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Photos of households in the 1950s typically display a family in the living room, a mom and dad sitting in separate chairs — one knitting, one reading — while a couple of children lay on the floor, cradling their heads in their hands, watching a black-and-white television.

But not in Cathy Silak’s Astoria, New York, home. Which is what led her to an interest in the legal field.

“As you can imagine in the 1950s, that was the technology that was grabbing,” she said. “But not in my household.”

Describing her parents as very hardworking and intelligent people, Silak said her mother was a homemaker who helped manage family rental properties, and her father, a World War II U.S. Navy veteran, was a civil servant. Because they valued education, they banned TV from their t

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