After Mimi and I were married, we lived with her sister and mother on Pennsylvania Avenue in Newark. Her sister was about 16, and as she walked to school, boys in passing cars would call out to each other “Mira! Mira!”.
Mimi took the bus to work every day, at the Mega Foods store in Scotch Plains where she was the bookkeeper. I picked her up every night, and that’s where we bought our weekly groceries. A hundred dollars’ worth of groceries filled the trunk and half the back seat.
At the end of Pennsylvania Avenue was small, triangular Lincoln Park. President Kennedy’s motorcade was once rerouted past it to counter a threat about traveling on Broad Street. Mimi didn’t know Kennedy was in town that day, but she and our 3-year-old got to see him and wave as he went by.
A little-noted Lincoln Park event months earlier was a battle between blacks and Puerto Ricans. During the fighting, park benches were disassembled and their slats used as lances and clubs. When I saw the fighting from a block away, I thought to myself, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not involved.” The police eventually arrived and broke it up. Helping to keep the city’s lid on, the newspapers made no mention of the event.
We seldom overslept on holidays, because if there was a parade involved the sections formed up in front of our house before moving to the main route on Broad Street. We shared our porch steps with excited band families and early parade-goers.
Mimi and I went to the Mosque Theater, now Newark Symphony Hall, to hear Nina Simone. We were led to the balcony and seated there with the other white people, 20 or 30 of us. We didn’t care, she was fantastic.
Mimi has read about a cooling summer drink called “The Pimm’s Cup” which requires 3/4 cup of Pimm’s #1 liqueur. She asks me to pick up a bottle, and next day on my way home I stop at the S. Klein On The Square department store, which has a liquor department. I ask the help for a bottle of “Pimm’s Cup”, having to repeat myself twice. They chortle, this is a new one on them, and they keep calling back and forth “Pimp’s Cup, Pimp’s Cup” until they locate one.
There was a small, smoky fire in the rooming house across the street. Even before the fire trucks arrived, the residents were outside on folding chairs, watching a ballgame on their rabbit-eared TV, an extension cord plugged into the vestibule of the church next door.
Our neighbor dies and while the family is at the funeral his house is robbed. The neighborhood is changing.