07-04 Cousin Linda

OK, she is not a bro … but cousin Linda Young seemed like a sister. It would never be a surprise, to come home from school when we lived on Bowie Avenue in the Dufferin and Eglinton area, to find Linda there with her mother, Aunty Ray.
Aunty Ray was mother’s best friend, and they always seemed to be kidding around, often in fits of laughter. And speaking “jibberish”, which I found out was Yiddish. From the photo, it is obvious Ray was a beautiful woman, but what few people knew was that she had an opera quality singing voice. Ray met her husband to be, cousin Jack Yancowich, while studying music in London. Yancowich became Young.
I remember playing with Linda one afternoon while Aunty Ray was trying to teach our budgie a swear word in Yiddish. One evening, about a week later, while Dad was home and we were all eating dinner in the kitchen, the crazy budgie let go with the Yiddish swear word and I thought my mother was going to split her guts with laughter. Every time she tried to explain how long Aunty Ray had been training the budgie to curse, she went back into a laughing spree. It was a special memory.
In this wonderful picture, taken in front of Bowie Avenue in the fall of 1941, Linda is seen with our grandma Halter and my brother Ian. I was about eight at the time, and remember showing Linda the letter “a” on Dad’s license plate which gave him unlimited gasoline, something rationed for everyone else. Selling officers’ uniforms was considered part of the war effort.
1941 was the year that Uncle Jack was made a partner of John Bulloch Ltd because Dad decided he wanted to have his own factory. When Uncle Jack came to Canada in 1939 with Aunty Ray and baby Linda, he had owned his own clothing manufacturing business. Dad got him a senior position with his supplier Schiffer-Hillman.
No one could know that the following New Year’s Eve, Aunty Ray would be killed in an accident, and that we would see even more of dear Linda. She came to the cottage and stayed with us. She went to summer camp about a mile from our cottage. And Uncle Jack moved closer to us when we moved to Forest Hill Village, so we could play together.
This photo is of Linda’s eighth birthday party, which was a “doozy”. Uncle Jack had a magician attend. The birthday cake had hidden quarters in every slice (which we thought was really something at the time!)
The good news, following the family tragedy, is that when Uncle Jack married again, Linda had a wonderful new mother, and soon three new brothers. In the photo, from 1958, Linda is 21 and with her brother David, her Dad and wife Hilda, and other brothers Paul and Allan. Linda studied to become a psychologist, and two of her three brothers followed in her shoes.
This is a great shot from 1968, showing Linda at age 31 with her Dad at her brother’s wedding.
It was at a great family reunion around the same period, when Linda came to Chicago from New York to help celebrate her cousin’s high school graduation. This cousin is Linda Lifschultz, the daughter of Mother’s other sister, Aunty Anna. Behind the younger Linda are her parents, my Mother, and beside me, cousin Linda at age 30.
In 1974, at age 37, Linda married Stanley Kent, a dentist from New York, and tragically died of cancer five years later.