Photos of Pollack’s Hotel, Courtesy of Stacey Mandelbaum

One of the unexpected benefits of publishing my article on women in science is that I heard from the daughter of a former employee of my grandparents’ hotel. Here’s the message; the photos follow:
Hi Eileen,
I really enjoyed your article on women in science in the NYT magazine section. (I went to medical school at Yale in 1982 and also met my husband, Alex Frank, there.) When Alex read your blog, we learned that your grandparents owned Pollack’s Hotel in Ferndale, New York, and that you would welcome any photos of the hotel.
As I was helping my parents move out of their house this past summer, I discovered a box of old photos, which included some pictures taken at Pollack’s Hotel during the summer of 1949. My father, Joseph Mandelbaum (known then as “Yuss”), had a summer job playing the accordion there. He was only fifteen years old that summer, and I believe he played the accordion in the Catskills to earn money for college and medical school. He speaks fondly of that summer.
I have attached all of the photos from Pollack’s Hotel. There are two photos of Yuss with the other three young musicians that he played with (Larry, Murray and Eddie), a photo of him pitching in a Pollack’s staff baseball game vs. Stevensville Hotel (Pollack’s apparently lost 3-8), a picture of him relaxing by the pool, and several other photos taken on the property, including a photo of the building where he slept. Several of the photos include his mother, Beatrice Mandelbaum, who worked in a sweatshop in Brooklyn, and came up one weekend to visit him. Some of the photos have names and dates written on the back, and I have included all of that information along with the pictures below.
I hope you enjoy the photos.
Warm regards,
Stacey Mandelbaum
PS I know you probably won’t get to these photos for a while, but I just saw my father, who is turning 80 this week, and he told me a few more things about the photos that I want to pass on.
First, I learned that my father (Joseph Mandelbaum) worked as a waiter in the children’s dining room, in addition to playing the accordion, during the summer of 1949 when he worked at Pollack’s Hotel. He said that your grandmother was very kind to him. He gave me full names of 3 of the 4 musicians in the photos–Joseph (Yuss) Mandelbaum on accordion, Murray Weiss on trumpet, Eddie Panerello on sax, and Larry on drums. He told me that the photo of the 5 women standing in front of white fence was taken in front of a building across the street from the hotel. In another photo, the couple sitting on a bench (perhaps by the pool?) listening to the radio are my father and a young woman named Bernice.