In many ways, I am and remain a nice Jewish girl from
Massapequa.
My folks bought their first house in Massapequa in 1949. A
petite house on a corner lot facing Hicksville Road at the corner of Chicago
Avenue. My folks shared stories of meeting other Jewish couples who escaped
Brooklyn and the Bronx to set up digs and have babies in the country. My
parents were one of the founding families of the Massapequa Jewish Center on
Jerusalem Avenue. (It became Temple Judea years later. As a side note, its last
Rabbi was the rabbi of my congregation here in Maryland.) Sadly, it’s closed now.
One of the reasons they chose Massapequa was because it
didn’t have “restricted” neighborhoods. (Meaning they sold to Jewish families.)
Imagine having to even ask that kind of question today.
We lived there until 1959 when we moved within Massapequa to
Ontario Avenue, right off of Parkside Boulevard and the Massapequa Woods. This
is the house I ultimately considered home. I went to Lockhart (where I skipped
second grade), Parkside, and then Berner, as we all did. What I remember most
was the freedom we had to roam outside without a lot of interference or fear
from our folks. We all walked blocks and blocks to school or rode our bikes. I
walked to piano lessons (Dave Goldstein’s mom was my teacher for three years)
and to friends’ homes. A simple motherly yell out the door was enough to send
us home running.
I remember playing baseball in the street in front of our
house. (My mother’s side mirror was third base. She lost at least one mirror
every summer for years.) I remember Summer Playground at Lockhart where Alec
Baldwin’s dad was the head honcho. We called Alec “Little Alexander.” He was a
huge pain in the ass, but he adored his dad, as did we all.
I also remember being the only Jewish family on the block,
and except for the O’Connell girls across the street, the only kids who went to
public school. There were times of tussle now and again, but it made us aware
of the outside world as young kids and how to manage and conduct ourselves.
My mother was a bookkeeper who worked at home while we were
very young, then took full-time employment when we got older. My dad worked for
the Long Island Press for many years and then opened a Shell service station in
Merrick. He owned it until he died in 1975 at 51.
I loved high school...
I didn’t belong to any particular group, but I felt at home
with friends and activities. It was a time of social upheaval and I loved
feeling a part of it all. It was a time I found my ‘voice’ and my deep feminist
outrage. I also discovered I had a comic turn of mind ... more on that later.
I also fell in love - completely and deeply - for the first
time. Mark Pass and I escorted each other gingerly and joyfully through the
journey of first love. I couldn’t have asked for a better boyfriend for my
junior and senior year. (My heart tore more than a little when I learned of his
passing three years ago.)
After Berner, I went to Nassau Community College where I
ramped up my studies and graduated in 18 months. I went to Syracuse University
as a mid-year transfer where on paper I majored in Broadcast Journalism at the
Newhouse school, but in actuality majored in interpersonal relationships and
tequila sunrises. My dad died of a heart attack in late 1975. I dropped out of
school, came home, and worked while I waited for my world to stop spinning.
A year later, I was engaged to a nice Jewish boy from East
Meadow. We had met at NCC, dated for a while, and reconnected a few years
later. I worked for his brother as an AV tech for BAR/BRI, the bar review
course, and then as an Executive Secretary for a dress manufacturer in the
Garment Center. He was finishing school at University of Maryland, so we
married in 1977, and I moved to Maryland where I’ve lived since.
I worked for a tiny AM radio station during the day (if you
remember the show, WKRP in Cincinnati, our station was so small I was forced to
be the brainy girl AND sexpot rolled into one.) I finished college at U of MD
in the evenings and began grad school in broadcast management. I thought I had
it all figured out, until I took a job with a medical publishing company as a
junior copywriter. It was there I discovered direct marketing (we used to call
it junkmail), and a career I absolutely fell in love with ... and have
continued to do so since.
I worked for the publishing company for 5 years working my
craft and career up the ranks. I then went to a direct marketing agency for two
years where Special Olympics and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
were my accounts. Then, after being denied a promotion because “we just don’t
promote people (code for women) too fast.”, I borrowed $3k from my savings,
promised my husband if it didn’t work out after two years, I’d go back to a
regular job, and opened my own marketing consultancy in 1987.
I remained in business full-time for the next 25 years. I
did take a regular job two years ago when my second husband - and the father to
my three kids: Hilary, now 22; Spencer, almost 17; and Piper, almost 16) and I
divorced.
Wait ... did she write second husband? What happened to the
first?
My first spouse and I divorced in 1989. (I decided to go to
Vegas for a six-week divorce because Maryland’s laws were and remain woefully
antiquated.) It was during this time, I discovered the nascent beginnings of the
online world, pre-internet days. I was working as a freelancer for a small ad
agency that had a teeny division of General Electric as their account. GE was
looking to monetize the downtime on their mainframes with private little online
networks.
This was 1985 and I knew I had just tasted the future. It
wasn’t word processing or spread sheets. It was communications - and it was
amazingly fun. GEnie was the service and chat was a major part of the
experience. There were a handful of women online and hundreds of men. Needless
to say, I felt like a homecoming queen most evenings - and all from home. :)
My kids call me and their dad online pioneers. I tell them I
invented the :D emoticon in 1986 and they believe me. :D
My soon-to-be second husband was one of my admirers. During
this time, I won a trip to Paris on the Concorde. It was like taking a
honeymoon before the wedding. We had a fabulous time. He moved from
Massachusetts to join me in Maryland. We married in 1990. Our first daughter
was born two years later.
Life was good, but after too many miscarriages to count, we
adopted our son and second daughter as infants from South Korea in 1998 and
1999. (If you’re doing the math, I was a first-time mom at 37, then 42, then
again at 44.)
It was during this time, I began a deeper interest in the
online world. I developed my first websites to chronicle my first adoption
(adoptkorea.com) and then my interest in e-commerce (www.adoptshoppe.com) ... this
work, built on the foundation of my original work in direct marketing, has been
my vocational passion since.
But life has a way of sneaking up on you ... my second
marriage broke under a boatload of strains. For the past four years, life has
been hectic, strange, unsettling, but liberating in all the right ways. Being a
pragmatic woman, I realized I needed a steady gig. Today, I’m the director of
marketing for a trade association in Washington, DC, and still consult, teach,
and do a bunch of other stuff. I like the challenge and keeping myself in the
thick of things. I still think there are mountains left for me to climb.
I’d rather work than do housework or cook. Feel free to ask
my kids about that. My son learned how to cook to keep from having to eat
‘breakfast foods” for dinner because it’s faster. They’ll tell you how awful
life is. :) I can’t imagine retiring from work I enjoy, but I wouldn’t mind
trading my usual 60-70 hours a week for a basic 40. That would seem like a
vacation!
Thinking back on my Berner days, there’s little I would do
differently. I had some wonderful teachers - Ken Zanca for 10th grade English
who encouraged me to pursue writing (not copywriting, but hey I’m still
writing, right?), and Rob Brownstein who taught me biology and tutored me and a
few other kids through geometry at my parents’ dining room table every week. I
passed that class due to his patience as I walked numbly through theorems that
still don’t make sense to me.
Earlier I mentioned discovering a comic turn of mind ...
I loved comedians growing up. The timing, smart word play, all
of it. We all listened to Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Firesign Theatre, Cheech and
Chong, Robert Klein, and George Carlin albums.
I had a huge crush on David Steinberg.
I was stealthy at first. I liked to comment quietly to
classmates at Lockhart, Parkside, and Berner - and make them laugh. I was a
little rowdy with the other two girls in Hebrew School as we sit in a sea of 40
awkward boys at Congregation Beth-El for our bar and bat mitzvah training.
I didn’t think much of it until Syracuse where I began to do
actual 20 minute sets. Folks laughed. It was great. I played some clubs on LI
for the next few years. One of my favorite memories was having my dad (and mom
and a girlfriend) see me perform at a crappy little club in Lindenhurst. (When
I told my dad about performing he said flat out, “What? You’re not funny. Tell
me a joke.” I replied that I didn’t tell jokes. I was a monologist. “A
monologist? Florence, she’s a monologist.)
Dad didn’t think I was funny because we all were.
But perform I did. He sat at the bar by himself because he
didn’t want to be distracted by my mother during my set. I had a good 20
minutes. The bartender laughed and said that the girl was good. Dad puffed up
and little and said that girl is his daughter. We all met afterwards at the
Massapequa Diner. Dad walked in, sat down, and was silent. Not being able to
take it anymore I said, “So, Daddy, what did you think?” Taking his Art Carney
doing Ed Norton time of it - straightening his cuff, brushing off invisible
lint from his shirt - he looked at me and said, “You weren’t half bad.”
For my dad, that was praise of high order. My mother told me
later how utterly surprised and delighted he was. (He also liked that part of
the routine was about him.) I ultimately decided not to pursue this as a career
in part because I realized I didn’t need the approval of strangers to feel good
about myself - and really great comics do, I think. But it might be nice to be
a comedy writer ... maybe when I retire and ready for a brand-new adventure!
Massapequa is still my heart’s home. I sometimes dream of
browsing the old 5 & 10, walking down streets new yet still familiar, and
wandering old homes and finding rooms left unexplored. You can take the girl
out of Massapequa, but ...
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| Piper, 16; Roberta, and Hillary, 22 |
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| Roberta and son Spencer, 17. |
Written by Roberta Rosenberg
