Life at the Concord
Sharon Lee Parker talks about the Catskills, cancer, and life for the Teaneck International Film Festival

The actual Catskill Mountains might have been called the Jewish Alps, but they aren’t exactly Alpine. The hills, in barely upstate New York, are significantly smaller, less rocky, less rugged than the mountains in Europe.
But when you look at the explosion of talent, jokes, food, color, stories, food, joy, romance, fashion, Jewish community, food, and massively oversized personalities that came out of the Catskills — the Borscht Belt — and still color the memories of everyone old enough ever to have gone there, either in their heyday or even in their decline, you realize that they maybe should have been called the Jewish Himalayas. They were that big.
The Teaneck Film Festival is screening a documentary on the mountains, logically if ploddingly called “The Catskills” — why not another, less-well-known nickname, the Sour Cream Sierras? — that looks at the region as it was during the 1920s to the 1980s, when demographics, politics, and technology caused its decline, at least as a Jewish vacation paradise.
One of the film’s many distinctive, irrepressible voices belongs to Sharon Lee Parker, whose husband’s family owned the Concord, and who was its director of guest relations for decades. Ms. Parker, who now splits her time between Florida and Hackensack — allowing for jaunts to many other, more exotic places as well — will add her insights, memories, and stories to the talkback after the film is shown. (See below.)
Ms. Parker, who was born in the early 1940s — to ask for more specific information seems rude — grew up in Oceanside, on Long Island, the daughter of Michael Strauss, a legendary sportswriter for the New York Times. “I grew up thinking that my name was Sharon Strauss-of-the-New-York-Times, because that’s the way I always heard my father’s name,” she said. Her mother, Cecilia Strauss Rosen, came from Danby, Vermont, and that’s where she and her sister spent most of their summers.
Her grandparents, who were among the few Jews in town, owned the store on Main Street, which was basically the town’s only commercial street. The store didn’t have a name — it didn’t need one — and life was idyllic there. Cecilia went to Manhattan for college, and while she was at Barnard she met Michael, who was a law student at St. John’s. “He became a lawyer, but he loved sports, and he worked for the New York Times part time as a student, and then after he graduated they hired him,” Ms. Parker said. “He was with the Times for 53 years, and he loved every minute of it.”
He left the Times to retire, but instead he became a sportswriter at the Palm Beach Daily News. He held that job until he died, at 96, the result not of illness but of a fall, Ms. Parker said. He was in such good shape that “he could recite ‘Gunga Din’ until the day he died,” she added.
She met her future husband, George, when they both were children, Ms. Parker said. George’s father, Ray, owned the Concord; he’d inherited it from its founder, his father-in-law, Arthur Winarick, a former barber who’d made a fortune with a hair tonic he called Jeris.
Michael Strauss took his daughter on a trip to the Concord because he’d been invited to report on the artificial snow that the hotel was the first to use. “So if it was Christmas or Chanukah vacation or even if it was Passover, as long as the sun was shining and it wasn’t pouring rain, you could ski,” she said. “As long as it was 32 degrees at night when you made the snow, it could be 50 degrees and you still could ski.
“So I saw this little boy, skiing down the hill without using poles. Who was that little boy? It was George Parker. Ten years later, I married him. At the Concord.”
Ms. Parker was a singer; as a child “I used to sing at the Rutland Fair in Vermont, and I was New England’s Teen Queen,” she said. She was on a TV show in the 1950s called “Toyland Express,” with the ventriloquist Paul Winchell. “I’ve had an insane life,” she said.
She considered a career as a performer, but “when I married George, my father-in-law looked at me and said, ‘Sharon, you can be on tour with Glenn Campbell or you can stay married to my son, who’s got 1,200 bedrooms here.” She chose the son and the marriage, and they stayed married until George died. “He was the only one of his parents’ three sons to stay married,” she said. “The others, Robert and James, had multiple wives. They all were lovely — but it didn’t work.”
Ms. Parker’s career for the next three decades made her very happy. She was in charge of guest relations, which meant that she was in charge of making sure that the hotel’s guests were happy. Did they want a different table in the dining room? A different room, with a better view? A more desirable seat in the Imperial Room, where the country’s top comedians and singers performed? She’d always see what she could do, and she almost always could do something.
She opened her heart to her guests, and as a result many of those guests became lifelong friends.
She always went backstage to meet the performers, and the list of the people she met is a history of midcentury American culture. “I met Alan King and Buddy Hackett and Kenny Rodgers and Willie Nelson and Gloria Estefan and Tony Bennett and Tony Martin and all of the greats. They all were there. There were 3,000 seats in the Imperial Room. When you got a standing ovation there, you knew that your life would be good.”
She’s the mother of two children and the grandmother of four; she’s close to her sister and her sister’s children too. “I enjoy every single day, and I feel very blessed to have an interesting life,” she said.
But her life wasn’t always good.
In 2002, she didn’t feel good. She and George lived in Charleston, South Carolina then. She went to her doctor, who said that she had allergies and told her to take Allegra. But somehow that didn’t seem right. She called a friend — a doctor she’d met at the Concord — who told her that she didn’t have allergies. He was right. Soon, doctors at both Memorial Sloan Kettering and NYU diagnosed her with two separate cancers, lymphoma and thyroid cancer, as well as a benign brain tumor.
She was treated at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. When her doctor, Andre Goy, moved to the John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center, where he is chairman and executive director, so did she. That’s why she lives in Hackensack for part of the year.
Ms. Parker is cancer-free now.
Her husband was not so lucky. “George died of cancer in 2015,” she said. “Lung cancer. They all smoked back then. He smoked cigars imported from Cuba. The cancer went from his lung to his brain before he ever went to the doctor.
She didn’t drink or smoke — still doesn’t — because her father was adamant about the risks of those habits.
She’s at the hospital because she works with patients and their families, offering them support, advice, warmth, and love. She works with everyone who is open to her, she said. She basically does the same job at the hospital that she did at the Concord; using kindness, openness, and genuine concern to help people make the best of the situations in which they find themselves. Granted, cancer and a vast hotel dining room are not at all the same thing, but helping people as they navigate those very different things takes similar skills.
“I often say that before you come out of the womb to be born, you don’t ask God to make you white, black, pink or beige, or say that you’d prefer to be Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist. You come out of the womb just as you. The kind of person you are depends on how good you are.
Ms. Parker has written a book, “Look Out Cancer, Here I Come: How I Beat the Odds and Came Out a Winner,” and now she’s working on a second one, about the Concord.
She writes poems as well; she read one, called Wonderings, that she often reads to patients.
This is an excerpt from that poem:
“Have you ever wondered what lunch might be if you could say we are all cancer free? Would the stars seem brighter? Would the sun shine all day? Would the problems of our world seem to just fade away? Would people care about others in sorrow? Would we reach out and hope for a better tomorrow?”
Quite a few verses later she answers her own question:
“And whenever you help to give others a lift, you make this world better. Why not give it a try? Because you’ll have something that money can’t buy.”
What: “The Catskills,” a documentary about the Borscht Belt directed by Lex Gillespie, will be screened. It is sponsored by the Jewish Standard.
Where: At Temple Emeth in Teaneck
When: On Sunday, November 10, at 12:20 p.m.
Why: As part of the Teaneck International Film Festival
AND:
Who: Sharon Lee Parker, of the family that owned the Concord, who worked there for 30 years, will be at a talkback with Sandee Brawarsky of Teaneck, the Jewish Week’s longtime arts and culture editor.
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