DRITTELL BUILDING

My parents, Ida and Benjamin Mark in 1940 in Warinanco Park, which is located mainly in Roselle and partly in Elizabeth, New Jersey

March 9, 1985, celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday at the Nevele Hotel in Ellenville, New York. Pictured left to right front, Sharon Mark Cohen, Ida Friedman Mark, Alvin Mark-Back from left to right, Nathan Mark, Stuart Mark, and Benjamin Mark

If only those Drittell Building walls could talk. While out for a ride, my husband and I drove by my old stomping grounds, the street where my mother before me, and I then grew up in Roselle, New Jersey. There, I spotted the name on top of the brick factory building where my mother once worked.

I had been trying to find the spelling of the company name and had asked my brother, but we forgot the second “L.” Here it was, etched right in the cement of the façade, still standing after all these years.

Lucky for me, my mother lived long enough and miraculously spoke openly in her final years, divulging one incident that happened at the Drittell factory, which we never expected to hear. While you can always think of more to ask after the fact, I’m not complaining. Maybe it took until she was 95 to get a significant tale about the working conditions in the stately brick building, but we did just that in 2010.

You see, my mother worked piecework at that factory located a stone’s throw away from home. Situated diagonally across from the apartment building where she lived in Roselle, she worked there in the 1930s, making buttonholes and sewing buttons on shirts. After she married in 1940, her work career ended rather abruptly when my father got wind of what the atmosphere was like inside the Drittell Building.

Sans a telephone, a yell out from the factory window signaled my mother to come to work. The boss shouted across to her apartment, located on the second floor in the four-family building where she was living. With that, she stopped doing her housework, quickly changed clothes and swiftly made her way to the Drittell Building across Chandler Avenue.

On the occasion of her 95th birthday, my brothers and I hosted two birthday parties for our mother at her house. By then, she was living for many years in Elizabeth, New Jersey. One party was on her actual birthdate of March 9. She insisted that she always celebrated on the 9th, but truthfully that date of birth is questionable as her birth certificate shows March 10, 1915.

To accommodate anyone who couldn’t make it on the 9th, which was a weekday, we had a second celebration during the weekend. A few other nonagenarians attended, even including a couple of the women she knew from her youth. One looong-time friend, who joined the festivities, was still living in Roselle.

What a good thing the video camera was running when my mother started talking about her job at Drittell’s factory. One of the few stories about my maternal grandmother from our family lore tells that she had been good friends with the Drittells and did work for them, such as ironing and cooking for festive parties. My grandmother passed away when my mother was 19, in 1934, and my mother, as I said, married in 1940.

She continued doing piecework after she was newly married until she came in from work one day, and my father asked how her day was. Fortunately, we had the tape rolling as she recaptured that scene. Uncharacteristically, she shamelessly revealed that she proudly responded with a smile, telling her new husband that when she leaned over to put something on the boss’s desk, he announced with a pleasing look, “You know, you arouse me.”

She continued to recount the dialogue that ensued seventy years prior when my father explosively reacted to her boss’s remark by asking, “He said, what?!” Clueless at the time about what upset him, my mother said she naively wondered why he was questioning her response. My father didn’t hesitate to follow up by asking her if she knew what the boss meant. Confused by his reaction, she asked for an explanation. My father reticently told her what the boss was getting at before sternly insisting that she resign immediately.

Back in the 1940s, before any legal protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, my mother had no choice but to leave her job. She shifted all her energy into being an exemplary housewife and mother to her four children. When she would get flustered with the four of us, she would mutter, “I wish I could go to work.” While she never went back to salaried employment, she was worth her weight in gold for all that she gave of herself for her family.