When Barbara Goldberg, at right, lost her husband in 2001, she says she honestly did not know how she could possibly go on with her life without him. David Goldberg was 70 when he died shortly after being diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. A smart, dynamic man, he was the first commissioner of transportation in the state of New Jersey. In fact, the department of transportation building in Ewing Township is named after him.
“All I could think was that I’m a widow; I’m all alone now. I might as well be sitting in the house with my hands in my lap crying,” says Goldberg of those dark days after her husband’s death.
And then, her niece, Linda Arye, asked her if she would like to make a quilt. Arye is founder of Quilts for Kids (www.quiltsforkids.org), based in Yardley, PA, an international organization that harnesses volunteer power to turn unwanted scraps of fabric into beautiful, hand-made quilts that are donated to comfort sick and abused children in hospitals and shelters.
Goldberg says at that time Arye was doing interior design and would visit showrooms to pick up fabric for her clients. One day she happened to ask what they did with all the discontinued fabrics. “They took her to a storage facility with floor to ceiling bales of fabric, and they told her they throw it out,” says Goldberg. “So my niece told them send it to me. She had 18-wheelers pulling up to her house in Yardley with yards and yards of fabric that would have ended up in landfills.”
Arye’s daughter had been hospitalized as a little girl and Arye remembers that they wouldn’t let her daughter take her little teddy bear with her. Arye said it would have been so nice for her daughter to have something comforting to hold onto during her treatments, and that is how she came up with the idea to form an organization that would make quilts for the children who most needed them.
“She was just getting started, and I wanted to help, but when she asked me to help make quilts I told her I didn’t know how, so I’d have to take a class,” says Goldberg. She signed up for a quilting class at Pennington Quiltworks, and the rest is history. Goldberg, who just turned 77 on December 30, estimates that over the last 10 years, she has made literally hundreds of quilts.
“Taking this class got me out of myself, which was the best thing that could happen,” says Goldberg. “I had to be out and about, and that was part of my healing process. That saved my life.”
Goldberg, who lives in the over-55 community of Cranbury Brook in Plainsboro, has a second floor loft dedicated to her craft. It is large, airy, and full of light, and she says she can get lost in her quilting for hours and hours.
“It’s a labor of love; I’m thinking some kid is going to love this, this one is for a little boy, this one is for a little girl,” she says. “I pray for snow days so I don’t have to get dressed, and I can cut pieces and sew them together. It fills my time and keeps me out of the stores.” Goldberg, who is a small woman with a large sense of humor, adds, “It also keeps me out of my refrigerator. I’ll work until my back hurts, and then I realize it’s four o’clock, and I haven’t had lunch. I can’t wait to see how it turns out so I just get lost in it.”
Goldberg’s knack for quilting and ease with a sewing machine likely came from watching her mother in her Brooklyn childhood. Born after two brothers, the long-awaited little girl, Goldberg says she was a well-loved child. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was a civil engineer for the city of New York.
“My father was not very tall, so my mother had to shorten his sleeves, and she made his pajamas,” says Goldberg. “She also made all of her own clothes, and my clothes too, until I got to a certain point, and I said all the other kids get to wear store-made clothes so she let me buy some things.”
But when her mother sewed, and that was often, Goldberg would sit at her feet and ask questions — learning, for example, how to make a stiff collar for a men’s shirt. “My mother always answered my questions, and then something would happen to the machine, and I would hear words that a child shouldn’t hear. Then she would tell me, ‘don’t sew.’ I would ask her why, and she would say ‘it’s too frustrating,’ because she wanted everything perfect.”
Nonetheless, her mother kept sewing, and Goldberg kept watching. “She let me use her machine, though not too much and under close supervision. I won a sewing medal in elementary school. I had made my own dress.”
Goldberg says that her mother’s words have stayed with her to this day, which is why she loves making quilts, pillow cases, drawstring bags, and the like, but she holds the line at making clothes.
Goldberg studied elementary education at Brooklyn College, and after graduating, taught second grade for a year at a school in Carnasie, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. At that time she received a phone call from a friend who had recently gotten married. During the conversation the friend said, “Do you remember this guy I used to go out with? You ought to meet him.” Goldberg says:
“We met at her house, and she told me, ‘he’s here, and he brought a friend, so take your pick.’ I played it cool. I was wearing a dress I had made. We all talked, and as we were leaving, David said, ‘may I call you?’ On our first date, we took the Staten Island Ferry. It was five cents a ride, and it was all he could afford.”
Goldberg says she knew right then and there that he was the one. “I liked his voice. That was the first thing. He had a good baritone speaking voice. He was already an attorney. I went out a lot, and my parents would ask how did it go, and I always had reasons why I didn’t like the guy — his hands were sweaty, things like that — but with this one, when my parents asked how was your date, I said, ‘it was good and I like him.”
Goldberg says she finished her first year of teaching on June 28, 1957, and two days later, on June 30, married David. They were living in Ewing Township when their children, Debbie and Daniel, were born, and then they moved to a larger home in Lawrenceville. Goldberg’s daughter lives in Florida and gave her two grandsons, now 24 and 26. Her son, Daniel, a patent attorney in the Princeton firm of Meagher, Emanuel, Laks, Roehling and Goldberg LLP, lives in Plainsboro with his wife, Holly, a school nurse who works in various schools, with their two daughters, Pamela, 18, who graduated from Collier, a private high school in Wickatunk, NJ, and is taking a gap year, and Sophia, 14, who attends the Mercer County Health Science Academy.
Goldberg was still living in her Lawrenceville home, alone, after her husband’s death, when her daughter-in-law called one day and told her about the community of Cranbury Brook being built just a few minutes away from their Plainsboro home.
“I had never thought of moving but I came and looked at the pictures and models and thought about it. The more I thought about it, I realized it was a good thing to do. My own neighborhood was changing, and there I was by myself surrounded by families with little children. When I said I would do it, my daughter-in-law put her arms around me, jumping up and down.”
Goldberg moved to Plainsboro in 2006 and has not had one moment of regret. “I’ve made a lot of friends. My community has lots of activities for older people. I’m on the board of trustees of the homeowners association so I get to know people. I go to social committee meetings. Plainsboro Township had a lovely luncheon at the Westin for senior citizens. I take exercise classes in the municipal complex. Having the Asian market close by, I eat a lot of great food. I jumped in feet first, and it gets better and better.”
Despite her busy life, the centerpiece is still very much her quilting, and she clearly pours her heart into each and every project. One of her special pieces came out of a request from Trish Baker, the mother of Kenny Baker, who lost his fight against anxiety and depression and committed suicide in the spring of 2009 when he was 19 years old. He and his younger sister, Katelyn, were friends of Goldberg’s granddaughter.
Goldberg made a memory quilt for Kenny’s mother from his T-shirts. “We sat at a table going over every shirt, and we cried together over every one of them,” she says. “That one took a lot out of me.”
Because of the volume of quilts made for the children through Quilts for Kids and the specifications that are required because most of them are so very ill, the staff has put together quilting kits for volunteers to sew, together with directions, a design, and pieces of fabric.
“There are two ways of quilting; one way is by hand, the other by machine,” Goldberg says. “I do everything on the machine because these quilts for kids go to very sick children in hospitals, and they don’t want the kids to be able to pick out loose threads. They have tubes attached from every orifice, so everything has to be machine-quilted. The children may be nauseated from their treatments so their quilts have to be 100 percent washable, 100 percent cotton.
“They are cozy and small enough for a kid to hold and to take with them to treatments. I once received a letter from a mother saying that her child was buried with the quilt; that’s how much it meant to him.”
Sometimes the volunteers meet to quilt in groups, and Goldberg loves the camaraderie. “They are the most generous, giving, and loving people, these people who show up and volunteer their time,” she says, “and it’s a joy to sit with them and sew. I learn something new all the time, which I love.”
The quilts go not only to children in hospitals all over the country, including the Children’s Miracle Network of hospitals, but also to disaster areas where children are in need of comfort and warmth. Quilts for Kids has donated quilts to flood victims in the American midwest, tsunami victims in Indonesia, and to orphans in China.
Goldberg says she doesn’t receive money for her quilts. “This is about the joy of making something and being creative. I’d be embarrassed to ask for money.”
In addition to the joy quilting gives her, Goldberg says it gives her purpose and a channel for her talents. “It takes patience, patience, patience. There are lots of do-overs — if the seam is crooked, you can’t leave it that way. It takes precision. You need the right tools and a good eye for color and detail. And research. Thank God for Google because I can Google quilt patterns and get billions.”
Goldberg says she is lucky to have found a passion late in her life that helps her utilize her time in a way that brings happiness to others. “I have always loved sewing machines, and so watching these quilts as they progress from little snips of fabric into beautiful things is wonderful.”
