My father, William Silberberg, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1902.  His parents were Helen Aaron, born 1880 in Columbus, Ohio, and William Aaron Silberberg, born in 1867, in New York City.  Their children included my father, Aaron, and Roxanne.  Helen was killed by an intruder in their home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 1923.  My father was then a senior at U of PA, Aaron was a freshman at Western Reserve U (now Case Western Reserve) and Roxanne was in high school.  The family’s movie theater business (where my father sometimes played piano to accompany silent films) went into disarray, and fortunes suffered with the 1929 stock market crash.  My father’s stories included playing pool with Bob Hope, who was from a relatively low income family.  Roxanne was placed in a catholic convent school by her father, Aaron dropped out of college to help his father, and later travelled with him when he moved to Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh.  His father had contracted tuberculosis as a child and spent 2 years on a Native American reservation where he was allegedly inducted as a ‘blood brother’.  Aaron contracted tuberculosis, spent 3 years in a sanitorium in Takoma Park (Washington, DC) in order to be near my father and mother.  After discharge, he moved to Miami, Fla, where he supported himself by horse race betting, advising Kentucky stables, and professional bridge.  He developed a long-term relationship with Penny Richardson.

My mother Leslie’s father, George Rubenstein, born 1875 in Cork, Ireland, emigrated at age 18 to Philadelphia, where he met and married Lillian Spellman, who was also born in 1875, in Lexington, KY.  Leslie was born in Philadelphia, in 1905, as was her sister Dorothy, in 1902.  Dorothy’s 1^st marriage was to _______ Mitchell, who died of complications of rheumatic heart disease two years after their marriage.  They had a son, Henry (Hank) who married Renie.  Dorothy married again, to Henry Bechhold, who had emigrated from Germany in the mid-1930’s, and changed his name to Beechhold.  One of Lillian’s sisters, Harriet, married Samuel Moss, a professional artist.  A 2^nd sister, Flora Spellman’s daughter was Jane Nichols, known to me as ‘Cousin Jane’.

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This is Don. I’m doing this on April 17th, 2021. I’ll start on my maternal grandmother’s side and start with the fact that my grandmother, Lillian Spellman, was born in Columbus, Ohio, and 1875. Her siblings were Alfred Spellman, subsequently known to me as Uncle Al and Harriet, known to me as Harriet. Harriet married Sam Moss, who at the time was an illustrator for magazine illustrations. He became famous for two or three illustrations in particular.

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He invented the image of Reddy Kilowatt for an electric company. He did a very famous piece of the railroad line. I think it was United. I’m not sure what United Pacific, I’ll find out later, of to two trains passing in the night that became a kind of iconic image. And the third was a painting of the little Dutch boy for Armand Hammer baking soda, which Alan has the original of oil on board. He then turned to fine arts painting.

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They either had a place in Maine or they simply went to Maine every summer, stayed on the coast, and he did numerous seascapes and images from that area. In addition to other paintings, we have two in our apartment. One is a seascape from a harbor. Another is a miniature of a landscape beautifully done. He did miniatures like that prior to doing larger works. Alan has some I believe Mark has some paintings. There are many more that were in Hank’s household and I’m not sure what became of them all, but he was Samuel A. Moss

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You can find him. You can find auction references to his work. They lived in Westchester, I believe it was Scarsdale. I believe that they did not have any children.

Uncle Al, that is Lillian Spellman’s brother remained a bachelor his whole life. I’m a bit vague as to what he actually did for a living, but he he worked in businesses and sales. He told an apocryphal tale, which was that during his time in New York, which is where he lived for most of his life, he became friendly with the with Cardinal Spellman in New York and they became poker partners. He told that with all seriousness, so it may have been.

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He would visit my parents household maybe once a year, always very briefly, one night, two nights, never longer. One of the stories that he liked to describe was traveling to Mount Clemens, Michigan. And we’ll get to that when we describe Mom’s family, which was a spa with hot springs and hotels, he would take a fancy club car with friends who would play bridge and poker the whole way and then enjoy the bars and stay in hotels, then return to the east.

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He also told stories of his family who moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Louisville, Louisville or Lexington, Kentucky. And I think it was Louisville and that he used to earn some money robbing graves in order to take the bodies to the medical school to be used as anatomic teaching specimens. And he told that as if it were very serious. That was confirmed by his sister, my grandmother, Mama Lil, who said, yes, that went on. She never ventured forth herself, but she knew it was going on.

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The other story that comes from Kentucky is that another relative and I don’t know who it was at the time Lincoln was assassinated was it some sort of meeting. And he stood up and cheered him. It was good news to him. He was obviously on the other side politically and somebody shot him in the leg. As far as I know, he survived. I don’t think it’s apocryphal. I heard it as if it were a very serious story.

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I don’t know the story of how they met, nor do I know why she was in Philadelphia. But my grandmother, Mama Lil. Met her husband to be George Rubenstein, I think, in Philadelphia, and they were married and then lived in Philadelphia for the first part of their marriage. During that time, my grandmother became a screenwriter for Lubin Studios, which at the time was probably the largest film studio in the country in Philadelphia.

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She was not alone. There were apparently numerous female screenwriters, some of whom were Jewish, some of whom were not. And she also was called on to act in some of the some of the films. We have images of those. Lubin decided to move to Los Angeles, where other studios were beginning to develop. He tried to persuade her to come with him as a screenwriter and probably her husband, my grandfather, George Rubenstein, said, no, he’s not going to move to that den of iniquity, nor her allow her to do it.

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So she did what women of the day did, which was say, OK, if that’s the that’s the wish of my husband I’ll abide by it. And she moved on to become a syndicated columnist, giving advice about how to write screenplays for others for a number of years. She was a pretty good poker player. She tried to teach me. I really never learned it and didn’t pay that much attention to it. She was an artist from her early days.

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There are paintings by her in the family. And Mark and Alan, I know Alan at least has one sort of a Woodland’s painting. She was actually a wonderful person, a wonderful grandmother, very loving.

George Rubenstein was an immigrant from Cork, Ireland. He arrived in Philadelphia at age 18 and had no high, no education beyond high school, had no ready made way to earn a living. Do not think that he was greeted by any relatives in the US.

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But what he did was go to the businesses on South Street looking for work, was hired by one, at least as a hawker, to stand out on the street and try to persuade customers to out of the store. What sold him was his Irish brogue. So that’s how he started a business career. He became a retail businessman in Philadelphia, primarily, I think men in women’s clothing and then later lamps for lighting. I have the feeling that he was not terribly successful at this because he moved from one business to another and then finally ended up moving to with the family to Norfolk, Virginia, after my mother’s graduation from Germantown High School in Philadelphia, although I’m not absolutely certain about that.

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My mother, Leslie’s, sister was Dorothy, who was her older sister by three years. The family dynamics were complex. Dorothy was known as “outside angel,” “inside devil;”, very difficult to get along with for anybody in the family. And was very problematic as she remained for the rest of her life.

My mother met my father, William William Aaron Silberberg, I think probably in Philadelphia, although I’m not sure when he was graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.

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They were were cousins, third or fourth cousins that might have had something to do with their meeting. Then after their marriage, they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where my father was a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was a leading newspaper of the day. And then after several years, he was recruited by columnists in Washington, D.C., Robert Allen and Drew Pearson who ran a very popular syndicated muckraking column. And they needed help in digging up information and writing it up, which my father was hired to do.

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So he did that for several years, moving to Washington, D.C., of course, with my mother. Now I’m ahead of the game. If I back up before that all happened while my father was a senior in college and his brother Aaron was a freshman at Case Western Reserve at that time, known simply as Western Reserve University in Cleveland, their mother, Frances, was murdered by an intruder in their house in Shaker Heights. They had been a very well-to-do family in Cleveland.

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They owned at least one movie theater, maybe two movie theaters, other properties; were living well. My father described playing the piano at silent movies in the early days in his father’s theaters. He also described playing pool with Bob Hope, who was from a poor section of Cleveland, but was a good pool player and occasionally would show up among the people that my father played pool with. Well, their mother’s death just was a catastrophe for the family business and her husband’s business began to fail and they ultimately ended up selling the house in Shaker Heights.

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The depression occurred. They moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lived in the Squirrel Hill district. He became, my father’s father, became a jobber for shoes for the Midwest. He traveled by car and was joined by Aaron, my father’s brother, who helped him with that business until he developed tuberculosis. The way that happened was that my father’s father, William, had developed tuberculosis as a young man, as a boy, I believe, living in Far Rockaway, New York, although I’m not sure of that at this point.

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One of the ways to try to arrest tuberculosis at that time when there were there were no drugs, really no treatment, the way was to go live on an Indian reservation in order to have a fresh air cure. And that’s what he did, a tribe in Oklahoma, I think it was. So either Sioux or Cherokee, I’m not sure which. Allegedly, he was inducted as a blood brother of the family that he lived with.

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The tuberculosis was arrested sufficiently that he returned to New York and resumed his education. Well, then it turns out that, Aaron, probably by simply being in the same household, contracted TB. And he was he was put into a tuberculosis, a sanatorium sanatorium in Takoma Park, Washington. Right. That’s a Washington suburb, Washington, DC suburb, in order to be near my family. He spent about three years there. While he was there, he became fascinated by betting on horses. Bookmaking became an expert.

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After his discharge, he moved to Miami because horses ran 12 months of the year in Miami, Hialeah surrounding area. And he actually made his living for the rest of his life with an occasional bet on a horse. His system was to watch for a horse with excellent breeding and training whose owners were starting it in races with horses that were way below his speed in order to begin to build up a record. He would spot that, bet a lot of money on that horse, maybe once that would happen once in two or three months.

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And that was how he made his living. He knew other people betting on animals. To jump ahead, when I was a freshman in medical school, we went to visit Aaron and his very close girlfriend, Penny. And during that time, my mother said she would very much like to go see the Greyhounds race, that was still a major I’ll call it a sport, tourist attraction at that time. I asked my uncle Aaron, “How would I know which dog to bet on?”

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And he said, “Well, I don’t know anything about greyhound racing, but I know somebody who does. I’ll give them a call and I’ll let you know.” And then before we went to the races, I had the names of, as I recall, three dogs to bet on. I bet only on those dogs and won hundreds of dollars. Enough money that I was able to pay for all my books for my second semester in medical school. How did he know those dogs were going to win?

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Well, it turns out it was all a crooked occupation. Dogs were drugged and the people in the know knew which dogs were drugged with stimulants and which ones were drugged depressants and hence, which which ones to bet on. So illegal, but lots of fun.

So my mother had started to write when she was about a 10 year old in Philadelphia, poetry and short stories. And was intrigued by the science fiction magazines that her father, George, was bringing into the house. So she got interested and began to write science fiction starting at about age 18 or 19.

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And the rest is history as one of the two first female science fiction writers in the United States. In addition to one in France. And then, of course, way before them, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. She continued to write basically until she was distracted by the arrival of my brother Bill 1942 and by World War Two, and by simply maintaining a household in Washington, DC, and never really did any writing beyond that time.

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One of the quotes that’s in one of the articles about her is, is what I heard in nineteen forty five when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, her reaction was, first of all, horror. And secondly, a feeling of having been partially responsible because that was the kind of thing that science fiction writers are writing about. And the belief at that time, and it may be fairly accurate, was that anything you could imagine and write about will at sometime happen and that that basically just turned her off to any further, any real efforts in science fiction beyond then.