Mark Hofreiter's Art and Cartoon Pages

Mom's Story
My daughter and I visited New York City several years ago in search, among other things, my mother’s birth place. We took a lot of cash with us to pay for a long cab ride. We After a cold windy early morning trip to the top of the Empire State building and brunch a brunch of eggs Benedict with lox which infected me with campylobacter, a bacteria that originates in feces and once established, poisons all the good bacteria with a toxin. This makes digesting food impossible and the results unpleasant. But now, having gotten off a bus on the upper east side, we walked north into Harlem. We were outsiders there being surrounded by the late morning junkies, the homeless and the whores. We walked toward the northeast corner of Central Park where we felt more a part of the city rather than a hostile foreign country. We found a cab driven by a young middle eastern man but was quite and patient with us and understood street names as we ushered him around the sites of my mother’s child hood.
Harlem was a foreign country in 1927 to many of Manhattan’s higher class mid-town residences. It was filled with the emigrant Irish who entered the country between the early nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. And the next generation of those first émigrés were making new little Irish Americans. The Irish who would grow up fighting the great depression and fascism and making the babies.
My mother was born at 416 W. 129^th Street in what is known today as Mahattanville, just above Morningside Heights. The Studebaker Factory was built in 1923 and located several blocks north of 129^th Street. The Nash automobile factory was just being built in 1927 within blocks of the walkup apartment my mom was born in on 129^th. The area was home to several dairies which supplied all the milk for Manhattan and the black population was growing alongside the Irish. As early as 1901 there were race riots.
My grandfather was apparently quite the racist and said ignorant things about people of color. (People are a product of their time, if they are not careful.) He was a bar tender. He also schemed with my mother’s uncle Buddy to open a used car dealership. One of the brothers was a milkman, I believe. Uncle Buddy was a bar tender too.
Tommy, mom's father, told mom to tell people, who asked what her father did for a living, he played piano in a whore house.
One day two months ago, my mom was in an auto repair shop waiting room when she got up to tell the mechanic to be sure and tell her what was wrong with her car. She had become very unsteady on her feet. She was 81 years old. When my mom set her mind on something, she could be very determined. I imagine she had a hard time catching the mechanic’s attention and stepped out into the garage bay and fell. By the dirt on her knit blue pants and white shirt, I got from the hospital; she fell on her hip and rolled on to her front. The clerk in the mechanic’s shop said she helped mom up and helped her back to a chair and called an ambulance.