| Notes |
- AKA Oliver Hale
Wrote (with Esther) about the history of children’s games in New York City, under the pen names Ethel and Oliver Hale: “From Sidewalk, Gutter and Stoop”, 1938
“ I worked with Oscar for about three years in the late 1960s at The Tamament Library of NYU(where I was a grad student) The library was devoted to the history of American social protest and socialism and Oscar was a sort of unpaid (at his insistence) archivist. He actually personally knew some of the leading lights in the Socialist movement in NYC so he was really adept at helping us catalog, index and display our materials.
However he was quite a raconteur ...especially about bohemian New York in the twenties and thirties -a state of mind where he lived at the margins... He told me he had a odd gift of making good money as an analyst at Dun and Bradstreet even though he had little interest in business or finance. He was quite a success there and was able to not only retire early but help out his sister (whom I once met briefly) and other family members (whom I cant recall).
Of his Greenwich village period the thing I was most struck by was his unrequited love for Edna St Vincent Millay. I gather she was a real beauty as well as being a lauded poetess and Oscar told me he was "desperately" in love with her for a long time..He was a romantic man, even when I knew him in his older years and he spoke of her with real feeling and longing.. He also tried to finance and produce a sort of early documentary film about life in the tenements that lined the then elevated subway lines in NYC.. He wanted to film the lives of the people one saw from the subway cars-sort of half fiction and half documentary. I think he actually wrote a script of this and he was inspired by the fictional technique of John Dos Passos who wrote a book about Manhattan similar in feeling to what Oscar was trying to achieve.
Hew as very proud too of a series of poems he wrote about each of the signers of the constitution-he used to go to the 42nd street library every Saturday and do research on the more obscure signers.. I read most of these poems and really liked them-I think some if not many of them were published but I cant recall where.. No one else ever did anything like this and he used his pseudonym for them..he had what my own father had-an acute awareness of possible anti-semitism in getting things accepted for publication-especially Americana. He loved that piece in This I Believe and gave me my own copy. He even wanted to revive the series-they had been very successfully published by Simon and Schuster and he knew someone who knew Dick Simon and tried to make this happen.
Oscar walked every day to library form his home-a good 2/3 mile walk each way. He never tired and never took a nap.. he also ate his lunch every day at one of the very few health food restaurants in NYC then-a place called Brownies .. he kept in great condition and I was not at all surprised he lived as long a he did.
He was a modest, sweet, generous, smart and good man.. When I went on a brief vacation with my then wife to Italy he asked why we returned after only 8 days.. I told him we ran out of money and he was sincerely surprised that I didn't just wire him to send some to me...something I wouldn't dream of asking my parents for! He helped everyone who had any sort of question at the library and was a real font of information on many types of questions. He had a sweet disposition... its too bad he didn't have kids as I am sure he would have made a great parent. I never met his wife unfortunately... “
-Laurence Prusak [4]
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Our Family History
1897 - 1984 (86 years)
