SHARING STASHED MEMORABILIA — Sharon Mark Cohen

My Aunt Fannie left lots of memorabilia for me to fish through when she departed the earth in 1993. There was a newspaper clipping in the pile of papers showing a mounted police officer. That picture reminds me a bit of the large glossy from The Lone Ranger and Tonto TV Series, with the Lone Ranger and his horse Silver, which hung by my crib.

Things take time. It took until 2009 for me to meet Harold Schneider, the mounted police officer featured in the article, and share a few words with him about my father and his family, and my father-in-law's clan. That’s right, he knew both families, and he knew them quite well.

Harold and his wife both hailed from Down Neck Newark, New Jersey, the same enclave where my father was raised, with his four brothers and one sister, Fannie. My aunt was best friends in childhood with Harold’s wife Gertrude (Gertie) Meinhard. My father-in-law’s brother Maurice (Moe) married Gertie’s sister Alberta (Bertie).

It’s such a small world. Even Frank Napurano (aka Frank Nap), the founder of the radio station WDVR-FM, at which my husband hosts a weekly talk show, The World of Work, broadcast Fridays at 4:00 p.m., knew the Meinhards. Frank and his wife were each raised Down Neck, where Gertie and Bertie’s brother Fred Meinhard was Frank’s family doctor, whom he held in high regard.

Harold and I met in 2009 at Aunt Bertie’s graveside funeral at the Beth Israel Memorial Park in Woodbridge, New Jersey. He was 93. There, the newsy picture of Harold as a young man dressed in uniform flashed through my mind. The papers, however, were stashed away. I was waiting to find them so that I could share them when we met again.

Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve gone Down Neck to visit Harold, but I was juggling family life, work, and other commitments while looking for the stashed memorabilia. His obituary shows that Harold passed away at age 99 in 2015. That means I had six years to visit and hear more tales about both sides of our family, but life got in the way.

When I finally found the clear plastic sleeve filled with the condensed version of Harold Schneider’s life, I quickly wrote something to post here, along with the telltale pictures for all to see. His lone son, Scott, and our cousins, Harold’s niece Jill and nephew Alan, are sure to appreciate watching his life unfold in my post. As evident from my bio, my mantra is that everyone is entitled to a legacy.

In 1935, when Harold’s wife Gertie autographed my aunt’s East Side High School, Newark, New Jersey yearbook, “To a sweet kid…,” could she possibly have known that my aunt would save a snapshot of her friend’s life? Pleasingly having kept the papers from my aunt’s stash, eventually uncovering them from stacks of memorabilia, then putting them into this blog post to be claimed, makes me feel good. What a treasure it will undoubtedly be for the family to have this part of Harold’s legacy.