In retirement you have the time to see the world, and if you also have the desire and the money it can easily become your main form of recreation. We did a lot of travelling over the years: many times to California, Palm Springs for two months every winter, and extra visits to L.A. for family simchas. We would visit Freda’s brother Morry and his wife Reva, first when they lived in Pasadena and later in Corona del Mar (Newport Beach). We attended brother Gary and Norma’s wedding in L.A. and in later years visited them in Westwood, a part of L.A. In a lifetime you change friends many times as you go from one stage to another, but not your relatives. I remember friends from Regina, friends from Winnipeg, from the RCAF, from North Carolina, Appleton, Toronto, the U of T, and Temple Sinai. You change your friends as you move from place to place and they tend to diminish as the years go by. In our visits to California I had a chance to renew and retain a friendship with a childhood chum, Dr Peter Moss (a.k.a. Muscovitch). He was one of the few Regina friends that I managed to keep in touch with as we all spread out geographically across Canada and the United States. The last time I saw him was at the Regina Synagogue Reunion in the spring of ‘89 and he was ailing at the time; he didn’t make it till fall to attend Martin and Sharon’s wedding.
In 1969 I attended an Operations Research conference in Venice Italy, and I carefully planned the itinerary so it would be a Grand Tour of Europe for Freda and me. We did London, Paris, Rome, and Florence and ended up in Venice. The conference was actually at a hotel on the Lido side of the Grand Canal, the clean side. When time allowed we would take the ferry across the Grand Canal to see the Piazza of San Marco and Doge's Palace and the other famous sights of Venice. A memorable bit was when we flew from Florence to Venice and on landing at the airport, the porter took our luggage and us not to a taxi but from the airplane to a motorboat that transported us directly to the back door of our hotel on the Lido. That was impressive as well as convenient.
This was our first trip to the continent, Freda’s first time in London, and my first return to London since the war when I had spent many a good-time 48-hour leave there in spite of the blackout and the bombs. Freda and I enjoyed London on that trip and we returned there several times over the following 30 years. Now we still enjoy pleasant memories of our visits there.
One advantage of the academic life is that you get a chance to travel. Time is more flexible in the summer months when we’re not teaching and every seven years or so you’re allowed a sabbatical year. During the 1979-80 academic session I visited Andrew Ehrenberg, professor of marketing research at the London Business School located in Regents Park, a prime location, and we were fortunate to be allowed use of one of the two faculty flats on the Campus. Andrew was a smart dynamic statistician who had developed a reputation as an expert in marketing research and had parlayed that talent into a profitable consulting business. One evening Freda and I got a good introduction to one of the older British customs when Andrew invited us for dinner to his home, a town house in Dulwich Village, an upscale community south of the Thames. His driver, who normally picked him up at the end of the day, drove us all to his home that night. A British couple, friends of the Ehrenbergs were already there. I don’t remember what we had for dinner but I do recall a lovely view of the Thames in the distance from the dining room window. After dinner the hostess surprised Freda (and me) by inviting the three ladies to retire upstairs “to freshen up”, leaving the men in the dining room to “enjoy their cigars and conversations”. What went on upstairs I do not know? But downstairs we didn’t actually smoke cigars but it was obviously a remnant of an old British custom that, when we were young, we read about in books.
Our flat in Regents Park was a short walk down Baker Street (the Sherlock Holmes Baker Street) to Oxford Street with Marks & Spencer on one corner and Selfridges on the other. We spent September through January there, five months with time to enjoy the theatre, the antique markets and the sight‑seeing in general. It was an intensive re-introduction to London for both of us and we’ve never forgotten it. There were several Canadian expatriates in London at the time and we managed to get together with some of them on occasion. Herb Solomon and his wife, New Yorkers I had met years earlier in the States, had a party one night at his flat where we learned who all were in town. There was Agnes Herzberg, Ben Epstein, Nancy Reid, Terry Smith, Donald Watts all from the profession, and others I can’t recall. Ben Epstein was from a University in Israel and Nancy Reid, one of the younger ones, was attending Imperial College there and she is today a distinguished University Professor in the Statistics Department at the University of Toronto. All were people that I had known before either personally or by reputation.
During the High Holidays we went to our neighbourhood Liberal Jewish Synagogue on St. John’s Wood Road nearby and Rabbi Rayner there welcomed us. The services were more Liberal and more progressive than at our own Temple Sinai.
In January we left London for California and I spent five months visiting Professor J. Morgan Jones, head of the Marketing Research Department at U.C.L.A. We rented a flat near the campus in Westwood.
Because Freda had two brothers living in California our winter breaks tended to gravitate there rather than Florida. Our annual escapes to Palm Springs also gave me a chance to refresh acquaintances with relatives on my father’s side of the family, the Brotman family that left Regina for Tacoma when I was young. There was also Rissell Kahn Felson and her family, who moved to San Diego many years ago. At present Rissell, Meta Brotman Williams, Dave Kahn, and I are the only 4 cousins left from an original group of 11 on the Paull side of the family. On my mother’s (the Bernstein) side, I originally had 26 cousins and my best count at the time is that 17 are still alive. In the old days a person could easily count 30 or 40 cousins. Today my children can count their cousins using only the fingers on their two hands; my grandchildren need use only one hand.
We made the effort to attend mispucha weddings and other life cycle events in Montreal, Baltimore, Winnipeg, Edmonton, White Plains and a Synagogue Reunion in Regina. The cousins in turn would attend ours. The weddings of Barry & Joanne in Toronto, Martin & Sharon in Vancouver, and Alanna’s Bat Mitzva in Toronto were all extremely well attended by the out-of-town mispucha.
Other holiday trips took us to Montreal where we would visit Freda’s sister Ruth & David Fisher now both gone, Ottawa, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Ogunquit, London, Paris, Helsinki, Stockholm, New Orleans, Athens, the Peloponnese, Rhodes, Crete, Southern California, Las Vegas, Washington, the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, Alaska, Scottsdale Arizona, a second trip to Israel, a Radar reunion in Clinton Ontario, and what have I missed? The three-week trip to Greece was one of the more memorable, even to today. Although we did a lot of traveling over the years, at this stage of our life we feel we should have done more while we were still fit and able. As you get older everything you used to do with ease gradually becomes more difficult. At 80 your warranty runs out and medical afflictions, some minor, some major, begin to slow you down whether you’re willing to admit it or not.