{"id":5652,"date":"2013-10-14T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/?p=5652"},"modified":"2013-10-02T08:41:24","modified_gmt":"2013-10-02T12:41:24","slug":"elinor-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/elinor-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"Elinor Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is possible to explore family history and understand it reasonably well, family, on the other hand, is always a mystery.<\/p>\n

\"Alice,<\/a>
Alice, Ruth and Elinor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The problem with trying to understand your own family is that you were a child when you first encountered these mysterious people.\u00a0 <\/span>Your views on each of them are colored by the nuclear family you grew up in and even that nuclear family had its secrets, lots of them.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This is why family historians are always asking themselves, “Why didn’t I know this?’ or “Why didn’t I spend more time with this person?” or one of a thousand other questions usually accompanied by slapping the forehead and saying, “Duh!”<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I did some forehead smacking recently when I discovered a 1977 article from The Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia about my cousin Elinor Brown.\u00a0 <\/span>Elinor is my first cousin, once removed, or put in language I actually understand; she was my grandmother’s sister’s kid.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I knew Elinor when I was growing up.\u00a0 <\/span>We weren’t as close to my grandmother’s family, but we saw them from time to time.\u00a0 <\/span>They came to our weddings and Bar Mitzvahs; we went to theirs.\u00a0 <\/span>There was no estrangement that I know of, there just didn’t seem to be a lot of communication, but what do I know, I was a dumb kid.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Elinor<\/a>
Elinor Brown (top right) with her father and sisters,
Alice and Ruthe<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elinor was born in 1898, so she was about 50 years older than I am.\u00a0 <\/span>As a child I suppose she was just another old person to me, but I knew Elinor when I was an adult in my twenties and thirties.\u00a0 <\/span>Why then did I know so little about her?<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The article from The Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia is about Elinor’s career in the advertising business.\u00a0 <\/span>I knew she was in business of some kind and I knew she was successful, but I never thought about what it must have been like for a woman of her generation to be in business.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Elinor began writing for the Yiddish newspaper, Der Tag, which was owned by her father.\u00a0 <\/span>After high school Elinor went to secretarial school in Syracuse.\u00a0 <\/span>Secretarial work, after all, was what women did until they got married.\u00a0 <\/span>Elinor came home for the summer and took a job in the secretarial pool at an ad agency.\u00a0 <\/span>She never returned to school and somehow made it from the secretarial pool to space and media buying.\u00a0 <\/span>She was the only woman in that area.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>She made the next big jump when she heard that the Contadina Company was looking for an ad agency.\u00a0 <\/span>She flew to Chicago and convinced Contadina’s parent company to hire the E.L.Brown Agency.\u00a0 <\/span>This was the birth of the agency.\u00a0 <\/span>When she arranged a banquet for Contadina dealers she ran into a bit of a problem.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This from the Jewish Exponent, “I finished making the arrangements with the hotel management, went up to my suite to change, and decided to go down for a drink.\u00a0 <\/span>But they turned me away at the bar–unaccompanied women were not allowed in.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I was furious!\u00a0 <\/span>Here I had just finished spending God knows how much money in that hotel, and I couldn’t go to the bar.\u00a0 <\/span>I grabbed the assistant manager and told him my story. He finally escorted me into the bar and sat with me while I had my drink.\u00a0 <\/span>But–imagine!”<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It was a problem that would persist so she dealt with it.\u00a0 <\/span>“I hired a man whose only function in the agency was to pick up the check.\u00a0 <\/span>He traveled with me wherever I went, all over the country, and that’s all he did.\u00a0 <\/span>Pick up the check.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>What can I say, it’s brilliant, appalling, and yet awfully funny.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0There are a lot more stories I could tell about this interesting woman and her long and successful life.\u00a0 <\/span>She married twice, had children and grandchildren and worked into her 80’s.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I am delighted to know more about this early feminist.\u00a0 <\/span>I’m just sorry I didn’t get to hear her stories from her.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is possible to explore family history and understand it reasonably well, family, on the other hand, is always a mystery. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The problem with trying to understand your own family is that you were a child when you …<\/p>\n

Elinor Brown<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[132,131,75],"class_list":["post-5652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-bublick-family","tag-leaf-family","tag-silver-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5652"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5660,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5652\/revisions\/5660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}