About five million years ago—my junior year in high school—I acquired a fake ID to work one summer in the fabled Catskills. Today it sounds really strange to get a fake ID for work, but then if I wanted to make decent money as a waiter I had to be 18, or at least feign 18 to the rather loose standards of the pre-photo card era.
It was the very tail end of the great era of kosher resort hotels, with about a dozen or so left of the more than 200 active during the immediate pre-WWII (and immediate postwar) heyday. The place where I worked could be charitably described as a dump of the first order, with a ton of really good food. One could have stayed there for a week, American plan, starting at $98, and zooming up to $135 (for a glorified trailer with en suite bath). It was so cheap that a family planted their, as we now phrase it, cognitively challenged relative in an inexpensive room for the season, reasoning that it was cheaper to keep her tin the hotel than in an institution (and the owner graciously saw to it that she took her meds, such as they were in the middle 1970s).
I worked my tail off and made very, very good money. I also returned to high school with tales of senior citizen licentiousness that made almost any raunchy teen sex comedy look like “Sesame Street”. (The aforementioned lady was discovered in a compromised position with a trumpeter from the hotel’s three piece trio, but that’s another story.)
This new book covers the history of the Catskills, for a family audience.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/books/review/the-catskills-its-history-and-how-it-changed-america.html?contentCollection=weekendreads&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=c-column-middle-span-region®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region
For a more accurate version of the Catskills, check out any concert footage of Buddy Hackett in front of a live audience, and not on network TV.
No need to shout, your borsht is on the way!
Jim Shulman
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