Back in the 1920’s, Joseph and Charlotte Baum and their friends loved practical jokes. Once, as a new bride, Charlotte was sent a picture postcard, forwarded from a friend of theirs who had supposedly received it from Charlotte’s new husband Joseph. The picture showed Joseph sitting in a rowboat with a young woman in a sequinned flapper dress and a tight hat with a big artificial rose. Their friend sent this picture to Charlotte enclosed in a letter saying how sorry he was to break this news. On the back of the card, Joseph had written a warning not to show it to Charlotte. Their friend wrote that he felt it was only right to inform her. Charlotte found all of this hilarious and kept the card for the rest of her life
Their daughter Flora was sensitive and literal, and she couldn’t understand her parents’ love for practical jokes. She found them silly and frightening; more than once they made her cry. One afternoon her mother approached her, looking worried. Charlotte said she’d been gathering Joseph’s jackets for the cleaner and inside the pocket of one she’d found a frilly red garter, which she showed to Flora. “I don’t know what to do. What will I do?” Charlotte repeated, until her daughter burst into tears in front of her surprised mother.
Even Flora’s tears did not stop these jokes. One evening, the frilly red garter was “found” again by Charlotte as she was hanging up the jacket of their good family friend, Rabbi Berkovitz. Charlotte pulled aside Rabbi Berkovitz’s wife, Sallie, pretending to be very upset at what she’d found in the rabbi’s jacket pocket. “I’m so sorry, Sallie. I feel so terrible,” she said. Flora couldn’t keep from crying even though she knew it was a hoax. Sallie laughed and said, “Joseph must have put it there.”
As a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Flora was swept along in a practical joke devised by her classmates for their Bible teacher. The young women in the class were mostly new brides, and they were fond of this teacher. However they and their husbands resented the staggering loads of homework he assigned. So they invited him to a fancy dinner in one couple’s apartment. They prepared a wonderful meal and set a fine table, but in place of a tablecloth underneath the dishes they spread pages of the teacher’s assignments. More assignment pages covered the floor and the walls, and some were even stuck to the ceiling. The teacher took it very well.
Later on, Flora tried to teach manners to her three boys while the family was vacationing in a seaside hotel on Block Island. The boys learned how to open the door and wait for her to walk through; which forks and spoons to use at which times during the meal; and how to push in her chair as she sat down. After a few mishaps, Flora made sure to grasp the edges of the chair so that no prankster could pull it out from under her before she sat down. By that time, she did not ask herself how her boys could find it funny to see their mother plop onto the floor. The practical jokes seemed to have skipped a generation. Flora tried to take them in good humor.
Copyright © Leora Freedman 2015
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