OUEEN CITY OF THE ADIRONDACKS
Sender Gorlin
My
FOLKS
moved into that town in northern New York from Stunehill,
on Lake Champlain, up in Vermont.
We had come to Stonehill from
New York City in 1906. A few months earlier, a bullet driven into my
brother's body during a
pogrom
in Bialystock, sped the family across the
Atlantic.
Shortly after our arrival my father found work in an East
Side bakery.
My father liked best to lie on a couch and read; he found that work
in the cellar-bakeries on Forsyth Street in New York's East Side made
him cough.
That scared my mother, for two of his brothers had died
of T.B.
A friend told him of an "opportunity" up in Stonehill, Vermont,
and so we traveled up there.
It was a curious partnership with another
man in which my father, mother and three brothers (the oldest was 12)
worked to support the family of eight.
My folks left Stonehill in 1911 and came to Glendale where my
father opened a bakeshop.
Glendale, at the time, was a small industrial
town in the Adirondack foothills.
It was called the Queen City of the
Adirondacks.
It was a papermill town.
During the spring months logs
drifted down from the northern towns to be ground into pulp and then
into paper by the workers of the International
Paper Company in the
gray-looking mills near the South Glendale bridge.
Only once did these workers get a half-holiday without having: their
pay cut. That was the day of the first Armistice ceiebration.
The sirens
in the three fire stations shrieked, the bells in the churches clanged, and
everyboc!y quit work and dashed out into the streets.
We didn't go to
school that afternoon.
I stood before the news bulletin in front of the
office of the Glendale
Times,
reading the latest news of the "Armistice."
The real Armistice didn't come off until the following Monday
morning, the 11th of November.
I guess we expected it, because I ar-
ranged with Louie, who was a sound sleeper and the son of the tailor
(who boasted that he once fitted up a custom-made suit for State Senator
Emerson) to waken him when I heard the sirens screeching at the West
Street Firehouse. Neither Louie, who lived opposite us, nor I had a watch
27
