99 Welland Road

One of 10 houses in Blake Park constructed by the builders Burdo & Boyd, including five in a row at this end of Welland Road, 99 Welland Road was the home at first of Lillian and Christopher Wyatt.

Christopher Alleyne Wyatt (born in New York in 1884) was shown as a salesman and later as a manager in the Street List. (He had been listed as a pig iron salesman in both the 1910 and the 1920 U.S. Census.) He and his wife Lillian (born c1879) and their family were listed at this address from 1931 to 1939.

The next residents were Bessie L. and Joseph G. Brin who moved here from 74 Abbottsford Road. Joseph Brin (1898-1952) was a lawyer, a professor, and managing editor and associate publisher of the Jewish Advocate newspaper, which he and his brother took over from the previous publisher in 1917. The Brins, according to 1942 Christian Science Monitor article marking the 40th anniversary of the newspaper, transformed it from a publication, mostly in Yiddish and "filled with long reports from the Old World homelands, and with nostalgic escapist material," into one addressed to the lives of Jews as new Americans.

When the Brin brothers took over the Advocate [wrote the Monitor], they clearly saw the need for a paper, printed in English, and designed primarily for Jews born in America and needing only a little leadership to participate fully in the communal interests. This did not mean loss of their religion and traditions in the melting cauldron. It did mean co-operative participation in political, charitable, and social affairs along with all the ethnical, political, charitable and other groups that, taken together, comprise the great American democracy.

The perception of this need, and the substantial degree in which the Advocate has answered it in the Boston area, merits -- and is receiving -- unstinted praise at this anniversary time.

The Advocate remained under the ownership and leadership of the Brin family until 1990.

Joseph Brin was born in Russia and came to the U.S. in 1909. He attended Boston University and the Boston University School of Law. As a lawyer, he was active in the Jewish Prison Aid Society. He also taught speech and semantics at Boston University.

Brin and his wife Bessie (born c1900) were listed at this address until the early 1950s.