"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 lived from 1904 to 2005 and served as a New York City public-school teacher and administrator. He experienced major technological, medical, political, and social changes including human flight, spaceflight, pandemics, vaccines, economic devastation, Nazi conquest, atomic warfare, civil rights, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. As a child he and his brothers heard Titanic distress calls on a homemade crystal radio; at 14 his father died in the Spanish flu and he worked as a Wall Street runner. He recalled patrolled streets and later security measures after 9/11. He favored the maxim, "Nothing is ever as bad or as good as it seems." He saw New York as chaotic, unjust, and nonetheless full of decent people of diverse origins trying to make lives.
Read at Curbed
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