Katja, age 3
Dear George,
Katja says she remembers hardly anything about her
childhood. That can’t be entirely true because she’s told a lot of anecdotes
over the years. Last week we sat down and chatted about her recollections
in more detail. Here’s the picture
that Katja provided.
I always thought of Katja as a Southern belle, and it
turns out there’s a kernel of truth to that.
She was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in the late years
of the Great Depression. Her mom, Helen Werrin, was 25 years old and had
graduated from Temple University with her degree in nutrition and
diatetics. Her dad, Milton Werrin (henceforth Buck), was 30 and had
received his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Penn. His job for
the U.S. Army took him around the state of Virginia, inspecting meat at
military bases to make sure it wasn’t infected.
Katja, 17 months, in Roanoke
The family lived in a beautiful white house in
Roanoke. They got together regularly with family friends, the Pressburgs,
who had two small boys about Katja’s age. The children played lots
of baseball, and one of the
Pressburg boys smacked Katja in the forehead with a baseball bat. She
still has the scar above her left eye.
Buck’s and Helen’s families lived in Philadelphia,
and, homesick, they decided to return in 1941. Buck bought his brother
Nate’s veterinary practice and house at 408 S. 20th Street in center
city. The animal clinic was on the first floor, and Buck, Helen, and
Katja lived upstairs. As a young girl, Katja loved the 20th Street
neighborhood. She was allowed to
be out on the street by herself, and it was very exciting. There were tons of kids, lots of
different kinds of people, the streetcars ran right by, and something was
always going on. Her mother disliked 20th Street though – the city heat,
the smells coming upstairs from the animals, the noise, the shabbiness of the
neighborhood.
408 S. 20th Street (today)
When Katja was four, her parents enrolled her at the
Settlement Music School, a famous community school and daycare center.
The children were introduced to music and the arts through lots of rhythm
instruments. Katja’s specialized in playing the triangle. She went
to school every day and completely enjoyed it. In fact, until she got to
high school, she always loved school -- the whole idea of going off to school
and being part of a place.
In 1942 Katja started kindergarten at Spring Garden
School, a couple of miles away at 12th and Parrish streets. Getting to
school required a trolley ride, and Katja began doing this on her own by first
or second grade. Occasionally Buck would take Katja and her friends –
Joanne Soloff and Charlotte and Judy Kaplan – to school in the family
Chevy. The children loved riding in the rumble seat, even though Joanne
had a propensity to get carsick. Once there, Katja’s favorite subjects
were English, History, and Music – just about everything as long as it didn’t involve
arithmetic.
Spring Garden Public School,
12th Street
Katja’s siblings, Ami and David, were born during her
early years of grade school. The
family home was a few blocks away from Rittenhouse Square, and Helen would take
the three children to the Square on outings. Katja got to push Ami and
David in their double-decker baby carriage, and Helen called her “my little mother.” There was a
bronze statue of a goat with little horns at the center of Rittenhouse Square,
and the children’s favorite activity was climbing on the goat. As they
got a little older, Katja would take the two kids on outings to Rittenhouse
Square by herself. David was a cutie-pie, though he often suffered from
his eustachian tubes being inflamed.
Katja remembers Ami as being mysterious and very organized. When they later shared a bedroom,
they’d get into fights because Ami wanted Katja’s side of the room to be as
clean and neat as her own. Katja
did have lots of responsibility as a child. She took the bus, trolley
car, and/or subway to school by herself, and at home she cleaned up the house,
did the dishes, and helped with the laundry.
In their 20th Street
neighborhood most of Katja’s playmates were young African-American girls.
The children’s favorite activity was double-dutch jump-roping. While
Katja participated regularly, she was awed by the abilities of her fellow rope-jumpers who did triples,
somersaults, and all sorts of fancy moves. She summed up, “They were
great!” At home Katja spent a lot of time curled up by the radio,
listening to the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, Fibber McGee & Molly, the Green
Hornet, and Superman.
Around third grade, Katja started helping her dad in
his vet practice after school. She’d feed the boarding animals, play with
them, and try to quiet the animals down while Buck was working on them.
Her most significant task was holding puppies or cats in a blanket while Buck
was castrating them. He’d explain, “It’s all over in just a minute.
Just hold them around the head in the blanket so they can’t move.” The
puppies and kittens were usually just a few days old, and they didn’t seem to
mind it much. Katja said about her vet assistant duties, “I loved
it.” Buck in turn helped Katja with her homework. Everything except
math, which was his worst subject too. In general, Buck was the more
lenient parent; Helen, more strict.
Buck and Helen (circa 1970)
Helen’s father, Samuel Brooks, owned a custom tailor
and dry cleaning shop in Germantown, a Philadelphia suburb where he and Katja’s
grandmother lived. Helen’s biological mother had died when she was only
three, and her father remarried Dora, who Katja knew as Grandmom Brooks.
Katja went regularly to her grandparents’ house for the weekend. She was
very close to her grandparents, and her love of opera traces back to her visits
with them. Mr. and Mrs. Brooks kept a kosher household, so the only thing
that they did on the Sabbath was to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the
radio. When Grandmom and Grandpa Brooks came to visit at 20th Street, her
grandfather would always pull a candy bar out of his pocket to give
Katja. She remembers him taking her to her first movie, The Dolly Sisters with Betty Grable and June
Haver. Grandpa Brooks liked to take Katja and her siblings places, but he
was very poor and money was always in short supply. He had excellent
taste, but never any extra money for luxuries. He was very proud when
Helen completed college.
These childhood years on 20th Street weren’t an easy time
for the family. Buck’s veterinary practice was a struggle, and there were
always money woes. Helen was working as a substitute home economics
teacher in an inferior public school, and she was unhappy there. Her
salary was $5 a day – better than nothing, but very low pay.
Katja’s Grandpa Werrin (Michael) and Grandmom Werrin
(Anna) were Russian immigrants who had met and married in America after their
arrival around the turn of the century. Grandpa Werrin had an egg
candling business on Water Street. He imported eggs from Vineland, New
Jersey, then distributed them to local grocery stores, making daily decisions
about how much to pay and how much to charge for the eggs. He loved to
play cards and won a seashore hotel in Wildwood, NJ, in a card game. He
and Anna operated the hotel in the summer for many years. Grandma Werrin
cooked and ran the hotel. Customers would come for a week, month, or the
entire summer, and their room price included three meals a day. Buck met
Helen there when she applied for a waitress job. Years later he sent
Helen and the three kids to Wildwood each summer to protect against polio in
the city. Usually they would stay in Wildwood with Grandpa Brooks, but
Katja also stayed in the Werrin’s hotel on occasion.
“The Vampy Scamp” (Katja, age
8, at Wildwood)
Grandmom Werrin had a reputation as an excellent cook,
and the entire family would gather at their West Philadelphia home on Friday
nights. Because Anna wasn’t allowed to cook after sundown on Friday
evening, a live-in maid did the cooking on Friday and Saturday nights.
They’d have bagels, cream cheese, and lox; smoked whitefish; smoked sable;
bialys; Manischewitz wine, and some hard liquor as well. Katja remembers
those meals as much like scenes out of The Godfather,
Part 1. Michael and Anna had five children: Doris (who later
married a wealthy chicken king from Chicago), Beatrice (married to Joe), Nate
(married to Sophie), Milton (with Helen), and Miriam (married to Moe).
Grandpa Werrin had an explosive temper. He could be loving and warm at
one moment, then yelling and throwing things seconds later. Buck and Nate
had inherited some of that volatile temper themselves, so Katja describes
extended family gatherings as very noisy. There’d be lots of fighting and
uproar; then everybody would get over it and get back together. Helen
often felt caught in the middle. After the meal was over everyone would
gather around the tiny TV and watch boxing.
Katja was
always told by her dad that she had inherited “bad blood” from his side of the
family. Once when a friend came
over for a tea party, the little girl broke one of Katja’s toys, and Katja
pushed her down the stairs.
Another time she got in a fight with one of her little boyfriends, and
she went to his house and hit him over the head with a sock full of
potatoes. The boy’s mother called
Helen and said Katja was forbidden to ever play with her son again. These incidents seemed to confirm the
bad blood hypothesis.
Ami (left), unknown friend,
and Katja, age 8, on the Jersey shore
One year Helen took a summer job as the dietician at
Girl Scout camp, and Katja got to go along for free. She wasn’t
enthusiastic about sleeping in a tent, and, because Helen was on the camp
staff, Katja had to dig latrines to avoid being labeled a “teacher’s
pet”. She had a much more enjoyable time during the summers of 1947 and
1948 at Camp Galil, a Zionist youth camp in Buck’s County. Katja loved
Camp Galil and acquired her first boyfriend there, a good-looking boy named
Jules Cohen. It was the time of the War of Independence, and weapons were
hidden on the camp’s grounds for shipment to Israel. Buck and Helen also
took the three kids on a big trip one summer to Maine, Montreal, and Toronto. The kids spent the whole time in the
back seat reading comic book tales about Emma and the Cement Mixer.
Katja’s family always had dogs. Buck gave Katja
her first dog, a little dachsund which was to be her own. Katja loved the
dachsund. A week later her dad said he had to take it back because the
previous owner’s daughter who had polio missed it so much. Katja was
heartbroken. The family also had a
beagle that was completely untrainable.
Their beloved boxer, Tammy, who was really Ami’s dog, died of cancer,
and everyone felt very sad.
Katja, age 10, and David on a
hayride at Farm School
Starting at age 12, Katja took piano lessons after
school once a week. Her teacher was Miss Theresa, a heavyset woman who
had been blind from birth. Katja’s not sure whether Miss Theresa lived
alone, but there was never anybody else at her house. She lived in Little
Italy in South Philadelphia, and Katja travelled there by herself on the
hour-long trolley car and subway trip. Miss Theresa was very nice, but
the piano lessons themselves were boring. At home Helen played the
upright piano in their living room. Katja did too, though she didn’t like
to practice.
One of Buck’s veterinary clinic clients, Mrs. Scott,
took an interest in Katja and gave her books and a subscription to the London
Illustrated News which was full of articles about royalty. Katja became
very interested in British royalty. Mrs. Scott also talked a lot about
going to France, and that became one of Katja’s major goals. Katja says
she always wanted to go away and have adventures from the time she was a little
girl.
So those are some of the highlights of Katja’s
girlhood. Her Philadelphia world
and family life were pretty different from growing up in Menominee in the
U.P. That’s what makes for the
spice of life.
Love,
Dave
G-mail Comments
-Ami G
(5-22): This version of Katja's life proves that everyone grows up in a
different family, even sibs! Very nice tale! Our Boxer's name was
Jennie (actually Sad Sack Jennifer) and her very coveted puppies payed for the
family's dining room set!
No comments:
Post a Comment