Roy and Arthur was a vaudeville comedy team. Roy was my father; Arthur was my uncle Bunk. On November 22, 1921, after their last show that night in Philadelphia, Phil Roy got a call backstage, where he was told, "It's a boy!"
My father drove that night from Philadelphia to Babylon, Long Island, to greet his new son, Jacob Cohen. Me. (My father's real name was Philip Cohen; his stage name was Phil Roy.)
I was born in an eighteen-room house owned by in mother's sister Rose and her husband. After a couple of weeks my mother took me back to her place in Jamaica, Queens where we lived with my four-year-old sister, Marion, my mother's mother, my mother's other three sisters -- Esther, Peggy, and Pearlie -- her brother Joe, and a Swedish carpenter named Mack, who Esther later married. The whole family had come to America from Hungary when my mother was four. My mother's father -- my grandfather -- was almost never referred to in that house. Rumor has it he's still in Hungary -- and still drinking. My dad wasn't around much, e ... read full excerpt from: It's Not Easy Bein' Me ebook
