Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 68th post, Helena recalls a childhood vacation spot with her mind’s eyes, ears, and nose. Enjoy!
My father and a snippet of memory
My father was a traveler. Before he married my mother he moved to Canada. Only one phrase tells me that: “Your father showed the first talkie film in Canada.” It was a phrase I heard spoken more than once, a family story, untold. All I had were those words. Your father showed the first talkie film in Canada. So it couldn’t have been said by my father. Yet it seems out of character for my mother to have said it. She spoke of the present realities in a day and not much about the past, or the things below the surface of life; but she knew those things, I can see it now, in her eyes. My mother was mysterious, maybe because of the things she wasn’t inclined to say. But that knowledge about my father and Canada was passed to me by someone in my family. And who knows, maybe it was my mother, in a moment of pride.
Research tells me the first “talkie” shown in Canada was shown in 1928, when my father was in his early twenties. The “talkies” made their way North, from New York City to Montreal. But all I have is that phrase, “Your father….”
The next time Canada shows itself in my childhood is in the black construction paper photo album that sat on the shelf in the hall closet, when we lived downstairs on Crown Street, the closet where the Hoover upright waited, smelling of dust, and where the rag bag hung on a hook. That photo album is familiar to me. It seems as if my parents took it down from that shelf with regularity. It wasn’t a thing stuck away, but a book of images my parents read and talked over, drinking coffee nights in the kitchen, while I was doing my homework or falling asleep. Sepia photographs set into glue-backed, molded paper corners. Pictures of my mother and father on their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. My parents are playful in those pictures. They’re wearing clear, rubber-hooded raincoats—I can’t think they were plastic in 1937. Tourists to the Falls wore them to stay dry. Those falls must throw horizontal rain. I don’t know who snapped the picture, likely someone my parents didn’t know, maybe someone who’d struck up a conversation with them—they were magnets, beautiful and in love. Maybe my parents then asked and offered my father’s camera. My parents were overflowing, like The Falls, with joy, smiles lighting both their faces; who could have resisted their request? They pose, natural comedians, a team, crisscrossing, one behind the other, peeking out from behind one another’s shoulders, looking without embarrassment or self-consciousness at that very nice person they’ve asked to record a moment of their honeymoon, while the shutter clicks.
The photo album
In that photo album, there are pictures of my father and his friends, dressed in suits, perfectly creased pants, ties and brimmed felt hats. They are also mugging for the lens. Those pictures could have been taken in Canada. At Niagara, my father is in his thirties. Thirty-four when he married my mother, at the Pierpont Hotel, chic, in Brooklyn. My mother was twenty-eight. My parents were chic, too. But in those pictures of my father and his friends, my father is in his twenties, and hasn’t yet met my mother. And it makes sense to me that he lives in Montreal. Because you don’t cross the border, driving for two days, or three, or four, on sometimes dirt roads that linked up, The Blue Book, the pamphlet of driving directions printed in the 20’s tells you, roads that come to a barn with Pillsbury Flour painted in red as a landmark, a place to turn left, to get to Canada—there were no highways—you need time to make your way to Canada in a Model T. My father drove one. There are pictures of him in that photo album, with one foot on the running board, the T’s door open—he’s posing again, getting in, or getting out of that shiny black car. No, you don’t drive from Brooklyn to Montreal to show a movie. A Model T drove forty-five miles an hour. My father likely stayed at tourist houses along his way. A place like Fogelsanger’s. And he might have moved to Montreal with that group of friends whose images are in the pages of my family’s black-construction-paper photo album, held there by those glued, paper corners, full of camaraderie and comedy, performing for the camera, vaudeville, slapstick. How young they all were, friends whose images are in the camera. My father was a traveler. And at some point, I realized he lived in Canada in his early twenties, when he showed the first talkie there.
He was also a documentarian. He loved the camera, and always had two with him, one for still pictures, one for moving pictures. So of course he would be a projectionist. He was fascinated by images. An image-maker as I, his daughter, am an image-maker. And my father was a projectionist, living far from home.
Fogelsanger’s, Bucks County, PA
By the time my sister and I had arrived, my father had another black car. I vaguely remember it. Maybe it was a 30’s Chevrolet; that sounds familiar. Then he bought the dark green Dodge. It was a ’52, because I was seven. We took trips in both those cars. Weekends we went out to Long Island, still rural, to swim in Lake Ronkonkama. My father called it Lake Ronkonkamo, and I took it as the given, that was its name, until I moved out to Long Island as an adult, long after both my parents were gone, and was amazed to hear people say, Lake Ronkonkama. The word never looked right to me, when I saw it on addresses, or signs on the Long Island Expressway, —Ronkonkama. They just didn’t know the name of that beautiful lake my father took his family to, to swim—Lake Ronkonkamo, likely in late spring, or the dog days. Because if it was summer, we were upstate, not far from where I live now.
Whichever car my father drove, it seemed like his car, because my mother didn’t drive. Few women did drive then, and the expletive, “Woman Driver!” was quite acceptable, even funny, and my father used it, if, in our travels, we encountered a woman driving too slowly, or changing lanes, or who knows what. “Woman Driver!” I can hear him grumble to us.
We went to see the family in my father’s car, in The Bronx, or in Brooklyn, once we moved to Queens. By the ’60s, he had a new Chevrolet, metallic gold with white wings.
But it was in the Dodge that he took us to Bucks County, the Amish Country, my mother on the passenger side on the gray, red pin-striped, plush couch-designed for-a-car, my sister and I in the back. My mother was prepared with tissues, sucking candies, a thermos of water. She must have learned to navigate in the four years before my sister was born, then me, three and a half years later. I was fascinated by the Hershey’s chocolate factory. I remember its wonderful smell, the only chocolate that smelled that way, the only chocolate that seemed legitimately chocolate. I remember driving the roads of Hershey, PA, behind the shiny black horse-drawn buggies, then pulling slowly around them to pass, looking back at the men sitting in those slow-moving buggies, the backs marked with red triangles, with whips they only lightly touched their bridled horses with, wearing black, broad-brimmed hats, black pants held up by black suspenders, under their black jackets. Black black black black, of course I remember. And I can see my father’s pleasure—he brought his family to peer into another world—the Amish. No photographs. The Amish don’t allow it, and he clearly knew that, because I knew it. But I was fascinated by the Amish and the picture I took, with my eyes, and all my senses, the clop clopping of the horses, their smell, that picture needs no corners to hold it in place—it all came into my soul.
But it was Folgelsanger’s that became the monument of our trip to Pennsylvania, its talisman that I carry. Mr. and Mrs. Fogelsanger’s bungalows. My parents stayed in one, my sister Jo and I stayed next door in another. I can see my parents’ bungalow through our open screened window. I can see their light, still on. That was reassuring. And it was a kind of magic that they were there, but we, Jo and I, were on our own, together.
Unlike me, my sister Jo was fearless. A born leader, and I suppose I was her first follower. I was mesmerized by her; she was charismatic before I knew the word. I was in a world of a particular joy, being with her, in our cabin, on a rural road in that world of Pennsylvania, a cabin built on a flat and planted field, nothing but field to the horizon, smelling like manure, as wonderful a smell to me as the Hershey’s chocolate. I can hear the night sounds, the crickets, a passing car, a sound so occasional that it makes up the image of the night we stayed there. The night we slept at Folgelsanger’s, my sister and me, my parents next door.
The red cheeks of Mrs. Fogelsanger, the kind faces of both those people, Mr. and Mrs. Folgelsanger. The silence of that vast, open, country place. Away from roads busy with commerce and tourists. A silence I could see. And the music of being alone with Jo—separate from but near my parents. Their light went out early. My sister and I talked late into the night. Maybe she told me a story, about a character she’d invented for me, like Scheherazade, it seems to me now, it went on for at least a thousand nights. She’d begin with the question: Want to hear a story—about Mergetroyd Gaboobaldink? Yes, that was his name. Of course I did.
Maybe I was eight years old. My sister had magic. She cast a spell.
For the rest of our lives together, every now and then we’d say to one another, “Remember Fogelsanger’s?”
What is a place you visited in childhood that you still recall vividly? Have you ever written about it? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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