My Boyhood Summers in Bay Beach, Ontario, Canada
First published March 10, 2026
My maternal grandfather, Max Silverstein, emigrated from Russia to the United States as a boy. I know nothing about the reasons, his voyage, how he decided to settle in Buffalo, New York, nor when he met my grandmother Eva, also a Russian immigrant. At the time of my birth in 1934, he was a successful businessman in Buffalo, New York, where he co-owned (a legal partnership) a jewelry manufacturing plant, Star Ring Manufacturing, employing about twenty persons, most jewelry craftsmen and some office staff.
He and my grandmother had three children, the oldest, my mother, Vera, the middle child, my Aunt Roselle, and the youngest, my Uncle Sonny, named Arnold Marshall Silverstein, but throughout his life known as Sonny Silverstein.
Star Ring Manufacturing was housed on the second floor of a building in downtown Buffalo at 887 Main Street. It had offices, a conference room, and a large area in which multiple jewelry artisans sat at individual kiosks on the floor periphery under large windows providing excellent ambient light. There they made rings of many styles, most containing semiprecious stones. In the 1930’s and 1940’s Masonic jewelry, notably rings, were very popular and these were included in Star Ring Manufacturing’s output.
As an older child, I would visit, occasionally, and play in the conference room with small boxes filled with jewelry stones; I, also, would watch the jewelers at work. My grandfather employed his two brothers, great-uncle Mendel and great-uncle Ben, in the business, which was very successful.
My grandfather died from a sudden, massive stroke from malignant hypertension at a time when there were no antihypertensive drugs. He had been referred to the Mayo Clinic, where they performed a sympathectomy without effect. This procedure cut the thoracolumbar sympathetic nerve chain in a desperate hope that it would alleviate what was known as “malignant hypertension” in an era without any effective drug therapy. I was about 10 years old at the time of my grandfather’s death. My grandfather’s business was a partnership. Thus, after his death, the business reverted to his partner, leading to Uncle Ben moving on to start his own similar business, Comet Ring Manufacturing. At the time of Alice Jo’s and my engagement, Uncle Ben chose a perfect emerald cut diamond, the shape Alice Jo preferred, and gifted us her engagement ring.
My grandfather’s business success allowed him to live an upper middle class life style. He belonged to a Jewish men’s club, the Montefiore Club, in Buffalo that had dining facilities, a small gym, swimming pool, and lounges for casual meetings and a few meeting rooms for business meetings or other club events. We occasionally had family dinners there, and I sometimes used the swimming pool. Later, a new Jewish Center was constructed in Buffalo, where my friends and I spent leisure time using the facilities and participating in a basketball league in which our team won the championship one year. I learned to play squash and pocket billiards there as well. Two of my basketball teammates at the Jewish Center, Dan Goldberg and Joe Chazan, later, were my anatomy lab partners in the medical school first-year anatomy class at the University of Buffalo when groups of four dissected a cadaver.
My grandparents also had a summer home in Bay Beach, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Erie. To reach it, we first drove across the Peace Bridge, connecting Buffalo to Fort Erie, Ontario, and then a 40-minute drive to the cottage on Lakewood Avenue in Bay Beach. We would often stop in the town of Ridgeway, Ontario, on our route for their delicious ice cream and, occasionally, in the Tartan Shop for English woolen ware.
The summer cottage had a living room and a screened front porch, three bedrooms, a large kitchen, and an adjacent dining room for ten surrounded by screened windows. It was on a double lot, so it had a very large adjacent grassy area in the center of which was a patio with chairs and lounges surrounded by grand, large trees. A long driveway led to a two-story garage that had a stairway leading to a suite containing a large bedroom and bathroom for weekend guests. When I spent the summers there, my parents remained in Buffalo as my father had a busy dental practice, but they would come and stay in the guest quarters on weekends, intermittently. The lot was large enough so that in the back, starting adjacent to the garage and extending south, was a vegetable and flower garden about 25 feet long and 10 feet wide. I was responsible for much of the weeding and watering. I also learned about the growth and maturation of the plants as I tended to them. The yellow flowers turning into cucumbers and the flowering of the gladiolas, for example.
The house was about a ten-minute walk to the public beach on the north shore of Lake Erie.
Much of our time was spent on the beach of those with lakefront cottages. The most notable of these was the Gertrude (Gert) and David (Dave) Cornblum home. They had two daughters, Jill and Joan. Jill was enough older than I that she had a different circle of friends, Joan who was a few years younger and was among the girls with whom I socialized in Buffalo and at Bay Beach. On the weekends, the Cornblum’s beach had large gatherings of our friends, some of whom drove in from Buffalo for the day. Other family friends had homes near us. Isadore (Izzy) and Hazel Lederman were friends from Buffalo who lived in easy walking distance in Bay Beach. Lynn, their daughter, was a bit younger than I was, but we played together occasionally, and their son Richard (Dickie) was even younger, and we did not interact too much until later in life. Izzy Lederman owned a furniture store in Buffalo, and after Alice Jo and I left Buffalo and started our own home in Rochester, he graciously sold us furniture, heavily discounted for our budget. I was on a medical resident’s salary. As an intern, from July 1960 to June 1961, my salary was $1200 per year ($13,000 in 2025 dollars) and increased by $300 each of the next two years.) Alice Jo was caring for our infant children while I was completing my residency. (Susan born in September 1960, and Joanne in April 1962. Pam came later in 1966 when I was Chief Resident in Medicine.)
Another family from Buffalo we knew, the Panoffs, had a summer cottage in Bay Beach, one block to our west on Rosewood Avenue. They owned Leff’s Chocolates, a prominent store on Delaware Avenue in downtown Buffalo that sold all varieties of candies in attractive boxes of various sizes. Chocolate candies in handsome boxes were very popular gifts and family treats. They were chocolate-coated with interior flavors of vanilla, or various berries.
The Breggar family, good friends from Buffalo, rented a summer home in Bay Beach. Sadie and Bill Breggar had a daughter, Linda, who was two years younger than I was, but we were chums during the summer months. They lived on Schooley Road, which was the boundary between Bay Beach to its west and Crystal Beach to its east. Their cottage was an easy walk from ours. When one crossed Schooley Road, going east, one left Bay Beach and entered Crystal Beach. Summer homes and an occasional year-round home populated Bay Beach. There were no commercial properties. Whereas Crystal Beach had summer homes, but much of the community had commercial properties, grocery, clothing, and a variety of other stores, eating establishments, and hangouts with outdoor music and dancing in the evening, where coed groups gathered.
A large amusement park sat at Crystal Beach’s east end, abutting a dock where the Crystal Beach Boat (a ferry) docked after crossing Lake Erie from Buffalo. (Figure 1) It made this round trip several times a day. The amusement park was large and had traditional rides, a large merry-go-round with an arm where one could try to grab a brass ring while whizzing by, a large Ferris wheel, bumper cars, a roller coaster, game kiosks, and food stands (see link below). It also had one unusual ride, a series of canals in which one could drive an inboard motorboat through the canal system. A great favorite of young teens. Adjacent to the amusement park was a large dance hall that attracted big bands of that era.
Figure 1. The ferry pier in Crystal Beach. (Round trips from Lake Erie port of Buffalo, New York).
Lake Erie was clear (hence, Crystal Beach) and had white-sand beaches and warm waters in those years. Later, the Lake was polluted by industrial wastes, but that postdated our experiences there. It was, later, cleaned up.
Erie Road ran east-west along the lakefront from which long driveways would access the lakefront cottages. Erie Road paralleled the beachfront and, thus, was the terminus of the north-south residential streets, like our street, Lakewood Avenue, giving access to the beaches.
The summers in Bay Beach were a highlight of my childhood experiences. After Alice Jo and I began dating in the summer of 1954, we would visit the Cornblum’s cottage in Bay Beach on occasional weekend days, where we enjoyed a beautiful summer day with several childhood friends who gathered there. Sherkston Quarry, northwest of Crystal Beach, was a short, roughly 10-15 minute drive along the coast. It was a close neighboring attraction to the northwest of Crystal Beach. We would meet friends there very occasionally. We, also, had a very isolated quarry swimming area in Canada, just over the Peace Bridge, to which we would escape to from time to time. It was sometimes just the two of us, there.