Sophie’s death
I think the death of my mother, from a heart attack, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with. Jo Anne and I had just arrived in Mexico for a vacation, and we had to immediately come back. It was October of ’74; my mom was 73.
My father knew that he could not live alone and purposely went to the Orthodox Jewish Home; he had been on the board there and he just went there; it was like a hotel – someone would pick him up and go to schul together; then someone would pick him up and have breakfast, and he’d go downtown to go to work.
All my connection with the family was through my mother: she was the matriarch. Seldom did I talk to my dad on the phone; he was hard of hearing. He was not a great one for talking, and we had to fight with him to get glasses and to wear hearing aids. He read the paper with a magnifying glass. My mother was the core of everything. It was her doing that kept Bob and me close; whenever we were in town; she made sure that Bob and Dottie would come over for dinner.
It was hard not having Sophie there as the core.
Phil’s death
It became hard dealing with my father after my mother died, because the communication wasn’t that good. We still did things – like we had Thanksgiving, Walter would drive him up. He was going strong; at times he would take Edith to dinner, and frequently Chippy, because Chippy was widowed at that time. I can remember when Rosalyn, Irv’s wife, went into the nursing home, my dad would be down in the nursing section schmeikling the nursing staff to make sure they would take care of Rosalyn. That was the type of person he was.
My father died, I guess, in his 80’s. I always thought he’d been born in 1899 instead of 1897, so when we went to Cincinnati to celebrate his 80th birthday he laughed at us and said it wasn’t.
Schmeikling is a Yiddish word that means doing something nice for someone so they will do something nice for someone else in return. My dad would bring the nurses hose and things like that, in the hopes that they would take good care of Rosalyn.
The Felson Family 