Black Lamb

August 2010 in Black Lamb

Volume 8, Number 8 — August 2010

August 1st, 2010

In the cover story of our August issue, Black Lamb newcomer Benjamin Feliciano begins a column that will be called Day In, Day Out with A day in the life. In American dreamer, Terry Ross tells the story of his immigrant paternal grandfather, Louis Roslafsky. John M. Daniel reflects on the guitars in his life in Gifts with strings attached.

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Category: Month summaries | Link to this Entry

American dreamer

The secret life of Louis Roslafsky

August 1st, 2010

BY TERRY ROSS

I didn’t know my Grandpa Louie… really know him. My brothers and sister didn’t know him, either. I’m not sure his own son, my father, knew him.

Louis Ross (born Roslafsky) mingled in our lives as a kind of forgotten man, an old widower with broken English (despite fifty years in America) and a whistling hearing aid. A retired baker when he moved from Buffalo, N.Y. to be near us in northern California in 1961, he drove first a ’53 Buick my father found for him, a spiffy straight-eight which he used to ferry old ladies to shul, only the tops of their gray heads visible. When the Buick finally died, he drove a ’67 Chevy sedan; a 1972 registration card was among the sparse effects he left behind when he died, in 1974, aged eighty, in a nursing home.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ross | Link to this Entry