Laurie (Lawson) Robbins

Laurie (Lawson) Robbins

About me:

Laurie Gail Lawson Robbins, I am the last Lawson to graduate from the Seattle Hebrew Day School (1964) and the last Lawson to graduate from James A. Garfield High School (1968).

My claim to fame is that I met Jimi Hendrix in 1968, when he returned to Garfield High for a Basketball Rally. I was waiting in the anteroom to the gym when he came in. We chatted briefly and I got to say “I love your music!” His hair was very big-afro style, he wore jeans & a white hippie shirt, and at the rally he said, “You must beat Ballard” (Garfield’s big rival). In high school, my friends & I used to theorize that “Purple Haze” was written about Garfield, whose colors are purple & white.

Since then, I graduated Mills College and met Steve Robbins when I volunteered in the Berkeley office of the McGovern Campaign. We married in 1973. We lived & worked in Portland from 1972 to 1982. Presently, we live in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., I teach Yoga and work with Steve in his business. Our daughters, Elizabeth Ann Robbins Rapoport (born 1979) married Dave Rapoport in 2005, and Rachel Shoshanah Robbins (born 1982) still reside in the Philadelphia area. After trying to sum up some family stories for this cookbook effort, I can only say that I wish I had listened to the stories better, and written them down then.
Laurie

Some Stories about the Lawson Family

According to my father, Shimshy (Sam) Lawson, his mother was the greatest “balahbustah” of all women who ever lived.

Ette Leah Kaganovich Lawson was so revered by her sons, that when they told stories about her, their love proudly showed through.  The story goes, she did it all.

She cooked on a woodstove and kept strict kashruth laws.  She sewed all their clothes, even undergarments.  She baked bread, especially challah for Shabbos.

Hersh remembers Grandma Lawson churning butter.  She grew a lot of their food, and kept a beautiful vegetable garden with fruit trees and grapevines.   Fruits and vegetable were preserved and the grapes turned into kosher wine.  Supposedly this wine brought in extra money during prohibition.

Their little white Victorian duplex is still standing in Seattle on 17^th and Fir Street, just one block from the former Bikur Cholim Synagogue, the cultural core of the neighborhood.  The same trees and garden beds grace the yard today.

Ette Leah had a brother who also came to this country for a while.  His name was Mordechai “Motte” Kaganovich.  His story always fascinated me because he went back to live in revolutionary Russia. After his return he sent two pictures, one of him in tefillin, and one without, implying that he could no longer daven (pray) there, or even talk about it.  He had a son, Lazar, who was in the Politbureau in the 1920s.  My father called him a “Trotsky-ite”.  The family heard from his family through the 1920s and then no more. The last address was from Vitebsk in western Russia.

According to my Dad; our Grandpa, Shmuel Lawson, came from Samke in Minsk Gebernia (a Province in western Russia) to this country around 1907, via Montreal, Canada.  The family name “Loshen” was anglicized to Lawson during the immigration process.  My Dad said that “All the men left Russia to avoid the Czar’s army.”    He said that his grandfather, Israel Pesach, was a “melamed” (learned man or teacher) in Samke, and his salary for teaching was paid in potatoes.

Shmuel Lawson’s first American home was Savannah, Georgia, where he lived with family friends from the old country and sold trinkets and newspapers on trains that ran from Charleston to Jacksonville.  Word was he was arrested for peddling without a license.

After one year, he returned to Montreal and married Ette Leah.  My dad said that theirs was an arranged marriage, and that they had known each other as kids.  They moved to Seattle because his uncle Chaim Labe Steinberg* was already there with his son, Sam Steinberg.

* Chaim Labe Steinberg was Grandpa Lawson’s uncle on his mother’s side by marriage.

Grandpa Lawson started in Seattle with a pushcart.  According to my dad, they all “junked” for a living.  Later, he owned an Army Surplus “dry goods” store in Auburn, Wash.  selling work clothes (later known as denim jeans) for the railroad workers.  It was a tough business, because he had to compete with the J.C. Penney store, only a few doors down the street.

He would work all week and then take the “streetcar” home for Shabbos (or he commuted by the inter-urban train, I have it written two ways.)  Hersh recalls that it may be both.

Hersh wrote to me that he remembers, “In the late 1940s going down to King Street Station with Uncle Ip to pick up Grandpa in the evening.  It’s very likely that in the 1930s and maybe during the war years, he used to not only take the train to and from Auburn, but took the Yesler Street Cable Car downtown to catch the train.”

I once asked my dad why he was a pharmacist and why his brothers were accountants.  He said that they were only allowed to go into programs that did not require classes on Shabbos.  Accounting and Pharmacy were the only choices.

Some things never change. After college my Dad took a “road trip” to Los Angeles, with two friends, Perry & Mosie Gershon (who according to my father invented the personal injury lawsuit).  They set off in a used Model A Ford, the kind with the crank in the front, drove down to Santa Monica and wet their feet in the ocean.  They marveled at how warm it was compared to Puget Sound and drove back home. If you knew my Dad, you will remember the mischievous glint in his eyes when he was causing trouble.   When my Dad told stories about his travels with the Gershon brothers, he did it with that glint.

After my Dad graduated from pharmacy school, he was too young to get a pharmacy license, and it was the depression and jobs were scarce, so he worked as a soda jerk (mixing ice cream drinks) at a neighborhood drugstore and as a clerk for City Light Electric Co.   Not long after getting his pharmacy license he volunteered for World War II.

World War ll was an opportunity to travel and get experience.  At first, my Dad was a medic, assigned to an induction station in Seattle.  His job was to test the recruits for medical problems.  He always claimed that he failed his little brother, IP, who wanted to enlist.  He did this for his Mother, so her youngest could stay home.

Eventually my Dad was shipped overseas, first to England and then France.  Keeping with his orthodox faith, he made great friends with local people by going to Shul.  These friendships gave him a better war experience because he was with families for Shabbos.  They would share their rations with him, and he would share back, often finding cans of peaches, chocolates, and especially, tea on the base.  He served our country with great pride.  And he never bought German or Japanese products until Sony and Toyota.

Born in 1915, my Dad considered “Man Walking on the Moon” to be the most awesome scientific development in his lifetime.

Seattle in the 1950s was a truly beautiful, small city.  She was totally the “Queen City of an Emerald Coast”.  The Madrona neighborhood where I grew up seemed like the whole world to me.  All my cousins & family friends lived within walking distance, and we walked everywhere. We all went to the same schools, and Shul, Young Israel Youth Group & BBG/AZA.  Also in the neighborhood was my Dad’s Denny Blaine drugstore, walking on the staircases down hill to Lake Washington beaches for swimming , parks for playing, the Yesler Branch Library (the librarian sisters lived down the block), the Seattle  Hebrew Day school – Talmud Torah  (where I went from kindergarten through ninth grade), all the Shuls (we belonged to Bikur Cholim), Garfield High School, Brenner Brother’s Bakery, Ziegmans’s and later Varon’s  kosher meat market, Bluma’s,  Glazer’s, & Sam Goldsmith’s drug store, to name a few.

Shabbos was always a major event.  Friday night was lighting candles and having chicken for dinner.  On Saturday morning there were services at Shul, and Saturday afternoon, an Oneg Shabbat, a gathering at someone’s house, Ma’ariv and Havdallah services, to end the Shabbos would be at yet another person’s house.   It was a tight little community.   Today we’d call it a subculture. To me, the whole world was Jewish, and then, that was all I needed.

Our grandparents made a courageous journey to America.  According to my Dad, they left their homelands out of necessity.  The Lawsons settled in Seattle and made a life for themselves that they loved, and that I love remembering.

Our children and their children should know the little we know about our family, who these people were, and why we love them.  I’m proud to be a Lawson and I love this project that Alex has initiated.  My great wish is that many of us will contribute something to this project.

Great work, Alex.