Friday, June 16, 2017

Show me your Da das!

I have shown mine.
Why not make Saturday and Sunday post fathers pictures days!

Mine, Irving Wenzelberg, lived from 1-27-1907 till 5-11-1986, Mother's Day that year.
He was funny and kind and passed away without any regrets and a fight for staying alive and when his heart gave out they worked on him for a couple of hours. They loved him already with his short stay at that hospital, he told jokes to their staff! He had had a brain stem thrombosis weeks before and he lived five and half weeks with that, when most people lived only twenty-four to forty eight hours with that type of stroke, he even was going to physical therapy, but he died of pneumonia since he was allergic to penicillin and they could not find any other medications to save him back then, even in 1986!
My Dad was always the one to make me laugh at myself when my teenage self took things too seriously!
He felt I was capable of doing my first non-babysitting job at fifteen, as a short order cook in the snack bar at my Dad's Bowling Alley and Restaurant with nightly entertainment too, the Eclipse, in Hasbrouck Heights NJ, back in 1965.
He paid me a dollar an hour and I could eat and drink whatever I desired so long as it was any non-alcoholic beverages behind the bar where I wasn't supposed to be due to ABC, in NJ Alcohol Beverage Commission did not catch me, but I had to go there to get the soda for the kids who were in the Saturday Bowling League to go with their sandwiches, I made it like a spy game to make sure I wasn't being watched!
I made hamburgers and hot dogs, and sometimes I burnt them, but smiled at the kids and called them barbecued and they ate them anyway when I served them, a few I remade. I made fries the same way many places do today in that oil bath fryer, but not the healthy oil then.
Dad had shown me how to measure/weigh the meat and place it in the handmade patties shaper way back when.
Great experience and I got to see my Dad more often.
By seventeen I worked for Ohrbach's and then Lord and Taylors while in my senior year of high school and all through college and after too!
But this is about my Dad.
He was one of six children, his youngest brother died as a toddler.
Probably from some horrid ailment they had no idea how to treat way back then in the earlier part of the 1900s.
Most all of my aunts and uncles on that side of the family had at least two children, so lots of cousins!
I was told Grandma Gertie and Grandpa Abe came to America in the 19th century from Austria, but since then it is confusing since many genealogy trees show that they came from other eastern European countries, so to this day it is still unclear.
Dad though was born here in New Jersey, USA; I think only the eldest, his sister, my Aunt Rose, was born in Europe.
Dad was the middle of the five left.
He had three sisters, Sophie just the next older from him, Anne was the baby, and Rose the eldest, and his younger brother Morris who he helped financially get through law school.
Rose and her husband had a men's wear store for decades, Sophie's husband had a pocket book manufacturing company, and Anne's husband was a structural engineer.
Kids all went to college, a few even went to the  Ivy League.
Considering Grandpa was a house painter and very hard worker!
The new world was everything I bet he imagined.
When I was small Grandpa Abe, Dad's Dad was a small slender man when in his home he loved to watch TV westerns, and drink Schnapps and eat dried fruit; all kept in a cupboard alongside of his bed.
When Grandpa visited us he loved to go out and work in our garden at our home in Paramus NJ.
He was quiet and always busy, I think he lived well into his late eighties maybe early nineties.
He was like those Blue Zone people.
Grandma I never met, she passed away in the late 1940's before I was born. I was told it was from her diabetes that was not under control and caused gangrene to both of her legs and she died while hospitalized.
Sad.
Dad in spite of many sad things, he was always positive and loved the world and found the good in most all people, when no one else could.
There is so much more I am forgetting... oh when I was small and most parents read to their children he told me stories about his growing up and numerous jobs he had before becoming his own boss at the age of nineteen when he left law school since he thought his brother was better suited to it than him, and he opened Irving's Dairy with his siblings help. I guess similar to convenience stores of today, but more like a small grocery back in 1926. Dad was forty-three when I was born.
He had that for nineteen years and then with his cousins bought the Eclipse in 1945!
for another nineteen years then tried retiring for six months and decided after Mom helped to decide he was driving her crazy with his antsyness he signed up with Snelling and Snelling the temp position agency and did some interesting jobs from delivering false teeth to ending up become a toll taker on the Garden State Parkway in NJ!
He died the year after he retired again, on May 11, 1986!
My Mom, Sylvia, had passed away in February 15, 1982 weeks before their forty-first anniversary March 9, 1941, and he remarried in 1985, for the third time. Dad had been a widower at only thirty-one; his first wife had had a heart condition, Anne. Yep they, he and Mildred, his third wife, celebrated their first anniversary while he was hospitalized.
So he had had a full life and as he said without any regrets.
What more could anyone want or need really.

Most recent photos of Dad in Bamber Lake NJ where we moved from to Florida after he passed away just a few months after in August of 1986.

Me and Dad: His birthday our kitchen there and the other one is a Father's Day photo receiving Best Great Dad Grandpa certificates in our living room there in Bamber Lake NJ. Love you Dad and I miss you daily!




 

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