GREENSTEIN

the armory in Vilna. I don’t know how accurate this is, because young Charlie was three years old and, according to cousin Ed professor let him take an arm home with him to study over the vacation. My grandfather wrapped it up in a newspaper and got on Cohen, there was no armory in Vilna. He also remembers being lost in Hamburg, Germany, as the boat was about to embark for the trolley in Baltimore and sat down.

America, and being returned to his mother by a friendly German policeman (Ha! Ha!).

A lady boarded the trolley but there wasn’t any place for her to sit, so my grandfather, being the gentleman he was, offered My grandfather’s extended family was large, although his two brothers and one sister left few descendants. Both of them, the lady his seat and she gladly accepted it. This left my grandfather hanging onto a strap above the lady who was sitting down.

Bill and Joe, went to law school: the first, to the University of Maryland. Bill became a prosecutor in Hartford and carried a gun; The trolley lurched and the arm slid out of its newpaper wrapping and landed in the woman’s lap, and the lady started screaming Joe went to NYU and became a judge in Norwich, CT. Bill had one son, Harvey, who moved to New York and killed himself.

and couldn’t stop.

Joe had one daughter, Sandy, who was born with a cleft palate, remained single and lived with her mother the rest of her life. My In his final year of studies (1912), he was supposed to meet one of his professors at a pregnant woman’s house so he could grandmother hated Gert and refused to see her anymore. When Charlie wanted to see his brother, he had to drive to Norwich.

watch the professor deliver her baby. Charlie showed up, but the professor never did, so my grandfather, who knew nothing about My grandfather Charles was very skilled and very smart, but he found it difficult competing with the college men at Maryland delivering babies, had to deliver the baby – which he did.

Medical College until a professor told him: “Greenie. What others have done, you can do.” He took his medical boards at Yale That kid is now 101.

and scored first in Connecticut.

After his graduation, Dr. Charles had to take his medical boards, which were scheduled to be given at Yale. He was still My grandfather was “normal,” but I think the rest of the Greensteins were psychological wrecks. I believe they suffered from worried, he said, because he had never attended college, and that might put him at a disadvantage. As was Charlie’s nature, this panic disorder, with which I have also been diagnosed. They seem to have led fairly tragic and shortened lives, and the ones who became but another challenge to him, and he studied and studied until he took the exam, and placed first among all the other survived were prone to substance abuse. There are very few descendants in the direct line from Sam – who also seemed to have doctors!

suffered anxiety all of his life.

With his license in hand, he opened a medical office in Meriden, but in 1917 he was drafted into WWI. He was sent to Fort The Greensteins were originally from Latvia and have been traced back by my cousin Ed Cohen to 1799. They were bootleg-Oglethorpe, GA in the Medical Corps, and arrived just in time to treat our soldiers brought down by the Spanish Influenza. My gers, tavern keepers, and liquor salesmen, and they carried their profession proudly into America with them.

grandfather said that the boys would go to bed feeling fine, wake up feeling a little strange, and would be dead by nighttime. He said he “piled the bodies up like cordwood” in front of the infirmary.

Family Snapshots:

Then, the War was over, and my grandfather was discharged. Jerry Lavitt one told me Charlie rushed it along by eating a lot

Dr. Charles Jacob Greenstein

of eggs and raising his albumen count into the stratosphere. His mother wanted him home, Jerry said.

Charlie, like every other veteran, wanted to get on with his life, and soon after he got home, he married my grandmother Dr, Charles Jacob Greenstein (1886-1967) was my grandfather on my mother’s side. Charlie was born in Lithuania and came to Dorothy Ada Ziering. They honeymooned in Niagara Falls, NY, and soon afterwards my grandfather decided to take a specialty the U.S. in 1890, age 4. He went to public school in New Britain, then to New Britain High School, the same school in which I in the Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat. Charlie and Dorothy lived in NYC with my step-great grandmother – on 72nd St. – and my began my teaching career in 1969. He lived on Spring Street with his parents, two brothers, Joe and Bill, and his sister Sadye.

grandfather commuted cross town to Manhattan Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat, graduating in the Class of 1922. The school is still in Charles was the checker champion of New Britain when he was 10 and wrestled in high school. After graduation he tried a existence – as is his graduation picture.

number of things, including attending NYU Law School (then known, I think, as New York Law School), for six months, and He returned to Connecticut and opened an office on Main St., New Britain in the brand new Andrews Office Building – which then dropped out, calling the subject: “Dry as a potato chip.” He took a job on the night shift in a local factory, which specialized is also still there. Once, it was the most stylish address in the city: now it is a half occupied beat up old building with a sweat shop in making metal toy wagons. His assignment was to sit in front of a giant pressing machine, take a sheet of metal off of a stack, full of illegals in the basement. I know, because I have visited it recently. He occupied that office until his death in 1967.

stick it under the press before the press came down (which made it into a wagon), and then take the wagon off the press and stack A year or two before his death, he was hospitalized in California with a heart condition. He had traveled to visit his daughter, it up with the wagons he had just made: Reach. Place. Wait for the press. Take the wagon out. Stack. Reach for another sheet.

Helen. He diagnosed the problem himself: It was a rhythm problem, at the time called “Johnson’s Syndrome.” The pacemaker Once, “in the dead waste and middle of the night,” (Shakespeare) a Polish immigrant next to him nodded off to sleep, pitched was being developed and the hospital offered to fit him with one, but they said it would be an 8 hour operation, and Charlie knew forward under the pressing machine, and became a toy wagon – and a corpse. This cause Charlie to re-think his choice of career he would never survive the operation, as he was approaching 80.

and quit this job for the only other job he could find: being a mortician’s apprentice. He helped the mortician embalm and prepare He said he was determined “to go with my boots on,” which he did. He was hospitalized a second time in 1967 and was about bodies for funerals. Charlie loved the work because he got to see the inside of the human body for the first time (with the excep-to be discharged the followingmorning, but he died in the middle of the night. I was in college at the time and was shocked to hear tion of the time he saw the Polish guy become a wagon), and wanted to know as much as he could about what made the body about it because Charlie had told everyone “not to tell the kids.” It was the first big loss of my life because Charlie had basically work.

been my father when my father Al was in in Army. I called him “Daddy Charles,” and my father “Daddy Alvie,” and “Daddy He enrolled in Maryland Medical College under the “Jewish quota,” and worked diligently at his studies despite the fact that Charles” became what the rest of the grandchildren called him.

most of the other students had graduated from college. At one point he became very discouraged when he was trying to memorize Charlie wanted me to become a doctor just like him, and was probably the main reason I took a pre-med program despite my the anatomy of some part of the body. The professor took him aside and said, “Greenie, what others have done, you can do.” and having absolutely no aptitude for science or much of an interest in it. When he died, his dreams for me went with him. I was wor-that gave Charlie the courage to keep on trying.

ried about the draft by then, and I had the chance to tell him the last time we met. He said: “Don’t worry. We’ll pay somebody off.”

He told me a number of other stories about his time in medical school. One involved a boy who had put off taking Anatomy I laughed – silly old man! But knowing what I know now, and knowing how most of my generation dodged its way around

until he couldn’t put it off any more. He took one look at his cadaver and passed out. The next day he returned to class and tried the Draft, I should have listened more carefully to him.

it again, but with the same result. The boy had already had two years of medical school, so he tried it a third time, with the same Benny Ross

results. He dropped out.

Benny Ross (ne Rosenberg) was my grandfather Charles’ grand nephew; He worked his way up in Vaudeville and by the

Another story Charlie told was about what happened when he was taking the trolley back to Connecticut from Baltimore.

1930s he was a headliner. He made it to the top just at the very end of vaudeville. He was the straight man in the act of “Ross and There were two ways to travel up the east coast in those days: If you could afford it, you took a train; if you couldn’t afford that, Stone” (Marilyn Stone, his wife, predeceased him in 1946). He played at the Holborn Theater before the Duke and Duchess of you had to take the trolley from one town to another, often having to walk from one terminus to the beginning of another trolley Someplaceorother, and bought my mother a Kewpie Doll in 1932 after his tour of Australia. Rick has the doll. We inherited its company’s route. It was Christmas break, and Charlie was having trouble memorizing the muscles and tendons of the arm, so the baby chair.

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