Trudi Schnitzer Stone

Prahl: Please start by stating your full name and tell us where and when you were born.
STONE: Trudi Jean Schnitzer (my given name) Stone. I was born in Portland on January 2, 1944.

Prahl: Tell me about the family that you were born into, the household. Who lived with you and who was there?
STONE: My mother Ruth Rosumny Schnitzer and my dad Manuel Schnitzer, but he was called M.R. Schnitzer, because there were two Manuels, and my sister Fay.

Prahl: An older sister?
STONE: She’s older. She’s three and a half years older than I am.

Prahl: Where was your family living when you were born?
STONE: We were on NE 50th Street right off of Halsey.

Prahl: Did you have extended family around you? Were your grandparents…?
STONE: Oh yes, on both sides of my family. As my dad said, “Family comes first.” And it was always that way. My mom was the only one that drove in her family so she was in charge of all of her family, and Daddy was very involved with all his brothers and sisters, so we all grew up together.

Prahl: Did the whole family live on the east side? Did everybody live close?
STONE: No, my grandparents all lived in Old [South] Portland. My mother’s parents lived across from Shattuck School, and my dad’s parents lived (it’s all gone now) down on Second.

Prahl: Were you a frequent visitor to South Portland?
STONE: Every week we were in South Portland.

Prahl: Did you have friends who were growing up there, or were most of the people your age already living someplace else?
STONE: No, all of my friends were in Northeast.

Prahl: What schools did you go to?
STONE: I started out—I was reading at five and because my birthday was late they wouldn’t let me into school, so my parents sent me to Catlin Gabel for one year and started me in first grade, and then moved me into public school in second grade at Rose City. Then when I was going into fourth grade we moved over on 29th and Fremont, across from Alameda School, and lived there until I left to go to college.

Prahl: Was Catlin Gabel School at a different location? Where was it?
STONE: Oh, yes, it was some little place up in the hills. I honestly—I had to take a school bus. My mom would walk me down to the school bus and pick me up. One of my memories of that is there was a big dog that I had to go past when I went to get the bus, and that dog always stood up on the fence and scared me to death every day, so my mom would come and get me, because the dog would scare me because I was only five.

Prahl: And your sister was at Rose City at the time?
STONE: My sister was at Rose City.

Prahl: What is your sister’s name?
STONE: Fay Levinson.

Prahl: Fay Schnitzer Levinson.
STONE: You probably have her husband’s book. He wrote The Jews of California.

Prahl: I bet we do. 
STONE: In fact, it just came out in a new printing.

Prahl: Let’s stay with your family. What sort of things did you do with your family? Was it a religious family?
STONE: No.

Prahl: What were your activities?
STONE: My grandparents were all religious but not my parents.

Prahl: But in your own family, did you light candles on Friday night?
STONE: My mom always lit candles. That was about as far as it went.

Prahl: Not a kosher home.
STONE: No, except when my grandparents came. My mother did some magic so that my grandparents, her parents, would eat at our house. My grandfather Schnitzer died when I was four, and I don’t remember him very well. My grandmother Schnitzer—I never remember her leaving the house.

Prahl: Was her name Bertha?
STONE: Bertha.

Prahl: Did she have an accent when she spoke?
STONE: Oh, yes, but she almost never spoke, either. This is the way my cousins and I remember her. The table in the dining room was a big round table like this table but bigger, where all the Sunday breakfasts were every Sunday. When my grandfather died in 1948 the boys and Aunt Frances decided they had to see their mother every week, so they started Sunday Breakfast. Uncle Monty was the cook. My cousins and I still remember Grandma just sitting in a chair. She never really talked to us but she had her little chair in the dining room and that’s where she sat. The men would eat, and then the wives would eat, and then the kids got to eat.

Prahl: So, you didn’t have your meal with them.
STONE: No, not Sunday brunch, not Sunday breakfast, because there wasn’t room. There were a lot of us.

Prahl: Did you do anything with your grandmother?
STONE: Not that grandmother. My other grandparents—we had a house in Seaside. These were the Rosumny grandparents. We always were at the beach, and they were always at the beach. In fact, my grandkids are the fifth generation Seasiders now. My mother always went to the beach as a child. Then they got a house when I was a baby, a teeny baby. So, every Shabbat we had Shabbat dinners in Seaside every Friday, when we were at the beach. We went to the beach when school got out and stayed until Labor Day.

Prahl: How did you get there?
STONE: We drove down. We did not have a car when we were there. Daddy would come on the weekends. We didn’t have a phone, we didn’t have a TV, we played. We played outside.

Prahl: Can you remember what you played?
STONE: We stayed on the beach a lot of the time. Daddy built us a sandbox because we had an empty lot next to our house. He put a swing set and a sandbox. The Goldmans lived next door. My best friend down there was Cathy Kerwin, whose father owned the drugstore in town.

Prahl: So, she lived there all the time.
STONE: She lived there all the time. Joyce [Goldman] and I would go over there and we’d play dolls in her basement a lot. I remember that.

Prahl: Were you close with your sister as a playmate?
STONE: Then, we were. But as you get older there’s sibling rivalry and all that stuff, but when we were little, yes.

Prahl: Did your mother tell you stories about what it was like when she went to the beach as a child?
STONE: Well, I think they started in Long Beach, and then somehow ended up in Seaside. But in those days, you had to take a ferry. I remember Daddy would take us on ferry rides on the weekends sometimes over to Long Beach because there wasn’t a bridge yet.

Prahl: So you’d drive up to Astoria, or did it go from Seaside?
STONE: No, we drove from Seaside and went to Astoria and got a ferry, but when they [my grandparents] came I don’t think [Highway] 26 was built, so they came the other way, which is probably why they went to Long Beach instead of coming into Seaside, because there probably wasn’t a good road at that time.

Prahl: Do you remember what you ate when you went to the beach, what kinds of foods there were?
STONE: Crab. [laughs] But we couldn’t do that when my grandparents were around. We had salmon every Friday night. Since Mother didn’t have a car we’d walk downtown almost every day and get groceries. There was a big fruit stand downtown and we’d get fresh fruits and vegetables downtown.

Prahl: Was the arcade there already when you were a child, or is that a newer thing?
STONE: Oh, it was completely. The arcade? It wasn’t [as big].

Prahl: With games and—
STONE: No, what was there was where—next to the movie theater, which was the movie theater—it’s empty now; and Tom and Larry’s. There was a merry-go-round. There was a Ferris wheel. There were all kinds of rides. Every weekend my grandfather would take us downtown to the rides. We’d walk downtown. They’d stay on 12th. We’d go down there to have breakfast with them on Sunday morning and then he’d walk us downtown and take us to the rides. Then up on the corner…. Well, that’s the other thing we did a lot. When it rained there was the natatorium, and we swam a lot. And there was a roller rink next to the natatorium. When it was bad weather we were in the roller rink or swimming.

Prahl: Aside from your one friend who lived there all the time, did you have friends from Portland who came out and were at the beach, too?
STONE: Yes, I mean half of the Jewish population lived at the beach in the summer. The Goldmans still own the house, well, Joyce. They still have their house, and her cousins own the house next door. The Semlers have that house. That was the Boyarsky’s house. I remember my mom—I mean, all the women were down there and they played cards almost every night, so we’d rotate houses. I remember sitting at the top of the stairs in our house and looking down at them all playing cards.

Prahl: So they played cards before you had gone to bed.
STONE: Yes, I think we were sent to bed but we came and watched!

Prahl: Then back at home, did those same families who intermingled at the beach, were they the same families who were intermingling in Portland, too?
STONE: Yes.

Prahl: Was it a synagogue-based friendship group, or were people from all different parts of the city?
STONE: No, because I think the Goldmans belonged to the Temple. We belonged to Ahavai Sholom but my one set of grandparents belonged to Sixth Street and one set of grandparents went to First Street, so it was in the time when you could walk, and we did. Fay and I would walk on the high holidays from Ahavai Sholom down to see both sets of grandparents and my uncles at First Street.

Prahl: Did you go to Sunday school yourself?
STONE: Yes, at Ahavai Sholom. I was bat mitzvahed. 

Prahl: Then did you stay as part of Neveh Shalom when Ahavai Sholom…?
STONE: When I came back?

Prahl: We’ll leave that question off until get there! Let’s talk about high school. What kind of a student were you?
STONE: Straight A.

Prahl: You were at Grant High School?
STONE: Yes.

Prahl: You had many friends at the school?
STONE: Yes. It’s interesting. In those days the Jewish kids had their own table for lunch. We all ate together, and we were never allowed in the social clubs. The Jewish kids weren’t allowed in the social clubs, so all the BBG girls and AZA boys, we all ate lunch together. There were a lot of us at Grant.

Prahl: Were BBG and AZA clubs that you went to at the Jewish Community Center?
STONE: Yes.

Hochstein:  When you say “weren’t allowed,” was it an understanding that you shouldn’t ask, or was it actively that you were asked and you were denied?
STONE: You just knew. I don’t know. We just knew that we weren’t going to get in those clubs.

Prahl: And that you couldn’t sit at other tables?
STONE: Oh, we could sit at other tables but we all loved being together. They were our good friends.

Prahl: Did you have friends at Grant who were not Jewish?
STONE: Oh, yes. One of my best friends is still here. But she should have been, because she dated all the Jewish boys. We always said she should have converted!

Prahl: Did you date non-Jewish boys?
STONE: Not a lot. There’s this interesting story that goes with that. My mother wasn’t totally against it but when I was Sweetheart of BBG—AZA, when I was Sweetheart of AZA, Joyce Perkel had been Sweetheart the year before. My mom—there was a boy at Grant who wasn’t Jewish who asked me out, and she said I could go. Joyce Perkel showed up at my house and told me I couldn’t go out with a non-Jewish boy because I was Sweetheart of AZA and it didn’t look right. I said, “Joyce, my mother said it’s okay, so I’m going to go.”

Prahl: That’s peer pressure.
STONE: It was both ways. You really weren’t supposed to. I didn’t do it much but you could. I wrote a paper in college about all of this because I was a sociology major.

Prahl: You should bring it here.
STONE: I don’t know where it is. Because there were such interesting pressures. There were pressures on both sides, very much so.

Prahl: Tell me about dating in high school.
STONE: I was very, very active in BBG. My sister was president of “313”, and she was vice president of “region”, I think. Before I even got to high school I was really involved with all of that, so when I was in high school most of my friends were BBG girls. I was in K’maia but it wasn’t a big deal to me. Social clubs weren’t for me; I liked service clubs. I was also active in USY. I was regional secretary.

Prahl: What were the service things that BBG did at the time? What were the service activities that you were involved in?
STONE: I know we collected food. I think we went to a pantry. We collected things to get money to give to charities. I don’t remember all of it. Everything went on at the center in those days.

Prahl: Were your parents involved in activities at the center as well?
STONE: Not at the center, but my mother was very active in B’nai B’rith Women and in Hadassah, and I think one other. My dad, not so much.

Prahl: Did she talk to you explicitly about service and about the things that she did?
STONE: I think I followed my sister, to be honest. You know, big sister. I don’t know if it was expected, it just was. Then some of my friends were very active in USY, and I wasn’t as interested but they were very active. Stuart Weinstein was president of our local chapter at the time and he wanted me to be on his board so I was—I don’t remember what I was, secretary or something—then we went on to regional board, so I was on a regional USY board at the same time I was on a regional BBG board, and still got As in school, so my mother couldn’t say much!

Prahl: Did you travel around the region?
STONE: We did, BBG particularly.

Prahl: Can you tell me what the region is?
STONE: The region was Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Spokane. The quarterly meetings were more often than not in Seattle because it was kind of the meeting place, then the regional meetings rotated between Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver.

Prahl: How did you get to Seattle?
STONE: We took the train.

Prahl: To all of those cities you could take the train.
STONE: We took the train. No adults. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. Then when we went to district conventions in California we took the train.

Prahl: When you went to a regional event in another city, where would you sleep at night?
STONE: Oh, friends. You know, you became friends with so many people. You always had friends to stay with.

Prahl: Any friends that have stayed your friends over the years?
STONE: Out of town? When I went to college, of course, we were all in sorority together.

Prahl: Where did you go to college?
STONE: I went to the University of Washington for two years and then I transferred to Berkeley. But those two years, pretty much the whole board of BBG was in my sorority.

Prahl: What was the name of it?
STONE: Phi Sigma Sigma.

Prahl: Was it a Jewish sorority?
STONE: Yes. We weren’t allowed in the other sororities either at the time!

Prahl: Were there more than one Jewish sorority?
STONE: There were two Jewish sororities, ADPhi which was for more the socialite kids, and the BBG kids were in Phi Sig. Then the AZA boys were in Sammys, and the more socialite boys were in Alpha something. I don’t remember what it was called but there were two, two boys and two girls.

Prahl: When you say that one was more “socialite,” what were you if you were not socialites? Were you more intellectual?
STONE: No, we were BBG and AZA kids. There was a line.

Prahl: But you made the distinction that the ones who went to the other sorority were more socialites. So what were you more of?
STONE: Service, I guess.

Prahl: Did the sororities do service activities too?
STONE: Not much.

Prahl: So you were socializing.
STONE: Well, I wasn’t good at it. I was a terrible pledge. They had a pledge hall and I had straight As and they’d make you go study in this pledge hall with all the pledges, and I can’t study that way, so I’d disappear and stay on campus. Then I remember pledge year during the week they had something with some fraternity. They said we were required to go and I had a test the next day and I just stayed on campus. My sister had a friend who was a TA and I went to his office and studied and didn’t go back. But they never could do anything to me because I was keeping the grades up! Then the second year I never could blackball anybody, so even if I had stayed in Seattle I probably would have left the house. I lived across from the house when I went to Berkeley but I never let them know I was there. It wasn’t my thing.

Hochstein:  What years are we talking about for college?
STONE: ’61 to ’63 in Seattle and ’63 to ’65 in Berkeley.

Prahl: I want to go back before we do your college life, which I definitely want to do. I want to make sure we have covered the birth family enough. Let’s talk about the Rosumny grandparents and their business, because we have some pictures [at OJMCHE].
STONE: You do, you have it in the cafeteria.

Prahl: Let’s start with their full names.
STONE: William Rosumny and Annie Rosumny.

Prahl: And their children?
STONE: Sally, Ruth, Marvin, and Annette. They were all five years apart, which was very unusual in those days.

Prahl: They were immigrants.
STONE: My grandparents came when the pogroms were going on, the beginning of the 20th century.

Prahl: Do you know why it was they came to Portland instead of someplace else?
STONE: No, I don’t know why they came to Portland.

Prahl: Did you have extended family here that they were related to, maybe?
STONE: Well, both sets of grandparents, their parents were here. I think they all came, because Papa—I know Papa and Gertrude [his younger sister] had to stay in England while the rest of them came here because Gertrude got sick and they couldn’t leave her in England by herself so they made Papa stay with her. So they were kids, they were young kids. 

Prahl: Then did they take a boat by themselves from England?
STONE: They did, and didn’t speak any English.

Prahl: Then the train?
STONE: I don’t know how they got to Portland. We never got those stories, and I so regret not knowing.

Prahl: Were they Yiddish speakers?
STONE: Yes.

Prahl: Did you learn any Yiddish?
STONE: No. My parents would speak Yiddish so we wouldn’t know what they were talking about, when they didn’t want us to know.

Prahl: Tell me about being in their home. What was that like?
STONE: Then my grandmother’s family came. They were cousins—my Rosumny grandparents were first cousins, so in order to get married they had to go to Canada, because they weren’t allowed to get married in the United States.

Prahl: Was she also named Rosumny or was she a different name?
STONE: No, Medofsky. Ben Medofsky’s pictures. That’s her brother. So they went to Canada to get married. Anyway, the house I remember, although from reading Gertrude’s thing, they had an apartment above the bakery. The house was on Broadway and I remember that Uncle Ben lived in the back and it was so cold back there. He was a bachelor. He never got married. So Uncle Ben lived with my grandparents. One of her brothers lived with them until they tore down that house when the urban renewal happened. It was a big dining room. We all ate there. I remember my grandparent’s room because Papa always hid the afikoman. They had lace on the dressers, and he always put it in the same place, so we always knew where to go to look for the afikoman, in their bedroom. Then there was a living room, and in the living room—I actually have the lamp now. They had a Tiffany kind of lamp in the window and it had red light bulbs in it at the time. I remember you’d go down the street and you’d see this lamp in the window with red light bulbs. That lamp is in my window now but it doesn’t have red lights.

Prahl: Were they the kind of grandparents who you climbed up in the lap of?
STONE: My Papa was. My grandmother wasn’t as much, but Papa was. Papa taught me how to play cards. We did everything at the beach, more than here. He liked to play with us a lot. They had chickens in the basement. My sister says she remembers them going down—Papa going down and killing the chicken for—however they did that then, to make it kosher.

Prahl: He kept the chickens in the basement?
STONE: They had chickens in—that’s what my sister said. I do not remember that, but she said she remembers because it was stuck in her mind forever when they killed that chicken. I remember we used to come in—I’d take the bus over after school sometimes just to visit and come in through the back porch. It was always really cold back there. My grandmother was such a good cook. She made strudel on the dining room table. The whole dining room table was her strudel-making place.

Prahl: Did you get to help?
STONE: You know, they never taught us how to cook. It was very sad.

Prahl: Why do you think that was?
STONE: I don’t know. My mother didn’t really teach me either. That recipe never went down because her daughters never learned to make strudel, which was such a shame. She was such a good strudel maker.

Prahl: She didn’t keep a recipe book that got passed down?
STONE: Oh, no, it was all—there wasn’t a recipe!

Prahl: What kind of cook was your own mother?
STONE: My mother was a good cook, pretty basic. I mean, I never ate a mushroom until I left home because my dad didn’t. My dad liked meat and potatoes so it was pretty basic, but she was a good cook. When we were at the beach she would make clam chowder because Fay and I would go dig up clams. And we’d go pick berries and she’d make berry pies and berry jam.

Prahl: What about handwork or making anything? Did your grandmother?
STONE: My grandmother did. I have some of hers.

Prahl: Did she teach you any?
STONE: No.

Prahl: Well, at least you have something.
STONE: My mother didn’t, either.

Prahl: She also did the work but didn’t teach you?
STONE: No, she just had her mother’s stuff. My mother knit. My mother knit like crazy. She knit all the time. She died when she was a month shy of 95 and she was just finishing—well, she was making me a quilt for my bedroom, and when she died I found someone that could finish it for me. I have her works everywhere in my house.

Prahl: Who was the family historian? Who collected all the details?
STONE: She was.

Prahl: Your mother was. Did she write any of it down?
STONE: Well, that stuff’s missing. Remember? I think I told you I can’t find her scrapbook and stuff, so somehow when we moved her out of Rose Schnitzer—or when she died and I moved her out of Rose Schnitzer, stuff disappeared. So, yes and no. 

You wanted to know about the bakery. Papa had the Star Bakery. My fondest memories of the Star Bakery is whenever we’d go downtown, of course we’d get cookies. But the Rose Festival, the parade would go right past the bakery. So Papa would get out early in the morning and he’d get bread every morning, rye breads. So he’d unload the bread into the bakery and he’d put those big wooden bakery boxes out in front for Fay and I and my two cousins, Sheryl and Michael Levin. We’d go and watch the parade on the bakery boxes, and he’d bring us cookies. My mom and her two sisters worked at the bakery, and Uncle Marvin did the books.

Prahl: As children or adults?
STONE: As adults. Uncle Marvin did the books.

Prahl: What was Uncle Ben doing?
STONE: Making money! Buying real estate, I don’t know. I never quite knew. He never had a job job that I knew of. I don’t know what he did except he earned a lot of money.

Prahl: Did you little girls get to go play in the bakery? Did you go visit him at work in the bakery?
STONE: My grandfather?  Oh, yes, we did. My Uncle Ben was an amazing man. He never married. He was known all over Portland. He rode his bike all the time. He would walk to Salem. I mean, he was quite an amazing man. Every day was his birthday, so whenever he’d go into a restaurant he’d say it was his birthday and he’d get (“It’s the first day of the rest of your life.” he’d say), and they’d always give him birthday cake. He put my kids through college. He gave Fay and I, and I’m sure he did for Sheryl and Michael, too, he’d send us a check every year for college for our kids. He was very generous. He took care of everybody.

Prahl: In the late 50s, what were your parents’ expectations for their daughters? Did they expect you to go to college?
STONE: Not my dad. He didn’t think girls needed to go to college.

Prahl: Did you have to talk him into it?
STONE: My Aunt Sally talked him into it. Well, Fay got to go. Somehow Fay got to go. She went to Portland State because she was engaged at that point and Bob was at Portland State. Then it was my turn, and I wanted to go up to Washington. He said the only way either one of us got to go to college was if we would go to secretarial school, too. Fay wanted to be a psychologist, I wanted to be a sociologist. He says, “You’re never going to earn a living, so you have to go to secretarial school.” So, in the summer we’d have to go to secretarial school.

Prahl: Where did that happen?
STONE: Downtown. I hated it. It was upstairs, it was hot. I don’t remember. I learned to type, never really learned to take dictation. Fay did. She was really good at shorthand. I never really got it. Anyway, we went. So somehow Sally—I think at that point Sally was working for Daddy and Uncle Lou. She was Uncle Lou’s legal secretary. Daddy and Uncle Lou had offices together forever.

Prahl: What work did they do?
STONE: My uncle was a lawyer and Daddy was an accountant. They had, across from the old Post Office, Meier & Frank’s and then that old—wasn’t that the Post Office?

Prahl: You mean in Pioneer Courthouse Square?
STONE: Yes, across the street from that.

Hochstein:  When you said “Papa” before, that’s not the same as Daddy.
STONE: No, Papa was my grandfather. What was the question?

Prahl: We were talking about having to go to secretarial school and then you could go to college.
STONE: Somehow Sally was Uncle Lou’s secretary at that time. She could get anything for me, pretty much. She was a very special woman. So she talked him into letting me go away to college.

Prahl: Do you know what she said to him?
STONE: Some of which I wouldn’t want on record.

Prahl: But the upshot was that he agreed.
STONE: Yes, he did agree. I honestly still wonder how I got to go to Berkeley, because that had to have been expensive. There was probably some reciprocity with Washington at that time, and also because I was the first honors class—I was in the first honors class at University of Washington, so I got a scholarship.

Prahl: When you were in high school, hoping to do this, did you know that sociology was what you wanted to study?
STONE: I wanted to be a social worker. I always wanted to be a social worker. I was going to do that. And when I graduated from Berkeley my husband wouldn’t let me go to graduate school. I did for one year, for the county. I was a social worker and then when I left him in 1986 and ’87 I applied to graduate school and in ’88 went to graduate school and became a social worker.

Prahl: What was his reason?
STONE: He didn’t finish college, and I think it was a threat to him. He didn’t think it was important.

Prahl: Were you working at the time?
STONE: Yes, I was working.

Prahl: So it would have meant stopping working and going to school.
STONE: No, I didn’t work when the kids were little.

Prahl: So it wasn’t the income he was worried about losing.
STONE: No, it wasn’t the income.

Prahl: So, two years at University of Washington.
STONE: Then I transferred to Berkeley and I honestly don’t know how any of that happened. I don’t remember filling out—I must have done something.

Prahl: And you had to leave your friends.
STONE: I did. It was a broken love affair and I just really needed to get out of Seattle for a year, so I was just going to go for a year and then go back to graduate because I would have graduated from the honors college and Phi Beta Kappa and everything. Then I met Richard. He was out of school, so I stayed and didn’t go back, so I graduated from Berkeley.

Prahl: How did you make new friends at Berkeley?
STONE: Oh, it’s an interesting story. I went to Berkeley. I knew three people there, my cousin Nadine Bricker, who lived in San Francisco and was married and kind of took me under her wing, my mother’s best friend who has turned out to be my kids’ godparents, both of them, and friends from BBYO. My sister Fay had a friend there and her brother was a year older than me. I had met him because he had come up some time when I was in high school and stayed with us in Portland and at our house in Seaside. So when I went to Berkeley, Fay said, “Call Jack and he’ll acquaint you with people.” He was president of the 20-30 club which was for singles at the Jewish Community Center in Oakland. He introduced me to everybody, Jewish friends there, and that’s how I met Richard.

Prahl: Was your circle at Berkeley particularly politically active? Were they interested in debating the issues of the time?
STONE: My best friend I met in Hebrew class, and then we got an apartment. We were there during the Free Speech Movement and everything. That was a scary time. Actually, I was still in the dorms then. When I transferred, Mother said I had to live in the dorm. I didn’t know anybody. You can’t just go get an apartment. So the girl who ended up being my roommate, Faith, also was a junior transferring in from back east somewhere. Then I had already met Dina. We went to the march. It was a lot of police, a lot of police in riot gear. It was scary. What’s was his name, the big one that spoke at Berkeley?

Prahl: Abbie Hoffman?
STONE: No, it wasn’t Abbie Hoffman. I can’t think of his name. Anyway, they shut down the Admin building and there were riot police everywhere. Faith got arrested! Dina and I left, but I remember Faith got arrested. She got out. I was a very harrowing time. Of course, when I was there Kennedy was killed. That was the most memorable thing to me. I remember walking across campus from a class and I heard the loudspeakers at the student union blaring that Kennedy had been shot. I ran back and Faith was napping and I woke her up and said the President has been shot. Nobody moved out of the dorm for three days. We had one television for the whole dorm and everybody was around it. We saw Jack Ruby shot on television. I mean, it was—we must have gone to meals but nobody moved. I’m sure there weren’t any classes. It was a very hard time.

Prahl: Were you in contact with the folks back here about it?
STONE: I must have been. I just remember we were all huddled together at school. It was a hard time.

Prahl: That was your first semester, the fall of your first semester at Berkeley. Were your day-to-day conversations with other students and with friends about these issues, about politics and what was going on in the country?
STONE: I know at the University of Washington Vietnam was a big deal because we were all afraid that the guys were going to get drafted. Of course, that was still going on. Dina and I were pretty political. She was always an activist.

Prahl: Did that carry over into your adult life once you got married? Did you continue to have an interest in it?
STONE: Oh, yes. 

Prahl: What were your causes?
STONE: My causes. The poor, and children. Although I was a social worker I always worked with the elderly. Being a social worker, I always was working on causes for children and poor people. It was disturbing to me when people would say, well, they chose to be that way. They could go get jobs. I lived in a different world than that, so I was always out there. My son said that’s why he became a high school counselor, and a counselor psychologist, because of everything I was doing!

Prahl: A lasting legacy.
STONE: And is still very involved.

Prahl: Did you marry Richard before you graduated from Berkeley?
STONE: Six months before—well, February, and I graduated in May.

Prahl: He had already graduated?
STONE: He never graduated, but he was out of school and he was working. His father had a men’s clothing store in Oakland.

Prahl: He grew up in Oakland?
STONE: He moved there when he was I think 12, because he was bar mitzvahed in Oakland. He’s from Pittsburgh. He’s the Stone.

Prahl: Where did you raise children?
STONE: In Oakland, and then we moved to Piedmont when Eric was in fifth grade. He was extremely bright and he was extremely bored in Oakland schools. We thought:  private school, or move. So we moved—Piedmont had absolutely fabulous schools and we found a 100-year-old house that was three doors into Piedmont but enough to get him into school. We bought this house and had to re-do the whole thing, but the kids got to go to school.

Prahl: Tell me the names of the children.
STONE: Eric and Wendy. Eric was born in ’67 and Wendy was born in ’69. It was interesting what we did because Richard and I were both very involved in trying to keep our kids centered in the real world because Piedmont was pretty White. We left them in Scouts in Oakland and most of their friends were Black and Asian in Oakland and we wanted to keep it that way. We’d go back and forth. It was important to us that they grew up in a much more liberal atmosphere than they were going to get in a White high school and a White grade school.

Prahl: Did you join a synagogue?
STONE: There? Yes, they went through—we were at Beth Abraham and we were at the Orthodox synagogue for a while. We had a wonderful rabbi we adored at the Orthodox synagogue. It was in walking distance of our house, and Richard’s parents belonged there. But when he went on aliyah to Israel—

Prahl: Richard?
STONE: No, the rabbi. We loved our rabbi and Richard helped build their sukkah every year. We were very, very close to them but when they moved with their three little kids to Israel—they lived two blocks from us—they hired a German rabbi who did not like kids in the synagogue and didn’t want them in there for services. Rabbi Leaderman and the kids—I mean, he had a baby that’d crawl around. Kids were always in there. So it changed the whole atmosphere, so we left and went to the Conservative synagogue. Then by the time Wendy was going to be bat mitzvahed, I was working. I didn’t go to work until she was starting middle school, full time. I knew I couldn’t—then we went to Alameda for school because it was a good—we liked the synagogue there. We had a lot of friends over there. It was a Conservative synagogue, small. Rabbi Shulman had left the Conservative synagogue and gone to L.A. We didn’t like the new rabbi there. We knew we couldn’t—there was no way I could get Wendy to bat mitzvah training in Alameda. She’d have to take two busses. So we reluctantly, very reluctantly joined the Reform synagogue because most of the kids in Piedmont that were Jewish went there and I could get into a carpool.

Prahl: Why were you reluctant?
STONE: I’m not Reform.

Prahl: What was it about the Reform synagogue that you…?
STONE: Well, this example from her bat mitzvah! At the temple in Oakland, when they open the ark, they leave it open and people sit down. I told the rabbi, I said, “Rabbi Brody, my aunt Frances Bricker—my whole family came for her bat mitzvah—they’re Orthodox and they will not sit down if you have the ark open. There’s no way.” So for us he had the ark closed for her bat mitzvah. I mean, it wasn’t comfortable to me. Too much English, weird things like that, everybody didn’t wear tallises, they didn’t wear kippahs all the time, but it was a thing we had to do to get her through school, do we did it. It was a good school.

Prahl: How do you think that your children’s Jewish education and life differed from your own?
STONE: I wanted to move back here. From the time I had kids, I wanted to move back to Portland because I thought it was a wonderful place to raise Jewish children.

Prahl: What would be the differences?
STONE: It wasn’t a cohesive community like it was here. People flowed in and out, it was hard to keep good friends because they’d move away. The Jewish community certainly wasn’t cohesive. The youth groups weren’t strong at all. I could barely get Wendy into BBG and she didn’t stay. Eric wouldn’t go into AZA. They did USY reluctantly. It wasn’t like here, it was just everybody did it, so that’s where your friends were. I really wanted that for them, but Richard wouldn’t leave his folks, so didn’t come.

Prahl: Did they go to summer camps?
STONE: They did.

Prahl: And you did not?
STONE: Me? Oh, of course I did. I went to BB Camp.

Prahl: I just assumed you were at Seaside the whole summer.
STONE: Well, we went to BB Camp, too. We went to BB Camp and one summer I went to Schechter and was a CIT at Schechter. I went to BB Camp. Mother sent me to BB Camp when I was eight or nine. I was probably eight because it was the summer we were moving—because they were moving and Fay was going and I guess they wanted to get the house—I was way too young. I was a mama’s girl and I was not happy at camp. My cousin Nadine was a counselor there.

Prahl: Do you remember how long the sessions were?
STONE: Three weeks. All girls, three weeks. So Fay was there, Nadine was there. I hated it, I wanted to go home. So I didn’t go back until I was probably 11. Then I enjoyed it.

Prahl: Tell me about the things you enjoyed at camp. Try to describe a day of good things at camp.
STONE: I learned to play softball. I was a horrible sportsperson, and I was the best improved softball player. I’m left-handed so I never was good at sports because I was left-handed. I loved the crafts. We did a lot crafts. We had—I don’t think they called them the Judea Games but we had that. We camped, we went horseback riding on the beach which I absolutely loved. What beach would it have been? We went over to the coast and went horseback riding on the beach. I got thrown from a horse; they made me get back on. Then we went camping. It was a great camp, I loved it. And I was a counselor there.

Prahl: Were the counselors high school students, college students, do you remember?
STONE: I’m sure they were college students. You could go there through high school, at least through—because the boat house, the big cabin down by the water was always for the high school kids. I was a counselor there when I was going off to college. 

Prahl: Was it segregated, boys and girls? Even all the way through high school?
STONE: It was still segregated. It was segregated until—

Prahl: I don’t think it is now.
STONE: Oh, no. Wendy went there. Eric came up—

Prahl: From California.
STONE: I brought them up, and Eric went. I don’t know how my mom found this out, but through the Jewish Community Center here—because the Jewish Community Center there wasn’t really very Jewish and they didn’t do anything specific. So the Jewish Community Center here took a bus trip for (how old was he, 12?) across the United States and through Canada. Didn’t know a soul, and Wendy went to BB Camp while he was off on this trip.

Prahl: Did he enjoy it?
STONE: He loved it. His friends when he moved here—because both my kids were raised in California and ended up living here, which was—besides my mother being here—why I came back, because my kids were here. Eric’s first friends here when he came back were the kids that he knew from that trip. One of them ended up, actually, when he went Santa Barbara, was at college with him. 

Prahl: What kind of Jewish life do the kids have now?
STONE: Eric and his wife have taught at Neveh, the high school program, for years. He is taking a year off now because his daughter left for college so he decided to take a year off. But he’s been teaching there for years. Both of those kids went through the whole high school program. Now Mason, my daughter’s oldest, just was bar mitzvahed, and Levi is in Sunday school.

Prahl: All at Neveh?
STONE: Neveh, all of them at Neveh, which is how I ended back up at Neveh. But we also belonged to Shaarie Torah because my family’s there. Mel doesn’t quite understand. This is just something in my heart. I have 27 family members in Shaarie Torah cemetery, and I said that’s where I want to be. He said he wants to be cremated. I said that’s not going to happen.

Prahl: Both the Schnitzer and the Rosumny?
STONE: All of them are there, and my great grandparents. Except my mother’s grandfather emigrated to Israel. He was a rabbi.

Prahl: Do you go to the cemetery? What do you do there? Do you talk to the people who are buried there?
STONE: I talk to my mom, and I’ve always put rocks. I told Mel we had to join Shaarie Torah because that’s where I want to be buried.

Prahl: Do you ever go there?
STONE: Yes, we do. We take classes. I like services better at Neveh but we like Josh so much; it’s just a personal preference. I adore Josh. When Uncle Marvin was dying he was so wonderful. I told Mel this is where we have to be, because when Rabbi Isaacs retired, we just didn’t connect with Rabbi Kosak. But a lot of our friends are at Neveh. We take classes at both. We take take a class with Rabbi Stampfer. We take a class with Josh. So, we go to both. My headstone will be hopefully by my aunts.

Prahl: I’m going to jump back now to early children. You didn’t get to go to graduate school.
STONE: I did not.

Prahl: Did you work when they were young?
STONE: I worked—when Wendy was little we were broke. Richard’s father decided to retire and for some reason he didn’t give Richard the store, although Richard had worked there all his adult life. But his other son didn’t want it. So, he [Richard] had to find a new profession.

Prahl: What was the store?
STONE: A men’s clothing store. Mother worked for Willoughby Hearing Aid center at the time; she had worked there for years, and we were good friends with the Willoughbys, and Paul Willoughby suggested that Richard come up and train with him, and he did, and decided he wanted to go into that business. I prayed he would stay in Oregon because Paul was going to set him up and I could come home and our kids could come home, and he said no, he wanted to go back. So he and his brother started a small hearing aid business. At the time we were on food stamps. We had nothing. So when they were little I sold Avon, and then I sold Tupperware because I had a baby. I’ve never believed, if you can afford it which isn’t so much the case today, regretfully, those years are so precious when they’re little that you need to be with your kids. So once Wendy started grade school I worked but I was always home after school. I was always the Scout leader, I was the den mother. I only worked from 9 to 1. I could still help in the classrooms in the afternoons. Then when they went to middle school I worked full time.

Prahl: Doing what?
STONE: My friend, my neighbor, was a bookkeeper for a doctor’s office, and she wanted to quit, so she trained me. I started doing that. So I worked for different doctors’ offices until I went to graduate school.

Prahl: You went to graduate school after your divorce, you said.
STONE: Well, during.

Prahl: But you were staying in California.
STONE: I was in California. I went back to Berkeley.

Prahl: And got a graduate degree in social work.
STONE: Yes, loving every minute.

Prahl: Also working as a bookkeeper.
STONE: No, you can’t, because it was full-time. You were in school two days a week full-time—no, the first year you were in classes three days a week full-time, and you had an internship two full days a week. There was no way. I did work in the summer. I got a work-study thing in the summer to help pay for school. Then the second year you were in an internship three days a week and in classes two days a week. It wasn’t part-time like they have now. There wasn’t any way you could—I mean, some people did it. I don’t know how in the heck they did it.

Prahl: Did you go immediately into doing social work when you graduated? What kind of social work?
STONE: Oh, yes. I loved what I did. When I first got married I worked for the county in old age services and I was a social worker. In those days you couldn’t work part time. They wouldn’t let you come back part time when I had kids. They wouldn’t actually even let you go driving once you were so many months pregnant, out into the field. And I only worked with seniors then and I absolutely loved it. So when I went back I knew I wanted to work in senior services, so my first year I worked in senior housing. My advisor said that she wanted me—she felt, because I worked in six different buildings, she said I want you to do something more specific your second year. She had me work with Alzheimer’s. I was going to be in a day program and I was going to be here and there. They didn’t pan out and I ended up at the Diagnostic Center in Berkeley. I ran support groups with people with dementia, with wives, husbands. Absolutely, it was my calling. It was definitely my calling. So when I graduated, when I was in the senior housing, the person I reported to in the senior housing was on the board of an Alzheimer’s program. She recommended me to them to run their program. So right out of school I became the director of an Alzheimer’s program. I pretty much got to grow it. It was the best job I’ve ever had.

Prahl: Did you find something in that field when you moved to Portland?
STONE: I came up and was offered—before I moved here I was offered a job here at the Alzheimer’s Association but my partner of 24 years would not move, and he said he wouldn’t come, and I turned down the job, which broke my heart, but I didn’t want to leave him. I don’t know how many years we’d been together at that point, but enough that I felt committed to staying.  So when I came up here I retired at 61. Well, then when I got divorced I moved to Santa Cruz so I had to give up that job.

Prahl: You moved to Santa Cruz?
STONE: Well, Aptos, actually. My sister was there. I’d left him once before and I was six blocks away from where my house was. I’d go pet the cats and pick up my mail. It didn’t work. Fay’s rabbi (Rabbi Rick was just amazing. He also has a psychology degree.) sat down with me. I went down to visit him and he said, “If you really want this to work; we are here and here’s Oakland, and there’s this big mountain in between. You can’t go home to get the mail and you can’t go pet the cats. So think about it.” And I moved down there, and I thought I’d try it. I took a leave from my job. I didn’t tell them where I was going, and found a job, but not in Alzheimer’s. I was still on the Alzheimer’s board and I ran support groups for 22 years, so I stayed in it. I had to give up that job. Then I got a job in San Jose, director of a case management program for seniors, low-income seniors.

Prahl: And you did not go home and pet the cat.
STONE: I did not go home and pet the cat. And I couldn’t bring the cat because the cat I wanted to bring, Licorice. When Eric left for college I was pretty depressed when my oldest left. My daughter was working for a veterinarian and she said, “Come and get a kitten.” We already had a cat, Licorice. She said, “We all have to take a kitten home.” (which I’m sure wasn’t true). I went and got a kitten and Licorice totally became, even though it was a boy, the mother of this kitten. I would have had to take both of them, and I really couldn’t do that. I was living in a mobile home and I couldn’t do that. But I did get a cat as soon as I got down there so that I didn’t need to go home and pet the cat because I got my own. Then when I moved here, the first place I called was the Alzheimer’s Association and said, “I want to do a group.” So I did the Tigard group for a number of years and then I started one in Tualatin.

Prahl: Where did you move to when you came back?
STONE: Tualatin. I gave the guy parameters. I said, “I want a one-story house; I don’t want to be in Multnomah County (because of the taxes).” He took me all over and he said Tualatin. I said, “There’s nothing in Tualatin.” When I grew up the country club was there and there was nothing. I said, “I want a one-story house.” and he kept showing me all these other houses. I said, “I want to go home; I want to go back to my mom’s.” He said one more, and it was the house we have. We’ve been there—well, Mel’s been there 13 years. He came a year ahead of me. When I went back to quit—

Prahl: You met each other in Santa Cruz?
STONE: Oh, so, my sister’s husband was the cantor in San Jose. He died young, at 40. He was in a car accident. But he had taught all these bar mitzvah kids, of course. So somehow I found out there was this Jewish dating service. This was really new. You’re talking 1991, probably. There wasn’t computer dating then. You could date Jewish or non-Jewish. So I didn’t care at that point. I just wanted to get out a little bit. It didn’t work out so well with the non-Jewish. I was dating a Baptist and when Hanukkah and Christmas came it was like, that’s it, didn’t work. So I called him and I said I wanted to meet a Jewish man and I told him who I was. He said, your sister, she was married to Bob Levinson. I said yes. He said Bob trained my boys for their bar mitzvahs. I will find you a Jewish man. And the next one was Mel and we’ve been together 24 years.

Prahl: What was he doing?
STONE: Computers. He’s a computer administrator. He ran the computer program for the city of Mountain View. He ran one for a magazine, different big things like that.

Prahl: And he was willing to make the move when you wanted to come back?
STONE: No, he was not willing to make the move when I came back, not at all. Wendy got pregnant, almost lost the baby. I came up to stay for a week to take care of her, and I went home and said, “I’m moving. You can come or not.” We’re not married. We’ve been together 24 years but we’re not married. I said, “You can come or not, but I’m going to Portland.” He had lost his job, and he said okay. I was going to resign and my boss didn’t want me to leave. He said, “Will you stay one more year? You can go up there as much as you want. You can take three-day weekends.” He gave me more money. I was only 60, so I socked away. I really wasn’t going to get Social Security or anything if I quit. So I stayed until I was 61-1/2, and then I knew I could go. I called my financial guy who was up here and said, “Can I do this?” He said yes, not for long, but 62 wasn’t that far away. So Mel came before I did. The reason he never wanted to come, he finally told me, was, “There would be no room for me in your life. Your children are there; your mother is there; your grandchildren are there. You’ll be too busy.” So he came a year before me. He took my mom to all her doctor’s appointments. He had the grandchildren stay overnight. He picked them up from school. He fixed my kids’ houses. By the time I got here he was a full-fledged grandpa.

Prahl: Was there room for you in his life?
STONE: There was plenty of room, plenty of room. He was happy to relinquish some of it back to me.

Prahl: So you’re the perfect person to ask this next question. How have you seen Portland’s Jewish community change? You went away and came back.
STONE: The best thing for me, when I came back to Neveh, was all my friends from high school are still there. It was like walking home. I got to pick up a lot with some old friends which was just—

Prahl: Name some of your high school friends.
STONE: Joyce Goldman Singer, Sharon Salmonson—what’s her married name, can’t think of it. At the synagogue? Nancy Kaufman—it will come to me. Barbara Olshan Steinbach. We just kind of picked up.

Prahl: What are the lady activities that you do with those girlhood friends now?
STONE: We have a lot of lunches. Well, Joyce died last year. That was hard, was the first of my friends. Not only did we live next door to each at the beach our whole lives, when we were in high school they moved three doors away and we rode to high school together. So when I came back and she’s sitting two rows behind me at synagogue—or two rows in front of me—so that was a hard one. That was definitely a hard one. But she introduced me to all these other people that I’m in this Havurah group with now, 22 of us. We go to the first Friday service at Neveh and then we all go out for Chinese food. They’ve been doing that for years. I’ve been here 12 years and they’ve been doing it longer than that.

Prahl: Do you play cards with them?
STONE: I don’t, because I do too much other volunteer work. A lot of them play Mahjong a lot, but I don’t have any time. 

Prahl: What is your volunteer work?
STONE: I’ve been a volunteer at Audubon in the hospital for 12 years. Until my bird died I walked around and took an owl out to talk to people, and a peregrine falcon and a kestrel. So I do that every Wednesday. I lead school groups out at the Tualatin National Wildlife Refuge with the education group out there. I work in the grade school, through all four grandkids at the same grade school, Tualatin Elementary.

Prahl: Had you been involved in outdoor kind of things before Audubon?
STONE: Yes. I led tours in California at Elkhorn Slough

Prahl: Were you a hiker?
STONE: I was a hiker but I do birding. That’s what I was doing. My friend and I, we’d go out. The third Sunday of every month was our day out where we were in California, at Elkhorn Slough. She was a plant person and I was a bird person so we were a great team going out with people. Then I ran two support groups when I was here for a while until I had to take care of Uncle Marvin and his wife, so I finally couldn’t do that anymore, while I was taking care of them. I got to finally do—I could do it once in a while on the weekends, and here I could go birding whenever I wanted. I love to bird. It’s my passion, my non-working passion. Mel never was a birder but he’s a photographer. He’s a wonderful bird photographer. He’s a wonderful photographer. Our house is covered with wonderful pictures that he does.

Prahl: We didn’t talk about the Vietnam War. Was Richard the right age to be drafted for the war?
STONE: He was. He didn’t go overseas, though. They called him back right at the end. He was at Fort Lewis.

Prahl: What about Mel?
STONE: Mel was in the service but didn’t go to Vietnam. But when he got out of the service he went to Vietnam as a government contractor.

Prahl: What about you? What did you do during the war?
STONE: I was having babies! I was just talking about that because we went to see The Post last Tuesday. I said somehow a lot of this just slipped by me because I had babies and I was very involved taking care of the kids. I wasn’t as active then.

Prahl: Were your parents Zionists? Did they talk about Israel?
STONE: My mother. I don’t think Daddy was, particularly. Mother was. We always had a Blue Box.

Prahl: Do you remember conversations at the dinner table about Israel?
STONE: I went to Brandeis Camp when I was in college. Do you know about Brandeis Camp? I came back a zealot and wanted to have Shabbat dinner which drove my father crazy, but we started having Shabbat dinners, and I wanted to go to Israel.

Prahl: Did you?
STONE: This is interesting. The rabbi at Hillel at the University of Washington talked me out of going until I graduated. He said, why don’t you wait until you graduate? I was going to take a year off. I wish he hadn’t done that because by then I met Richard and then I didn’t go because I thought I’d go for a year and I’d come back and we would have absolutely nothing in common. So I didn’t go until I was 40. My sister and I went, and then Mel and I went ten years ago, took my 84-year-old aunt. I’ve been twice, will go again. I’m hoping to take grandchild four. I take each of my grandchildren on a bar mitzvah trip, and I’m thinking number four may actually want to go to Israel. I keep offering it.

Prahl: Where have the first three wanted to go?
STONE: We took Dante to Costa Rica. Mati wanted to go to Egypt but that’s when everything blew up over there and we couldn’t, so we ended up on a European—went to Spain, Italy, and France. Then Mason we’re taking to London in June. Then the fourth one, we’ll see. He was going to go to Africa and he changed his mind. We were all hot to go to Africa. We’ve been to Africa but we really wanted to take him.

Prahl: I’m glad he’s giving it good thought.
STONE: Oh, this one is so cerebral. He is just so into history. He really wants to see castles and all that stuff, so it should be a fun trip.

Prahl: I think we have covered everything that I had hoped to cover. Were there parts of Trudi’s life that I didn’t ask about that you wanted to ask about?
Hochstein:  I did have one question. I was very interested when you described the self-segregation versus other segregation in the groups at Grant High School. I wondered what it was like when you were in Seaside. Were you consciously a group of Jewish families that were—did the people in Seaside perceive you as the Jews? You felt perceived as the Jews?
STONE: No. My best friend wasn’t Jewish, she was Catholic. We just were together all the time.

Hochstein:  You felt like just tourists in the town?
STONE: I never felt like a tourist because we were there three months at a pop.

Prahl: So the locals didn’t treat you like—
STONE: No, I knew all the local kids because I’d hang out with—I had a bunch of girlfriends down there that were in high school down there. We all hung out on the beach and hung out with the lifeguards. No, I didn’t. We never went to services. My grandfather went to services every weekend, every Saturday.

Prahl: Where did he go?
STONE: Believe it or not, my uncle’s house. My uncle—and it wasn’t his at that point—but it was on the Prom and my uncle Morris, my grandmother’s brother, had a home on the Prom—

Prahl: Morris Schnitzer?
STONE: No, Morris Meadows. It was Morris Medofsky but he changed it to Meadows. The back room was the synagogue and then somebody else bought it, Jewish, and the services continued there. Papa would go to services there every Saturday morning.

Prahl: I had heard that Israel Boxer had a congregation at Seaside. I wonder if that’s who it was.
STONE: It probably was. The people who own it just tore that house down—my cousin, my Uncle Morris’ daughter was up a couple years ago and I showed her the house and the back was still there. So the people who just bought it and tore it down left that back room. He said to me, the man when he was building it—and I know they do that because then it’s a rebuild and not a new house, he said, you know that was the synagogue? I said yes, I did know that. He’s not Jewish but he knew that that room had been the synagogue. So that room is still there. The one thing I did want to tell you about was the Sunday breakfasts. When Baba died—she died the day after I was married.

Prahl: Let’s get her real name on this tape.
STONE: Bertha Schnitzer, Baba to us, but Bertha. We got married on Saturday night at home. Doc Himmelfarb (he was like the extra brother of the Schnitzers) came, and he was drunk. He said, “Your grandmother is dying.” So we got up. It wasn’t the best wedding night because I was all upset. We got up first thing in the morning and went to Sunday breakfast. They wouldn’t let me see her. She died that afternoon. They didn’t tell me. They said there’s some Jewish thing, you can’t give bad news the week of a wedding, for a week, so they didn’t tell me until a week after we flew home.

Prahl: You must have been so sad.
STONE: Yes, it was hard, but at that point Aunt Frances decided to move it to her house, where it stayed until she died. I can’t remember the year, in the late ‘90s she died.

Prahl: Who were the people who came to it every weekend?
STONE: Every Sunday? All the brothers and the sisters-in-law. 

Prahl: All the Schnitzer brothers.
STONE: All the Schnitzers and then whichever kids were in town. Whenever I was in town we’d drag the family there, whichever cousins. Howard Cohen always went. He’s married to my cousin Barbara. Barbara didn’t come but Howard came every week. 

Prahl: Who cooked for all these people every week?
STONE: Uncle Monty. He did it for her house, too. Uncle Monty. So when Frances died I promised her—I was still living in California but I promised her when I saw her before she died, that it would continue. None of the cousins did it, so as soon as I moved up here in 2005 I started it again. But we only do it once a month or so, because everybody is busy. So, the cousins from my generation and my kids’ generation, come to brunch once a month or every six weeks. We’re keeping it up.

Prahl: Your mother didn’t teach you how to cook and your grandmother didn’t teach you how to cook. Where did you learn how to cook?
STONE: My best friend in college taught me how to cook; she had an apartment.

Prahl: You learned how to cook the things that her family knew?
STONE: Well, I had my mother’s recipes. When I got married and really had to cook, I got a lot of recipes. I make my mom’s pot roast. I still make her pot roast. I make her kugel and I make a lot of things that she made. I have her recipes, but I didn’t really cook with her. I remember one Passover I was in a religious phase. I was in grade school. Well, it was probably junior high, but grade school then was—we didn’t have junior high. I wanted to stay out of school and go to services with Papa. Somehow they let me. So after services, Mother was working and Daddy was working. I went home and I wanted to make a Passover pie. I made this Passover crust and then I used real pudding because I didn’t know. I was 12 or something, 13! I think Mother ate it anyway, because I’d worked so hard to make this Passover pie for them. But they let me. I did a lot of that stuff with my grandfather. I liked to go to services with him. I’d go over and go to services with him before Friday night services—for Friday night dinner.

Prahl: Did the challah for their Friday night table come from the bakery?
STONE: Oh, yes.

Prahl: And everybody else’s table, too.
STONE: And rye bread. Oh, wonderful. My mom, when she was high school or getting out of high school, they didn’t have money to send her to college. She got into Reed but she didn’t get to go to college because they didn’t have any money. So she was working for the bakery and Papa sent her—she’s 17, 18—sent her to San Francisco to learn how to make doughnuts, because he was going to get a doughnut machine for the bakery. So here this young girl—we’re talking—she was born in 1912, so 1930 maybe, trotted off on the train and learned how to—and she was the doughnut maker when they got the doughnut machine.

Prahl: Do you remember the doughnuts?
STONE: No, it was before I was born. They didn’t continue with it. She told me wonderful stories.

Prahl: The bakery had a delivery truck, right, that would deliver all over town?
STONE: Oh, yes. This is the story I heard: He originally was in business with [Harry] Mosler and they didn’t get along. They ended up both having bakeries.

Prahl: Enough business for everybody. I think we’re done here. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much.  I’ll give you to opportunity to edit it when it’s finished, and if you think of more we’ll meet up again and do it again.
STONE: Okay.

ADDENDUM:
After the interview, Ms. Stone added some thoughts:

I did think of a few things. When you asked how I became interested in political and social issues, I remembered that my mom and dad were on opposite sides politically. My mom was for Stevenson and Daddy for Eisenhower. I always followed Mother’s lead and became much interested in social causes. When Kennedy was running I was too young to vote because the age was still 21, but I campaigned and worked for him. Also, the reason I wanted to be a social worker was because of my Grandfather Rosumny. He was always giving help to anyone that needed it and he was my example of what type of person to become.  

Certainly there are more stories about growing up Jewish in Portland. My whole world almost revolved around youth groups, but it started younger. When I went to religious school mid week there was a bus that picked me up from Alameda grade school. I can’t remember the driver’s name but I think he owned the parking lots downtown. I got out of school early to go. My friends until high school were not all Jewish because my school did not have many Jewish kids. I am still close to many of them. My dearest non-Jewish friend still comes to Seder and makes the best matzo ball soup.