MISS LUFTIG LOVED

He apparently liked nudity – or at least his gay back butler William did. The Palmieri family used to tend to his property and assistance of Senator Abraham Ribicoff. The Center contines today, and has added a Gifted and Talented Academy to its many William would let the Palmieri boys swim in his pool – naked. Mitch had many girlfriends: among them, Jean Harlow, who was programs.

said to have been seen at Christie’s Service Station crying about Mitch having just broken up with her.

Everyone in town and in the family assumed Dad was rich – including his children – but the truth was Dad lived on air –

The first week we moved into Easton Rd., a silver Roll Royce pulled up, and a tubby short bald guy with a mustache got out.

and bank loans - and by the end of his days, on Social Security and finally on an Army pension. He probably should have better He had seen “Liftig” on the mailbox, he said, and then asked: “Who’s Liftig?” My brother Rick said, “I am.” I said, “I am.” Inez prepared for retirement, but he never thought he’d live very long. He was injured in Germany right after the War when his jeep said, “I am.” Mitch introduced himself and the small man who was riding with him: Milton Greene. “This guy fucked Marilyn ran into a German lumber truck and he was thrown through the windshield. Dad always thought the injury would eventually get Monroe,” he said. “He’s also a famous photographer.”

him – and it probably did when a blood clot formed in his brain at age 78 and he suffered a stroke.

Mitch invited us over to his house for Eggs Benedict one Sunday shortly afterward that, and then said, “I hope you’re not My mother Fran took care of him as best as anyone could – for ten long years – until he died in his 88th year.

here to leech off me like my brother.” Because of this, I didn’t stay in touch with him – if only to prove the point that I wasn’t out Dad was the smartest man I ever knew. We all loved him and there was no question he was the leader of our clan. It’s three for anything he had. This was unfortunate, however. His last words to me before we left his house were: “I like your wife more years after his death, and I still can’t get over losing him.

than I like you.”

Before he died in 1975, though, Mitch sent a letter to Inez saying he regretted being such “a bad cousin.” He is remembered

Eleazer Liftig

fondly by his niece and my cousin Diane Liftig Saslow Lustman – and by Inez. He is buried next to his brothers near West Rocks.

Before he died, Mitch married his long time sweetheart and secretary. Helen Lucas Liftig. She lives in their Park Avenue apart-Found by Dr. Rick Liftig: an article in the St. Petersburg, Fla. newspaper from New York in 1953 - short news report about an ment. When asked why she never married again, Helen said: “Why should I settle for beer when I had champagne?”

Eleazer Liftig, a haberdasher, whose home/ apartment was invaded by an armed robber. Liftig wrestled with the robber’s wrist By the way, Helen Liftig opened a micro-brewery restaurant on Times Square, produced her own beer, and was sued by her with one hand and punched him in the face with the other, knocking him out, and the police arrested the criminal (these were the employees for making racist, homophobic, and otherwise offensive remarks to them. I don’t know the disposition of the case, but old days). Eleazer was apparently elderly. The punchline was: “Liftig was formerly a professional wrestler.” No one knows who there is no more brewery.

he was or how or to whom he was related. The Liftigs didn’t have much to do with each other.

Dr. Al Liftig

Dr. Robert A. Liftig

I like to think that my father, Al Liftig, “broke the mold” and lit out into new territory as the first son of a Russian Jewish Bob Liftig, son of Al and Fran, was born in the 97th General Hospital, Frankfort, Germany, October 19, 1947. The War in Europe immigrant and a Ukrainian Jewish woman, Sara Dorothy, whose mother Rose held off giving birth to her daughter until their had ended two years before, and Al Liftig was now serving in the American Occupation Forces. My father told my pregnant steamship came within sight of the coast of America.

mother Fran it was safe to come over because the U.S. Army said it was. I traveled in utero with Mom and got to Germany in the Dad (AKA “Pop” to his grandchildren) deserves his own biography. Born in 1922, Bar Mitvahed like everyone else in his spring of 1947, where a few months later, I was born – and became a German citizen.

family for 5,000 years, Dad later became a Unitarian and acted with Ernest Borgnine for the WPA at the State Theater in Hartford My nurse was the wife of a First Class Nazi Offender who had disappeared – apparently to South America. I was a noisy, during the Great Depression. He moved to Avon over the objections of his father Morris who tried to talk some sense into him by hyperactive, screaming kid, and the only thing that could get me to sleep was when my Frau sang her favorite Nazi marching noting that Avon “didn’t even have bus service to Hartford.”

songs. One evening my parents got back from a night on the town and heard what my Frau was crooning their baby. They sent her Dad paid no attention to him.

to her room in the basement. It was actually her house, but she had rented it to the U.S. Army, who would have taken it over any He had wide interests as a child, including: crystal radios, printing, stamp collecting, and sailboats. Dad graduated from way. They found another Frau for their American baby.

Hall High School, where the yearbook listed him as “Best Actor,” and he enlisted in the Army one month after Pearl Harbor Germany was a mess right after the War. The cities were destroyed and there was rubble everywhere, and there were serious was bombed. The Army sent him to the U. of Maryland where he played intramural Lacrosse and trained to be both a PFC and shortages of important supplies which only the Germans didn’t have. My father and mother bought a lot of things on the Black a dentist. After his graduation from the University of Maryland Dental School, Dad was stationed first in Germany where I was Market, including: guns, Dresden China, beer steins, cameras and watches. They lived well and their sympathy for the defeated born, and later, during the Korean War, in La Rochelle, France with our NATO forces. Dad spent 17 years in the Army, and dur-was limited.

ing his long service to our country, picked up other hobbies: racing sports cars, horseback riding, shooting skeet, skiing, sailing My mother and I were evacuated during the Berlin Blockade in 1948, and we moved in with my grandparents in New Britain.

some more, and becoming an expert marksman and gun nut. He also developed a life long love of French language and culture, As much of this is covered in my comic novel, “Baby Bomber Chronicles” (Still available on amazon.com) I will only briefly and learned to sing all the rousing military songs while he played his harmonica – and we sang them together after he got home outline my life after our return from battle.

from his wars.

I began my scholarly career as nursery school student in the West End of New Britain, and then was allowed to continue to Dad broke from tradition in other ways. Settling in Avon, meant he was a pioneer or sorts - outside the Jewish Pale of Kindergarten at Vance School - the same school my mother attended almost 20 years earlier. The kindergarten teacher told my Settlement in West Hartford. In Avon, he became a respected local politician – President of the Avon Board of Education, Member mother I was “immature,” and I remember poor Mom crying until my grandfather convinced her that, at age four or five, there of the Board of Finance,Treasurer of the Avon Fish and Game Club, member of the Zoning Board - and widened his interests to was not much else to be expected.

include ham radio, Civil Defense, and owning sailboats, including: Rickabob I and Rickabob II; but he didn’t abandon his child-After we moved to Avon, Connecticut, my brother Rick was born, I went to Towpath Elementary School (built in 1948

hood hobbies, and continued on to buy, build, use, and enjoy: a platen printing press he called “The Old Clod,” a ham radio shack and since torn down – I have some bricks). Towpath was a happy existence that processed any immigrant’s grandchild who from which he earned many international contacts, awards, and friends from all over the world, sports cars (MGs, Jaguars, and enterered one end of the building, and turned them into little Old Yankees by the time they were graduated out of the other Austin Healys) and a Land Rover, and a stone driveway that led to our house which Dad named “On The Rocks” (516 Deercliff end. What happened to them afterwards was somewhat of a mystery, because Avon had only a small Junior High School

Rd.Avon, CT) from which he took yearly trips to the French Riviera.

on the premisis, housed in an nearby 19th century wood frame building, but no high school anywhere: Those who survived Among Dad’s most successful and lasting legacies was the founding in 1962 of the Talcott Mountain Science Center For

the white building were rumored to have been sent to Canton High School – our neighboring town - for further processing.

Student Involvement under the leadership of Dr. Donald LaSalle and Dr. Francis “Frank” Driscoll, and with the invaluable 525

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