In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (22 page)

If sport intensity varied from colony to colony, with some colonies almost ignoring strenuous physical activity, food was another story. Meals and noshing are part of the Catskill culture. “Eating was done on an almost continuous basis—breakfast around eight, coffee and maybe a piece of cake or toasted bagel around ten-thirty, lunch at twelve-thirty, fruit, coffee and cake in the mid afternoon, dinner around six-thirty,” recalls
New York Times
food and restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton of Catskill summers. “Then after card playing and other evening activities, some herring, more cake, a little of this and that around eleven, just before bed.”
²⁶

Cramped as most bungalows were, many people had weekend or weeklong guests. (At larger places, owners tried to discourage this by charging a per-night guest fee for the use of facilities, but enforcement was difficult—short of a bed check.) Hostess gifts were expected, and “whoever came up from the city brought food, as though my mother hadn’t stocked up for the new arrivals,” Sheraton remembers. “The customary gift was delicatessen,” and there were always “towering boxes of cake.”
²⁷

Notes

  
1
.   Joey Adams, with Henry Tobias,
The Borscht Belt
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 23–24.

  
2
.   Ibid., 25.

  
3
.   Ibid., 25–26.

  
4
.   Ibid., 25. While its official name was Orseck’s 999, everyone called it “Orseck’s,” or “the Orseck boys,” or just “999.”
Quo Vadis
(1951) is an epic movie known for its lavish use of extras.

  
5
.   Ibid., 26.

  
6
.   Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer,
It Happened in the Catskills
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 98.

  
7
.   Ibid., 96.

  
8
.   Adams,
Borscht Belt
, 26–27.

  
9
.   Ibid., 27.

10
.   Norman Ober,
Bungalow Nine
(New York: Walker and Company, 1962), 1.

11
.   Stefan Kanfer,
A Summer World
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), photographs between pp. 46 and 47.

12. Adams,
Borscht Belt
, 30.

13
.   “It’s Time to Order Your 1997 Mah-Jongg Card,” Lancaster (Penn.) Jewish Community Center’s
The Center News
, November 1996, 3.

14
.   Ober,
Bungalow Nine
, 141.

15
.   Miriam Damico, personal interview with the author (Loch Sheldrake, New York), 12 August 1993.

16
.   Harvey Jacobs,
Summer on a Mountain of Spices
(New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 13. “Taft” was a Bronx high school. Thomas Jefferson High School is in Brooklyn.

17
.   Adams,
Borscht Belt
, 30.

18
.   Robert K. Plumb, “Upstate Hydroelectric Plant Will Tap City’s Water System,”
New York Times
, 3 March 1954, late city edition, A20.

19
.   
Sweet Lorraine
, dir. Steve Gomer, Autumn Pictures/Angelika Co., 1987.

20
.   Robert L. Schain, “A Study of the Historical Development of the Resort Industry of the Catskills” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1969), 368.

21
.   Ibid.

22
.   
The Rise and Fall of the Borscht Belt
, dir. Peter Davis, 90 min., Villon Films, 1988, video-cassette; distributed by Arthur Cantor, Inc.

23
.   Ober,
Bungalow Nine
, 70.

24
.   Ibid., 71.

25
.   Ibid. A “fungo” is a bat with a ball attached to it by an elastic cord. You can hit at the ball endlessly.

26
.   Mimi Sheraton,
From My Mother’s Kitchen
(New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 243.

27
.   Ibid.

Bungalow Stories

Arthur Tanney

W
HO
R
EMEMBERS
B
EING
Y
OUNG
?

There was a certain stillness to the mountains. A quiet unlike what we’d ever known in the city. You felt it the first moment your parents opened the car door in the small town to pick up a few things, maybe milk, juice, and rolls, on the way to the colony that first weekend. You and your brother or sister piled out of the back of the sedan, from under a mountain of pillows and blankets, and you waited a moment while your mom went into the store. All the while the excitement bubbled inside you, like a geyser, so eager to get to the colony to see friends not heard from in almost a year. Would there be new kids this summer? Would your name still be where you wrote it on the big rock under the tree near the handball court? Would the pool, by some miracle, have given birth to a diving board during the winter? Who’d be your counselor in camp? Hopefully not the dweeby guy with the glasses and the acne….

Then back in the car for the last five minutes to the colony. The anticipation unbearable. The car windows were open wide, because a/c just didn’t exist, and you could smell the jasmine and the honeysuckle and the fresh-cut grass, and the small hint of pollen, and then, around the bend, through a clearing in the stand of pine and birch, you got your first glimpse of a bungalow, peeking through the branches.

Has anything since been as much fun?

H
AVE
Y
OU
T
HANKED
Y
OUR
P
ARENTS
?

Mid July, and it was at about this point that you had really settled into your summer. The camp softball team was pretty set, and you were doing better than you’d hoped all winter long, though not quite so well as the new kid on the colony, whose surprise presence had upset your plans on being the pitcher, having you settle, instead, for playing second base. You’d had your eye on the new kid’s sister, who was a year and a half younger than you, but cute all the same, with curtly red hair and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and you didn’t half mind the half pound of steel she was carrying on her teeth, because her smile was brilliant all the same. You’d been too long in the pool earlier in the summer, when the sun was subtropical, and your shoulders had burned so badly that they’d blistered, and you were sure you’d never escape the ubquituous scent of the Noxema that your mom gobbed onto your reddened skin every day. But there were other things that were going especially well. You’d made the record score on the colony pinball machine, winning an unheard of fifteen free games, consecutively, managed to impress even your dad in the process. Your grandparents had already completed their annual summer sojourn to the colony and left you with a tidy stash of cash that you were tapping into regularly to consume egg creams and malts in the colony concession. You had even adjusted to being a half day behind on box scores, because the
Daily News
and
Post
didn’t get the late boxes upstate, and the
Record
was always a day behind, anyway. But there was news of great concerts upcoming at Monticello Raceway—Jay and the Americans, Ike and Tina, maybe even Chuck Berry—if only your parents would let you go. And in August they were throwing a big thing outside of Monticello, with a lot of groups—The Who, Santana, Hendrix—but no way your parents would let you go, at twelve. They were calling it an Aquarian Festival. Woodstock.

And you got postcards and letters from your buddies in the city, who were going to day camp or just hanging about, playing ball on the asphalt and chasing the Good Humor man, and stifling in the humidity, not knowing what it was like to slam shut the screen door of the bungalow and saunter over to the pool, your arm slung through a big, black inner tube, the world at your feet.

And have we thanked our parents for such great memories?

T
HE
C
ASINO ON
S
ATURDAY
N
IGHTS

On Saturday nights the parents dressed a little better than usual, and after dinner they migrated toward the casino, where they performed God only knew what kinds of pagan rituals that were guarded like holy state secrets from us, the kinder. There was a certain mystery and romance to seeing our parents act silly and laugh at foolish, inane jokes while sloppily inbibing rye and scotch and gin (who drank vodka and tequila in those days?), and munching potato chips and pretzels from those little plastic bowls that were lined with napkins and ritually refilled from huge metal tins. From a distance, through the warm, sweet Catskill summer nights, the sounds of their merriment were cloaked in velvet.

We could distinguish the band—usually a three- or four-piece combo, a collection of NYC school teachers who, on vacation, imagined themselves magically transformed into Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, or John Coltrane. Every summer there was a stripper, and the next day there were hushed stories around the pool about which father had been foolish enough to manhandle the talent while under the influence. Each year there was a mentalist, or hypnotist, whose appearance and resulting hystrionics were fodder to embarrass at least a half dozen parents, and then, each year, there was a mock marriage—this the best of the weekends—when our parents entertained themselves by role reversal, dressing the biggest, crudest man as the bride and the smallest, meekest woman as the groom, and
La Cage aux Folles
ing it up all the way to the breaking of the glass.

I think of those nights our parents shared in those little colonies dotted all about Sullivan and Ulster counties, in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s, when they fled the city for little shacks in their country, with no air conditioning, no TV, one colony phone, and little else but their desire to enjoy. And I look at our lives now—fancy cars, the Hamptons, backyard pools—and damned if I’m still not jealous.

B
UNGLOW
C
OLONY
M
OVIE
N
IGHT

The “movie guy” always showed up a little late. He wasn’t tall, wasn’t short, was pretty nondescript, in fact, but he usually wore a plaid short-sleeved shirt and black slacks, always black slacks, even in the dead of July when the temperature topped out past 90. He drove a beaten up blue-green station wagon, with half-bald tires and a filthy, grimy windshield that by a miracle could be seen through. Strapped to the roof of the wagon were long, metal cylinders and black, steel and iron poles that, after a little “movie guy” magic, were suddenly transformed into a giant screen, which wound up erect at the far end of the casino, in front of the stage.

Once he’d set up the screen, which invariably was more yellowish than white and somewhat stained around the edges, he adjourned to the concession for coffee. Coffee! It was 96 degrees in the casino and the guy was drinking hot coffee! There he would endure the entreaties of 50 or more pajama-clad monsters, bags of Bon-Ton potato chips or pretzels in hand, pleading for him to finish his business and roll the film. The “kiddie films,” a long reel of short cartoons, usually began at 7 or 7:30, always too early for the summer sun to have left the sky. So the shades were pulled down on all the casino windows, and we sat in semidarkness, our hair still damp from our evening bath, bathrobes pulled snug against summer pajamas, our feet encased in slippers or pool thongs, and were delighted and enthralled by Heykyl and Jekyll, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and, of course, Bugs Bunny. Sometimes, maybe once or twice a summer, by some miracle, we found a Three Stooges or Little Rascals slipped in with the animation. That was a special treat.