Fishers and Cohens (almost certainly Bronx, NY, about 1950)

This is my favorite of all the family pictures, having all four of my grandparents, and almost all their children, in one photo. I don't know where this was--Betty and I noodled over it, and eliminated all the likely places, but I'm sure it was someone in our family's apartment. I don't know the event either, but given how everyone is dressed, it could well have been a Passover celebration. In any case, in this photo are:
[Back row] Annie, Sam
[3rd row] Jerry, Betty, Mollie, Isaac, Sue
[2nd row] Rae, Paul, Rose, Sol
[Front row] Josh, Willa

Missing are Bud and Harry Cohen, plus my father (who undoubtedly took the picture). As always, click on the picture for a much larger version.

Scattering My Parents' Ashes (San Diego, CA, Dec 2009)

Double-click for high-res full-screen version (after the video starts). The hills in the background are in Baja California, Mexico.

Scattering Ashes from Josh Fisher on Vimeo.

Christmas 1982 - Part 2 of 3 (Darien, CT, Dec 1982)

Christmas Dinner:





And the after-party (or maybe the before-party):

Christmas 1978 - Part 2 of 3 (Teaneck, NJ, Dec 1978)

More photos from the Christmas of 1978.



Earlier, I blogged the four generations of Fisher boys. If you click on the photo, and look carefully at the background, you can see that this is three of us.

Christmas 1976 - Part 2 of 2 (Teaneck, NJ, Dec 1976)

Jessica and Betty.


And Jessica's not-yet husband, Gordon, who I believe we met that day. I recall that we had given them very careful directions about how to get to our house by public transportation (it was just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, where they lived). But they showed up in a hired car, and the driver lurked outside for the hours of their visit. We were duly impressed! (Elizabeth says Jessica was very embarrassed.)


With Sarah and Calico.

Betty's and Rae's Families (Bronx, NY, and California, ~1957 and ~1995)

Back in Miami, and now I have access to the 6,000 old family pictures again.

The left-most child below is my cousin Verne (Cousin #17/Ray's #2), who I've somehow missed in all these pictures. Just two more of my 19 first cousins to go! To the right of him are his sister Marci, and Ilene and Larry in front of Betty and George.



And here are the four of them again, about 50 years later.

With Betty & George (San Diego, CA, about 1990)

Marci and Larry (various places and times)

The two oldest of my 19 first cousins were born when I was about nine years old: Betty's son Larry, and Rae's daughter Marci (Cousin #15/Rae's #1). I saw a lot of both of them at first, but I saw little of Marci after she was very small, since I was in Syracuse and Rae at some point moved to California. I continued to see a lot of Larry, since he has always lived in the NY area, and I stayed with Betty a lot when I was a teenager racing off to NYC at every opportunity. Here is Marci with Elizabeth just before my parents' 50th anniversary party.


And Marci and Larry with their mothers. I believe that Larry was born in the fall of 1954, and I would guess he's a little over two here.


And Larry, with his wife Judy, at our house in Woodbridge, sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Wegmans (West Henrietta, NY, ~1988-1992)

At some point after moving to Rochester, my mother discovered Wegman's Supermarkets. They had a once state-of-the-art store right near their house (I think my parents were already there when it was opened). Wegman's is a privately-held (my mother would always tell of her encounters with Danny Wegman), Rochester-based, 72-store chain that is always rated at or near the top in any supermarket ratings (e.g. 2009 Consumer Reports says it's the best).

For my mother, her love of it was almost a religious thing. It was a really big part of her life. Thus, supermarket pictures...



The two families together, once again, Sue and Betsy Fisher in the back (Sam's wife and daughter), Betty and Judi (from my mother's side) with my mother in the front. I'm guessing they were all there for my mother's 60th birthday party in 1988.


Stefanie and Josh.

Sundays in Van Cortland Park (Bronx, NY, around 1950)

My parents' move to Syracuse in 1952 took me away from my extended family, and it removed me from the ethnic world I was often part of, especially on my mother's side of the family. Many Sundays each summer, Turks and Greeks would gather in Van Cortland Park, with tons of food, music and dancing, like out of a movie. The kids would run free, and Paul and I in particular would explore the park.

My grandfather, Isaac, was an accomplished darbuka player (I am told he earned money playing in Turkish nightclubs in lower Manhattan at night). Here he is, below, with Rae, my mother, and my grandmother Molly looking on:


Betty and my grandparents.



My grandparents dancing.


My grandfather doing the DJ honors. I wonder if that's Paul, Harry and Bud's back on the left?

Greenmeadow, Part I (Palo Alto, CA, Summers 1991-93)

When I joined HP, I was asked to spend summers in California for a few years, since I'd be something of an island in Boston. In 1990, we spent about a month in boring corporate apartments (if you go to the link, you'll see the pond where Dora got to know about 40 ducks by name--the rest of us were just bored there).

But in 1991, 1992, and 1993, we rented the same absolutely wonderful Eichler house in a neighborhood of them called Greenmeadow, in Palo Alto. If you don't know about Eichler houses, I recommend the short Wikipedia article I linked; they are very special. The owners, Ken and Virginia Crittenden, were a retired couple who went to their cabin in the the Sierra each summer. They had bought the house new in the early 1950s, and were among the few remaining original owners in Greenmeadow.

In the Eichler philosophy, the house was a wall to the street, but inside it was built around a wonderful courtyard.


We had a few visits from our family members, especially the California ones, but all three of our living parents visted as well. Below, my Uncle Bud and his wife Laura are at the outdoor table with us, along with their three kids, Matthew (Cousin #10/Bud's #3), Natasha (Cousin #11/Bud's #4), and Sophia (Cousin #12/Bud's #5).


The Crittendens had a dog who went with them to the Sierra, but they left the cat, Sooty, with us (I don't think it would have worked to take him).



We "asked" the kids to engage in some activity for the summer, which was always hit-and-miss. But by the third summer there, Dave had gotten pretty old, and rebelled. So I set up a serious computer science exercise for him: He had to write a Pascal program that would efficiently find a solution to "Dad's Puzzle". I outlined the general nature of the steps one would take to do so (using a breadth-first tree search, and hashing to prune the tree), and, sure enough, by the end of the summer he had succeeded. It was even animated, so you could watch the solution happen on the screen.



The 4th of July parade was a big Greenmeadow thing, and if you look at the pictures of last year's, little has changed. Dora became good friends with a neighbor family, the Cookes (more on them tomorrow).


Willa's identical twins, Sherry (Cousin #13/Willa's #2.5) and Heather (Cousin #14/Willa's #2.5) came with Willa (no, I don't know who is who, though I imagine Sherry to be on the left).


That's Willa, with Dave, my father, Heather or Sherry, and Betty. There's my parents' two families together at a small gathering 40 years after the pictures I had before.


Bud's son Barry and his wife.




Matthew and (I think) Sophia, with the very-tolerant Sooty.

Betty and Annie (various locations, around 1954)

My mother was the oldest of 6 siblings, my father the oldest of 4. They were married when they were 17 and 16 years old, respectively, and their families lived on Washington Avenue in the Bronx, just a few blocks away from each other. As a result, all the kids in both families hung out together, and were all friends to some extent.

The best of friends were my father's sister Annie and my mother's sister Betty. They married Stretch and George, respectively, a few apart in January, 1954.


Betty (left) and Annie at Betty's wedding.


At Betty's wedding, that's Annie's husband Stretch (Irving Jacobson) standing next to Betty's father at the alter.


Betty and George (not quite married yet) at Annie's wedding. They got married right after that.


And finally, Betty and her sisters Rae and Sue at Annie's wedding. (My mother undoubtedly did the annotating.)