Born Teddy Allen in Brooklyn, NY in June, 1926, her parents were Jewish immigrants from two small villages in Eastern Europe. During the 1920s, her father owned an automobile garage and later, after the Depression, he worked as a baker. Teddy grew up on East 7th Street in Brooklyn with one older brother, Walter. She graduated from James Madison High School in 1944.
During WW II, while still in high school, she served in the National Security Women’s Corps, an auxiliary group which supported the war effort. After starting college at night, she passed the civil service exam in order to work (for a year — 1944) as the secretary to the lieutenant in charge of the Naval Clothing Depot in Brooklyn. She completed two years at NY’s City College before taking a full-time job, at age 19, as the office manager in Manhattan for a small fabrics manufacturer (where she worked for five years).
When Teddy was 16, she met George Goldberg, who was a year older and lived just around the corner. George came home in 1946 from serving in the Army in Europe and they were married in Brooklyn during the Great Blizzard of 1947, then honeymooned in Lake Placid. They remained a devoted couple for fifty-five exciting and eventful years, until his passing in 2003.
From 1950, with the birth of the first of their three children, until 1974, she was a homemaker on Long Island, raising her family in Jericho (where she served on the PTA) and then Great Neck. Teddy and George also had a home on Hart’s Cove in East Moriches for thirty years. They loved their time “away” there, where they made many friends and spent happy weekends looking out on the bay.
In 1974, she and her husband co-founded GGX Associates of Great Neck, a leading supplier for the bar code scanning industry, then in its infancy. From 1977-1996, they also published Scan Newsletter, which covered worldwide developments in the auto-identification industry.
In 1995, George and Teddy established the Scan Newsletter archives at the Special Collections section of Stony Brook University’s Library. That collection was later expanded to include the papers for the AIDC100, a prestigious organization of the leading professionals from the auto-id industry.
In 2006, Teddy was inducted at the annual Scan Tech convention in Atlanta, as an honorary member of AIDC100.
Teddy was an accomplished knitter and painter, enthusiastic bridge player, and an avid Broadway theater-goer. She enjoyed traveling and visited both Russia and China when she was well into her 60s. She was admired and loved by a wide range of friends and family members, who will remember her as a charming and stylish woman who was a great listener, always accessible to everyone.
Teddy is survived by her children, Jeff of Washington, D.C.; Robbi of Westhampton Beach, NY; and David, wife Nanci, and grandson Jonathan of Port Washington, NY.
As Teddy reflected back this year, it was her great wish that everyone should love their life as much as she loved hers.
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