During my growing up years (and for much of my adult life) RoseMary and Donna have been my favorite cousins. There were other cousins, too, although I saw them less frequently than I did the Weida girls.
My childhood existed during an age when physical interaction with cousins was common. Families seldom left the hometown, so it was possible for routine visits to occur among us. The only relatives who moved were the Tippers: Aunt Sophia, my mother’s sister, and her husband, Uncle Gil. Their children included Maryann, Rosalie, Marcella, Gilbert and Oswald. They disappeared when the family moved to Lompoc, California. At some point in my childhood, Uncle Guffy, my father’s brother, moved to some unknown destination and his son, Ernest, became invisible.
Age differences are more important for children than they are for adults. This was the case for Donald and David, the two sons of my father’s brother, Isadore. Although there are only eight years between Donald and me and only thirteen between his younger brother, David, and me, we seldom saw one another, let alone engaged in playtime activities. They lived in Warren, twelve miles north of Niles, but worlds-away in travel time. Moreover, when Donald was at a playable age, I was a teenager.
On the other hand, Fremont, Jr. and I were only a year apart and lived in nearby neighborhoods. I’ve already commented on our earliest fight: The Battle of the Baby Doll! We could have had a closeness from pre-school days through high school graduation, but once we had become teenagers, we seldom had any regular interactions. This may have been a result of his view that we were academic competitors and he had to do as well in classes as I had done each preceding year. And he did. He may not have been valedictorian for his class, but he was within the top ten. On the other hand, I greatly envied him his popularity, especially throughout high school. He continued to exhibit this leadership after college. Following his return from Brown University and graduation from Youngstown State, he became part of the banking system for Niles. Shortly afterwards, he was elected mayor. He also served as President of the City Council for thirty-four years.
Fremont had a younger sister, Mary Ann (born 1939). She was only four years my junior, but we seldom interacted throughout our lives. Some forty years ago, upon our moving to Houston, I discovered she was living here, also. Over the intervening years we have met only twice.
Of all of my cousins, my closest, as I’ve written, were members of the Weida clan, especially RoseMary and Donna. My relationship has been limited with their siblings, Wanda, Charlie, Bill, Althea and Michael. My other maternal cousins came from smaller families. They were Caroline (Corky) and Diane, the daughters of Uncle Frank Moransky. Caroline, born in 1940, is only five years younger than I am. The others born in 1940 had no siblings. Although both Billie Jr. (Uncle Bill Moransky’s son) and Frankie Jr. (Uncle Frank Borecki’s son) were only five years younger than I, we interacted more than I did with my other cousins, perhaps because they were, also, the “only child” in the family.
RoseMary and her husband, George Karnofel, continued to be my closest relatives. When Karen and I would return to visit Niles while living in Ithaca, we four would spend afternoons and evenings with pots of coffee, packs of cigarettes, and hours of conversation on just about every conceivable topic. Neither of them had attended college, but their native wisdom and multiple interests were well beyond the content of others who had never left the hometown and had retained minds closed to the world-at-large. RoseMary had heart problems much of her life. In 1986 she died during an operation at the Cleveland Clinic. Four decades later, I still miss her as much as if she had departed only yesterday.
Over the intervening years, I maintained an at-a-distance relationship with Donna, who had moved to New York City while I was living in Oregon. When Karen and I moved to Bethesda and later to Amherst, Donna managed to leave the City to spend a few days with us. We also stayed with her in her flat in lower Manhattan. Fond memories are recalled for all of our adventures prior to her death in 2016 from her own heart-problems. Donna loved the City, from her first days there on her own, through the terrible ones following Nine-Eleven, when she stopped riding the subway and desired to remain above ground at all times. With buses, cabs and much walking, she led us on explorations of her City, from Ellis Island to Central Park.
During the last few years, Karen and I have had an on-going Facebook relationship with Michael, the youngest of the Weidas. It shocked Karen and me when we were notified of his sudden death in November 2022. His brother Bill had died in 2021 from heart problems, as had their sister Althea many years ago. At the moment, I am the oldest of the remaining cousins: Caroline, Diane, Charlie, Donald, David and Mary Ann. Our number has become a mere half-dozen of cousins.