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| Frances and Harry Dolgin, Irene's parents |
Irene Dolgin Goldstein, second interview by phone, January 16, 2015
In Interview 1, Mrs. Irene Dolgin Goldstein, hereafter
“Irene,” told the story of how her father Harry Dolgin arrived in St. Johnsbury
in 1916, right after marrying Irene’s mother Frances. On the day when he came
to town on the train from Boston, local blacksmith John McLean helped him
negotiate a bank loan to purchase a horse and wagon to start his business here,
hauling scrap – known at the time as being a “junk dealer.”
Irene has another John McLean story to share: About 35 years
later (1951?), John McLean came to see her dad and it was his turn to feel
“low.” McLean explained to Harry Dolgin: He could no longer use the location
where his blacksmith shop had operated for all those years, and when he looked
around town, he found no place that he could afford to move into. “Dad had
recently helped out the town of St. Johnsbury by trading a junkyard location
for the stone sheds,” Irene recalled. [“Stone sheds” were specially built for
the regional business in granite and marble, and stood next to the railroad
siding. Some still do.] “He took John to the stone sheds and unlocked one.”
Harry asked John whether the shed would work for the blacksmithing business,
and John said it would be perfect. “Dad gave it to him for one dollar a year
for as long as he wanted. Dad was so happy that he could do something for
John.”
Many changes happened in the Dolgin family and business in
those 35 years. For example, Irene recalls that around 1923, “Dad received an
SOS from his sister Buzy [pronounced “Boosie” and listed on the Census as
Busia] Shnitzer. Buzy hadn’t wanted to come from the Ukraine to America
earlier, when Harry brought other members of his family (1910). But now her
husband had been killed by soldiers. Some time later, a soldier entered the
house and threatened to kill Buzy; her little girl ran in front and confronted
the soldier, who then left the house. “So Aunt Buzy decided it was not safe,
and gathered her seven daughters and a cousin, Jake Olshansky.” The fleeing
family reached Romania, but did not have the funds to go further, and that was
when they sent their “SOS” to Harry Dolgin.
Irene remembers that her parents chose to put guarantee the
required funds to guarantee entrance to America for the immigrants, which by
then numbered 10 people: “Mom and Dad had to have $42,000 in the bank to
guarantee to get them access to the U.S.” Irene adds, “I think they came from
Romania to Holland to New York.” Then they came to live near the larger Dolgin family
in Chelsea, Massachusetts. An older daughter, Rivka, got married there, but the
new family in general wasn’t happy there, and ended up moving back to the Bronx
(northern part of New York City); they stayed in touch and there was plenty of
visiting back and forth.
This is a good point to mention the early Dolgin family
photo [found by BK, online] shown here. Irene confirms that the young man at
the left rear is her father’s brother Philip, and then, from left to right,
Aunt Minnie, a girl whose name doesn’t come to mind just now, Aunt Bertha, and
Harry (Irene’s father). The man with the girl on his lap is Aunt Buzy’s
husband; Aunt Buzy is sitting next to him; and the four little girls are theirs
(they would have three more after this photo, which was probably taken in
Ukraine.)
Among the Jewish families that Irene can name from her years
growing up in St. Johnsbury (the 1920s into the 1940s) were the Cohens,
Caplans, Stahls, Weiners, Shapiros, and Goldbergs, and in Lyndonville, Morris
(Moishe) Nurenberg. She also recalls Jake Aaron in St. Johnsbury, who moved to
Brooklyn with his wife, daughter Rose, and two sons.
The Goldbergs, like the Dolgins, were in the junk business,
but with a different approach. Irene’s dad, Harry Dolgin, handled both automotive
and other junk, but the Goldbergs mainly handled automotive scrap. (The
Goldberg family’s auto scrap yards lasted to nearly the end of the 20th
century.)
Irene recalls that her father used to melt down lead into
“pigs” (large blocks) for the Fairbanks Scale Company. He would also bring cast
iron to Fairbanks. Irene remembers that during the Second World War, her father
sent the steel he’d collected to Pennsylvania.
[In fact, Claire Dunn Johnson’s book I See By the Paper notes that Harry Dolgin took over leadership on
scrap metal collection for the entire town, for the war effort.]
During this wartime scrap collection period, Irene started
wearing slacks. It was a necessary change of attire for her share of the
wartime scrap movement: She would go to the junkyard, just during the war, to
oversee one or two loaded freight cards going out via railroad at night. In
order to make sure the loading was done properly, she’d climb up the side of
the freight cars. “Everything had to be done as fast as you could get it done,”
she says.
Other Jewish families in town were shorter term residents.
“It was strange, but it seemed as if somebody moved out, and somebody moved
in.” Irene estimates that there were about 25 Jewish families in town at any
one time.
Let’s go back to one of the other names: “Mrs. Weiner had a
ladies’ clothing store. I think her husband died young, and she had daughters.
One moved to Montpelier or Barre; another one married Harold Shinauer, who was
a bookkeeper for St. Johnsbury Trucking.” There was also a son who moved away,
and a daughter Betty, a year or two younger than Irene. [From BK: I must have
the spelling wrong for Harold, as I can’t find him, although there was a Harold
Shiro who worked for St. J. Trucking. Mrs. Weiner was Sarah (Masur) Weiner, b.
1891 in Russia, and her husband was Maurice Weiner, b. 1882 in Russia; they
immigrated to the US in 1911 and appear in the 1920 St J Census. The children
who show in the Census and in a birth document are Samuel, b. 1919, and
Bertha/Betty, b. 1925. In 1920 this family lived on Ely Street, and in 1940
Mrs. Weiner and these two children are at 4A Railroad Street.]
Harry Cohen and his wife had a small ladies’ store, and they
had one son. They eventually moved back to New York (City) when Irene was about
18.
Pearl Stahl’s daughter had a ladies’ dress tore; her
sister-in-law, married to Pearl’s son Harris Stahl, took it over. [Stahl
records online: Pearl A. Stahl, b. 1912 in New York, d. 1985 in St. J.; Harris
W. Stahl b. 1916, son of Rudolph and Augusta Stahl; Jeanette S. Stahl, b. 1915;
family address 11 Boynton Ave.]
When Irene was about 10 or 11 years old, she asked her
father whether she could have an allowance, as other kids talked about. He told
her, “You don’t need an allowance. All you need to do is come to me for money.”
He had charge accounts at stores in town, so that Irene and her mother could
buy their clothes that way. When Irene was a schoolchild, every day her father
would give her “a couple of pennies” and she’d go into Renfrew’s Store on the
corner across from the (Portland Street) school and get penny candy.
On the corner of Concord Avenue and Portland Street, on the
same side as the (Portland Street) school, was “a truncated fountain for horses
and a spout on the side for people to drink.”
Irene remembers that Mr. Silver “had a farm of horses off
Lafayette Street in the back there. I remember a couple of fellows on horses
came down through the street. They said they were going to bring some cattle
down to the train – ‘Everybody get off the street,’ especially Portland Street.
We could stand upstairs and watch, they were herding cattle down Portland
Street like you see in the movies.” It only happened once, and Irene was amazed
by this! Not too long afterward, Mr. Silver sold his farm.
“We used to go swimming,” Irene recalls. They would swim in
the (Moose) river in back of Carey Maple Sugar Company [now Maple Grove]. “We
called that the Checkerberry.” They could leave their things untouched on the
shore, swim into the river, sit there and sun themselves, and swim back.
Irene’s brother Arnold, before going into the service [for
World War II], would go target practicing and sometimes take her along, further
up the river [east from town], by the railroad tracks. They would gather up
beer cans that had been thrown off the train. Irene would throw the cans, and
Arnold would try to shoot them.
Irene’s father Harry Dolgin built a grocery store, then
rented it out to the First National Bank. And he gave her brother Arnold a car.
For gas, her brothers would siphon the remaining gas out of the old junk cars
in the family’s junkyard, and they would add this bit of gas to the “glass
carburetor” of Arnold’s car. They could then “drive around in a circle and toot
twice, then have to siphon more!” They also would drive up and down a hill of
ashes in the yard. Irene tried siphoning once, and never again!!
When Irene was in seventh and eighth grade, she and the
other girls from Portland Street School had to go to the school on Summer
Street to study home economics. She would have a nickel to spend and on the way
back, she used to stop at the Cross Baking Company and buy a bag of broken
candies, which contained so many, “that would keep you a week!” She learned to
cook, bake, and sew.
For high school, Irene attended St. Johnsbury Academy. “That
was a great school, it still is, and you know what, it’s 75 years since I
graduated.”
As a child, Irene went for health care to Dr. Prevost. On
one occasion, her brother had made a seat to slide down the hill. She thinks it
could have been made from an iron spring from a car, a couple of inches wide
and very long. Irene was told by her mother not to touch this, but she decided
she had to. She took it across from the school and fell, getting a cut on her
chin. “The doctor came right over, he wouldn’t stitch it, and taped it
together.” She still has the scar. Her mother said to her, “Let this be a
lesson, when I tell you something, not to do it, because G-d will punish you
again!”
Across from the school was a skating rink with a little
shack with a stove in it, “so you cold get warm and then go back and freeze
yourself.” Irene would go skating in the evenings after her homework was done,
in grades 7 and 8.
[I asked Irene whether she remembers people worrying about
polio.] Irene remembers a girl she knew who got polio, and she remembers her
children receiving the vaccine for it. “It was sad, so many kids got it, but we
were lucky.”
Irene did have to go to the dentist as a child, and also had
her eyes checked. She wore glasses for a while, but by high school her eyes
were better and she didn’t have to wear them. She graduated from high school
when she had just turned 17. This early age was a result of what her mother had
done, putting her into school for first grade a year ahead of time when Irene
was only five. Irene’s mother told the registering teacher that Irene was six.
“The teacher said ‘I have to see her birth certificate’ and Mother said, ‘If
you want to see it, you can go get it, here [in Massachusetts] is where she was
born.’ The teacher said, ‘but I have to see it.’ Mother said, ‘Were you there?
I was there!’” Irene’s mother told her this story much later, when she was a
teenager.
The beautiful photo that Irene provided for her interviews
(shown with Interview 1) was taken when she was 18 years old (1941). A third interview follows this one.
