Considering all the things I’ve been through, an interview with: My mom's mom and dad

For posterity, I attempted to get candid with my grandparents

Lynn and Stan at their wedding

As the writer in my family, it’s up to me to get it all down. Recently, while listening to BBC radio, I heard Paul McCartney talking about his mother. (He lost her when he was 14.) All he had were hackneyed memories. He said she was a nurse, a good woman, and he recalled a time when she was whistling in the kitchen, which made him think, “She’s happy.” It’s nice. Proustian in a way. But it’s not much. What will I remember when my grandparents go? I have all four—a rarity at the age of 28. My oldest grandpa, Norm, is heading into his 91st year. The artist Jasper Johns, that age, still picks up the paintbrush every day, but my grandpa is hard of hearing and walks with a cane now and is far from being one of America’s most celebrated living artists. 

No, my grandparents are just ordinary people living ordinary lives, which breaks from the mold of what I generally do on Insufficient Fare. But the constant Jewish guilt I’m fed led me to want to speak with them about their lives while they’re still kicking around on this rock. When I was visiting my hometown of Boca Raton, Florida last month for Thanksgiving, I spent some time with each grandparent and took down their story. In this edition, I spoke with my mom’s mom and dad, Stan and Lynn Margolese. Perhaps, to those outside of my family, this won’t be as interesting a read as when I interview a writer promoting a new. Perhaps, hearing about someone else’s life is always vivifying in some way or another. You’ll have to read on in order to determine for yourself. I won’t make that kind of call for you. 

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Stanley Margolese:

Me: What year were you born 

Stan: 1938

Me: And where?

Stan: Montreal

Me: Where in Montreal?

Stan: At the Royal Victoria Hospital 

Me: What’s your earliest memory? 

Stan: Coming out of the womb

Me: No. C’mon. 

Stan: My earliest memory? I never really thought about it. Good question. The country maybe. Trout Lake.  

Me: What’s the country, Trout Lake? 

Stan: Trout Lake is near Ste Agathe. I don’t even know if it exists anymore. 

Me: In the Laurentians?

Stan: Yeah. 

Me: Why don’t you explain what the Laurentians are?

Stan: the Laurentians are a mountain area 60 miles North of Montreal. There are a lot of country homes and ski hills, lakes, camps, and so on. I went to camp there for many years. Camp Hiawatha. That’s an Indian word. Hiawatha was a woman. 

Me: She was? 

Stan: I think so. 

Me: What did you do at camp?

Stan: I played a lot of sports. 

Me: You were a sports star, right? 

Stan: Yes. I was. 

Me: Where did you excel? 

Stan: All sports. Baseball, football, hockey, tennis, swimming. Basketball and baseball were probably my better sports

Me: And what happened? 

Stan: What happened? 

Me: Well, you got bad at sports at one point, right? 

Stan: Yeah, when I was 12-years of age, I had an accident. 

Me: What happened? 

Stan: I got kicked by a horse in my forearm. My arm was broken. They took me to the hospital to set my arm and my heart stopped beating and I died on the table. They injected my heart with adrenaline. They brought me back to life and they brought me from the Jewish General Hospital to the Montreal Neurological Hospital where I was in a coma for 31 days. It took me the better part of a year to learn to walk, talk, move—all the normal functions afterward. And I missed a complete year of school. All my friends were now in high school and I was home, which means that when I went back to school, all the kids who were in Grade Six while I was in Grade Seven [became my classmates.] It was very emotionally horrible for me. 

Me: What happened? Did you ever make friends with those kids?

Stan: I guess I did but I was too blue, too miserable, to be friends with anybody. And slowly, slowly, slowly things came back. And then I met Lynn. 

Me: You’re skipping a lot. Did you ever go to college?

Stan: No, I went to a junior college to learn Italian. 

Me: Did you learn Italian? 

Grandpa: Sì. 

Me: What jobs were you working at this point?

Grandpa: I worked at Eaton’s, which was a department store in the photography department—one of my first jobs. My first real job was for a place called Salvage Disposal, which meant that when something had to be salvaged, they bought it for the insurance company, they tried to salvage it and sell it for more than they paid for it. That was my first real job. 

Me: Like what, refrigerators? 

Stan: No. Like a boat sunk in the Montreal Harbor, and they had the entire shipload of whatever was on the ship. They got it for next to nothing. They were able to salvage it and sell it for a huge profit. That’s what the business was. 

Me: How long were you there? 

Stan: I was there for a summer. It was a summer job. 

Me: OK. What did you do after that? 

Stan: I remember, my high school years were also rough because the teachers were told to go easy on me and it was difficult making friends, but I managed to get through it. 

Lynn: And what did you do after, Stan?

Stan: And then—you’re not supposed to talk—and then I met Lynn and my life changed. 

Me: Your luck changed, you said? 

Stan: My life. 

Me: So that was a major event in your life: meeting grandma? 

Stan: It certainly was. 

Me: Her parents didn’t want you to marry her, right? 

Stan: That’s correct. 

Me: What happened? 

Stan: My father intervened. Spoke to her parents and we were able to get married. They didn’t want me to get married because they felt I was sick. I was sick before, but I wasn’t who they were expecting Lynn to marry.

Me: Did you have a limp or something like that? 

Stan: No

Lynn: Very slow talking. Very slow vocabulary. 

Stan: I didn’t have a limp. I just wasn’t able to do what everybody else did. And for me, it was more mental than physical. For years, I kept saying, “Why did it happen to me when I was Joe Cool. Now I couldn’t do anything.” But over the years, it did come back. I was able to skate and swim and bowl. I belonged to a bowling league. I played golf. I did everything everybody else did, but not nearly as well as they did or as I would have liked to have done. And today, I have eight wonderful grandchildren and am happily married 62 years and life goes on. 

Me: OK, but what happened before you met Lynn. What were your other jobs. What were you doing? 

Stan: My father was a dress manufacturer. He wanted me to come work for him but I didn’t want to. He convinced me to and I was in the dress business for most of my working life. It was a family business. I left the family business and started my own business and was fairly successful. I sold the business to my partner, became a traveling salesman, and one of my salesmen convinced me to become his partner. He had had a heart attack and was afraid he was going to die on the road somewhere and nobody would find him.

Anyway, I became his partner. We traveled together for several years. Then he died and Lynn became my partner on the road. We traveled together. I had a showroom, which was a mistake I made because the people who came to Montreal to buy wouldn’t come into my office, my showroom, because they knew I was gonna come to them. Because I traveled, I was very disappointed in having this expensive showroom. I was able to get out of my lease and we were able to travel through the whole province of Quebec for several years. In ‘92 or ‘93, one of the firms I was representing asked me in a joking manner, “How would [I] like to move to Florida?” I said to him, “I would move tomorrow. My wife would move yesterday.” From that conversation, we ended up in Florida. I opened up a store. It was a beautiful store selling maternity wear. The plan was to have six stores throughout Florida and three months after we opened, the people from Montreal who opened the store, who owned it, said that they’d made a mistake, that they were going to close the store. We were in Florida and we technically were supposed to go back to Canada.

I had a visa that said I could only work for this particular company and then my lawyer found a loophole that Lynn was able to become an American citizen and we could stay. We did and there were a lot of problems with Lynn’s visa and her paperwork and we were here, technically, illegally, but as long as we didn't leave, we were fine. So we were stuck here. It took us several years to straighten out Lynn’s paperwork problem and we opened up a store in the Festival Flea Market, which my daughter Shari helped with. She was drawing things on bibs. I was selling children’s wear. Shari was terrific at that time. I was selling T-shirts, all kinds of things that Shari painted. Then, they closed the store and I was selling kosher food for several years all throughout South Florida—Miami up to Palm Beach. And then in 2009, I had a car accident, which changed my life completely because, [as a result], I began to slowly lose my ability to walk. The last three or four years, I haven’t been driving the car because I’m afraid if I drove I’d be a risk behind the wheel. My wife saved my life because she does all the driving. Now I have a scooter that takes me all around. And I have an electric wheelchair for the house and that’s my story up to the minute. 

Me: That’s it? You don’t have anything else that happened in your life? 

Grandma Lynn: I think that’s enough. He’s gone through quite a few things and he ended up OK. 

Me: You don’t want to say anything more? 

Stan: I have terrific grandchildren who I love deeply. And I’ve been a good, faithful husband—at least I think so—and we traveled quite a bit over the years: We’ve been to Mexico, Hawaii, California a couple of times, Vancouver, Ottawa. 

Me: Anywhere in Europe? 

Stan: Yes, I was in Italy. It was a business trip. I went with my partner. 

Me: What do you do these days?

Stan: I play on the computer. I do crosswords and word puzzles. I plan to write a book with my grandchildren. My grandson Jacob is going to do the artwork and my grandson Alex is going to be the co-author. And if I live long enough, I’ll get it published. 

Me: How old are you? 

Stan: I’ll be 84 in two months. 

Me: What’s the book? 

Stan: It’s going to be called English: It’s a Language? It’s about homophones that I find in everyday life. In the newspaper, crossword puzzles, and books. I find a word that has more than one meaning, I write them down. I have a list of well over 1,000. When I get to 2,000, I’m going to stop. I thought I was going to stop at 1,000 but I got a lot more words. When I get to 2,000, I’m going to stop and then hopefully I’ll be able to start looking for a publisher or self-publish and that’d be my retirement fund (if I ever sell any books besides the ones I’ll give away). I miss my grandchildren because most of them are out of town. I speak to them on the phone, we FaceTime some of them, and I have a happy life actually considering all the things I’ve been through. And I’m lucky to be here; grateful. And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 

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Lynn Margolese

Me: What year were you born, Grandma? 

Lynn: 1939

Me: What do you remember about that time? 

Lynn: Nothing. Earliest I remember is from when I was two.

Me: That’s around that time. What do you remember from when you were two?

Lynn: That I was sent away at two years old to sleepaway camp

Me: Two years old? And what happened? 

Stan: You weren’t two

Lynn: I was two. No, I was four maybe. My mother worked. She was a very prominent person in the community and my father was a dentist…

Me: What did she do? 

Lynn: What did she do? She was written up in Who’s Who of American Women. She was a philanthropist. She raised money for all kinds of organizations and headed all kinds of organizations. B’Nai B’rith, Bar-Ilan University. She devoted her life to doing work without being paid. And she was not interested really in being a mother too much. I have a brother who is five years older than I am and he was sent off to sleepaway school when he was 12 so I was seven. I basically helped my father preparing meals and all kinds of things and did all kinds of things that my mother wanted me to do and I was left alone a lot. 

Me: What did you do when you were alone? 

Lynn: I remember being afraid of being in the house alone. I used to call my parents because they were very social and they used to be out at night and I’d call them and tell them to come home right away because I was sick. And they got my goat because they sent a doctor ahead of them. And they said I wasn’t sick. On my twelfth birthday, what they did to remedy the situation was to buy me a dog. So I had a dog and I was still left alone most of the time. 

Me: What was the dog’s name? 

Lynn: Champ. 

Me: What type of dog? 

Lynn: He was a Cocker Spaniel. I had friends. I had a lot of friends. I went to school where [Stan] went to school—Ioana Avenue School—across the street from where I lived. I had a lot of responsibilities. I worked a lot. Got part-time jobs and my mother, when I was going into junior high school, decided that I should change schools so I left everybody I knew and went to a new school in a new community. It was very rough. Only thing was I was very popular with the boys so that was nice. I went to Westmount High School and graduated from there and then I went to Macdonald College and got a teaching diploma. 

Me: Is that a full college? 

Lynn: Yes, and I was awarded all kinds of honors for teaching and the best part of that was that when I had to practice teaching, I practiced at the school where I went—Iona Avenue School—and some of the teachers were still there [from when I attended.] I went to the teachers’ room and was able to assimilate myself with all the teachers who were my teachers. It was quite amusing. Then I went on and I taught and I went for my special-ed degree, which I have. And that was my dream. To help children with disabilities. 

Me: How were children with disabilities treated back then? 

Lynn: They were hidden away. If you had a child that was not mentally able, they were put in a room and they weren’t allowed to associate with anybody else. It was a secretive process. And then when it started to be a little bit well known, they started to open schools that taught children with disabilities and it was a love of mine to help kids and it still is a love of mine. I have an affinity for it. I can spot a kid and tell you, “He’s got problems. I don’t know what they are but I could tell you he’s got problems.” And then my life changed dramatically because I had to leave teaching. I had three kids and was working. I had my own bookkeeping business. Then I worked for him in his business and my life changed in all different steps because of the changes in our way of living. 

Me: What do you remember about [Stan] when you first met him? 

Lynn: He lived up the street from and the first thing I remember is he has a brother four years older than he is and his brother was walking down the street and he was laughing. We all knew Stan had had an accident and Roni was saying, “It’s so funny. He has to drink from a bottle. He’s like a baby and it’s the funniest thing.” And I said, “Oh, my god.” His brother is spastic, which means that his leg and arm are shorter than one another and he had a lot of disabilities and Stan overtook him because Stan won the “All-Around Camper” before his accident. He was a sports kid and did wonders. And all of Roni’s friends were Stan’s friends because he could outdo Roni and there was a lot of jealousy, which Stan never knew, but there was a lot of jealousy and it was interesting. He had a father who [sighs] was very disappointed that this kind of a thing happened to his second son and he couldn’t imagine why it happened and why it cost so much money to get what he got as opposed to what he had. Do you understand what I’m saying? 

Me: Mhm

Lynn: He had a kid who was fabulous and a kid who lost all these abilities and it was a very big disappointment to Jack. It was sad. He is a superhuman being, Stan, but his father didn’t see all these things in him at that time. And there was a lot of animosity in the family. A lot. I came into a very difficult family. We lived with his parents for a year in the basement and his parents and my parents were like fire and water. We had a lot to overcome, and we did it. And we came out fine. 

Me: What was it about him that you were attracted to? 

Lynn: He was a very warm, sweet, funny guy. A lot of friends. Lots of caring. I was 14-years-old when we started going out. We were kids. 

Me: How old was he? 

Lynn: 16. And I went out with lots of other guys, but he was always at my door waiting for me when I came home from my dates. Listen, we’ve been through life. We’ve been good and bad and we’re still together. We love one another. We help one another. And that’s what life’s all about. I don’t think I’ve got any regrets. I don’t want for anything. I don’t need anything. I’m happy with what I have. I always was like that. What else do you want to know? 

Me: What was it like on the road? 

Lynn: It was great. We stayed in hotels—run of the mill motels. I drove the van. We had a big van and we had all of our samples in the back of the van. 

Me: What were the samples of? 

Lynn: Maternity wear. Dresses. Everything. And we would take them out of the van and schlep them into the stores, store by store, or we’d open up in a hotel and people would come and see us. It was very interesting. The province of Quebec is quite a place to travel. We made a life for ourselves. It was very different from the road I thought I’d be on, but it was a road. 

[Lynn stops here and then we start back up with Stan]

Me: You’re religious, right?  

Lynn: In his heart

Stan: Well, to a degree. At my bar mitzvah, that I never had…

Lynn: Oh, tell him about that. 

Stan: I was going to take over the whole service. The cantor was going to have the day off and I never had the bar mitzvah [because of the accident]. An uncle of mine went and learned the whole haftorah and said it for me at my bar mitzvah when I was 13. All I did was make a speech under the arc, which all bar mitzvah boys did at that time. When I was 43, I had another bar mitzvah

Lynn: Your wife made you.

Stan: It was the year after my son’s bar mitzvah because I didn’t want to take away from his bar mitzvah. At his bar mitzvah, I asked the cantor if he would teach me. And he said, “Not only will I teach you; I won’t charge you.” I had a bar mitzvah at 43 and Rabbi Cohen gave the best line of his entire career. He said, “No wonder Stanely was so good. He had 30 years to practice.” And Lynn made a speech at that bar mitzvah and everybody in the shul was crying when she read it. It was a very moving day for my life. 

Me: Are you religious? 

Stan: I would say that I am but I’m not overly religious. I observe and I watch shul every Saturday from Hampton Synagogue in New York because I love the cantor and the choir. I went to shul every year with my son-in-law Stuart until I switched over and started going to my son Steven’s in Palm Beach for several years. Now, because of my inability to walk, I watch the services from home on TV. 

Lynn: I just want to tell you that when he made the bar mitzvah there were some catty comments.

Stan: That I was doing it for presents. 

Lynn: I got up on stage and congratulated him and then I said, “I want you to know that he studied very hard for this bar mitzvah. It was something that was in his heart that he really wanted to do. It had nothing to do with gifts. It had nothing to do with people coming. It has to do with achieving what he wanted to do.” They were all crying because I really came on strong. 

Stan: If anybody asked me what I want, I said two things: A donation to the shul and a donation to the Jewish General Hospital. That’s all I ever wanted. My friend, Burt Metcalfe, out in California, sent me a 1951 pen from Parker 51 authenticated and when [my daughter] Randy graduated college I gave her the pen. It was in my safe deposit box. I never wrote with it.