Ms. Popper was born in Hudson, Wyoming in 1915 and first came to New York in 1941 with Mr. Welles to promote 'Citizen Kane.' As Mr. Roberts tells us, "she moved to the city a year later, befriended many celebrities, wrote a hibachi cookbook and never left." She passed away in Manhattan on Sunday, March 6th.
I like to think the basis for the hibachi cookbook came from Ms. Popper's cooking many meals in an apartment's fireplace in the city on a hibachi. Many pre-war apartments in New York City had working fireplaces, and people did grill food on hibachis in the fireplace.
The mother of friends of mine used to grill on a hibachi in one such apartment. She was from Connecticut, and the two friends, brothers, were born in New York City. One now lives in Ohio; the other on Long Island.
It seems that's the way it goes. Those that are born in New York City later find themselves living somewhere outside the borders that would allow them to vote for the mayor. And quite often, completely outside the state.
It's almost as if those that are born in New York City have to leave, just so others from outside the city can move in. Affordable housing has always been tough to find.
A middle-aged, or late-in-life New Yorker, who is actually from New York, is hard to find. I recently caught some dialog from the movie 'Humoresque,' starring John Garfield and Joan Crawford. It is hard watching some of the older movies with all that cigarette smoke. I felt I want to open a window, even if it is cold out.
Well, Garfield's character, Paul Boray, is playing the violin at a swank social gathering in an uptown Manhattan town house. Joan is the icy hostess who is drawn to pay attention to Garfield's playing. At the end of a piece she asks him where he is from. He replies, New York, In a distant tone she replies that is rare, "a New Yorker who is from New York." The relationship gets its start there. The movie was made in 1946.
Even then, 1946, someone can observe that New Yorkers from New York are a rare bird.
Ms. Popper was from Wyoming, and moved to New York in 1942, and never left. The movie that she's famous for being in, 'Citizen Kane,' is about William Randolph Hearst, a person born in San Francisco who moved to New York, bought newspapers and ran for mayor of NYC and governor of New York State. Hearst later moved back to San Francisco, probably because someone else moved into New York. It is fitting that a New York fixture remains the turnstile in the city's subway system.
For the longest time I was a middle-aged New Yorker from New York, at least from within the city's boundaries that included Flushing, Queens. I now live on Long Island.
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