THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 26, 1996 TAG: 9606260030
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 219 lines
IT'S 5 P.M. on a Thursday evening. Cocktail hour for Helen Snyder Simmons and Lillie Snyder Davis.
All is in place. The cheese curls and potato chips on the coffee table. The coasters protecting the sideboard. In comes Helen, carrying a tray with heavy, crystal glasses, glimmering with a clear liquid.
Their doctors have given these two sisters permission to sip their jiggers of vodka each evening. After all, with Lillie at 96, and Helen at 94, it's a little late to be telling them what they can and can't do - as even their family has learned.
The sisters have been sharing a drink together every day for 17 years - since Lillie moved into the apartment above Helen.
Their conversations during these twilight toasts ramble. Politics. Gossip about their family. Plans to attend an upcoming opera or the symphony.
But mostly, it is just a time to be together. As they have been - if not physically, then emotionally - for 94 years, ever since 2-year-old Lillie Snyder met her baby sister.
Sharing their youth. Sharing their marriages. And now, sharing the twilight of their lives.
The photo album is heavy. Too heavy for Lillie Davis' thin arms.
But she picks it up anyway, veins showing like blue runners under her translucent skin, and staggers beneath its weight to the sofa.
``I don't know what you want to see these for,'' she says, her high, thin voice carrying the ``old Norfolk'' drawl. ``They're just some old pictures.''
As Lillie opens the album, a thick stack of yellowing Western Union telegrams falls out. Dated March 1, 1925, they are all congratulatory messages on the date of Lillie's wedding.
Lillie Snyder met her future husband because her mother wouldn't let her younger sister, Helen, travel alone to Syracuse to attend a college football game with Helen's beau.
So Helen ordered her boyfriend, Jack Simmons: ``Get my sister a date.''
Dates had never been a problem for Helen. With her long, blonde curly hair, mischievous eyes and curvy figure, she was always the popular one among the three Simmons girls. Lillie, the oldest, with her dark, brooding looks, her ``safe'' job as a secretary, was the serious one.
Lillie and Helen were the oldest of five children - three girls and two boys - born to Sam and Yetta Snyder in the small living quarters above S. Snyder's - Sam's general store on Chapel Street in Norfolk.
Money was tight, but there was always enough for music lessons. For a special chin strap designed to correct Lillie's skewed jaw. And for Helen to travel by ferry to a dance in Newport News one night, where she met Jack Simmons.
Jack did find a date for Lillie for that football weekend: his best friend, Marvin ``Monnie'' Davis.
And love bloomed.
That spring, the two couples planned a double wedding. After all, they figured, why should the Syracuse contingent have to travel twice to Norfolk?
But their rabbi was worried. According to unwritten Jewish law, he told them, a double wedding would be ``too much joy'' for one day. His suggestion: one sister would marry just before sundown, the traditional end of the Jewish day; the other, just after sundown.
Pictures in Lillie's album show the sisters in knee-length lace dresses, floppy brimmed hats nearly hiding their eyes. Helen, 23, has her hand on her hip, giving her customary dash of pizazz to the picture. Lillie, 25, is characteristically more sedate.
The couples honeymooned in Miami taking an overnight train trip to what was then a virtually unknown tourist destination.
It was the beginning of a Florida land boom and Helen's husband, Jack, convinced Lillie and Monnie to stay and get in on it. For a year, the couples bought and sold real estate. Then a severe depression hit the state, along with two hurricanes. The boom collapsed and the couples left.
Helen and her husband returned to Syracuse. Lillie and her husband went to Richmond.
There, true to the retailing in her blood, Lillie and Monnie started a children's clothing store called Baby Land. Meanwhile, in Syracuse, Helen's husband started selling real estate.
Both women wanted children. But Helen never got pregnant and it took Lillie 10 years before she had her first son, Stuart.
The yellowing black-and-white pictures in Lillie's album show a young mother holding up a snowsuit-clad baby. But ``Aunt'' Helen is missing from these family pictures. She'd been ill.
When Stuart was six months old, Lillie got a call from Helen's husband. ``If you want to see your sister alive,'' Jack Davis said, ``get up here.''
The year was 1935 and commercial air travel was new and risky. But Lillie feared that if she took the train to Syracuse, Helen would be dead by the time she got there.
So she left her baby in her husband's care and boarded a tiny, 8-passenger plane. The chairs weren't even bolted down, she remembered. When the plane landed in Washington, there was a telegram from Jack. ``She's still alive,'' it read. ``Keep going.''
A larger plane took Lillie to Newark, N.J., and from there, she rode the mail train to Syracuse, arriving around 2 a.m.
Helen still remembers her shock at seeing Lillie. ``What are you doing here at this hour?'' she asked.
``I came to see you,'' her sister said.
Through the years, the sisters' lives took different paths. Lillie and Monnie headed west to California, where they made a small fortune in real estate.
Helen and Jack, who had owned a woman's clothing store in Norfolk during World War II, sold the store and, using the proceeds, took early retirement in Norfolk.
In 1956, they moved to California to live near Lillie and Monnie. But it was a lifestyle that Helen, with her strong roots back in Norfolk, didn't like.
``It was like a continual vacation,'' she said. ``It didn't seem like it was a permanent thing.''
Three years later, Helen and her husband moved back to Norfolk.
The two sisters spent the next 20 years on opposite sides of the country. There were visits, often when a family member was ill and one sister came to lend a helping hand. They saw each other at weddings and bar mitzvahs. But for the most part, it was a time of separateness.
Lillie and Monnie lived a very wealthy life in California, traveling to Europe by boat, hosting cocktail parties and benefit dinners. Helen and Jack led a more sedate, middle-class existence in Norfolk. In their home, money, while not exactly tight, wasn't always plentiful.
Lillie, busy raising two sons, doesn't even recall missing her sister very much during this time.
``We're people that don't feel sorry for ourselves,'' she says.
And yet, when the time came in 1975 for the couples to celebrate their 50th anniversary, they did it in the same manner in which they were married - together.
Photographs from the anniversary party in California show Helen in a bright blue gown, gathered with sequins underneath her breasts. Lillie is dressed more conservatively in black and white. But the sisters wear identical sprays of white flowers pinned to their left shoulder.
Twenty-one years later, sitting in her fourth-floor apartment overlooking Norfolk's Hague, Lillie looks at the faded color pictures that show the sisters, their husbands and friends, dancing, feasting and laughing.
She looks at her sister sitting across the room.
``They're all gone now. All gone.''
Helen and Lilly share their sisterhood with little obvious emotion. They don't hug or kiss. They don't even take the other's arm when walking.
Neither can explain the connection, the need they have for each other.
Yet the need is there.
In 1979, after Lillie's husband died, Helen wanted to bring her sister closer. Come home, she said. It's time.
An apartment had opened up in Pembroke Towers, the high-rise building on the Hague where Helen and Jack lived, and Helen snatched it up for her sister.
After Lillie moved back, Helen included her sister in the parties, lunches and temple sisterhood meetings that made up her days.
And, of course, the sewing group.
Helen started the Marcelle Gates sewing group, named after her closest friend, at Ohef Sholom Temple in 1956.
Every Monday, 20 women met in a large room in the temple to sew. Women like Geneva Hofheimer, Evelyn and Rose Nordlinger, Alice Oberndorfer and Elsa Goodman - the bedrock of Norfolk's Jewish community.
They made armhole bibs out of Turkish dishtowels and stitched medallions on children's clothes. Fashioned beaded- and lace-trimmed petticoats, aprons, table and blanket covers. Some were sewn by hand, others on hand-powered sewing machines.
Over the years, the sewing group donated $50,000 to the temple. The money bought a meat-slicing machine, china, computers and helped fund the temple's 150th anniversary celebration.
``The money is not anywhere near as important as the devotion. . . that these women brought to the temple,'' said Rabbi Lawrence Forman.
But eventually, the original members of the sewing group died. Younger women went into the workforce instead of into the temple sisterhood. And the group's numbers dwindled.
On Jan. 26 this year, the temple honored the contributions of the Marcelle Gates sewing group. It honored Helen and Lillie, the club's last two survivors.
It is hard to see the young Helen and Lillie in the elderly women they are today. Age has whitened their hair, furrowed their faces and faded their blue-green eyes.
But it hasn't bent Helen. Her back is still straight, her chin lifted. She is vain about her beauty, refusing to wear her glasses in public, never leaving the apartment without makeup. She still wears her brightly colored clothes like a couture model.
But age has marked her hearing. She is nearly deaf.
So Lillie is the translator. Somehow, even though Lillie rarely raises her voice, Helen can always hear what her sister says.
If Helen is the tropical bird, bright in all her plumage, then Lillie is the wren. Once the taller of the two sisters, now she is stooped and thin, birdlike in her fragility. She dresses in drab colors - browns, navy blues, tweeds. Her jewelry is simple - a pair of pearl earrings - or nonexistent.
But her mind is as nimble as a gymnast. Her hearing is clear and her eyes bright behind wire-rimmed glasses.
She spends much of her day reading stock reports and business papers. Although her accountant does her taxes, Lillie handles the rest of her multitude of investments.
Helen is more inclined to read novels. And she's a killer bridge player. It's one of the few things she does without Lillie. Everything else - the Virginia Opera, the symphony, plays at the Wells Theater and exhibits at Chrysler Hall - they attend together.
These days, Helen does the driving. Lillie's license expired this spring, and she doubts she could pass the vision test. So they alternate which car Helen drives. One day, it's Lillie's Oldsmobile. The next, Helen's.
Unless, of course, Lillie has to be somewhere before 10 a.m. Then Helen, a late sleeper, tells her to take a taxi.
Sometimes their great-niece Terri Denison drives them around. Then the sisters sit in the back seat and talk. About current events and community gossip. The latest party or wedding they've attended. The upcoming elections.
One thing they don't talk about is what the other will do when one of them dies. Of the five Snyder siblings, only their youngest brother is still living.
``It will be just awful for them,'' says Denison's mother, Helen Koltun. ``Aunt Lillie once said to me, `I cannot imagine life without Aunt Helen.'
And so they continue to meet every evening at 5. One day in Lillie's apartment, the next in Helen's. They sip their vodka and crunch their cheese curls. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
ABOVE: Lillie, left, and Helen on the day of their double wedding in
1926. BELOW: The newlyweds in Miami.
Color photo
MOTOYA NAKAMURA/The Virginian-Pilot
RIGHT: Lillie, 96, and Helen, 94, have shared a drink every day in
each other's Norfolk apartments for 17 years.
Photos
Helen, left, graduated from high school in 1919 and Lillie in 1916. by CNB