These retrospective obits can be of women from any era, and as such can be outside my time frame of memory. They are interesting from a historical viewpoint, but they do not ignite personal memories of their times on earth.
As I said, "can be," and there is the occasional one that firmly overlaps my memory of my own era, as well as that of my father's. Since he was born in Manhattan in 1915, I always feel I can relate to all events that have come after. And certainly the start of The New Yorker magazine fits inside those memory boundaries.
So when the NYT obituaries editor William McDonald recently filled a retrospective tribute slot with Barbara Shermund, 1899-1978, I was all in.
Ms. Shermund was a founding cartoonist for The New Yorker, an apparent woman about town in the 1920s who came to the attention of Harold Ross and Rea Irvin, the founding editors who fulfilled their vision for creating a cosmopolitan New York City magazine that lives to this day, no small achievement considering how many print publications have bit the dust.
The sub-heading to the obituary tells us Barbara was," a cartoonist who drew almost 600 cartoons for the New Yorker with sassy captions that had a fresh, feminist voice." Her cartoons appeared in the 20s and 30s for the magazine, with 9 covers to her credit. She's is likely the one cartoonist few alive today can directly remember.
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| You're wasting your time. I'm a terrible housewife |
The obit writer, Janaki Challa tells us, "Caitlin A. McGuire wrote in 2020 for the Art Students League, "'Shermund's women spoke their minds about sex. marriage, and society; smoke cigarettes and drank; and poked fun at everything in an era when it was not common to see young women doing so.'"
She showed a talent for drawing at a very young age, and her architect father and sculptor mother encouraged her artistic pursuits. She arrived in NYC while in her early 20s, coming from her native San Francisco.
If you write and draw what you know, then Ms. Shermund clearly portrayed women who were not wall flowers; they were in the fast lane. I like to think it would have been a hoot to know her. She seems like the type of woman my father would have met in Pete's Tavern and then spent some time with at the Hotel Irving, a near flea-bag joint across the street from Gramercy Park on 20th Street. The hotel ran through the entire block. You could enter from 19th Street as well. It was part residential SRO occupancy as well as a discreet hot sheet place by the hour. I think it was the backdrop for a Woody Allen movie, Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Hotel Irving got its name from its proximity to Irving Place, a short north/south strip of street that runs between 20th and 14th Streets, between 3rd and Park Avenue South (the old 4th Avenue). Pete's Tavern was and still is on Irving Place and 18th Street, as well as the old Washington Irving High School, an all-girls NYC high school. I think it's long closed now, but the building is still there. The 19th century writer Washington Irving was said to have lived in a house that later became a beauty parlor.
At the 14th Street end of Irving Place sat the Academy of Music, the building that once housed the Metropolitan Opera Company that is sometimes mentioned in the current miniseries 'The Gilded Age.' After the opera company moved to 39th and Broadway the pile was converted to a movie theater. The 14th Street area deteriorated a bit in the '60s. The Academy of Music was not a great destination. I distinctly remember going to see the movies M*A*S*H and Patton there as a double feature in the early '70s.
My father was not a serial adulterer—my mother not really being in the picture—but it was only much later in my life that I came to realize where he might have been when as a young boy growing up I was constantly being taken to the New York Ranger games at the Old Garden on 8th Avenue by the flower shop's septuagenarian delivery man Owen Lennon, a true relative of the Lennon sisters who appeared on the Lawrence Welk show. (I kid you not.) My father would easily have declared Barbara, a "live wire," or, "quite a gal."
I once became aware of someone he might have been involved with when suddenly a willowy model-type was hired to take over the second family shop we had at 324 Second Avenue, also between 18th and 19th Street on the East Side of the Avenue.
It was another one of my father's bright ideas that made no money. Although there was only a another florist on the avenue, Garnet Flowers on 22nd Street, my father reasoned that since the location was directly across the street from Manhattan General, near Beth-Israel and New York Eye and Ear hospitals, he didn't want another florist nearby to steal our hospital get well bouquet business. He had a Duane Reade drug store business plan before Duane Reade ever carpet bombed Manhattan with locations. Unfortunately it was a bad plan and only drained money, never making any.
It was a step down store that today would be classified as a pop up store. It was a bare bones place dominated by a large showcase refrigerator you could enter from the back to store flowers, a counter, and maybe a chair and table.
I didn't know the young woman's name, but whenever I went there to restock the place with flowers there seemed to be a NYC Sanitation worker in uniform hanging around. At one point I know he took her out to dinner, and she eventually disappeared. My father lost one to a Sanitation man. Oh well. There were others, when he somehow mumbled later in life that he took many women to the Hotel Irving.
In the 1960s I was a fan of The New Yorker magazine. I loved the cartoons and the sly quips at the bottom of stories. I never read a poem I liked, but the covers were great. I never subscribed to the magazine, getting my fill in doctor waiting rooms. I remember reading James Thurber's biography of Harold Ross, 'My Years with Ross.' I think perhaps I imagined I would write something that would be published in the magazine. Never happened.
One thing I distinctly remember from Thurber's story was that Harold Ross kept a supply of loose change in his pocket. Half dollars, quarters, dimes and nickels. He jingled when he walked.
According to Thurber Ross did this because we once took a cab and went to pay for the cab ride with folding money, all he had. The cabby slyly told him he had no change. Ross went ballistic, envisioning that the tip he was going to give now just became larger. Ross was incensed. Ever since that ride, Ross carried enough loose change that would cover the meter, along with giving a small tip.
It is hard to believe you could take a taxi in Manhattan and pay for it with loose change, but that is precisely what my father did when we closed the shop at around 8:30 and he was tired and wanted a cab ride to Penn Station for the short ride home on the LIRR to Murray Hill on the Port Washington line, a near whistle-stop station that was carved out between Flushing Main Street and Broadway, all because there was a Mrs. Murray who was a wealthy resident who was someone connected to the founder of the LIRR. The stop remains, but is sometimes now skipped, since only four cars can take or discharge passengers. The Murray estate long ago became the Murray Hill Shopping Center.
My father would scoop some loose change out of the shop's register and we'd be off, barreling up Third Avenue to 33rd Street, when a left was made at Zwerling Brothers Haberdashery and we proceeded west to the old Penn Station, roaring down the ramp to the taxi "pit" and the LIRR. There was little traffic in the '60s and I believe the fare was always under $1.00, with tip.
The retrospective tribute obit for Barbara Shermund is a beaut. There are three photos, two of which are cartoons from The New Yorker and one of her, hugging herself in a mink coat, the ultimate trophy a woman could have in that era. Have you ever seen Liz Taylor in 'Butterfield 8'? Or listened to the lyrics from the Hot Box chorus girls in 'Guys and Dolls'..."take back your mink, what made you think I was one of those girls?"
Ms. Shermund sort of disappeared and with no immediate family; her ashes were unclaimed in a New Jersey funeral home for 35 years until they were claimed by a descendant in search of information about her.
I was smitten by the obit. Since I already have a rather large poster size copy of a 1938 New Yorker cover showing a chauffeur standing behind a young boy and girl who are clearly from a Manhattan private school as he supervises them pushing nickels through a dessert slot at an Automat, I had to look into what might be available from Ms. Shermund. I know such an Automat scene was possible because one of the two brothers I grew up with in the '60s lived on 55th Street in Manhattan and told me as an after-school "Group" activity from the church, they were sometimes taken to the Automat to do just that: buy a dessert through the window.
I remember my own nickel plunging days at the 14th Street Automat, just west of Irving Place, with a back entrance on Irving Place. There I would get a meal, or likewise shove nickels into the slot to get a piece of mince or lemon meringue pie, along with a cup of hot chocolate that poured into a stoneware cup after you inserted perhaps 2 nickels and turned the crank. Just the right about came out.
The stoneware was so thick and sturdy that I wonder if any ever broke. You could drop them on concrete and they would bounce back at you.
You always used nickels at the Automat. If you needed change there was a kiosk in the center with a cashier who could dispense the right number of nickels blindfolded. Their thumb retreated back from the loose roll of nickels they gripped in their palm as they magically dropped 5 nickels on the granite counter after the presentation of your quarter. So many fingers had scooped up those nickels that the granite surface was dug out a little more than originally conceived, and was as smooth as a baby's bottom.
I figured the least I could do was look into getting a similar size framed poster of one of Ms. Shermund's covers. ART.com had a few to offer. And reasonably priced, even with framing.
There is absolutely no wall space left in our house to hang another anything. That didn't deter me from considering an equally sized framed poster cover of a 1933 New York Cover by Ms. Shermund.
I chose one that I believed revealed her saucy side by portraying a woman who in her clinging, figure hugging nightie (dress?) is playing busy-body as she wanders out onto her terrace and tries to peek through the fence to see what he neighbors are up to.
You know it's one of those penthouse-type terraces from all the old movies that show rich people having breakfast out on and looking at the city below. Barbara I'm sure was wholly familiar with the setting. She was probably the one in the outfit playing peek-a-boo.
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