Nov 22, 2019

Well, unfortunately, my mother and grandmother, which were my main family, they are deceased. We used to have big feasts and my grandmother was a great cook and she had a 450 acre farm, upstate New York, West of Esperance, which was West of Schenectady. I don’t know if you know upstate.

But it was a beautiful area with the Schoharie Creek running through it. And we used to have wonderful family gatherings. I still have an uncle, but I don’t really see him …

He was in the army and so he was in Seoul, but I did meet him in Seoul. I was a singer and I did a USO tour to Seoul. And my uncle had gone to West Point and he graduated as a Colonel.

So I go to Seoul and who’s in charge of the base that we go to, but my uncle! So they treated us royally and it was a lovely trip. And Vietnam was, not Vietnam, but Seoul who was really, very welcoming and I loved the trip.

I did a cabaret, an hour and a half show. And I did that. I started in, as a matter of fact, it’s a Latin quarter here on Times Square. I worked there for a solid year, three shows a night, seven days a week. The only way I got a day off was when they shot JFK. Then they closed the place for the night. But I proceeded from there to a Caesar’s Palace in Vegas.

And I also worked as a travel agent for American Express. I managed an office on 42nd Street. And so I used to sell a lot of Concorde tickets and so they said, the Concorde of course it’s gone now, but at the time it was very popular with the executives from different organizations and all over the world. And the Concorde was like two hours and a half trip from Paris to New York or New York to London. It was too expensive to run. But the executives loved it because they, and they sent me, they said anybody’s who sells the Concorde should experience it. So they sent me the around the world first class and I came back on the Concorde. Which was lovely, it was a lovely trip. But it’s much easier to explain to executives that you better go to the john before you get on the plane because the lavatory was very small and these were big burly guys, you know? So I always said, make sure you go to the john, you’ll be uncomfortable otherwise.

Oh yes. You absolutely could tell that the plane was traveling much faster. It was a lovely experience actually. And of course when I did that, they sent me around the world first class and I went to Jakarta and I stayed at the Almond Doré, which was a beautiful, beautiful resort. I was paying seven hundred dollars as a travel agent for staying there.

I walked into the room and I thought, well, I better change because Jakarta is warm. And I’m dressed for traveling and so I get my jacket off and with that the lights go out. So I’m standing in the middle of the room and I saw is that there was like a lavatory at the bottom of the room and all I could picture was I’m going to go head first into the bath tub. At $700 a night. I didn’t think that was very nice. But anyway, it was a beautiful resort and a beautiful trip. And those kinds of trips don’t come around very often, truthfully.

Oh yes, sure. I took plenty of photos. I worked for a newspaper the Wave of Long Island. With the woman called Dorothy Dunn and she wrote the column that she had, and I made the pictures. It was a fun job.