Broadway, Schrafft's and Seeded Rye

In Broadway, Schrafft's and Seeded Rye--Growing Up Slightly Jewish on the Upper West Side, Lyla Blake Ward, author of How to Succeed at Aging Without Really Dying, tells it like it was growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1930's and early 1940's. Through essays and poems, histories and vintage photos, Lyla Blake Ward makes this unique neighborhood-- 72nd street to 110^th-- east and west of Broadway, come alive.

Looking back-- and back---and back, she is able to recapture the atmosphere of this singular community, its culture and the families who lived there--a place, according to the author, where almost everyone she knew was Jewish and only the pigeons ate white bread.

Lyla Blake Ward's writing career officially began in 1949, when she sold her first poem to Collier's magazine: Betrayal at Plymouth Greasy gizzards, flying feathers Oh the difference it would make, If the Pilgrims had decided To give thanks with sirloin steak. Over the past 65 years, she has published numerous works of humorous verse, op-eds, personal essays and social commentary in newspapers and magazines around the country, including Good Housekeeping, The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day, Family Circle, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and Newsday, among many others. Her first book, How to Succeed at Aging without Really Dying, published in 2010, a collection of humorous essays, appeared on Amazon's list of the Top 100 Books, all genres, in 2011. The German version, Wo Ist Meine Lesebrille (Where Are My Reading Glasses?) proved to be a great success with senior audiences overseas. Residing in Somers, New York, with her husband of 65 years, Russ, Ward enjoys reading, wrestling with crossword puzzles and double crostics, baking, knitting, crocheting, and watching endless reruns of "Seinfeld."