I just got an email from Richard Grayson, a sometime contributor to OTBKB, about the 60th anniversary of his parents.
He says that he spent over an hour yesterday morning driving all over Mesa and the
East Valley in Ariszona trying in vain "to find a 60th wedding anniversary card (the
highest we could find in this part of Arizona was for the 50th), this
is the best we can do for our mom and dad, Marilyn and Daniel Grayson."
His parents were married sixty years ago today, on May 28, 1949 at the Park Manor
on Eastern Parkway and Rogers Avenue (now the First Baptist Church of
Crown Heights).
Mom & Dad at the bungalows of Rockaway Beach, September 4, 1946
Mom & Dad at lunch, Apache Junction, AZ, May 27, 2009
Thanks so much, Louise. Mom has Alzheimer’s and although she lived in Brooklyn from her birth in 1931 until 1979, she remembers mostly living on Ocean Parkway by Neck Road, where in the early 50s we had an apartment in a house owned by her aunt’s mother — “across from the gangsters,” she always adds (she means Carlo Gambino, who was directly across the street from us – who seemed pretty nice to me). She always asks me if that’s how I know her, “from that neighborhood.” She has to be prompted to remember her parents’ house in East Flatbush or our rented apartment (she will remember the landlord was mean to my brother) there or the house in Old Mill Basin where we lived for 21 years (“the house with swimming pool”). She doesn’t recall at all 20 years of Florida living but says she would like to go back to Brooklyn. Her question about Brooklyn always is: What kind of people live there now?
Mazel Tov! Having recently lost my parents, who would have celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary, I know how wonderful this is. I hope you and they enjoy their day.