Labor Day Yarmulkes
My father, a pharmacist, was one of the founders of Local 1199, a union of druggists that eventually grew into the Drug & Hospital Workers Union (which Martin Luther King, Jr. called his favorite labor organization).
My family would attend the Labor Day parade at summer’s end, to march with all the men (and some women) in their funny paper hats, which made them look like soda jerks, only proud . . .
I loved my 1199 hat. It was the closest thing to a yarmulke that this secular Jew knew.
I'm the kid in the checkered shirt with no paper hat on my head: face to the camera in the top picture (along with my father and mother), back to the camera in the lower picture (along with my father). The kids in the foreground who are actually wearing the 1199 hats, and the kid holding the sign — I don't know who they are!
L: I assume the photographs are of you as a kid although they don't especially look like
you, but also that the girl at your side is Suzy because I have never known you without her.
In Hebrew school you had to kiss your yarmulka if you dropped it. Ditto most Hebrew books. Ditto the mezzuza on the doorframe. Ditto your tallis when you put it on. What was with all that kissing? Lucky it was pre covid, that cholera.