Page 174 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Brothers and problems

When we went into partnership, my brother Ben was not married,
but he soon found a girl and got married. We started the partnership
in the store in 1910, and in 1912 we bought a lot in the Adams
district, which was then being subdivided. There were no houses
anywhere near that place, until you came to Culver City, which was
just starting then. We made monthly payments, figuring when it was
paid off we would build a double house there for our families. That
winter we had big rains and floods, so I told Ben to go out and see
how Adams Boulevard looked. He took the street car in the morning,
and didn’t come back until close to evening. The district was flooded,
and the Adams car had gotten stuck there.
The next thing we did was trade the equity in the lot for a house
on Twenty-first Street between Central and Griffith avenues. We
bought it in partnership from an Italian man named Marino. It was a
single house, built originally for a large family, and we had to divide it
between our two families. Ben took the living room, dining room,
and kitchen. I had three bedrooms: the front one as living room, the
center as bedroom, and the last as kitchen. It was the most
uncomfortable dwelling. When Carmel arrived, I built a sort of
enclosure on the top of the porch, which had a slight incline. It was
half boarded and half screened, for the whole family to sleep there. I
cut a square hole in the roof of the porch and made a ladder to hook
up to the ceiling of the porch; we climbed up and down it night and
morning, and moved it away in the daytime. We slept up there for
twelve years, until we moved out of the house. It was not a very
pleasant place to sleep in the winter when it was cold or raining,
when the drops bombarded the thin ceiling, but we had the
advantage of fresh air. It was cool in the summer, for the screens
were on three sides.
Yet, with all the discomfort and crowded conditions, we got along
in the beginning fairly well. We were not used to much better
surroundings in the big city we had come from, and many people had
no better way of living at that time. And a person can always be
comfortable, in body and mind, when he is not too close to another
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