We moved to Sunnyside, Queens in 1944. My earliest memories are of Sunnyside Gardens, the neighborhood, of Sunnyside Gardens Park, and of the Sunnyside Progressive School where my parents, Lucille and Manny Rosen, placed me. The school was located on 47th Street, just north of Queens Boulevard where the elevated subway ran. The elevated subway and its entrances were concrete and looked like buildings to me.  I was 2 and a half years old.

​

          I think the school had two floors and on the roof was where we went to play in the open air. The first floor was for the youngest children from two and a half to about four. The second floor was for the older children. Under the stairs to the second floor were two closet-sized bathrooms. At the top of the stairs, we older kids had a bigger coed bathroom with two sinks, two urinals and two stall toilets. Even though the girls would gather around a stall in use, the boys were always trying to peer at us from under the stall doors. There was one boy who would bend down low to the floor so he could peek into the stalls. We called him “the Tushy Man.”

​

          One morning, Johnny Swinburne asked me to run away from school to his apartment house, about two blocks away. He told me we could get candy there, and I guess I found that exciting.  Down the school stairs we went where at the bottom, we were met by two teachers for the younger children on their way up. Asking us where we were going, we replied, “To the bathroom.”  Clearly, they didn’t give much thought to this response as they continued on their way past us up the stairs.

​

          Out the front door, we turned left and headed down the hill to Johnny’s house. We had to cross 43 rd Avenue where I was already feeling frightened. Once inside the apartment, Johnny found fun in shooting a water pistol at me. Happily, the doorbell rang. Our teachers had arrived.  I was glad to see them but I also worried about our punishment.  I don’t remember how we were punished, but I never forgot this nursery school escapade, and retold it often: “I ran away from nursery school with Johnny Swinburne.”  From these, my earliest Sunnyside days, I have vivid memories and longstanding relationships. As it turned out, my cousin married Adria Fisher who also went to The Sunnyside Progressive School.  I also met my oldest and best friend, Peggy Heyer from Kew Gardens. We are still close friends.

​

          My mother sometimes told me that she thought putting me in school at such a young age was wrong and that she was bad mother. She suffered guilt most of her life because she believed that.  For a long time, I believed it too. Thanks to the Women’s Movement, I came to realize she did the right thing for herself and most likely for me. Thinking about her guilty feelings saddens me. I hope she realized at some point that she had done the best thing. We never talked about it.

​

          Sunnyside Gardens is one of the first co-operative communities in the United States. The brick attached houses formed a rectangle bordering the gardens behind them. The neighborhood is an historic site now where little has changed over time.

In my childhood, Sunnyside was a hotbed of communism, and my parents were members of the Communist Party. Being a Communist Party member didn’t become illegal until 1954. I didn’t know anything about communism, but everything was very hush, hush among the adults…and I was a little girl. Only after we had moved away did I understand more.

​

          My parents belonged to the Teachers Union, its members a mix of Communists and other leftists.  My father taught bookkeeping and other accounting related subjects at Long Island City High School. My mother taught merchandising. During the McCarthy era, HUAC came to the New York Board of Ed and started hearings. Many of my parents’ friends lost their jobs because they refused to name names. But their own names were in the newspapers. My parents didn’t want my father’s name in the paper, so he resigned when he got his notice to appear. I still have an article from a newspaper about teachers being fired. Their names are in the article and there is a photo of Harry Adler. He died young, probably all of this contributing to his death.

​

          My mother wasn’t working at the time. When she returned to work, still during the McCarthy era, she taught math at Julia Richman High School Annex. One day she came home very upset.  She had been eating lunch in a faculty room, sitting at a table facing the door. When it opened.  a woman she had once been friends with walked in. “Lucille” the woman said, “I didn’t know you were still working.”  My mother said that at that moment, she would have run out of the room, but there was only the one door. Two weeks later my mother received a notice to appear before the committee. She too resigned. By then we had moved to Kew Garden Hills, as had many of our family friends.

 

          I remember many of the families we knew then: The Thompsons, (their daughter also named Ellen like me), the Sparers, (another Ellen and her sister, Laurie), the Efrons (Sheila and Richard), the Swinburnes, (Johnny and Billy), the Barons, (Phyllis, Michael and Margie), and the Adlers, (Ann and Joel). I remember these children well, much more clearly than the children I grew to know later on, after we moved away. We have no photographs but they are so clear to me somehow. 

​

          There was also a boy named Bruce and a girl named Lucy. She had straight dark brown hair with bangs. I don’t remember their last names.  For some reason I can’t explain I never actually attended Bruce’s birthday party, but each year my mother would take me to his house on the day of the party, always before the other children arrived.  I’d wear a short, party dress which was popular for little girls at the time. It had sashes attached to the sides that tied in a big bow in the back. Complete with white anklets and Mary Jane patent leather shoes, I was the perfect party girl.  I’d give Bruce his birthday present, have some treats, then we would leave before the party began. This has remained a mystery all my life. I used to think my mother wanted me to marry Bruce, but I didn’t want to.  I couldn’t have been more than six. 

​

          After school let out for the day, I used to go to Frieda Summers’ ceramics class on one day and to Bernice Penner’s painting class on another. They held these classes in studios in the basements of their very narrow, brick, attached houses. I can still visualize these narrow houses with stairs going up to the second floor and down to the basement. I didn’t like the painting class because Bernice wouldn’t tell me exactly what to do, and I got to not wanting to go even though I really liked Bernice. Now I know, because I have taught art all my life that she was right about not telling me what to do!

​

          In ceramics class, I made many bowls and ash trays. I also made three reliefs of faces. They were of my family: my father was bald but had a mustache, I gave my mother dark brown, curly hair and my baby sister, who had no hair, had only eyes, a nose and a mouth. My mother kept them for many years, and now, I keep them wrapped in a handkerchief in my sewing box.

​

          When we first arrived, we lived on 46th Street between Skillman and 43rd Avenues on the second floor of a two-story house. When my father received his draft notice, we moved to an apartment on 50th Street in the same building as my grandparents. Fiftieth Street was in Woodside but we were still basically Sunnysiders. Sometime after our move, the age requirement for military service changed and my father was by then too old, so he never went into the army.

​

          Sunnyside Gardens Park, “members only,” was on the northern edge of Sunnyside Gardens. It had ball fields and tennis courts. There was a playground and something called a merry-go-round which was simply four wooden benches that attached around a central shaft. If you were brave, you sat on the outside and kicked the ground with your feet and this thing would go around by itself, or else your father would run around in a circle moving it along. There was also a swimming pool and a children’s pool. In the early 1950s, our mothers wouldn’t allow us to go in the pools because there was a polio scare. It was believed that polio was transmitted in water. I’d cry and beg to go, to no avail.

​

          I also went ice skating in the park with my father when I was very young, maybe three. I had double runner children’s ice skates made of metal. They were clamped to my little, high-top shoes. The ice on which we skated was most likely on the tennis courts that had been flooded and frozen over. My father came from Montreal and ice skating was part of his life. It became part of mine. I adored my father. I remember his tenderness, and the energy with which he skated.  He held my hand as we moved around the rink. When I got tired, we went inside where he took my skates off. I had hot chocolate, sat on a bench and watched him skate. But I’d get bored sitting there alone. I wanted my daddy, and I walked around in my little white shoes, calling out, “Daddy, Daddy.” But he didn’t hear me, so I stepped out onto the rink to get him and slipped on the ice and fell. My lip hit the ice and bled, and I began to cry. Someone picked me up and my father was immediately by my side, holding me. After that we went home and he returned to skate alone.

​

          Some years ago, I had a job interview on Queens Boulevard, a little past Woodside, just beyond Calvary, the Catholic cemetery. After the interview, I drove down Queens Boulevard to Sunnyside, and through the streets I’d lived on. They were totally familiar to me. I parked near 43rd Avenue and walked around, and down 50th street. I went into the lobby of the apartment building where we had lived. It felt like I’d been there the day before. The floor had the same marble pattern, the elevator was in the same place to the right after the entrance. On the left were the mailboxes. Past the elevator was the staircase going up to the second floor.   At the end of the building there had been an empty lot where I was cautioned not to go, but don’t know why. In the day, children had always played outside without any adults watching, and we had gone into this lot all the time. Where the lot had been, there were now a few more modern-looking two-story attached houses, with similar houses across the street. There was still a bar just past our building on 43rd Avenue.

​

          When I was a child, there was a candy store where I could buy candy for a penny. My grandmother would throw pennies, wrapped in a paper bag, down from her kitchen window, and I’d go around the corner and buy some penny candies. On the corner was Karlic’s Drugstore. Across the street on the corner of 49th street was Models Grocery. It felt like they were still there but maybe I imagined that.

​

          On the corner of 50th Street and Skillman Avenue was a café that seemed as if it had always been there, where I had lunch. It was certainly much nicer than anything around when I was a child but somehow it seemed to belong. I felt safe and happy. Maybe that’s how I felt as a child in Sunnyside. That’s a nice thought. I wish I’d spent more time exploring the streets, walking around, looking at all the places I remember and the houses of our friends. Maybe I’ll be there again someday but I doubt it and I feel sad.