PeaceBang

Binghamton

My mother’s family is from Binghamton, New York, a city my father used to refer to as the Armpit of the United States, and my mother affectionately refers to as Sinus Valley.

We used to take road trips from New Canaan, Connecticut to Binghamton pretty often when I was a kid and going there always seemed to be a trip back in time. Now I recognize the “special” feeling in Binghamton (and by “special” I mean depressed and vaguely oppressive) as being related to economic and class issues, but I didn’t know that as a kid. I just thought of Binghamton as being dead.

I’m sorry we were so snotty about Binghamton, and about my maternal extended family, when I was growing up. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t good for my sister and brother and me. We became so thoroughly identified with my father’s lineage that we missed a lot of the richness of my mother’s cultural and historical DNA. Her parents both had fascinating and sad stories — many of which I finally eked out of my grandfather when he was near 90 years old — and a simple, steadfast Russian Orthodox faith that I have never appreciated until recent years.

My grandfather, my Dede, ran away from home to New York City at the age of 14 (after one too many savage beatings from his mother, a bitter woman with too many kids, enslaved in an arranged marriage and killing work of running a rooming house) and went to work as a grocery boy, living in the attic of his employer. He delivered groceries to the big stars of the day and remembers escorting a very inebriated John Barrymore home from the corner pub more than once, earning a 50c piece for his efforts, and the heady experience of hearing the great man pronounce his name. “Charles,” Mr. Barrymore would say in his most elegant tones, “Would you see me home?” “Cha” would do so (no one ever called him Charles), and sometimes put Mr. Barrymore to bed as well.

Miss Dorothy and Miss Lillian Gish gave my young grandfather tickets to their theatre performances. Another man whose name he could never remember gifted him with a first edition of a book. I’m sorry that I never wrote down the specifics, but I think it may have been a book on Abraham Lincoln.

It touches me that these luminaries treated my grandfather so kindly. At a time when he was invisible, they made him feel seen and noticed.

My Baba had come from Czechoslovakia at the age of five with her mother and settled in Pittston, Pennsylvania. Her father (another arranged marriage) was a coal miner. My grandparents, Anne and Charlie, met in New York City and wooed at places like Coney Island. They settled on Valley Street in Binghamton (which my great-grandfather pronounced “Welly Street,” and Binghamton as “Bee-Ha-Tone”*) and raised their children, two boys and my mother, Shirley (named after You Know Who With the Curls).

During all the years of my childhood and teen years, my Baba and Dede lived on Front Street across from the Howard Johnson. My mom liked to stop there at the end of the long drive and phone them, pretending to be calling from Connecticut. When they answered and they’d chatted for awhile, she’d say, “What are you doing for dinner?” And then we’d descend upon them, crowding into their house with the magical laundry chutes –you could send Barbie down them!– and the raspberry vines outside. Their house was on a rich, wet meadow that led out to a big pond. There was always birdsong and humidity, honeysuckle and the slight odor of mud underneath it all. Cicadas shrilled all night and we could hear cars going by our windows; something we never heard at home.

I have some cousins from that side of the family and they have some lovely children of their own. Last year, MotherBang suggested that we have a family reunion. And so we are going to. I haven’t been back to Binghamton since my Dede’s funeral in the late 90’s, and I’m looking forward to it. I just wish that Baba and Dede would be there, too, and when I push them to tell me more about their lives, they wouldn’t respond with “Oh Vick, you couldn’t possibly be interested in that.”

Yes, Baba and Dede, I am interested. I always have been.

Charles Lesko and Anne Billo Lesko on their wedding day, January 23, 1933.

*My grandparents used to get notes from Dede Billo addressed to “9 Weli Street, Bihanton” (9 Valley Street, Binghamton). My grandmother never finished elementary school. My mother didn’t go to college (girls don’t need to go to college! They need to get married!). My Baba used to tell me that if I didn’t stop reading so much, I would never get a husband. Baba, you were right!