Israel Cantor Family  Society
Founded 1913

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Eulogy by Daniel Cantor

Poem by Madeline Cantor

Millie the Muse by Phil Cantor

A Few Words about Millie by Carrie Cantor

Eulogy by Steve Cotler

In the mail
Irrepressible Tomato by Michael Berkowitz

Remembrance by Fran Hirsch

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Eulogy, May 16, 2008
Daniel Cantor

Millie Cantor was born Mildred Block, on April 13, 1920.  She was the daughter of Tessie and Isidor Block, and the  middle child between her older sister, Edie and her younger brother, Jack.  The family’s story is a familiar one, but no less cherished for being so.  Both parents were Jewish immigrants, Tessie from Slutsk, near Minsk , Isidor from Lithuania .  There were many relatives, and the importance of family ties was established early in her life.  

Her childhood was not easy.  Her father committed suicide when she was only five years old, a death that must have hung over her all her life.  It left her mother -- the indomitable Tessie, whose namesake great-grandchild is here today -- to raise the family in circumstances that can only be described as dire.  They were poor, of course, but no poorer than most of the people they knew.  There was a brief interlude of financial progress when the family headed towards the middle-class, but it soon collapsed. Whether from the experience of everyday life or the ideological atmosphere, Millie and her siblings, like so many others, were firm believers in social and economic justice, and they were committed Roosevelt Democrats.  These early values stuck with her throughout her life.  

It was in these years – the late 1920s and early 1930s, that she discovered her first true love: books. It was a lifetime love affair.  She told me that once she started reading a book, she felt an obligation to read it all the way through. “If the author took the trouble to write it, the least I can do is finish it.”  That’s a good reader.  

No doubt as a result of all this reading she was an excellent student.  She attended John Dewey Junior High School and New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, finishing at age 16 and moving on to Brooklyn College .  Living at home, she commuted to the college, majoring first in chemistry and later switching to speech - literature in today’s world.  She wrote her senior paper on Virginia Woolf and long have we wished we could find it.  In 1941 she graduated: a serious, capable, intelligent, progressive young woman in an era when there were not so many avenues open for such.  No doubt she wanted a room of her own.  

World events intervened, of course, and with the US entry into World War II, Millie joined the defense effort.  She got a job working for something called the British Purchasing Agency, but did not stay long there as she was soon hired away by the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps Labs.  “They wanted girls with some college math,” she told us, and so she found her way to Fort Monmouth , New Jersey to a house full of young Jewish women, all of them working in defense plants, all of them away from home for the first time.  They were heady and exciting years.  Millie was 22 years old.  

She soon met Herb Cantor – 7 years her senior – at a folk dancing class near the base.  She once told me that she knew right away that she had met “an unusually nice fella.”  Which he was.  Herb soon shipped out to the Asian theater but they had time enough to fall in love, and a few months ago Millie even allowed that they had spent one forbidden weekend together in New York City , not visiting a single relative.  I was glad to learn this.  

The war years passed quickly.  They were actually good years for Millie, as her granddaughter Tess discovered when interviewing her for a school project.  “What about the privations and rationing of the war, Grandma?”  “Tess, honey, it was a ball.”  And so it was for a young woman about to embark on the long second act of her life.  

Herb returned from China late in December 1945, and Millie and he married a few weeks later. They moved to Long Beach where she worked as a librarian, and in 1948 they moved to Levittown .  She was an original Levittowner, and was always proud to be a member of that brigade.  Mady commented the other day to Phil and me about the amazing intelligence and dedication and energy of the women who made communities out of these brand-new, barely finished neighborhoods that had been potato fields a few months earlier.  Millie was among them, raising a family, building a community.  

There was the babysitting co-op and the embroidery group and the neighborhood ballroom dancing classes and the Better Education League and the typing classes for the kids.  We literally carried picnic benches to the sidewalk, put our typewriters on them, and sat in folding chairs while the neighborhood typing teacher told us what to do. I know that many historians and sociologists have described the decline in community spirit and voluntarism in these last decades in America , and no doubt they are right.  There’s a famous book on this topic called “Bowling Alone.”  As my sister pointed out, Millie never bowled alone.  Of course, she never actually bowled, but you take the point.  

This devotion to community and the public good was unusually clear in one aspect: the public library.  There was no library when Millie arrived in Levittown , and among her life’s great accomplishments was the establishment of the Levittown Public Library.  In the 1950s she was the president of Friends of the Library, and she ended up serving nearly 30 years on the board, including several terms as president.  This was an elective public office, and Millie was not afraid to take on the opposition.  Consider this clip from the Levittown Tribune from April 1955.

“Public spirited mothers aren’t exactly a rare thing around here, but Mildred Cantor, wife of Herb Cantor of 78 Sprucewood Drive and President of the Friends of the Levittown Public Library, recently scheduled civic and personal duties almost too close for comfort.

Millie got together with other Friends, on Tuesday the 12^th, to go over the copy for a letter opposing the “Abolish the Library” proposition, to be written over her signature as President. Not until the letter was in the best possible shape did she relax enough to realize that maybe the letter was, but she wasn’t!

On Wednesday the 13^th, with the letter copy in the works, Millie hied herself to the hospital and gave birth to Daniel Edward Cantor, 6 pound, 15-ounce, baby brother of Madeline and Philip.

You’ll note that the date of Daniel’s birthday – April 13^th – is the same as Millie’s.  That was Millie, having a baby, and fighting the good fight with a pen and paper.  Of course it wasn’t all selflessness: she enjoyed being in charge of things and wielding power. One of the pleasures we took as children came from the one perk that accrued to Library Board Trustees -- namely the ability to return books late and not pay a fine.  We would walk up to the women at the checkout desk and say: “We’re Millie Cantor’s children”, and they would smile and give us a big wink.  Of course, Millie being Millie, we were almost never late in returning our books, but it was nice to have a backup plan.  

Truth be told, her love of the library was partly from her love of words and language and books, and partly from thriftiness.  She was of the generation that saved more than they spent. And this led her to her outspoken dislike of bookstores – she considered them a private answer to a public need.  It’s an aside, but I have often thought that the perfect logo for the Working Families Party would be a Public Library building, as what else so instantly captures a civilization’s advance. Plus it would remind me of her.  

I don’t want to leave the impression that Millie lived just in the world of books.  She was as practical as she was intelligent. She was an accomplished craftswoman, serving as a Judge for Crafts at the Nassau County Fair, and was an expert knitter, embroiderer, weaver and all-around fix-it-yourself-er.  She gave lectures on knitting, and turnout was good.  She combined her love of good craftsmanship with her social agenda when she got involved in Master Crafters, a nonprofit consignment shop for older artisans. Master Crafters provided a market for their work via the store that Millie and others managed, and it gave her great pleasure to know that not only were these crafts people keeping busy, they were also making a little money. Some of them sorely needed it.  

Throughout these decades, Millie’s lively mind and active hands were matched with a big heart.  She loved her family fiercely, but not exclusively.  I am certain that the Apa kids, or the Hirsch kids, or the Lebwohl kids, or any of the many visitors and friends we brought to the house over the years would agree that she was a warm, interesting and interested-in-them woman.  She had a wall in her house against which we measured all the visitors, writing their names, hometowns and dates -- in ink -- on the wall. It was a giant “welcome” sign, and repeat visitors always checked for the earlier signatures, even after they stopped growing.   

I know much less about my mother’s life after I left home, but I do know that she and Herb kept busy.  Trips to California to visit Edie and Jack. Meetings of the Cantor Family Society, which Millie served as secretary.  We kids saw her with reasonable frequency, but now it doesn’t feel like enough.  Mom was a great cook, and family gatherings through the 70s and 80s and 90s were always lively and delicious affairs, especially when we started showing up with spouses.  I think – make that I know -- that Millie was ecstatic when her semi-accomplished children actually started to get married and began procreating in the late ‘80s. You might say that Act III began with the arrival of the grandchildren, led by Max, and followed by Nate, Tess, Eli , Ethan and Alice.  Each child filled her with enormous joy, and she bragged about them whenever appropriate -- which she thought was basically always.  She loved her children’s spouses, and bragged about Carrie and Arthur and Laura nearly as frequently as the grandchildren.  

Mady’s husband, Arthur, deserves special mention. Millie deeply adored him, and with good reason.  I want to publicly thank him – Phil and I want to publicly thank him – for his devotion to Millie over the last 30 years, but especially these last years in Philadelphia.  It was like she had a third son.  

After Herb died Millie’s life narrowed.  She had wonderful friends in Levittown and Wantagh , some of whom, happily, are with us today, but life got lonelier.  She continued her close-to-annual trips to California to visit her beloved brother Jack and her nephews and nieces. And she continued to be active in the Family Society and to read and knit as much as her eyesight would permit.  

In 2005 she sold the Levitt house. I joked that that she’d finally had enough of the interviews with the Ph.D. candidates, journalists, sociologists and filmmakers who somehow ended up at her kitchen table wanting to learn about the history of early Levittown .  I’m guessing there were at least two dozen such interviews over the years.  The matching chairs where she and Herb read decades of New York Times’ and New Yorkers were given away, and Millie spent her final 2 ½ years at Cathedral Village, close to Mady and her family.  

She did okay there, but she missed her old home and her old friends and, of course, her husband. Plus the food, she said, “was a little bland.” Millie had a sensuous relationship with food, and knew how to savor a good meal. She also was ever-willing to send something back into the kitchen at a restaurant, which filled her children with dread.

She got sick just a month ago.  It was just a week after Alice became a Bat Mitzvah. In fact, it was on Millie’s birthday – our birthday – that she started feeling poorly, and here we are.  It has been a powerful few weeks.  She knew what was happening.  At the end of the long family meeting with the doctor who gave her the grim diagnosis, the doctor finished up by saying: “Mildred, I’m very pleased to have met you.”  Millie didn’t hesitate: “Well, I can’t really say the same about you.” The five of us left and went out to have Chinese Food.  

She kept her wits about her to the very end, even as the pain medication made her terribly groggy. We were talking to her a few days before her death, and I said something about how Philip, Mady and me – and her eyes popped open, she smiled and said, “Philip, Mady and I…” All four of us had a good laugh. She liked to laugh, and in this regard she married well.  

At Alice ’s Bat Mitvah, Alice and Doug sang a song that the three Cotler brothers – Millie’s nephews – wrote. It’s called “Standing on the Shoulders” and it had been rattling around in my mind since the event. On my last visit with Millie, just hours before she died, I said to her: “Mom, I just want to thank you and Dad for letting us stand on your shoulders, for all that you did for us.”  

I know that I speak for my brother Phil and my sister Mady when I say that we are still standing on her shoulders, and that we are so very proud to be Millie Cantor’s children.

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