Comments:
The long list of activities that precedes Ro’s biography notes in our 1957 yearbook suggest she was part of almost everything in school from four sports and Riding Club to editing and writing for the Pioneer so singing and performing in the senior play. She didn’t always feel that way, however. “My parents wanted us to go to school at the Brookville School but we couldn’t get in.” No Jews admitted. And in that era Jews were still officially and unofficially banned from many social clubs, country clubs and other organizations. When those forms of discrimination were generally accepted, even teachers sometimes showed their biases. Rosalie, however, also found ready defenders in the class and says that her boyfriend Jimmy O’Donnell as well as Brud Neice were among them. Jimmy would not repeat what he heard, but he “would come over and my mother or father would see a black eye and he would say he got into a fight. I almost didn’t want to know about it. Part of me would make believe it didn’t exist.”
The Greenfields had chosen to live in Greenvale because it was a quiet place and Ro’s father, an inventor and industrial designer, had a heart condition and her mother was frequently ill. She and her sister “Beanie” (Elaine, Class of ’58) “had these anxieties about losing our parents.” Nevertheless, Ro became very much a popular member of our class, in school and out. We voted her “most enthusiastic” for the energy and optimism she showed.
Rosalie left Sea Cliff intending to be a teacher or reporter. She became both. In college she switched her major from theater to film and found work with Broadcast Music, Inc in New York, then entered the American Musical Theater Writers Workshop. She began writing musicals and libretti, and she married one of the Theater’s conductors. The marriage lasted less than two years. With a master’s in education from Columbia she started teaching in New Rochelle High School. From ’65-7 she was at Edgmont High in Scarsdale, then at Herrick’s in Williston Park on Long Island.
In 1969 she left education to become a reporter for Home Furnishings Daily, reporting on fashion and business in the home furnishing market. Then and now, Rosalie says, “Politics is a pretty big part of my life,” and so she moved from fashions to political research at WNBC TV. However, “At 34 or 35 I was getting a little bit over the hill and thought it was too late to have a career in television.” She enrolled in Columbia to work on her doctorate. “I decided I had to study anthropology, and then communications theory. Finally, my advisor said, ‘wait a minute, stop, you’ll never finish.’ I never felt I had done enough.” She received her doctorate in education with a thesis on married couples and their movie going preferences and habits. The interconnection between film and personal behavior continued to occupy her as she became an instructor in media studies at Penn State’s Abington College campus. She also published work on media violence and its impact on children.
Meanwhile Rosalie had fallen in love with a man she interviewed for an article. Stanley Matzkin flown 59 missions in a P-47 Thunderbolt in WWII, participating in the Normandy invasion and winning a Purple Heart. “He was a real hero,” Rosalie says. “He read everything, but he cried at the ballet.” Her sister Elaine says, “he was one of the really good people, and the world needs more like him. . . . . He was more than an Uncle to my children. In many ways he represented the ‘good father’ to them.” He was also a noted philanthropist and a founder of the Forman Day School in Elkins Park, PA. In November 2003 doctors told Elaine and Stanley that he was terminally ill and they had no remedies. Three days later he died.
Rosalie has lost none of her enthusiasm for life. She is on the board of Directors of the Jewish Social Policy Action Network, still very active in politics, and she has returned to writing lyrics for musicals.
