The Harris Newmark Family 1913-1993

EIGHTY MORE YEARS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

From Left to Right: Elizabeth Levi Lissner, Fannie

Emily Nordlinger Abrams, Harris Newmark, Jr.

In 1993 a book was written to chronicle the eighty years after the publication of Harris Newmark's "My Sixty Years in Southern California 1853-1913."Oral histories were taken of three members of the Newmark family who were living in 1913, Elizabeth Levi Lissner (my aunt), Harris Newmark, Jr., and Fannie Emily Nordlinger Abrams.  All are now diseased. The following are the oral histories, which were in the book.

ELIZABETH LEVI LISSNER 1902-2002

Elizabeth Levi Lissner, born in 1902, is the senior member of the Newmark clan, and seen by many as a shining example of what it means to "age gracefully:' Liz, as she is known by most, is the daughter of Rose Loeb Levi and Herman Levi, and the granddaughter of Estelle Newmark Loeb and Leon Loeb, Liz's vivid memories not only of past information about the family, but also current facts, is a wonderful contribution to the family history.

Elizabeth, let's talk about your

earliest memories.

I remember when I was around 4 or 5, we lived

on Lake Street, near MacArthur Park, and the whole

family lived all around there. My grandparents,

Estelle and Leon Loeb, lived on Westlake and the

Loews lived on Alvarado. I remember when my

mother's cousin, Rose Loew Nordlinger, got married.

They had a big old house that belonged to the senior

Nordlingers on 9th Street across from where the

offices for the Catholic Church are now. We all used

to walk around and see each other. There were a lot

of children in the family, most of whom were

younger than I. I was the oldest great-grandchild,

since I was born in 1902. The next one was my

brother, John, who was born in 1905. Then came my

brother, Leon, who was born in 1907, and so was my

mother's first cousin. Nick Newmark. My last

brother, Richard, wasn't born until 1917.We had a nurse who came when I was five weeks old and left when I was 23. She raised all four of us. Her name was Marie Sturtevant. She was an American, from

New England. She was with my parents until she got sick and practically died. I was 23 and married when she left.

What else do you remember about your life then?

It was a nice two-story house. I went to Hoover Street School, which was at 9th and Hoover, and I loved school. John and Leon went there, too. Richard is 15 years younger than I am, so he was practically like my own child. I married for the first time when he was about four, but I've always been close to him. He lives in La Quinta and I talk to him every week. He's the only one left. My other two brothers are gone. I was closer to John than to Leon.

Did your mother or grandmother cook?

No, neither could boil water. I'm the cook in

the family. I liked it. I taught myself. We always had help in our house. We had Marie, the nurse, and we always had a cook who I guess did housework. I guess Marie did the upstairs and took care of all our stuff. And the cook cooked and did downstairs.

They used to wait on table. My mother always had

two in help in her house and they both lived in our large, two-story home.

What do you remember about your brothers when they were young?

John was a nice kid, but I don't remember

much about him until he went to college. He went to

Stanford. He used to bring kids home and we had

lots of fun. I was married by then because I married

when I was 18. I didn't have any sense. I was like all the rest of the kids. John was a good golfer and so was I. I never played with him, although we both belonged to Hillcrest.(* John Levi’s handicap was an 8, and Liz played to a 13)

John was very active at Cedars. He was the financial secretary on their board. He used to be at the hospital practically every day. That's when it was on Fountain. I don't know if he was still living when they moved to the new building. I think he may have given it up. He got sick. He had cancer and he was sick for a few years. I don't remember when he quit.He was very active in Cedars and 1 guess that's why  John, Jr. is so involved with charities. John, Jr. is very interested in the Jewish Home for the Aging, as you know.

Leon had bright red hair, the only one in our

family. They called him Red and he was a lawyer.

He married Dorothy Bachman and she died at 32,

when Pat was 10. The little boy, Doug, was only

four. Leon remarried when Pat was about 11 or 12.

The stepmother is still alive. Leon died about three

or four years ago. He was a big smoker and he died

of emphysema. They lived in Palm Springs. The

second wife was also Dorothy. We called the first

one Dottie and the second one Dee. I didn't see

much of Leon. He went to college when I was

young. They used to bring boys home for holidays

and weekends.

I remember when Leon went to work for Loeb

and Loeb as a lawyer and they used to represent   

Max Factor. The Max Factors were crazy about   

Leon. They hired him to leave Loeb and Loeb and

become one of their executives. He was there for 20

years. I never saw much of him during the time he

was at Factor's                                

During World War II, by the way, my husband,

Louis, who had his own practice, was a partner

of Lester Roth, who's a California justice.

During the Depression things were tough and

Louis helped get Lester Roth a judgeship. His

father was in politics and so he was able to help him. During the war Loeb and Loeb were short of lawyers, and they represented all the movie studies in those days. They asked Louis to come there. He gave up his own practice and became a partner. He was there for many years.

What else do you recall about your brothers?

I think we mostly fought as children. I used to

do a lot of fighting with my brothers. I remember in

1912 my parents took us to Europe with another

couple of friends of theirs, who also had two boys.

There were five little kids all around the same age,

except Leon was a little younger. But the other

three boys were all about my age. Their name was

Meyer. We were in Europe for six months and they

teased me unmercifully. I remember lots about the

trip but what I mostly remember is how the three of

them would gang up on me. Of course, the Meyer

boys were my good friends for life, but they died.

Their parents and mine were best friends.

Leon was an amateur ham radio guy with a number, and he had a radio station in my mother's attic on St. Andrew’s. The maids' rooms were up there, too. He used to do Morse code. He kept that for many years.

I notice that some of the cousins in your great grandparent’s generation married each other.

Yes, that happened in the older generations.

That was because they didn't have anybody else in

those days. This was a very small town. And San

Francisco wasn't much bigger. Harris Newmark

married his first cousin, Sarah, who had come

around the Horn to get to San Francisco with her

family. I think there were either three or four girls in their family. Two or three of them married cousins. That’s why they lost so many children, I think. They used to die of diphtheria. My grandmother, Estelle Loeb, lost two children from it. She had five.

What were the names of her children?

George, who was born in 1880 died early. My

mother Rose was the next. She was born in 1881.

Then came Joe, in 1883, then Edwin, in 1886.

Harold, who was born in 1893, was the baby. Edwin

used to tease my grandmother about Harold, and I

remember she didn't like it very much. We'd be at

the dinner table and he'd say something about my

little brother Harold, and I remember she'd say, "Oh

Edwin!"

As I said, everybody lived near everybody.

When I was a child we used to walk to Aunt Emily

Loew's house, which was a block away from us, on Alvarado. We even walked to Rose Nordlinger's, on West 9th. That was the furthest. Rose Loew married a man named Louis Nordlinger. He owned a jewelry store that subsequently became the second best jewelry store in Los Angeles. Then he retired. I remember going to their store when I was a little kid. It was on Broadway near 6th. In fact, whenever we went downtown we'd meet my mother or my mother would meet her relatives or friends at Nordlinger's.  Their children were Fannie Emily and Louis, Jr. Fannie Emily hated her name so she changed it to Fen (the initials of her first, middle and last name) when she was a teenager. I was her big cousin and I guess she looked up to me and I always loved her a lot. And we all were devoted to her grandmother, Emily, who was very different than my grandmother.

What was Los Angeles like then?

It didn't go much beyond Vermont Avenue;

Hoover Street school was on 9th and Hoover, and

there was a streetcar that ran out 9th street and

when it got to Vermont it turned around and came

back. Later on, when I was a teenager, I guess, it

went further to Western Avenue. There were farms

and small homes out there, I guess. My father got a car when I was about six or seven, one of the first automobiles, a Duro. We use to go on rides on Sundays. We'd ride to Santa Monica and Venice, but you had to go out Washington Boulevard to get there. Wilshire and the other streets weren't open. Once we got stuck there. There'd been rain, and Washington is very low. The roads were all dirt, and out around where the Marina is now it flooded a bit. There were hardly any cars in those days. We got stuck in the   

mud and someone had to come and pull us out.

My great-grandparents, Harris and Sarah Newmark, had a house on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica on the corner of Arizona and Ocean Avenue. They used to go down there every summer, and it was a trip to go down there. The Red Car did go, but you had to go downtown to get the Red Car. It went out Venice Boulevard to Venice and then back to Santa Monica. My great-grandfather had an automobile and I remember going down there for a drive with him. We drove to Brentwood and back

What do you remember about

your great-grandparents?

I don't remember much about my great-

grandmother Sarah. My only recollection is seeing

her sitting and knitting. She used to knit and so do I. She died when I was about eight, in 1910.I remember going to their house often. And I vaguely remember their golden wedding celebration, probably because I've seen pictures of the flowers and the gifts they got. My great grandfather lived until I was 13, so I remember him. He seemed to be a nice man. The last few years he was sick and he had a male nurse who lived with him. Everyone in the family kowtowed to Harris. The folks used to go there one night a week to keep him company. He liked to play cards. It was sort of a command performance. He was an old man. In those days if you were 60 you  were antiquated, and he was only 70-something when he died. At that point he lived with the senior Loew's on Alvarado Street.

Most of what I know about my great- grandparents is what's in the book, “Sixty Years in Southern California.” I do know they took my mother to Europe in 1899, before she was married. She had a wonderful time. My mother had French relatives because my grandfather, Leon Loeb, was French. I never knew my French great-grandparents, whose names were Jacob and Rosalie Levy Loeb. I know they lived in Strasbourg. There was a nephew of my father's who was a soldier in World War I and my mother and father sort of kept up with him.

Lets talk about your grandparents, Estelle and Leon Loeb.

I don't think my grandmother Estelle was very bright because she wasn't well-educated and she married at 16. My mother was a very bright woman, and Joe and Edwin Loeb were very bright men-college graduates. In those days not everybody went to college. But my grandmother, she was crotchety.I only remember that she didn't get along with everybody in our family. She used to come to dinner all the time at my mother's and half the time she'd gc home mad about something. And it wasn't really anything that any of us did. The only one that teased her was my Uncle Edwin. I remember she interfered with my mother and it used to bother her. She use to tell her what to do and if I remember right, she used to try to remind her of what her duty was to other family members. She used to come to our house after I was married to Louis in 1932. I didn't have much trouble with her, but she criticized everything. I remember that she was difficult. She lived until 1937.

What about *Leon, your grandfather?

He was darling, but he died when I was a little

girl. He was a very sweet, quiet man. I don't remember too much more about him.

*Leon Loeb had been born in the French city of Strassburg, and came to Los Angeles in 1866. In 1879 he married Estelle Newmark,daughter of the Harris Newmarks.Leon Loeb worked in Solomon Lazard's dry goods store for a time, and later was a partner

in the same firm which was then called the City of Paris store. He was very active in Jewish and fraternal life. Loeb succeeded his relative, Eugene Meyer, as the French consular agent of Los Angeles in 1883, serving until 1898, when he resigned because of the attitude of the French government in the Dreyfus case (The American Israelite, Cincinnati, October 13, 1898, p. 3).

Do you know what kind of work he did?

I think he might have worked for Harris

Newmark, who had a lot of property, downtown and

in Montebello-all of which has been sold. He was in

what they used to call the mercantile business. I

guess it was retail stuff. And then there was MA.

Newmark Company, a wholesale grocer. He was a

cousin. He has a bunch of relatives who are friends

of mine that lived here, but they're not closely

related to us. They were close relatives of my great-grandparents and they were in businesses together.My grandfather Leon also was French consul in L.A.at one time.

What can you tell me about your great-uncle, Marco?

He was a darling man. He got very hard of

hearing towards the end of his life, but he had a

wonderful sense of humor and Nick is just like him.

Everybody loves Nick. He's very funny about

himself. He thinks he's old and decrepit, and he's

younger than I am. He's my mother's first cousin. I

kid him about being the older generation all the

time. I see him a lot because we go to lunch together about once a month.

What can you remember about Ella Newmark Seligman?

She married Carl Seligman. I liked him. I can

remember being a little kid and going to see him

when he was dying. He had cancer, but it wasn't

mentioned in the family. Ella had three daughters

There was a Lottie, who died in a menta institution,

and Ruth, who married a fellow named Hirschfeld

and had two daughters,and Rosalie Jacoby, who had

several children. But I've lost track of all of them.

Maurice Newmark, who was called M.H.,was the oldest son, and also worked at M.A.Newmark & Company. He was a stamp collector; he had a fabulous stamp collection. I never knew much about it, except that he had it, but I know it sold for a large sum of money after he died. He had a daughter,Florence Kauffman and she had two sons, Steven and Richard. I think Richard is still around. He lives in San Francisco. Maurice was married to Aunt Rosie, and she was a cousin-also a Newmark. She lived to be an old lady. She was a fragile little old lady and very sweet. She used to invite us for dinner. I always liked her. We used to make fun of her, because she was kind of prissy, but she was cute. She had a sister, Emma, whose daughter was one of my best friends. Emma married a man named Goldschmidt. They had two daughters and I was raised with them. One of them lived up at the corner and died about 8-10 years ago. We were very close friends.I’ve lived here 37 years. And she lived here before I did.

Is there anything else you recall

about Emily and Jacob Loew?

We loved them. They were our favorites.Uncle Jake died when he was not too old.Aunt Emily lived on for a while and she lived with her daughter, Rose Nordlinger, and we lived on Irving and they lived on Lorraine, a block over. We used to go over there all the time. We were very close to them. She was darling and I loved her. She was the one that got my mother into Christian Science.

What was Santa Monica like when you went to visit your great-grandparents?

It was beautiful, just houses along Ocean Avenue, and the streetcar ran across the street, along Ocean Avenue. You could pick up the streetcar and it went all the way to Venice and came to town on Venice Boulevard.

Do you remember how long that trip would take?

About an hour, I guess. You ended up downtown and then to get to where we lived, you had to transfer to a yellow car. Those were electric trolleys. They had a thing that went up over to the wires. There was a conductor and a motorman. The conductor took the money and the motorman ran the car.

Do you remember many horses drawing carts or wagons?

We had a Chinese vegetable man who had a horse pulling his vegetable wagon. I remember getting fruit off his wagon. He'd come up and down the streets. And also the iceman used to come with a horse. He used some tongs to pick up a huge cube

of ice and he used to sling it over his shoulder to

carry the ice in and put it in the icebox on the

back porch.

What else do you remember about your home?

I always had my own room. I think the boys slept in the same room, but I don't remember. When we got to St. Andrew's it was a bigger house. When I was 15, Richard was born, and John was 12 and Leon,10.

Did you graduate from high school?

Yes, I went to Berendo Junior High and then Girl's Collegiate, a private school, on the corner of Adams and Hoover Avenue. At the start of World War I, we had a car and driver, but the driver went into the Army during the war.My mother used to drive the car, but she would let me take it to school sometimes, so I didn't have to take the streetcar because it was far. When the war was over she got a driver again. In the meantime she and I both drove.  I was 13 when my father taught me to drive. I vaguely remember being in Santa Monica and learning to drive.

Was it the kind of car you had to crank?

No. I never cranked a car. It had a self-starter. It was a five-passenger touring car. When it rained they had glass windows that came down the sides and screwed in. Then around 1915, we got a sedan.

What do you remember about Steve Loew, Senior?

He was darling. He was the last one to die of that group. He was the youngest. He was loads of fun. When I was a kid he lived on Alvarado and I lived on Lake. He was quite a bit older than I. He was a wild kid. I remember seeing him on the roof of their house. He used to drive a fast car and he was kind of a frisky young man, but then he got married at 21 and settled down. He had three sons, Steve, Jack and Robert. He always was fun, up to the day he died. He had a good sense of humor. He kept my father young, because they were in business together.

Where did your father come from?

From Stuttgart, Germany. When we went there in

1912 he had a mother living, my grandmother, and a sister. His sister was married to a man named Eiseman, and they had two sons. The younger one  (Max) came over after the war and lived with my parents for quite a long while, until he was on his

feet.  Then he moved to San Francisco and he died there, but he wasn't so terribly old.

How did your parents meet?

It was all through family. My father was working for his uncle, Mr. Loew, who was married to my mother's aunt. My father always knew my mother, even when she was a little girl. He came here when he was 15, and they didn't get married until he was 30. He must have known her for a long time. But it was a big romance; they loved each other a lot. As far as I knew it was a very good marriage. But in those days everybody stayed married.

Was your family religious?

When I was a child my grandmother and I guess my great-grandmother used to go to what used to be called B'nai B'rith, but is now Wilshire Boulevard Temple. It was the only Reform temple in Los Angeles. It was on 9th and Hope in those days. I remember sitting near the front. Everybody had their own seats. They'd buy seats and have their name on them. I went to Sunday school. I used to go on Saturday mornings with my grandmother.

I don't remember that my mother always went,

but she was active at the temple. They had a sewing

group that used to sew for the orphanages and

Kaspare Cohn Hospital, which became Cedars-Sinai.

Then, it was just a little hospital in Boyle Heights.

The sewing group used to make shirts and shorts and pajamas for the children at the Jewish Orphan's Home of Los Angeles. When they moved to Motor Avenue, they called it Vista Del Mar. I always volunteered there. I worked in the office there for about 20 years, two or three days a week. That's my interest, not so much anymore, because I don't do anything any more. I remember my mother sewed at the temple every Tuesday. Finally, during World War II, they became a Red Cross unit and they did whatever the Red Cross gave them to do. After that they sort of disbanded. The hospital didn't want stuff anymore and Vista Del Mar had gotten too big.

Who was the rabbi at the temple?

It was Rabbi Hecht. I was confirmed there. My brothers didn't want to go to Sunday school, so

they didn't. When I was about 16 Rabbi Magnin came to be Rabbi Hecht's assistant, and his first cousin was my best friend. Her name was Siegel. They owned a store named Meyer Siegel. She just died about a year ago. We were best friends all our lives. They lived next door to us. Her mother was Rabbi Magnin's aunt, a daughter of I. Magnin from the department store family. Rabbi Magnin came from San Francisco and was a grandson of I. Magnin. Everyone loved him; he was an earthy man, lots of fun.

In later years my husband and I became very close to the Magnins. We used to have lunch together every Saturday at Hillcrest Country Club, along with about 5-6 other people, until he died. We joined the group when some of the people got old and got out or died. Edgar Magnin liked my husband, and we knew him from the club, and he asked if we'd like to come for Saturday lunch. My husband was a lawyer in Loeb and Loeb, the law firm owned by my uncles, Joe and Edwin, and one of the other partners, Walter Hillborn, used to go to lunch. He was an Easterner from Boston, and a Harvard graduate.

When you lived at home, did you celebrate Jewish holidays?

Not really. We knew when they were and when I was a little kid we used to go to temple on the Jewish holidays, but I celebrate them much more now than I did then. My husband was very un-Jewish. We didn't belong to the temple until he got very friendly with Rabbi Magnin, and it was a friendship. Magnin got him to join the temple.

As far as religion, my mother was a Christian Scientist. She was a diabetic late in her life, like her mother was, and she never went to a doctor. But when she got sick and they couldn't control her blood sugar, we made her go to the doctor. They had no history of her illness so they couldn't get it straightened out. She had to have some surgery and  she died.

How did she become a Christian Scientist?

Aunt Emily Loew was a Christian Scientist, and someway or other she got my mother into it. I didn't know about it-I was just a kid. I think she was having a nervous breakdown after Richard was born and the doctor wanted her to go away from home and she didn't want to go so she took up Christian Science. And she didn't go away from home. And she never went to a doctor. She was healthy until she had the diabetes problem. There was no conversion to Christian Science-she just went to church. No one thought anything of it in those days

Did the rest of the family go to doctors?

Yes, we all did.

Did she want you not to go?

Of course, but we did anyway. We didn't have any problem over it; we just went. I was married and had kids of my own. I was 15 when she went into Science. I used to go to church with her sometimes to keep her company.

What was the appeal of Christian Science to Reform Jews?

It was a good religion. The medical part I

don't think was so great, but the people who

believed in it believed in it. My niece, Pat Isaacs, is a Christian Scientist. She's done well with it and she's married to a doctor, which is peculiar, but she's raised all five of her kids in Science.

If I didn't know as much as I know about the

Science religion, I probably wouldn't be religious at all. That's the only thing that makes me Jewish. The Science that I got from my mother, that I know. They teach you to think positively and not to let evil into your thinking, a lot of good stuff. If I didn't know that I wouldn't be a very good Jew. I consider myself being a good Jewess because I go to temple and I do what I'm supposed to do, but I don't think the way the service is at temple.

So your grandmother was more involved in temple?

Not really later in her life, but the family's life

sort of revolved around the temple, because everyone in the temple knew each other.

When would your extended family get together?

We never could all get together. There's one

picture of some sort of gathering at the Loew's

house, after my great-grandmother died. It might

have been my great-grandfather's 70th or 75th

birthday. I remember that occasion. I must have been about 12, so it was around 1914. Otherwise there were too many of us to all get together. We used to get together with the Loew's and Nordlinger's a lot, because those were my mother's closest relatives, and my dad being at the mill, he was close to Steve Loew, and Rose Nordlinger was my mother's first cousin, so they were very close.

What did you do for recreation?

We used to play in the street and in the yard, and we went to the park with Marie, our housekeeper. The street used to get muddy when it rained and then we couldn't go out unless we had rubbers on. I remember the Banning boy and the Taylor boy and our kids playing baseball and football in the street They were a little older than my brothers, but they used to come over there, they were good friends, and they'd throw a football around. I remember we had stuff in our backyard to play with. We had a cement place in front of the garage. We had a picnic out there one day. A bunch of us were going on a picnic and it rained, so we had the picnic in the backyards.

Was it a big deal when they started paving the streets?

I don't remember. The freeways were a big deal, but that wasn't long ago. The Santa Monica Freeway was built since we lived here. The San Diego too.

Would you go to the San Fernando Valley?

We used to go to Encino, Laurel Canyon and other places in the Valley on picnics, because the Jansses had a big ranch out there and I think our mill used to buy wheat from them or something. They started Westwood. We thought Encino was way away from here and it took all day to go to Santa Barbara. Now you can go up for lunch and come home.

How would you get to Santa Barbara?

We went to Hollywood and through Cahuenga

Pass and out through the valley. It was a two-lane

highway, the same as the freeway is now, except we

used to have to go on Ventura Boulevard until we

got to the highway. Ventura was just a little narrow

street.

Did many people live in the Valley?

The first person I knew who lived in the Valley was after Universal City was built, in the 1930s. We had a nanny, a Scotswoman who took care of my husband's sister and brother when they were children. When they were grown, Nursie was still around and so was her sister, both retired, and they owned a little house in the valley, near Universal. The freeway went in right behind their house. By that time they were in their 80s and both of them had to be taken out and put in homes. Nursie used to stay with our kids so we could get away once in a while.

When I was a teenager and my brothers were

in college we used to drive to San Francisco for

football games and we used to make it in two days.

We stayed overnight in Santa Maria or Paso Robles.

There was a hotel there.

It was just rural scenery like it is now where it's not built up. Today it's practically built all the way. My husband's father used to say, before we ever dreamed of it being like it is now, that someday it's going to be one big city all the way up and down the coast. We thought he was crazy, but it is. I drive to La Costa a lot because that's where my grandson lives, and it's off the San Diego freeway.

What would the family do in the summer?

We used to rent a house in Venice for a

month or two in the summer. My dad would take

the streetcar to work every day. It took about an

hour or so.

What was Venice like then?

Very much like it is today on those little streets

that go up from the ocean front, except there

weren't the mobs of people, except on Sundays.

Kaspare Cohn and his daughter and son-in-law had a

big house on the corner of Ocean Front and Sunset

Avenue. We used to spend a lot of time there on

Sundays and holidays looking out the window and

watching the people walk by. Where we lived was up

the street and there was no street in front of our

house-just a sidewalk. It was above the Speedway,

between there and the streetcar tracks.

Do you remember the canals in Venice?

They were in the area that's now the Marina.

remember them. There are still some there. There

were a few gondola rides but I don't remember

anyone we knew going around the canals. There was

a roller coaster at the top of Windward Avenue,

called Race Through the Clouds. We went there

when we were young kids. There was also an Ocean

Park pier and Venice pier with amusements and a

dance hall.

Did you spend most of your time in Venice Beach?

Yes, right on the beach. Then we used to go

to the Venice pier and ride on the merry-go-round a

lot. They had games there, too. The Japanese used

to have ball games where you threw the ball and got

prizes. My mother had all kinds of china stuff that

she won on the piers at Venice in the summer.

You'd pay a dime and roll your ball and add your

score, and when you had your score there'd be a big

platter up there, it would be like 500 points, and

she'd save her points and get these platters. I had a bunch of them but they're all gone. It was good Oriental pottery-Imari and stuff like that that  today is priceless.

Did the rest of your family go to the beach,too?

Everybody went to the beach. They used to

take houses. After my great-grandfather died the

house on Ocean Avenue belonged to his five

children. They'd take it each summer in turn. One

year it would be my grandmother's turn. My mother

took it one time. Aunt Emily used to take the Loew

family. It was a big house with room for the kids.

There were steps down to the beach across the

street. It was great for kids.

I remember begging the family not to sell that

house. I was 18 when they sold it, that summer we

had a house also in Santa Monica, on 4th Street.

Richard was a baby then and John and Leon were

grown or away. The Loews had a house near there,

too. So someone else had the house in the front and

they were talking about selling it. I begged them not to, but it had gotten very old. They got it in 1905-1910 and it needed everything. There's an apartment house on the property now. When they sold it they broke my heart. It belonged to everybody in the family and it was a good piece of property and we always had fun there.

How would you describe ethnic relations when you were growing up?

Everything was fine. When I went to junior

high there were two or three black children in the

school and we were all friendly with each other. I

remember O.C. Mae Patton. She was black and a real good friend of ours. We liked her. We were never allowed to say the word "nigger" in our house. It was against the rules. My mother would call us down if we said it. We had a colored driver named Henry. He used to take Richard fishing. One time, after they returned, my mother said to Richard, where did you go? He said, I don't know. She said, were there any colored people there? He said no, only us. He didn't know what colored meant. He was about four or five.

Do you remember Nick’s house?

Sure. I remember going over to their house.

They lived on Arapahoe, between Hoover and

Vermont, between 9th and what's now Olympic,

which used to be 10th Street. They had a big old

two-story house and we used to go there and play. I

don't know if my mother used to leave us there or

come with us.

Nick was a little younger than you?

Yes. He just had an 85th birthday. He was

Leon's age. They were friends all their lives. He was always part of our family. All my brothers' friends were. Frederick Weisman, who collects art, has a brother Ted, who was Leon's best friend. They went to Stanford together. I see Ted all the time. He’s at Hillcrest usually when I go there, which is seldom. I see him also in Temple.

Does anyone stand out from your childhood for getting into trouble or being a prankster?

Once a boy in the neighborhood, the son of

friends of my mother's, hung John up on a telephone

pole I don't know how he got down. He was a bad

one They lived on Lorraine or Irving in Windsor

Square, where quite a few of us lived. You stayed in

your neighborhood when you were kids. We didn t

have cars. I never had a car until I got married.

Tell me about movies when you were young.

There was Universal and Mr. Laemmle, whom

everybody knew, owned it, and he had a daughter,

Rosabelle, who was a friend. She married Stanley

Bergerman and he's still around and I still see him

occasionally. He's my age and now re-married.

They used to own Universal City. There were a lot

of little studios around Hollywood and we used to go

on the lots all the time.

I have one friend, Helen Stern, now Mrs.Richard Lauter, whose father, Jacob Stern, owned the corner of Hollywood and Vine and a whole square block of orange grove. Catty-corner to their orange ranch was a barn. That's the barn they talk about that was saved by the city. And that was the Famous Players Lasky studio. Jacob Stern originally made his money in Fullerton, but they moved to Hollywood and they had a house on this property. It was far out for us to get to, but I used to go to Sunday school with her and her family would take us home and my parents would drive out and get me. In the summer I used to stay there two or three days.

They had a reservoir on their place to irrigate

the orange trees, and they sold the crop. It was like a farm. We used to swim in the reservoir, and that was the first swimming pool I ever went into. It was cement and eight feet deep all over. You couldn't stand up in it. They didn't have any steps into it. We had to jump in and pull ourselves out. I prevailed on her father to put some steps in, so he put a wooden ladder down. She used to give parties out there in the '20s and it was fun. Then they moved out to Holmby Hills and her mother died there. They had a fabulous property at Wilshire and Vermont, too. My friend still lives in Beverly Hills. She's married and her husband is 92. She's 90. We had a lot of fun together.

Did people think a lot about buying property in those days?

No. They should have, but they didn't. There

was so much of it, nobody thought it was going to be

good. In the '20s Louis and two or three of his     

friends were going to buy the corner of Wilshire and

La Brea. One of them was an architect. They were going to get a few dollars together, I think it was    about $25,000 for the corner, and none of them had the money. So it fell through and they kicked

themselves forever. But that's the way the old-timers were, they didn't see it. And the Newmark sold everything before it was time. Harris owned where the Santa Anita racetrack is, and he sold it to "Lucky" Baldwin.

["It was in March (1872) that we purchased from Louis Wolfskill the Santa Anita rancho, consisting of something over eight thousand acres, paying him eight-five thousand dollars for this beautiful domain. ..."When we bought the Santa

Anita, there were five eucalyptus tree or blue gum

trees growing near the house. I understood at the

time that these had been planted by William Wolfskill from seed sent to him by a friend in

Australia; and that they were the first eucalyptus

trees cultivated in Southern California." page 474

"On 'Lucky' Baldwin's first visit (1875), he offered us one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the

property; but learning that we wanted two hundred

thousand dollars, he started off in a huff. Then

Reuben Lloyd, the famous San Francisco attorney

who accompanied him, said on reaching the sidewalk, 'Lucky, go back and buy that ranch, or they'll raise the price on you!' and Baldwin returned, carrying under his arm a tin-box (containing several million dollars) from which he  drew forth twelve thousand, five hundred, tending the same as a first payment." p. 439, "Sixty Years in Southern California"]

Property didn't have any value in those early

days. You just had it. Maybe somebody owed you

some money at your store, so they gave you some

property. That's how Jacob Stern got his property.

He had a mercantile place and when the farmers

didn't pay their bills he foreclosed on them and took their property. A lot of people got rich that way in those days.

It’s hard to picture what downtown looked like back then.

It looked like it does now except the stores were smaller. The first high rise on 7th Street was the Roosevelt Building at 7th and Flower. Those were all built by my husband's ex-father-in-law in the 1920s. His name was Isadore Eisner, my children's grandfather. He built all the 12-story buildings downtown, every one that's named after a president, including 6th and Olive, which is called the 51 Building. He lost them all in the depression,

Let's talk more about stores and businesses. Did people mostly buy on credit?

We had charge accounts in stores, like they do

today. There was Robinson's, on 3rd and Broadway.

My mother used to take me in there to buy ribbon at

their ribbon counter. I used to sit up on the counter. We knew the girl, I think it was Miss Michaels. My mother used to sew and make clothes or underwear for me, and we used a lot of ribbon. Today you can't find ribbon anyplace. It was a small store, but as big as we had. This was a small town in the '20s. There were 50,000 people.

I also remember Meyer Siegel's, where I used

to buy my clothes. Mrs. Siegel worked in the store.

They had a two-story store, on Broadway. Then they

moved to the Miracle Mile. And then Bullock's came. It was the same store it is now. It was on 7th and Broadway. It was an eight-story building with a

furniture department, china and glassware. Then

Robinson's got big. They had a wonderful book

department. That's where I learned a lot about reading. There was a man named Mr.Kubel, their

book man. He used to get advance copies of everything and give them to me to read. My mother

was a good customer. I read everything I could get

my hands on.

Where did people shop for groceries?

There was a Young's market on 7th Street.

First there was one on Broadway, called Jevne's. It

was a fancy grocery that subsequently became like

Jurgensen's. It looked like a very nice store. It was large and so was Young's. Young's went wholesale.

Did the market have all kinds of food?

Jevne's didn't have meat, I don't think. There

was a delicatessen on N. Main Street, way up on

First Street called Jedofsky and Oder. They were a

couple of old German guys. They were like Mutt

and Jeff. It was fun going there. It was in the back

of a big market that subsequently became Grand

Central Market. It wasn't a Jewish deli, although

they had everything you could get in a Jewish deli. It wasn't kosher, though. We used to go there on the

way to the mill and get sandwiches and my mother would get cold cuts there. Jedofsky and Oder stayed in business until I was married to Louis. They used

to deliver, I remember. We'd order stuff when there was a football game and we'd have people over.

All the stores were downtown, except the small neighborhood markets. I remember a market at 9th and Hoover when I went to grammar school, where we used to go and buy candy bars after school. And we had a corner drugstore at 6th and Western when I was a teenager. It was called the Sterling Drug Co. and all the kids in the neighborhood who knew each other used to hang out there every afternoon. Sometimes we'd get ice cream sodas, which they made prolifically. Today you can't get a soda anyplace. I make them myself when I occasionally crave one.

When I was real little, there was a fruit and

vegetable vender named Charlie who came around

to Lake Street with a horse and wagon, and that

lasted until World War II. When we lived on

Kingsley we had a vegetable man who came to the

house, but by that time he was driving a truck.

When you were growing up, were people very conscious of the movie industry?

The ones that knew about it were. It wasn't

like it is today. There was a studio on Glendale

Boulevard, the old Mack Sennett studio, where

Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle worked. We

knew where they were but we never went running

after them when we were teenagers like they do

today. I was raised in Hollywood. I remember being

on the lot at Paramount when Geraldine Ferrar

made "Carmen." She didn't sing, because it wasn't a

talkie, but I remember watching her acting. My

friend Helen Stern and I could walk on that lot

whenever we wanted, because they knew her as the

Stern kid from the farm across the street. It was very informal. So we just walked over and watched them make movies if we felt like it, but most of the time we didn't.

Did you go to the movies often?

There was a movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard we used to walk to at night. It was down about six or eight blocks from Vine Street and Mrs. Stern used to send her maid along with us. When I was growing up we had to go downtown to go to a movie. We'd go to 3rd and Broadway to the first big theater before the Egyptian or the Chinese. They had a guy who played the organ in the fancy ones, or someone playing piano, and they made it up as they went along to match the action in the movie. We also went to the Orpheum that had Vaudeville live! 

What do you recall about the concerns your parents had about their children?

You didn't have to be so concerned about

your kids as you do today. But they talked about

them all the time, and all the kids knew each other

and played together. I was the only girl in the family.

Were the boys competitive with each other?

Not that I remember. We just all fought. We lived next door to the family that my niece, Pat Levi, married into the Louis Isaacs on Lake Street, and they had three kids. The boy, Hart Isaacs, was the same age as John and Leon and he was always the best friend. His son, Hart Junior, is married to Pat Leon's daughter. It just happened. I remember that the middle Isaacs child a girl-had polio. It was when polio was unknown. The youngest was a boy named Charles.

What diseases were people worried about when you were growing up?

They weren't worried about polio then. We all

had chicken pox and measles, etc.

Do you recall a flu epidemic?

In 1918 there was an epidemic,during the war.

It was a bad one. Quite a few people we knew died.

Some of the Jewish boys from Los Angeles in the

service died from it, and some were killed in action,but no one in our family. They were either too old or too young to go. But in World War II, I guess there were a lot of them. My three kids were all in at once. But they all came out of it.

What else do you remember about World War I?

I remember knitting socks. I was going to

Girl's Collegiate, and there was a lot of whoopla,

though not as much as there has been subsequently

about wars. It only lasted a few years and most of

the time it was in Europe.

Do you remember your parents talking about the war?

Not really. I remember the night it was over

with. Everyone got in their cars and drove around

town honking horns. Steve Loew got my parents and

they went with him. I was in school, and I guess it

was a school night.

Why don’t you tell me more about Girl’s Collegiate.

It was on the corner of Adams and Hoover. I think the buildings are still there. It's right next to the Christian Science Church, which has a big dome on it. My mother went there when it was a small, private girl's school. There were two girl's schools, Marlborough and Girl's Collegiate. Marlborough didn't take Jewish girls. My grandparents sent my mother to Marlborough, and she had been there a few days when the head mistress called my grandmother in and asked her not to recommend this school to any of her friends. So she said, if I leave my daughter here it's a recommendation, so I'll take her out. Then she sent her to Collegiate.

How did they get in if they didn’t take Jews?

I don't know. It was evidently a mistake of some sort. I think now they do take Jewish girls. But it was a quota deal. My mother graduated from Girl's Collegiate and when I became old enough to go she sent me. I even had some of the same teachers she had. They were old ladies, but they were darling. The school belonged to two sisters named Dennen. One was the principal and the other taught English. Her name was Miss Grace Dennen. She never married. She taught Shakespeare, and it was the best time of my life, because I loved it. She taught us to read and I've been a reader ever since.

Why did your mother and you get sent to private school in those days?

I don't know why my mother did, except maybe

it was the thing that people did. I got sent because

my mother had gone there and I was the first

grandchild of the school.

Was there anything people didn't like about the public schools?

Not in those days, because there were very few

of them. My mother wanted to get me away from

boys, I guess.

And your brothers went to public school?

Yes, they all went to L.A. High. Everybody

went there. My children went there.

You mentioned the quotas. Do you remember anything about anti-Semitism in those days?

It didn't really exist when I was in Girl's

Collegiate, there weren't many Jewish girls in the

school. There were two or three of us who went there. We were in different grades, but we knew each other. Some of them were my very good friends afterwards. But in school I went with two or three Christian girls from old families and we kept up our friendship for six or eight years after graduation but I got married when I was 18, and they didn t. Some of them went to college and we gradually just drifted apart. I don't think it had anything to do with anti-Semitism.

What kind of education did your parents have?

I don't think my father was educated, but he

was bright. He used to read a lot. My mother didn't

go beyond high school. Girls didn't go off to college in those days. A lot of girls didn't. My generation was about the first generation of Jewish girls that started going to college. A lot of the girls that were a year or two younger than I went to Mills, and gradually they went to other places. I never thought of going to college. They talked about it at high school and some of the girls went, but not the Jewish ones.

But the Jewish boys did?

Yes. My brothers went to Stanford. A lot of

the boys I knew went to Cal. Did your brothers go to Stanford because the family was up north? No, there was no family up north by that time. They just went there because they wanted to. It was a very good school. It wasn't as hard to get in there then as it is now. Some of the boys I knew went to Cal and one had a car, and he used to drive home. It took about eight hours. In those days UC didn't have all the branches.

Do you want to say more about the Depression?

I don't remember much about it except that

times were tough and Louis had a mother to help

support. He and his sister helped support her. She

worked and helped, and Louis did most of it

financially, I guess. She must have died around 1940.

Did any of the Newmarks have any problems during the

Depression?

Not that I know of.

When you were growing up were you aware that the family was an old L.A.family?

I knew it was an old family and I was 4th

generation and that they had some property. I

became conscious of that when my great-grandfather

died. When his estate was settled the five children

got their share and I don't know what it consisted of,but there was an office building at 9th and Los

Angeles Street, a 12-story building called the Harris Newmark building. They all owned that building. Steve Loew, Sr. used to run it. He and Marco Newmark, I think, although Marco afterward got out when he was older. It was a successful building and it made good money. Then they sold it and

everybody got their share, and by then I think my

grandmother had died, so my mother and my uncles

got their share of it. There never was an awful lot of money but nobody ever suffered much. Louis and I

had a tough time during the depression because we had three kids and things were tough. Lawyers did

better than other people, but they didn't do  wonderfully.

Were you aware of people who were doing badly?

Oh, yes. It wasn't anyone we knew, but we used to do a lot of what we called charity work. I always worked in the Parent-Teachers Association in the late 30's and early '40s. I did child welfare work and PTA. We had a huge feeding program going on all over the city. There only were 350 schools in those days, and I had charge of all of them. There were only about 20-30 of them that needed feeding help. We used to do it through their cafeterias. The cafeterias would provide the meals and the PTA would run it and pay for it. If a kid came to school without breakfast, he'd get breakfast. They'd give food to anyone who came and asked for it-and clothing if they had it. I thought that was wrong, because I knew enough about what was going on in the Jewish community that cases should be screened. So I set up a questionnaire for the schools. If a parent came in and asked for food for their children, if they wanted their child to have breakfast or lunch every day, they had to give them some sort of statement to prove they were needy. It wasn't very difficult, not like the social agencies do.I thought some people might have been taking advantage. In those days it was mostly Hispanics who lived on the East side. We didn't have any racial problems. The Japanese always took care of their own. They didn't always send their kids to public school, either. And the black children weren't poor like that then. We didn't have too much problem with the black schools as I remember. I remember there was one school in Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium is now, it isn't there anymore, and it was very poor. And there were schools in the East side, across the river. In those days you could go downtown and go all over town driving. Today I wouldn't dream of going downtown. I feel safe, but the traffic is so terrible; And we didn't have any freeways and if I wanted to go to Boyle Heights I went down E. 1st. Street. Sometimes I went to Venice to visit schools; I'd go around and give talks at various schools.

It sounds like the PTA's did more than they do now.

I think so. I don't hear anything about PTA these days. They had political power then. I remember going to state conventions when our kids were in grammar school. One year it was in San Pedro or Long Beach and one year it was in Oakland. I remember going there with a bunch of women from our school. Some of them were 10th District and some were local PTA's. I went as a local. Later I went as a district, because I was a district child welfare chairman. I'd had some experience in that in the Jewish community because I worked for Family Service at one time. The original Kaspare Cohn Hospital was on Whittier Boulevard in Boyle Heights. Then it moved and when it got big it was Cedars and they moved to Fountain. Kaspare Cohn was a relative, because my great-grandfather, Harris Newmark, was his uncle.

You mention Boyle Heights. That was a very large Jewish community at one time. Did any of your family live there?

No. They always lived west, as far as I know.

Boyle Heights was mostly the foreign-born, the

Eastern European Jewish people who lived there, and also a lot of the poor people. I used to go over there a lot because we didn't have charity work on this side of town in those days. It was mostly in

Boyle Heights. Evidently they were people who were just getting started. After all, I was fourth generation, so our family was established. We used to do work over there at a community center. One of my friends started a women's auxiliary and built it up, and we had summer camps.

We were German-Jewish. The German-Jewish families seem to have been the ones that were here first. They came here during the 1840s-'60s.They got settled here and in San Francisco, and also in the East. They became more substantial. The immigrant families came later, from Eastern Europe. Mostly they were Polish and Russian. They were Orthodox to begin with, while the Germans mostly were Reform. They kept up their religion and also their Yiddish,

I had a funny thing happen to me once. When Leon worked for Max Factor we used to see some of the Factors socially. One night John and Leon and their wives had a summerhouse for a month in Manhattan, and they invited Louis and me and some of the Factors for a barbecue. The Factors were telling these Jewish jokes. One of them had a Yiddish punch line and we didn't laugh. Max Factor, Junior said, "What kind of Jews are you anyway?" They were the foreign born ones. Max Factor came here and started selling powder on the street. They became members of Wilshire Boulevard Temple. As soon as they got a little money they moved west and they lived in Beverly Hills. I knew all of them. They were darling people. I was crazy about some of them. Max said his name was Frank, and when the father died they changed his name to Max Factor, Jr, so they'd have a name for the company. I always call him Frank when I see him. The older brother's name is Davis. I think he's still alive. But they did come from Boyle Heights, particularly the younger Max Factor's wife Millie. I know she was born there. Boyle Heights was also Orthodox Jews. There was also an Orthodox temple on Temple Street, somewhere on the hill near where the Board of Education is now. The charities mostly started in Boyle Heights, but they've all come west.

Why did the charities start there?

Because that's where most of the Jews were. There weren't a lot of Jewish people living around where we lived. There were many old time families, with names like Hancock and people like that, who all lived around us. And there was the Banning family. I think they lived on Alvarado. And Reese Taylor, whose father was Waller Taylor. Reese Taylor was Union Oil. They lived across the street from us. There were lots of Christians that we went to school with. Mulholland was older. My great grandfather knew him. Louis Lissner's father, Meyer, was a lawyer also, but he became a politician and he became the right-hand man of Theodore Roosevelt in California. Also, he was close to the senator who became governor, Hiram Johnson. He was terribly active in politics. This was between 1904-1912, maybe later. When I married Louis his father was in Washington. He had a job back there that was given to him because he was a big Republican. He had to give it up and come home because he had Parkinson's. He died before we got married.

Was your family very involved or interested in politics?

My parents weren't. None of the Newmarks were, as far as I know, and neither was Louis, for that matter. But his father was. He loved it. He thrived on it and I think that's why Louis didn't like it because he thought it killed his father.

Do you remember anything about Prohibition?

Yes. We all drank! Did you have bootleggers that

brought it to the house? No. We used to go to restaurants where they served it in coffee cups.

Were those speakeasies?

No, regular restaurants. I remember going places and getting it. I was at the age, 17, so I never went without liquor. We used to go to home parties and have cocktails.

Would people worry about being caught?

I don't remember being worried. We wouldn't drink and drive. I never had a problem because my husband never drank. He didn't like liquor, and I did. I never had to worry about the driving part.

Would you say that women in your generation were expected to get married rather than work?

Yes, mostly they were I don't know many people of my generation who had a career, not like today.

Was that generally acceptable to the women?

Yes, I think so. I had one friend who was married and had two children. She started writing children's books and she was very successful. She went to Bryn Mawr and subsequently became a doctor and became prominent.

You've seen some major changes in Los Angeles.

Sure. There was nothing out here. There was a dairy on Hauser right off of Pico and we used to go there and pick mushrooms. The cow fertilizer made mushrooms good when it rained. I remember when Hillcrest Country Club and Rancho were built Hillcrest was opened in 1921.

What else do you know about Hillcrest Country Club being opened?

They wanted a Jewish country club. Some of the members belonged to San Gabriel, and that was getting far and the city was getting big and it was harder to get there. It was started by some of the old-timers who thought they'd like a Jewish country

club. I think Joe Loeb was on the original board.

Marco may have been. It was the Hellmans, I know.

At one time Joe was president.

Hillcrest was a beautiful club, way out in the country. When it first opened there was a racetrack in Beverly Hills. It was about where Pico and Roxbury are now. They raced on Sundays and it made a big noise. There was nothing in Beverly Hills except the Beverly Hills Hotel had started. When the war came we belonged to Hillcrest. We were charter members. At that time, we lived down by the Ambassador and it used to take 45 minutes to get there. There were just two-lane highways. I was married to my first husband when Hillcrest opened and I started playing golf. When we got a divorce I was out and he sold his membership. Then I married Louis and he was a member. We stayed in a while, but we never went there because the children were little and in those days they didn't welcome kids. Today it's overrun with kids, but they're trying to stop it, because there are too many.

Besides the fact that they didn't allow kids when we belonged, there was also a Depression. We were married in 1932 and by 1936 there was the

depression. I couldn't play golf anyway because I

didn't have gasoline to get there and we had gas rationing during the war. The Factors gave Leon a

membership and he didn't want it particularly. Louis

decided he wanted to go back in after the war so

Leon sold us his membership. In those days you

could do that. We went back in and I still belong. I

played golf for many years. When Louis was alive we

were very active at the club, but all our friends are gone. I don't know a soul over there anymore. I just keep the membership because my son thinks I

should. I couldn't play golf anymore. I couldn't get

up and down the hills, even with a cart. Nick and I are the only ones in our family who have lived   beyond 76 except my Uncle Joe Loeb. I used to say to Louis, you're going to outlive me. He said,

"Remember your Uncle Joe." And I remembered my

Uncle Joe who lived to be 90. He's the only one. I

can't do anything much, but I am healthy.

Tell me about your first marriage.

I got married at 18. I was married for nine years and then I was divorced. We adopted a baby before we divorced, though. We knew a relative of someone who died in childbirth. She knew I was trying to have a baby and she asked me if I wanted to adopt this baby, so I took him. He was ten days old when we got him. He was from up north and not Jewish. He was a good little kid. He was always a very good son. When I married my second husband Louis Lissner, in 1932, he adopted this son, whose name is John London. He changed his name because he had a wife who didn't want to be related to us. It's a long story. It created problems. He works at the Capital Milling Company, too.

John London had two sons whom I raised along with the other grandmother, and they're darling. Andrew Lissner is a marine biologist in La Jolla. He has two little girls. The other one is Christopher, a paralegal in a big law office downtown. They're not really blood relatives of ours except Louis and I raised them and they were terrific grandchildren. I'm very close to them.

My son, Dick, has four kids. My son, Robert, who lives up north, has three kids, one of whom also is adopted. I see the oldest girl a lot. She comes    down to see me. Louis and I also raised his two sons, Bob and Dick.

What else do you know about family members?

My mother used to see Rosalie Seligman Jacoby because she was her cousin and she was a Scientist also. They met sometimes through the church. When my mother was alive I occasionally saw Rosalie and her daughters. We've lost complete track of each other. I don't know where they are.

And Joe and Edwin Loeb each had two daughters and I never see them or hear from them.  They're my first cousins, and none of us ever see them. We don't know where they are. Marjorie and Virginia were Edwin's and Kathleen and Margaret are Joe's. The last I heard of her she lived on the Stanford campus with her husband. They have a daughter. Virginia married somebody named Scott and had five children and lived in Santa Monica. I never saw her but I have a friend whose husband was related to her on her mother's side, and he used to see her, and they said she was ill and one of her children took her up north to live. She told me that within the last six months. She doesn't know much about her, either.

And that's my story!

HARRIS "NICK" NEWMARK (1907-1997)

Harris Newmark,Jr, born in 1907, was the son of Constance Meyberg Newmark and Marco R. Newmark and one of the youngest grandchildren of Sarah and Harris Newmark. He's known for his sharp wit and his warm and humorous anecdotes about the family are

a wonderful addition to this update of the family history,

Nick, why don't you talk about your family and your earliest memories of them.

The memories don't go back as far as they should. My own family lived on Arapahoe Street in a house they had built a few months after I was born.That was in 1907. My sister Eleanor and I both went to Hoover Street grammar school, Berendo Intermediate (now junior high) and L.A. High. I remember the home very well because I lived there, except for time away at college, for 27-8 years. It was a two-story house, square and very comfortable. It was wood. It was green and it had a front porch. It had a bamboo tree in the back which the kids in the neighborhood and I used to make use of. You'd put mud on the end of a stick and flick it. We used them to sling mudballs all over the neighborhood. The trees along the street were tall, slender palms. In those days there apparently was no fear of fires, because they never cut the fronds down, and they accumulated year by year, dried out and hung straight down. There were practically no automobiles and we used to play football, baseball, depending on the season, in the street, without fear of getting hit by a car. Frequently the baseball or other things we used would get stuck in the fronds and when there was a good wind, during the night the first one out got all the stuff that was knocked down onto the street.

When did people start calling you Nick instead of Harris?

I got that in high school. We had a mathematics teacher who was wonderful to the students. He used to take several of us in his car to an ice cream factory nearby in which he had a part and parcel ownership and we each got a helping of ice cream, in addition to which, once we got out of sight of the school, he didn't mind if we smoked. In those days, and I think there still is, there was a Nick Harris Patrol which primarily monitored neighborhoods, residences. It was a private company. Everybody used the streetcar, and the streetcar benches all along the various lines had advertisements for Nick Harris Patrol, so the name was well-known. The math teacher started calling me Nick Harris and all the kids in the class picked it up and it's been with me ever since.

What kind of neighborhood was it?

It was primarily gentile, maybe a quarter Jewish. It was a good neighborhood, not elegant but a nice neighborhood, and small. But immediately north the affluence of the residents was lower.Consequently Hoover Street Grammar School had a mixture of children from well-to-do families and from poorer families.

Did many of your relatives live in the area?

Yes, within walking distance.

What are some early memories of your family?

My sister Eleanor, who is three years younger, and I didn't always get along too well, which was primarily my fault, because I usually ignored her (this has subsequently been corrected). I was very fond of my parents, whose names were Marco and Constance Newmark. To my best recollection, I always got along very well with them until I reached my middle teens, when I began to experiment with ways of living which they didn't care too much about. I'm speaking of bootleg whiskey and girls.

Neither of which pleased them?

It depended on the girl!

Where would you get the whiskey?

It was amazing we didn't all get killed by poison. We'd go out in a group of 4-5 in a car and someone always had a phone number, which one of us called. Arrangements were made to meet on some dark corner where we'd wait, the bootlegger would pull alongside of us, we'd give him $5 and he'd give us a bottle of bathtub gin. Usually the race was to see who got sick first. 

Later in life, at 22, when I'd finished college   and come home to live while I worked, there was a   

bootlegger on the corner of 9th and Hoover, who had a lease on the whole apartment house. He ran his bootlegging business on the second floor. Rooms were available for any who wanted them, if they would pay the price, which was probably $2. I remember during the Bank Holiday, my family had no cash, so I borrowed enough from the bootlegger to carry us through until the banks were reopened.

Going back a ways, my father was very fond of fishing and I inherited that from him. We often went fishing anywhere from the long wharf in Santa Monica to as far south as Balboa. He'd drive, fish, and then take us home, and in the case of Balboa, he’d row the boat. I never inherited his energy.

When did your father get a car?

I think his first car was a Chalmers. During

World War I he bought a Stanley Steamer, which gave him nothing but trouble. He wasn't enough of a mechanic to do the things necessary to keep it running, and additionally, if he went any distance it ran out of fuel. Finally, we were playing football or baseball in the street in front of the home when my father came home one night and started up the driveway, which was a small incline. Half-way up the driveway we heard a lot of explosions and steam boiling over. My father was not injured, but he obviously didn't like the episode. At that time he decided to sell the Stanley Steamer, and ran an ad. It was answered by a one-legged man who paid him approximately what he bought it for. The gentleman wanted the car because he could not manipulate the brakes and throttle with only one leg. The throttle on the Stanley Steamer was on the steering wheel.

Was there anything else unusual about that car?

It had a steam engine. Because the full power of the car could be stimulated very quickly with the hand on the throttle, the car could go 20-30 miles an hour in a quarter of a block. In those days a lot of kids used to hang onto the back of the car on bicycles when it started and ride about a block, until it finally reached 8-10 miles an hour, then let go. They learned very quickly not to try that on a Stanley Steamer.

Do you want to say something about your maternal grandparents?

My maternal grandparents, Max and Emma Meyberg, lived on the same street we did, but on the other side and further north. My grandfather loved to garden and as a young boy I spent a fair amount of time working with him in the garden on weekends.

My mother was very close to her mother and spent a great deal of time with her and an aunt, Camilla   

Hellman.                                     

What kind of work did your grandfather Meyberg do?

He was in the lighting fixture business, commercial equipment, with several partners. Fortunately, he was smart enough to leave that business before 1929, when commercial building stopped, and he then got a Westinghouse light globe distributorship and ran that from his office and warehouse in the warehouse of the Leo J. Meyberg Company, (his son) He did his own selling and shipping, with the help of two other men. When he died, in about 1935, the Leo J. Meyberg Company, for which I worked, took over his business and I was put in charge of the light globe division, which I handled for some 10-12 years. It's an interesting fact that my grandfather did all his bookkeeping at his office, including the expenses of the home. After his demise, the IRS examined his books and said they couldn't understand what was income, what was legitimate business or home expense, and so dropped the audit, which was fortunate, except that they probably did so because the estate was not very large.

How about your paternal grandparents, Sarah and Harris Newmark?

I don't remember my grandmother because she passed away when I was about two. My grandfather I remember very well, because he lived until I was nine and he liked to be surrounded by his family. So every Thursday afternoon he'd come by our house on Arapahoe, pick me up, along with a cousin, Leon Levi, and one of our parents, and take us for a ride. This usually took place about the time a football or baseball game was getting exciting and I’d have to leave it to go with him, which didn't

increase my fondness for him.

Where would you go?

To Santa Monica and back, something of that sort. Almost always west. I very often sat in the front seat, next to the chauffeur, and a Pierce Arrow in those days did not have doors to protect those sitting in the front seat. I used to be a little leery of falling out of the car but I never did. After my grandmother died he lived with one of his daughters, Emily Loew, on Alvarado Street. Frequently he had the family over for food and pictures.

What are your memories of Santa Monica back then?

Santa Monica was for those days a long distance from L.A. and transportation back and forth was limited to the comparative few autos at that time and the Pacific Electric, which handled most of the traffic, both freight and people. The only neighboring communities were on the ocean and to the south in the following order: Ocean Park, Venice, and Playa Del Ray. In recollection, Santa Monica was a pretty clean, small town with its own streets and gardens, (flowers grew prolifically during the summer.)

My most vivid memory of Santa Monica, other than fishing, was the automobile races held once a year. The track was the streets and the route was Wilshire to Ocean Avenue to San Vicente and all the way back to the east end of San Vicente at Wilshire.  We lined the streets to watch the cars speed by  (probably 60 miles per hour tops) and the hero was Barney Oldfield, the leading driver of his day. After an accident or two when skidding racers hit the spectators-causing serious injuries, if not death-the sport was called off in Santa Monica.

Let's talk a little more about your grandfather.

He was stern and we had to be quiet when we were with him, which also did not help our affection.

He had a summer home in Santa Monica on Ocean  Avenue, a good sized two-story home, where every

other year we stayed with him for about 2-3 months.

Outside of having to be quiet in his presence, it was wonderful because I could walk down to the pier and go fishing every day.

Were there a lot of sunbathers at the time?

No, there just weren't many people on the beach. The beach was entirely different then. It was a beautiful beach. The water was clear. Everything was clean. I remember catching a number of small fish, such as smelt and a few others, bringing them home and insisting that they be cooked for dinner. The cook was not very fond of this. As I recall, I had to clean the fish first.

Did each family have their own cook?

No. I don't think so. It seems to me we went down with maybe a nurse. The rest of the staff was my grandfather's.

What kind of stories did the family tell about Harris?

I don't remember, except that they seemed to think of him in reverence.

Were you raised knowing that your family was an old Los Angeles family?

I wasn't too conscious of it until I was older.

My father took a great deal of pride in it. Obviously he was well enough informed to participate in the writing of “Sixty Years in Southern California.” I can remember him working on that until 2 or 3 in the morning after a full day's work at the grocery company. He was very dedicated to the completion of it, working with his older brother Maurice and a man named Perry Worden, who was a professional researcher.

Was this to update it or finish the original?

This was to finish the first edition. I believe

Maurice died in 1928 and the second edition came out when Maurice was still alive, but after that my father did almost all the work by himself or without the help of Perry Warden.

What else do you know about the writing of Sixty Years in Southern California"?

I think they worked from Harris's memory. He may have jotted some things down. The book jumps around from here to there, just like things came to his mind. I don't think my grandfather had anything

to do with the writing of it. I think the two sons and this professional researcher did the work. I think my father and uncle did most of the writing.

Except for the first three or possibly four editions, they updated them and had a different forward. During World War II-I think three editions had been put out by then-the country asked for metal, rubber, anything to help the war effort. So the family got a strong feeling of patriotism and gave all the type to the government because it was copper. So that was the end of that.

My father single-handedly brought out the fourth edition after World War II. It was done almost entirely by photography. Then the fifth edition, which I had quite a bit to do with, was merely a copy of the fourth edition. There was only a page or two of printing. Jake Zeitlin took on the publishing of the fourth edition and he suggested that we turn it over to Dawson's Bookstore on Larchmont. They acted as publisher. They've got about half the edition left. For the first one, they published maybe 1000 copies, and by the time the family got through, they were probably a quarter gone. I think there was a lot more interest in early Los Angeles in those days than there is now.

Tell me about your father, Marco.

He was a something of a playboy as a young man, from what he told me. I'm speaking of high school. He used to go in the back and smoke, the same things I did. He suddenly became aware of the fact that he needed a better education and went to Berkeley, graduated from there and went to the University of Berlin, where he anticipated spending two years, with the intention of possibly becoming a professor. He was very discouraged after about six months in Germany because of the anti-Semitism he encountered so he gave up that ambition, came back to Los Angeles and worked for the family-owned grocery business, in 1902.

What can you tell me about that business?

The business was originally H. Newmark, started in 1865, in Stearns's Arcadia Block on Los Angeles Street, and soon after changed to H.Newmark & Company. ["A brief chronology from Sixty Years in

Southern California : "My only assistant was my wide-awake nephew, M.A. Newmark, then fifteen years of age, who had arrived in Los Angeles early in 1865."(p. 343)..."Sam, brother of Kaspare Cohn, who had been in Carson City, Nevada, came to Los Angeles and joined me. We grew rapidly, and in a short time became of some local importance. When Kaspare sold out at Red Bluff, in January 1866, we tendered him a partnership. We were now three very busy associates, besides M.A. Newmark, who clerked for

us." (p. 354) "After twenty years' association with the wholesale grocery business, I withdrew, on December 5th, 1885, from H. Newmark & Company, and on that day the business was absorbed by M.A.

Newmark, M.H. (Maurice) Newmark, Max Cohn and Carl Seligman, and continued as M.A. Newmark & Company, (p. 549)]

My father stayed with it until they were forced

to close for lack of available funds, in about 1935.

What really killed the wholesale grocery business was the co-ops and the beginning of the large markets, who very often bought directly and didn't need a wholesaler.

What did a wholesale dealer mostly carry then?

Almost everything but produce. They carried

all canned goods, flour, sugar, etc. I remember

working there one summer vacation, when I was in

high school. They bottled their own vinegar and as

the bottles came down the line, after being filled and corked, it was my duty to dip each one in a wax

solution to seal the cork.

Where was the business located eventually?

It was on Wholesale Street, at the Southern

Pacific Terminal, approximately 7th and Alameda.

What did your father do when they had to close?

He had a tough time from two standpoints.

One, the whole family to varying degrees was hit real hard by the depression and, also, my father didn't like the idea of being inactive.

The Harris Newmark estate had been incorporated after my grandfather's death and according to the terms of his will, each of the five children got 20% of the properties. That was fine in the 20s. During that period the Harris Newmark building, at the corner of 9th and Los Angeles Street "was built in memory of my grandfather. It was a loft building and was full of clothing manufacturers. When the Depression came along, the lessee of the building couldn't handle it any longer because the smaller manufacturers were going out of business rapidly and walking away from their leases. The family had to take it over, without any particular amount of rent coming in. I remember their telling me at the time that the mortgage was held by Pacific Mutual Insurance Company. The family told them to take the building because they couldn't meet the payments. Pacific Mutual said, "We don't want the building-you keep it."

Eventually it began to work out of its problems, but unfortunately, the family sold it way too soon. Then my dad in a minor way had something to do with the running of the building for which he was paid a very small amount in today's terms, but quite a bit in those days. In spite of his struggling for an idea to find something he could do he never really did any work, but being a scholar he wrote a great deal.

He was very active in Masonry, an active Shriner, active in the B'nai B'rith lodge and others which I can't remember. He also, until it had to go out of business because of the Depression, was very active in the Uplifter's Club. That was a club within the L.A. Athletic Club. Certain people there who were supposedly gifted from the standpoint of being writers or musicians or artists formed this lunch club within the L.A. Athletic Club. They later got

ambitious in the late '20s, and bought a great deal of property in Santa Monica, and some of the members

bought or leased lots and put up their own homes. The clubhouse was there. I remember having some good times down there with my father and the family. It wasn't on the beach; it was near Will Rogers Park. When the Depression came along, that was the end of that. When things got tight, this group of men who insisted on people of some talent joining, needed money worse than they needed talent so they began to take in people who had at the time money. Later they went broke, too. By then the club was wiped out. [Editor's note: The former Uplifters' Clubhouse is in Santa Monica Canyon, on Mesa, off of Entrada. Now it's called the Rustic Canyon Community Recreation Center. * I (Linda) went to camp for 6 weeks there in the 1940s.]

Was your family able to stay in their home?

Yes. They stayed there until my father died in 1959. My father had a great affection for the home and didn't want to move. My mother had wanted to move west among her friends, but didn't do it until a

considerable length of time after my father's death.

The house was then sold and the last I remember, the man who bought it-a bachelor who lived there alone-was still there 20 years later. The house is still standing as of six months ago.

Let's talk about your mother.

She was more of a homebody. She liked family, at least her side of it, and was very close to her mother and aunts. Mother never did any amount of housework. She read a great deal had tea parties, etc. She reached an age when there weren't many of her contemporaries around.

Did she not care for your father's side of the family?

I don't think they had a great deal in common. It was not a matter of disliking; it was just that they went in different directions. Of course mother always went to the Newmark family parties and got

along with everybody, but I think she felt more

comfortable with her own group.

Do you know how your parents met?

I really don’t.

Was your family religious?

No. As a matter of fact, that brings up an interesting subject. My family insisted that I go to

Sunday school at the B'nai B'rith temple, which became the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. At that time it was at 9th and Hope Street. The Jeffrey's family lived across the street from it, they had a son slightly older than I and he had to go to the

Presbyterian Sunday school, around the corner from the B'nai B'rith Temple. He had the same distaste for Sunday school I did. There was a Catholic church about a block from the two of them, who knew how to get to kids. They had moving pictures. So the two of us would play hookey and go to the Catholic Church and watch the moving pictures. Either my parents knew I was playing hookey and paid no attention to it, or they didn't find out. But when it came time for me to be confirmed I went to my parents and said, "Do you really care whether I'm confirmed or not?" And they said they didn't care. So if you ask me how religious they were, that's the answer. They went to temple only twice a year for the holidays, although father was active on the temple board.

Were they still identified with being Jewish?

Yes, very much so. It wasn't a matter of trying to avoid that, it's just that my father was an agnostic and he thought religion was a lot of baloney.

Was that how his parents also felt?

Sarah, I don't know anything about. Harris seemed to be somewhat religious. But I was very young when he died.

So the family mostly associated with other Jews and Jewish organizations?

Father was very involved. They both belonged

to the Concordia Club. They used to have lectures.

That was a mixed Jew and gentile social club.

And your friends were apparently a mixture.

Yes, although the older I got the more they became Jewish.

Did you run into any anti-Semitism in your neighborhood or school?

Not really. I don't remember any, maybe a crack once in a while.

Let's talk about some of your other relatives. Did you have any favorites on the Newmark side?

They were so much older than I was They were 20 years older than my father. I knew them all and spent some time with them.

Did anyone stand out in terms of personality?

The next generation, my father's age, very much so. I thought Edwin Loeb was a great guy of course, this was when I was considerably older not a kid. We used to play bridge at his home very often until 2 or 3 in the morning, with plenty of whiskey. And Steve Loew Sr.-- I remember when I stayed with my family at my grandfather's in Santa Monica Steve Loew bought a Stutz Bearcat, a real sporty car for those days. His wife Lucille took me to the concessions on the pier, and driving around in that car gave me a great thrill. It made a lot of noise it was a well-known car. The pier, as I recall, was in Ocean Park; I don't believe they had any concession at Santa Monica in those days, but they did have a ballroom.

Do you remember Rose Loeb Levi?

Oh, yes, because Leon, one of her children, and I went through school together and I spent a lot of time at their house. I still remember it was always well-stocked with candy.

What do you recall about Rose and Herman?

Rose was an attractive looking woman. She pretty well ran the roost, as far as the house was concerned. I don't know anything about their

business affairs. She was very conversationally minded and he usually sat on the sidelines. It was not unusual for the woman to do the talking however. 

Were there any particular characters in the family?

One of my father's sisters was named Ella. She

married Carl Seligman. They had two daughters my

father's age, and one of them, Rosalie, married a

Jacoby and they were very successful. He was a nice-looking guy without money or brains, but she was a very shrewd investor and did very well. The son,

Grover, fancied himself as a poet and I think had

quite a bit of stuff published. He died a long time ago. (Editor’s note: Grover was the publisher of two poetry magazines and his poetry, papers and letters are in Special Collections at the UCLA library.) There were two girls. Sally and Eleanor, and I don't know what happened to them.

You were good friends with Leon?

Yes. John was a little superior to us. He was older. Elizabeth, of course, was much older.

What are your memories of them?

John always tried to run us, not very successfully. He was a year and a half, two years older, which is a big deal when you're younger. The youngest son, Richard, was quite a bit younger than we were and we didn't pay any attention to him. Everything goes by age, I guess.

What was Leon like?

He was bright. He used to drive me nuts when I'd go to his house after high school sometimes. He was a wireless buff. That's when the communication between Catalina and the mainland was by radio. People thought they were on a private line and everyone in town who wanted to could tune in on them and hear whatever they had to say. He used to spend all his time with his damn radio and I sat around doing nothing, waiting until someone took me home. But Leon and I got along quite well. We roomed together at Stanford at one time. Leon was unusual. From the time he was I don't know how old, he adored his two uncles, particularly Ed Loeb, but also Joe Loeb. From the time he reached high school his one desire was to be an attorney. He was well suited for it and very successful. He was the Loeb and Loeb representative or partner handling Max Factor and the Factor family liked him so well they induced him to leave the law and come to work for them. Then, a European branch of Factors was bombed out, and they needed someone to go over there and rebuild. They sent him and his family over there and they lived in

England for a year or two. As far as I know, Leon  got them successfully out of the trouble. It was badly run, but not illegal. Leon married a nice young lady Dorothy Bachman. They had two children, Patty and Doug. I don't know what she died of, but she died as a very young woman. Then he married Dee

and she really raised the children.

When you went to Stanford, was it always a given that you'd go to college?

As far as my parents were concerned, yes. My mother never went to college, but my father became quite scholarly and was very ambitious for me to become at least a university graduate. I think he gave up as far as my becoming a scholar was concerned. My idea was to go to Tulane in New Orleans or go to the University of Hawaii, which sounded great to me. They nixed that and then I said I'd like to go to Berkeley, and my father, who had graduated from there said it's too darn big, go to Stanford, which was a very wise thing.

You must have done very well in high school.

Reasonably well. I was terrible in Latin, just awful. My father was very anxious for me to take Latin, but in a family conversation my maternal

grandfather told me I ought to take Spanish. He

said it's the coming language in Southern  California. He really saw what was coming. Today you can't order a meal; you can't have your car parked or do anything without speaking Spanish.

So I took Latin and hated it and I got a pony an English interpretation of the book. With the help of that I got along reasonably well. I got through about two and a half years of it. One day the teacher told me to come up and I let the pony slide off my lap and she said, bring up whatever you dropped there. So she destroyed the thing or kept it or whatever and from then on I didn't know a darn

thing about Latin. After fussing around with me for a while the principal finally called my parents and

suggested that I drop Latin.

When I got to college I was one year short of

foreign languages, so the recommendation was (it

was really a demand) that I take a year of a different language. So I went into the French class and the assistant professor was talking in French to the students, and I heard that for about two minutes and walked out and took Spanish. The only way I got

through Spanish was by cheating. One year we

studied five different Aesop fables in Spanish. The

final was to, in our own words in Spanish, write one

of three out of the five Aesop fables. The only thing I could do was memorizing one and hope to hell they picked it, which they didn't. So I wrote down the one I memorized anyway. We had a rather attractive young instructor, so after class I went up to talk to her and gave her some blarney that I knew this one better so I thought I'd give it to her and she said,” You mean you memorized it?" And I said, "Yes." She said, "I know the problem. Don’t worry, I'll give you a C."

What did you major in?

Econ. Where I don't think I learned a great

deal, whether it was the fault of the course or my

fault, I don't know. Probably a little of each.

Was that in the '20s?

Yes. I graduated in'28.

Let's talk a little about those years. What was most important to you?

Playing cards. If I spent as much time studying

as I did playing cards I probably would have been a

Phi Beta Kappa. Mostly bridge. I remember contract bridge started in the San Francisco area as far as the West Coast is concerned. We started playing it at Stanford and I became fairly proficient. There were much better players than I but I was fairly decent at it. So when I came down here after graduation the fellows here were just starting to play contract and I knew it, so I really cleaned up for a while until they caught up with me.

What stands out in your mind about the roaring '20s?

Bootleg alcohol-there weren't many blind pigs, speakeasies. They had a lot in San Francisco but none down here to speak of. It was such a thrill to go up there and hit the speakeasies, which was just like going into a bar.

Were people worried about raids?                          

No, I got caught in a raid once, down here. I

had a cousin named Harold Germain and I had some

girl I was going with at the time, I don't remember  

which one. Someone told me there was a home on 

Wilshire Boulevard, about as far out as L.A. High,  

that was an Italian restaurant that served wine so I

suggested we go there and have dinner. When we  

pulled up in front I told the other two to wait and I'd go in and make sure we could get in. I knocked on the door and rang the bell and a couple of tough    

looking guys opened the door and said, "What do   

you want?" I said, "I understand you have food and

wine. Three of us want to come in." There were red

and white checkered tablecloths and everything.    

They said, "We don't know you, how can we take a  

chance with you?" So I mentioned the bootlegger I 

knew on Hoover Street. They said, "Who is he?" I  

said, "He's at such and such, why don't you call him  

and verify that I'm OK?"

And then they grabbed me! They were        undercover police. They raided the joint and       

cleaned it out. And I hit it at just the right time. So then they said, "You're breaking the law." And I    

said, "I'm not breaking the law. I haven't done a     

damn thing." They began to overwhelm me, and said, you take us up and buy us a drink at Honig's and we'll let you off. I said, "I won't do it, and not only that, I haven't done anything wrong. You have nothing to arrest me on." So they finally let me go. I rushed to the nearest phone and called Honig and told him what happened. He had to close up for a few days.

A little later than this we used to go down to

Central Avenue. There were a lot of nice spots there. There was a mixture of black and white in

these places and as far as I know everybody got along fine. Now look what they've got.

Do you have any favorite memories about your

neighborhood?

My father was crazy about French bread and

some bakery when I was a real small kid used to

deliver it every other day. He came with a horse and

wagon and he'd take it up to the front or back door

and leave it, then go back and go on to his next

customer. One day he went up to the house with the

loaf of bread and my father started the car and

started down the driveway, and it frightened the

horse, and the horse took off. I never had so much

fun. We got in my father's car and chased the wagon

until we finally caught it somewhere around

Alvarado and 9th, and he got the horse calmed down

and went about his business. Another thing, they

used to deliver ice by horse and wagon. The iceman

would come and cut off a hunk and put it in the

icebox. We used to chip away and get little pieces of ice. He knew it and didn't care. When I was in intermediate school there was a small grocery store over on 9th Street near Hoover and I got a job delivering for him on a bicycle with a bag over my neck, with pockets in back and front, and I think he paid me two dollars a week, which I thought was great.

What’s now in the area where your home was?

Koreatown. It's not in the center, but awful

close to it.

Do you have any memories of World War I?

Yes. There was a family that had a big estate,

for those days, on Alvarado, between Wilshire and

7th. The owners had an afternoon party where you

bought tickets, which was for something for the

soldiers and you got a chance to win prizes. My

mother couldn't go and gave me the ticket and I won

a box of chocolate candy. I was so proud of it. I

went home with it. It was a hot day and by the time I got home it was just a big mass of chocolate that had all melted.

I remember Victor Hugo's, which was a very

well-known restaurant in those days. It was

downtown. I was taken there once or twice and in

those days, on account of the so-called food

shortage, they had a rule, you paid so much for a

buffet meal, probably $1 or $1.50, but if you took

more than you ate they charged you double, I

remember how cautious I had to be not to load on

more than I could eat. I realize now it was a

publicity gimmick but it worked.

Did your family talk a lot about what was going on in Europe in the war?

My grandfather, Harris, who was born in Germany and lived there until he was 19, was adamant that Germany was no place to be and he hoped they'd lose. My father was bom here and had affection for Germany, so he was pro-German as far as the war was concerned, until we got into it. Now that I think of it, it's very interesting.

Did the family members argue or discuss such matters a lot?

I've got to tell you about the time that Dewey

lost to Truman. After my grandfather Meyberg died,

my grandmother lived in this home on Arapahoe,

and every Monday night we used to meet there for

dinner-my sister, father and mother, an aunt or two

and Manfred Meyberg and his wife. He was the son.

Everybody except my wife, myself and my sister and

her husband were real hot Republicans. We were

Democrats. The night of the election, they changed

the family party from Monday to Tuesday so the

Republicans could gloat over Dewey's victory. We

got there and my uncle, who loved to do these things, had gotten Dewey stickers and buttons. We had the usual drink or two and then sat down to dinner. The results of the election began to come over the radio. You never saw a party die so fast in your life. Of course, we gloated about the thing, but the rest of the family thought the world had come to an end. Everybody crawled out and went home.

Do you remember World War I ending?

Yes. The Jeffries family lived across the street

from us and the thing to do was get in the car, of

course we needed someone to drive us, and go to the

downtown area and yell and scream and honk the

horn. We sot word that the War was ended and victory was ours and old man Jeffries drove us downtown and we went through the ceremony and then it turned out it was a false rumor. So we all crawled home. About two days later the thing was official. It hadn't been signed yet. I don't remember if we went downtown a second time or not

Do you have anything else to relate about the property the family owned?

They had a four-story building on Olympic at

about Hope. It was a regional distributorship for

automobiles. They got a chance to sell it to the

Norton family, another old family, and sold it for

cash. There were five members of the board in 1927-

8, the market was going up and they decided they

should put that money in the market. John Levi had

just gotten out of college and was working for some

brokerage house here, so he got the business, and

they got the business when the whole thing went

completely el floppo. I don't know if they bought on

margin or what. I have no idea. But I know it was a

very unsuccessful venture. Then they had the

Graybar Building, about 8th and Wall Street or

Santee. That was the distributing branch of AT&T, I

believe. It was connected with Western Electric,

which was AT&T-owned. It was a national chain of

wholesale electric supply companies. They occupied

the building and they paid $2000 a month rent, which

was big money in those days. Their lease ran out and

they decided to move and that was a problem-they

had a building with nobody in it. That was a tragedy.

Somewhere-I don't know how he got it- there

was a hotel on S. Main Street which was kind of an

embarrassment to the family. They got a very nice

lease, and then they found out the guy who rented it was running a prostitution ring out of there. But

they didn't want to interfere with the rent money, so they didn't do anything about it. I don't remember if I ever knew what happened. My father was a little ashamed of it. But the color of money looked good. And they all felt that way.

Let's talk about World War II and the years preceding that

I thought for a while I might get called. By

then my wife and I and our two children lived in

Westwood. We were a little nervous about the

situation because if I got called there wouldn't be

any income. But it turns out that the company I

worked for was considered of value for the war

effort. I was married, I had two kids, I was in my 30s, so they put me back on whatever classification it was. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of any military ambitions I had.

In World War II our driving was curtailed

quite a bit. We had coupons, and you could only get

so many gallons. The company I was with, the Leo J.

Meyberg Company, distributed RCA Victor records.

There was a shortage of shellac, so records were

scarce. If you wanted to buy a new record you had

to turn in an old one. The guys who really needed

records for their financial health were the juke box

operators. These guys knew how to get anything.

We used to get whiskey, cigarettes, anything we

wanted from them in return for giving them a few

extra records. There's always a way to do things, I

guess.

Do you remember much conversation about what was happening in Germany and Europe during the war?

Most of the conversation was confined to what

our people were doing over there. Of course, there

was a tremendous hatred of Hitler and the Germans

and for a while the Russians, and of course

Mussolini and the Italians.

Did the family feel any identification with their German roots?

No, not that I can recall. It had been a long

time since Harris came to America... in 1853. it's

amazing to think of the family being here that long.

        FANNIE EMILY NORDLINGER ABRAMS 1908-1999

Fannie Emily Nordlinger Abrams was born in 1908, the

granddaushter of Emily and Jacob Loew and the daughter of Rose and Louis Nordlinger. She has been called "Fen" since her teens and is well-known in the family for her wonderful sense of humor, Fen

hasn't been feeling well recently so her comments here are limited. Nevertheless she makes a wonderful contribution to the Newmark family history.

Tell us about your birth and your earliest memories.

I was born October 9,1908. We lived on top of the hill at 1537 West 9th Street, until I was 15. It was a big house, and it embarrassed me because it was very proper. There was a cook and a maid upstairs and one downstairs. Anything like that embarrasses me. My brother, Louis Jr. was born in 1912.

What are your memories of your relatives?

I only had three first cousins and I was the only

girl. Every time a new baby came along I was scared

to death because I was afraid it would be a girl. I

liked being the only one!

My mother's first cousin, Eleanor Newmark

Scharff is just a little older than I am, and she was and still is my closest friend. She's Nick's sister. Eleanor and I understand each other. We always have. We would go into a closet in their house that had a hat cupboard, and we'd climb into that cupboard with something to eat, and we'd read for the whole afternoon. That's the kind of friends we are.

I remember their father Marco as very funny,

and their mother Constance Meyberg Newmark was

always wonderful to me, which is surprising.

Why is that surprising?

Because I was very naughty, I lied like a

trooper.

What else do you recall as a child?

I always had a weight problem, and one year I

was taken to a place in Czechoslovakia to lose

weight.

What do you remember about your great grandfather, Harris?

He lived with my grandmother, Emily, after my

great grandmother, Sarah, died. I remember Harris

always wore a yarmulke, and I didn't know what that

was at the time. I thought it was just a little black hat, and that he was the only one who wore one! I thought that was just killing.

What do you mean that it was just “Killing?”                       

Oh, I've always said that... I don't know

It means funny, or too much.

Any other memories of Harris?

I also remember my great grandfather as being

kind Every year one of his children would go to

their house in Santa Monica for the summer, and I

remember going there.

Which other relatives were you close to?

We were close to Stephen Loew's family.

Everything that was important, we'd run over to tell

them. I remember Aunt Rose and Uncle Herman

Levi. He was so darling. He was so wonderful with

children.

And what about your grandparents?

I adored my grandmother Emily. She was

wonderful, and she was funny. I'm named after her

and my other grandmother, Fannie. My first name

had to be Fannie because she was the one who was

already dead. I remember always asking the teachers

at school to call me Fannie Emily, because I hated

iust Fannie. By the way, my grandmother Fannie  

was the first Jewish girl to be born in San Francisco, which I always thought was interesting.          

I was always crazy about Liz [Elizabeth Levi

Lissner] and I named my dolls after her. In fact, I

tried to get my daughter, Barbara, to name her child

Liz.

Nick was very good-looking. And all the boys

in the family were very bright and studious. They all went to college. The whole family was very close. The best years of my life were those years.

Autobiography/Genealogy

Linda Levi Art 1958-2003