Her Stage Name Was Sylvia Forester, But “Mom” To Us

(Draft chapter to Memoir in progress with working title, “Journal of An Ocean Lover”.)

Ours was a stay-at-home mom. That wasn’t the term for our mothers in the 1950s and 60s when practically all my friends’ Moms’ real job was “homemaker”. That’s what moms did. Or what I thought they all did. There was no childcare. At least I wasn’t aware of it.

Some Moms were better at it than others. Ours? Simply the best!

There were so many things about her that made it so. The greatest tribute came from my friends. They all loved her. Childhood friends who remain friends today say so without prompting. She was always genuinely happy to see them from the first day I brought them home to later years when they were grown.

During Mom’s coming of age into her early adulthood, societal roles were hard-wired. There were not many career choices available for women besides housewife. Some studied and took up social work, teaching and nursing. And a few women worked hard to become doctors and lawyers, like Mom’s cousin, our “Aunt” Edith. But they were extremely rare.

The stage, television and movies were available, but a difficult road to make a career of. Sylvia Reich loved the theatre. We were often reminded of her stage name, Sylvia Forester, a name she chose as early as a stage-struck teenager with a love for nature. As a young girl, she starred in a commencement play at her grammar school in the Bronx. From that day she decided to attend the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts, the prestigious institute Mom’s eighth grade teacher mentioned to her. Growing up, Mom believed she was going to be a professional actress. And she was for a short time, playing the character role in the off-Broadway show, Having A Wonderful Time. But after marrying our Dad, and later giving birth to my sister, Danna, and then me in 1950, her path diverted to full-time Mom, which, by the way, included volunteer director and consultant for our school plays.

I never told her what I took for granted but later realized, that she was simply the best Mom a kid could have. I was too busy being a kid and being loved by her. There was a lot of other stuff going on. We were not a Leave It To Beaver family, although I yearned for us to be. Despite the pain in our home, in fact, partly because of it, Mom’s love for us was rock solid.

One important job Mom performed was to make sure Dad, Danna and me were properly fed. I didn’t think about it much until years later when I had to feed myself. Mom not only shopped the best food outlets in our small town of Beverly Hills, Cal., she brought home their freshest and best quality offerings. She put all her love into this effort. Her weekly, sometimes daily routine entailed driving the few blocks downtown to the handful of specialty food stores. Beverly Hills had real shops at that time, two toy stores, a bicycle shop, a drug store and a Newberry’s. For our meals, Mom regularly visited McDaniel’s Market, Phil’s Fish Market, Walter’s Bakery and Pastries, the butcher shop I can’t remember the name of, and Nate and Al’s Deli, which is still there in its original location on South Beverly Drive.

The main grocery store in those days was McDaniel’s on South Cannon Drive. When I was small, Mom used to bring me with her, pushing me up and down the aisles in a metal cart. I was painfully bored and whined incessantly, particularly when she’d stop to talk without end with friends she ran into, and the store managers, clerks and cashiers. She put up with my impatience, never getting upset. She accepted my protests in stride, trying to move my attention to something else, anything happy she could think of, humming, cooing, singing and story telling.

Mom was a constant hummer. Much of her sounds were monosyllable singsongs of her own creation to keep her mind on track, and, by the way, being the creative person she was, her mind could easily run wild. They seemed to be short tunes, all happy. She absolutely loved Broadway musicals, and when I was a very little boy, she could have been on auto pilot, cycling her version of tunes from a Broadway musical — Gigi, My Fair Lady, and Oklahoma, some of her favorites from the musical golden age of the 1950s. Lyrics and melodies from those and later musicals were absorbed deep in my bones. I also remember some nursery rhymes she used to sing. It’s not hard to imagine her humming these tunes as well, including Go Tell Aunt Rody, She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain, Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be? and Doo Dah, and many more I cannot recall.

Mom was always reading and telling stories to us. When Danna and I were small, she read to us children’s books like Babar (the elephant), Little Black Sambo, The Little Train That Could, Madeline and Eloise, The Three Little Pigs, and all the Grimms Fairytales, just to name a few. Thinking about it now, she must have enjoyed reading Eloise the most because it expressed a lot of who Mom was, or who she wanted to be. But that’s another story.

Back to food: Our refrigerator was always stuffed with “ deli- cacies”, dairy products, all kinds of “sours”, especially pickles, and, of course, leftovers and take-outs from last night’s dinner at home and downtown restaurants. The Arden Farms Company milkman would deliver dairy products three times a week — homogenized and raw milk, buttermilk, eggs, cottage cheese, butter and kefir. There was a special slot with a metal door on the side porch for the white uniformed milkman with white hat to deliver. But he usually just left the metal cage carrier with everything in it on the side porch.

My parents loved cheese — crème cheese, nafatuel cheese (when it became available later), blue cheese, goat cheese, feta cheese, Camembert, munster, cottage cheese, and so many others. Their favorite shop when they traveled to northern California where my Dad’s mother and brother’s family lived was the Cheese and Wine shop in Carmel. More on this later.

Our dad loved pickled herring that came in a jar. So much of his and her tastes was a product of their Jewish Bronx, New York childhoods. Bagels were a staple, both regular and Bialys. The pickles were big fat kosher style ones in a jar, although they liked new dills as well, and sauerkrauts, different brands, but always Jewish style. And there was Canadian bacon. Not Jewish. As far as preserved fish, there was smoked sturgeon and sable, codfish and lox. There was “fresh” lox from the deli counter, but also lox by a company named Lasco packed in a squat wide jar. This salty lox was wrapped in a roll drowning in fish oil that pealed off in pieces. Mom bought these delicacies from Nate and Al’s. And there was no shortage of small jars of horseradish sauce, capers, exotic mustards and relishes, kalmata olives and shrimp cocktail sauce, all crammed into the narrow shelves on the frig door. And don’t forget the fruit juices — apple, grape, pineapple, pomegranate, and fresh orange juice.

The codfish was most unusual, although to us, a staple. It looked like a reddish thick square oily cake, narrowing down to one end with a little curl, in the shape of a short hairdo of the time. The flesh broke off easily in finger-size flakes at the touch of a fork. It was great on bagels with crème cheese. The crème cheese came in either cardboard tubs from the deli counter, or in rectangle silver paper packets by Philadelphia brand. There was only one variety with full fat content, no “lite”.

Talking about fat, my Dad loved his chicken fat on bread and bagels instead of butter. It came in clear tubs, also from Nate and Al’s. There were lots of leftovers in the frig or top freezer, including brisket Mom bought at the butcher shop she cooked in aluminum foil with Lipton’s onion soup, Hawaiian chicken with pineapples baked by the housekeeper and cooks Mom employed, borscht, and cow’s tongue. Tongue was about the only food I refused to eat, although I did taste it from time to time, with mustard. It actually wasn’t bad. It was just the idea.

There were fresh vegetables for salads and fruit, of course, including Chinese peas in a pod. I was often drafted before dinner by Sadie, our first housekeeper, live-in maid and nannie, to sit at a small table with a bowl of peas and a second empty one to remove the peas from the pods. There was romaine lettuce, carrots, onions, string beans and celery. Mom and Dad loved avocados, big fat ones that came from the large avocado tree in the backyard that shaded the entire brick-paved back porch. I did not acquire a taste for them until I became an adult. We didn’t eat much spinach or even potatoes, although we did have baked potatoes from time to time. Also absent were broccoli and cauliflower. Not sure why. Tomatoes, however, were always in abundance, and never bland, as most seem today. There were always apples and bananas as well as persimmons in a bowl on the counter. We had a persimmon tree in the backyard, and Rose, our second generation “help”, would make persimmon pie. I could never eat them plain. Mom would make baked apples with raisins and honey. And there were also lots of dried fruit, especially prunes and apricots, as well as nuts, stashed in the cupboards.

Dad used to keep a stash of candies in the small cabinet by his bed. Here he kept premium pistachio nuts, thick bars of dark chocolate almond bark, small round sugar speckled candy jellies, dark chocolate-covered thin mint wafers, premium peanut brittle, caramel corn, chocolate turtles, red candy apples, and other fancied goodies. I used to go into their bedroom when he was at work or playing golf and take just enough of one type of stash I thought he would not notice. The only thing was, I did it fairly often, so if he hadn’t taken any for himself since the last time I pilfered, I wonder today if he was ever on to me. He never said anything about it. As a kid, we had lots of candy brands to choose from that we bought for a nickel or a dime at the drug store. There were Juju Beads, Juji Fruits, Bazooka Bubble Gum, Jaw Breakers, Abba Zabbas, Sugar Babies, Raisinettes, Milky Ways, Three Musketeers, Reese’s Butter Cups, Tootsie Pop suckers, Almond Joys, Tootsie Rolls, Good and Plentys, Mars bars, and so much more. But the exotic candy delicacies Dad kept in his side cabinet tasted the best!

Mom was a fair but “lite” cook. She did not spend a lot of time in the kitchen like other moms I knew from visiting friends. Sadie was with us until we were teenagers, and a second black woman named Rose arrived after her and stayed into our older teenage years . More stories about them later. Mom’s staples were fairly quick orders. We ate Progresso or Anderson’s split pea soup with hot dogs Mom cut up and added (yum yum), German potato salad with bacon bits that came in a can (very tasty), beef stroganoff (probably from a packet), broiled T-bone, baked chicken, broiled salmon, lots of salads, and couscous and rice pilaf (also from a package). On some holidays and a few weekends with Sadie at her home in southwest L.A., Mom made brisket seasoned with Lipton’s onion soup as already mentioned, sautéd breaded veal (that’s another one I didn’t eat much), stuffed cabbage, chicken and matzo ball soup from Nate and Al’s.

Living just a block from downtown Beverly Hills, we had countless choices of fine dining restaurants. Some became landmarks. The rest turned over fairly often. Mom and Dad always had a favorite until it fell out of disfavor when he inevitably got upset with the service or with some dish that didn’t turn out right. There was Leon’s La Scala Boutique, the Swiss Chalet, Trader Vic’s, The Luau, Steers For Steaks, Lawry’s Prime Rib, Yamato’s (in Century City), Hamburger Hamlet and many others. By far my all-time favorite was a Chinese Mandarin restaurant on South Beverly Drive near Little Santa Monica open for ages named Ah Fong’s. We used to order pretty much the same dishes every time. For appetizers we had beef in a bag, fried egg rolls, and tiny barbecue spare ribs. (I used pick the bone clean and suck the marrow dry). For the main course, we had sweet and sour chicken sticks — big lollypop-shaped chucks of extremely tender chicken encased in heavily sauced and fried coating (my favorite!) — pepper beef, which was a big pile of thin strips of beef seasoned in sweet soy sauce base with pieces of bell pepper (also very yummy). There were other dishes, fish I’m sure, that I cannot recall.

Mom would much rather dine out than in. If there was any drawback to her homemaking, it was that and her cleaning skills, which was near to none. She let the maids do it. She was not only a “lite” cook but a “lite” house cleaner. That was undetectable to us because of the hired help, but what made it painful later on when we noticed it once out of the nest, was her hoarding. She was incapable of throwing out anything. Also, another story.

The remarkable safety valve for Mom was Brentwood Country Club. It was, looking back, such a necessary luxury in so many ways for her. Its dining room, especially on holidays with its outlandishly delicious and abundant buffets unquestionably set the bar for buffets everywhere. Eating there as a family slightly nauseated me for reasons obvious now but inaccessible back then. I often needed to be reminded later by my loving wife, Judy, that I had never enjoyed a normal home-cooked Thanksgiving or Passover dinner at home. So sad.

If a homeless person could have stumbled into the dining room at Brentwood Country Club on a special holiday buffet lunch or dinner, he or she might have died from shock at the abundance and variety of food spread on the various white-clothed table rounds. There was not one, but two carving tables, one with a juicy hunk of prime rib, and the another holding a huge and tender turkey sitting in its juices. The line was never long, so I had no cover that a busy line of people might present as a distraction to the server, who was almost always a middle age or older black male. I might have even skipped this main course a time or two just to avoid his eyes.

There was plenty of other food on the rounded white clothed tables spread around the room. Most distinct was the shrimp table, offering fresh prawns piled into a tall mound over ice. Sometimes there was a giant ice sculture of something like a seal or whatever. There were other food displays, including fresh fruit, but I’ll describe only one more, the desert table. On it were cakes and pastries of all kinds, at least a dozen choices, as well as ice crème of all flavors nearby. These were high quality sweets. Believe me. The routine for the desert table seemed to be repeated at the end of every holiday lunch or dinner we attended together. By the time you’d get to the deserts, you’d be stuffed, of course. But the behavior was always the same: gather as many samples as possible onto one or two plates, and return to the family table to share. Or, that was the expectation. I, the oddball, tended to just go for one or two things, a piece of dark chocolate cake or mousse, or a creamy slice of cheese cake. “What? That’s all you got?” was the second often repeated statement from a family member.

To describe the buffets at Brentwood Country Club as “decadent” as they were, out loud, if I could access the truth, would have sent my Dad into a rage. I get it now. The Club was a symbol of his crowning achievement. It was the “fruit” of all he had worked so hard to attain. Yes, part of it was status. But the truth went deeper. This was proof for his well-earned lifetime of work and mantra to provide for his family. What more was there to the prize?

For several decades, the Cheese and Wine Shop in Carmel was a must destination point whenever we vacationed there, which was often, as a family. The door was draped with hanging strings of beads, perhaps to provide a permeable portal through which the rich smells of cheeses and salamis of every imaginable import would lure in passersby. When you pushed aside the hanging beads portal to the kasbah inside, your eyes needing to adjust from the sun to its dimmer light, you were met with an overabundant array of fresh and dry can foods that piled and spilled from every space in the store. It was difficult to navigate the tiny aisles without knocking something over. The storeowner, whose name I forget, seemed to be a good friend of Mom and Dad. But today I realize it was no doubt the personal and welcome way he had with every customer that was part of the store’s charm. My parents could tell you about their favorite items they would take back to our hotel in large net bags. As a kid, although I liked the smells, I was not so much into exotic kalamata olives, balls of goat cheese in a jar, sourdough bread, and premium Italian or Kosher salami.

As memories of Mom and food and home-cooked meals tumble out, loving as well as not so loving, the idea of the dinner table as a potential powder keg for Dad’s rage cannot be exorcised. I am forever grateful, however, there was one other powerful ever-lasting force quietly at play — our Mom’s love.

Originally published at https://amiasoldieryet.medium.com on July 8, 2023.