CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
1937
Anne’s younger siblings, Sunny and Beryl, sang beautiful operatic duets together. Sunny was blessed with a rare combination of beauty and talent that did not go unnoticed; a band from Philadelphia asked her to tour the country with them as their lead singer, but Sunny rejected their offer. She eyed other plans for her future.
She was head over heels in love and wanted to marry a young man who had just graduated from the Pennsylvania State College of Optometry. When his Russian Jewish parents saw that the relationship was getting serious, they paid a surprise visit to Rebecca and Isaac without their son’s knowledge. “We have put our son through school at great financial sacrifice, and the parents of the girl that he marries will be responsible for setting him up in an office.”I
“This is not Europe!” a furious Rebecca yelled. “I’m not selling my daughter! If they marry, there will be no conditions other than that they love each other!” She promptly showed the couple the door and slammed it behind them. Under her breath, an irate Rebecca spouted, “Zol ze vaksen ze ve a tsibble mit de kopin dreid!”II
Sunny was mortified.
Devastated over the breakup, there was nothing she could do. Over the next few months, Sunny showed little interest in dating or other social activities. One day, a girlfriend asked her to go to a dance held at a synagogue around the corner from the family’s home on Mercy Street. She had no interest in attending the dance but went along to accompany her friend.
At this dance, she met Harry Usatch, a tall Jewish boy with thinning blond hair, a long face, and big blue eyes that shined. Harry was instantly drawn to Sunny. But her first impression of Harry wasn’t quite as favorable. Thirty years later, their daughter stumbled upon Sunny’s diary and read the following entry, written by her mother on the evening that her parents met: “Harry really isn’t my kind of person. He is very generous and appears nice, but there is something about him that I don’t like and I don’t have any interest in seeing him again.”
Harry’s persistence, however, paid off with another meeting, and Anne and Ben double-dated with the couple. Harry picked them up, and the couple sat in the rumble seat in the back of his fancy new car. Still, Sunny’s entries in her diary essentially remained unchanged; she still found Harry to be a little too rough around the edges.
“Now, I haven’t changed my mind,” she wrote. “He’s really not the person for me.”
Harry continued to ask Sunny out on dates, and she continued to say no.
Out of desperation, Harry asked Ben’s advice on how to win his sister-in-law’s affection. Ben took him aside and gave him a lesson on women. “Stop calling her,” he advised. “Let her think about why you aren’t interested in her anymore.”
Ben, of course, was right. After two weeks of being ignored, Sunny began to wonder about him. She missed Harry’s attention and finally agreed to date him. When Harry brought Sunny home to meet his mother, Anna, whom he adored, the two women took an instant liking to each other. Nervous but nurturing, it was Anna, not her own mother, who cared for Sunny after she had a tonsillectomy. Anna was warm and loving toward Sunny and wanted Anne’s younger sister to marry her little “Hershela.”
Years earlier, when Harry’s father, David Usatch, left his wife, Anna, and infant son behind in Kiev when he immigrated to America, he did so with the hope of making a better life for his family in the New World. Rumors soon circulated that David took an instant liking to his new homeland; in particular, he enjoyed the company of American women and the bachelor life.
Subsequently, it was the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and not David, who brought his wife and child to Philadelphia. When they finally arrived in 1915, Anna Usatch was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was admitted for a long stay at a New Jersey hospital. Three-year-old Harry was sent to live with a foster family while his cigar-smoking father continued to enjoy the perks of single life. Harry was confused in his new environment at the foster home and missed his ailing mother terribly. He was once so desperate to escape that he climbed on a metal heater and out a window, sustaining serious burns.
When David Usatch refused to take back his ill wife and child, a group of local women from HIAS picketed his office and waved unflattering signs in an effort to embarrass him. Their public scheme to humiliate him worked. David took back his young son and European spouse, who had by then given up wearing her sheitel (a wig worn by married Orthodox women as a sign of modesty) while recovering at the hospital. Despite their new living arrangements, when twenty-eight-year-old David Usatch registered for the United States draft in June 1917, he signed the government document as a single man with no dependents.III
Eventually David and Anna reunited, and the couple had a second child together. David Usatch put his young son to work in his junk business in Philadelphia, having the grade school–age boy drive a truck during the middle of the night. Harry would fall asleep every morning in the classroom, and it was not long before he was asked by his teachers to leave school. He often sat solemnly on the stoop with his young and bright buddies Ike and Irv, who had their friend memorize pages from Webster’s dictionary in order to improve his grasp of the English language.
March 13, 1938
On the day of Sunny and Harry’s big formal wedding, the rain was relentless. The stress of planning a wedding, combined with poor weather conditions and a major glitch with the floral bouquets, was enough to tip a typically nervous woman like Anna Usatch over the edge. It didn’t help matters that the wedding was held on the superstitious thirteenth day of the month. All these factors set Anna off; she disrupted the affair with her emotional outbursts over the flowers. Harry’s mother managed to dampen what was already a very wet day. Despite the wedding fiasco, Sunny loved Anna, and was kind and forgiving of her new mother-in-law.
Sunny got pregnant almost immediately. As soon as the newlyweds returned from their two-day honeymoon, Harry’s father decided that his junk business could not financially support two households. So he gave Harry a truck and three hundred dollars and sent him off to make a living on his own. Ultimately, Harry became more successful than his own father could ever have imagined. He worked as a metal and rags dealer and later exported used clothing to countries around the world.
Harry’s childhood buddies, who sat by his side on the stoop, also became strikingly successful. In May 1963, paper manufacturer Irv Kosloff and attorney Ike Richman purchased a basketball team from Syracuse and relocated the club to Philadelphia; the franchise was renamed the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers.
Anne looked back fondly on those early days when Sunny and Harry first met. She had no idea that those double dates when she and Ben sat in the rumble seat of Harry’s car would mark the beginning of a loving friendship between two families that would span more than seven decades.
1. I. Much of the information in this chapter was extracted from an interview with Bobby Usatch Katz (see Notes).
2. II. This is a Yiddish insult meaning, “You should grow like an onion with your head in the ground!”
3. III. Source: WWI draft registration card of David Usatch, signed by him in Philadelphia on June 5, 1917 (roll 1907610, draft board 8).