Lest It Be Forgotten After I Am Gone: The Arrival Of Manhood - 6
Raymon Benedyk, continuing his life story, tells of a bus tour round the USA.
As the year rolled along, and 1949 arrived, I planned my departure from New York. However, in the midst of my arrangements came the news that one of my father's brothers from London was coming on a visit. It was obvious that I could not leave before his visit had taken place, and I mentally agreed with myself to put my plans on hold until the autumn.
My uncle and aunt arrived in June, again causing a lot of family gathering. It was all very happy. However, my uncle did take me aside to advise me that I ought to go home since my father's business partner was diddling him and I was needed back in the family business. I was not sure what to do but, as a dutiful son, I finally decided that I would go back to London for a few weeks before returning to New York, where I would spend another winter and delay moving westward until 1950. Seemed the best solution at the time.
I had saved a fair sum of money by then and I booked my passage to England on the Queen Mary no less, leaving New York on October 1st 1949, exactly two years to the day of my arrival. No communal bunk site and undignified toilets for me this time. I wanted to show my family that my time in America had been successful. But, before my sailing date, I booked a Greyhound bus trip to tour around the entire United States, going south, west, north and east, a journey that was to take me just over a month, which took me to Washington DC, New Orleans, along the Caribbean coast, San Antonio in Texas and the Mexican border, Boulder Dam, Las Vegas - at the time literally no more than an oversized cowboy town with a few slot machines, and Los Angeles and San Francisco, Spokane and Seattle on the Pacific coast, into Canada to Banff, and on to St Paul and Chicago and finally back to New York.
On the way I took the opportunity to visit my mother's sister Tillie and family in St Paul, which proved very interesting in that my aunt's son-in-law owned a meat packing plant and I was invited to take a tour all over the location from where the animals arrived and were slaughtered, to where I was shown how just about everything about them was used in one way or another. It was not exactly a pleasant experience, and in fact proved quite an eye opener from which I should have become a dedicated vegetarian from then on, but did not.
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If you wish to make a donation to the Elsa Benedyk Memorial Fund, set up by her friends and colleagues entirely without Raymon’s knowledge to provide funds to support the children's ward of the Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem to commemorate her life of work with children in her nursery schools, it would be most gratefully received. The amount that you give will not be revealed to Raymon. He is not a trustee of the fund. Your cheque, payable to the Fund, should be sent to the fund's Treasurer Mrs I Dokelman, 14 Charville Court, 30/32 Gayton Road, Harrow, Middx HA1 2HT.
