The Story

“My father was from Romania, my mother was from Poland…They met here. I think they all came as teenagers. When they married, they lived on Milwaukee St. I lived very close to Schenley Field, so in summertime everyone used to go there. Everybody. And we’d play together. That I remember. When I was younger we lived in that block where I think all the parents were immigrants, spoke Yiddish. I understood Yiddish because my mother spoke it. She didn’t speak English when she came, and she wanted to get her citizenship papers because she had family in NY that she wanted to bring over, this was during the 30s.

I used to go to school with her at night, at Herron Hill, for immigrants to learn English so they could get their citizenship. That was quite a diverse crowd there! (Laughs) From all over. From Italy, from Greece, from all over. Most of the immigrants did not talk much about Europe. And now I regret not asking about that. You know my grandmother and her two sons died in the Holocaust. My mother’s mother. My father’s family from Romania, they didn’t suffer that much. Most of them left to go to Israel. My father ran away, like people ran away from the south, the Jewish boys ran away from the army because they were really not treated well.”

“I know my grandfather’s family was from Abbeyville [South Carolina]. And they knew of a gentlemen that lived in Abbeyville who was a very influential black man. Who was in the process of—he was tryna do business with some white people in the community who he thought respected him, I guess. And they kept insisting that he was trying to cheat them. One thing led to another, this man ended up dead, [and] my family said we gotta get outta here. And they packed up and came straight to Pittsburgh. I think they settled on Junilla St actually, where we have people in our family who still live in that very same house. But the house that they lived in that we all grew up in, including my mother and all her kids, was on Anaheim St, which is in Schenley Heights. But he had that house built for her. And it still stands today.

My grandfather Douglas Robinson was a Pullman Porter. That’s all he ever did his whole adult life. He loved his job as best he could under the circumstances. I hear…it was a good job, for black men at the time. But of course, it was the times. And he did well, financially. The Pullman Porters did well. They did better than most. My grandmother like I said, she was born in Red House, VA, she came to Pittsburgh when she was a young woman. She belonged to a lot of different ladies clubs, she went to teas, bridge clubs, card parties, all that kind of stuff. And she was very active in the community with other lady groups.

I used to get in the middle of the bed in the morning and just wait for them to wake up. I was in the middle of the bed one morning and she said to him, ‘Douglas put the light on.’ And he put the light on. And she said, ‘I said put the light on!’ And she woke up blind. She didn’t go to bed blind, but she woke up blind. After that she couldn’t be helped, she couldn’t regain her sight. When the light went out that morning, that’s the same switch that made everyone stay away from her. I just know he was very attentive to her. Anything she needed. She never wanted much but it didn’t matter. Anything she mighta asked for he made sure she had it…I thought he was a great guy.”