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Forks in the Road: Chapter 1 A KID GROWS IN BROOKLYN It was on a “Gasless Sunday” during the First World War, on September 22, 1918, that I entered this world. True to the pattern that would follow the rest of my life, the circumstances were somewhat unusual.
When the time came to take my mother to the hospital, the only motor vehicle permitted to be operated on “Gasless Sunday” was a hearse. So that was the mode of transportation that conveyed my mother (and me) from the residence at 606 West 135th Street to the Italian Hospital in upper Manhattan, New York.
My father, Walter Winkopp, was born August 8, 1893 in New York. He had been in “Show Business” for a few years, as a song-and-dance man, then a producer-director of vaudeville and cabaret performances. My mother, born May 8, 1900, performed in one of his productions as one of her first public appearances. Romance took over and they married in 1917. Soon thereafter, maternity ended her performing career and she functioned as her husband’s wardrobe mistress for a few months prior to my birth.
My mother's name was Helen May Catoggio; she was also known as “Maude” because of a falling-out between her mother and her Aunt Helen, after whom she had been originally named. She also had the affectionate nickname of “Tootsie.” Pictures confirm that she was an extremely beautiful young lady, but marriage at 17 and motherhood at 18 were followed by illness at 19 and death at 20. My father always referred to her sickness as “the influenza epidemic,” but others present at the time have since told me it was tuberculosis.
At the age of one, I was placed in the care of my paternal grandmother, who, along with assorted aunts and uncles, harbored me for several years. My mother’s family is essentially a mystery to me. She had an Italian father, Michele Catoggio, and a German mother, Clara (Klara Wilhelmina) Ritter. Both had entered the U. S. as immigrants just before the turn of the century. My grandfather has been described to me as employed in “wholesale produce.” I have been unable thus far to trace the Catoggio roots, although I have found some other people with the same not-too-common surname, and we have tried in vain to make the connection. Trying to research my heritage during World War II, I contacted the only sister of my mother, my Aunt Adelaide, known as “Dolly,” born in 1894. who lived in Philadelphia. She had married Frank Davis, who was a railroad man; they had a son, Frank, Jr., who was at that time single, and a daughter, Claire (or Clare) who was married and had two small children. I met each of them very briefly. Aunt Dolly told me that my great-grandfather was Carl Ritter, a Prussian soldier born in 1845 and died in 1918. His wife was Marie Hertel, born in 1838 and died in 1908. Unfortunately, my paths and those of the Davis family went in different directions thereafter, or I might have been able to learn more about my mother’s family. In 1975, I received a phone call from Frank Davis, Jr., from Denver, where his mother had apparently been living with him and his family for some time. He notified me of her death, gave me the appropriate information, and I sent flowers to the funeral. I did not think to ask him for his address, and I did not receive an acknowledgment of the flowers, so I could not get back in touch with him when I wanted to pursue the relationship. I have tried in vain ever since to locate him or his sister. There appear to be Catoggios in several areas of the nation, most of whom descended from a family in the area of Naples, Italy, but none of them seem to have any connection to Michele. There are also colonies of Catoggios in Brazil and Australia, again without any apparent link to my grandfather, who died long before I was born, in 1904 at age fifty. Grandmother Clara was an entertainer, using the name of Cora King as a member of the “Kingdom Sisters.” The 1920 census reveals that she was living with my parents and me in Manhattan at that time. She died in 1926. Apparently, at one point after Michele and Clara were married, they decided to change their names so as to have the same initials; she became Clara M., and he became Charles M. In 1902 they had a third child, Walter Royal, who died in 1905. There was never very much said in my presence, concerning my mother and her family, in the succeeding years. My father was always reticent to discuss my mother in any way. I wish now I had pressed him for information: how they met, what she was like, what occurred during the two years of my life that she was alive? These questions will always remain unanswered.
There is no such mystery about the paternal side of my genealogy. First of all, the surname of Windsor was not the true family name. My father was born Walter Winkopp. In his early days in vaudeville, his act was due to play a theatre in The Bronx, New York, and the fellow putting up the “billing” complained that Winkopp was not a suitable name and should be changed. My father looked up at the marquee and saw the name of the emporium was Windsor Theatre. Then and there he became Walter Windsor, and subsequently so did I. I was named after a theatre! At the outset of World War II, the Selective Service (draft board) required me to use my legal name, so I went into the service as Winkopp. Throughout my pre-Army career, I had always been known as Windsor, so I didn’t want to resume my career with a conflict of names. In the city court of Richmond, Virginia in early 1946, my surname was legally changed to Windsor, and having long felt deprived by not having a middle name, I honored my grandfather by becoming Walter Michael Windsor. My release papers from the Army identified me under my “new” name. The original name of Winkopp varied, over the centuries, having been Wennkauff, Weinekoup, Wynkops, Weinkouffe, Wynchauff, Wincop and Wincopp. I am fortunate, thanks to my Uncle Oscar’s research, to have a fairly complete family tree on my paternal side which goes all the way back to Joest Wennkauff, born somewhere in Holland in 1562, and traces the roots to northern Germany soon thereafter. It was from there that the succeeding generations were propagated. Among these various generations separating Joest Wennkauff from Walter Windsor, there were two mayors of Rheinberg, a university dean at Erfurt, a monk, and Franz Schreck, mayor of Tauberbischofsheim in about 1835. Passing through the latter town on a European trip in 1985, I recorded the names and addresses of eleven Schreck families. I wrote to each, trying to establish the connection, but none replied. My great-grandfather was Adolf Winkopp, a lawyer in Tauberbischofsheim, who married Marie Schreck, the mayor’s daughter. Their son was my grandfather, who was born Franz Josef Alfred Winkopp in Tauberbischofsheim in 1846. He emigrated to New York, where he married Anna Blumlein in 1868.
Anna bore him eight children; two were stillborn and two died in early childhood. Anna died in 1879 and her younger sister, Caroline, moved in to care for the children, subsequently marrying their father, who shortened his name to Alfred and was known as “Eddie.” There were seven more children born; three were stillborn and one died in his infancy. My father was the next to last.
“Eddie” was proprietor of well-known restaurants in the Brooklyn, New York area. For years he operated his establishment within the Schwaben Hall, a noted concert hall. His last place was the Winkopp Hofbrau Haus, located at 965 Broadway in Brooklyn. All of the family worked in the restaurant. One of my very few family heirlooms is a copy of the program for a testimonial dinner given to “Eddie” by his friends on April 14, 1906, the occasion of his leaving Schwaben Hall. He died in New York in 1920.
So the Winkopp family, as I knew it in my early life, consisted of my grandmother Caroline, three aunts and two uncles from the first wife, and one aunt, one uncle and my father from the second. I lived with Grandma and maiden Aunt Anna in a flat at 28 Grove Street in Brooklyn from infancy to age seven. Uncle Al and his wife, Aunt Lydia, lived a half-block away. My first time to see a dead person was when Aunt Lydia passed away and was “laid out” in their home. Shortly thereafter, Uncle Al bought a row house at 58 Highland Place in the East New York section of Brooklyn, a fair step upwards, and Grandma, Aunt Anna, and I moved there with him. He was crippled from a childhood accident, but operated a successful mail-order greeting card business from his home.
Among my memories of these early years was that I was trained to indicate my need to visit the bathroom by asking for attention. It took several years for me to realize that I was saying “I need attention” and not “I need to tenchine.” Also I recall my introduction to radio, first with a crystal set, and then, one night, when I was invited to leave my bed and come downstairs to join my uncles and hear a Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney championship fight over a big receiver with a horn loudspeaker. My education had started at a public school, the number of which I do not recall, located near the Grove Street flat. I entered P.S. 109 in East New York in the second grade. All this while my father had mostly been “on the road” staging shows, occasionally popping in with a gift and a “hello, Pal!” One of my recollections from that period was the pride he took in my ability to read at a very early age, particularly the labels on phonograph records. He would always ask me to get out and play Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean. One day he stuck his head in the door and said, “Guess what I brought you this time - a new mother!” He had met and married Virginia Garland whom he had met while putting on a show in Omaha, Nebraska. Shortly after the move to Highland Place, he and his new wife, and a new baby half-brother named Howard, came to visit and ended up staying with us in what was already a crowded house. Not long after that he announced that he had made a big deal and we would be moving as a family (pop, mom, two boys) to California. One evening late in 1927, we packed up and left. I remember that I was waiting out in the taxicab while the others said their goodbyes, and my beloved Grandma was in tears because I was ready to go without even a farewell hug. I guess I was even then a person who was ready to plunge ahead into whatever the next adventure might be. We traveled by train to Youngstown, Ohio, where, nearly as I can tell, Dad was booked to put on a holiday show, then move on to Los Angeles. We had Christmas and New Year’s in Youngstown. The highlight of Christmas was my receiving a beautiful tenor saxophone. On New Year’s Eve, our apartment was loaded with noisemakers and other paraphernalia of the holiday, and we stood out on a balcony at midnight, throwing confetti at a crowd in the street below. I also recall Dad taking me to the theater in Youngstown, where he had them run the movie for me, as the only person in the audience, while he transacted some business. The film was Sorrell and Son. It made a great impression on little Walter. As far as I can recall, that was my first movie. Soon after that, we were on another train, heading west, all except the saxophone, which I have since deduced was one of a number of items that ended up in a Youngstown pawn shop to raise the money for the trip.
Preface |
Dedication
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