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Carol Brock Oral History

 File
Identifier: QMP-0035

Scope and Contents

In this oral history, Carol Brock discusses her lifelong Queens residency and her favorite aspects of living in Queens; her birth in Corona in 1923, her family’s move to rural Beechhurst when she was 3, then to Sunnyside and later Douglas Manor with her husband; her father’s career in real estate; her childhood in Beechhurst and memories of her friends, their families, and the trappings of rural life in Queens; attending P.S. 79 in Whitestone; the dress her seamstress grandmother made for her graduation and the skill of her mother who went to millinery school; her grandmother’s home in Fresh Meadows and later Beechhurst; her time in Bayside High School; being influenced to go to Queens College over Cornell by Judge Charles Colden, a founder of the college; details of her Home Economics coursework at Queens College, being president of the Homes Economics Club, and her social life at that time; how her grandmother influenced her work at Queens College because she grew vegetables and made cheese; graduating from Queens and marrying her husband Emil Andrew Brock in the same month; starting her career as an assistant food editor at Good Housekeeping magazine with help from Queens College professors; making lunch every day for the editor, Herbert Mays, and the head of Hearst Corp. Richard E. Berlin, in exchange for lessons about the magazine business; her first bylines and then 23-year career at Good Housekeeping, and then Parents magazine after that; entertaining distinguished guests like Herbert Hoover and the Duke of Windsor; pursuing a master’s degree at New York University in 1963; memories of her friend’s home being demolished when the Cross Island Parkway was built; descriptions of her father and his love of hunting, fishing, and boxing; attending local cultural events in Douglas Manor like the 100th birthday celebration of the Matinecock Chief Waters and writing articles about the tribe’s traditions and recipes; the changing nature of the Douglas Manor neighborhood; attending the World’s Fairs in 1939 and 1964 in Flushing Meadows and the International Expo in Montreal in 1967; her career as a restaurant consultant after her journalism career and her favorite New York City restaurant; working in magazines and newspapers at its height of glamour; founding Les Dames d’Escoffier in 1976, a professional organization for accomplished women in the food, wine and hospitality fields, who had previously been excluded from all-male Escoffier groups.

Dates

  • 2015-03-12

Creator

Access

This oral history is open for research. Media files and transcript can be viewed and/or requested through the Queens Memory Project on Aviary: https://queenslibrary.aviaryplatform.com/collections/21/collection_resources/28478. For help using the site, contact QC.Archives@qc.cuny.edu.

Conditions Governing Use

Interview shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Users are free to share or adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, as long as they meet the terms of the license. See license details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

Biographical / Historical

Carol Lang Brock was born in Corona in 1923 but spent most of her childhood in Beechhurst. After graduating from Queens College with a degree in home economics, she began a highly successful career in food journalism that included positions with Good Housekeeping magazine, Parents magazine, the New York Daily News and the Queens Times/Ledger. She and her husband eventually bought a home in the Douglas Manor section of Douglaston, and she died in April 2020 at 96 years old.

Extent

1 Digital Files ; Duration: 01:14:51

Language of Materials

English

Abstract

Carol Brock, a food writer at Good Housekeeping magazine, Parents, and the New York Daily News, founder of women's professional organization Les Dames d'Escoffier, and Queens College alumna, sits for an oral history with Lori Wallach in March 2015.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Donated to Queens College and Queens Public Library by Lori Wallach and Carol Brock in March, 2015.

Physical Description

One MP3 file totaling 1 hour 15 minutes in duration.

Processing Information

Oral history conducted as part of the Queens Memory Project (http://queensmemory.org), a collaborative program of the Queens Public Library and Queens College to collect stories, images, and other evidence of life in the borough of Queens.

Creator

Author
Caitlin Colban-Waldron
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Repository Details

Part of the Queens College (New York, N.Y.) Special Collections and Archives Repository

Contact:
Queens College Library, CUNY
Benjamin Rosenthal Library RO317
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing 11367 USA us