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This is an excerpt from the memoirs of Howard Mehr (Lenore's
father): written in the early 1990’s:
PARENTS
Both my parents came from
what we would today call large families, although they were probably considered
more or less average in their own day. My mother had three sisters and two
brothers, and my father had two sisters, one of whom died in infancy, and three
brothers. Both were children of immigrants.
MOTHER (SARAH EPSTEIN MEHR)
My mother’s
maternal family is detailed in Alex Friedlander’s extensive genealogy called
The Vilna of Gaoen. Her father was Marks Goldstein (Epstein after
he emigrated to the US) and her mother was Betsy Barden. Alex shows her to have
been born in 1891, although we thought she was born in 1892. She died in 1990,
so she was either 97 or 98 when she died. She had three sisters, Golda
(1890-1979), Nan (Anna; 1894-?), and Bertha (c.1902-1990), and two brothers,
Morris (1896-1967) and Sam (1898-1925).
Betsy Barden Goldstein died
in 1905. Soon after her death, Marks came to the US and settled in Holyoke, MA
where he was known as Epstein. There is some confusion here. My mother said
she came to the US when she was 13, which would be 1905 or 1906. She had been
living with a Barden family for some time, and the two youngest, Sam and Bertha,
were in an orphanage. I don’t know about Golda, Nan or Morris. Mother was
particularly fond of the Bardens. Several of them visited here and she made
several trips to England especially to see them. My brother Morton also visited
them in England.
Mother felt guilty, I think
about Sam (who was a family favorite) and Bertha. Sam apparently was a favorite
uncle of mine until his death when I was less than four.
My grandfather settled in
Holyoke, MA where he had a hardware store. After awhile, he sent for some of
his children. Throughout the history of US immigration, it has not been too
unusual for a man to come here alone and then send for his family after he has
become established. I am not sure who came when, but my mother came when she
was 13. I know that Bertha came later and that Sam didn’t arrive until after
World War I.
I can’t remember my mother
saying much about her life before she came to the US, except that she had lived
with the Bardens. She did say once that she played field hockey in school.
In Holyoke, she went to work
in a paper mill as a counter. I remember her demonstrating once how she could
fan a thick pile of paper and walk her fingers through, counting off sheets in
fives. Holyoke was an important paper-manufacturing town in those days and
there is still some paper made there. She never spoke much about her father,
except to remark once that he was too cheap to get her window shades for her
bedroom.
My mother moved to New York
about the time of World War I where she lived in the home of an uncle, Abraham
Epstein. He was prominent in the Socialist party, and I believe my mother voted
Socialist in national elections for many years for sentimental reasons.
I think she worked in a store
in the financial district that sold lingerie and other ladies wear or
accessories. I think it was one of a chain called the Rainess Shoppe.
Her uncle Abe had at least
two sons, Harry and Moses (mish), and I think there was at least one daughter.
My mother often visited and phoned the Epsteins and several friends. And I’m not
sure which women were related and which were friends.
At any rate, Harry graduated
from NYU (I believe it was the Bronx campus, which is now a community college).
He often brought his two friends, Joe and Herman Mehr (twin brothers), to the
Epstein apartment. Once they brought a cousin, also named Joe Mehr, who became
my father. The Epsteins always referred to my father as “Big Joe” because he
was older, and to the cousin as “Little Joe”. The twins used to joke about this
on the frequent occasions when they and my father met.
My mother and the Epsteins
exchanged visits (sometimes our whole family went up to the Bronx) and phone
calls. Mother also stayed in touch with several friends from that period. One
was Ceil Hellman, whose husband worked for Sears Roebuck for many years. Another
was a single woman named Fannie (Frances?) who had what I think was a pretty
good job for a woman at that time. She seemed fairly well to do. I think my
mother called her a “business lady”.
Ceil Hellman incidentally,
had siblings with family names like Wolf and Fish. Morton and I made jokes
about that.
Later my mother became
friendly with several women who lived in our neighborhood in Jackson Heights.
Thinking about my mother’s
friends, it strikes me that I can’t recall any mention of any close friend of my
father aside from business associates.
FATHER (JOSEPH MEHR)
My father was the oldest of a
family of four boys and one or two girls. There is some question whether he was
really born in the US, but if he was it was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
on May 15, 1888. He was “officially” born in New York, but I believe he may
actually have been a baby when my grandparents arrived here. He remembered the
Henry Street Settlement House with gratitude and pleasure, and contributed to
the organization every year. I am not sure of his father’s name, but it may
have been Samuel. He must have had at least one brother, since there was a
family of Mehrs in Patterson, NJ who were first cousins to my father. His
mother’s name may have been Vera Levant. There was a family of Levants in
Pittsburgh, PA who were first cousins to my father. My grandparents originally
came from the Baltic States – Latvia, I think – when it was Russian, and lived
in Moscow before coming to the United States in 1888. They first lived, as I
said before, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, then moved to New Jersey.
My grandfather was a tailor.
My cousin, Florence used to say he had been “Tailor to the Tsar”, but my mother
said once he had manufactured uniforms for the Russian army. He had a tailor
shop in Newark, I believe, and owned a boarding house in Bradley Beach, NJ. The
boarding house operated only in the summer, and was originally considered a
sideline. But they lost the tailor shop and lived in the boarding house year
round. I vaguely remember the boarding house. My father went to high school in
Bradley Beach and his name is inscribed on a World War I memorial there. My
grandfather had a stroke when I was very young, and I only remember him as an
“ancient” man who was paralyzed and couldn’t speak. My grandmother outlived him
by many years. I think she died in the late forties or early fifties. I
believe my father and possibly one or both the younger brothers helped meet
household expenses. After the stroke, they sold the boarding house and moved to
Irvington, NJ.
After my father came Abraham,
Rose, Harry, and Henry. Christians have remarked about the last two names,
since one is a nickname for the other. The old Jewish custom, however, is to
name the child in Hebrew and then select a name that sounds somewhat similar in
the language of the country of residence.
Abe looked very much like my
father. He was a “stage manager” (in charge of scenery, props, lights, etc.) in
the legitimate theater in New York. He was married once to a showgirl and
divorced. (I remember seeing a photo of a very beautiful woman.) In the
depression following the 1929 crash, he was out of work for a long time. His
last job was as a projection operator in the movie theater on the pier in Asbury
Park, NJ. I remember him showing me the projectors and pointing out the signals
to change reels. I remember hearing that projectionists belonged to the same
union as stagehands as an explanation of how he got that job. He was working
there when the ocean liner The Morro Castle caught fire and ran aground
just off Asbury Park with great loss of life. Uncle Abe was among the local men
who collected the bodies as they washed ashore. He drank heavily and may have
been an alcoholic. He died before World War II.
Rose was married and either
divorced or widowed: her last name was Michaels. She was a schoolteacher for
many years in Newark, NJ. She lived for many years with my grandfather and
grandmother in a small house in Irvington, NJ (I think the address was 73
Norwood Avenue.) We visited there fairly often when I was young, on holidays and
weekends, so I was fairly close to Rose’s daughter Florence, who was about 2
years older then I.
Florence married a man named
Bill Sapiro (Or Shapiro?). They met as students at the Univ. of Michigan or
Michigan State Univ. He was a non-too-successful advertising man and she worked
as an occupational therapist and later a supervisor in the New York City Public
School System. She had a daughter, Allison Behrman living in NJ, married to a
doctor. Another daughter, Virginia is married to Graham Wilson, living in
Wisconsin and teaching women’s studies in a University. Florence and Bill
eventually moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL. Florence died in 1992.
Harry was next. He taught
science in junior high school in or near Newark, NJ. When my father thought he
might write children’s books about science and engineering, Uncle Harry gave him
three high school science textbooks. I read all three (I was about eight at the
time) and they started my lifelong interest in scientific and technical things.
Harry married Anna Lasky and they had one daughter, Myra and a son. I took
movies (which I never saw) at Myra’s wedding: I think that was the last time I
saw any of that family. Florence and I thought Anna was the prettiest of the
Mehr women, and she was a favorite of both of us.
Henry was the youngest. He
was a dentist, and had an office at the main business intersection in Union,
NJ. His wife’s name was Bertha and they had one son, Michael. They lived in a
small apartment about a block from the office while I was growing up, but later
they built a fairly large house with the office attached a few blocks away.
There may have been another
sister who died in infancy. If so, I believe Florence was named after her.
The Paterson Mehr’s consisted
of the twins, Herman and Joe, two other boys, Milton and Leonard, and two girls,
the younger named Florence.
Herman and Joe both went to
NYU. One of their classmates and close friends was Harry Epstein, my mother’s
cousin. It was though this connection that my mother and father met. Because
my father was a few years older, the Epsteins called him “Big Joe” and the twin
“Little Joe”. That was a standing joke when they got together. The twins
worked their way through school as musicians (they both played violin). They
had a band on the radio for awhile, but ran afoul of the musician’s union for
giving a job to an ununionized musician. Herman and Joe both got degrees in
chemical engineering from NYU and had then studied law. When I was a boy they
had a practice in the Lincoln Bldg. on 42nd street in New York.
Herman had a son who died in a car accident. Joe had two children and his widow
lives in Mamaroneck.
Milton was a seaman and a
communist in the thirties. Morton saw him a few years ago living in Milan,
Italy where he was teaching English.
There was another sister
whose name I forget, she was the oldest, I think, and had a son named Alex (?)
who was of an age with my cousin Florence and me. She also had another son by
a second husband. I think in the late forties I heard she was living in
Victorville, CA.
.There were relatives of my
father in Brooklyn, but I don’t remember the name. The Grandmother of that
family was still traveling around Brooklyn by herself at the age of 107. Her
method (translated from Yiddish, since she spoke no English) was to find a “nice
young man” and show him her destination written on a piece of paper. One of the
daughters was married to an artist named Abe Birnbaum whose work appeared
regularly on the pages and covers of The New Yorker magazine.
My father attended the
Western University of Pennsylvania , which is now the University of Pittsburgh,
for a year or two before transferring to Yale. He lived with an aunt and uncle
in Pittsburgh, the Levants. In his generation there were Ben, Howard, and
Oscar, and possibly others. When I was a boy we visited Ben at least once: he
had a professional practice – possibly a dentist. Howard was a musical director
of shows on Broadway. Oscar was the famous pianist and comedian. He was the
pianist who made George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue famous after
Gershwin died. He also appeared in several movies (often playing himself) and
was featured on a radio program called Information Please
While my father lived in
Pittsburgh, he worked as a trolley car motorman or conductor. At some later
period he also worked as a motorman on a street car that ran from Brooklyn to
Queens in New York. He told me once that it was the line that ran up Junction
Boulevard (about 6 blocks from where we lived in Jackson Heights) to what is now
La Guardia Airport.
After one or two years at
Pitt, he transferred to Yale and completed the engineering course there. He
never got a degree, however, because according to Morton, he lacked some kind of
language credits. He then went to work for Public Service Company in New
Jersey.
Public Service at that time
was a fully integrated utility company. They produced both electricity and
illuminating gas (which was made from coal) and ran street cars with their own
electricity. Like many street car companies of the time, they built amusement
parks at the ends of the car lines. Palisades Park, across the Hudson from
about 125th street in Manhattan was theirs. (Kennywood was at the
end of the line from Pittsburgh).
They also operated coal mines
in Pennsylvania. My father was sent to one of the mines to test the coal. He
claimed to be the first person to operate a bomb calorimeter in a coal mine. (A
calorimeter measures the amount of heat given off when a substance burns.) He
would check the heat content of the coal before it was mined, and the high
quality coal was shipped to Public Service generating and gas plants, while the
rest was sold on the open market.
By 1917 he had received
several promotions and was working in a laboratory in a generating plant in or
near Newark. He was living at the boarding house in Bradley Beach and commuting
by train. One day after we got into the war, he decided to enlist. He stayed
on the train at Newark, continued to Hoboken, and took the ferry to Manhattan.
He signed up at Whitehall Street in the same building where I enlisted 24 years
later.
I’m not sure of where he
received his training, but he wound up at Fortress Monroe near Newport News, VA
as a warrant officer in the field artillery. He told me once that his first
task at Monroe was to wire up a telephone switchboard. He’d never even looked
inside one, but they were fairly simple devices in those days.
He went overseas as the
commander of an anti-aircraft battery at Orly Field near Paris. Being a warrant
officer stationed right outside of Paris must have been a choice assignment. He
brought back a souvenir, which I still have: a brass handled short sword that he
found on a visit to a battlefield after the Armistice. I also have somewhere
his notebook where he sketched identification details of various Allied and
German airplanes: wing and tail shapes, etc.
When he enlisted, Public
Service promised him his old job back. When he was demobilized, however, they
wanted him to start over testing coal in the mines. So instead, he got a job
with McGraw-Hill in the advertising department of one of their leading
magazines. In those days, most trade paper advertising was not handled by
agencies. If the advertiser didn’t prepare his own ad, the magazine did it for
him. My father’s first magazine job was preparing ads, writing copy and doing
layout.
Then he got an opportunity to
sell subscriptions. Apparently there was fairly good money in that. The
company didn’t expect to make anything on subscriptions; if a salesman exceeded
his quota, his commission plus bonuses was more that the subscription price. He
told me it was customary to try to sell legitimate subscriptions to plant
managers, engineers, etc. for the first three weeks of each month, and then to
sign up anyone he could find – floor sweepers, handymen, etc. – to fill the
quota.
He did well at that, I guess,
because by 1927 he was selling space on one of their leading magazines,
Factory. When Harvey Conover and Bud Mast left McGraw Hill to start a
competing magazine, Mill & Factory, he went with them. He stayed
with Conover-Mast until he retired.
Mill & Factory
was based on an idea
that was quite novel then. Mill supply companies bought the subscriptions for
their customers, who received the magazine free. Each supply house, which had
an exclusive territory, got its ad on the cover of the magazine it paid for, and
an additional ad inside. In the 1940’s, another publisher asked Conover for
permission to use the term “Conover-Mast circulation” to describe a similar
scheme he contemplated for a new magazine. Conover refused, so he coined the
term “franchise circulation”, which is a perfect description.
Later, Conover-Mast started
several more magazines, but none had the same circulation scheme. They were out
–and-out free, under what is now known as “controlled circulation”. To get the
magazine, a subscriber has to state that he has a job with certain specific
responsibilities in a specific industry, and he has to say he “wants” to get
it. Most trade papers today are controlled.
Conover-Mast started a new
magazine around 1929 called Materials Handling & Distribution, and
my father was assigned to it. It was a good magazine, I believe, but it’s
timing was bad. First of all, it was probably before its time, since the
technology was then probably too simple to warrant such a publication. (It was
published in Readers Digest size format.) More significant, though, was the
depression which struck at the end of its first year.
Things got pretty tight in
1930, 1931, and 1932, and my father sold space for two other magazines besides
Materials Handling. One of them was a furniture magazine of some
sort, and we got several pieces of furniture at low prices directly from
manufacturers he called on.
By the end of 1932 however,
Conover spotted a new opportunity. Prohibition had been in effect for 12 years,
but the Democrats campaigned that year on an immediate legalization of beer and
an eventual repeal of the 18th Amendment. As soon a Roosevelt was
elected with a sweep of both houses of Congress, Conover-Mast started work on a
brewery magazine. They shut down Materials Handling, and my
father went to work full time on Modern Brewer . He sold space to
suppliers and manufacturers and acted as a reporter, calling on the breweries
themselves. His territory usually covered New England, New York, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, and may have included West
Virginia and Ohio as well, at least part of the time. For long stretches of
time, he would leave by car on Monday or Tuesday, spend almost two weeks on the
road, and return on the second Thursday of Friday.
At first there were a few
large breweries and eight or nine hundred small ones operating in the US. More
were started as business improved, until there were over 1400 in all. Then
competition and mergers began to reduce the number, the smaller breweries folded
as the larger ones grew. By 1940 the industry had caught up with the
modernization required after then Prohibition hiatus, and there wasn’t enough
business to support the three publications in the field. So Conover-Mast sold
Modern Brewer to Brewing Age, and my father went
with the deal for a year. The current version, Modern Brewery Age
is still published right here in Norwalk, CT.
After the year was up, my
father returned to Conover-Mast as advertising manager of a magazine they had
bought, Purchasing, and a directory that they started, Plant
Purchasing Directory. (this was actually started at Conover-Mast as the
Plant Production Directory in 1941 or 1942.) This time again,
Conover’s timing was good. The industrial purchasing agent became more
important as the growing “defense” effort and later the war-made shortages and
sped up the introduction of novel materials and equipment.
In 1943 Conover started a new
magazine called Aviation Maintenance. Engineering and
manufacturing were covered by existing publications, but keeping the existing
planes flying was a tremendous job and the magazine found a good niche. It was
later expanded to Aviation Maintenance Operations, soon shortened
to Aviation Operations and, after my father had retired, became
a thick, prosperous book during the 1950’s and 1960’s as Space &
Aeronautics.
Meanwhile in 1951 a medical
exam revealed that my father had cancer of the colon. He was operated on, but
retired from Conover-Mast,, where he had become a vice president. As he
recovered from the operation, he worked on a part-time basis on the
Purchasing Directory. Then he, and my mother got a summer place in
Stamford, CT, and he did some work for a small publishing house in Greenwich:
Cleworth Publishing Company, which is now in Cos Cob. Unfortunately, while his
colostomy was successful, the cancer had spread and his condition gradually
worsened. He died in a veteran’s hospital in New York City in December 1955.
As I look back across the
years, I can see that my father made a real effort to make contact with me. I
know that in many ways I was a great disappointment.
I know he took me places when
he was home. I’m sure he took me to the Museum of Natural History at least
once, and I think he took me other places. These excursions, of course, were
just he and I: in the earliest years I have the impression that Morton wasn’t
with us.
A little later we went places
occasionally where both Morton and I were along. One such place was a Sunday
visit to Holmes Airport, which was at the Northwest corner of Jackson Heights.
I’m pretty sure that when he bought me a brief ride in an airplane, Morton flew
as well.
I don’t remember his ever
having any interest in sports. He did say that he once gave a play-by-play
description of a major league baseball game to an in-person crowd; he was
receiving the reports by telephone. But I can’t recall him ever talking about
sports, or even indicating any desire to play. He did have a set of golf clubs,
and in know he played occasionally at outings, but I have the impression he was
a real duffer and only did it because it was expected of him in certain business
situations.
When I was very small, he
brought home some boxing gloves and sparred with me a little. I don’t know
whether lost interest or I did, but I don’t remember playing with the gloves
more than once.
Once, when I was quite young,
he took me fishing. We were staying at Bradley Beach, and he rented a boat,
which we rowed out on Toms River. We fished with a drop line (no rod) and
didn’t catch anything. I was quite bored by the whole excursion.
I was very much a sissy and a
coward in the elementary school years. I have always ascribed this to the fact
that I was told not to engage in any excersize by my pediatrician when I was
about 7. This sounds almost blasphemous today, but this was Dr. I. Newton
Kugelmass, who was a very influential man in his field. Of course, we may have
misinterpreted him, but the practical result was that I avoided both the
rough-and-tumble games and the formal sports that kids of 7 and 8 normally
engage in. Later, I had almost no skills with which to compete with boys of my
age, and I compensated by a massive disinterest.
I remember once when I was
travelling with my father on one of his business trips, he took me to a Pirates-Phillies
game in Pittsburgh. I know we went, but I don’t actually remember anything
about that game.
Again, when I was in my first
year of high school, he took me to the big football game of the year. That he
took me makes sense, because it was held at the stadium of George Washington
High School up in Washington Heights. Stuyvesant didn’t (and still doesn’t)
have any outdoor athletic facilities of its own. I took a book along to read,
which I think bothered him a little.
Aside from these two outings,
I can’t remember my father ever showing any interest at all in either football
or baseball.
He was interested in
boating. At Conover-mast, where he worked from 1927 to his retirement circa
1951 (and as a consultant several periods afterwards), most of the big shots
were into yachting. Harvey Conover raced a large sloop, and several others who
lived in Westchester ran sail boats or motor cruisers. Dad went on several
windjammer cruises, and sailed on Conover’s yacht, Revonoc, several
times. The New York chapter of the Industrial Advertisers Association (now B/PAA)
had an annual outing at Plandome near Port Washington on Long Island. The main
daytime activities were first golf and somewhat down the list in second,
tennis. But the Conover Mast contingent assembled in their boats the night
before in Mamaroneck harbor behind Conover’s house with a group of invited
guests (mainly advertisers and agency people). They then sailed in convoy to
Port Washington, where they gave boat rides to those who didn’t want to play
golf or tennis. Then they would spend the night – after the banquet - in a
cove on the Long Island North Shore, and return in the morning to Mamaroneck
harbor. My father regularly went on one of those boats.
He finally bought a boat of
his own, a sport cruiser, after I came home from Albuquerque. He only ran it
for two summers and then sold it. He wanted to go cruising, but I couldn’t get
away (I was just starting my “career”), Morton was in school at Yale, and my
mother really didn’t want to go cruising. Maybe, too, my father had just waited
too long. At least he was a captain with his own boat for a couple of years at
the IAA outings.
At the IAA outings, the
advertisers and agencies donated so many “samples” and other things as gifts and
prizes that nearly everyone went home with something. The tennis and golf
winners got special prizes. The “captains” got things useful on boats. And all
the seats had numbered tickets that were good for other prizes. As captain, Dad
got a coil of nylon anchor rope one year; that, of course, went with the boat
when it was sold. The next year he got a splicing knife; I still have that
knife and it’s one of my most versatile and valued tools. Later, when I was
working briefly at O.S. Tyson Ad Agency, he won a door prize – a 50 foot steel
tape measure that was donated by Tyson (by coincidence) as a sample of their
client, Stanley Tools. I still have that tape, too, although the plastic case
it came in deteriorated a few years ago.
Some of my happiest memories
of my teen years are of travelling with my father on his business trips. These
were one or two week business trips, usually through New York, Pennsylvania, and
Ohio, although I remember at least one trip to Boston and another to Baltimore.
On these trips we met many people who seemed to think highly of my father.
There was a real fondness exhibited between him and some of his customers.
Sometimes we were even invited to their homes.
One thing that struck me at
the time was how often he seemed to run into old acquaintances. He would meet
someone in a hotel lobby or at a trade show who he had known in Bradley Beach or
who he had worked with at Public Service. To me it seemed uncanny. One place
it happened was at Lakehurst when we went there on the arrival of the Hindenberg
on its maiden voyage.
LATER YEARS
At the time of my father’s
death, my Aunt Bertha had moved in with my parents in the apartment on 81st
street in Elmhurst. Toward the end, I felt that my father was very much annoyed
by Bertha, who was rather loud and vulgar, and did not give evidence of being
too bright. As a result, I was angry with her for several years. Later, I
realized that her presence was a great help to my mother.
My mother continued to live
in that apartment for many years, although she spent her winters in Florida.
Finally, she gave up the apartment and moved down to Miami Beach as a full-time
resident. Both Nan, and Bertha, her sisters lived near her in Florida.
When my mother was 96 she
began to be in poor health as a result of several falls and also deteriorated
mentally. She died in 1990 at the age of 97 (or possibly 98). Bertha
died a month after my mother. All of her brothers and sisters died well
before she did.
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