Goldfoot Genealogy

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

                   Charlie sitting, 6  and Meshke, my father, standing at 4, Jewish parents from Lithuania and their father just dying in an accident.  They are 2nd generation immigrants;  1st born here.  

I say the very narrow world of my father, Moses/Morris/Maurice Goldfoot is because he was born on July1,  1908 at 277 Baker Street in South Portland and died in 1967. His father died from an accident involving his horse and wagon when he was 4 years old and his brother, Charlie, was 6.  They sold newspapers on the street and were able to make change.  My father, the smaller and lighter haired trailing behind his brother got the most business, he told us.  Then they'd come home and give the change to their mother.  Sometimes they managed to go to the movies.  Their mother, my Bubby, was so short she was almost midget-size, and only spoke Yiddish, completely illiterate from Lithuania as both parents were.   

As a child, he went to movies.    Motion pictures debuted in Oregon in 1894 when a kinetoscope arrived in Portland. The innovative technology allowed boxing matches, vaudeville acts, and other popular entertainment to be shown in penny arcades and peepshows and, after 1906, on the nickelodeon. 

Soon early films were being projected in theaters, first at Cordray’s Opera House in Portland. By 1897, local documentary films were being made, including Fishing on the Willamette (1897), The Portland Fire Department (1901), Decoration Day Parade (1902), Panoramic View of the Columbia (1904), and Opening Ceremonies of the Lewis & Clark Exposition Grounds (1905). One of the first feature films made in the state was The Fisherman's Bride, a 1908 silent film produced by Col.    He picked up English when he started school.  

 He lived in a day consisting of the radio.  Just before he died in 67, we had TV in the house by 1953.   One of Portland's first radio station licenses was granted to The Portland Telegram and the first broadcast was heard on November 21, 1921 from the Telegram's offices in the Pittock Block.  By his teens at 13, the year would have been 1921, so he may have had radio by then. "The Sheik of Araby" w. Harry B. Smith & Francis Wheeler m. Ted Snyder was popular.  

                      

I remember sitting around our radio in the living room in Portland's Ladd's Addition and listening to Lux Theater.  Lux Radio Theatre, sometimes spelled Lux Radio Theater, a classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network (1934–35) (owned by the National Broadcasting Company, later predecessor of American Broadcasting Company [ABC] in 1943–1945); CBS Radio network (Columbia Broadcasting System) (1935–54), and NBC Radio (1954–55).                

Dad went in for all the sports; running, and loved baseball.  He had to quit high school before he started his senior year to help support the family of his mother, brother and two sisters. He hated giving up baseball but could weigh the more needed skill that he had-working-against enjoying something.   

              Mel Blanc, both born in 1908, a month older

I presume my father listened much earlier, and also in his many trucks.  He went to Failing Grade School in SW Portland with Mel Blank .Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Blank  May 30, 1908 – July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years. During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.    

Blanc was born on May 30, 1908 in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children. He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School. He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10. He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.

        Dad, fighting under the alias of Billy Meshke

The Neighborhood House was right around the corner and that's where he started boxing, and went into it there professionally.  He said that if the opposition looked really tough, he'd lay down rather than be beaten to a pulp.  He had boxes of his gloves in our basement.  

At about that time he tried marriage with a Rose Zusman, but that was over about as soon as it started, marrying June 3, 1928 when he was 19 and divorced August 12, 1929 at 20. He worked for the kosher butcher on 3rd and Lincoln where the Lincoln Theater resided a few doors away.  

Then he met my tall mother, Mildred Elizabeth Robinson and married on April 29, 1932, bringing her home to his mother who they lived with for a few months.  Mom learned how to make a lot of Jewish dishes that Bubby was known for. He was still with the kosher butcher when I was born in 1934. His minimum wage was $0.40 per hour.  He got so he gave my mom $15 per week for groceries.  That's what he paid me per week when I was 16 and could drive myself to work.  I'd do his books after school.      

                                1934 During the Depression
                                         

Shipyards, Dad's 2nd job 

                                        
     Out of 24 hours, he worked 8 here at the shipyards, then the rest in his own business, buying cattle, selling hides to the government, meat to people.  He must have slept very little; never went to synagogue, unfortunately;  trying to provide security  for his family that he never had. 

Ann was born after her father had died.  Here she's with Bubby and her daughter, Harriet.  Bubby lived with Ann and her husband, Werner helping her with her 5 girls.

I loved it when he did get together with his sisters in Portland.  They'd speak Yiddish and laugh and laugh. Elsie had one son, Donnie.   I wonder if they mentioned how Bubby used to use the broom when they were under the bed to reach them.  She was outnumbered 4:1.  To provide for them, she had been a chicken plucker.                             

By 1941 we were at war, the 2nd World War.  Dad was exempt from the draft as he was in a business of buying hides by then with the beginnings of his own wholesale Meat Co.; leather for army boots.  So he, who never hammered a nail, became the manager at the ship yards of a group of workers. With his own business of Lincoln Wholesale Meats, he had butchers working for him; and my little cousin, Don, who finally was able to drive one of his trucks for him after school.

                   Silver Falls Meat Packing cattle truck

Dad never took a vacation but probably enjoyed the auction houses he drove to across Oregon in buying cattle more than he would any vacation.  A Jewish guy wearing jeans and flannel shirts and cowboy boots must have been quite a sight, sort of a Mel Brooks in "Blazing Saddles," 

. 

Dad made it big, but no hat; but wore the boots.  You walk around horse manure in cattle auctions, you know.    He wound up on Columbia Blvd next door to Swift and Armour with his new business of Silver Falls Meat Packing Co.  Though I had been keeping his books for him single-handed since age 15; when he moved in there, he hired professionals with machines.  I lost my job!  The best I did was enter college, and finally one day, while teaching at Lindbergh Grade School in Ontario, Oregon, got the school camera and made a study of cow to table...went through Silver Falls taking pictures and telling the story of meat.  

          6 hr 20 min (375.4 mi) via I-84 E driving....Portland to Ontario

When he came home from the road, being gone all week, he'd watch TV.  Life was all work and no play;  no reading great books or any book for that matter;  only magazines.   

Dad died on July 23, 1967, flown into Portland from Ontario to the Portland hospital. His illness happened right after Israel's 6 Day War (June 5th to June 10th 1967)   He had become ill and died in about 3 weeks at age 59. He probably didn't even follow the war, nor know about any of them as they didn't make the Portland papers.  What was in his life was the price of cattle, and what his children were doing.  He was so lucky that our mom was the kind who liked her freedom but also felt and needed that security he provided. She and I had a good time together.  

Dad died after being in the St. Vincent's hospital in Portland for four days.   He was only 59 years old.  He died at 11:00pm.  He's buried in the Shaarie Torah Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.  They spelled his mother's name as Hattie Germankoski on the death certificate.

He had hepatitis.  He had had a blood transfusion after surgery.  He had gone into shock.  They used hypnosis to bring him out.  The prostrate was operated on and was swelling.  It was hyperplasic.

Since then, I've heard from business men who were helped and got their start in business from my father.  That's a very Jewish mitzvah.  He helped many.  

He died in St. Vincent's Hospital in Portland and so did his father, most likely different buildings between the old hospital and the new one.       

Labels: baseball, Billy Meshke, boxing, butcher, meat packer, Mel Blanc, new immigrants, Ontario, Oregon, Oregon shipyards, Portland

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                         

                 1934-1935 with Dad, Morris Goldfoot in Portland    15 in 1949  in Portland and boyfriend Mort had left town

My family had moved to SE Portland of Ladds Addition that consisted of a mixed population of 3 Jewish families of Padrow and Robinson and Bricker and us; Swedish, several Chinese, Irish, and Italians and others.  Our school potlucks were a marvelous feast of around the world foods.  When I was born, my father worked in South Portland where he was born, in the kosher butcher shop on Lincoln Street. 

Later on, he had his own business of Lincoln Wholesale Meats, and after that he had grown into Silver Falls Meat Packing Co. I don't think anyone cared that he was like the Jewish Cowboy with jeans down to his hips way back then, and even wore cowboy boots. He was a great cattle-buyer and truck driver.  Being Jewish was not an issue that I ever heard about.     

     Middle aged in Ontario, Oregon dressed for Rosh Hashanah, and my mother and I were the only Jews in this town.  Oh yes, we did find one lady who had married an Italian fellow, and she became my mom's best friend.  This was a town that was important to my father's business.  He had a feed lot here for his cattle.   I taught 4th grade.  

  1980 Mom gave us a party before we left; making aliyah to Israel.  Danny was a lost Brooklynite who found us a synagogue in Boise, Idaho.  We moved to Israel and both of us were teachers.  

                                                 

     86 years, hiking in April 2021 in Gresham, Oregon

The problem of anti-Semitism and my life synchronize.  From 1933 on, life in Germany for the Jewish people had changed dramatically.  It was the start of a government sponsoring anti-Semitism as Hitler was coming into power.  I was born in 1934 and fortunately for me, in the United States. So here I am in January 2023 and still am alive!

I still am witnessing anti-Semitism in the world, and it's been 89 years since it started in 1933, that is governmental sponsored anti-Semitism.  

In their 25-point party program published in 1920, Nazi Party members publicly declared their intention to segregate Jews from “Aryan” society and to abrogate their political, legal, and civil rights.

Nazi leaders began to make good on their pledge to persecute German Jews soon after their assumption of power. During the first six years of Hitler's dictatorship, from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939, Jews felt the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives. Many of these were national laws that had been issued by the German administration and affected all Jews. But state, regional, and municipal officials, acting on their own initiatives, also issued many exclusionary decrees in their own communities. Thus, hundreds of individuals in all levels of government throughout the country were involved in the persecution of Jews as they conceived, discussed, drafted, adopted, enforced, and supported anti-Jewish legislation. No corner of Germany was left untouched.

Then Nazi Germany entered Poland on September 1, 1939 and their hatred  and jealousy of and for Jews spread throughout the world.  WWII had started.

To justify the action, Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans living in Poland. They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning, with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany.

According to their logic, they, who were persecuting Jews living in Germany, should have had the world to invade Germany to free the Jews.  Ha!  No one came to the Jews' aid, not even the United States.  They were dealing with their own anti-Semitism at that time.  No Jews allowed into many athletic clubs;  the telephone company of NY not hiring Jewish women,  These are things that happened to my friends.

                                           

   Nessim Menashe shoe store, West Burnside, Portland, c.1916.Courtesy Oregon Hist. Soc. Research Lib., 023972  

In the first half of the 20th century, Jews were discriminated against in employment, access to residential and resort areas, membership in clubs and organizations, and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrollment and teaching positions in colleges and universities. Restaurants, hotels and other establishments that barred Jews from entry were called "restricted".  As to stores, they started their own.  That's how Meir & Franks

 developed.                         

1948-1951 My cousin Nathan Goldfoot 3rd from left, me on right, my boy

friend, Sam Arnstein, on left, at one of our formal dances.  

My Jewish peers and I were not asked to join any sororities or 

fraternities in   high school or college so we had our own.  Actually, we had a great time and 

had formal dances at wonderful places.  I remember sitting in 

the cafeteria of 

high school and the other students were talking about those 

terrible Jews.  I  mentioned that I was Jewish, and were they

 ever surprised! 

 That was it; I embarrassed them.  It felt good.  

Jews encountered resistance when they tried to move into white-collar and professional positions. Banking, insurance, public utilities, medical schools, hospitals, large law firms and faculty positions, restricted the entrance of Jews. This era of "polite" Judeophobia through social discrimination, underwent an ideological escalation in the 1930s.  Many Jewish students were turned away from Medical school as they had quotas, and we had so many bright and eager Jews that missed out becoming doctors, something my father would have loved to be able to do, but he was one of the poor Jews.  He went on to be the designer and owner of his own meat packing company, and he knew a lot, so much, about anatomy.  

My family and I living on the West Coast weren't harmed, but throughout the world, other Jews were losing their lives.  

Portland had 8,000 Jews in the 1920s.  Today, Portland is home to more than 40,000 Jewish residents, and Jewish history in Oregon goes back to 1849.   Many Jewish residents helped shape Portland’s future, such as Bernard Goldsmith, the mayor of Portland from 1869-1871, who built the Willamette Falls Locks in Oregon City; Aaron and Jeanette Meier and Emil Frank, of the Meier & Frank department stores; “Soda Pop King” Louis Albert; and Sam Schnitzer of Schnitzer Steel, to name just a few.

TABLE B (CONTINUED) Jewish Jewish City Population City Population Kansas City, Mo 12,000 Reading, Pa 1,750 Butte, Mont 1,000 Scranton, Pa 7,500 Omaha, Neb 10.000 Providence, R. 1 15,000 Camden, N. J 2,000 Memphis, Tenn 7,000 Jersey City, N. J. 12,500 Nashville, Tenn 3,000 Paterson, N. J 15,000 Dallas, Tex 8,000 Trenton, N. J 7,000 Fort Worth, Tex 2,250 Albany, N. Y 7,000 Houston, Tex 5,000 Buffalo, N. Y 20,000 San Antonio, Tex 3,000 Rochester, N. Y 20,000 Salt Lake City, Utah... 2,500 Syracuse, N. Y 12,000 Richmond, Va 4,000 Akron, 0 2,000 Seattle, Wash 5,000 Cincinnati, 0 25,000 Spokane, Wash 1,100 Columbus, 0 9,000 Tacoma, Wash 900 Dayton, 0 4,000 Milwaukee, Wis 20,000 Toledo, 0 7,500 Youngstown, 0 5,000 Total 513,000 Portland, Ore 8,000 or about 4.1$ As to cities of the second class, namely, those having a general population of between 50,000 and 100,000, their percentage of Jews averages about three per cent. Generally speaking, with regard to both classes mentioned above, it may here be noted that the proportion of Jewish residents is greater than the mean in the East, and less than the average in the West. The tables given below are peculiarly instructive as exhibiting how the percentage of Jewish residents tends to become gradually lower as the total number of citizens decreases.

Children of Eastern European and Sephardic immigrants who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s remember the neighborhood as insular and nurturing. It was a time of increased antisemitism locally and nationally, and the neighborhood of South Portland and its institutions provided a respite. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, and accelerating in the 1940s and 1950s, families moved to more prosperous areas of the city. Still, South Portland remained a Jewish institutional hub, with ethnic shops, the Portland Hebrew School, the Jewish Home for the Aged, Neighborhood House, the B’nai B’rith Building (later the Jewish Community Center), and all but two of the city’s congregations.

Anti-Semitism makes fun of to the point of cruelty of being Jewish.  It states that Jews are stupid when our IQs say otherwise.                             

Many of our Jews could be classified as "star" people, and we are the Star of David people,  a group talked about of immense talent in many fields on the internet today.  The author implies that they may have come from the stars.  Well, our people did come as aliens from other countries but not from the stars.  For us it was good genes; good families that believed in education.  Native Americans, Chinese, etc all have found star people among themselves.  

Resource:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitic-legislation-1933-1939

https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/jewishpop-ajc.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_United_States

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/invasion-of-poland-fall-1939#:~:text=On%20September%201%2C%201939%2C%20Germany,to%20encircle%20and%20dismember%20Germany.

https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/jews-in-oregon/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_people_(New_Age_belief)

Labels: anti-Semitism, Jewish population, Oregon, Portland, WWII

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

          Nathan Abraham Goldfus/Goldfoot b: August 5, 1871 in Telz, Lithuania

Labels: anti-Semitism, Goldfus, immigrant, Lithuania, Nathan Abraham Goldfoot, Oregon, Portland, Telsiai-Tenz