Lillian Cohen Transcript
Charlotte Kupiec: – Tuesday, June 1, 1999. I'm Charlotte (Kupiec?), and I'm interviewing Lillian Cohen. Okay, Lillian, you wanted to read something that you left out –
Lillian Cohen: No.
CK: – from this form?
LC: No, I just want to refresh my memory in case you ask me something.
CK: I wanted to ask you, what it was like to grow up as one of triplets, three girls, in Providence, Rhode Island, and you know that's before the age of all these fertility drugs, so it was a rarity.
LC: 1925.
CK: It was very uncommon.
LC: Very uncommon. They said triplets were one in ten thousand.
CK: You're identical.
LC: No, fraternal, but we're all girls, which is unusual in itself.
CK: Sure, it is.
LC: But I've had many people ask me that question. What is it like to be a triplet? And I've always answered by saying, “I don't know what it's like to be other than a triplet,” so it's hard for me to say, except that we were very close, always, and we still are. We're all still living, and we see each other on a regular basis and speak to each other all the time. It's been a very close relationship, even though at times we haven't lived near one another. We are near one another now.
CK: Here in Massachusetts?
LC: We're all in Massachusetts, but we're originally from Providence, Rhode Island. Since we've married – each one of us has married – we've lived in several places, like Texas, Baltimore. I'm the only one that stayed around Rhode Island, and then moved to Massachusetts, and now we're all in Massachusetts, and came here. I have one of my sisters – I'm the middle of the three –
CK: By seconds?
LC: Eight minutes.
CK: Eight minutes.
LC: Eight minutes apart. My youngest sister and I have been closer over the years. We used to be called “the twins and their oldest sister” because the one that was born first was always more mature-looking; she was a little heavier, a little taller than we were, and then we went past her. She was sort of the spokesman of the three of us, and didn't look quite as identical, even though we're not. My younger sister Betty and I look very much alike.
CK: Were you treated differently by your parents?
LC: No, no. But when we were in school, that was part of the problem. At that time, when the kids went to school, they went in the middle of the year. We went in September, and then there was a class in January. When somebody was able to do the work and surpass the work that they were doing, they were skipped, as we say. They were advanced to the next grade, but it wasn't a full grade. It was like half a grade. Our sister, the oldest one, was above average. We were average, and she was above average. So, we lived with that kind of setup, where we weren't always together in school. We never were put in the same classes, even though we were in the same grade. This was all done when we were in elementary school. When you were in the first, second, or third grade is when they did things like that.
CK: Did you also go to some sort of religious school, like shul?
LC: We always went to temple. In our neighborhood, where we lived, it was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.
CK: Where is that in Providence?
LC: In Providence, Rhode Island?
CK: Yeah.
LC: It was on the south side. I don't know.
CK: Is that near Brown?
LC: No, that's the east side.
CK: That’s the east side.
LC: We were on the south side, which was near Roger Williams Park, if anybody knows Providence. Our temple was several blocks from our house. We could walk there.
CK: You were down here on the map. I’m looking at the map of Providence around there.
LC: Yes, that's right. My husband came from the east side, so he was up here between downtown Providence and Pawtucket. They call that the east side. This was the south side. Our temple was close. Within our neighborhood – it was amazing, because it was a close-knit neighborhood. Everybody belonged to the Conservative temple. There were several Conservative or Orthodox temples. There was a Reform temple that moved eventually to the east side, and that was the temple my husband belonged to. No, he belonged to a Conservative temple also, but there were some people who – at one time, I think Temple Beth-El was Conservative, and then became Reform during that period of time, because I know he would come to temple in South Providence at times. Anyway, our neighborhood was just a wonderful neighborhood, and we had several sets of multiple births, besides ourselves. There had to have been at least five sets of twins, and they were all Jewish. Everybody would say something about the water in South Providence, in the Elmwood section of Providence, because we all lived within three or four blocks, and we were all pretty close in age. There were a few younger, but we were all – we had friends down the street.
CK: [inaudible]
LC: My parents were friendly. Yeah. My parents were very friendly with two families: one had a set of twins, the other had a set of twin girls, and one had a set of twin boys. The other friends in the neighborhood had sisters and brothers who were twins. [laughter] It was just the strangest thing.
CK: How did you meet Donald, your husband?
LC: He was a friend of my brother's. I have an older brother, two and a half years older than I am.
CK: [inaudible]
LC: Our brother, being a little bit older, was the first grandchild in the family, the first male, besides, and got lots of attention. When we came along, he felt left out, kind of, and he wasn't too crazy about us. He is now, [laughter], but when we were growing up, he had a bit of jealousy there. When we went to grammar school for the first time, we were interviewed by the Providence Journal, the newspaper, and they asked us questions. They asked him, our brother, how he felt about having triplet sisters, and he said he didn't like it too much and that he would like to sell us for at least a hundred dollars apiece. When we were grown up and through college and such, he was in the service and came home. He was kind of friendly with my husband at the time. My husband never knew that his friend Morton Narva had triplet sisters, never mind sisters. Then he found out, and we started to date when he was just getting out of the service.
CK: You were young when you married.
LC: Yeah, we were twenty-one, twenty-three. He lived on the other side of the city, so I didn't know him at all. My parents knew his parents, but that's how we met.
CK: He served? Did he go abroad?
LC: No.
CK: During World War II? He was here?
LC: He stayed in the States.
CK: You wrote down that you had recollections of friends who did go off to war.
LC: Oh, yeah.
CK: What was that like?
LC: Well, my brother, for one. He was in the Army Air Corps and served in England. He was a navigator, and it was rather traumatic for him. He came home a basket case after the war. I think he had some emotional problems for a while, just like shell shock or whatever, because he went on many missions over to Europe, from England. They were based in England, and he went over to – he talked about flying over. There are a lot of people who served, men who served, who, when they came home, really didn't want to talk about it. I have a cousin who – I'm not sure what he did when he was overseas, but it was so traumatic to him that we never ever heard where he was or what he did. Some did talk about it, but there are some that just didn't want to discuss it.
CK: You girls were home at the time.
LC: Oh, yes.
CK: How were your parents during this time? They came from Eastern Europe.
LC: Well, my mother was a very small child when she came, when she left. My father was a bit older, and he was about thirteen or fourteen years older than my mother. He came to this country when he was a young man, but my mother came when she was a small child. I think she was five years old when she was in England because we all kid her about the fact that she went to school in England. She went to kindergarten, and the kindergarten was a Portuguese school. We have pictures of the class. That was interesting. She was the oldest, and she had three younger sisters. The second oldest was born in England, and the other two were born in this country when they came. They settled in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and they were both born – my younger aunts were born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. I have one still living, and she's ninety years old. She's the only one in my mother's family, close, a sibling who lives over at the rehab now.
CK: My mother is there.
LC: Is she?
CK: Yeah. Tell me what it was like in your house since your parents were active in the synagogue?
LC: Yes, they were very active, especially my father. My father was treasurer at the temple, and he served in that position for a long time. My mother was active. I think she would have been more active, but she didn't care for the rabbi as much as my father did. I won't mention his name. He was a very fine man. He married my husband and myself. Well, my husband and I were married because he belonged to another Conservative temple. He had his rabbi, and he had his cantor. They were very close with them because his parents were also very active. His father was Brotherhood president, and his mother was Sisterhood president, I'm sure. For how long, I don't remember, but they were very active. They wanted to have their rabbi and their cantor, and my mother-in-law was related to a gentleman who was the cantor at our temple, so we had two cantors and two rabbis, which is a bit unusual. [laughter] We were truly blessed.
CK: You were confirmed, you said, at that temple.
LC: Oh, yeah. At that time, we were not bar mitzvah. We had Hebrew school on Sunday, and we attended regularly. I'm not sure I got too much out of it, but we did have confirmation. That was a big thing in that day. It was like graduating from high school. We would have – it was kind of a social event, and we had parties afterward, and everybody got gifts. I mean, it was like we were having our own bat mitzvah, but it was a whole class of –
CK: What was the ceremony?
LC: – fifteen of us. It was just a typical Friday Shabbos service, and we all had a little speech. Whether I wrote it or not, or I had help with it, I'm not sure. I probably did write part of it. As I wrote down on the questionnaire, I had the flower offering that was part of my service.
CK: What was that? I didn’t know what that was. What’s a floral offering?
LC: Well, we all carried bouquets. I mean, the gals. We wore long dresses. I have a picture of it. The girls all had quite long white dresses, and the boys wore suits. We carried these bouquets. I can't remember what my sisters’ part of the service was, but I never forgot what mine was, and it was the floral offering.
CK: This is a wonderful album that you pulled out.
LC: Well, only because it was –
CK: There are girls on every page. [laughter]
LC: Yeah. It was a seventieth birthday, and I put this – my sister-in-law gave us a party.
CK: Gorgeous.
LC: Yeah. She asked if we just bring pictures of something. Probably in here.
CK: Is this it? No.
LC: No, that's my wedding. Here it is. This is in front of the temple.
CK: Oh, that's so lovely.
LC: And I just remember it from –
CK: Did someone make these dresses for you? They're beautiful, these puffed sleeves.
LC: I don't think so. I think we were just able to buy them.
CK: Which one is you?
LC: How about white bows in our hair?
CK: Gorgeous. Which one is you?
LC: I'm always in the middle. I was secondborn. Except in this picture, I'm not in the middle, but it's almost hard – sometimes, I have to look twice to see because Betty and I look so much alike. It’s hard to believe.
CK: How old are you in this picture?
LC: I would say we were about ten, twelve – no, twelve or thirteen. It's terrible how –
CK: What a blessing. Three gorgeous girls.
LC: – things aren’t dated. It’s so important to date things. There are no dates on these, so I'm just guessing. It’s the same picture, I think we were in some kind of dance program. We took dancing lessons and the usual bit. I think we were just in these organza burgundy dresses because we were participating in some kind of show.
CK: Are you sitting on the camera?
LC: Are you going to edit this out or something?
CK: I'm not editing it at all. Someone else will do that.
LC: I don't know whether to stop or –
CK: I just keep quiet. That’s what it is.
LC: So, anyway, it was a typical Shabbos service. We had the usual service, and then we just participated.
CK: Was this just for girls?
LC: No, no.
CK: Or boys also were confirmed?
LC: No, it was the whole class. We were all the same age.
CK: I can’t focus this at all [inaudible].
LC: I think we are fifteen. Fourteen or fifteen when you have confirmation.
CK: Oh, yes.
LC: I think we were fifteen. You can take it later.
CK: I’m going to try to take this picture of you holding the picture.
LC: A little different. [inaudible] How I've aged. Anyway –
CK: You’re still gorgeous.
LC: – this was a wedding picture. I was the last one married. My sister Pauline was married when she was nineteen. My sister Betty was married when she was twenty, and I was married at twenty-one. I was the old maid at twenty-one. [laughter]
CK: Where is your brother now?
LC: He lives in Boston.
CK: Oh, he lives in Boston?
LC: Yes, Chestnut Hill. He moved up to the Boston area before any of us did. My father was in the shoe business, and he and his brother had retail shoe stores all over New England. At some point, when my brother was out of school and out of service, he started to work for the company. Our office was in Boston, and my uncle, who was the partner with my father, lived in New Bedford, so they met once a week in Boston. That's where the connection comes to the Boston area. The company always had offices in Boston. At some point along the way, we grew to the point of becoming a large enough shoe concern to be in discount stores when discount stores became popular. We became a public company, and we had shoe outlets all over the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
CK: Did you help out in the store?
LC: No.
CK: No?
LC: When I was in school, I did go occasionally on a Saturday, but my brother, who loved to play football and sports, and my father wanted him to work in the store – that was a bone of contention all the time. I can still hear him badgering him, “You got to work.” He worked some of the time, but he was away at school, or he was in the service, so he wasn't there that much. When he got out of the service, he wasn't so sure what he wanted to do. He studied business at Penn and Wharton. He was not sure that the shoe business was for him. I think he almost went into the food business with his father-in-law because they could have used him then, but he decided he didn't want to move out of Rhode Island, so they stayed, and he went to work, and he became president of the company.
CK: What got you into floral design?
LC: Well, I was always interested in it. That's why I chuckle about the fact that I had the floral offering. I guess way back in my subconscious, it was something I really wanted to do.
CK: I still don't understand what the floral offering is. What did you do? What did it mean?
LC: Well, I had a prayer or some kind of a service, and I offered flowers to the congregation. That's all I remember about it. I had the floral offering, somebody else had another prayer to say, somebody else had another speech to give. My sisters don't even remember very much about it, but I never forgot that. It's amazing because I remember certain things, they remember certain things, and then – “How do you remember that?” It’s a long time ago. I know there's still confirmation in the temple, but it's not the big deal that it was for us because we didn't participate in bat mitzvahs and things like that; it wasn't done then.
CK: So, you're the one with the green thumb.
LC: Well, sort of. My sister, Betty, has a green thumb also, but not in the floral design sense. She is a gardener. She has a beautiful garden on Winchester Drive. If you came up that way –
CK: Yeah, I did.
LC: – you went right by her house on the left-hand side, the embankment. They have some beautiful flowers growing on that embankment. That’s her house. Beautiful. But I always was interested in doing floral arrangements. When I moved up to Lexington, what happened was that my husband, who's had three careers in his life, worked for his father, who was in the sporting goods business, and then his business had to be moved from downtown Providence to some other place because the building was being taken over by the hotel. It was either sell it to somebody or just completely forget about – the Rhode Island Cycle Company, as it was. Actually, he sold it to a friend who ran it for a period of time, but not in the same location. The impetus of all this was that my father offered him a job, and he'd have to go to Boston to work in the Boston office. My father used to laugh about what my husband did because he said, “He doesn't have anything to do with the shoe business. He buys what doesn't sell.” What he meant by that was that my husband was part of operations. He set up the departments for the stores. His job was many-faceted because he could run meetings for all the managers. He could organize anything and do it very, very well, and he was involved not with advertising, but he [inaudible] set up and the display. We still had retail stores, so they had to be involved with the windows and set-up. He had to deal with people from New York who did that kind of work. He worked before we moved up here in ’64 to Lexington. We lived outside of Providence in Warwick, and we lived there for eighteen years. Then, part of that time, he was commuting to Boston, which was before 95, and it was a very difficult – we never saw him. I mean, weekends, we did. He’d get up very early. It was an hour and a half up to Boston and an hour and a half back at night, so it was three hours shot of the day. That was a little difficult, and then finally I just said, “We just can't do this any longer. We've got to move up to Boston.” His father was retired and still living. We moved to Lexington. He worked in the shoe business for eighteen, twenty years, and then the business was sold. We had just gotten so big, and things got to a point where it was too big. We bought some companies that we should never have bought, and one thing or another. What happened was that the company went into Chapter 11, and so everybody had to look for another job. After a year or so, my husband started in the advertising specialty business. That's his third career, and he's done very well with it.
CK: You were raising four small children at the time that he was –
LC: Yes, right.
CK: Tell me about your kids.
LC: Oh, they're wonderful, but also different. We have a daughter, Lynne, who is fifty-one. And then we have Robert, who is three years younger; Steven, who is four years younger than Lynne; and Lee, who is forty-one. There’s ten years' difference between the first and the last. We're all very close, and we see them fairly often. My son lives in Foxboro – Robert. The two other boys live in the same town, Holliston. Our daughter lives in Maine, but she's moving to Connecticut this summer. Her husband has a new job. She's a teacher. She's a language arts specialist and will be working in an elementary school in Newington, Connecticut, and she's very good at what she does. She is branching out and doing all kinds of other things other than teaching, and it's very gratifying. Robert's been stuck at the computer at Stop and Shop, where he's a systems specialist. Steven is a nurse anesthetist. He's our in-house medical person. We go to him for all our problems. [laughter] I wonder if he gets tired of our talking to him about our aches and our pains, but anyway, he's with kids, so he doesn't mind. He's married to a nurse, and they have two wonderful – all of our children have two children, so we have eight grandchildren, and they're all terrific in their own way. They're musical, they're athletic, they're just a joy, and we see them, go to all of their events as much as possible.
CK: You said that music is very important to your family.
LC: Yes, it really is. I guess it all started – I've always played the piano, and I always enjoyed playing the piano, but as my husband said, “I'm a mechanic.” I can read music. I can play it. I can't play it off the top of my head.
CK: You take pleasure in it.
LC: I do. I love and appreciate music. My husband's always been – music’s always been a part of his life. He played the clarinet and the saxophone when he was young. He had his own band, so it's not unusual that our grandchildren have more than our children. They all played the piano. Steven's the only one who had no patience for it. [inaudible] sorry to this day that he didn't because he did take a course at high school once, thinking that maybe he would take a liking to it, but he's very appreciative of music. He tapes things and gives us wonderful recordings, and loves music. But Robert and Lee, the oldest and the youngest boy, are really more involved with music. Lee played in the jazz band at high school and also in college. Robert’s always fiddled around with the piano and wrote his own little tunes and things. It's his daughter who is a very fine trombone player. She has brought us a lot of joy because she has played at Lincoln Center with the Foxboro Jazz Band. She plays not with just the jazz band, but she plays with wind ensemble and another couple of other bands at school. They have a very fine music department at Foxboro. So, the last three years, they've been invited to come to play with the Lincoln Center Jazz Band with Wynton Marsalis, who was the director. So, we've gone the last three years, and every year they've won first, second, and honorable mention. We're very proud of what she's done. Today, our son sent us a poem that she wrote – Abby is her name – a poem that she wrote that’s a very, very fine piece of work. I think she got some recognition for it, but he sent it to us – email – today. She has a younger sister, who's just as talented in a different way. She loves to dance and perform, stay on stage musically, and she dances. Then Steven’s two children are both – the daughter Linsey plays the piano beautifully. She also plays the flute. She's stopped with the flute, but piano – she does excellent piano work. Her brother plays the trombone. Abby's sister also plays a clarinet, so you can see where it's all come from, especially from their grandfather. Lynne’s two, Nancy and Scott, both play the piano, and Scott still plays a little bit. Nancy's more of an athlete, like her father, and she's a big tennis player and basketball player. In fact, she's going to Bates College next fall, and she's going to be playing basketball for the college. She's very good. Then this little Hannah, who's just started to play the piano. She's nine years old. She's doing very well. She's going to play again with her father, a duet for her recital, in a couple of weeks, and we'll go see that. Linsey, the big piano player, is also a track – runs track for her high school. Actually, she's not in high school. She's in the eighth grade, and she runs so well that she's come in first in the mile or whatever she's done. She does very well.
CK: Keeps you [inaudible].
LC: Yeah, they do. We spend most of our time going to track meets, recitals, or jazz concerts.
CK: Do you still play the piano now?
LC: Occasionally, yeah.
CK: What kind of music do you like to play?
LC: Oh, anything. I love show tunes to play. I don't play classical, like Chopin and things like I used to, but if I have the music out, I'll try to play some of it. No, I just like to play on occasion, but not like I used to.
CK: But you sit on the computer.
LC: No.
CK: Well, you're emailing your kids.
LC: No, I don't know how – the only thing I know how to do is type.
CK: Well –
LC: My son sets it all up, and I do my email. Then he'll tell me what to do – the next step. I'm going to learn.
CK: Well, you’re on your way.
LC: I’m going to learn because I'm determined, but you have to take the time to do it. I understand if you study the computer, you really have to use it. If you don't use it, you lose it.
CK: Like everything.
LC: Yeah. So, our son Lee tells us that we should get another computer. He has a computer because my husband's third career is in our lower level of our house, and Lee works for him now, so he's the computer giant. He's the one who makes the business run by computer, and he does a great job.
CK: What did you write down that you wanted to remember to tell us? You said you had things there that you wanted to –?
LC: Well, I didn't write this down, but my nephew, Richard Narva, is getting himself very involved in the family tree, my father's side of the family, and so we've been working on that together, trying to get information. We email one another occasionally to keep in touch with what's going on with the family. I have relatives in Canada – Montreal – and we're very, very close with them. They came to this country when my cousins were eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. There were four children, and it's interesting because my two – there were two males and two females born of a single father that had two wives [inaudible]. My aunt Eva – no, first, it was –
CK: What period of time are we talking about?
LC: This is before the war because they got out of Poland just before that. Well, I think the youngest boy was eleven or twelve, and he's seventy-five now. So, it happened sixty-five years ago, approximately, that they came. My parents tried very hard to get them into the United States, and they couldn't. What happened was that they got as far as Montreal. My parents and my aunt and uncle went to Montreal and found them an apartment and set them all up there, to which they are, to this day, so grateful that they would do anything for us because if it hadn't been for them – they sponsored them. They did whatever had to be done. They came from a small town in Poland called Nineveh. I'm not sure how you spell it. My nephew has more of that information, and I thought he was going to email it to me, and I haven’t gotten it. He says I finally have the name of that town properly spelled because we were spelling it many different ways. It’s pronounced Nineveh. Anyway, they got settled, and my uncle started a butcher – became a butcher and had a wonderful market. When it was time for them to be able to come to this country, the United States, they were so settled where they were that they really didn't want to move, so they've been there ever since. We're very, very close with them. We see them at least once or twice a year.
CK: This is always? Since they came?
LC: Yes. Oh, yeah. Because the youngest one is my age, a little older. But what happened was my father had three brothers and two sisters. The oldest sister, her name was Pauline, which is my sister's name, had two children, a boy and a girl. The girl was older than the boy. Then, when Pauline died, my aunt, naturally, married her younger sister, who was Eva. When he married Eva, he had two more children. He had a girl and a boy. The children looked so much alike, you're sure they were from the same mother, but it was a sister. It's uncanny because the two boys – I have a picture of them right here, but they look so much alike. My nephew and I are trying to establish this family tree, and we’re still missing –
CK: What got in the spark in you to start –?
LC: I’ve always been interested. I've always been interested. The best thing you can do is tape family history.
CK: Right. What did you learn?
LC: I never did that. I would kind of write some things down, and my mother would tell [inaudible] she'd tell me, but it never stuck. I'd have to ask her many times.
CK: What did you learn in your genealogical quest? Did you find out about your great-grandparents?
LC: No, I didn't know very much about my grandfather. My grandmother on my father's side, she was Bubbe, and when she came to this country with one of her sons, my father's brother, she – because they all came kind of separately. They didn't all come at the same time. My father came to this country. He settled in New York for a period of time. He was a tailor. He ended up coming to Providence and then establishing a shoe store.
CK: They all came before the war.
LC: Yes, yes. And some came because they were trying to avoid going into the Army in the First World War. I remember my uncle, the oldest – well, my father's the oldest – the next oldest, my uncle Jack, gave his – it didn't give his correct age, because he obviously was trying to avoid going into the service or something. Then he came to this country. He kept that same age, and it was a bone of contention with my father about this whole thing. Anyway, they established this shoe store. He lived in New Bedford, my uncle Jack. So, they had this company with two, three – there were retail stores. They kept opening all these retail stores everywhere, and we must have had twelve or thirteen, and then it just grew and grew. My uncle in New Bedford was more the business part of the company, whereas my father loved to be out on the road. He would go from store to store as a manager. He wanted to make that – he loved people. He just loved being out with people all the time. My mother used to get very angry because he would transfer shoes all the time, and his truck would always be full of shoes, where they needed one in Pawtucket, or they needed one in Warwick, or they needed one somewhere else. She used to get very angry that he was schlepping shoes all the time.
CK: You all had good shoes. It's not like the cobbler –
LC: Oh, yes, the first thing we did – when we’d buy a pair of shoes, my father would go right down and touch the toe, just make sure they fit. Because he did know something about tailoring when he came to this country. I don't know what he did when he was in Poland, but maybe he had something to do with tailoring or something because he always felt – whenever we bought a coat or something, he'd always feel the fabric, and, “Oh, that's nice,” whether he approved or not. I think we are digressing a bit. [laughter]
CK: [inaudible]. By the way, what do your grandchildren call you?
LC: Nana.
CK: Nana?
LC: I’m Nana.
CK: You’re Nana?
LC: Yeah
CK: And your husband’s “Papa?”
LC: Yeah.
CK: Let's digress a lot. Do you remember visiting the World's Fair in 1939? What was that?
LC: That was very exciting because my parents –
CK: I don’t want this to – okay, I have to watch that.
LC: As we were growing up, they were well enough financially so that they could take a lot of trips. They always went away, either to Florida, or they would go on a cruise, or they would go someplace, South America, and they would usually go with my aunt and uncle, my father's younger brother. His wife and my mother were very close friends, as well as being relatives, and they both had the same name. My mother's name was Anna, and so was her name, Anna. They got along so well. Unfortunately, she had cancer and died fairly young. But they did travel a great deal. We were always home with a maid. We were always home with a grandparent. My father's mother we called “Bubbe” – came over to this country when she was a bit older, and she didn't speak any English. All the time she lived with us, which was at least thirteen, fourteen – she spoke Yiddish.
CK: Yiddish? Did you learn?
LC: And my parents did, too.
CK: Did you learn?
LC: We could understand her, but we've never spoke it. I can understand a bit of it, but I feel badly that I can't speak it, because I think it's wonderful to be able to do that.
CK: When you learn email, you'll learn [inaudible].
LC: [laughter] Oh, I didn’t know.
CK: So, what about the World’s Fair? You remember that.
LC: Oh, so, as a result, that was our first big trip anywhere. We were always home. Today, the children go everywhere with their parents. They take big trips. They go everywhere. We stayed at home. Well, we were four of us, and that wasn't the thing to do. They just had the help at home. My grandmother was always there, and there was always a maid besides.
[Recording paused.]
CK: – side B of the first tape, and Lillian Cohen is telling her story. Go on about the World’s Fair. So, they took you?
LC: The thing for us was to go to summer camp. For many years, we went to camp in the Berkshires.
CK: All of you? All four of you?
LC: All of us went to the same camp, and we were there for a long time. I was a camper, and then a counselor, and we loved it. But this particular summer, a lot of people at the camp were from New York, and so they had a bus that would take the kids from camp to the train because we weren’t too far from the New York state line. They would get on a train. So, we got on a train – that was probably the first big train ride we took – and we went to New York and met our parents.
CK: This was a camp trip?
LC: Well, not a camp trip, but was after camp –
CK: Oh, I see.
LC: – that we planned on this. It was probably end of August. Went to the World’s Fair, and it was just great because we saw the big city. I don't know if we'd ever been to New York before. We went to the Automat. We stayed in a hotel. I mean, we were country bumpkins. But I'll never forget coming back from one day at the World's Fair and walking on the street to go to our hotel. They were selling newspapers on the street, and I saw the headlines, and it said, “Germany invading Poland.” I never forgot it. It was amazing for me to see that. It made such an impression on me. So, that was the beginning of the World War.
CK: How did your parents react to that?
LC: Well, they were pretty shocked about it.
CK: Did they have any family still there?
LC: No.
CK: Or had they all gone?
LC: My father may have known some people. I don't know. But at that time, they had just come. I can't recall now exactly the dates when the (Schwann?) family, my cousins, came to Montreal, but I know that my – it must have been close to the beginning of the war, because my older cousin, his name is Ben, was – I don't know if he was drafted, or if he just joined the RAF [Royal Air Force]. I have pictures of him in uniform. The younger boy didn't go into the service. Not sure whether he had a physical problem, whether it was his eyes, or whether he had to stay home because he was the only male, or whether they didn't draft them, but he enlisted, the older boy, and he was in the Air Force. They had to have come when he was – I don’t know if he was married then, but he may have been. He must have been twenty, twenty-one years old or something like that.
CK: So, it's less the World's Fair than the timing of it that you’re remembering?
LC: Yes. But what was interesting about that, all these things that were happening, we went to the World's Fair, and the things we saw, and things that we did – there was television for the first time that we saw. We saw our image on TV. The superhighways of the day and of the future. Then the three of us went to the Gordon exhibit, the Gordon Milk exhibit –
CK: Cows.
LC: – and we got ice cream. We were sitting at the counter ordering our ice cream, and there were these three girls behind the counter, and they were also triplets. The things you remember. So, that was interesting. That's all I remember about the World’s Fair.
CK: What was camp like? Was this a Jewish camp?
LC: Oh, it's wonderful. Yes, it was. There were some non-Jewish – some of the counselors weren't Jewish. The owner of the camp was from New Jersey, and he got a lot of New Yorkers who were counselors, and they were great counselors. He had this one man, he was an Irishman, who did something on Broadway. He wrote music or whatever, and he was the music director. We always put on camp shows, and he made up songs for everybody to sing. We still sing the camp songs. Mac was his name. Must have been MacLaughlin or something. We called him Mac. He wrote songs for all of us.
CK: You were in the shows?
LC: Oh, yeah. We were in the shows. We were performing. My brother performed. It’s funny. He doesn't remember some of the songs we sang to him. We remember all the songs.
CK: Sing one of them. [laughter]
LC: [inaudible]
CK: A little piece of one?
LC: For posterity. I can't remember it offhand. One of his songs was “Pierre Bourgeois.” It was a little French song. He was Monsieur Bourgeois. “[inaudible] we ever heard of [inaudible] in the springtime, we ever heard about [inaudible] in the fall, but until you met Monsieur Bourgeois, you don't know gay Paris at all. When I think of all the lovely darlings.”
CK: [laughter] Oh, that’s terrific. Marvelous. Oh, dear.
LC: It was great. Camp experience to me was just the greatest thing. I've always pushed it with my kids. They all went to camp up in New Hampshire for many years, but not when they were young; they went when they were older and then became counselors. Our son Steven was in this camp called Walt Whitman. I always felt that camp was the greatest experience for any kid, if you liked it. If you didn’t like it –
CK: Did you stay the whole summer?
LC: Oh, yes. Yes.
CK: The whole summer.
LC: Oh, yes. When we went to camp, four of us went to the [inaudible] Camp [inaudible] in Monterey was a boys’ camp, and it was right over the hill. We were there for two months. We got a bargain, because we got everybody in Rhode Island to come with us. Besides the four of us, I think it cost five hundred dollars for all of us to be at camp, when today it's $25,000 to go to camp. Isn’t that awful? Our grandchildren don't go to – they go to day camp, or they take trips and do things like that, but not like we did.
CK: How did you girls – three of you – stick together? I mean, did you miss being with your parents?
LC: No.
CK: How old were you when you first started going?
LC: I was probably twelve. We went to other camps before that, a few weeks to Girl Scout camp. Spent a couple of years at Girl Scout camp. We used to go – when we were younger, my parents would rent a house down at the beach. It was called Oakland Beach. We would have wonderful summers there.
CK: Where? In Rhode Island?
LC: In Rhode Island. Out in Warwick. We used to go there a lot. I mean, we had our own camp there. It wasn't until we were eight or ten years old that we went to Girl Scout camps.
CK: You were a Girl Scout.
LC: Oh, yeah, I was a Girl Scout.
CK: What was it like being a Girl Scout?
LC: I've been a den mother and a scout leader. I don't know. That was the thing to do. We all did it. All our friends were Girl Scouts.
CK: Is that where you learned to do this wonderful needlework? I’m looking at gorgeous stuff on the wall. I’m assuming that you did it.
LC: Right. I've done a lot of that. Some of it, my sister-in-law has done. The one on top, she did. I did just about all the others.
CK: This calendar is [inaudible].
LC: Yeah, the perpetual calendar.
CK: How did you –? What is this? Crewel work?
LC: It's crewel. Yeah, cross stitch. My sister was living with me for a short time between marriages, and she did a little bit of the rays of the sun. My sister-in-law was visiting, so I guess I had her do some of it. I guess I did most of it myself. But you move it, it's got Velcro on the back, so it's a perpetual calendar. That came from my mother. My mother was a sewer; my grandmother was a knitter. We always did needlework.
CK: You're still doing that now?
LC: Every once in a while, I’ll pick up the knitting needles, and I make booties.
CK: You have a lot of opportunity.
LC: Yeah. [laughter] I even make them for other people because they're fun to [inaudible]. I can't sit in front of the TV and just watch the TV. I have to either be reading, doing a crossword puzzle, or knitting. Do all that.
CK: What kind of work do you prefer doing with needlework? You prefer knitting?
LC: I’ve always liked – I don't know what it is about me, but I've always liked to try something different. I wouldn't stick with doing forever needlepoint. I did that for a while. Then I went to Bargello. I started with a little bit of cross-stitch. My mother did a lot of cross-stitch. She did so many tablecloths for all of us.
CK: I hope you still have them.
LC: I do.
CK: So, I tried that. I've even hooked a rug. I always come back to needlepoint or knitting. Do you pull out those old tablecloths that your mother made on holidays or something?
LC: Yeah, I use them on occasion. Yeah.
CK: By the way, what happens with holidays? You have all your kids around. Do you all get together, like for the Seder?
LC: Yes, Seder has always been here. We lived in Lexington in a smaller house that we rented and bought, and then we built a house on (Sugar?) Road. Lived there for eighteen years. Holidays, especially. Yeah, all the holidays, they come to us.
CK: Greet the crowd.
LC: Yeah, we're always twenty. We're eighteen anyway, but my sister –
CK: Do you do all the cooking?
LC: I do basically all cooking, but I don't do the desserts. They all have to bring something, so I always say bring dessert. [inaudible] daughter-in-law, who always brings the [inaudible] Passover. Our son loves to bake, so he's always bringing a new torte or something. They're good cooks. All our kids are very good cooks, more so sometimes, I think, than their spouses. [laughter] I wasn't a cook when I first got married.
CK: Did your mother keep a kosher house?
LC: She did when my grandmother lived there and changed the dishes for the holidays and all that. I remember going downstairs, schlepping the boxes up, and changing the dishes. We did that until she passed on, and then [inaudible].
CK: So, your grandmother lived with you.
LC: Yes, my father's mother lived with us. She was eighty-six, and then she passed away.
CK: How old were you when she passed away?
LC: I was in high school.
CK: You were in high school.
LC: Yeah, so I was a teenager. When she lived with us, she always seemed like an older person, really old person, the way she looked, the way she wore her hair, the way she dressed, and all that. She wasn't too well, but my goodness, she did help take care of us when we were young. Because when we were born, there was an older brother, and there was a handful of kids who were – four under two and a half years of age, so we had a nurse for a year, and we had my grandmother, who lived with us. Her husband, my grandfather, who I never knew, died in Europe. Then we had our other grandparents; my mother's parents were always around.
CK: What did you pull out here? You have a lot of photographs here. These are the ones of you and your sisters.
LC: Yeah, this is when we were very small. But this is a picture that looks like we were a year old.
CK: You in the middle.
LC: No, I’m not in the middle. She's in the middle. This is Pauline. Those formal pictures, because we looked so much alike, they always put her in the middle. She's in the middle again. Not here, though. [laughter]
CK: You put together this album, you said, for your –?
LC: Our seventieth birthday.
CK: Your seventieth birthday. You did this for yourself, or for all of you?
LC: I did it to show everybody at the gathering we had. This was because we were so famous in 1925. We were written up in the paper.
CK: It's the Evening – I can't read it. What newspaper is this? Is this the Providence local paper?
LC: These could have been the Providence paper or the – we were born in Providence, but we lived for a year in West Warwick.
CK: Read the headline.
LC: Yeah.
CK: Read the headline.
LC: The headline is, “Triplets Born to Mr. and Mrs. Morris Narva. Three girls and mother reported as doing well. Arctic couple receiving congratulations from hundreds of relatives and friends.”
CK: Arctic couple?
LC: Yeah, because that was the name of this little town in West Warwick, Rhode Island.
CK: Arctic, okay. Confusing.
LC: They call it Arctic. “Triplets and twins are born.” My mother's obstetrician delivered two sets of twins the day that we were born.
CK: How did you celebrate your seventieth birthday, the three of you, with family?
LC: Well, my sister-in-law had this very nice party and just invited the female relatives. My aunt, the 90-year-old aunt, was there. She wasn't ninety then. And a cousin who was in one of these little pictures, who was born eight days before we were born. My aunt was in the hospital with her, and my mother was expecting twins, and it ended up being triplets. Then it says, “First triplets born in the Jane Brown Hospital,” which is part of the Rhode Island Hospital in Rhode Island. “Arctic mother and three daughters reported doing nicely.”
CK: Still?
LC: Yeah.
CK: So, what else have you got in this book here?
LC: So, the rest of the book is pictures from our early childhood. These were just extras here. This is a picture of my parents. I cut out newspaper phrases and put them together. “We are proud to announce.” This is a picture that was taken in the hospital. This is Pauline. In these early pictures, it’s hard for me to tell which one, because Betty and I really do look a lot alike. We even have the same features in our hands. They look arthritic, but my father had – his pinky was shaped even more so than this. His was more like this. But Betty and I have so many of the same characteristics in our physiques that it's amazing that we aren't identical.
CK: This is also from the newspaper?
LC: Yes.
CK: The three of you. This wonderful picture.
LC: Yeah.
CK: Read the headline.
LC: “Oh, what a year of pranks it’ll be for my two sisters and me. When a little girl is one of triplets, New Year's Day holds more than the ordinary promise of happiness and laughter, for one's share is bound to be multiplied by three. And by the expressions in the picture below, it would be Pauline in the center who will take the lead in all the pranks in the Narva household this year, for Lillian and Betty are not quite so sure that this happy New Year business is one that calls for smiles at the outset. The triplets born within the past year and seeing their first New Year's today are the daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Morris Narva of Pawtuxet Valley.” So, we were a year old there. Here is a picture of the three of us in these wicker carriages. There's a carriage for two, and Pauline had to be in a carriage by herself because they didn't make them big enough. Believe it or not, to this day, we found out recently that she was always so upset that when they put the three of us in the carriage, in the larger carriage, she always had to sit where the feet are, and she never liked it. I never knew that until we were older, and she said, “I don't know why they put me there.”
CK: And she’s quite young to remember.
LC: That’s right. The reason they put her there was that she was so much heavier than we were, so they put her next to one of us. It wouldn't fit. She had to be where our feet were. Anyway, this is a picture of both grandparents, my Bubbe and my Grandma Kibrik and my Grandpa Kibrik, and our older brother, and the three of us, and mother and father, and the three of us in their little – I don’t know what – they were little wooden –
CK: Tricycle.
LC: – tricycle. I remember I told you we were always at the beach for the summer, and we spent all of our younger years until we were eight or ten, when we went off to camp at the beach. They just rented the same house every year, and it was right by the beach. There it is.
CK: Is that your car? Your family car?
LC: Could have been. [laughter] There was a hotel on the next corner that was called Rest Awhile. We were great swimmers. We were in the water all the time. This is the close cousin that was born eight days before we were.
CK: By the way, you can stop at any time if you want to take a break or anything.
LC: Not sure how old we were there, but it looks like we were –
CK: Two or three.
LC: Yeah, at least three. My mother was very close with her younger sister, who had these two little girls, Bunny, we called her, and Mish, and we were always together, so there were pictures of five little girls. I mean, we could have been quintuplets.
CK: Look at those [inaudible].
LC: Somebody was somewhere on a trip, or maybe my mother had brought these wonderful satin –
CK: [inaudible] costumes.
LC: They’re satin pajamas, and they were all in very bright colors. One was green, one was red, one was blue, and naturally, everything that we wore was the same design, but in different colors. My mother never put us all in the same color. She made a lot of our clothes, actually, and sewed a lot, but she would do them in different colors. In fact, I found it one day when I was cleaning out something, and I gave it to one of my granddaughters, and she loved it. She uses it as a costume.
CK: You still have this today?
LC: I had that – that’s Betty. I had mine. It was a very unusual shade of green, olive green.
CK: Oh, my. You were, like, ten here?
LC: Yeah. Nine or ten. We're still at the beach, and it seems to me – maybe we were ten years old when we went to a summer camp, and we no longer were down here [inaudible] beach.
CK: [inaudible].
LC: This is probably junior high school. Imagine buying three bicycles.
CK: Three bicycles, was it?
LC: Yes. Believe it or not –
CK: These balloon tires.
LC: Yeah. These bicycles came from my husband's father's business. He sold bicycles. It wasn't until my husband, after the service, went to work in the business, that they started to sell toys and sporting goods, but he was basically in the bicycle business. The kids were growing up, then it wasn't sport so much as it was elocution lessons, dancing lessons, voice lessons. Our piano teacher also taught voice, and he tried to teach the three of us to sing. I remember we sang “Mama's little baby loves shortnin', shortnin'. Mama's little baby loves shortnin' bread.” [laughter] Then we were in a dance recital, and we did “Isle of Capri.” [inaudible] song.
CK: What kind of dancing was this? Like, tap dancing?
LC: Tap dancing.
CK: Looks like the Girl Scout uniforms.
LC: Yes, but it wasn't. It was camp. Those are the dress-up clothes for – we put those uniforms on for Sunday.
CK: Describe them.
LC: During the week, we would wear pale green shorts and shirts, but on Sundays, weekends, or visiting, we wore the white shirt and navy blue – I think it was navy blue or green, I don't remember that. These hats we had on – our parents would go to New Hampshire – when we'd go to camp, they'd go to New Hampshire during vacation. They would come up to visit, and they brought us these felt hats that you get up in New Hampshire, used to – places that sell these things, and I think they had a feather in it. I don't know. I remember getting those. This was high school, this was college. This was when Pauline got married to an ensign. He was a dentist in the Navy. He met my sister Pauline when he was at camp. He just wanted to marry her in the worst way, and so he was going off to the Pacific or something, and they got married when he was home on leave. She was in college. She quit college and got married, and this is my mother's family – my grandmother, my aunt, my mother, my other aunt. They were all at her wedding.
CK: This was taken at the time of the wedding?
LC: Yes. This was 1940. Early 1940s. No, it had to be ’44, ’45, during the war. They got married, and it was a very informal wedding. She just wore a street-length dress, and we had similar dresses in different colors. This is the aunt that’s the only one left in my mother’s family. Right here. My Aunt Alice. That’s my wedding.
CK: Your wedding was a little bit more formal.
LC: My wedding was the only formal wedding because it was just after the war, and I had such difficulty finding a dress. There just weren't that many wedding dresses around. I came all the way to Boston. I couldn't find one.
CK: Why was this? Was this because of the war?
LC: Sure, yeah. There just was very little to choose from. We borrowed my dress. We did get dresses for my sisters; that didn't seem to be a problem, but I couldn't find something for myself, so we ended up borrowing a dress from a friend, somebody my parents knew, and the size was right.
CK: Skinny little thing.
LC: Yeah, I was. [laughter] Not anymore. This was taken ten years ago. [inaudible] This is a picture – I don't know if this is the picture that's in a book. I have a book written by Elizabeth Noble under that table. I can get it for you. But we are published. We are in a book about twins. This author knew my niece, and she was writing this book. She said, “Do you think you might be interested in interviewing my mother and her sisters? They're triplets.” She said, “Oh, yes.” We met her down at Copley one day, and she interviewed us, and we're in the book. One of our baby pictures that you saw is in the book, and then a more – I don’t know [inaudible] more recent picture, but it says how we get together. We call ourselves the TLC, Tuesday Lunch Club.
CK: [laughter] Tuesday Lunch Club.
LC: [laughter] We just get together on a Tuesday and have lunch. We tried to do that at least once a month. That's downtown. I think she took that picture, and we were right outside the Copley Square area. Yes, there's that cousin of ours who was born within a week before we were. This was taken – my sister had moved to Beaufort, South Carolina. We went down there to celebrate our birthday. This is a more recent picture, and I think this was just before she moved to Beaufort.
CK: Read the caption that you put under it.
LC: It says, “The best of friends, the way we are.”
CK: Talk about skinny. [laughter]
LC: [laughter] We look like we just came out from a concentration camp. We were very thin little girls. Not Pauline so much, but Betty and I really needed some fattening up. There's our grandmother. Here's the five of us. We were all very close growing up … that's it.
CK: This is wonderful.
LC: Milestones, I called it.
CK: Is there anything else that you want to say, or anything that you can think of that you wanted to add to this marvelous story?
LC: Well, look at my notes here. See what I wrote down. That pretty much covered it. You asked me before about how I got interested in flowers and all that, and that basically must have been a hidden talent that I didn't know I had, because it wasn't until we moved here. I always loved flowers in the garden, and my mother, who liked the yard to look nice, but didn't involve herself with anything like that, had roses in the garden. I thought how nice it looked, and all that. I had shown some interest then, but I was so busy roller skating or playing, and we were very athletic, Betty and myself especially, and my brother was also very – Pauline just didn't like contact sports at all. We would chase each other around the house, as children will, and we had the kind of house that you could easily run around. She was the one who cried if anybody pushed her or shoved her, or something like that. She didn't want to play like Betty and I and our brother. We fooled around a lot. She was more serious, but it was not really until I got married, and my husband, Buddy, always went with his mother every spring or summer to buy flowers. She loved flowers, and she loved to put flowers in the garden, the annuals and everything like that, which my mother didn't. The two of us would make a garden. We had some lovely little gardens in our house in Warwick, Rhode Island, where we first lived, and we were married. I grew vegetables. I did a lot of things like that. Before I moved to Massachusetts, I did join a garden club through a friend of mine who was getting involved with a temple garden club in Providence.
CK: I see you were also very active in Temple Emunah’s Beautification Committee.
LC: Yes, that's been my baby, I call it. Nobody knows very much about what I do. There might be a handful of people who realize that I'm the one who makes the place look the way it does.
CK: Are you still doing that now?
LC: Yes.
CK: That's you?
LC: But anyway –
CK: That’s wonderful.
LC: – it's just been an interest of mine, so I joined this garden club, and then I moved. I took a few flower arranging lessons, and that was really – got my foot into it because the first thing I did when I moved to Lexington was when the welcome lady came around, she said, “You know, there's a Lexington Field and Garden Club if you're interested.” She knew something about it. When they were having the meetings and all that, I joined immediately. Eventually, I got to be – there's several groups within the big garden club. I eventually got to be chairman of one of the groups and took flower-arranging lessons. I mean, I'm still studying and learning about flower arranging, but I got so involved with it that I started to compete in exhibits in different flower shows around, and enjoying some other groups other than the Garden Club. There was a Home and Garden Guild, and then there was IDS, and I'm on the board of the IDS.
CK: What’s IDS?
LC: International floral design. IDS is International Design –
CK: Society or something.
LC: [laughter] My mind’s just gone blank.
CK: But you had your own businesses, as well.
LC: Yeah, I did. I got involved with doing flowers for Lexington Arts and Crafts when I joined them, and one of the groups there. We always made things for their fair. I started to make wreaths, and I started to make dried flower arrangements. I sewed some things there. The next thing I knew, I was doing things – people would ask me to do something, and that's where it all started, and I would do – somebody would say, “I'm having a bar mitzvah. Would you do flowers for me?” And I'd say “Okay.” Then I worked at a flower shop in Lexington called Crickets.
CK: Oh, yes.
LC: I worked there for about five or six years and got friendly with a gal from Belmont, the two of us worked there, and we've been best friends ever since. She lives on the Cape. She's my age. We have so many similarities in our life. She's not Jewish. I've gone to her church down in Cape Cod, in Centerville, to Our Lady of Victory Church, and I've done their Christmas exhibits there. I mean, their floral work, and I've helped her with weddings, and she's helped me with weddings. I did that for about ten years. My husband would help me, and my kids would help me. It's not the easiest job in the world. People don't realize how physically exhausting it can be, and buying the flowers, trying to keep them alive, trying to keep your clients happy – it was just a labor of love because I didn't need to do this for a livelihood; it was just a big ego trip. [laughter] In the meantime, I was doing exhibits for the spring flower show. I went with this IDS, International Design Symposium – I had a senior moment. I went to New York and did flowers at St. John the Divine in New York. It’s up near Columbia University. That was an experience, and I've gotten a lot of blue ribbons. I was telling some girls the other day my first arrangement I ever did was when I first moved to Lexington. I was so green that I got an honorable mention, but the judges said, “Your material is in very fine condition.” [laughter] They didn't have any negatives; they only had a positive to say. Anyway, I've never had an honorable mention since. I've gotten a lot of blue ribbons.
CK: You’re still doing it now?
LC: I did one last October, and I got a second in Worcester at Tower Hill.
CK: What kind of plants do you like working with?
LC: Well, this fresh plant material. Actually, the design I did was for – the title of it was “The Sukkah,” so I did a lot of fruits and vegetables in a fresh flower arrangement. It came out quite nice. Everybody thought it should have been a blue ribbon, but I got second.
CK: How did you do this?
LC: I just put it in a very large container, and some branches up here, some lovely flowers here. Hanging, I had eggplants, and I had grapes, and I had apples, and I had – I wanted to have the limes because of the [inaudible].
CK: [inaudible].
LC: Yeah. I wanted to have it sort of look like that. I was very pleased with what the eventual – how it looked eventually, but there was somebody who had one a little better than mine. Anyway, that was interesting, because it was the sukkah. It had to be the sukkah. But the last five or six years, I haven't done any work. Actually, one of the last arrangements I did was Rabbi Eiseman's daughter's wedding. I did two of the girls' weddings. I’ve done several of their daughters’ –
CK: Another daughter is getting married in October. [laughter]
LC: Yeah. [laughter] I have a friend who has done things for them. My involvement with the temple – one time, they said, well, why don't we have a garden club there? Well, I was so involved with the Lexington Garden Club [that] I didn't want to get involved with another garden club. I thought it would be too much, so I've taught some flower arranging classes there, and I did an exhibit for something the Sisterhood had, where I showed centerpieces for all occasions. That was interesting.
CK: You're still working at the temple now.
LC: Yes.
CK: What are you doing now?
LC: [inaudible] temple was that – I always hated –
CK: This is Temple Emunah in Lexington.
LC: Yeah. I always thought the gardens and the temple grounds were not at all very pleasing, and I thought to myself, “I want to get involved with doing something here,” and so this was when our son, Steven, the nurse, thought maybe landscaping would be his occupation. But it really was an avocation for him. He loved doing it. During college, he worked for Wagon Wheels, he worked for Nick and helped him a great deal. He really loves – he still has a big garden at home and all that. But I found this man who did alpine gardens, and I asked him if he would give us a plan and do a garden across from the entrance to the temple, where the stone wall is, and the [inaudible] the pines, and the mountain laurel, and whatever we have up there. That was done a long time ago.
CK: So, you’re responsible –
LC: He did a very nice job there, but then we had no sprinkler system, we had nothing. We still have some of the same plantings, but it's not like it was originally. We had a lot of wild blueberry in there, we had a lot of fern, we had a lot of interesting things. The children loved to climb that mountain, so they would kind of trample things. Half of the stuff is still there. It really needs to be redone.
CK: Do you go, from time to time, to services?
LC: Yes. Oh, yeah. But what happened was – then they were renovating the whole temple, and they took all the shrubbery out, and the young landscaper that was doing work there came up with a plan for the foundation plantings. I saw it, and I said, “Uh-uh, this is not a good design. This is the basic landscaper who doesn't really know design and make it something that would be worthwhile to look at.” At the time, I got acquainted with a woman in Winchester who had a wonderful design sense. She wasn't educated in landscape design, but she knew more than some landscape design people with degrees. I asked her if she would do a design for the temple. She did a design, and we had a certain amount of money that we could spend, so we did three-quarters of what her plan was, and we put all those azaleas and all the wonderful plantings that are in there now. I'm so pleased with the way it came out.
CK: So are we.
LC: We added trees. We added a couple of pear trees on the side. I just feel so close to – that's my religion. You see, I'm not one to say I have to be at temple every Saturday, or I have to be there for every occasion. My husband somehow feels the same way. We can pray at home, we can do what we do in our own way, and that's just the way we are.
CK: But you've made a major contribution to the temple.
LC: That’s the way I feel. There's my religion right there. But most people don't know that I do that. I don't make a big issue of it. I spend a lot of money, my own money, for things that big because when somebody else was there, running the temple, and she said, “Well, you could have fifty dollars,” or “We don't have any money to spend for anything outside.”
CK: Or even enough for [inaudible].
LC: Thank goodness this landscape in Winchester said, “We'll do this plan, but you have to have a sprinkler system. There's no way this is going to survive, you know that.” It's a hotbed up there in certain areas. Thanks to her –
[Recording paused]
CK: – I'm interviewing Lillian Cohen on June 1, 1999, and we're now at 9:15 in the evening, and Lillian is talking about gardening at Temple Emunah. Okay, go ahead. So, you got the sprinkler system in.
LC: We got the sprinkler system in, and that's why things are doing well there. From time to time, there have been people who said they'd love to help, but I don't go there any specific time. When I can, I go, and I do –
CK: How often is that? How often do you go there?
LC: Well, in spring, I might go once a week to see what things look like and pull a few weeds. What [inaudible] has always said he'll help me, and so for a while there he was helping me pull weeds, plant some flowers, and then I realized that it was a bit of a chore to put in annuals and [inaudible] and take care of everything, so I decided – I've got the mulch there. The plants were starting to get really big, and didn't really need it. As it is, there’s Vinca growing there, and it's taking over. At some point, somebody's going to have to pull it out because it's going to kill some of the stuff there. Anyway, we planted most everything that was in the plan, except the trees. The two pear trees were put in the last three years, I guess. Now we're in the process with Peggy Moses and myself because she wants a garden in memory of her mother, but she doesn't want to sign – she doesn't want anybody to know what – she just wants a garden.
CK: What space?
LC: We're putting it – you know where the dogwood tree is right by the side entrance?
CK: The school?
LC: By the school entrance.
CK: The school entrance? Yes.
LC: Well, there's space – we thought there was more space than there is now because when we looked at it early February or so, it was not that full. Nothing had leafed out. We were away, and I came back, and I called this fellow that's going to do the work. I said, “Brian, I'll meet you up there. We have a problem because we don't really need as much as we thought we needed, because everything is leafed out. You have to probably prune some things back, so we can get things in there.” So, that's what we're working on now. That garden will be in a couple of weeks.
CK: What kind of garden are you thinking of? Perennial plants?
LC: She wanted something flowering in the spring. Probably, flowering shrubs will be there with a few perennials. We're putting in a large rock at the corner, and there were Cotoneaster plants there, the spreaders. They mulch so heavily, but this is the temple group. I tried to tell them not to put too much mulch on because you're going to kill the plants that are there.
CK: They didn't know it was going to be [inaudible].
LC: Yeah. So, that was what disappeared. Also, when we put all this new landscaping in, I don't know which grade – the younger kids came out while we planned. The gal just left. She wanted –
CK: The educator?
LC: She wanted the children to be involved with something planting – to do some planting.
CK: They have the vegetable garden now.
LC: Yeah, but no, this was something else for the youngsters. We put in this Ajuga that is the red leaf one. They helped plant it, and I told all the children, and some of them still remember to this day, that I said, “At some point when this grows and spreads a bit, it's going to look like a carpet.” Some of them really took me seriously. But what happened was, they put so much mulch down there that half of it's gone. Anyway, the rock’s going in there, Cotoneaster, something evergreen that will be a focal point, and then some other shrubs around it. It's going to be beautiful.
CK: You're working with the gardening, but you were so active with Hadassah also. What did you do with Hadassah?
LC: Not that much. One year, I was membership chairman. I've always been involved with donor and flowers for the table, so I did that for several years. But it's time the younger generation comes along and starts to do their own thing. If anybody asked me, it's not easy for me to say no, so I do get involved, but I'm trying to –
CK: You still [inaudible].
LC: Yeah. Like today, I was helping at the Monroe Tavern through the garden club. We take care of a colonial garden there. I was working there today. Yesterday, I went with my sister to a nursery to pick up plants because I'm a landscaper for the condominium. I just do the plantings this time of the year. We have a gardener here, but I put in the annuals. We used to have a sign at the corner, and I put the plantings in there. In the fall, I'll put bulbs in. Around the different areas in front of somebody's house, there might be an electric box, and there's shrubbery there, but also the need for some annuals in the spring. I have a friend up the street. The two of us will get that all done, and then I'll be away for the summer. We go down the Cape.
CK: Oh, you go to Cape. Where do you go?
LC: New Seabury. We've been renting a house, the same house for – this will be four years now, but we've been to other areas all around the Cape, renting houses here and there.
CK: Beach people.
LC: Not really. I just like being down there. The last few years, our daughter's been down there with her husband. He was the baseball coach for the –
[Recording paused.]
CK: Let’s just add this, that you had –
LC: No, no. It’s not necessary.
C: What was it about?
LC: I don't want this on here because I wrote about my father-in-law. I don't want it on there. I was going to tell my husband. I hadn't done it, but when we were first married –
CK: Do you want me to close the tape?
LC: Oh, yeah. You still got it on?
CK: The tape is going. [Recording paused.] Just [inaudible].
LC: You got it on?
CK: Yeah, I just put it on now, so you can edit whatever you want.
LC: I just have to say that I'm married to a wonderful man who is what makes our family click. He is so understanding and so wonderful to be with that people invite us to their homes, just so that he can entertain everybody. He was always telling jokes, most of the time, and so humor was the nourishment that kept us all happy. My husband could have been a stand-up comic if he wasn't a salesman with his own business. Music is a very important part of our lives, and so has been with our children and our grandchildren.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
