Family Activities
Recreation
Recreation for Mom and Pop seemed to be the rides in the country that they took each week. They used to visit farmers to buy sour cream from them. Mom especially enjoyed riding with the windows down and taking in the smells of the crops.
On some drives they would go to Roseland Park at Canandaigua Lake. A treat for Mom at Roseland Park was having an American cheese sandwich and a glass of buttermilk at the pavilion.
Another activity they had was Saturday morning soap shopping. Pop would examine the Saturday paper to see which drug stores had sales on bath soap, and he and Mom would buy soap at each of the downtown stores having soap sales. They would come home with six or a dozen bars of soap. We had hundreds of bars of soap upstairs in the cabinet: Lifebuoy, Lux, Camay, Palmolive, Cashmere Bouquet, Ivory. Pop may have started buying the soap because it was cheap, but it overtook him, and he couldn't stop.
After the kosher butchers' strike and the meat markets began closing early on Mondays, Mom and Pop would occasionally have picnic suppers in the park, usually at Charlotte park on the lake.
They attended the Sunday picnics in the parks sponsored by the different shuls and lodges. Pop felt obligated to attend a picnic if the sponsoring shul or club bought their hot dogs from Amdursky's. All there would be to eat at these picnics were the boiled hot dogs and soda pop. (No ice cream - not with hot dogs.) For many of us that was enough.
Except for the soap shopping the children could and did accompany Mom and Pop, unless they had their own activities. All the children at some time picked up tennis rackets and played in the parks. Maplewood and Seneca were the favorites for tennis and for being in a park-like setting, and they were easy to get to. The lake was nearby and accessible by streetcar, so we went there too.
<-- Previous Page Next Page -->
