New York Metro Area in the 1950s: Growing Up Like Jeffrey Epstein (but we didn't become monsters)

 If you were young in the 1950s, lower middle class (or even lower) and based in the New York Metro area you probably grew up much like Jeffrey Epstein. 

Today The New York Times captures the details of how it was for all of us back then. And, as the entries from his pals from those days for his 50th Birthday Book testify, there was (and is) great nostalgia for how it was.

Essentially the defining characteristic of that unique childhood and our teenage years was this, reports the NYT: "the unwatched way they grew up." 

Families were too overwhelmed financially surviving to supervise us. 

The Catholics among us had too many kids to seem to be able to keep track of the ever-increasing number. 

And the recent immigrants were preoccupied with chaos within the home such as drinking problems. 

My gallows humor years later was that if my sisters and I hadn't come home for several days no one would even notice. 

Unwatched by adults, we were formed by our friends. There were always tons of kids in the neighborhood to choose from. 

Overall, the values were solid. I only recall a few who wound up in-and-out of prison. But that was obvious early. Everyone from those days remembers the two brothers who tormented animals. We knew to steer clear of them. From the Times piece there seemed no tells where Epstein was headed.

Also standard in those days was the universal do-gooder rescue efforts. 

Among those to be saved from generational poverty were the brainy. As with Epstein, we were sequestered in school in high-achieving pods. No ambiguity: We were going to college (even though Epstein didn't). 

The system was fool-proof. We all attended the same classes together, not to be contaminated by association with those who were doomed to, as the saying was, "to fall by the wayside." The pods tended to be dominated by Jewish kids. That's where I, although a devout Roman Catholic, got down Yiddish. I participated in the Jewish holidays. I named my cats "Rebecca" and "Sarah."

Incidentally, it was with a deep longing for those heady aspirational times that I recently bumped into the use of Yiddish terms such as "mitzvah." It was by a celebrity lawyer whose career I profiled. That's Paul, Weiss' Brad Karp. I couldn't believe I spotted it and how much that term brought back.

In addition, there had been unusual stickiness among us. When my mother and sister died so many from that time showed up at the wake. There was open weeping for "how it had been in the neighborhood." 

Maybe the past isn't prologue. There were all those solid peer values and yet the Epstein monster rose from that background.

But you may be able to go home again. I've found here in the midwest a part of the city simulating so much of the past. Or at least how I want to remember it.

I am "unwatched." Unlike the WASPY Gold Coast of Connecticut, where I did my former 40-year-career, no one gives unsolicited advice. Just like the opportunities extended in that hothouse pod, my braininess is recognized and doors open. Although I'm not Jewish, in other parts of the US such as Tucson, Arizona, I have been taken for Jewish and harassed. Not here. It hasn't emerged as an issue.

In the Kodak Carousel episode on "Mad Men, Don Draper reaches into the power of nostalgia. I wonder if any of that flashed by Epstein as he was dying. Instead, maybe it was regret. In the tarot that's symbolized by the Spilled Milk card. 

Path to earning a good living, finding your tribe and not going insane is doable.

Let’s start the journey together with a Tarot reading.

One free question.

Jane Genova, 3^rd Generation Psychic 203-468-8579, jangenova374@gmail.com