Maurice Heads West
My brother and I were very close. We went sleigh-riding together. I attended all the sandlot baseball games that he played in, and if anyone ever dared hurt him running around the bases, throwing a ball, or even sliding into home, I was there to get on top of the opponent. I always said that he was more important to me than breathing. And it was necessary that he be there for me at all times.
When I was ten years old, Maurice came home from school and said to my father “I want to be a baseball player.”
And Papa said to him “No son of mine is going to be a baseball bum. You will go to California and find your way there in our larger family.”
The larger family was those relatives who had come to America in the late 1800s and had gone to California. And so my brother was sent out to live with Aunt Millie and Uncle Max. He got a job in the dried fruit business with the family—it was called Rosenberg Dried Fruit. He never graduated high school because Papa decided to send him off. He went out there not thinking very happily about leaving home.
Though our house was very lovely, my brother had grown up sleeping in a room that was called the hall bedroom. It was just enough to hold his bed and his dresser. But when Maurice arrived in San Francisco, he moved into the most luxurious house that you ever thought of in your life.
If you know San Francisco, they all face the bay, the private houses, and overlooking the academy, the Presidio. The family house overlooked the Presidio and onto the bay. And he came into that house from our farm family. And suddenly, here he was out in California, living with a maid, a chauffeur, and a butler. It was quite a drag for him to understand all of the mechanics of that family. But he got comfortable very quickly.
When he got comfortable, Aunt Millie said “Over and out. This is no place for you to be living. You’re earning a living now. You are working at Rosenberg Brothers. You find yourself your own pad and live on it.”
There was a man who was about his age, named Mel Spiegel, who lived in San Francisco at the same time. He was also on the Rosenberg Brothers’ roster. He was one of the workers. And he and Maurice became good friends. So Maurice moved into the rooming house that Mel Spiegel lived in.
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t with me anymore. His absence made my heart heavy.
ruthweissremembered 
My grandmother remained close to her brother throughout her life. These little snippets of story about her siblings are sort of unfulfilling for me because I want to get back to hearing some of my grandmother’s fully formed stories. However, it’s so important to understand how her world was changing as she grew intoner teens. My grandmother had a remarkable life partially because she developed a sense of independence and dealt early with adversity. Maybe not the kind of adversity that you or I have experienced but there’s a definite sense that each time one of her family members drifted away, a little piece of her went with them.
There will be more about Aunt Millie and Uncle Max and their home a little later when Ruth gets shipped off to the west coast in much the same way that Maurice was.