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| A generation ends with Aunt Flo’s passing |
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I always called her Aunt Flo, though it was said that everyone called her Flossie. Either way, Florence Goodman, nee Goldberg, was the last of the Goldbergs of her generation.
And what a generation it was. Nine siblings, six boys and three girls, all orphaned when their father, my grandfather Yechiel (“Charles”), died in the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918.
He was 42 years old.
Florence was his youngest daughter, five years old at his death, just shy of her 95th birthday at her own death a month ago.
It is hard to imagine a tighter family.
Two of the girls, Aunt Libbie Steinberg and Aunt Rose Barnett, and their husbands, spent their entire married lives in the same house, raising their families together.
And the other girl, Aunt Florence, took in her mother, my grandmother, the family matriarch, and they lived in the same house, together with her husband and daughter Carol, for decades.
Meanwhile, it was as if Aunt Flo also lived in Aunt Libbie and Aunt Rose’s home; the three were inseparable, day in and day out. It is not a surprise that among Aunt Flo’s great-grandchildren are both a Libbie and a Rose.
Still more: In his eighties, my Uncle Harry, who lived in Los Angeles, regularly called his older sister Rose for advice and counsel.
All of the siblings lived into their nineties — my Uncle Jack lived the longest, to 97 — with two exceptions: Uncle Morris, who died at 89, and my Dad, Max, the second youngest of the siblings, who died at 61.
Being the two youngest, Aunt Flo and my Dad were very close. They goofed around as kids and, it seems, the only sore point was that Dad brought home an ice cream cone for his Mom every day after selling newspapers on the street corners of downtown Denver.
But he didn’t bring home ice cream for his sister Florence — he didn’t have the money. His sister Rose remembered an earlier moment: “Once Papa gave me a quarter and I thought I was a millionaire.”
Dad started selling newspapers downtown when he was seven. He and older brothers would dump the newspaper sales receipts — pennies, dimes, quarters — into their mother’s hand. That was the daily parnassah, or livelihood, after Papa Yechiel died. In addition, my Dad would present his Mom with the ice cream cone.
That kibbud eim, as in “honor your father and your mother,” stuck with Dad his entire life. He was quite the world traveler, but never did he leave home for Stapleton Airport and never did he come home from Stapleton Airport without first visiting his mother (and Aunt Flo, too; remember, her mother lived in her home).
In fact, every morning of Dad’s busy life, he would visit his mother a few blocks away before going to work, or going to shul.
A tight family indeed.
Uncle Willie and Uncle Morris lived in Salt Lake City. The big excitement of our youth was when they would pay the Denver relatives a visit. They always stayed at the home of Aunt Libbie and Uncle Dave Steinberg, and of Aunt Rose and Uncle Louie Barnett. They were four siblings in one house.
Uncle Willie was quite the sportsman. In his youth he once sparred with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey (once, and only once, he emphasized — he was afraid). Uncle Willie was a bundle of fun. And Aunt Sarah? She was flamboyant, with a loud, metallic voice and a heart of gold.
Uncle Willie loved telling the story of how he met Aunt Sarah. Willie, struggling to work his way out of poverty, tried his luck in Salt Lake City. Legend has it that he was aiming to ride the rails to Omaha, but his buddy got mixed up and they ended up in Salt Lake. Willie stayed.
He got a job as a meter reader. Happening on the household of the Brisk family, the head of the household somehow detected that Willie was Jewish and invited him in — then managed, somehow, to introduce him to his daughter Sarah.
There were probably no more than a handful of Jews in the Salt Lake City in the 1910s, and lo and behold, Willie Goldberg meets Sarah Brisk and they marry.
Uncle Morris followed his older brother Willie to Salt Lake and how he met Aunt Augusta I never learned.
Speaking of weddings, here’s what Rose remembered about sister Libbie’s: “The Glazelach [Glassblowers] Shul — Libbie and Dave married there. Someone stole all of the fruit, and Dave forgot the ring.”
Seems there’s a lot of stories about matches in our family. The shidduch between Grandpa Yechiel and my grandmother was made back in their hometown of Brisk, Poland. He came to Denver in 1894; his bride followed in 1895. Aunt Rose and Uncle Harry remembered this:
“In New York they loaded Mama [my grandmother] in a box car. They wouldn’t let her out until Papa was there to take her . . . She was so pretty, they were afraid someone else would grab her.”
When Dad was right out of high school he joined Willie in Salt Lake and got a job with the Salt Lake Telegram. One fine day he announced to his editor that he was going to bring in an exclusive interview with Jack Dempsey. Willie had introduced his kid brother Max to Dempsey. The editor laughed, but sure enough Max came back with the interview.
That began a lifelong friendship between Max Goldberg and Jack Dempsey. This resulted in the first donation to the General Maurice Rose Memorial Hospital — a facsimile of Dempsey’s $1,000 check is still on display in Rose Medical Center.
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