people grousing about how late the kids were up the night before and how that hampered their plans.
When the men came up with cars, many brought food, especially fruit and vegetables from the city. With cars available, some people went shopping, some went visiting, but most stayed put and played cards. The men’s game at Richman’s was three-hand pinochle played with two decks. Often two games or more went simultaneously, one featuring folding money and the others, change. Some men preferred to play rummy. At my father’s pinochle table, it was not unusual for several hundred dollars to change hands during the weekend. The regulars could all afford it, but I remember when a new guest joined them and lost heavily. His wife came to the regulars and berated them for taking advantage of the poor guy. They never played with him again, and his family didn’t return the following year.
The fathers at Richman’s were not very sports-minded, although most of them went swimming on the weekend if it was hot enough to drive them from the card tables to The Rocks. At many of the larger colonies, especially those with younger crowds in the late 1950s and 1960s, sports were very important on the weekends, and fathers took full advantage of all the facilities—except for the swimming pools, which tended to be mostly used by the kids, with parents playing cards at the poolside.
Some men also enjoyed fishing. Most went to the Neversink, while others drove to a nearby lake. Morningside Lake was especially popular in our area. Nightcrawlers were especially favored for bait. Mother’s cousin Sidney, then our tenant, told a tale of bait-gathering woe from his previous colony. Anticipating Saturday fishing, Sid and a pal went out with a flashlight on a rainy Friday night. The worms were out in abundance, and as they collected them near the bungalows they enthused, “what a beauty” and “boy that’s a big one.” The next day an irate tenant-friend berated them. “Don’t you guys have any shame?” He, perhaps egotistically, thought they were voyeurs.
After the 1950s completion of the Neversink Dam as part of New York’s watershed program, and the ensuing impounding of its waters, the Neversink River became unswimmable because its flow was changed. Formerly free-flowing for many miles, the water warmed up in the summertime to a temperature in the seventies and eighties. Now, water from the bottom of the reservoir was released in a restricted flow just about nine miles above our swimming spot.
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Water temperatures are usually in the fifties, except in the midst of a heat spell when they may rise to the low sixties. With a restricted flow, the water level was also radically lowered, rendering many swimming holes too shallow. New York City compensated those resort owners who owned riparian rights for the loss of the swimming use of the river, and many bungalow colony owners used the money to build swimming pools.
Before World War II, only hotels had swimming pools, and many of these were spring fed and so had algae in the water. I vividly remember going swimming at the Raleigh Hotel pool during the war—in a large green tank. While most tenants cheered the antiseptic blue and white modern pools, some people were nostalgic for the messier early ones. In the film
Sweet Lorraine
, the granddaughter and the handyman met at the site of the “Old Pool,” which the girl “always loved.”
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But progress was at hand. Shortly after the war ended, the building of blue-painted, chlorinated pools began in earnest. Hotels advertised “Hollywood” pools, and some of the larger bungalow colonies followed suit. The river’s demise as a swimming alternative stimulated the rush to pools, and, by 1960, most colonies whether they could afford it or not had a pool. The demand for nice, sanitary-looking pools was so overwhelming that even hotels and colonies on good swimming lakes put in pools. The anomaly of a pool right at lakeside became commonplace. Many of my grandfather’s mortgage loans during the 1950s were made to pay for swimming pools. If you decided to go ahead with the pool, your next decision was whether to have a pool less than seven feet deep, or a deeper one capable of allowing for a diving board. Any pool under seven feet, by law, didn’t require a lifeguard—deeper pools did. While lifeguard lore at hotels often involves romance, bungalow colony lifeguards were usually teenagers whose parents were staying at the colony—and the job really lacked cachet and glamour. Sometimes parents only agreed to rent on the condition that a son be made the lifeguard. It was usually the lifeguard’s job to check the chlorination level of the pool, to skim leaves off the surface, and, most particularly, to remove any dead creatures—frogs or small mammals—before the guests used the pool. City people were especially squeamish about sharing their water with animal corpses. At many colonies, the pool became what one observer called an example of “conspicuous nonconsumption,”
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where tenants, even nonswimmers, would not rent in a pool’s absence. On the heels of the pool trend came the demand at hotels for indoor pools. Hotelman Carl Gilbert ruefully noted in the 1970s that, “A person will call and ask if we have an indoor pool. They may not use it, but if you don’t have it, they won’t come.”
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The indoor pool mania never hit the colonies, although at least one colony, Mason’s in Monticello, had one. Indoor pools tended to be used even less than outdoor ones, but they were and are symbolic.
Richman’s received almost fifteen thousand dollars for our riparian rights, and Grandpa and Father debated putting in a pool. I naturally wanted one. There was discussion with our neighbors the Yustmans and the Puttermans about sharing the cost, but that went nowhere. Pools were costly, not only in their structure, but because of the elaborate, massive filtration systems then used. Sensibly Grandpa and Father decided against a pool, but with the loss of swimming facilities, we could only attract a crowd not interested in swimming—that is, mostly older people or people with very small children who liked the lower rates we had to charge because we lacked a pool. Today, the Sullivan County landscape is littered with abandoned pools built for small colonies that were simply not economical.
At large colonies, athletic men would play water polo and the whole colony would stage water shows that were mock emulations of Esther Williams movies. A water show illustrated with home movies made at Lansman’s is in
The Rise and Fall of the Borscht Belt
.
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But mostly the pool was a background.
Handball courts were common and were used to play both handball and racquetball. Basketball courts—incorporated with the handball court’s paving or separated in the larger colonies—were also very popular, especially with American-born fathers who had played the game in school. By the 1960s, some colonies even had tennis courts. But the single most popular game was baseball. Many of the larger colonies were league members, and the big games against other colonies were on Sunday mornings. Saturday was practice day. Women and children were expected to show up and cheer. Lansman’s, our local Goliath bungalow colony, usually dominated the play. Jason Cutler, the hero of
Bungalow Nine
who is hung over after a night of partying, is rousted out of bed by other active tenants of Hector’s. “Hey Cutler! Yo Cutler! The visiting team is on the field.”
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Dressing quickly and skipping breakfast and even coffee, goaded by his wife (“Musn’t be a poor sport, Darling”),
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he drags himself to the field, and—as a first-time bungalow tenant—is astounded by what he sees:
The ball field was a human beehive. The visitors had the diamond. Along the fringes the local team was limbering up arms, batting fungos and capering about with vigor Jason found demoralizing. Hector stood by importantly wearing blue pants and a blue cap mounted rakishly over his left side tic. He was ready to umpire. The men of the colony were out in force. They had more than enough for a team; light-footed Al Miller, hoarse-voiced Buddy Berg, florid Milt Krinsky, big Jack Rappaport, smiling Joe Alfelder, Abe Barsky prancing about … and plenty more. The heavy drinkers, heavy dancers, and good-time-Charleys until three in the morning were out en masse, behaving as if Saturday night had never been.
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