52 Weeks - The Saga of the Sock Monkey

Toys--sock monkeys! In the late 1950s, my mother (Daisy Schwartz Burk) acquired two pair of red heel socks and the instructions to make sock monkeys for my sister and me. My memory is that the "kits" came home from summer day camp, but however they arrived, my mother was excited about making them...at least the first one.

Mom had no sewing machine and didn't want one. Her mother, my grandmother Hermina Farkas Schwartz, was an expert with a treadle sewing machine and could have whipped up these monkeys in half an hour each (no exaggeration). But the directions looked simple enough for hand sewing and we girls thought the monkeys looked adorable, so Mom enthusiastically set to work.

That first monkey was probably fun to sew, but when it came to the second monkey, Mom's enthusiasm started to drain away. And now that I'm making a sock monkey for my sister's birthday (shh! don't tell her), I understand just how she felt. (BELOW is a photo of my completed gift sock monkey--yes, the one in the middle!)

The head, torso, and legs are made from a single sock. Getting the body to look just right isn't the hard part, especially if you have a sewing machine and you've got plenty of red yarn to cinch in body parts at the right places. It's the arms and ears and tail, made from the second sock, that are more challenging because little pieces of sock can unravel very quickly if you're not careful. It's not rocket science but it's a bit tricky.

Mom stuffed my sock monkey with old nylons (sis's monkey will be stuffed with odd bits of quilt batting). The original sock monkeys lasted for a long time but alas, all those beloved old stuffed animals eventually got loved to death.

A decade ago I found myself a ready-made sock monkey and it's been enjoying the hospitality of my guest room ever since. I found a second one for my sis around the same time, but her kitties have been enjoying it and the stuffing is leaking out. Now she'll have a brand-new, home-made sock monkey to bring back so many good memories of the original toys of our childhood!

52 Weeks - WINS, WMCA, WABC & Orchard Beach in the 1960s

Nostalgia today: New York City was (and probably is) a cut-throat radio town, and in the 1960s, rock 'n roll loving teens had their pick of some great stations and DJs. With our pocket-sized transistor radios, we could "spin the dial" and listen to:

• WMCA 570 AM, the home of the Good Guys. If I had a penny for every time my sister and I dialed in to answer a rock trivia question for a shot at winning a bright yellow Good Guy sweatshirt or 45 rpm record, I'd be a gazillionaire right now. Believe it or not, we did win a few times and until it fell apart, we had one of the sweatshirts (alas, long gone in the pre-eBay era). Of course our parents weren't thrilled about our monopolizing the phone with our dialing antics for an hour or too, but it was pretty tame fun. DJs I remember vividly include Harry Harrison and Jack Spector.

• WABC 770 AM, producer of the Silver Dollar Survey (countdown of top 40 songs) and the radio home of some of the most legendary rock 'n' roll DJs ever: Cousin Brucie; Dan Ingram; Scott Muni; Ron Lundy; the list goes on and on, too long to include here. The wattage of this AM station was so high that it could be heard quite a distance from New York, and was always clear and static-free when we tuned in at Orchard Beach. More below on the beach scene. No matter what top 40 song you wanted to hear, chances are you'd hear it more often on WABC, especially during "teen time" on weekends.

• WINS 1010 AM, which featured, among other DJs, Murray the K (and his famous submarine race-watching music--that's "make out" music for the uninitiated). Murray the K appointed himself "the Fifth Beatle" and rode the Fab Four's coattails during the early-to-mid 1960s. WINS, like its competitors, vied to be first to air the new single from some hot group like Dion & the Belmonts (from the Bronx, natch) or the Tokens (The Lion Sleeps Tonight, remember?).

Orchard Beach, in the Bronx, is a man-made beach only 30 minutes or so away from where my family lived at the time. (The beautiful and expansive Jones Beach on Long Island was a lot further away from our apartment and required the use of a car, which we didn't own. My aunt would drive us there once or twice every summer as a treat.)

On a hot summer day, my sister and I would hop two buses and walk down the hot sand of Orchard Beach until we got to THE section where teens hung out, Section 10. Nearly every transistor radio in the place was tuned to WABC by design: As you walked the length and breadth of Section 10, you'd never miss a note of your favorite Paul Revere & the Raiders song or the Rolling Stones ordering people off their cloud. The aroma of Coppertone was everywhere and summer seemed to fly by too quickly.

Matrilineal Monday - the Steiner sisters

My husband's maternal grandmother, Floyda Mabel Steiner McClure (1878-1948), was the baby of nine in her family. Here's a photo of Floyda with three of her sisters. From left, Carrie E. Steiner Traxler (1870-1963), Blanche (Etta) Steiner Rhuark (1864-1956), Floyda, and Minnie Estella Steiner Halbedel (1867-1947). Carrie and Blanche lived around the corner from each other in Upper Sandusky, OH. Floyda lived in Cleveland.

The above photo must have been taken about 1938 or so. How do I know? The photo below, with Minnie at right and her husband Edward N. Halbedel (1865-1946) at left, includes my husband Wally, age about 3 or 4, and his younger sister. 

Recently I was in touch (via Ancestry) with a Traxler descendant and we plan to share info. I can hardly wait! More cousins to connect with. She and my husband both remember Aunt Blanche's parrot, who would say "Brice McClure" and "Polly want a cracker" over and over (and over and over). Why would the parrot be talking about Floyda's husband Brice? No clue, but it's a vivid memory for both.

Sentimental Sunday: 3 Generations of Ladies

After I married and moved away from NYC, mom (Daisy Burk, 1919-1981) didn't often see all of her girls all at once. It was a treat to be together on vacations and holidays!

Once Daisy's first grandchild was born, we made get-togethers a priority. Three generations of ladies in the family!

Wordless Wednesday - Paula and Ibolyka Schwartz

This is a Wordless Wednesday because alas, I knew far too little about my great-aunt Paula Schwartz and her daughter, Ibolyka (Violet), shown in a photo they sent  to my maternal grandfather Theodore (Teddy) Schwartz (original name "Tivador," as in the inscription) in 1930.

Paula and her sister, Etel Schwartz, never came to the US even though their older brothers (Teddy and Samuel) arrived in the early 1900s and subsequently pooled their money to bring their baby sister Marushka (Mary) Schwartz to New York, as well.

Paula and Etel died in the Holocaust in World War II, along with other siblings. Their father, Herman Schwartz, died some time before the war.

2022 update: I've learned a lot about the family by searching Yad Vashem's testimony and connecting with Ibolyka's daughter, who is my 2d cousin on the Schwartz side.

52 Weeks - You Are What You Eat? Junk Soup and Blintzes!

What my mother (Daisy Schwartz Burk, below) cooked wouldn't have made Auguste Escoffier happy...but she had a few notable dishes.

One was junk soup, so-called because anything she found in the fridge was fair game. She started with chuck steak, cut it up into chunks, browned it with a bit of onion, and then into the giant stock pot it went, along with potatoes, celery, carrots, and whatever was available. My sister remembers cans of mixed vegetables were usually part of the recipe because Mom knew we'd eat those (mostly--NOT lima beans for me). Hours later, with the addition of alphabet pasta to give her three girls a smile, junk soup was ready (and in such quantities that it made welcome encore appearances later in the week).

Another of Mom's specialties was cheese blintzes. Her filling recipe called for a mixture of pot cheese and farmers' cheese, two cheeses that weren't watery, plus an egg, a little sugar, and a pinch of cinnamon. The crepe "leaves" were made from eggs, milk, flour, sugar/salt. After making the leaves one by one, and covering the stack with a dish towel to keep them from drying out, she'd assemble the blintzes with a tablespoon or so of cheese mixture in the center, roll up each blintz, and lightly saute it in butter. Certainly Mom learned to make these from her mother, Hermina Farkas Schwartz, whose apple strudel and home-made chicken soup (with home-made egg noodles, made and cut and dried at home) were legendary in the family.

And then there's chopped liver, another of Mom's specialties. She hand-chopped the chicken livers to the right consistency, after they were sauted with onion and mixed with hard-boiled eggs, plus (I assume, in the early days) schmaltz. Add a little salt and pepper and you're on your way to cholesterol city, but a happy journey it is.

She wasn't a happy baker. In fact, she never baked until her daughters begged her to make us cookies (and let us help in the prep). Then she confessed that the oven didn't work right and getting the landlord to make repairs was a long process. Eventually she succeeded and surprised us when we came home from school one day with some kind of fruit bar she baked from a mix. We loved them! At least I did until I unfortunately glanced at the box and saw I was eating fig bars. Ugh! Never touched them again, but now we were on our way to brownies and other easy-to-bake goodies.

My father, Harold Burk, rarely cooked but in his 60s, he became interested in baking apple pies and every fall, he'd experiment with crust and filling to get the highest pie (sky-high pie, he would say) with the flakiest pastry. If his pie fell in after baking, he'd say something like "next year." I'd enjoy eating Dad's apple pie no matter what it looked like.

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History by Amy Coffin is a series of weekly blogging prompts in 2011 to encourage us to record memories and insights.

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy - Home is where the elevator is

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My parents Daisy Schwartz Burk and Harold Burk lived their entire lives in New York City apartments and I was brought up here, one of twin apartment buildings just a block from a huge park in the Bronx. Getting into an elevator every day (many times a day) was part of the experience. 


In the summer, when we were playing in front of the building and the Bungalow Bar ice cream truck came around, we'd yell up to my mother to ask for money. She'd tie two dimes in a handkerchief and float it out the living room window to the street below, where we picked up the bundle and bought choco-covered pops. (Mister Softee trucks came later.)


When my mother tried her hand at writing children's stories, she wrote about children going to visit their grandparents and vying to push the elevator button for the right floor . . . exactly how we visited our maternal grandparents (Teddy and Minnie Farkas Schwartz) every other Sunday for dinner. They lived in an apartment building near Tremont Avenue in the Bronx.


My paternal grandmother Henrietta Burk lived just a few apartments away on the same floor where we lived here on Carpenter Avenue in the Bronx. In fact, as I've noted elsewhere in this blog, most of my father's family lived in this apartment building: His older sister Millie Lang lived on the top floor with her husband and my cousin Elliot, his brother Sidney Burk lived with their mother Henrietta on our floor. (Grandfather Isaac Burk had died 7 years before my birth, so I never knew him, but my cousin Ira is named after him.) Only my father's younger sister lived elsewhere, in Queens.


When I was growing up, this part of the northeast Bronx was a "suburban" area, where one-family homes dotted the side streets and apartment buildings dominated many of the corners and avenues. Because the elevated subway line was just a few blocks away, it was an especially convenient location for commuters (like my father) going to work an hour away in Manhattan.