TH

IS IS

ME

My name, Joyce, is from the Latin name Jucunda

which means “joy, playful and merry.” Well, that’s

basically me.

This Is MeJoyce Powell

A Biography

www.storyterrace.com

This Is Me

This Is Me JOYCE POWELL

Text Jamie Rubin, on behalf of Story Terrace

Design Grade Design, London

Copyright © Story Terrace/Joyce Powell

Text is private and confidential

First print February 2018

www.StoryTerrace.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 7

1. WITH A BANJO ON OUR KNEES 9My Roots in Chicago and Beyond 10The Family that Plays Together, Stays Together 13From Tower to Alfred to Tremaine to Plymouth 17Sirens and Rations 21

2. “PLAYING” WITH PEOPLE 31Becoming a Dante 32He “didn’t want any jailbait” 35

3. GROWING UP AND SETTLING DOWN 41A Noon Wedding 41The House of Ill Repute 43My Most Special Accomplishments 45Wilshire Boulevard Temple and the Jews with a Christmas Tree 47

4. JUMPING IN AND GIVING BACK 63Finding My Calling 63All You Have to Do is Ask 68Our Greatest Concern 69

5. OUR LASTING LEGACY 81Holding Hands to Keep from Fighting 82Looking Towards the Future 84

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INTRODUCTION

I was born in Chicago on June 2, 1930, right at the start of the Great Depression when things started to go bad for lots of people financially. By the time my sister was born three years later, things were particularly difficult for my parents—they had to borrow money to get her out of the hospital.

My father was a traveling salesman; he started out by selling lamps. Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles and went to work selling promotional advertising for a company called Hamilton Ross. This meant he would sell items to a business, like a jewelry store. He would sell them something like a bunch of pots and pans and the store would use those items to entice their customers to buy merchandise. If a customer bought a watch, for example, they’d get the watch along with the pots and pans or dishes or cutlery or whatever other promotional item my father had sold to the store. My parents thought Hamilton Ross, the man who owned the company my father worked for, was the “be all and end all.” They thought he was so rich and successful.

About twenty-five years ago, after my parents were gone, an extraordinary thing happened. My husband Lawrie and I bought two apartments in the Wilshire Terrace building at 10375 Wilshire

10

Boulevard where we still live today on the fifth floor. While we were moving in and doing renovations, we met one of the men who worked in the building washing the windows. We were making conversation and he started to tell me what our apartment used to look like, pointing out that we had very different decorating choices from the previous owner, a man named Hamilton Ross. I could hardly believe it when I heard him mention that name. I asked him to repeat what he said just to be sure. I had heard him correctly—the man who used to own the apartment I was now living in was the same Hamilton Ross who had been my Daddy’s boss so many years before, the super rich man who my parents thought had really made it. I guess by that time, I had made it too.

I’ve been very lucky in my life but I have always known one thing: “There, but for the Grace of God, go I.” If I could ever help anybody who wasn’t as lucky as I was, that’s what I did. I’ve had a wonderful life and family and had the good fortune to travel the world, but I also spent most of my adult life helping other people financially, personally, and in other ways as well. I’ve always believed in giving back. This is my story.

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1WITH A BANJO ON

OUR KNEES

I was born in Chicago, but I’ve lived most of my life in Los Angeles. My younger sister was also born in Chicago. My mother, however, absolutely hated the cold mid-Western winters, so every year she would pack Beth (I always called her Cissy) and me up and we’d live with her parents in Los Angeles on Mansfield Avenue until it was warm enough for us to return to my Dad in Chicago. My mother wanted us to have roots in L.A. and always told us it was much easier to live some place where the sun was always shining and you could walk anywhere year-round. She was right. I met my husband, raised three children, built a career in social work and gave to countless charities all in Los Angeles. I barely even remember Chicago so I guess my mother’s plan worked; my roots are here in L.A.

My Roots in Chicago and Beyond

When we spent our winters in Los Angeles, I was so used to being alone with my Mom and sister while our Dad was back in Chicago that one night, I woke up screaming because there was a strange man in my mother’s bed. It turned out it was my Daddy! I hadn’t seen him

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for six months and didn’t expect to find him there. My mother was always complaining about living in Chicago and having to do things like put on rain galoshes so finally, when I was six, my father relented and agreed to move to Los Angeles permanently. We finally came to California, with a banjo on our knees. We never went back.

Before L.A., my mother was born in Rochester, New York, the youngest of seven children. Her family moved to California when my mother was in high school and she graduated from Hollywood High School. My grandfather had a good job. He was a foreman at Hart Schaffner Marx, a big time men’s clothing manufacturer.

My father’s family was from Odessa, where he was born. He came to the U.S. in 1911 on the S.S. Potsdam. No one really knew their actual birthdays at that time, but he always considered his birthday July 10, 1898. As an adult, I was fortunate enough to travel around the world and I took a trip to Odessa. When I got there, I noticed everyone on the street looked like me. Every person I looked at had my eyes. We all had the same eye color. I finally understood the person I would always see in the mirror and said to myself, “this is what an Odessa Jew looks like.”

My grandfather, my Dad’s father, had a job delivering the Jewish Daily Forward, a Jewish newspaper that was shipped by train from New York and sold at newsstands all over Chicago. He picked them up and delivered them by horse and wagon. Two of his sons, my dad’s brothers, Solomon (Pete) and Leo, worked for him and eventually delivered papers by truck instead of horse, but not my dad. He became a salesman after leaving the navy. He had one sister, my Aunt

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Birdie, who would babysit me sometimes. She was a lot like me. She was always “telling it like it was.” I never knew my grandparents because my dad’s father died before I was born and his mother died shortly after I was born. They are buried in a cemetery in Chicago. Their names were Fannie and Hyman Rabinowitz.

When I was in elementary school, my teacher asked me to write down my father’s name on a form and I wasn’t sure what to write. Officially, his name was Meyer. But that wasn’t what people called him. He was Mike, he was Mickey, he was Doc, lots of people called him Doc because he once worked in a pharmacy. Even my mom called him Doc. He was a real character. My mother was Victoria, or Vickie, Wager.

My mother never talked about her early life. Most of what I know about her parents came from one of her sisters who used to know everything. I know my grandfather came from Latvia. He was a strict man and my grandmother did everything he said. He had a heart attack and died while driving his car. I remember my parents were out of town when it happened.

My parents met at my mother’s oldest sister’s wedding in Chicago. My mother used to joke that they were going to have to put her on a train out of town because she would be considered an old maid, unmarried at 24.

Growing up my name was Joyce Robbin, but I learned later that my last name was actually Rabinowitz and my parents changed it to Robbin. It was officially changed in 1942 when I was twelve years old, something I learned much later, as an adult, when I was nursing

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a golf injury. Because I was hurt, I couldn’t play for a while so instead of going to Hillcrest Country Club, I spent my spare time at the Mormon Church on Santa Monica Boulevard where they have wonderful family records. That’s how I began to know who I was.

As a kid, we always had Passover seder at my grandparents’ house in Los Angeles and everybody would make something for the dinner meal. I remember we weren’t allowed to talk at the table. We were children and we were supposed to be “seen and not heard.” They would bring out the gefilte fish to the table and everyone would clap. We’d give everyone credit for what they made. It was usually chicken and chicken soup with matzah balls and tzimmes and some kind of dessert.

I do not have a middle name. When we moved to California, I started at Wilshire Boulevard Temple and when I was confirmed, everyone’s name was printed up in the program. Everyone else had a middle name except for me, so I made one up. I decided I was going to be Joyce “Anne” Robbin so I gave them that name when they were writing everything down and that’s how it was printed up. My mother came to the confirmation and saw that I had invented my own middle name on the list of students. I thought she was going to die!

Today I use Joyce R. Powell as my full name. That’s because when we were first married I used my name, Joyce Powell, everywhere, including at the bank we used near our first apartment at Vermont and Olympic. It turns out, there was another Joyce Powell in the

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neighborhood who happened to use the same bank. That Joyce Powell came in, used our name, and took all my money. At that point, I changed my signature to Joyce R. Powell.

The Family that Plays Together, Stays Together. . .

My parents played golf and bridge and they fought a lot over both things. As a kid, I didn’t always know that they were just arguing over a bid in bridge or something that had happened on the golf course. I thought they might have been fighting over something more significant. I have a lot of memories of playing cards with my parents. I remember that we learned to play during the depression. We didn’t go out to the movies or to other events, we were at home playing cards or mahjong. My mother taught my sister and I how to play so she could play with us when she couldn’t find anyone else to play with. We always played for money, even if it was just pennies. I still love to play bridge and I play often at Hillcrest Country Club and at the Barrington Bridge Club in Brentwood.

I remember growing up without a lot of money. By the time my sister was born, it was the heart of the Great Depression and my parents had to borrow money to get her out of the hospital. I was raised to be very careful with my money and to this day, I still pay all the bills. I was always taught if you have one penny, you don’t spend that penny. If you have two, you think about it and you might

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get what you want. As a woman, I think you need to make sure you always know what’s in the bank and how much you can buy.

I don’t really remember when Cissy was born, I was too young, but I do remember who she grew up to be. She was always so beautiful—tall, thin, and dark. My mother was very pretty also. Even as a kid, Beth (she didn’t like the name “Cissy” when she got older) and I never looked alike and we never were alike. I’ve been married for 69 years and she was married three times and was always looking for Mr. Goodbar. We just didn’t see things the same way. She died two years ago, when she was 82.

Beth had three children: Tony, who was actually her husband’s son, but she raised him and he always thought of her as his mother. She also had a daughter named Patty and a son named Brad. They are all wonderful people and they are friends with their cousins, my three children.

When I was growing up, I remember we often had a salami hanging on the back porch. A good, hard salami hanging from a string. My dad would come into the kitchen, take a knife, cut off a chunk, and eat it right there.

My mother always cooked but my father also cooked and chipped in. He would come home from work and start tasting the soup or stew my mother had come up with and try to season it—that went over like a lead balloon with her but he tried anyway. My father really did cook, especially later when my mother wasn’t able to, so when I got married, I thought all men cooked.

In addition to soups and stews, my mother made cheese pies for dessert. I still make them myself. I just made them for Thanksgiving

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this year. They start with a graham cracker crust that you bake. Then you fill the pie crust with cream cheese and sugar and vanilla and you bake that too. The topping is sour cream with sugar and vanilla and it’s very rich. They’re delicious.

I was always close to my dad. He was such a character. I was close to my mom too although she was mad at me a lot of the time. I remember once she had picked me up from school and we were driving down the street, probably on our way home. A cop pulled us over and came to the car window to tell my mom he stopped her because she had blown through a red light. She was not having it. She told the officer she absolutely did not do it; there was simply no way she had run a red light. Then I had the bright idea to open my mouth and said to her, in front of the cop, “Oh yes you did Mommy!” He gave her a ticket for running the light and she was so mad at me. I don’t think she ever got over it.

My father did well in business after having nothing during the Depression. He was always a salesman of sorts. After his start selling lamps, he later opened a business called Robbin Products. He sold promotional type things like pots and pans, mostly to jewelry stores. One of his customers was Kay Jewelers; they were credit jewelers. That meant you could go to their store and buy a piece of jewelry, like a ring for example, pay $6 up front and you could walk out with the ring. You would pay the rest by paying the store $100 a week or a month after that, or whatever the arrangement was. To entice people to buy the jewelry, the store would have promotions. For example, with the ring you were buying on credit, you would get something like a set of pots and pans. That’s where Robbin Products came in.

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One of the items I remember one of my dad’s jewelry stores selling was a “two-ruby watch.” It was a really big deal at the time but as I recall, you needed a microscope to see the rubies. Most of the stores he sold to were in downtown L.A. and they are all gone now.

Going to downtown L.A. at Christmas time was a big deal in my family. My mother, father, sister and I would all take the trolley down to see the department store windows all dressed up. We loved looking at the Bullocks department store windows especially. My sister and I loved cashmere sweaters which we often received as presents during that time of year. We had to share them and we would always be fighting over who got to wear which one at which time.

My father died in 1968, when he was 69 years old. My mother lived until she was 82 and died in 1985. I think she always wanted to work but in those days, women didn’t work if their husbands could support them. She was interested in money and the stock market so she would work on that. I remember she would watch the ticker tapes. I would find her sitting at the corner of Roxbury and Wilshire, watching her stocks such as GE, GM, AT&T and other blue chips go by at the Merrill Lynch Company. She would go there every day to check to see how her investments were doing. I have a similar interest in the stock market but I can check my stocks on my computer. I like to play around with money that was left to me and I learned that from my mother. She did very well and so have I. My husband doesn’t like the stock market, but I love it.

I can remember a lot of scenes from my childhood in my head. Even when the war came, even when I got older. Nothing terrible

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ever happened to me. I had a pretty normal upbringing and I consider myself lucky for it. I had guidelines but my parents weren’t very strict. It was a nice childhood.

From Tower to Alfred to Tremaine to Plymouth

My family moved around L.A. a lot when I was a kid. We started at my grandparents’ house on Mansfield, then we lived on Tower Drive in lower Beverly Hills and then we moved to 1042 Alfred Street, which was a nice duplex at La Cienega and Olympic. When we lived there, I went to elementary school at Carthay Circle. We walked to school and we would take the bus home. I wore skirts and blouses and sweaters to school. We were not as casual as kids are today. Girls never wore pants at the time. In second grade at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, I met Bunny Pensick and Sue Stern and we stayed friends forever after that.

When I was in middle school, we bought a big two story house at 829 Tremaine Street, a continuation of June Street, in Hancock Park and I went to John Burroughs Junior High School. We later moved to a smaller place on Plymouth and I went to L.A. High School.

I have always loved dogs and my sister and I had a dog named Teddy while we were growing up. We really loved Teddy but my mother was not a fan of dogs. One day she let Teddy out of the house, accidentally or on purpose, I’m not sure. We never saw Teddy again after that.

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I can still see the house we lived in on Tremaine in my mind. It was a center hall plan. You walked in and the dining room was on the left, the living room was on the right, and there was a hall down the middle that took you to the breakfast room and the kitchen. From the breakfast room you walked out to what we then called a “sunroom.” My daddy used to take a nap in the sunroom on the weekends and every Sunday night we would all gather around and listen to Walter Winchell. We had to be very quiet when he was on because in those days, there was no internet and there was no 24-hour news. We only got TV news once a week so we were quiet and we listened and we learned from him. I also remember listening to FDR on the radio. He was my favorite president because he instilled confidence in people.

I had a nice big room all to myself in that house on Tremaine and my sister did too. I thought it was a peaceful time for my family when we lived there but we eventually moved to a much smaller place. I later learned that we had to move because my mother had had a nervous breakdown in that big house. At the time, I was told that it was too hard for her to keep up such a place by herself. This was around the time everyone was going to work for the war effort and it was too difficult and too expensive to take care of a big house by yourself. My cousin gave me the details on my mother’s mental state when I was much older. Nobody explained to us what was going on when it happened.

We left Tremaine Street in search of a smaller and cheaper place to live and landed at a newly built apartment house on Plymouth Street in between Crenshaw and Rimpau. I remember it was near

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a police station. My sister and I went from having big rooms all to ourselves on Tremaine to sharing a room at our place on Plymouth. I lived in that apartment until I got married and moved out.

Sirens and Rations

Beth and I had to get used to sharing space at our place on Plymouth and we also had to get used to a new way of life during the war. I remember we were always running into the basement of the apartment whenever we heard a siren. It would happen as often as once a week—we’d hear a siren and we would run downstairs each time. We had to go each time because we never knew if the siren was real or just a drill. I remember just dropping everything and running. It sounds frightening but I don’t remember it being particularly scary. Our basement was fixed up so it wasn’t terrible being there and my mother had gone to school with the mother of the family next door so we were friendly with her kids. When we heard the siren, we all went down together. It was actually kind of fun.

The war also brought rationing, which was something else we had to get used to. If you were in line at the drugstore, for example, and you saw something you needed, you would try to get it if you saw it because you didn’t know if you were going to see it again any time soon. Sometimes you couldn’t get it even if you saw it in the store. We had stamps for lots of items that were rationed and those were the only way you could buy them. We would use stamps for food. They were rationing things like meat and sometimes chicken

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and vegetables. Because we were poor when I was a kid, we ate gizzards and livers and things like pickled tongue. I would tell my kids about that later and they thought it was “so gross” that we ate that stuff, but I always have liked them!

One thing that was really rationed during the war was gas. At that time, I didn’t drive yet but I would read the signs at all the gas stations I saw when I was out and I would come home and tell my parents when I saw a gas station that had gas.

The legal age to drive in California was sixteen but I started driving much earlier. I started at fourteen. My cousin Edward had been in the service and when he returned home, he came to live with us for a while. He was in his early twenties and I was thirteen or fourteen and he decided to teach me how to drive. It was fun for a while, but then I had an accident. I didn’t know that when you’re driving, you have to let the wheel go after you’ve made a left hand turn so I made a left hand turn somewhere and I kept my hands on the wheel and kept the car turning and I turned right into another car! I was driving my dad’s car. These days, everybody has two cars in their households, but at that time, we only had one car, the one I mashed into someone else’s car. My parents yelled at me for a while after that.

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Wager Family picture, Chicago 1906

My grandparents, Rachel and Jacob Wager

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Aunt Sid and Aunt Nell’s double wedding, Chicago, 1921

My Aunt Annette and Isadore Polland’s wedding, Chicago, November 8, 1914

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Grandma Fagh (Fanny) Grandma Bess and Grandma Vicky, 1952

Grandpa Miles and Grandpa Doc Grandpa Doc, my father

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My dad in the Navy suit my daughter Nancy would wear many years later (see page 56)

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My mother, Victoria Wager Robbin

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Aunt Birdie, Uncle Leo, and Grandpa Doc

Aunt Birdie, George Burns, and Aunt AnnetteOpposite: My sister, Beth

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Book Title: 

This Is Me

Package Size, Number of Words, Pages, Photos: 

Complete turned Custom (12,641 words, 48 photos, 98 pages)

Ghostwriter Level: Critically Acclaimed

TH

IS IS

ME

My name, Joyce, is from the Latin name Jucunda

which means “joy, playful and merry.” Well, that’s

basically me.

This Is MeJoyce Powell

A Biography

www.storyterrace.com