Old Man Continues To Be Adorable

It’s been a few weeks since we fell in love with the 103-year-old Harry Rosen, who loves going out to dinner but has trouble finding a date. Lucky for us, Alan Richman at GQ took Harry out to a fancy meal at Eleven Madison Park and plied him for more tales of his early days in the city, starting a business in The Great Depression, and his opinion on raw carrots served 30-ish ways:

“The first thing that happened after I got off the boat, all of us speaking Jewish (Yiddish), they put us in a class to learn English. Most of us were pitching pennies, not listening. Bottom line is that I got to know one of the students, who said, ‘I got a job.’ He wouldn’t tell me where, so I followed him one day. It was at a mom-and-pop store that sold imported dried mushrooms from Russia. I got a job putting them on strings, sorting them, big to small. I became a mushroom stringer.”

At the age of 12 he was earning 25 cents an hour, bringing the money home to his mother, receiving a few pennies as a reward. “I’d go out for a Charlotte Russe with a cherry on top, three cents each,” he says.”

Other highlights include Harry trying an oyster for the first time in his life (“He liked it”), and the restaurant’s chef suggesting Harry pre-screen his new post-Times profile love interests by demanding they send him a photo. Also finally knowing what the mall store Charlotte Russe was named after.

Photo: andersc77

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