Edited interview with Patricia Coshland (PC), daughter of Israel April. Interview conducted by Joe Manning (JM) on September 6, 2008.

JM: You told me you had seen the photos before.

PC: Yes, I had some of them. I think I got them from my mother. I don't know where she got them from. Later on, one of the photos was in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, and I knew right away that it was my father and his brothers.

JM: When you first saw the photos, did you realize that they had some historical importance?

PC: Yes, because my father was selling newspapers when the Titanic sank. My brother Marty told me that my father or one of his brothers delivered newspapers to the White House.

JM: What was your reaction to seeing your father and his brothers selling newspapers at that age on the streets at night?

PC: They did anything they could to make money. It was a very poor family, with lots of children. Their parents were from Russia. My father lost his mother at a young age. My grandfather remarried, and I don't think the boys liked her, so they apparently moved in with their older sisters, who raised them at that point.

JM: How old was your father when his mother died?

PC: I'm not sure, maybe about 10. (He was 13.)

JM: What did his father do for a living?

PC: He owned a grocery store in Arlington, right across the river.

JM: In the 1920 census, his father is living with wife Nora.

PC: My father's mother was named Mollie. Nora must have been the second wife.

PC: Sam and Dave. Sam had an auto paint shop on Church Street, in DC. His children ran that till recently, when they sold it. Dave lived out in Maryland on a piece of property right near College Park. When University Boulevard was put in, they took over the land and he made quite a bit of money. He was in the liquor business. It's interesting about Ellis, who was a much younger brother. I don't know whether his brothers and sisters paid for his schooling, but he became a doctor. He was an allergist in DC.

PC: Yes. My brother recently gave me a newspaper picture of my father and three other young men, who are shown receiving scholarships to college. My father is wearing a football uniform. He got a scholarship to Penn State. I had it framed.

JM: Did your father graduate from Penn State?

PC: No. He ended up at Grove City College near Penn State, and played football for them. He graduated from George Washington University. (According to her brother Marty, freshmen couldn't play football, so Penn State sent him to Grove City College. He went back to Penn State for his second year. He was also on the wrestling team, but he broke his collar bone, so they took away his scholarship. Apparently, his older brothers helped him pay for the rest of college.)

JM: What did he do when he graduated from college?

PC: Various and sundry things. He sold cars in the 1930s. At that time, he had to go to Detroit to get the cars, bring them back, and then he had to teach the customers how to drive them. When I was growing up, he was a liquor salesman. In DC, there were a lot of distributorships. We have a lot of beer and liquor memorabilia.

JM: Where were your parents living when you were born?

PC: I was born in 1944, in northwest Washington. We owned a house on Roxanna Road, right off 16^th Street, below Silver Spring on the DC/Maryland border. We used to say that the President of the United States lived at one end of 16^th Street, and we lived at the other end. I lived there my whole childhood.

JM: What was your mother's name?

PC: Myrtle Robin. She was originally from Philadelphia. She stayed at home when I was young, but after I finished junior high school, she went back to work for the government, for the Department of the Army.

JM: Did you go to college?

PC: I went to the University of Maryland, and I graduated in 1965. I graduated from high school in 1961.

JM: What was your father like?

PC: He was very outgoing. Everybody liked him. He always had a smile on his face. My son is just like him. And he is a salesman, just like him. My brother Marty was also a salesman. My father loved sports. He thought I was a third son, so he took me to a lot of baseball games at old Griffith Stadium. He had a big family, and they were very important to him. We used to go back to New Jersey where he was born, and there were still a lot of the Aprils up there. He was born in a very small town called Carmel. They had orchards up there, and grew cranberries along with other crops.

JM: Why did they move to Washington?

PC: I am not sure.

JM: Would you describe your parents as being middle class?

PC: I guess so - probably lower middle class. I knew we didn't have a lot of money, but I never wanted for anything. Two blocks away from me were big houses. The people from that neighborhood had really nice luxury cars. We didn't have that. I always worked in the summertime when I was in high school. When I was in college, my parents paid for the first semester, and I paid for the second.

JM: Did your father talk about working as a newsboy?

PC: No. When you're young, you don't think to ask your parents about their lives. It's only when they're gone that you realize that you should have done that. When my mother passed away, my brother and I went through a bunch of pictures, but we don't know who the people are. They didn't write anything on the back of the pictures, and unfortunately, there's no one left to identify them.

JM: Was your father in good health up until he died?

PC: Yes. He had never been in a hospital. He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 67.