Excerpt from Uncle Richard Orlikoff's Letter of July 7, 2000
Dad said that the farm was stony, with poor soil. Somehow or other they got into New Jersey and began a dairy farm. When I was very young, Dad was a milkman in Passaic, New Jersey. I believe he was delivering milk from the family farm.
Came the depression and the dairy could not support all of them. Dad moved West to join Mother’s family in South Bend, Indiana, where Sam Levine operated a rendering plant. Times in South Bend were grim and Dad moved up into Michigan (Whitehall), where he traded furs in the winter and ran a junk yard year-round, graduating into the auto parts business. I remember traveling with him to the Upper Peninsula to buy furs from the Indians. We left Whitehall for Big Rapids with all of the family’s belongings packed on to a truck. If we had been in Oklahoma we would have been called “Okies”.
In Big Rapids Dad bought the house and business (Junk) of an old Jewish man named Rose. I don’t know whether he paid cash or bought on contract, or part cash and part contract. We replaced Rose as the only Jewish family in Big Rapids.
Somehow or other our Grandfather, Sam Levine, moved up to Muskegon with his family. Perhaps the move of both families was coincident. I believe the Levine family had been in Michigan at an earlier time. I remember stories about the Levine family arriving in Houghton, Michigan. Word of their arrival had preceded them and, it was related to me, the town turned out at the train station to get their first glimpse of real Jews.