In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (33 page)

The Orange Crush tasted like summer itself. I gulped half without stopping.

“Who gave you that
chazeray
!”

The voice made the bottle shake in my hand.

“Who gave you that pig food!” My grandmother raised a fist at Mrs. Grieben. “You want her to get fat as a pig, as a
chazer
like you?”

“You don’t call me pig!”

“Pig!
Chazer
! Pig!” Nana whirled. “And you! Don’t run around barefoot!” She said this in Yiddish—
gey nit arum borves
—and I wanted to laugh because this last word sounded like “boobas,” but I knew what was coming.

“You go without shoes, your feet get stepped on!”

I jumped back in time to prevent Nana’s heel from grinding my toes. As far as I could tell, this was the only real risk of not wearing shoes.

Nearly everyone I knew was terrified of Nana. As a toddler, Arthur had picked up a block and hurled it at her. He missed; she retrieved it and hurled it right back. Though the block split his scalp, Arthur was too stunned to cry, even when the doctor was stitching shut the wound.

My grandmother couldn’t hear a word of bad news my parents shouted in her ear, but let an enemy whisper a disparaging word across the hotel and Nana would scream: “You should burn in Gehenna for such a lie!”

She didn’t speak, she ranted, punctuating her sentences with goaty snorts—
naah, naah
—which made me believe this was how she had come to be called Nana in the first place.

“Don’t run with that bottle in your mouth, you might trip, naah, naah, you’ll knock your teeth out.”

“I don’t
have
any teeth.”

But even when confronted with the gaping truth, my grandmother wouldn’t relent. “Stay here until you’re finished, naah. You don’t walk, you can’t fall.”

I guzzled my soda and set the bottle on the counter. “I don’t think you look like a pig,” I assured Mrs. Grieben, then ran back to the pool.

What luck! My mother was playing canasta. I slipped quietly down the steps, but the waves spread like radar.

“Lucy, you’ll get cramps!” She turned in her chair. “You need to wait an hour after eating, at least.”

“But I only ate soda!”

“Then why is your face covered with chocolate?” She unrolled a tissue from her sleeve. “Here, spit.”

I refused; she spit for me, scrubbing my cheeks and the skin under my nose until I could smell my mother’s sour saliva. I squirmed free. Had Herbie and the other boys witnessed my shame? No, they had already left to set up for dinner.

“Come on, Mom,” I pleaded. “Just a little while? Can I?” I was whining, I knew, but the sun already was touching the hill behind the Eden. “Now? Can I? Please?”

My mother’s eyes strayed to the new hand of cards on the table. The other women’s heels were tapping the deck. “Oh, all right. Just don’t go into the deep end.”

“I promise,” I said. But even before she had played her first card I had ducked beneath the floats and was heading toward the marker that proclaimed

7
FEET
.

The sunbathers were the first to pack up. The pinochle players stubbed out their stogies and hectored their wives into bidding their last hands. The canasta games ended. My mother stood and stretched. She saw me in the water. “Lucy, come out of there this instant!”

“Just one more lap.”

“I can’t stand here arguing.”

Though Nana ruled the kitchen and my father served as her steward, my mother’s job was hardest since she mixed with the guests, scurrying from table to table and enduring their complaints about cold soup and spoiled liver. They had paid a flat sum, which earned them the right to gobble all they could, three meals a day. Most of them tried to wolf down enough food to recoup their investment, and, if they could, accumulate interest.

“You’re old enough to understand,” my mother said. “Even with all our work…. The prices these days! And how can we pay off our debts if we’re only a quarter full? What will your father do, at his age…. All I ask is, please, don’t do so much to aggravate me.”

Growing Up at Grossinger’s

Tania Grossinger

T
he Grossinger staff was very large. Sometimes at the height of the season there were almost as many people who were paid to be at the hotel as there were those who paid to be there. It was not uncommon, in summer, to find nine hundred and fifty employees on the payroll and one thousand guests on the register.

There were a great many jobs to fill. In addition to augmenting the departments whose staffers had direct contact with guests, i.e., waiters, waitresses, bellhops, bartenders, pool staff, social staff, athletic staff, camp counselors, office help, and the like, there was a whole staff world behind the scenes. The guests never saw them, but their stay could not have run as smoothly without the cleaning help, kitchen stewards, pantry help, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, engineers, security men, maintenance men, laundrymen, florists, greenskeepers, and others I can’t even remember.

Most of the “back of the house” staff worked at the hotel year round and many of them made their homes in Liberty. Many had been with the hotel for twenty or thirty years, some even longer.

In the summer, many college students applied for jobs as busboys, waitresses, or bellhops where they could conceivably make $1,500 during the season in tips and salary, have virtually no expenses, and have a heck of a good time to boot. Competition was tough. Dave Geiver was never particularly disposed to hiring collegiates for the summer as he considered his dining room organization professional and didn’t like the idea of having to train new people from scratch. Not for naught was he nicknamed “Dave Geiver, the Slave Driver.” But he had little choice because who else but college kids could afford to take a job for just three months a year. So he culled the best from the applications he received. Whenever possible he demanded experience, at best from other hotels, at least from summer camps. Sometimes it became sticky when guests tried to use their influence to get a job for a relative or friend of the family. Geiver had one stock question: “Would you want him to wait on your table?” Not surprisingly, many withdrew their requests.

Off season, there were at least four hundred permanent employees. They took jobs for a variety of reasons, making money usually the least of them. No hotel in the mountains paid very well, though I assume Grossinger’s paid better than most. But working there had several advantages in addition to the free room and board and few expenses.

The major reason most of the single women worked there was to meet rich men and get married. While others paid for the privilege, they, because they were there for a long time, would be exposed to all the “good catches” and pocket a salary as well. And they were very highly motivated.

I remember one girl who was nicknamed “How much?” because the first question she’d ask a fellow she was snuggling up to on the dance floor was “How much money do you make?” If the answer wasn’t to her liking, as far as she was concerned, the dance was over.

Interestingly enough most of the girls, especially those in the front and back offices, did marry as a result of working at the hotel. But they married fellow staffers.

Some boarded the Shortline bus from New York City just to get away from home … to be part of the “glamorous, exciting, swinging life” they read about in the gossip columns. Others were escaping an unhappy love affair or marriage. And, of course, there were those who just had nothing else to do and thought they’d try it out as a lark.

Youngsters who wanted to make it big in show business were always applying for jobs. The girls would take jobs as file clerks or switchboard operators, the guys as bellhops or chair movers on the athletic staff, hoping to get the chance to sing a song or two some evening with the dance band or do their “thing” in front of a live audience.

It wasn’t always easy to achieve such ambitions. When I was ten years old I became friendly with a roly-poly fellow on the athletic staff named Butch. Early that winter he had gone to see Morty Curtis, the man in New York who booked the entertainment for the hotel, introduced himself as Butch Hacker, and explained he wanted a job in the mountains. Asked what he could do, he gave an imitation of Lou Costello. Mort knew he had his man. He had finally found the one person qualified for the last position left open on staff. He gave him a oneway bus ticket to Liberty and wished him well. Buddy Hackett, né Butch Hacker, spent the next three months freezing, pushing people down the toboggan slide, and fixing them up with snow sleds. When spring came and he began to thaw out, he left for greener pastures.

In the beginning I was astounded at the singleness of purpose among the staffers who wanted to be “discovered.” The men would do anything they thought would brighten their chances of getting ahead. If a top agent’s wife was alone during the week, you can rest assured she wasn’t alone for long. If a talent booker for a nightclub had any worries about his homely daughter finding someone to keep her company, he need worry no more. She had company. The women were just as aggressive as the men. It was not uncommon, any day of the year, to overhear the following conversation, or variations thereof:
HE
: “Can you really sing?”
SHE
: “Can you help me?”
HE
: “It depends.”
SHE
: “Baby, not only can I sing, but take me back to your room and I’ll make your mattress sing!”

One thing for sure. The hotel offered employees a life-style that no 9 to 5 job back in the city could equal. Not everybody lasted. Some couldn’t adjust. Others couldn’t keep up with the pace. They became part of the “We hire, they tire, we fire” cycle.

It was not uncommon for some to come up for a short time, a season perhaps, and stay five or six years. It was a way of life they quickly grew used to. No chores. No grocery shopping. No cleaning the rooms. Everything was done for them. It was what I called “the convenient rut.”

Of course there also was fun—and inside jokes—that made getting through the tough days tolerable. I remember one bellhop, Joey, who was a master at double-talk. He’d start speaking to a guest in his own impeccable slang, insulting him with every outrageous epithet in the book, and the poor guest, not understanding a word that was said, and afraid to show his ignorance, made up for it by double tipping.

New page boys at the pool always had to pass a test. A call would come in and the head lifeguard would instruct him to walk around the pool paging “Mr. Cocken. Mr. Gay Cocken, please” (which is Yiddish for what one tells someone else to do in his hat). One summer a guest, who was trying to be a bigshot and didn’t understand what the words meant, got up and answered the page.

And there was always some clown in the dining room who, on the busiest Saturday night of the season, would organize all the busboys to carry their trays of dirty dishes at precisely the same moment into the kitchen and dump them simultaneously, insuring a nervous breakdown for at least two dishwashers.

Sometimes the experience taught one how to think on her feet—and fast. One friend of mine at the front desk received an emergency call from a guest early on a Sunday afternoon. She had checked out that morning after breakfast and had just discovered she had left her diaphragm in the room. The problem was that she needed it later that evening. Seriously. What to do? My friend thought fast. She told the guest to meet the 3:00
P.M
. bus arriving at Port Authority bus terminal in New York City at 6:00
P.M
. and she guaranteed her package would be on it. It was.

There were side benefits as well for those who worked at the hotel. One young staffer was about to be insulted when she was asked if she would baby-sit for some pickled herring, lox, and bagels. Before she had a chance to protest, she was told it would involve a little more than just sitting. Dinah Shore was opening at the Paramount Theater in New York City and Bob Weitman, the manager and a summer seasonal, decided to surprise her. He called Abe Friedman and asked to have a huge basket of Jewish delicacies prepared, then called the hotel airport and arranged for the pilot to fly them to Teterboro airport in New Jersey, where they would be met by car and driven directly backstage to the theater. As Ethel told her friends afterward, when she had awakened that morning, the last thing in the world she expected to be doing was sharing a corned beef and pastrami sandwich with Dinah Shore in her dressing room that same afternoon.