My Grandparents Anita (Straus) & Joe Weber

Elizabeth Weber Handwerker,  a member of the JHSNJ, has written our April 2018 newsletter.

My grandparents, Joe and Anita (Straus) Weber, met as students at Eastside High School in Paterson.  I never met my grandmother—she died before I was born—and I barely knew my grandfather.  There are a great many questions I wish I could ask them, but since I cannot ask them, I hope that some readers of this newsletter might be able to answer these questions for me.
 
My grandfather graduated from Eastside High School in June 1935, a few weeks after his 16th birthday.  His parents had immigrated to the US from Lithuania around 1911, or so they told the census taker, and they spoke Yiddish at home (his name was Yonach until he entered school. While there, school officials insisted on a more “American” name, and his mother chose Joseph instead of Jonah).  What schools would he have attended before Eastside?  What grades did he skip in order to graduate from high school so early, and how common was this at the time? 
 
Following his family through successive censuses, the Webers lived on North 1st St, then on Benson Street (which no longer exists), and his high school yearbook said he was living on Fulton Place by 1935.  I’m told his family was quite devout, but I have no idea if they were associated with any synagogue or landsmen shaft society.  I’ve heard that my grandfather attended the Patterson Talmud Torah, but I have no idea what he would have studied in the Talmud Torah, and how many of his afterschool hours he would have spent there.  If you can tell me anything about the Paterson Talmud Torah in those years, I’d love to hear about it. At Eastside my grandfather Joseph was enrolled in the "Mechanical Arts" curriculum.  His yearbook lists his activities as being math club and orchestra. His hobbies were listed as amateur radio, chemistry and astronomy. In that same yearbook his ambition was declared to be undecided. The editors of the June 1935 yearbook felt the following quote most applicable to him: “The highest condition takes rise in the lowest……”
 
By the time he reached his teens, my grandfather was busy working odd jobs.  His father, a union house carpenter, was often unemployed during the economic depression of the 1930s, and left the family around the time my grandfather finished high school.  My grandfather tried work as a golf caddy and did not like it. After that he found that he could earn money repairing radios (I’m told he had been a member of the Passaic County Amateur Radio Club since elementary school, but I don’t know much about what that entailed).  This was the beginning of what became a remarkable career in engineering and physics. 
 
After graduating Eastside High School my grandfather studied engineering for a year at Cooper Union.  Feeling badly about his older siblings paying for his housing and meals, he took a competitive exam for the civil service and scored high enough that he was instead nominated for a place at the Naval Academy at Annapolis.  He graduated from Annapolis in 1940 and was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Lexington.  The Lexington was out at sea during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but was sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea in May of 1942.  Grandfather used part of the navy’s payment for his possessions lost at sea to buy an engagement ring for my grandmother.
 
My grandmother came from a very different Jewish Paterson family than my grandfather.  Her parents were born in the US (in Ohio and in North Dakota) and I believe both of them had attended college.  She grew up in a large house on 14th Avenue that her parents had built in the 1920s, near Barnert hospital.  It is possible her family may have belonged to Barnert Temple (do those records still exist?) but they did not often attend.  Her father was a manager of the Straus-Kent, a silk manufacturing company (which I know nothing else about) until he died suddenly in 1929 when my grandmother was 11 years old.  I am told that their life insurance company went bankrupt during the Depression but my great-grandfather’s business partners continued to support my grandmother’s family, even helping to pay my grandmother’s tuition to Smith College.  I would like to know more about Straus-Kent, and the people who helped my grandmother’s family.
 
My grandmother’s high school yearbook, from January 1936, shows she was voted the “Brightest” and the “Pride of the Faculty” among the girls of that graduating class at Eastside High. Her stated ambition then was  "to do the right thing at the right time." Anita was enrolled in the "Classics" curriculum.  The editors of her high school year book thought the following quote best described her, "Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low - an excellent thing in a woman." {It was 1936, after all!!} She earned a degree in physics from Smith College in 1940 but I don’t know what she did from then until she married my grandfather in October of 1942 and I doubt anyone still alive could tell me.  After she married, she taught high school physics for a year or two while my grandfather was at sea commanding a small ship in the Atlantic.  I believe she lived with her mother and grandmother in Paterson during 1942-1943 and again around 1946-1947 when she had two young children and family housing was scarce near my grandfather’s naval assignment in Washington, DC.  I’d love to hear from anyone who might remember a young physics teacher in the Paterson area named “Mrs. Anita Weber”!
 
My grandfather’s family left Paterson in the mid-1930’s—by 1940, the census showed his mother and his unmarried siblings living in East Orange.  He went on to study electronics at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, to be the first head of "electronic countermeasures" in the Bureau of Ships. He would leave the Navy in 1948 to become a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland.  With the huge increase in the number of college students at the end of the war and their interest in new technologies such as RADAR, he was hired as a full professor on the condition that he earn a PhD, which he did, at night, in less than 3 years. 
 
He had, as I have written above, a remarkable career.  He was among the inventors of the MASER (an antecedent of the LASER), and was nominated for a Nobel Prize for this work (although other researchers won the prize).  He was the first to make a serious attempt to detect the gravitational waves emitted by exploding and colliding stars and he believed he had detected these waves.  The designers of the LIGO project, which has received so much attention these past few years, have publicly credited his gravitational wave detection efforts from the 1960s and 1970s for inspiring their project, which has involved thousands of scientists and billions of dollars to detect gravitational waves.
 
Meanwhile, my grandmother raised four sons and managed their household.  Her widowed mother remained in Paterson until about 1956, when she remarried.  My father remembers driving up from Maryland to Paterson in those years and visiting Ms. Hallie Turner, who had taught science to both of my grandparents at Eastside High School.
 
My grandmother died suddenly in 1971.  I never met her but very much wish I had! 

Elizabeth Weber Handwerker, member of the Jewish Historical Society of North Jersey