in parentheses

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding research career. He’s since published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, plays, hybrid and interviews in nearly 200 journals and anthologies on five continents. Publications include Hippocampus, Ilanot, Kestrel, Litro, Newfound, The Atlantic, Typehouse. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.

Out and About

In the Spring of 1959 when I was a twelve-year-old finishing 6th grade, my father invited a family member whom I had never heard of, whom nobody ever talked about, to visit our home. A resident of Manhattan, he was the son of my father’s mother’s sister Lydia, who died in October 1909 while giving birth to her first child. In her honor, that child’s father, William Stein, named him after his mother, calling him Lydell Jules Stein. That made Lydell a first cousin of my father’s.
I knew nothing about Lydell before this meeting and, after the meeting, learned little more except that my father took me aside and said, “Lydell is homosexual.” I learned nothing else about his life except that, presumably because he was a homosexual and, also, a Jew, he was largely excluded from family interaction and conversation, perhaps partly by his own choice.
At the time we met, Lydell asked me about my interests. We were sitting out on the porch with flagstone floor and jalousied windows. He was very short, very thin, and wore unexpectedly simple clothing for what I considered an important family gathering. I said I collected stamps. He said that he collected stamps too when he was around my age. He promised to send me his stamps, saying, “I really have no need for them.” A week later, a large envelope arrived in the mail. It was filled with more than thirty little glassine envelopes containing late 19th and early 20th century stamps distributed as a product promotion. He had never gotten as far as putting them in a stamp album. Perhaps he’d never owned one.
A few months later, Dad took me to Salem, Massachusetts, on a business trip. He was meeting with a man named Osborne. Dad was in market research and Osborne worked for one of Dad’s clients. Usually, they met in Rochester, but Osborne owned a carriage house in Marblehead, near Salem. I was given unlimited freedom for three days to do whatever I wished in the historical town of Salem. I visited the House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne House, the Witch House, the Peabody Museum, and the ice cream shop on the first floor of the Hotel Hawthorne, where we stayed. One time, I was shown the garage of Osborne’s carriage house. Dad said that’s where they were holding their meetings. Later, we ate at a fancy restaurant overlooking Marblehead’s coastline. After the trip, Dad took me aside and said, “Jim Osborne is homosexual.” I still have the postcards I purchased that summer as I walked around Salem wearing a pair of shoes that were already on their fourth set of full soles and heels. The shoes were retired after their seventh set of soles and heels a few years later.
I know nothing else about Osborne other than that he worked for Kodak, had a house in Marblehead and, according to Dad, was homosexual. All Dad had told me about Lydell was that he lived in Manhattan and was homosexual. He told me nothing about how Lydell made a living or about his relationships. Lydell was the first gay person I knowingly met, and Osborne was the second, a few months apart, both meetings orchestrated by Dad. Sixty-three years later, Lydell’s stamp collection is the only artifact I possess to document having met him and they never made their way into an album because, soon after I met him, I too lost interest in collecting stamps.
According to public data sources, Lydell was born in the Bronx. The 1920 Census shows that, at age 10, he was living in the Bronx with his father’s parents, Richard and Babbetha Stein, both immigrants from Germany.
According to the 1940 Census records, at age 30, Lydell was living with his factory manager father and stepmother at 530 West 113th Street (the same house where they lived in 1935). This was a 24-unit, eight-story apartment building built in 1910 on the lower west side of Harlem, also known as Morningside Heights, around the corner from Columbia University. At the time, Lydell was working as a bookkeeper at the stock exchange. His 1940 draft card indicates that at age 30 he weighed in at 106 pounds and was 5 feet 3 inches tall. Instead of his father, an aunt is listed as next of kin. His employer was Thompson McKinnon, a Wall Street Securities firm. In 1943, he joined the army for three years.
According to the 1950 Census, Lydell at age 40 was living with his twice-widowed father, age 70, who was working full-time as Special Police. Lydell was no longer working on the stock exchange; instead, his reported line of work was beautician, from which he had been out of work 25 weeks. Living with them was a man reportedly Lydell’s father’s brother-in-law, 77, and that man’s son, 38, who worked in the hosiery industry and, like Lydell, never married.
I don’t know whether Lydell was captured in the 1960 or 1970 Census. Those data aren’t available yet. A 1960 city directory shows him still living at 530 West 113rd Street. It’s entirely possible that he was still living there in 1970 when, coincidentally, as a Census enumerator in Harlem, my assignments included the street where Lydell lived for parts of at least four decades.
In February 1972 Lydell died at age 62. It’s likely he was still living in New York. However, I remember seeing several years ago that he died in Virginia, not New York. I can’t find a shred of evidence to support that now. If he actually did move to Virginia, I wish I’d known. I’d been living in the DC area since 1965. Then again, assuming he moved to Virginia, I doubt any family members even knew about it, much less when or why. Or, if they did, they kept it to themselves. After all, Lydell was a well-kept family secret and certainly not the only one.

In Parentheses Literary Magazine (Volume 10, Issue 1) October 2025

By In Parentheses in Volume 10

48 pages, published 10/15/2025

The October 2025 issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine.