Florence, born in 1916, was an artist from her earliest days. As an independent woman in New York City, she was trained at Parsons Art School, and made her way in commercial art in the 1930's.

It was later on in the 1950's after moving to Colorado with a young family that she began to paint creatively.  Her oils date from the 50's and 60's and thereafter she began to work in other media like pen and ink, etching press, watercolor, and pastel. She continued to be creative into her 90's and now resides in Santa Monica where she lives a comfortable life with an appreciation of a of her accomplishments and a love for her family.

Memoirs by Florence Unkeless

My early years were fairly uneventful,and not unhappy, in spite of the fact that I came from a more or less broken home. My mother and father did not get along and quarreled all the time. Papa left for good when I was fourteen years old, and I have only a dim memory of a tall thin man with curly, rather kinky, pepper and salt hair, and a big mustache. He was a kind man, and I cannot remember ever being punished or spanked by him or for that matter, by my mother either. The big fight between he and my mother was over his gambling. He loved to play pinochle, and would come home at all hours of the night. Whether he lost much money is something I do not know, but I can recall waking up at night and hearing them screaming at each other.

Mama was more real to me. She was a short, rather plump, pretty woman. I think she felt superior to my father, because even though they were both immigrants, she could read and write English, which he never did. I know nothing about their life in the old country, because they never talked about it. Mama always worked, so maybe finances were a problem, although I can't say I ever went hungry. She was a very talented lady with a needle, and my father was a good tailor and a cutter. At one time, while they were still together, they owned a small dress factory, where my mother designed the clothes and made up the samples. My father was the cutter and also the shop foreman, and my brother Leo did the selling.

Leo the eldest, blonde and blue-eyed in contrast to his three sisters, was fourteen years older than I was. Since he got married when I was eleven years old, we did not have too much in common. What I remember best about him was that he liked to draw cartoons.

Virginia, or Ginnie, as she was always known was the nearest to me in age, there being only seven years difference between us. We used to fight when I was small because I was her little sister and a pest. She lived an interesting but unfortunately short life. Being tall, statuesque, and good looking, she managed to get a job as a showgirl with the Marx Brothers. She appeared in "Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers" on Broadway and on the road with those musicals. It all seemed very glamorous to me. When not a showgirl, she would find jobs as a dress model in the Seventh Avenue Showrooms.

We lived in Brighton Beach for a few years, and during that time Ginnie met and married a handsome Irish lifeguard named Frank. They had a little girl they named Francie, who was curly-haired, blonde, and beautiful, but the marriage was not a happy one. They finally separated and eventually divorced. When Ginnie met and fell in love with Joe Gould, she gave up custody of Francie, who was about five years old at the time. I have never been able to understand how she could have done that, but she had her reasons. I'm not exactly sure what they were, but my guess is that it was fear of Frank, who could be brutal when drunk. He insisted on seeing the child. I have to say he really loved her. But I think that Ginnie wanted a clean break with the past so she could get on with her life, and that was her decision. Virginia married Joe, and was blissfully happy for a few years. Joe was 4F, therefore he did not have to go into the army. They had a little boy named Bruce, and when he was three years old Ginnie became pregnant again. In about her seventh month she had a viral pneumonia that caused a blood clot in her leg and it traveled up to her heart and killed her. She was thirty-six years old.

But I am getting ahead of myself. We moved so much when I was young that I have no great memories of neighborhoods, or childhood friends. Most of the time we lived in upper Manhattan, and I can remember roller-skating down the hill to Riverside Drive. At that age my knees always had scabs on them. Mollie, a butcher's daughter, was a friend of mine for a while. On warm summer days we would sit under a tree sewing dolls‘ clothes out of scraps of material. I caught head lice from her.

One summer when I was about ten years old, and my parents were quite prosperous since this was at the time we owned the dress factory, I was sent away to camp. We did have a maid then who was an enormous black woman named Hattie. She did not have a particularly good disposition so rather than have me underfoot all summer, it was decided to send me to camp. This was the first time I had ever left home, and I was terribly, terribly homesick. I detested camp and the things they made me do, like eating lumpy oatmeal for breakfast, singing dopey songs, and just camp in general. But worst of all were the swimming lessons. They started with teaching us the dead-man's float, and actually insisted that we put our faces in the water! I would have none of that, and wrote tearful letters home to please come and get me. Finally I got results when I mentioned that the camp doctor said I had heart trouble. I don't know where I picked up that idea since I was healthy as a horse, but it worked.

After three weeks my father came to take me home. Of course, by then I had gotten over my homesickness, learned to do the dead-man's float, made a wallet out of birch bark in arts and crafts, which I enjoyed tremendously. In short, I was really starting to have a great time. I was too ashamed to admit this, so I dutifully and regretfully left with papa, back to Hattie's grumpy ministrations for the rest of the summer. The moral is not to wish for something too hard, because you might get it. At any rate, I'm glad I learned to put my face in the water.

In spite of all the moving, and we moved at least once every year, I did not suffer unduly from it. School was a stabilizing influence, since I enjoyed it, and was always a good student. The one thing I was sure of was the fact that I loved to draw. I would copy Nell Brinkley drawings ad infinitum. She was a very sugary newspaper illustrator, and I thought she was wonderful. I also drew from memory acts I had seen on the vaudeville stage. I knew that Washington Irving High School had an excellent art course, which was the reason I chose to go there when I graduated from P.S 189, when all my classmates were going to George Washington High School in Washington Heights. This was just as well, since we soon moved to Brooklyn, and I did not have to change schools.

My first year in high school I made friends with Sonny and Ruth. Sonny was to play a very important role in my life. It was through her that I was to meet George, but of course I did not know this at the time. Although our academic paths diverged after that first year, since I took fashion art, Ruth textile design, and Sonny commercial art with extra academic subjects, we remained fast friends. To this day I feel I got a pretty good education in Washington Irving. We had a long day, because four periods were devoted to art and four to academics, but except for the fact that I took no math courses, I feel my education was well-rounded, especially in English courses. However, there was one thing lacking in good old Washington Irving, namely BOYS! After all I was living in a family of women, which included my mother and sisters Virginia and Gilda.

Sonny, Ruth, and I were quite inseparable in those days. I used to love to stay over at Sonny's house on weekends. First of all, he had her own room, something I had never before experienced. It was only an enclosed porch added on to a little bungalow in Brighton Beach, but it was warm and cozy. We would lie in bed and giggle until late at night, probably talking about BOYS. Finally her mother would come in and tell us to hush up. I think what I really enjoyed most was the warm family atmosphere. There was a father and mother who really liked each other, lots of relatives dropping in, and just the whole ambiance of the house was thoroughly enjoyable. Ruth had less of an influence, but the three of us did manage to have some good times together. I have have an old snapshot of us fooling around with some marionettes we had made for a play we had written for an English class.

My father had left for parts unknown after years of quarreling with my mother. I was fourteen at the time, and would meet him occasionally to go walking on the boardwalk, and then even that stopped. My older brother Leo had married and left home when I was eleven or twelve, and my memories of him are fairly dim. So my contact with the opposite sex were few and infrequent. I can remember bemoaning my dateless state all through high school. I envied the girls who would come in on Monday morning with tales of the marvelous times they had over the weekend. I was too naive [or dumb] to realize that they were just better liars than I was.

My year there was one that I enjoyed very much, never forgetting or being allowed to forget that I was the first one in the family to go beyond high school. When the year was up I was offered a scholarship for the final year, but that was not to be. This was the middle of the depression, and economics took over. I had to refuse the offer and go out to find a job, so I could help support the family. In those days Gilda was the real breadwinner of the family. She even gave me my allowance of $5.00 a week while I was in school. My mother ran a beauty shop in the front room of our flat on Avenue J in Brooklyn. She would charge three items for $1.00. Remember this was 1934. Mama tried hard enough, but she really was not terribly good. Without Gilda and her good job as a legal secretary we would have starved.

I was heartbroken at having to refuse the  scholarship. I would take long walks to release my frustrations and calm my wounded soul. But I did find a job as an artist at Montgomery Ward for the magnificent sum of $22.50 per week, which was not bad for those days. Truthfully, I was pretty proud to be able to contribute my share of the family finances. Some years later I went to work for a small advertising agency on Madison Avenue, and found myself working with the girl who was selected for the scholarship I had turned down. She also won the following year, and spent it at the Paris branch of Parsons. I was green with envy, since I figured it might have been me, had I been able to stay. Common sense told me, however, that I could not have afforded it anyway. But it was a nice dream.