Browse Items (75 total)

Interview with Marie Nejame Freije, Part 1

Marie Nejame Freije talks about her upbringing in Lebanon, and her family's flight from the country to Egypt due to war and the grueling nine day journey that almost killed her. She discusses running a bridal shop in Johnson City, NY after coming to the United States. After 38 years, she retire...

Interview with Marie Nejame Freije, Part 2

Marie Nejame Freije talks about her upbringing in Lebanon, and her family's flight from the country to Egypt due to war and the grueling nine day journey that almost killed her. She discusses running a bridal shop in Johnson City, NY after coming to the United States. After 38 years, she retire...

Interview with Mabel Quick

Mabel Quick speaks about growing up near Scranton and later in Nichols, N.Y. She discusses living and teaching in Johnson City. She discusses her ancestors coming to America from Europe, with particular focus on Tom Quick, her ancestor who purchased Staten Island from Native Americans. She discusses...

Interview with Leo J. Payne

Leo Payne speaks of his early childhood growing up in Binghamton and later working as a bookkeeper and stenographer. He owned his own trucking company in Binghamton in the early twentieth century. He discusses his inter-racial marriage and the death of his first wife in childbirth because there wer...

Interview with Gladys Gitchell

Interview with Eunice L. Davidson

Eunice Davidson speaks of her father's cheese factory, the first one west of the Hudson, called the Deer Spring Factory. She discusses her experience growing up on Tremont Avenue in the city of Binghamton, watching it grow from farmland into an urban community. She studied math and Latin at Sy...

Interview with Arthur G. Rider

Arthur Rider speaks of his childhood in Chenango Bridge and of becoming interested in watchmaking. He went to school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for training. He became a jewelry salesman for a company in Syracuse and travelled thoughout New York State. He later opened his own wholesale jewelry s...

Interview with Joe Polansky

Joe Polansky speaks about leaving high school to go and work in the coal mine in Coaldale, (Schuylkill County), PA after his father died. He stayed there for one year. During that year he became an amateur boxer and then attended a training course in Philadelphia under Jack O'Brien. He then ...

Interview with George J. Macko

Macko talks about his father immigrating from Czeckoslavia and settling in Binghamton, NY. Both his parents died when he was young and he and his siblings lived with a relative. At fourteen he left school to work for the Binghamton Glass Co. where he learned the glassblowing trade. He details the...

Interview with Herbert Levine

Herbert Levine talks of his father's family and their immigration from Russia to the United States because of the religious persecution against the Jewish people. The family initially settled in the lower East Side of New York City. Levine's father, who had apprenticed with a jeweler in R...