My wife’s sister Marg went to parochial school at Saint Columba’s, just a couple of blocks from where we lived in Newark.
Marg’s friend Sandy was as innocent and bashful as any 16-year-old Catholic school girl could be. Her mother sent her to the butchers to get chicken breasts for dinner, but she was too embarrassed to say the word “breasts”, so she asked for “chicken chests” instead.
I was barely out of my own teens then, and I loved ferrying Marg and her girlfriends back and forth from their dances and other school events. It was like having a carload of ultra-cute nieces. Besides Sandy, the regular passengers I remember were Dolores, Geraldine, Loretta and Annette.
There was a Barbara, too, sometimes. She lived the furthest from the school, out by Ballantine’s brewery. I’ve always been partial to the name Barbara, so she was kind of my favorite; there’s just something about that name. I never had a girlfriend named Barbara, but I did have a cousin Barbara that I liked a lot when I was kid, so maybe that’s it.
Writing this, I could picture one other girl, but couldn’t remember her name. I knew it sounded French and that I’d recognize it if I saw it. Google led me to a site promising “Top 1000 popular baby names in 1944”, the year Marg and probably most of the other girls were born. The site was babynames.it, the ‘.it’ meaning located in Italy. I began scanning the girls’ names column, stopping at times to recall a bit of life detail floated up by a familiar name. Eventually, at 307th in popularity, there it was, “Camille”.
Camille herself wasn’t French, though, she was Italian like most of the other girls. A few years later she stayed with Marg babysitting our kids when Mimi and I drove up to Expo 67. She was sort of a favorite too, and maybe a little more sophisticated than the rest. Later, she worked at Bamberger’s and let me use her employee discount to buy stereo gear, so that was nice.
Also at the baby names site, I learned how to pronounce the newly-popular girl’s name ‘Saoirse’, as in actress Saoirse Ronan. It’s properly pronounced SEER-sha, assuming we can trust the pronunciation of an unusual Irish girl’s name to an Italian web site. SEER-sha does sound like the way I’ve heard it, though.
I was working at the Foodland store in Elizabeth then, and companies like Heinz pickles and Sta-Puf fabric softener were always competing to get more shelf space for their products, usually by gifting store management with some thing of minor value. At Foodland, the definition of “management” was loose, extending all the way down to the bookkeeper, me.
One company tried to curry Foodland favor with tickets to a concert by Bobby Darin, the teen heartthrob of the day — ‘Dream Lover’, ‘Beyond the Sea’, lots more. No one else was interested in going, so I collected their tickets and turned them over to Marg to pass along. I provided concert transportation too, but didn’t go inside.
One summer Mimi and I rented a house up at Lake Hopatcong for two weeks. I had just changed jobs, so I didn’t have enough seniority to take my vacation during the summer. I commuted daily from the lake to Newark on I-80, not finished yet but hosting light traffic. There were no police assigned to the stretch yet, so you could go as fast as you thought you’d still be able to stop for a deer, if that’s clear. Fortunately I never saw any deer; I think the new road and its shoulders were so wide the deer were afraid to venture into all that open space.
The house was right on the lake and we had lots of room, so Marg invited her girlfriends to stay, visiting in shifts. They were good kids, and we loved having them around.
