Cohen Family

Lou, Dora and a 6-month old Marilyn Smith | NYC: 1927

Ostensibly, Dora Cohen's first paid gig was as a 14-year-old seamstress, seemingly a world apart from where she grew up at 682 Wythe Ave. in Brooklyn. Working in a factory, she may have sewn shirtwaists on a Singer she would later take to California as one of two prized possessions on the migration from New York (the other was a cedar chest, both of which are still around today).

We know today, from documentation at the time (which you can see below), that Dora Cohen was 4'11'', had brown hair and weighed 116 pounds on Sept. 11, 1920.

She was certified by the New York Board of Health that day - less than a month before she would turn 14 - to be "qualified for employment under the labor law," which prohibited those younger than 16 to work before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., and not more than eight hours any one day or more than six days in one week.

(Incidentally, it wasn't until 1938 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which codified federal child labor laws New York already had in place.)

Born August 23, 1906, to Sara and Joseph, Dora had one brother, Milton. She had short brown hair that, when not matted down, bobbed above her shoulders. Before she married Louis Greene, Dora graduated high school in 1920, the same year women won the right to vote and a decade before she would move to California, family in tow.

It is unclear (to me, at least) when Dora and Lou married, but according to U.S. Census records, they were together as of 1930 and living with Joseph and Sarah at the time. In fact, Marilyn (or the person that seems to be Marilyn) was counted in the 1930 Census as "Marian,"  which I'll chalk up to human error on the census takers part.

There are more interesting tidbits from the Census records, including that Joseph and Sarah Cohen were each born in Russia (Joseph in 1881) and Lou Greene's parents emigrated from Austria. Lou and Dora were first generation Americans while the family spoke Yiddish in the home.

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The transition from hustle and bustle New York was made possible by the Great Depression, which rendered Lou and his father-in-law Joseph Cohen unemployed and the Greene family in search of promise. They heard from Harry Craft, Dora's uncle, that California was a warm, snowless wonderland, where opportunities fell from the sky and jobs abounded.

It was 1930 and a three-year-old Marilyn Greene was not yet a Smith. The families, in search of a new beginning, boarded a Greyhound bus and made the five-day journey to Los Angeles. The trip included Sara Cohen, Harry's sister (and my great great grandmother), her husband, Joseph, their daughter Dora, her husband Lou and their daughter Marilyn.

Dora and Lou were nearly vanquished of all material possessions, save her sewing machine and cedar chest (the former now sits in Hillary's garage, the latter in Marilyn's living room), each prized for their memories and usefulness.

But they had little money and moved into a tiny, two-bedroom apartment on City Terrace Drive in Boyle Heights, where the American Dream would soon take root...