While helping my father, @fotogene32, clean out his house to move I came across lots of his old photos. The house, in Whitestone, Queens, belonged to his parents before he lived there, and this was taken nearby, at Fort Totten, by the Throgs Neck bridge. It’s my grandfather, Anton, and my sister Nina in 1966 or 67, about the time Anton moved into the house my father has occupied since inheriting it from his parents.

Our Dedushka (Grandpa in Russian) always used to claim that there were men encased in the bridge’s cement anchorages, one of which you can see in the background. Apparently they fell in while the structure was being poured and there was no way to stop the cement. At least that’s what he said. Anton was a gregarious man, full of tall tales like that. Born in 1909, he was a soccer pro in the Soviet Union before WWII, and survived Soviet prison and then German labor and internment camps along with my dad and my Babushka (Grandmother). To immigrate to the U.S.A. was a wild dream for someone in Stalin’s Russia, but they did it. This was more than 15 years after they arrived here.

My Deduska looks so cool, stylish and in his prime in this picture. I just love it. A couple of years later he suffered a stroke, and though he recovered reasonably well, and lived another decade or so, the swagger of his youth and the strength he projects in this photo never fully returned. ~shared by @kolomatsky