Text © Robert
Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2023
Images from the Francos collection
October 19, 2023, would have been my mom's 97th
birthday, being born in 1927, but she never made it past June 25, 1981. I am
more than a decade older now than she had ever been.
This piece is to celebrate Helen Rosen. The Rosen siblings are, in order of age from eldest to youngest, Miriam, Elsie, Eli and Helen. Elsie is the last remaining sister, approaching the century mark this coming October (living in Boca Raton, Florida, the last time I saw her was on her 90th birthday). I used to love going to her house in Queens before she retired South, and would spend a couple of weeks in Flushing, NY, every summer when my mother could not take my energy anymore. Elsie made the best noodle kugel in the world. But I digress…
Driving mom crazy at Camp HES, about 1965
Helen was born in
Brooklyn in 1926, the first American generation of the maternal family, and her
first language was Yiddish. She did not learn to speak English until she went
to school. She grew up in the then-highly Jewish Williamsburg neighborhood, and
was quickly nicknamed – for obvious reasons – Blondie. Eventually, she would go
by Lynn. Her neighbors included Mel Brooks, and drummer Buddy Rich. In fact, her
best friend then, Millie (aka Lefty), married Mel’s brother right after he
returned from World War II from the Air Force where he was a bomber pilot.
In her teens, the
family moved to the Bensonhurst area in one apartment, and then to another
where I was conceived (I was born in the no-longer existing Brooklyn Doctor’s
Hospital). But more on that later. She attended an all-girl’s high school,
which she hated. My mom loved the boys, and the estrogen-fueled locale was not
for her. She dropped out of high school, but not before picking up a smoking
habit, with Kent being her brand of choice.
Helen on the far left, Chickie next to her
During the war, she
first dated a guy whose last name was Schmuckman. She eventually told me, “I
liked him too much, so I dropped him. I refused to be Mrs. Schmuckman.” She did
get engaged to somebody after that, who never returned from the battlefield.
She was on a blind
date with a friend, Chickie, in 1947. The story goes, the two men walked into
the room, saw them sitting there, and one of the guys turned to the other and
said, “The blonde is mine,” though he was being set up with Chickie. That was
my father, Leo Francos.
Helen and Leo were married in 1948, and after a Honeymoon in Quebec City, moved into the Rosen apartment. My grandmother, Sadie, did not like my father (he was a handful…think a smaller Archie Bunker), and she and the rest of the family moved out. My immediate family stayed in that apartment, in one form or another, until 2009.
When I was thirteen,
after my Bar Mitzvah, my mom did as she said she was going to do: she went to
work (her first job since a munitions factory at the Brooklyn Pier during the War).
She was a keypunch operator for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and would
eventually become the supervisor.
Honeymoon in Quebec
Unlike my dad (until
he retired), my mom was a social butterfly, enjoying the company of others,
with a cackle of a laugh that ran through the Rosen family, that I adored, and
eventually inherited. My parents were known for their wild parties, especially
on Halloween (I have the old black and white photos to prove it), and heavy drinking
was common. They had a rolling bar in the corner of the living room that stayed
until my dad moved out, years after my mom passed on. The parties stopped when
they found my older brother, then a toddler, under a table with an open bottle
of Scotch in his hands. Even so, we often hosted dinners in the living room that
were held on a foldable aluminum table that was kept under my parent’s bed.
Halloween party in our living room
To be fair, while my
mom had her kitchen specialties, such as being creative with pineapples as
crudité, she was not a very good cook, because she simply did not enjoy the
process. Meats were overcooked and tough, and veggies were mushy from cans. My
brother Richie said, years later, that he first discovered how good steak was
in his early twenties when he went to a steakhouse (he is now an excellent
cook).
One of the things I
loved about Helen was that she was persistent, knew what she wanted and would
settle for nothing less. For example, whenever my father bought a new car every
four years or so, it came from Helen’s paycheck. She did not care what brand of
car it was, letting my dad handle that end, but she insisted that it had to
have a vinyl roof. I never figured out why, but it drove Leo crazy. Yet, he
complied every time.
Another occurrence she
put her foot down was at Passover when I was a young teen. Tradition decried
that two (meat and dairy) separate set of dishes needed to be used during the
8-day holiday, so my mother would climb up and take the Passover dishes down
from the upper kitchen cabinet and put the two sets of daily dishes in their
place. Of course, living in an apartment in Brooklyn meant cockroaches were a
natural part of our environment, thereby Helen would have to wash all the
Passover dishes, and eight days later, when she switched them back, she would
have to wash all the daily dishware. Finally, she had enough. “Leo,” she said
sternly, “I’m not doing this anymore. Ganish [enough]!” This led to a
multi-day fight that ended with my mother – all five-feet of her – standing her
ground and saying, “Fine, you want it done, Leo, you do it!” And he did. That
was the last year we switched dishes.
Helen had some health
issues over the years, such as a cigarette being flicked out of a car window in
front of us and landing in my mom’s eye. Another time, she fell down the
basement stairs and broke her coccyx (tailbone), giving her pain for the rest
of her life. She was warned not to have any more kids, but she had me anyway (I
am pretty sure I was unexpected).
At World Fair, Flushing, NY, 1965
After a heart attack in
one occurrence, and then falling on a subway station platform (or perhaps she
was pushed), she was informed that she had a brain aneurysm, and would need an
operation that was dangerous to remove it. She went under the knife, and
technically the operation was successful, but her brain swelled, and she died
three days later at age 54, on June 21, 1981.
I still picture my mom
sitting at the kitchen table in the evening after supper dishes were done, smoking
a Kent and reading a Harlequin romance novel (she read about one per day, and
was part of a collective that exchanged books at work). There is so much I
would love to ask her about now, but as kids, we did not realize our parents
would not live forever.
Day of my Bar Mitzvah, 1968
Other stories about her and photos can be found in earlier blogs, such as How Mel Brooks Set My Mother on Fire, For My Mom (on her birthday), and some photos of her with my father, Oh How They Danced. Feel free to add your own stories about Helen on the Blog's comments section below.
Posts
