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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. After we did thing number 11 on Monday, 100 Years of the Jersey Shore. Today it's thing number 12, 100 Years of the Catskills. Next week, by the way, we'll get back to political ones during the democratic convention week with 100 Years of Democratic Nominees on Monday and 100 Years of Democratic Convention Speech Moments next Wednesday. Today, we stay on the summer vacation track for 100 Years of the Catskills, which more or less is going to be the rise and fall of the so-called Borscht Belt hotels, hotels that cater to a mostly New York City Jewish population and famously featured stand-up comedians like Henny Youngman.

Henny Youngman: Two guys meet once says, "How's your children?" He said, "I haven't got any children." "What do you do for aggravation?"

[laughter]

Henny Youngman: Little old man gets hit by a car. The cop props him against the wall, covers him up with a blanket. He says, "Are you comfortable?" He says, "I make a nice living."

Brian Lehrer: We'll open the phone shortly, listeners, for your oral histories, your best memory of a line from a Catskill comedian or anything else. With us now on 100 Years of the Catskills is Phil Brown, Sociology and Health Science professor at Northeastern University in Boston, director of the social science environmental Health Research Institute there, and author of books, including Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area. I gather his family also owned one of the Catskill hotels some of you may have known, called Brown's. Professor Brown, thanks a lot for giving us some time for this. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Brown: My pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: I will ask you as we go about your family's personal experience with owning a Catskills hotel. First, just to give listeners a more specific sense of place for this conversation, you note that when we say the Catskills, in this context, we're really referring to a small section of the foothills of the Catskills, not even the heart of the mountain range. Where were the so called Jewish Catskills, the so-called Borscht Belt, in their heyday?

Professor Brown: That's exactly it. It's the western part of Ulster county and a good part of Sullivan county, and a small tip going up to Delaware County, where the German and Hungarian Jews were. Mainly, we're talking about Sullivan and Ulster county.

Brian Lehrer: You've written that Jews began summering in the Catskills in the 1870s. Why there? Why then?

Professor Brown: It was a little bit later than that. Jews came up there because they were first farmers, and Baron de Hirsch brought up people and taught them how to farm. It wasn't a thing they could do very well and the land wasn't great for farming, except for eggs and for dairy, so they started to take in borders. Around 1896, Gerson's was the first place that we know of that became a regular Jewish resort area. They found that they could make more money taking in borders, and those boarding houses eventually grew. Sometimes Jews bought old hotels that were already in place and turned them into Jewish hotels. They also started a wonderful thing called the Bungalow Colony. Lots of cottages where people had their own cottage for the whole year and cooked the whole summer and cooked for themselves.

Brian Lehrer: This, of course, was during the large scale Jewish immigration from Europe in the Ellis Island era that this all got going. You note that the massive immigration was met by anti-Semitic exclusion. Was that exclusion in the Catskills or from other kinds of vacation spots that drove New York Jews to the Catskills?

Professor Brown: It was all over, but especially the Catskills were the closest airy resort area that people could come to that seemed to have fresh air and pleasant greenery and nice hills and a place to get away. They came up there and they found signs that said, no Hebrews allowed, or even, Hebrews and dogs not allowed, similar to what people found in Miami beach in that era, despite the fact these would later become very Jewish places. There were even Ku Klux Klan rallies in parts of Ulster county.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Professor Brown: They had a lot to contend with, so having their own hotels where they could go, have their own Jewish culture, their own Yiddishkeit, their own cooking, their kosher cooking, and to be part of their own community was important.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has a Catskill hotel memory you would like to share? Do some oral history here. We always invite your oral histories on these 100 Years of 100 Things segments, a story, a comment, or a question about the rise and fall or heyday of the so-called Borscht Belt. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Did your family vacation there in that context? Was anything about the experience formative or culturally significant for you?

Do you have a Catskills coming-of-age story that you can share without violating FCC rules? Or questions for our guest, Phil Brown from Northeastern University and author of the book Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text with your oral histories and questions. Or maybe a laugh line you remember from any Borscht Belt comedian. Maybe Joan Rivers.

Joan Rivers: The way the styles are today, I'm glad I'm married, because if I was single, I could never get married looking like this. I feel sorry for any single girl today. The styles and the whole society is not for single girls. You know that. Single men, yes. A man, he's single, he's so lucky. A boy on a date, all he has to be is clean and able to pick up the check. He's a winner. You know that. Or a man could call up anybody in the whole world. Do you know that? "Hello? I saw your name in the locker room. I thought I'd give you a quick call." A girl, a girl can't call. Girl, you have to wait for the phone to ring, right?

Brian Lehrer: A young Joan Rivers. Harvey in White Plains. You're on WNYC. Hello.

Harvey: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I have a little story from the Catskills. I'm just short of 83 years old. In my late teens, early 20s, I worked as a waiter in the dining rooms of Catskill hotels for about six summers. One summer, one hotel had a on the staff, a Juilliard trained singer, she was about 17 or 18 years old, who performed that evening entertainments. She had room and board, and I was privileged to serve her daily three meals at one of my tables. I had three tables, each one about 12 people. Also her mother who was chaperoning her for the entire summer. We got to know each other very slowly, despite her omnipresent mother. Today, in this evening, we celebrate our 58th anniversary.

Brian Lehrer: Aw.

Harvey: August 14, 1966.

Brian Lehrer: Happy anniversary, Harvey. That's a wonderful story.

Harvey: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Phil, I'm sure many people meth their girlfriends, boyfriends, future spouses working as a waiter, as Harvey did, or being there as a vacationer in the Catskills.

Professor Brown: Exactly. The flip side of what most people know as guests, is what we knew as the staff. We were certainly up there very happy to meet people. For those of us who worked there, we often were older than we seemed in that kind of milieu, so it was a very romantic atmosphere, staff to staff and staff to guests and many stories like Harvey's.

Brian Lehrer: You write that overcrowding on the Lower East Side played a big role in spurring Jewish travel to the Catskills early in that period. Can you describe that connection?

Professor Brown: Yes. Of course, people needed to get away, and they were not used to this because in the old country, they didn't have resorts to go to, unless they were very wealthy. It was a very foreign thing to them, but they heard about the boarding houses. The places up there advertised Yiddish ads in the several Yiddish newspapers at the time, and so it made it more comfortable. Indeed, you could go up there and speak entirely in Yiddish in lots of resorts, certainly in the '20s, '30s, and even into the '50s and '60s, lots of people were still speaking Yiddish. It was a place where people could go and kind of bring the Lower East Side with them, but get away. Get away, no matter how little money you made, there was a place that you could afford.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned in that answer just now that in the old country, in Europe, only very wealthy people could go away to hotels or resorts, and you've written that Jews of all classes had places in the Catskills. Hotels, yes, but also the bungalow colonies, which you referenced before, and summer camps. I know my mother has described being a kid whose family of very modest means sometimes took summer vacations at bungalow colonies, where the mothers and children might stay a couple of weeks, and the men would come up on the weekends from their jobs. How would you describe bungalow colonies? It's not a term we really hear about lodging facilities today very much.

Professor Brown: Right. The bungalow colony, you basically rent it for the whole summer. If we're talking about right after World War II, you know, $300, $400 for a whole season. Even in the 1960s, I've got contracts in my archives of the Catskills Institute that you could for 800, $900, get a bungalow for the entire season. That was a wonderful place to go, and the men could continue to work in the city.

For people who've seen the film A Walk On the Moon with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, this is a really great, honest look at what the bungalow colony life looked like. People had small places overcrowded with people there. Just to say, we're overcrowded back in the city, but they just walked out the door, and there was a softball game, there was a tennis court, there was a pool or a pond, there was a mahjong game, and people that you knew and could rely on to help take care of your kids if you had to run to the town for a doctor or to go shopping. These were really wonderful little communities that lasted not just for that summer, but for many summers because people would return there.

Brian Lehrer: We talked about Jews being excluded from other places, driving the development of the Catskill Jewish hotel scene. Jay in Yonkers wants to follow up on that with a specific, I think. Jay, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jay: Yes, I have in my possession a guidebook from the Delaware Hudson Railroad dated 1941, and it lists all of the areas of the Adirondacks, going way up past even Saratoga. Almost every hotel and boarding house listing has printed restricted clientele, so Jews were not welcome there at all.

Brian Lehrer: You're saying the exclusion of Jews from the Adirondacks may have contributed to a Jewish hotel belt-

Jay: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: -developing in the Catskills? Anything specific to the Adirondacks that you have, Professor Brown?

Professor Brown: We have some materials in our archives from places like Schroon Lake and the Adirondacks, and we have what we call the other Catskills, places like Moodus, Connecticut. There are various little resort areas around New England and in New York that had some groupings of Jewish resorts, but nothing like 600 hotels and maybe 700 bungalow colonies in the Catskills, so it was much, much bigger. Even if they didn't want to be as gross as to say, restricted clientele or no Hebrews allowed, a lot of the ads in the guidebooks, and especially the Ontario and Western Railroads guidebooks said churches nearby, and that was code for no Jews.

Brian Lehrer: Beverly in Nyack, you're on WNYC. Hi, Beverly.

Beverly: Hi. First time caller. I've listened to you for so long. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Beverly: We had a hotel right down the road from the Brown's in Loch Sheldrake. It was called The Hotel Dinz. D-I-N-Z. My great grandparents moved out of the Lower East Side, I think, around 1920 or something like that, and bought the hotel. Basically, it was, I think, established first for people who were sort of tuberculin or wanted to get away. We had a big old main house with all these rocking chairs sitting outside, and people would just possess a rocking chair for the entire season. Some people did over winter, but then it became just a summer thing.

After my great grandparents died, my grandparents ran the hotel. My mother and my aunt basically spent the whole summer there with us as kids. They had both married drummers that they had met at the hotel who were working in the bands. As I was growing up, of course, I had a great time because all the boys who came to work for the summer were city college guys and we had a wonderful, wonderful growing up experience with an extended family from Hungary and Poland. Everybody we called aunt and uncle, they came back year after year after year. It was just like a really warm and supportive way of growing up.

Brian Lehrer: Wait a minute, do you two know each other? Phil, your family owned The Hotel Brown's. [crosstalk] Beverly says her family owned a nearby hotel.

Professor Brown: There were two Brown's Hotels. Charles and Lillian Brown is in Loch Sheldrake. One of the larger hotels was not ours. My parents, William and Sylvia Brown owned Brown's Hotel Royal in White Lake, and they probably had room for 50 guests at the most, compared to probably 500 or 600 at Charles and Lillian Brown. No, we didn't know each other, but I worked in Loch Sheldrake at the Carmel Hotel for several seasons, and I know the area quite well.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Beverly. How did your family get into the business, Professor Brown?

Professor Brown: They were always opening small businesses and not doing so great. Somehow in 1946, they had this idea that they would buy a little place that was already operating called The Royal and try make a go of it, and borrow a little money from this relative and that relative, and hoped that some of the relatives would come up and work for them. They weren't very good at this. I was born in 1949, during the period where they still owned it, but not in the hotel because they were closed for the winter. By 1952, the hotel foreclosed. They just couldn't meet the mortgage, and that was the end of it. For the rest of their lives, they worked in other people's hotels. My mother is a chef and my father running coffee shops, or being a chauffeur, or a maître d', various other jobs. They spent their whole life until they died working in the Catskills.

Brian Lehrer: You've written an extensive history of the whole scene, but how about for you personally? What was the best or most significant part of the Catskill Hotel experience for you personally?

Professor Brown: It was super exciting. Even though we lived in parts of Florida during the winter that were largely Jewish, the Jewish culture up there was much more intense. I was able to be around a lot of older people. I was able to hang around with musicians, and they taught me a lot of music. I was able to work. I hoisted my first bus box in the main dining room at the age of 13, and by 15, I was a waiter. It was very exciting, and certainly the romantic part was important and not to be forgotten. Coming from Florida, which was completely segregated, the mountains were not. I went to school up there with Black students. I was in the staff quarters, sharing quarters and sharing meals in the staff dining room with people who were Black and Latino, things that would never have happened down in Florida. I learned a lot about equality and justice up there as well.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting that you bring that up because-- [crosstalk]

Professor Brown: I also was able to make a lot of money and support myself.

Brian Lehrer: You could make a lot of money and support yourself?

Professor Brown: Yes. In high school, I was very independent. I could buy my own car, I could buy my own clothes. My parents, who were always short on money, I didn't have to rely on them for all of that. It was the growing up thing. It was you learned how to make do. You learned how to hustle. You learned how to make a little bit into a lot.

Brian Lehrer: As a waiter at a Borscht Belt hotel as a teenager, you made what, I guess, felt like a lot of money to a high school kid, right?

Professor Brown: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: You just talked about it not being segregated, but we have a couple of people calling in to describe what they see as racism in that scene. Let's take one of those, Gus on the Upper West Side. You're on WNYC. Hi, Gus.

Gus: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, there.

Gus: Hi, Brian. I love your show. I've been listening forever.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Gus: About 30 years ago, maybe more, I did a frisbee demonstration in a clinic at Grossinger's. Had a wonderful time while I was there. My partner was a Black man. When we showed up in the dining room, a lot of eyes and voices and comments were made, actually sub rosa, but it was obvious that he was an anomaly, but we did have a good time, and I really loved it up there.

Brian Lehrer: How did he feel about that ex--?

Gus: Now, the inclusion--

Brian Lehrer: How did he feel about that experience, if you know?

Gus: He felt a little uncomfortable while we were there. He's a very dramatic looking guy with a long ponytail and Puerto Rican and Black. He felt a little out of place, but because we were kind of hired help, we fit in. We also had a special skill, which we demonstrated for people. Back then, professional level frisbee was pretty unusual as well, so it was a double whammy.

Brian Lehrer: Gus, thank you very much. Anything in response to Gus, Professor Brown?

Professor Brown: Of course, you would find racism anywhere, even in the most integrated schools or neighborhoods or institutions, so I don't deny that it was there. I was listening to a radio show earlier today by an author who wrote a book on Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, and about the kinds of discrimination they faced when they would be playing in places where they had segregated audiences or simply all white audiences.

That would never happen in the Catskills. If a Black singer came, a Black comedian, a Black vaudeville artist came to do their show, and they got there at dinner time, they were walked right into the main dining room. They sat at the staff table with the band and the other entertainers and the senior staff, like the head counselor and the dance team. Yes, racism always exists, but the point is that you didn't shunt it off to the side. You didn't say, "You have to live in different quarters. You have to eat in a different place." That, to me, was just quite mind-opening and it helped me to understand a lot at that time.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, listeners, we're in our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today it's thing number 12, 100 Years of the Catskills, meaning, in this case, the Jewish Borscht Belt hotels, the rise and fall over about 100-year period where we haven't yet gotten to the fall, which we will with our guest Phil Brown, who wrote the book Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area. You were just talking about people playing in bands. David on Staten Island did that up there, I think. David, you're on WNYC. Hello?

David: Hello. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you. You got a story for us?

David: Yes. In 1955, I was 20 years old. A group of us went up to the Borscht Belt to see if we can get a job as a waiter or a busboy, more likely busboy, but we couldn't find any. I had been dating a girl who said she was going to work up in Ulster Heights as a counselor in a day camp in one of the hotels, so I said, "Let's go visit her." We went to visit her. While we were sitting there, they fired the entire staff, and they said, "You guys want a job as busboys?" We said, "Yes." We took the job.

It turned out there was a band there that played on weekends, and they also doubled as children's waiters or busboys. I had my trumpet sent up from the Bronx where I lived, and I joined the band. The drummer was Walden Robert Cassotto, who later became known as Bobby Darin, and so we got quite friendly. That was in 1955. I saw him several times during the winter, and we decided to form the band again the next year. We came up in 1956. At that point, I became a children's waiter instead of a busboy. Again, we played on weekends.

Bob was a very, very talented guy. He could do just about anything. He was an excellent comedian, as well as a terrific singer, just a general entertainer. It was quite a time. The problem was that a couple years later, that year I came up with my fiancé, and we subsequently got married. A year or so later, Bob had become known as Bobby Darin, and he had produced his first big hit, Splish Splash. I'm trying to remember the name.

My wife and I were down in the village in one of the coffee shops, and I saw Bob there with a kid, and he was telling this kid about the life of rock and roll, and so I said, "Bob, we ought to get together sometime." He asked me what I had been doing, and I said, "I just got a substitute license to teach science," so he said, "Let's be frank with each other, Dave. What are we going to talk about, science?"

Brian Lehrer: Oh, boy.

David: That was very distressing.

Brian Lehrer: He got too big.

David: Very distressing.

Brian Lehrer: What did you say Bobby Darin's real name was?

David: Walden Robert Cassotto.

Brian Lehrer: I guess if your name is Walden Robert Cassotto and you want to make it in showbiz, you change it to Bobby Darin, huh? David, thank you very much for that story. Let's go right to another caller. So much oral history on the phones. Melissa in Ardsley. You're on WNYC. Hello.

Melissa: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I am now 48 and grew up going with my family to Kutsher's in the '80s to very tail end. It was so much part of my life. The movie Dirty Dancing came out, I was 11. I don't know if I saw it right then or on VHS, but it didn't occur to me that the family was Jewish. I had no idea that the family like that, that was a part of the movie. I just on Facebook a couple years ago said, "Hey, so who noticed that they were Jewish?" It was a pretty 50-50 of my friends who are a similar Jewish background as I, and we're like, "Oh, that was something-- We knew it was class, but that was part of the story? Huh."

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Thank you very much, Melissa. Anything on that, Phil Brown?

Professor Brown: It was interesting. Dirty Dancing is the film that most people know about, and it's actually what we would call de-Judaizing. You could watch that and really, if you weren't Jewish, not know that this was a Jewish hotel with Jewish people. Very different, for instance, than the film I mentioned about bungalow colony life, A Walk On the Moon, or another film about small hotels, Sweet Lorraine, which is a really beautiful, beautiful film.

Some years ago at the Museum of Jewish History, I did a whole show on the films, the Catskills, and I had all the filmmakers who had done those films and others come and talk about them, and we showed clips. Dirty Dancing, again, the thing that people know, it's very inauthentic. It doesn't really give the flavor that you would see if you watched A Walk On the Moon or Sweet Lorraine.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Phil Brown from Northeastern University and author of the book on the history of the Jewish hotels in the Catskills. More of your oral history calls. We've been getting so many calls about the heyday period here in our series, 100 Years of 100 Things, so 100 years of the Borscht Belt Catskill hotels. In today's segment, we're going to get to the decline and why this scene that was so thriving on so many levels, as we've been hearing people tell your stories about, what happened to it? Among other things. Keep calling us, keep texting us, 212-433-WNYC with your oral history moments as we continue on WNYC.

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Rodney Dangerfield: I live here in New York on the West Side. I live in an older building, a much older building. I live in a kind of building, like if I want hot water, I got to let it run a long time. Last week, I took a bath on Sunday, I started the water on Friday.

[laughter]

I'll tell you, the one thing in my apartment in the winter, I always know how cold it is outside. Whatever it is in my apartment, that's what it is outside.

Brian Lehrer: Rodney Dangerfield on TV, but he had a reputation as a Catskills comedian. As we continue in our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, it's thing number 12, 100 Years of the Catskills, meaning, in this case, the rise and fall of the so called Borscht Belt hotels with Catskills historian, as well as an environmental health sciences professor at Northeastern University, Phil Brown. Your oral history stories or questions at 212-433-WNYC. Next week, by the way, it'll be 100 years of democratic convention items next Monday and Wednesday. You want to talk about the entertainment scene and how that developed with, I guess, singers in act 1, comedians in act 2.

Professor Brown: A lot of the original idea for entertainment up there came from the Second Avenue Yiddish theaters and the vaudeville shows there and the takeoffs on Broadway shows. A lot of those folks needed new places to work, and this was a great opportunity for them. You had talent bookers like Aaron Toda coming, bringing their people up all the time. They realized that they could bring people up and they could do three shows a night. They could do a big hotel, a small hotel, and then really late at night, a bungalow colony. They could get this huge number of entertainers running around the whole mountains, and people loved it. It was the kind of entertainment that they really wanted.

Some places had their own entertainment on staff. In fact, in our Catskills Institute archives, we've got a lot of those brochures and playbills from places like Grossinger's in White Roe Lake, where they did have their own entertainers, they did their own casting, they did their own music writing, and all the stage work, the lighting, and all of the costuming. This was a place where people could come up and they could try out, and eventually, it led them to other places. If you did well in the Catskills, you could go to Vegas. It was a place also that was very hard on people because they would boo you right off the stage. They weren't that polite.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Professor Brown: Singers and comics were typical. Every Friday night and Saturday night, even a small hotel would have one of each. Then during the rest of the week, there would be a film night. There'd be a champagne night with dance contests run by the dance team. There would be a bingo night one night, and there would usually be a talent show that the staff and the guests would put on. Lots of different kinds of entertainment in the small hotels. The big hotels had comics and singers all the time.

Brian Lehrer: Let me read from some of the texts that people are writing in with their stories. One writes, "My family is catholic, but living a block from the temple, most of our friends were Jewish. We would go to the Catskills for a weekend in the winter with the Sisterhood of the synagogue. This was over 50 years ago. We were at least a dozen close friends in our early teens and had the run of the place. I remember getting the lifeguard at about 10:00 PM, so he would open the pool and hang out with us. We had a blast." The listener writes, "I got my first kiss there too, from a boy who remains a dear friend to this day."

Speaking of lifeguards, another text, "I was a lifeguard in one of the bungalow colonies for several years, 25 years ago. Some of my favorite memories were interactions with the old Hungarian Jewish residents, golden bathing suits and all. They had great stories and were a wonderful window into our past in pre-war Europe. They were all survivors, a special breed of human beings."

Another one, "My Aunt Judy opened her own makeup business called Justine Cosmetics. For decades, she did very glamorous shows in all the hotels. The Concord, Grossinger's, Kutsher's. She was really very dramatic, and her customers ordered her makeup via mail for decades. She died last year, but was truly a legend, and I'm sure anyone who saw her show would never forget her." So many texts as well as so many phone calls coming in, but to do a little bit more of the narrative timeline in this 100-year frame, professor, you cite the 1950s as the high point, and then the decline began in the 1970s. Why?

Professor Brown: Right after World War II, you had people-- The economy was booming, they had more money to spend. You had a lot of survivors coming over, needing a place to work, needing a place to stay, and sometimes feeling that they needed a place all of their own. In fact, there's a another wonderful film called Four Seasons Lodge, which is a bungalow colony that is composed entirely of survivors, because when they were at other colonies, they felt like they just couldn't share their experiences with other people. That was a very important place for people to come in the '50s, and there was a huge growth into the early '60s.

There are so many reasons for the decline. One of them was, in fact, intermarriage. If you say at the beginning of the '60s, how many Jews married other Jews? Mostly they did, maybe 90%. By the end of that decade, maybe half of Jews married other Jews, so this became maybe not as comfortable. Even if you were a catholic friend of Jews, it wasn't the same comfortable place. A lot of the people who wanted kosher food didn't care anymore, especially if their parents from the previous generation had died.

You also had staff mobility. The people who used to be-- The first generation working there to get through college to become professionals, now they were professionals, and they didn't need to go back and work there as waiters and busboys and musicians and lifeguards and counselors. Labor problems were another issue. This was a very, to be honest, exploitative system of labor. We worked seven days a week, sometimes 10, 12 hours a day, or even more. Especially the people who did the handyman work and the dishwashing work, they were not paid very well, and they were somewhat exploited. It became much harder to get people to work in the hotels.

Plus, a lot of them had not been modernized. If you didn't have the money to modernize your hotel, you had very old, crumbling places with shared bathrooms. People did not want those shared bathrooms anymore. They did not want small rooms that were like 8X10 that had two kids and two parents in it. Then a whole other thing was travel to other places. By this time, people would entertain the idea of going to Europe. If you're talking about like 10 years after the end of the Holocaust, people weren't going to go back to Europe, but in the '60s, their kids in college were going there, and Europe now seemed safer.

Then there were, of course, the Caribbean cruises as well, which, by the way, got their idea of the all-inclusive vacation from the Catskills, where you paid one daily or weekly rate and you got all of your meals and everything else, all your entertainment, as well as your room and board. Now that people could travel elsewhere, they were much less likely to want to go to the Catskills.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking about primarily people from New York City who would go up there to vacation or to work. Elise in Brooklyn is calling in as someone who grew up in the area, living there year round. Elise, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Elise: Hi. I was born in Brooklyn, raised in the Catskills, went to elementary and junior, senior high school in [unintelligible 00:35:35] my town, Hurleyville, next town [inaudible 00:35:38] three callers ago or so. I'd love to get in touch with her because her last name is Ganz, and I think we could be related through my aunt, through marriage.

I spent my adult life in Brooklyn. My family first came to that area in 1920. My grandmother had a bungalow in Hurleyville. I lived through that arc of the kind of tail end of the high and through the decline, and moved to Brooklyn as a young adult in my early 20s after some time in New England. Now, I live there about half time in the house I grew up in, so I've seen the whole thing.

I want to go back a little bit to what your caller said about education and race up there because I spent my career in New York City as an educator, and I've studied race and education quite a bit. I, even as a child, found the schools up there to be quite racist, though they were, on paper, integrated. There was the use of tracking with the goal of getting upper middle class, primarily white and Jewish kids, into college and something called a general track, which would prepare people basically for manual work. Those are the schools that I remember when I attended.

Brian Lehrer: More of that up there than in the city in your experience? What--?

Elise: I don't think that's actually true. I think it's pretty much was, at that time, the same with IGC and SP. I think the way races is used, as Isabel Wilkerson would say, caste is education preserves that, those boundaries, but it wasn't a land of opportunity for people of color.

Brian Lehrer: Briefly--

Elise: As the hotel closed, things became far more desperate for those people. Many of them had to leave because there was literally nothing for them to do.

Brian Lehrer: What was it like for you as a kid, being what the vacationers may have called a townie?

Elise: Not dissimilar to now. The summer was actually kind of difficult because it became intensely crowded. We still, and now more so than ever, suffer with lack of resources and infrastructure for what's explosive growth because the Catskills is back to full tilt. Only now, instead of secular Jews, we mostly have, our visitors are mostly very observant orthodox Jews. The infrastructure of the town, both power and water, is inadequate for what we have in summer visitors. Being a town person, you know, I would look at it two ways. I think probably by the time I was a young teenager, I understood that this provided our economy and only maybe through summer camp experiences, or did I-- I probably would say, exactly only through summer camp experiences did I ever interact with any summer people.

Brian Lehrer: Elise, I have to leave it there because the show's about to end, but thank you for all the aspects of your call. As a last thought from you, Professor Brown, we could do another whole show from your other specialty, as an environmental health scientist on the environment of the Catskills and clean water and air and everything else, and is or isn't. Is what Elise suggests true, that the economy of that area has come back, but more for orthodox Jews than the secular Jews of the decades in the earlier part of the century? We have 30 seconds.

Professor Brown: That is generally true. Some of the small businesses that were there supplying plumbing, electricity, and wholesale groceries are still in operation, but mainly not. It's a very different economy because you don't have a half a million people going up there every year to vacation. Given the few seconds left, I would say, if you really want to learn more about this, visit our website at the Catskills Institute, and you'll see all of the wonderful history there, stories, music, and full of things that people like you, the listeners and callers in have sent us. Do send us stuff, because it will be part of our archives for students and perusers forever.

Brian Lehrer: Phi Brown from Northeastern University and author of the book Catskill Culture and from the Catskill Institute, thank you so much for this.

Professor Brown: My pleasure.

 

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