I couldn’t wait for Saturday morning. The movie theaters opened at ten o’clock and we’d all be there. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair. For one thin dime, you got two feature films, serials, a race, a newsreel, an animated cartoon, and coming attractions. Movies were magic. You stepped out of the real world （which had terrible things in it, like homework） and into a land of happy endings where dreams came true. There was nothing like the movies. My mother would send me to the theater with a salmon and tomato sandwich, wrapped in wax paper—“？’cause it’s a long day, you know?”
My mother was a true heroine. Losing her husband when she was only thirty, and then having four little kids to raise without a father. She was busy from morning to night: getting breakfast, washing dishes, doing laundry, scrubbing floors, cooking dinner, and finally getting her children to sleep. Everybody assumed my mother had a Yiddish or Jewish accent, probably because of my being the 2000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner, which I performed with a decidedly Jewish accent. Actually, strangely enough if my mother had any accent at all it was Irish. As a little kid she went to public school in New York City on the Lower East Side and practically all the teachers in the city at that time were Irish. So when she learned how to speak English, she spoke it with a bit of an Irish brogue. Instead of “Thirty-third Street” she’d say, “Tirdy-tird Street.” And instead of “Flush the toilet!” She’d say, “Flush the terlet!”
My mother was definitely short. So short in fact that I think she could walk under a coffee table with a high hat on. I loved her to pieces. She was particularly sweet and loving to me, her darling baby boy. I suspect I inherited my love for music from my mother’s wake-up songs. She used to wake me at eight o’clock every morning to get me ready for kindergarten. She always was singing along with Bing Crosby, who had a radio broadcast between eight and eight-fifteen every weekday morning. I still remember her sunny voice singing a Crosby hit, “I Found a Million Dollar Baby （in a Five and Ten Cent Store）。”
“If you should run into a shower,
Well step inside my cottage door,
And meet the million dollar baby
From the five and ten cent store.”
But what I particularly remember was that on cold winter mornings my mother would lay out my school clothes on top of our apartment radiator so they were nice and toasty. Then, she would take the heated clothes and dress me under the covers so that when I popped out of bed I was completely warm. No greater love.
Living in an apartment just below us on the fourth floor was my mother’s mother, my grandma Gertrude, and her daughter, my aunt Sadie. Sadie was the youngest of Grandma’s children—which began with Uncle Joe; Aunt Jenny; my mom, Kitty; then Aunt Mary; Aunt Dottie; and finally the last unmarried one, Sadie, who was last born and saddled with the job of taking care of her mom, my grandma. Sadie was a terrific sister to my mother. She was always there for her, especially when my father died. She worked in a Garment Center factory on Seventh Avenue, like almost everybody in our building did. But she was not just any ordinary worker; she was a “floor lady” （the male equivalent at the time was a foreman）。 She was responsible for the output and conditions of all the seamstresses on her floor. Sadie made a fairly good salary in those days, for roughly fifty hours of work a week she got the amazing sum of $30—which, believe it or not, was a lot of money when most workers were getting $18 to $22. When my mother was widowed, Sadie gave her about a third of her income each week. She also provided my mother with a couple of extra dollars a week by bringing home some work for her from her factory. Usually they were big bundles of bathing suit sashes, which were the shoulder straps that crossed at the back of the bathing suits. They were sewn on the back side of the fabric, and my mother was given a steel rod, which she used to reverse the fabric and turn them right side out, nice and shiny. A couple of times a week Sadie would come home with a big bundle of those bathing suit sashes for my mother to turn over. It was laborious work and took her over an hour to do each bundle. I don’t know when she went to bed, but she couldn’t have gotten more than five or six hours of sleep because she had to be up at six a.m. to prepare breakfast for her four children.
One night, when I got up to pee （the only toilet we had at this time was in the kitchen）， while half asleep on my way back to bed, I spotted what I thought was a mound of little diamonds sitting in front of my mother on the kitchen table. I couldn’t believe my eyes!