"My grandfather Sidney Lipsyte, the son of immigrants who became a New York City public-school teacher and administrator, lived from 1904 to 2005, a good run I don't expect to match. He witnessed, and sometimes experienced, a century of mayhem and invention: human flight, human spaceflight, pandemics, vaccines, economic devastation, Nazi conquest, atomic murder, peace treaties, civil rights, pacemakers, penicillin, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union."
"When my grandfather was 8, he and his brothers listened to distress calls from the Titanic on their homemade crystal-radio set. Sidney was 14 when his father died from the "Spanish" flu, and as a teenager he worked as a runner on Wall Street, shuttling paper certificates of stocks and bonds between brokerage houses. The whole area was blocked off, he once told me, patrolled by cops on horseback with shotguns."
Sidney Lipsyte, son of immigrants who became a New York City public-school teacher and administrator, lived from 1904 to 2005. He witnessed a century of upheaval and invention: human flight, pandemics, vaccines, economic devastation, Nazi conquest, atomic murder, civil rights, pacemakers, penicillin, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. As a child he and his brothers listened to distress calls from the Titanic on a homemade crystal-radio set; as a teenager he worked as a Wall Street runner during the Spanish-flu era. Family memory preserved the maxim "Nothing is ever as bad or as good as it seems." Photographer Hannah La Follette Ryan has documented commuters' hand positions since 2014 and noticed post-pandemic increases in shared behaviors such as headphone sharing.
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