By Barry Lewis

Elaine Grossinger Etess loved to talk to me about the old Borscht Belt.

And I couldn’t have been a more honored listening companion.

Visiting with Elaine became part of our annual trip to Florida. Bonnie and I would spend hours at her Boca Raton home and dinner at a local deli, catch up on the latest Sullivan County news, what was happening in her beloved Liberty and eventually reminisce about the Borscht Belt.

Elaine would share insight into the economic impact the resorts had on the region, the historic significance it played in breaking down religious and racial barriers and the cultural legacy it left for generations forever touched by their time spent working or vacationing in the Catskills.

The highlight was always the stories she shared about Grossinger’s. Her face lighting up talking about her grandparents Selig and Malke, struggling to take in

borders in the seven-room farmhouse. Watching her mom Jennie grow the hotel and become the first lady of hospitality and with the help of publicist extraordinaire Milton Blackstone, turn Grossinger’s into the “Waldorf in the Catskills.”

Each visit with Elaine brought up more Grossinger stories where Eddie Cantor discovers Eddie Fisher, where Fisher marries Debbie Reynolds and later takes Liz Taylor to meet Jennie and dedicate the indoor pool. We’d talk about Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali training, Lou Goldstein calling Milton Berle out in a game of Simon Says. And that time Eleanor Roosevelt walked through the dining room.

She talked about Jackie and Rachel Robinson finding sanctuary from ugliness at Grossinger’s. How the first black man to integrate Major League Baseball was able to escape the rabid bigotry he received from the fans in the stands, opposing players on the diamond and even teammates in the clubhouse, when he and his wife would travel up to the mountains and share dinners with Elaine and her family.

She said the hotel guests, nearly all Jewish and many who had escaped Europe, were open to Jackie and Rachel because of the bigotry and the horrors of hatred they had experienced in their own lives.

After her mother’s death in 1972, Elaine and her brother, Paul Grossinger turned the showcase into a sprawling 585-room resort spread out over 812 acres, while still maintaining the tradition that Grossinger’s was more than just another place to go on vacation and which the writer Damon Runyon once described as “Lindy’s with trees.”

We’d talked about the time I was a young reporter for WVOS covering at Grossinger’s the release of a new book, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” Bonnie, who was pregnant with our oldest, had joined me. Elaine, always the hotel hostess, insisted that we stay over and put us up in the Eddie Cantor building. We ate in the dining room, not far from where Eleanor roamed and where Eddie and Liz shared pickles and a bottle of seltzer.

I couldn’t help but wonder why she had so few mementoes of the resort in her tastefully furnished home, beyond a framed picture of her mom that once hung in the hotel lobby and several awards, including one marking Elaine as the first woman president of the American Hotel and Motel Association.

When Grossinger’s was sold in the mid-80s there was talk of the new owners creating a museum to honor its history. “I left so much there for the museum. By the time we realized there wouldn’t be a museum – it all disappeared,” she said.

On one visit she complained how the grand dame of the Catskills resorts with Tudor-style buildings, manicured grounds and a stunning indoor pool with the observation window had become a ransacked eyesore of old brick and mortar buildings, worn plywood and chipped concrete, overgrown grounds and a graffiti-laced indoor pool which nature turned into a greenhouse. Worst of all, the fabled “Jennie G” building that could be seen for miles and welcomed drivers heading westbound on Route 17 towards Liberty had literally become a shell of its former self.

“I just wish they would bulldoze it all instead of leaving it all to rot like this,” she said, as if to end the visual suffering.

A few years ago, Elaine, in her mid-90s, and I took our Borscht Belt conversations on the road for a special sold-out event in South Florida. After decades of welcoming the greatest stars to Grossinger’s it was only fitting that a Grossinger was welcomed as the real star of the show.

I will miss you Elaine.