MY AUNT HELEN -- OR BIG SISTER -- OR BOTH; TAKE YOURPICK
She was my mother’s kid sister, but not by much. Only a couple of years separatedthem.
She was my big sister, so to speak, although we were separated by a lot ofyears.
Helen Friedman, alias “Hale,” lived on the second floor of 582 Marcy, one floor below us. Like everyone else in the family, she hung out in the downstairs living room -- or kitchen, if she wanteddinner.
I got to like my Aunt Helen at an early age and for a lot of reasons – mostly because she was nice to me 99 44/100 of thetime.
Only once time did Hale let me down. Likewise, I disappointed her once, big-time.
Like my Mom and Aunt Hattie up in Albany, Helen was an athlete. When I was seven years old in 1939, I discovered two long slats of wood hidden behind the cellar door. Turns out that they were skis. Long before most folks took to the sport, Hale was riding New York Central’s Ski Train on Sundays up to Phoenicia, New York, two hours away.
The mountain – and I use the word very loosely – outside the Catskills village boasted the first rope tow in New York State. Aunt Helen rode the rails there almost every winter weekend until sadly, around 1946, The Central discontinued its SkiTrain.
When Hale wasn’t skiing, she’d don her ice-racing blades and hustle over to the Brooklyn Ice Palace on Atlantic Avenue near Bedford Avenue and hope that Olympic gold-medal speed skater Irving Jaffee would ask her to do a pairs-onlyskate.
“All the girls wanted to skate with Irving,” Aunt Helen would say. “He was a good-looking guy, Jewish and an Olympic champ. I would love to have gone out on a date with IrvingJaffee.”
But that neverhappened.
As far as I could tell, not many guys dated Hale, and I never could figure out why. Granted, she wasn’t as pretty as Molly Fischler, my mom – nor as convivial as their sister, AuntHattie.
Yet Hale was attractive in a pleasant sort of way. She had a nice body, good legs and a warm, if not beautiful, face -punim, as we would say inYiddish.
I didn’t worry too much about Aunt Helen’s love life, except once. She was an avid member of the New York Hiking Club and began dating a fellow member named LymanBarry.
One night while I was hanging
