Daniel Labby

Frankel: I will start by asking you to state your full name, date and place of birth.
LABBY: Well, Dan Labby, middle initial H. I was born in Portland, September 1st, 1914, or was it 1814?

Frankel: So I will start by asking you who lived in your household when you were growing up and list the names of everyone living in your household. 
LABBY: You want to know where I was born, beyond Portland? I don’t know how much detail you want.

Frankel: Well, let’s start with who lived in your household and then we’ll talk about where your parents were born and…
LABBY: Ok, I was a small child after birth in a house in Lair Hill, actually and my grandfather, grandmother and their four sons and two daughters lived in that house and so did my father and mother for a couple of years until they were established better.

Frankel: Can you give the names of your grandparents?
LABBY: Sure, well let me just start with the statistics. The house was 730 Second Street in Lair Hill Street and it was not too far from the Neighborhood House. My grandfather, picture up there on the…was the established Old Testament prophet in Portland because he was known as the “Old Man Labby.” And he eventually became the shammes in the Shaarie Torah so he was the sage that everybody went to. My grandfather’s name was Abraham and hence he named all of his sons Abraham as a middle name. So all my uncles, therefore, are Abraham, including my father of course. Do you want their names? Well there was Ben, Manly, Barney, Harry, my father, and the two women were Bess and Miriam. And Miriam is still alive, is the last survivor. And she’s over at the Robison Home, that other section. She’s 95; she was my playmate and also my babysitter, I guess, when I was a child. As well as all the other kids in the neighborhood in that time.

Frankel: And your grandmother’s name?
LABBY: We think her name was Essie. At least that’s what grandfather called her and we couldn’t get him or her to tell us whether that was Esther or some diminutive of a regular name. They were married when she was only 16 and both of them were Russian, of course. Everybody was born in Russia, except for Miriam. 

Frankel: You mean the children were born, except for Miriam, in Russia?
LABBY: Yes.

Frankel: And when did they come to this country?
LABBY: About the turn of the century. And they went from where they were which is now, I think, a Ukrainian-Polish border, although everything shifted, through Liverpool, England. And then on to New York where they lived for a couple of years. And then moved to Woodbine, New Jersey which was a settlement for immigrant Jewish families. And the reason for that was because Woodbine had, thanks to the Baron de Hirsch of England, an agricultural school. My grandfather chose to learn to make men’s hats and in that little town was the Dubitzky hat factory where he was trained to make the old hats with the brim and so on which became his business here in Portland. 

Frankel: What led them to Portland from New Jersey?
LABBY: I think somebody from their village who came to Portland because there was a patron here by the name of Miller, Mr. Alex Miller. I think it was his father, actually who started being a patron of the immigrant Jewish population. And so communication from the Lower East Side in New York where my grandfather was one of the pushcart peddlers, you know, on lower Hester Street… He agreed to have our family come out. So my grandfather and my father who was the oldest son came first by freight train, I understand, well that’s the family story. And when they became established they brought the rest of the family which was amazing. They had their troubles, even coming into this country. One of the small babies, I think my uncle Ben, had measles and they were afraid when they went through Ellis Island they’d be detained. So the story is my grandmother covered the baby up, held it in her arms with a sheet. And when the immigration officer wanted to see it she said, “No, the baby’s asleep.” So they came through. And that’s been one of the family traditional stories. The other thing that happened was that my mother’s family came from Moscow and she came with a family of about six or seven children through Paris where they stayed for a couple of years and where one of the sisters, there were four of them, taught my mother to play the piano and wasting time and finally they managed to come over and they went more directly to Woodbine where eventually as teenagers my father and mother met. 

Frankel: So for how long did your whole family live in one household?
LABBY: Which family?

Frankel: You were describing that you lived with your grandparents and your uncles in the same household.
LABBY: Yes, well we left after two years and moved to another part of South Portland. Actually at 5931/2 First Street, corner of Sherman. And my father by then had a GED from his high school training and then he became a dentist. He went to North Pacific Dental College here in Portland. And so when they moved from the family house he established an apartment above…in the second story of a building the bottom of which was a drugstore, Cottel’s Drugstore on the corner of Sherman. And he established his office in this building, in the living room of the apartment and there was a curtain separating the rest of the house where we lived as a…me as a child. That part of South Portland was mostly tradesmen and various professional people. My father was the dentist of the small community. And on First Street from where we lived, right on the North and South streetcar line I could look right straight across the street and see the barber and around the corner of that same street was my eventual violin teacher, a German. And then down the street were some rather well known people in that area. Do you want me to list them?

Frankel: Absolutely, I would love for you to go down the street and mention people who lived there.
LABBY: Sure, well right across the street from First and Sherman where Cottel’s Drug Company was Goldstein’s Furniture store and adjacent to him on down First Street was a very famous other drug store called the World Drug Company but it was famous because it was run by somebody by the name of Roscovitch; he was the father of Rothko, the great impressionist artist. There were several sons and Rothko came from Portland, went to New York. Then beyond that there was Levine’s Fish Market and in front of Levine’s Fish Market was a bench that many of the stores built for the old men to sit in the sun and talk, you know. The reason I bring that up, though is because when I was old enough to ride a tricycle I went from 5931/2 First Street by tricycle…I peddled alone all the way to my grandmother’s house at 730 Second Street and the reason I remember the lineup of the stores is because as I passed, the storekeepers called my mother and said, “Danny just passed.” So she knew I was safe and then when I got there, why, I was ok. My grandmother’s phone number was Marshall 4-1-2-4 and I called there every day as she requested and we had a little conversation, usually in Yiddish; that was my first language. They didn’t speak very good English. They eventually spoke enough broken English though. They’d better because they had all these youngsters in their house to bring up. Then on down the street on the same side, of course, was the famous Halperin’s Grocery Store. And Mr. Calistro eventually joined it so it became Jewish-Italian. But on the other street which I sometimes took was another Italian…the Martell Family. And that was up on Second Street. Sometimes I would scoot right straight down Second. As I talk I can picture myself actually riding my tricycle. Then there were a series of mom and pop stores as well as junk stores and across the street from Calistro and Halperin was Mr. Mosler’s Bakery, very famous place. And then down the street on that other side, which is the east side, toward the river, was Kessel and Fry. They were the kosher butchers. So that whole place was a kind of contained little village.

Frankel: And so what year are we talking about?
LABBY: I was born in ‘14 and I left there in 1921 and the age of seven. I went through my first schooling there, at Failing School. The principal was Mrs. Porter and my teacher was Miss O’Donnell. I was taken to school every day by the mom and pop grocery store below our apartment. They were the Kaplans and the Kaplan people had two daughters. Molly Kaplan used to lead me by the hand. The first day of school, I entered the first grade. Mr. Kaplan had an old Ford, model T and part of the noise in the neighborhood, early in the morning, was him trying to crank his car to get it started to go to the market to pick up vegetables and produce and supplies for the grocery store. Next to him going north down the street was the movie house, the South Portland movie house. Then on that corner, that’s Grant Street, the street car took a turn and went up Grant Street up to Third. And as a result we always had a streetcar coming by and the man who used to put tar in the tracks to keep it from being noisy…we used to go out and pick the tar up and use it as chewing gum. And also we put pennies on it to, you know, smash the pennies into a medallion. Then further down the block, past Grant Street was the Shaarie Torah synagogue where my grandfather when he eventually tired of being a hat maker… Because he wasn’t a very good business man, frankly. Usually his store was full of old Jews discussing midrash. I remember as a small child he would have me play on the floor. He’d give me scraps of paper to cut up and cloth and so on.

Frankel: Where was his store?
LABBY: His store was further down First Street, way into almost the center of town. I’d say almost about, I’m guessing close to Salmon. And across from that was the American Movie House where my Aunt Miriam who’s over at the home, used to play the piano. Because in the days before sound in the movies, you know they had to have some sort of music that kept pace with what was going on the screen. You know if the cowboys and Indians were fighting and so on, why she knew the appropriate music. So I lived in South Portland that way until about the second grade which would make me about seven, 1921. The other thing is that there were other mixtures. There were Italian people, you could tell from their names. And on top of that there were a few Turks, there was actually a Turkish synagogue, or whatever, across the street from the Goldstein’s store.

Frankel: Do you recall the name of that synagogue? [Ahavath Achim]
LABBY: No, I don’t. I didn’t even know what a Turk was, you know, except they were different; that’s all I knew. One of the lovely things about that whole experience, though, it was so different from my own brothers because they came later when we lived across the river. But it’s the fact that there were a lot of little boys so we had a neighborhood gang. And I say lovely because we all had pet names. I (obviously) was Danny but, for example. Abe Fuses was Avi. And to this day (though he died recently) I still call him Avi. And they were Lavelah and so on and all these diminutives you find in the Yiddish language. Whenever we met, years later, when we were established, we called each other by these pet names. And even when we played at the B’nai B’rith, we used those pet names with each other, yelling at each other. It was a close enough neighborhood so that many of the mothers took care of other children if they saw them getting into trouble, almost like village life. I remember one little boy, Lavelah, actually, he never seemed to be clean. He seemed somehow to play and always be dirty. And so the women loved to take off his shirt and wash it and put it back on him. So you got the feel, you know, of real…I don’t know, well village–close ties.

Frankel: When you say a gang, was it a Jewish gang?
LABBY: Yes.

Frankel: Versus Italian?
LABBY: Well, there was no trouble with that. We sometimes called each other bad names like a Wop, for an Italian, or a Shaney for an Irishman, or Kike for the Jews but those were derisions. I dealt with that later when I sold newspapers downtown as a newsboy because that’s the way we kind of were on edge with each other. The other thing about South Portland was that it was very self-contained. For example, across the street from my father’s office, the dentist, were two physicians. They were the Rosenberg brothers. Horace was the doctor that confined my mother when I was born. So the reason I have a middle initial “H” is because she named me after him. But when I got to school and the kids didn’t know what Horace meant they used to call me all kind of bad names like Horse and so on. I asked if I could please change my name and so they said keep the initial. So I changed it to Harvey; seemed benign enough. Am I telling you what you want to know?

Frankel: Yes, let me just ask a few more questions. Growing up, what about your Jewish life. Did you celebrate Jewish festivals, holidays, what are your memories of those?
LABBY: Well my grandfather was Orthodox so the house was kosher. My mother was not; she was trying to break out of that. But I was brought up, I guess as a small baby, the first two years of my life, in an Orthodox household. And my memories are of getting into that kind of life because my grandmother and grandfather not only kept a kosher house but they were very strict with the children. One of the things that I recall very definitely is at the Seders that they had when I was small, they’d invite Mr. Miller, the family patron, who is my godfather. Of course, I would be a baby about two years old but they would bring me to the table for a while and hand me around so I’d make the rounds, being handed from one person to the other all the way around the table. As far as I can tell that’s one of my earliest memories, goes back to, I suppose, one or two.

Frankel: You have that memory?
LABBY: I can still picture it, yes, yes. One of the reasons I think my memory works is because as the first child and a son, there wasn’t another child at my generation for six years. So my brother didn’t have this kind of… I was given an awful lot of stimulation. I’m sure I was adored by my uncles and so on; they used to push me around in the baby carriage.

Frankel: What about attending services at the synagogue?
LABBY: Well my grandpa, of course, was very orthodox. He wasn’t right off the shamas; he was later. But it was an Orthodox synagogue and so far as everything was actually observed, all the holidays… For some reason my folks were particularly anxious to have me learn Hebrew. They wanted to be a little more, I suppose, so called “enlightened.” So at the end of two years, they moved off to Laurelhurst where I was brought up as a young child. Yes, we observed all the holidays. My grandfather, as you can tell by looking at him, he looked like an Old Testament prophet and he was really revered. He always said that the important thing was respect. And so he lived a life just that way. He got up every morning and he laid tefillin and he did his prayers and the way he did it, he got up at dawn and he’d have a dill pickle and he would drink some vinegar and then he was alert enough to stand before his lord, I guess. And then he would say his prayers. And when the young uncles were brought up they had to show their arms– that they had had the tefillin on and the things had cut into it. And also the [ketzitzah ???] between the eyes. So he was pretty Orthodox. And I stayed in Yiddish with him until much later. When we lived on the east side we, of course, would visit.

Frankel: Would you have regular Friday night dinners at their house, or…?
LABBY: I think we did until we moved to the eas tside. And when we moved to the east side we still didn’t have an automobile. I was brought up, you see, in that kind of a household, with four uncles and they took good care of me. Well, my father and three uncles. And they used to take me fishing. For example, in the North and South streetcar for 5 cents you could go from Milwaukie all the way out to Willbridge, which is Sauvie Island. And we would all get up and take the first streetcar at dawn and go fishing as a family.

Frankel: Just to clarify, did your uncles move with your parents?
LABBY: No, they stayed in the house, for many years actually, until they began to marry. The two older ones didn’t marry for a long time. And I think when I was about, oh, possibly eight or nine or so, they moved from Second Street to 921 College Street. And the whole family moved.

Frankel: Do you have memories of immigrants coming before with you. Do you have memories of German Jews having arrived before the Russian Jews?
LABBY: Well, I married one. Her whole family has such a different history. They came around the horn to San Francisco then came up to Portland. Her grandfather is quite a famous man. You know his name? Ben Selling. He was Portland’s first First Citizen. Well my memory is mostly of the neighborhood which consisted, where we lived, mostly of Russians. For example, the Brownsteins were next to the Labbys. And Molly Brownstein became a well-known pianist. So she never played with us because she was always practicing. Across the street were some of the wealthier people. The family was Spivak and they had three children. And the youngest one, Rose, we called Ruchella, was part of our gang. The older fella, Barney, was much older and there’s another daughter. They had the biggest house. Actually it’s been torn down; it’s a parking lot now for the Neighborhood House. But during my childhood across the street a very significant thing happened. That is that they built the Multnomah County Hospital at the top of Lair Hill, and the Library which was run by the Loewenberg girls. The hospital had a nurse’s home because the nurses, very often, were unmarried and lived, you know, right nearby. And that was across the street from the Neighborhood House. And then it more recently became the Children’s Museum. As a little boy, old enough, I climbed across the street into the park where the hospital used to be before it moved up to Markham Hill and I took the path across what is now Barbur Boulevard, there was no Barbur, and walked all the way up thinking I was exploring the jungle, I remember. I must have been about eight or nine or ten, all the way up to the top of Markham Hill. So that area was pretty undeveloped at that time.

Frankel: Did you used to go to the Neighborhood House, what kind of activities were there?
LABBY: Yes, well the activities, on the whole were mostly aimed, as far as I can tell as a small child, at the needs of the people for not just recreation but… For example, there was very commonly a free clinic. And there’s a picture of me somewhere, of one of the pediatricians holding me and giving me an examination of some sort in the evening clinic. My mother was a nurse so she was active in that. But they had basketball I think. I can’t remember much else, dances and concerts and so on. But there wasn’t anything on the same scale, for example, as B’nai B’rith which I eventually went to.

Frankel: Did that exist already when you…
LABBY: I don’t know when it was opened but I know when I was pre-teen to a teenager I then went up to B’nai B’rith.

Frankel: On the eastside was there also something equivalent to a Jewish neighborhood?
LABBY: No, but it was being developed, where we lived, Laurelhurst. But there wasn’t any Jewish settlement but a lot of Jewish people came there. In fact many of them, like my father and mother were the generation that made the first immigration as children. For example, there were the Fischels, the Fischel company. There were the Rosenfelds. There were the Halpern’s, the Otis’s and the Taylors around my house within walking distance and the Tarlows. The names are still around Portland.

Frankel: So would you cross the river for your shopping or for the activities?
LABBY: No because it was already being developed on Sandy Boulevard and in Laurelhurst. In fact, as a kid I worked in the grocery store right there on Glisan Street. So there were stores available all the way, I’d say within seven or eight blocks.

Frankel: Moving away from your grandfather’s home and religion, did your parents celebrate the holidays or go to services?
LABBY: Mostly with my grandfather. Certainly on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur we visited him in the synagogue. And as usual Grandma was upstairs, of course. And as a boy, why, before I was confirmed, or bar mitzvahed when I went to see my grandfather since he was the shamas – why he always had the front seat of the east wall near the bima. And he would put his tallis around me and then he would introduce me to some his old cronies. In fact, one of the funny things that happened was that Mr. Schnitzer (and the Schnitzer Steel founder was one of his old cronies)…So he introduced me, I remember, as a medical student to Mr. Schnitzer where upon Mr. Schnitzer said, “You should come to my house and my daughters will make you a wonderful dinner.” [laughing] Edith and I laughed at that over the years. Because I practiced eventually with Mort Goodman, her husband. I think she’s still alive. 

Frankel: Do you remember the name of the rabbi at the synagogue at that time? 
LABBY: Yes, he was the Rebbe Rote. He was the Red Rabbi. He had red hair and a red beard and his brother married Miriam so he became a member of the family.

Frankel: What was his real name?
LABBY: Fain.

Frankel: So did you continue to belong to Shaarie Torah?
LABBY: We never did. I think my father, in keeping with the general policy of trying to be modernized… I went to…from the Orthodox to the Conservative and eventually the Reformed.

Frankel: Which synagogues were those, the names of those synagogues?
LABBY: Well, Ahavai Sholom was the Conservative, the Reform was Beth Israel. I went through all their Sunday Schools. 

Frankel: What are your memories of going to Sunday School?
LABBY: Well, you know, you think six days a week was enough. The seventh day I guess we all kind of resented it. But eventually, as we got older, for example I remember the social part of it was very important to me as I got to be around 12, 13. I’m sure I had crushes on some of the girls and so on. The best one, of course, ended up with me at Beth Israel where I was eventually confirmed. Well I went through my bar mitzvah at the Ahavai Sholom to please my grandfather, who didn’t want to set foot in a Reform. But he would compromise and go to a Conservative.

Frankel: Who was the rabbi at the Conservative shul when you had your bar mitzvah?
LABBY: I really don’t recall that because…

Alice: Was it Kleinman?
LABBY: I don’t remember.

Frankel: And at Temple when you were confirmed?
LABBY: Well, that’s quite a story because that was a great part of my life. I was a member of the first confirmation class of the new rabbi, Rabbi Berkowitz. He established the Octagonal Club. And the Octagonal Club was named after the shape of the new Beth Israel building; it was an octagon. He was wonderful with children, absolutely wonderful, and I loved him. In contrast to my Orthodox rabbis and my grandfather, he was the modern rabbi and I wanted to be just like that. He took me under his wing and after Sunday School I would go out and I would caddy for him at the golf club when he and Charley Berg…they played golf there. And then they’d buy me lunch, tip me and that was…you know a real seduction. So finally when I got to be, I guess, getting into… 

Frankel: You mentioned the Octagonal Club. What was that?
LABBY: That was a club of the graduates who went through confirmation. I was, I think, kind of pegged to be a doctor. My mother was a nurse, my dad wanted to be a doctor and couldn’t afford it and went to dental school. So it was inevitable, you know. On the other hand, when I met Dr. Berkowitz that was really quite overwhelming.

Frankel: You say Doctor Berkowitz?
LABBY: Well, he had a degree in divinity. He didn’t call himself that as we did. So my father and I visited him one day and said I had been admitted to Reed College. I must have been about 17 or 18. We’re talking now about 1932. And that was right after the Depression, or during the Depression, what am I saying. So Rabbi Berkowitz was absolutely overwhelmed and so excited that I had graduated his confirmation class and wanted to be a rabbi. So he went to Charlie Berg, who knew me because I’d caddied for them. And Charlie Berg said he would pay my entire education as a rabbi at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. And that was just overwhelming. But not too long after that Rabbi Berkowitz returned from a national meeting and looked very depressed. He said as a result of the economic depression synagogues were having to close their doors and there were a lot of unemployed rabbis and maybe I’d better think twice about it. Well I came from an immigrant family and security… So, I guess I finally decided otherwise and went ahead with pre-med. Anyhow, Margaret said she’d never marry me if I was a rabbi. 

Frankel: Did most of your peers go on to college?
LABBY: My mother was a nurse, trained in New York and when all her sisters went to New York City she went to New York City to train as a nurse. By then she and my father were engaged. He was in Portland so she finished her nurse training then came to Portland then they married here. 

Frankel: And your father went to dentistry school where?
LABBY: Here, North Pacific now it’s called. He taught there on the faculty for a while.

Frankel: My question was about your own peers. Was it common to go to college at that period?
LABBY: If you could, because the Jews always have desired education, you know. Most of my friends from South Portland went to college, yes.

Frankel: Was Reed the only school you applied to?
LABBY: Yes. It was known if you went to Reed that… Well, there was a bit of a hitch. I didn’t have enough money at the end of the first year. And so when I went to talk to them at Reed they said, “Well, why don’t you do this? Why don’t you work?” And that was the Depression. “Why don’t you work and go to night school and emphasize humanities instead of science? And then if all goes well and your grades are up to it then we can enter you as a tentative sophomore so you won’t lose a year.” So that’s what happened. I entered as a tentative sophomore and it was OK at the end of sophomore year and went on to do junior orals and my thesis and instead of going to med school after three years I stayed and graduated after four at Reed.

Frankel: So when you took night classes where did you work?
LABBY: Wherever we could find a job, it was the Depression.

Frankel: So what type of work did you find?
LABBY: I ran a flower shop in the Sweton building. I did deliveries for the flowers; I ran the elevator in the building; I sold shoes at several shoe stores; I washed dishes in restaurants to get a free lunch (they couldn’t employ me)–what they called a busboy. I cut lawns and did gardening on the weekends; we all did that. And I was a newsboy. Actually that goes back. I was a newsboy on Sixth and Alder at the age of about 11 or 12. And then I sold magazines in the street. There was an interesting little encounter. Sixth and Alder turned out to be a superb corner for a newsboy because it was right across the back end of both the Zells and Meier and Frank, across from the Selling Building whose granddaughter I eventually married. Two days after I started selling newspapers after school down there a big husky fellow came by and he said, “Get off my corner you WOP.’ And I said, “I’m not a WOP.” I was dark-complected as a kid. He said, “Yes you are.” I said, “No, I’m Jewish.” He wouldn’t believe it. He said, “You’re Jewish, name a couple of Jewish holidays for me.” That was easy. He said, “Ok.” He walked off.

Frankel: Do you know who he was?
LABBY: I haven’t got the faintest. It was a good corner, you had to fight to keep it. But those were the days when we had three papers in Portland. And of course the good corners were [good for] a lot of reasons. One was that when the stores closed all the young women who managed the counters would come and pick up the Portland News in order to follow the daily romance installment. And then, you build up a route. So I did that for a couple of years.

Frankel: Was the Jewish community affected, and your family, by the Depression? Do you have memories of incidents or things that you remember specifically?
LABBY: Oh sure, everybody was affected by it. As a matter of fact, there was a brisk sort of trade in what was essentially “barter.” For example, somebody established a series of script books and my father, for example, as a dentist, took I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars worth of script from people who wanted dental work. But he, in exchange, got that amount for, say, Meier and Frank or to claim as restaurant meals, for tailoring and so on. So there was a lot of this barter going on through scrip during that time. 

Frankel: Let me just ask, were your family affiliated or associated with Jewish organizations?
LABBY: Well, through the Temple, through the synagogue.

Frankel: Politically, were they Zionists?
LABBY: Yes, they were. Yes, my father particularly was. They used to have Russian evenings in their home. And so these people I picked off by name, like the Fischels and so on, the men would wear their blouses, the Russian blouses with the little button here.

Frankel: Your father?
LABBY: And they would have tea with a samovar and they’d serve the appropriate food, I guess, and then my father had a huge set of Sholom Aleichem and so he would read in Yiddish from Sholom Aleichem as entertainment for the evening. And I can remember as a kid up on the second floor leaning over the banister listening to all that babble in this language they refused to use in American except under these circumstances. 

Frankel: How often would they meet and for how long did this go on? 
LABBY: It went on for quite a while but I don’t know how often, you know, that was more their thing then the kids’.

Frankel: And Zionist in other words, were they aware of what was going on in Israel?
LABBY: Sure.

Frankel: Did they contribute, did they…?
LABBY: I guess so. I was too young a child to know about those things. 

Frankel: And then after Reed, after you graduated from Reed…
LABBY: Yes. Well after that I went to med school.

Frankel: Was that easy to get in or…?
LABBY: If you went to Reed it was a pretty good…because Reed had a high scholastic standard, yes.

Frankel: And we talked on the phone that there was no Jewish quota that…
LABBY: I don’t know.

Frankel: You don’t know. How many class mates in medical school were Jewish, do you know?
LABBY: Well, I think there were four or five or six in my class of about 60. So that seems like ten percent. But you could construe that any way you wanted to if you were at all antisemitic, why…

Frankel: Do you have memories of antisemitism growing up?
LABBY: I really don’t except, as I say, that kid that challenged me on the street. And I went to summer camp, B’nai B’rith Summer Camp, a couple of years to learn to swim, which I never did. They actually had a mixture. You didn’t have to be a member of B’nai B’rith to go to the camp as long as you could pay the fees. I don’t really recall any difficulties.

Frankel: And then when things began to change in Germany in the early ‘30s were you aware of what was going on in Europe?
LABBY: Well in the early ‘30s I was already…

Frankel: 33.
LABBY: I was already in my 20s, in medical school. Well, what happened…when we graduated from medical school and I accepted a commission in the Army. I actually had my internship at John Hopkins in Baltimore. And then the structure at Johns Hopkins was such that if you wanted to go on and be trained there after your internship you go away and do some research. And then you come back and go up the pyramid. So I went to New York City and took a fellowship in medicine with the New York Hospital and, of course Margaret and I had been going together for five years so it was about time we declared ourselves. We got married in 1940, so we’ve been married 64 years.

Frankel: Did she join you in New York?
LABBY: I was in New York and we quit courting and got married in the middle of my fellowship. But then we went back to New York, of course, after we got married. That would be 1941. We got married in December. They took up my commission and they broke in the middle of it, the latter two parts, two thirds part of my fellowship, and I had to report to Fort Lewis in August. In December, of course, was Pearl Harbor so I…

Frankel: But were you aware of what was happening to the Jews in Europe? Did you have relatives still overseas? 
LABBY: No, not that I knew. See, the Russian influence wasn’t as great as it was in Germany, I guess or certainly was recognized. I guess when you’re in intensive medical training that’s about all you do in your life. So, we were aware of it and I was in the war and very much aware of it after that.

Frankel: When you say you were in the war, where were you?
LABBY: I didn’t leave the country. I stayed in… One very funny thing (not funny “ha ha”), they put me in the infantry as a battalion doctor. And at one point we were being trained to take the beaches of the small…we didn’t know this, in retrospect…in the South Pacific. So they thought there was…which was wrong, they thought there was yellow fever in that area, which there was not. But nonetheless, the Army, being what it was almost a million men, were inoculated. In fact, I inoculated my battalion of 1000 men and gave myself a shot. And it turned out to be contaminated serum. 75, 80 % of us came down, including me, with hepatitis. So we were withheld. We had some deaths from it as a matter of fact. I was held up in Southern California in a hospital. Another group went over and did what we had been trained to do. And after that, because my test didn’t come down quickly enough after that, my group went on to North Africa and I was put in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC. And that’s where I ended up. But I stayed on active duty, what they called “inactive duty” which meant…

Frankel: You finished about your being inactive…
LABBY: Oh yes, well let’s see. I was “inactive duty” in uniform and I picked up my resident training in New York and periodically I went down to, I guess it was an Army installation that had my liver test done again. And then the war ended and so that’s the way I ended. I took off my uniform. And of course I went ahead and finished my training at Cornell University Medical School on York Avenue. And then went across the street to the Rockefeller Institute for medical research for another two years before I came back to Portland.

Frankel: Were you involved in the Jewish community while in New York?
LABBY: No, I didn’t have that kind of time.

Frankel: And and as you grew, you were married, did you have children before you came back?
LABBY: Yes, we had a daughter and son in New York.

Frankel: So were you part of the…in other words did you continue to celebrate holidays with your family? Did you raise your children…?
LABBY: Seder, yes we had a kind of Seder, just for the sake of the family. Margaret was also working for a while. But with two small kids in a New York apartment she was busy.

Frankel: So when did you come back, do you recall the year you came back to Portland?
LABBY: Yes, first of all when the kids were small and New York being hot and we had no air conditioning then, Margaret used to spend the summers in Portland, or at the beach. Then I shifted over to the Rockefeller Institute in ’46 and I was there two years and was eventually doing research in liver disease because of interest in hepatitis. And then in ’48 we had to make a decision whether to stay there (they made me certain offers) or to come out here and raise our family. I got an invitation to lecture at the Mayo Clinic on my way back so, with the help of some very influential friends, I managed to get a… You couldn’t get a new car; it was very difficult at that time–still post war. But I had a couple of very prominent New York patients who made it possible for me to buy a Chevrolet so I drove it to the Mayo Clinic, did my lecture. Margaret met me there and then we came here.

Frankel: That was 1948? That was also the year that Israel became an independent state. Do you have memories of that day?
LABBY: Not really. We were so busy with professional and family matters I don’t know if it took that much of our time frankly. We were not that Jewish, I suppose.

Frankel: Growing up and just to see the changes, did your parents have non-Jewish friends?
LABBY: Oh yes, sure.

Frankel: How about your grandparents?
LABBY: No, they were pretty much self-contained as far as I could tell. They lived to be very old.

Frankel: Your grandparents?
LABBY: Yes, the Labby gene…my grandfather…every time I spoke with him he said he’s 89, like Jack Benny. And we knew he was older because we had his immigration papers. But I said to him one day, “Weren’t you 89 a couple years ago?” He said, “Well, the Lord does not recognize you as a man if you are more than 89.” And the only thing I could interpret from that is that as you get older you can’t pay attention to the Lord because you become addled or psychotic or something. That’s as far as I could get but… And he didn’t die of anything having to do with his old age. He died at 96 and grandma was in her late 80’s I think. But he was sitting around reading until he got a clot in his leg and an embolism blew. He died of an embolism at 96.

Frankel: Did you continue to speak Yiddish with him?
LABBY: No. He liked to speak broken English somehow. And he was very proud of the fact he was making an adjustment. For example, he would always walk to the shul despite the fact that it was quite a good walk when he moved up to College Street. And as a result in crossing the street he was hit by a car and had a fracture in his leg. And they rushed him to the hospital and everything came out fine. And lo and behold the next time we had an orthopedic class the doctor put up my grandfather’s x-rays and asked me to come down and interpret them. Very sweet, yes. He healed up fine. 

Frankel: Did you live close by the Kesser Israel, the other Orthodox synagogue in your neighborhood?
LABBY: There was only that one that I know of.

Frankel: The Shaarie Torah one?
LABBY: The Shaarie Torah yes.

Frankel: Was there a Russian restaurant by the name of Adele’s?
LABBY: Yes.

Frankel: Do you have memories of that?
LABBY: Well I went there a couple of time, they were sisters and Adele was the oldest and they had good food, yes.
Alice: I can tell you about Adele.

Frankel: Was it not also a place where Russian Jews came out?
LABBY: I don’t know it that well. I was too busy being a doctor. Did have much time for anything… I had hobbies, I always had lots of hobbies.

Frankel: Such as?
LABBY: Well, I have one regret. I put in a lot of time playing the violin. From the age of five until I was 18. And then along came medical school. And I played in a lot of orchestras, the Junior Symphony, until I was 18, the B’nai B’rith Symphony and so. You can see over there I have 300 records, a 50, 60 year collection as well as CDs.

Frankel: I also read that in the ‘30s you had a camera.
LABBY: Yes.

Frankel: Did you take pictures of the neighborhood, of your family?
LABBY: That camera was mostly used for my medical school. I made my way through by doing some commercial photography. Sure there were a lot of family pictures, I suppose I don’t have any though. I think my brothers may have them. But, you know the German Jews couldn’t bring money so they brought Leica cameras and so for $100 I bought a Leica camera and I made a yearbook of my class going through medical school and sold it back to the class. I had enough money to get through my internship. The other hobbies I had, one is behind you. For 50, 60 years I’ve collected the ancient Chinese great porcelain and terra cotta pieces. 

Frankel: Alice did you have any questions?
Alice: Well I would, yes thank you. I wanted to clarify something because you were talking about your grandpa…a couple things about your grandpa, who had the hat shop. You said mostly there were men sitting around and discussing the mishna and so on. You said he wasn’t a very good business man, it sounded like you were going to say, and then what happened, that he became the sage and the wise man full-time is what it sounded like.
LABBY: Yes, well he…that’s when he took over the shammes; that was a paid position.

Alice: I see. And then the other thing I was going to ask you about is that you alluded to a Mr. Miller who was a patron and helped your father get into the hat business and I was wondering…
LABBY: Grandfather.

Alice: Grandfather I mean, yes. Was it a coincidence that Paul Lanfromm went into the hat business, too, or did he have the same patron by any chance?
LABBY: I didn’t know him.

Alice: That was just a coincidence that…
LABBY: I guess.

Alice: Because of my memories of your parents I wanted to ask you… You said your mother took piano lessons in Paris and you talked about the Russian group that collected with your dad while they read Sholom Aleichem. My memories are of your parents having parties in which your mother always had costumes for people to put on and your dad took pictures and there was a lot of gaiety and frivolity. Were you still in the house when those kinds of things were going on?
LABBY: Yes, oh sure. I remember your dad [David Turtledove] as a great jokester, yes sure and Fran too; she went along with it, shaking her head and saying, “What kind of a guy did I marry?”

Alice: Was the ambiance in the house…? It sounds like it was one of great hospitality and warmth and a lot of company.
LABBY: Yes, they loved to entertain and of course they were entertained in return so…yes. When we first got a car that was, let’s see, I’d say about 1928, something like that, second hand Pontiac. My father learned to drive and my mother did. She learned to drive, got a license and never drove. She scared the heck out of me once. But she took her test. I was sitting in the back seat and there was an examiner, you know in the passenger seat. And she said, “Now don’t worry, I’m coming to a stop street; I’ll stop.” Well she came to the stop street and stopped and then she went right on. And we almost got killed by somebody barreling the other way. So she was not a driver. My dad was and my brothers and myself. And then eventually we bought a Model A Ford and that’s the car that Margaret and I used for our wooing. It was kind of used by the kids, you know, as kind of an extra car. Cost all of $50. 

Alice: By the time…see Arnold is ten years younger than you, and then Bob is six but by the time they were born you’d already moved over to Laurelhurst, hadn’t you?
LABBY: Well we moved so that we could have a house and expand the family, I think.

Alice: So how did the atmosphere change with those two siblings from what you had had?
LABBY: Well, I didn’t have any resentment—am I not enough? No, I loved having brothers, especially Bob. You see when Arnold came along ten years later I was already in college. So I didn’t have much of a chance. And he became really the brightest one. He was always being mad at something so he was fighting his way because he was number three. And he slowly cooled over the years but it took a long time to be the nice guy he finally turned out to be, thanks to Eva.

Frankel: Did they have the same relationship with your grandfather?
LABBY: They barely remember him. They didn’t have the South Portland experience. They barely remember him. They do remember him. You probably looked in the book Jews of Oregon; there’s a picture of my grandfather in there looking very, very proficient. I took that picture and eventually E.B. McNulton, the president of the bank, painted his portrait, which I have upstairs; you’re welcome to see it if you want. 

Alice: May ask another question? It jumps ahead. I know that you made a major change medically when you decided to be a psychiatrist.
LABBY: Oh right.

Alice: How old were you and why did you decided to move into psychiatry?
LABBY: Well it goes back to the fact that I was given this opportunity to go to Johns Hopkins in internal medicine and it was hard to turn down. But I noticed that when I was in internal medicine that I really was more interested in the people sometimes than their diseases. So when I moved to the medical school full-time after a period of practicing I noticed my interest in people beginning to take over. Although I had other responsibilities and couldn’t do much about it. I actually was interviewed by a very famous psychiatrist in Johns Hopkins in the idea I’d come back to psychiatry. Adolph Meyer who was the father of psychosomatic medicine. But the war came along and disturbed me so I picked up my intern in medicine training. 

And as years went on in internal medicine I became complacent. I decided I really ought to do something about this. So I decided to take a year of sabbatical study and just to think about things. It’s good to get perspective if you go abroad. So Margaret and I moved with the family to France and we lived in France for a year. When I had the language in hand, I taught. And I made rounds up and down from Holland all the way through Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland and decided I really didn’t want to stay in internal medicine. And so when I got back I talked to George Saslow who is head of psychiatry. And he was known to seduce people out of medicine into psychiatry. He did a good job with me. He didn’t have to work very hard. When I made rounds someone often said, “You seem more interested in the person than their…?” So I paid attention to the message. Let’s see that would be 1962 and so I studied under George part-time and then I went to Philadelphia in 1970 and spent three months with a famous guy, Harold Lee. And then went across to London with the Tavistock Institute and I spent the year 1970, that would make me 56, 57. So I retrained in psychiatry. I went back to London in 1977, took another year of training then I came back as a professor of psychiatry. But I always felt that was a natural evolution for me, intellectually.

Alice: Well, having consulted you professionally with my mother, you remember, we were talking about geriatrics…
LABBY: Yes.

Alice: At the time and…this shouldn’t be on the tape, but in any event, I was keenly aware of your professional change and appreciative of it.
LABBY: I enjoyed it. It’s a lot harder than internal medicine because there aren’t any tests or x-rays or so on. It’s very difficult and I only just a few months ago stopped teaching.

Alice: Really?
LABBY: So I’m still running seminars in bio-ethics which is the thing I’m in after now.

Frankel: That’s what I wanted to ask you about, the center for ethics that you started in the ‘80s, is there something that prompted you to establish such a…?
LABBY: Well, actually it had been a kind of a sequestered passion of mine. The critical experience I think it was about 1960 something, 63 or 4, I began to worry in a philosophic sense about how much we value life, to be simple. And so with the help of funds from the Kaiser people and at Reed College I established what was known as the “sanctity of life seminar.” And I think it was maybe the late ‘60s we had a wonderful spread of very famous people from all over the world that came and gave lectures, which I was kind of producing. I eventually wrote a book for it. And it turned out to be amazingly successfully. It seemed to touch some kind of contemporary nerve. So that was the start of it in a more public way and then it was so successful that Kaiser said, “If you give us a little more publicity, instead of saying it’s all Reed College, after all, we’re paying the bills, we’ll do it again.” So two years later we did it again with another group of famous people. 

Frankel: What fields did they come from?
LABBY: Oh boy, well, biology, theology, medicine of course, sociology, that sort of thing, I’m sure there are others. We had some marvelous experiences with these people who were outstanding.

Frankel: As a result of this conference did things change at the school in terms of…
LABBY: Well I gave a little more attention to it. For example, I started something which eventually was called CHIME, Council on Humanism in Medical Education for the students. And once I got it started I let them run it and I was their counselor I guess. So I realized that that ought to be paid attention to. So when Susan Pole who’s head of the center now came from a couple of years study of bio-ethics in Chicago, she and I started something called the Senior Clinician Conferences. And the reason for that was because by then, 1989 I was already 75 and it looked to me like one of the greatest loss of man power was the retired doctor. You know, after all, 50 years or more sometimes, all that human experience and what happens to it when they retire. Some of them try to teach a bit. So I organized these things in order to help them kind of keep up. But I wanted to have the slant on it through ethics. And so in 1989, I think, we had the first one because we just put on the 30th, at two a year it’s been 15 years I guess. And we’ve had quite a good life. 

Alice: I’m just awed by knowing Dan as long as I have and still all the facets that I didn’t know and not realizing or forgetting your connection with Mort because he was just somebody who walked on water as far as I was concerned.
LABBY: Oh sure.

Alice: He came with Edith when I was six years old and I thought how can he have married her? I want to. I was six. And as I said to you earlier he was forever a part of our life. This will be taken off the tape I trust.

Frankel: Just for the record, can you give me the name of your children and your grandchildren?
LABBY: My children?

Frankel: Yes, and where they are, what they’re doing.
LABBY: Well let’s see. I have a son and two daughters. The oldest daughter is Joan and she is a graduate of Wellesley and in a fit of spasm one day I said, “I’ll pay for any college that you can get in.” Well she was a four plus student so she chose Wellesley. So the result was she stayed a long time in Boston. But now they just finished a couple of years (it was four I guess) in Utah, where her husband wanted to get a PhD in what’s called “distant education.” And he is now in Los Angeles as an associate professor in Western University, which is Buddhist because he is in distant education in Asia. That’s the oldest; she’s 62. Then my son who came next (they were born in New York). No Joan was born in Carmel, California when I was in the Army. David is an extraordinary guy, with some bias I say it. He graduated from Reed in classics because when we lived in France as a family he was envious of the classic education the European students get. And so he graduated in classics and then went to Yale, got a masters and then went to University of Chicago, got a PhD in anthropology and lived for two years on a little Island called Yap in the South Pacific and really learned about aspect of Yap culture. 

He came back and decided that he really wanted to do something in terms of international socialism. So he set himself up in Chicago along with one of the classmates from Reed College that he married and when it turned out to be a world force of 200 people he decided that wasn’t for him. And so he went into the steel industry underground. He didn’t want them to know about their education or they’d be put in administration. They wanted to be working people. So she ended up in the coal plant, with a Reed degree. And he ended up in…he’s a very good artisan, he ended up working in packing somewhere. And they stayed there for nine years until all of a sudden Japan was sending over cheap steel and both U.S. Steel and international Steel were beginning to lay off people. So they had a critical experience in helping to life. Now he’s divorced already and re-married. “Let’s get out of the mill before they fire us.” And she said something like, “Well I’d like to be a midwife.” And he said, “If you’re going to do that you might as well be a doctor.” And she said, “That’s a good idea. I think I’d like to be a doctor.” And he said, “Gosh, I think I would too.” So they went to medical school in their forties and eventually graduated from the University of Indiana and now he’s out here. He’s associate professor of medicine at OHSU and she’s one of the people who does infectious diseases at Providence Hospital. Two doctors. They have a child. In fact they had a child while they were in med school. So when they graduated we gave her an MD, medical daughter. That’s David; he’s now 60. Louise lives next door. She bought the family house and she was an executive secretary of a budding new company that I think went bust and so she stayed in the field for a while and then went to Portland State and in her late 30s, early 40s became a social worker, as did my wife. We all have had second careers. See Margaret actually taught English at Lincoln High School for 18 years and then she went to social work school and worked at the [???] center for five years and then retired. So, my daughter lives next door and she’s married to a fellow who’s vice president of his own corporation.

Alice: Has anyone ever interviewed Margaret in this way about her childhood in Portland? 
LABBY: I don’t think so.

Alice: That needs to be done.
LABBY: Well she, of course, was a granddaughter of this famous…

Alice: Well it should be done; we’re keenly aware of who the family is and we (meaning OJM) had a recent exhibit of Temple Beth Israel’s history as the first exhibit in a long-range program of exhibits about Oregon synagogues. But TBI being the oldest we started with it. Of course you can’t do the story of TBI without doing the story of the early settlers. And so of course there’s Mr. Selling, you know in a big photograph. And so clearly that must be followed through. 
LABBY: Yes, she’d have a lot to say about him and grandfather.

Alice: Oh, I’m just astonished. We need to put her on the top of the list and hope she’ll give us some time.
LABBY: There’s a hotel; they never had a house.

Frankel: Are you serious?
LABBY: Yes.

Alice: Umm hmm, I’d forgotten that story. 
LABBY: Yes, it’s quite a family.

Alice: Well that’s something we must put very high on the to-do list, ask if we can get an appointment with Margaret. Because that does connect back so far and I’m surprised we haven’t done it.

Frankel: Anything else you would like to add for the record?
LABBY: I told you more, I’m sure. Has it been interesting to you though?

Frankel: Absolutely.
Alice: Oh, fascinating

Frankel: Yes, I would love to have any…
LABBY: Well the problem in my own personal life was that I was from the eastside as a Russian Jew and Margaret’s family, well established for two or three generations was German. And they kind of looked down on us. The Russians were the shopkeepers and the laborers. The Germans, of course, were the industrialists and the big business men. And when I went to Reed I became very friendly with Margaret’s oldest brother. We hit it off and stayed that way all the way through medical school. He became a doctor too, before he died. And as a result Margaret’s family had feelings about who she ought to marry since she was the only daughter in the family with three sons. And they had another German young man in mind. But when she had a 16 birthday, the story is, one of her brothers, John, the middle one, asked me to be her date. And I said, “Well, I didn’t know you had a sister.” Because every time I went to the house we just studied and she never showed up. So we’ve been going together since she was 16. I’m now 147 years old; it’s been a long time.

Frankel: But did it cause any…
LABBY: I’m sure that they would have preferred her to stay within the social milieu of the Germans. But since I married up and she married down, as they say… There was that feeling… They didn’t mix.

Frankel: Do you recall Margaret being introduced to your grandparents?
LABBY: Yes. Because we had a five-year courtship. So she met everybody and I met everybody on her side.

Frankel: Were there stories relating to…
LABBY: Well, it happened that Margaret’s father was a very prominent doctor here, Lawrence Selling, one of the heads of the Portland Clinic. And my grandparents and my parents, of course, were very respectful and admiring of that. And I think it didn’t go the other way particularly but it was actually by the deed of Margaret’s father that I was offered the chance to be an intern at Hopkins. They realized was that we’d been going together for five years; it doesn’t look like it’s going to be broken up or anything and it wasn’t. On the other hand it’s been interesting because her background is so different from mine, you know, being German. So I introduced her to a lot of cooking, although I don’t cook but I knew about food. And she too introduced me to a much different kind of cuisine. 

Alice: I don’t think it is as much. It existed certainly in my generation, I’m not that much younger than you are, that kind of quote, intermarriage. But there’s another issue that you alluded to. Sylvia asked if your parents were Zionists and of course they were and my folks were and they all were. But many of the German Jews were not and they were very prominent in Temple Beth Israel. And as a child I remember, but you were in the service I’m sure, when Berkey [Rabbi Berkowitz] became a Navy chaplain. And Rabbi Houseman came up to hold the pulpit. He was a strong Zionist and oh! those ladies with the… They didn’t like that. They didn’t like that at all. So that would be a political dichotomy between the two families. 
LABBY: Yes Margaret’s family were not Zionists at all. And still she is not particularly interested in Israel. I think it’s just a hangover from…

Frankel: Have you ever visited Israel?
LABBY: Well we’ve been everywhere in the world and never gone to Israel. We’ve traveled an awful lot but we’ve never been there. We lived abroad for years and we’ve traveled a lot but…and even to this day there’s no great interest in…

Frankel: Have your children ever traveled to Israel?
LABBY: Nobody in the family. I’d like to go just out of curiosity. We did go to the middle east though. We went to [???]. Just recently in fact before all this broke. We traveled to Syria and Jordan. We’ve been to Egypt three times and we went to, actually we went to Arabia and Oman just two years ago.

Frankel: But not Israel.
LABBY: Well, you couldn’t go if you went…they wouldn’t let you in. And Margaret wasn’t interested anyway.

Alice: Well I just think you bring such a breadth of Portland history. And then we combine it with Margaret…
LABBY: Well, we’ve got a little different point of view.

Alice: Well you’ve got a really, you know, the whole circle is complete in a way.
Frankel: That’s right you’re both from the…

LABBY: … I squired his daughter around for a while. Well, Mr. Mosler was the, you know bread maker. He was absolutely the nucleus of an awful lot of activity in South Portland. He was a rather short man with a bullet head; he was bald. And eventually he had to move out of South Portland with Urban Renewal. He went uptown a little bit. But he always gave you the baker’s dozen, 13 bagels for 12. And on top of that he always had stories to tell. And his daughter married a rabbi. I don’t remember which daughter; he had two I think. And he became, actually a medical student as a rabbi. And I heard about him but I didn’t know his name until one day for some reason I was giving a little talk to one of the groups of medical students. I had quoted Maimonides and I saw him light up a little bit and after class he held back and introduced himself as rabbi and I said, “Well you must have been pleased to hear Maimonides name.” “Well,” he said “I’d have been more pleased if you had done it accurately.” [laughing] So he corrected me; it wasn’t very important. It was a good way to tie us together. Manny, I can’t remember his last name. He ended up becoming an a-list in Hollywood and making a lot of money. And one day when I ran to get some bagels from Mr. Mosler I said, “How’s Manny?” He said, [?]  “Oh, has he had tzuris?” I said, “What’s happening? Is he ok?” “Oh” he said, “Haven’t you seen the stock market lately?” [laughing] So that’s Manny, he became a doctor after he became a rabbi.

Frankel: Was there also not a story about Mr. Mosler not passing on the recipe?
LABBY: I understand that’s true, yes. And you can try, as we have, all the bagels in Portland;  they’re not like that. He boiled them a lot in order to get that thick crust which nobody takes the time to do now. We’ve tried four or five different kinds; they’re just bread, round bread.

Alice: I have a memory of Mr. Mosler with his hands in the dough. I mean I was a child and the bullet head that Dan described and the cigarette hanging out of his mouth with a long ash. And sometimes it went into the bread.
LABBY: No extra charge.

Alice: No extra charge [laughing] you’re right. But there’s never been another Mosler. And maybe all of our taste buds are now so changed that we wouldn’t even like it if we got it. But we all talk about it and wait for the coming of another Mosler.

LABBY: It was a very big grocery and he had the best, really the best food. Of course the Jews always want good quality food. But the interesting coincidence in my life is that when we lived in Laurelhurst and the last house we moved to (we had three different houses) it turns out that Halperins were nearby and their son was my age. And he and I became very good friends. And then the other coincidence is that Margaret’s cousin married him (Remarried after he divorced). He married the widow of Milton Halperin. So you know, everybody is related to everybody. Well they used to say about some of the families in Portland, if you knew the Directors or the whoever, you knew everybody.

Alice: You knew everybody.
LABBY: Because they married everybody, you know.

Alice: Somehow we got shortchanged in that department; we’re not related to anybody Dan.
LABBY: Your mother was born in England.

Alice: You have a good memory. Yes she was.
LABBY: Your dad wasn’t, though.

Alice: No, my dad was actually born in Canada. But my grandparents, my paternal grandparents are from Romania and my maternal grandparents were born in Poland or Lithuania or wherever. My mother’s family stayed in England and Ireland and that’s where all my second and third cousins are, that’s where everybody knows everybody.
LABBY: It’s kind of a little diaspora.

Alice: Yes, really. But no Turtledoves here, you know and just no family here.
LABBY: I’m glad you kept the name, I mean you didn’t change it to Turtle or anything else.

Alice: Well, that was my nickname in college actually. It was Turtle and mother was Mrs. Turtle, affectionately, you know. And dad was Mr. Turtle; he wasn’t sure about that. And Andrea, our youngest daughter, is so concerned that the name is going to die out that she was thinking about making it part of her name even though it was… Paul said, “Well how are you going to do that? No, there are no Turtledove men at all. Harry’s the last–a daughter and then a daughter and then we have the cousin who writes science fiction, another Harry Turtledove, Harry Norman. He had two daughters so he lives in Los Angeles and has been very successful as a science fiction writer, very successful. 

Frankel: The name Labby was it changed from Russian?
LABBY: Yes.

Frankel: What was it originally, do you know?
LABBY: Levkofsky What happened was my father went to college and he was called a “greenhorn.” Do you know that term? So in order to be otherwise he and my grandfather sat down and chopped off the “ofsky” and made it Labby. The funny thing is there’s a French family in town, Labbe, but it’s L-A-B-B-E, Lab-AY. And we’re frequently confused because there was a famous doctor up at the med school, Dr. Labbe who was an obstetrician. Just the other day I was asked if I was related to Tony Labbe, which I’m not. I said, “No, they’re the French and we’re the Russians.”

Alice: Labbe’s Restaurant, of course, was famous.
LABBY: That’s right. Well you know my nephew Paul?

Alice: Yes, Lore and Bob’s son.
LABBY: Yes, yes. He has sons so that’s where the name will go.

Alice: That’s right. Because the other, Arnold and Eva have three daughters.
LABBY: That’s right, my son has a daughter so that’s the only chance for the name to go anywhere.

Alice: Well that’s what people did. They had large families, they could ensure their wellbeing when they were older and they could ensure that the name would carry on.

LABBY: …It so happened that most of the newspapers in Portland and there were three when I was a kid: There was the Portland Telegram, the Portland News, as well as the Oregonian and then the Journal, there were four. But of course the Journal was an afternoon one and when those of us who came after school, you know to get the afternoon papers… The result was, though, that a lot of the Jewish kids got favored because all the so-called distributors who went around town supplying us on the street corners with newspapers were Jewish. And one of them, he came out of the Oregon Journal I remember and that was their building, you know where the big clock is, was very very friendly to us. And by friendly I mean he only gave you the number of papers that he thought you could sell. Because you had to pay him for them at the end of the day. And the other thing that was very kind of him was that at the end of the day if you had any leftovers you could go up and he’d buy them back. Even though they were like 2 cents apiece or 3 cents apiece. So it was a kind of a little Jewish industry. But there was another aspect to it that was extremely important and that is, those are the days of the old fistfights…uh…the old boxing…??? And Dempsey and so on. And those were occasions for the newspapers to issue extras. So you say “Extra, Extra” you know like the old… Those who did. We could ask anything we wanted to and get away with it. Like instead of 5 cents we could ask for 10 or even 25. But some of us, myself included, developed a different industry, two of them. One was that we’d go and get the last newspapers in the evening, when the fight had a winner headline to print. And then we’d take the streetcar and go out to the outskirts of Portland, like I’d go to Laurelhurst (that’s where I lived) to some of the developments. And we’d go up and down the street shouting. 

Now they broadcast those fights by radio. But still after that people wanted to read about it. So a lot of the drivers would set them up after each round and then they had the banner headline; they’d come off the press and we’d grab and run for the street cars. Very often what happened was, if I had a whole stack of them as I often did, I would sell them even before I got home on the streetcar. Otherwise we’d go up and down the street yelling “Extra, Extra” and then they’d turn on the porch light and we’d go up and we get, actually, as much as 25 cents. Now that was one industry. The other one though that was really fascinating was Rose Festival Time. We went down to the Yamhill Markets and we would collect orange crates for people to sit on. Because, you know, standing and waiting for the parade, standing and waiting for the parade. So we’d carry as much as we could and we’d go back and get more. They gave them to us free because they just were junk and we sold not only orange crates to sit on but newspapers in case it rained, for their heads. That was a great industry because we could make as much as 75 cents for something to sit on, and we’re talking, oh I don’t know, the 1920s. So the newsies really had it and an awful lot of them were on the street corners thanks to these fellows who did the distribution. The other thing is they were extremely kind to the handicapped; the blind, the crippled or the people who were kind of uneducated and, shall we say, mentally challenged. And so were the newsies. They would not steal a corner from anybody like that. It was its own culture, or subculture.