Another find from Alice's treasure trove are these pictures of Charlie working at the Roth's Creamery in Jeffersonville, in the Catskills.
My mother's aunt Ida (one of the Schorr sisters) and her husband Norman Roth ran a Creamery in the Catskills during the summer. They provided the local hotels with eggs and milks and butter. It looks like Charlie had an ideal (perhaps) job one summer.
I don't know if this was an actual dairy farm or whether they acquired the milk and eggs from local farmers, which seems more likely. Does anyone else have more information?
This was a morning job, says my cousin Sally Crown, and Norman and Ida found a place nearby that they could turn into a rooming house and they ran that also. Sally called it a kuchelein - "cook alone."
My grandmother Rose Brauner also ran a kuchelein, in South Beach, Staten Island, in Belmar, NJ, and at least once in the Catskills, near Ida and Norman.
Sally describes a kuchelein this way:
"It was a rooming house that rented rooms to families - usually parents and two kids to a room - for a week. The house had 5-6 rooms with a big shared kitchen with six burners lined up, labeled with the room numbers. Each family brought their own pillows and linens (Bed gevant) and their own pots. Everybody made their dishes and then shared with other families….an American kibbutz."
Nobody had cars then, so you hired a truck to drive you to the Catskills or wherever. "Two or three families in a car, loaded with all this stuff.
In the days before air-conditioning, vacation spots like the Catskills were a draw. They weren't THAT far from the city, and they were a lot cooler. Sometimes families would spend a month in the country, with the husbands (who were the only ones to work, of course, if there were young children) staying in the city during the week and commuting to the country on weekends.
We have some postcards dating back to 1907 that I'll include in the next post.
