'Milk' Evokes Memories for Relatives

What else to do on a snowy, blustery day? Read the Gray Lady, of course. I stumbled upon this from about a week ago. Don't know how I missed it, but here it is. It's quite touching, really.

Here's a taste:

Long before Harvey Milk became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, before he established himself as a civil rights leader in San Francisco, and before he was assassinated in 1978, he was a bright, sometimes mischievous, kid growing up in a large Jewish immigrant family on Long Island.

Gus Van Sant’s “Milk,” a nominee for the Academy Award for best picture, has evoked strong memories for Milk’s family on the East Coast. The film, starring Sean Penn, who has been nominated for best actor, focuses mostly on Milk’s life after he moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s. His family was not emphasized much in the film nor in earlier accounts, “The Mayor of Castro Street,” Randy Shilts’s 1982 biography of Milk, and Rob Epstein’s 1984 documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk.”

One of those relatives is Helen Milk Mendales, a cousin, now 87 and living in Bayside, Queens. Her father, Alexander, was an older brother of Harvey Milk’s father, William. Mrs. Mendales recalled of her cousin Harvey, who was 8 years younger, in an interview:

I knew him when he was a little boy. He grew up in Woodmere. I grew up in Lynbrook, which was about a mile away. We saw each other frequently. I saw his mother, who was very close to my mother.

He was a wild little kid — he and his older brother, Robert. One day, their mother had to go out for a little bit. Robert was probably about 6 years old and his brother was 3 years old – maybe they were younger than that. In those days there were no frozen foods. It was canned goods. Her larder was stocked with canned goods. The two of them got together. I don’t know whose idea it was, but they joined in and took all the labels off the cans. When my aunt needed a can, it was always a surprise.

If you're tired of shoveling snow go and read the rest HERE.

More later.
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