What was it like growing up in Elmira during the 1950s and 60s, a much-reminisced snapshot in time for city residents, past and present?
Sally DeLaney Goldberg lived it, and she has published a new memoir detailing the experience.
“457 Franklin St.” is titled after DeLaney Goldberg’s childhood home on Elmira’s Southside. The book’s subtitle – “Baby Boom Years: Growing Up DeLaney” – is a nod to both a unique period of American history and the footprint of the DeLaney family. Sally’s parents had 10 children in 16 years, creating a bustling household with a baby boom of their own on Franklin Street.
“Most of my friends had families of five, six, seven kids. They were all big families in those days,” DeLaney Goldberg said. “It was the baby boom generation. My father and mother married right at the end of World War 2. They were both 27 when they got married. They were a little late starting.”
A late start never fazed the DeLaneys. Sally, 75, will give her first-ever book talk at Elmira’s Steele Memorial Library on Aug. 22 from 2-3 p.m. “457 Franklin St.” is her nonfiction debut after writing several children’s books.
“It was very fun to write, but also very challenging. I had a lot of rewrites because I wanted to frame everybody and Elmira in the right way,” DeLaney Goldberg said. “My memory was so strong in who lived next door to us, what the neighborhood looked like, who we played with down the street. There were all these stories when our family got together for reunions. I pulled them all in over the years and put them down on paper.”
The memoir may offer a trip down memory lane for older Elmira residents, while providing younger readers with an insightful glimpse into the city’s past. Here is a snapshot of a few anecdotes included in the book.
Classic Elmira childhood memories
The first five DeLaney children – John, Tom, Eileen, Sally, and Ann – were each born roughly a year apart. The next handful – Jim, Paul, Jutty, Molly, and Joe – later followed. Their childhood featured many of the hallmarks of a 20th century Elmira youth. There were walks to Brand Park in the summer, ice skating on Miller Pond in the winter, baseball games, fort-building and pillow races down the stairs of their Franklin Street home.
Several additions were added to the house over the years, eventually settling at six bedrooms.
“It worked out just fine with two people sharing a bedroom,” Sally said. “The house kind of grew with us.”
The family didn’t get its first car until 1958. By the late 60s they had three, one apiece for mom and dad, and one shared by the teenagers.
“It was a competition for who was going to get the kids car on Saturday night to go out,” Sally recalled. “My mom would leave a note on the kitchen table – the last one in, lock the door!”
The cover of Sally’s book features a drawing of the home by artist Pam Agan-Smith, who completed the piece in 1980 before Sally’s parents sold the property and moved to West Elmira.
10 kids, one income
All 12 members of the DeLaney household subsisted comfortably on one salary, perhaps one of the more striking aspects of the story for a modern-day observer.
Sally’s father started working at Rosenbaum’s, a longtime Elmira women’s clothing store, at the age of 16. He planned to attend college on the GI Bill after World War 2, but Rosenbaum’s owner Sidney Hersch foresaw the baby boom and asked him to run the children’s department at the store, Sally said.
“They managed very nicely on one income. My father worked hard and the Hersch family was very good to him and us. It worked out,” Sally recalled. “My mom was a nurse but once they were married she didn’t really work anymore. She was too busy having children and raising us. She went to St. Joseph’s Nursing School and was very proud of that.”
A family news empire
The DeLaney children did contribute to the family’s finances, however. One chapter of the book details the family’s mini “news empire.”
Sally’s older brother Tom picked up a Star-Gazette paper route at age 12, and it stayed in the family all the way down to her youngest brother, Joe.
“Fo 20 years the DeLaney family had that neighborhood paper route. It was a big route,” Sally said. “My sisters and I would collect the route on Saturdays. So he delivered and we collected.
“And then in later years, my two oldest brothers, John and Tom, had the newsstand in front of Saint Mary’s Church where they sold all the out of town papers, and that passed down through my family to my youngest brother.”
A changing culture, Vietnam war
Sally graduated from high school in 1968 amid major cultural changes sweeping through Elmira and the country at large. The Vietnam war was at its peak, and some of her contemporaries never returned home from foreign soil.
A chapter of her memoir is dedicated to the period and the local lives lost in the conflict.
“That’s a sad chapter. The Vietnam era in the 60s brought such a huge cultural change, so I incorporated that because I was part of it, I lived it,” Sally said. “We went from selling beautiful, tailored outfits to send young girls off to college in Rosenbaum’s, which was an upscale women’s department store, to selling bell bottom denims and Tommy Hilfiger opening up People’s Place, which was right on Water Street. I talk about that as well, because that was his start.”
Hilfiger connections
Sally has first-hand accounts of Hilfiger’s early rise to prominence in the apparel industry. Now one of Elmira’s most successful, famous native sons, Hilfiger, just a year younger than Sally and from a large family of his own, got his start in his native Elmira with the founding of the People’s Place store.
Sally’s connections to the family stretch further back. She said Tommy’s father would often give her and her friends a nickel as they visited various downtown stores where family and friends worked. Their travels would be capped off with a sundae at Iszard’s Tea Room.
“That was a real nostalgic piece that people related to, because they remember downtown Elmira and doing those same kinds of things,” Sally said. “I hope it comes back. It was such a wonderful place to grow up.”
What is old can be new again. The Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Business School People’s Place Store opened on the Elmira College campus earlier this year.
Love and floods
Sally lived through some of the most pivotal days in Elmira’s history – the flood of 1972.
She and her husband married in late 1972, not long after floodwaters from Hurricane Agnes inundated her hometown. The period is recounted in detail in Sally’s memoir.
“It was devastating. Rosenbaum’s was destroyed, along with all of downtown Elmira,” she said. “It caused a lot of stress. My dad was worried he would never have a job again. It did reopen, but it kind of went downhill from there as all of Elmira seems to have done, on the Southside, anyways.”
Rosenbaum’s eventually closed in 1989 after 125 years of business, and the West Water Street building was demolished in 2014.
A lasting family legacy in Elmira
Sally became a teacher and settled in the Albany area with her husband, now a retired police detective, and the couple had three children. While some siblings migrated to Syracuse and elsewhere across the country, others remained in the Elmira area with new generations of the DeLaney family continuing to play a role in local education and business, including DeLaney’s Athletic Club.
“We still have some good Elmira connections,” said Sally, who added that she has received positive feedback to the book.
Writing the memoir has inspired her to begin planning another book about her youth in the city.
“This was a story I wanted to tell and it is very often nostalgic. It’s almost like a perfect childhood,” Sally said. “I wanted to write it that way, from a very positive perspective because that was my first memory and I think that was where I really learned how to capture moments as best I could.
“I wanted to tell a really good story about Elmira.”
“457 Franklin St.: Baby Boom Years: Growing Up DeLaney” is now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
This article originally appeared on Elmira Star-Gazette: New Elmira memoir recounts growing up in family of 12, changes in city
Reporting by Chris Potter, Elmira Star-Gazette / Elmira Star-Gazette
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Chris Potter, Elmira Star-Gazette | USA TODAY Network
