This is a woman's frank, uninhibited personal story played
out against the backdrop of the major world events of the
20th Century.




Sylvia Cole was born on the Lower East Side to Jewish immigrants
from Austria-Poland. By the age of six, she was living with her
maternal grandparents, her parents having come down with
tuberculosis as a result of the Spanish flu of 1918. The entire
nuclear family was dispersed: her parents in a sanitarium in Denver,
one brother in the foster care system, and the youngest taken by
an aunt and uncle on the day he was born.




At nine Sylvia was sent to an orphanage from which she was rescued
by a benefactor a year later. She lived for four years with an aunt
from whose home she ran away. She wandered homeless in New
York City until she was taken in by a teacher at Hunter College
High School, from which she graduated first in her class. She then
lived as an au pair girl in various homes while she attended Hunter
College, making Phi Beta Kappa.




This is the story of her adventures, including running away to
the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with another girl, the story of
her loves and marriages, first to a Broadway actor and then to a
well-known educator, of her intellectual passions. She retired from
a career as an outstanding teacher of English in the New York
City high schools and discovered that there is life after retirement.
She became an editor and writer and appeared monthly with her
husband, Abe Lass, on "New York and Company" at WNYC for
two and a half years.




She has two married sons, four grandchildren, and a boyfriend.