the last house...

     Kirk Douglas lived to be 103 years old and then passed on, yesterday.

     I remember when his autobiography came out, in the '80s -- The Ragman's Son.

-------------------- [excerpt] ------------- "Nobody" meant being the son of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants in the WASP town of Amsterdam, New York, twenty-eight miles northwest of Albany.  

It meant living in the East End, the opposite side of town from the rich people on Market Hill.  

It meant living at 46 Eagle Street, a run-down, two-story, gray clapboard house, the last house at the bottom of a sloping street, next to the factories, the railroad tracks, and the Mohawk River.



     My father, Herschel Danielovitch, was born in Moscow around 1884, and fled Russia around 1908 to escape being drafted into the Russian army to fight in the Russo-Japanese War.  

Those were the days when ignorant peasants like my father, conscripted into the army, had hay tied on one sleeve, and straw on the other, so that they could tell their right hand from their left.  

My mother, Bryna Sanglel, from a family of Ukrainian farmers, stayed behind and worked in a bakery to earn enough money to come to America two years later.  

She wanted all her children to be born in this wonderful new land.... --------------------- [end, excerpt]

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Kirk Douglas was in many movies:  I'm going to watch two of them -- one, I've seen several times before -- Out Of The Past, and the other one, Seven Days In May, I have not seen before -- it has Ava Gardner in it, as well as Martin Balsam, who was also in All The President's Men.

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