Paul – Page 2 – Everything That Happened .com

2018-01-212024-07-01

Superfund! (and why I care)

“On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia — ‘Mollie’ — Maggia. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. Everyone present knew what that meant.” –The Radium Girls, Kate Moore

Dial painters, 1922- courtesy Argonne National Laboratory

The Radium Girls were factory workers who from 1917 to 1926 hand-painted watch and clock dials with a glow-in-the-dark paint called Undark. The paint’s luminescence came from the radioactive silvery-white metal radium, then a recent and exciting discovery. U.S .Radium’s managers and scientists were aware of the paint’s dangers, but did not share that knowledge with the workers, who were encouraged to lick their brushes to bring them to a sharper point when applying the paint, ingesting tiny bits of radium. Some workers also painted their fingernails, hair and even teeth to make them glow at night. Within a few years, dozens of workers began showing signs of radiation poisoning.. They developed illnesses that included anemia, bone cancer, and necrosis of the jaw, known as “radium jaw”, which is as terrible as it sounds. By 1927, more than 50 had died.

At the Orange, New Jersey plant where the women worked, the company also extracted radium from raw ore, by a process called radium crystallization. Approximately half a ton of dusty ore was processed each day, with the radioactive waste dumped both on-site and off.

A 1981 gamma-radiation survey by airplane found about 250 sites throughout Orange, West Orange, and South Orange, many of them residential, where radioactive waste had been dumped or used as construction fill. Sites in Montclair and Glen Ridge were also contaminated, earning them their own Superfund designations.

The basements and adjacent soil of houses built using contaminated fill had to be dug out and replaced, with the contaminated material shipped cross-country for burial in Utah. At the site in Orange, the top 22 feet of soil had to be removed.

U.S. Radium had two other dial-painting sites, one in Illinois and one in Connecticut, that also required remediation.

EPA findings and actions

“In 1979, EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) initiated a program to identify and investigate locations within New Jersey where radium-processing activities had taken place. The former U.S .Radium Corporation processing plant was included in this program. In May 1981, EPA conducted an aerial gamma radiation survey covering approximately 12 square miles centered on the High and Alden Streets processing plant. This aerial survey located about 25 acres around the High and Alden Streets processing plant where elevated readings of gamma radiation were detected. This same survey identified areas of elevated gamma radiation in the nearby communities of Montclair, West Orange and Glen Ridge; the affected properties in these areas comprise two other Superfund sites, the Montclair/West Orange Radium site and the Glen Ridge Radium site.” — July 2011 EPA Review Report, full text available here.

Why I care

During the early 1950s, starting at about age 12, I played often at that site, No one knew about the contamination, not for thirty more years. Then on June 25, 1979, the New York Times published an article titled “Radiation Found at Site of Radium Plant Dating From the 1920’s“.

New Jersey’s humble Second River (to locals, simply ‘the brook’) flows alongside the site on its way east from First Mountain to join the Passaic River and Newark Bay. Who knows how much radioactive waste U.S Radium dumped into that little stream over the years? I played in that brook too, just a few blocks downstream, where minnows swam in the clear water.

I played in the yard between the paint application building and the brook. Railroad tracks ran through the yard then, and there were usually one or two freight cars sitting there awaiting loading or unloading. Adjacent to the tracks were the too-grimy-to-play-on portable conveyor belts and sturdy bins of the neighboring Alden Coal Company. I enjoyed playing ‘railroad engineer’, climbing the rungs to the top of a car and twisting its parking-brake handwheel back and forth from one extreme to the other.

By then, the paint application building was occupied by Arpin Plastics, makers of the “Arpin 75 Special Repeating Water Pistol”. (I don’t know why anyone would buy a non-repeating water pistol .) They also made a Tommy gun, with greater water capacity and firepower. Weapons that didn’t pass inspection were tossed into a dumpster behind the building, from which they could be rescued and rehabilitated by anyone willing to put in a little effort.

Apparently I didn’t spend enough time at the site to develop any sort of radiation poisoning. Thanks for asking!

Recent (May, 2018) Google Earth view of the main Orange Superfund site. Per the EPA, remediation is “essentially complete” and the site is being monitored . All that seems necessary is to add flowers and grass. Not sure what that wettish spot is.

Manufacturer’s ad for Undark, 1921 – courtesy Wikipedia

2018-01-242024-08-05

Highly detailed

I am usually the first to grab my family’s copy of Life magazine out of the mail. As touted on this week’s cover, the next-to-last page is a black-and-white photograph remarkable for the time, the first crisp, highly-detailed aerial view of the North Pole, or maybe the South Pole, I forget. It shows a complex, craggy and absolutely featureless mass of ice and snow. A bit off from the center, I draw a tiny barber pole.

While my brother reads the magazine that night, I watch. When he gets to that page, he studies it for a long time. He stares and stares and says half-aloud, “Hey…”. Once he realizes, he is annoyed, but laughs.

2018-01-272024-08-05

Music class

In seventh and eighth grade, we have music class twice a week. The class is divided into two groups for tonal management of the parts we sing. There is an alto group, mostly boys, and a soprano group, girls and boys like myself whose voice hasn’t changed yet. Before each song, Miss Barnett blows a single note on her pitch pipe so we know what we’re supposed to sound like.

When not accompanying us on the classroom piano, Miss Barnett spends her time correcting and verbally abusing the sopranos. We can do nothing to her satisfaction. After a few weeks, I tell her my voice is changing. There is no test to confirm my claim; she simply tells me to sit on the alto side of the room from now on. Goodbye to twice-weekly stomach cramps.

Our repertoire comes from a long-out-of-print song book of standards, spirituals and other royalty-free music, for example “Comin’ ‘round the Mountain”. Music is timeless, and our thrifty school board agrees.

One song in regular rotation is Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe”. It has of course been modernized since then, but in our classroom Old Black Joe grieves for “my friends from the cotton fields away”, with the chorus

I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low,
I hear those darky voices calling “Old Black Joe”.

In our class are two black kids, Joe Stokes and Richie Strickland. I don’t look over to see if they are singing along, but I’ll bet Joe Stokes isn’t.

Richie and I are friendly, and one day he arrives at my house with two fishing poles and we board the Number 20 bus to Branch Brook Park. As we pay our fares, I notice some of the other passengers nudge each other.

We try various spots around the lake but don’t catch anything. We come back to my house and sit in the sunroom, talking about baseball. After an hour or so, my grandmother takes me aside and says “Tell Richie he has to go home, we’re going to have dinner now.”

2018-01-272024-08-05

A Day at the Opera

In grades seven and eight I had a science teacher that I really liked and admired, Mr. Fischer. He knew I liked science and science-fiction books, and was open to such classroom questions as, if light is really particles (turns out it isn’t), can it be used to push a spaceship along, even just a little bit? The atomic bomb and the possibility of atomic energy were also hot subjects in our classroom. Mr. Fischer was a gray-haired bachelor with a slight lisp and some fussy behaviors. Given what we know, or think we know, today, Mr. Fischer was probably gay. He was good friends with our music teacher Miss Barnett, who had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.

Miss Barnett offered Mr. Fischer a pair of tickets to see Aida, and he asked me if I wanted to go. My mom said fine with her, and off we went one Saturday on the bus to New York. On the way, we saw acres of empty steel drums stacked up in the meadowlands along the route. It later turned out they were not empty, as most of the world probably thought, and had been leaking toxic goo into the North Jersey soil for years.

We arrived at the Met, still in the original building at 39th Street, and climbed to our seats. This is not meant as a complaint about the tickets, but we were in nosebleed territory, the highest section in the house. The section was so steep that when I turned around, I was looking straight between the knees of the old lady behind me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole outing and thought the opera was fantastic. I know now that a lot of people think Aida is bombastic, not fantastic, but what did I know then, kids love bombast.

Now, here’s what I think happened next, deduced by putting together two and two and based on the available evidence,

One Mr. Grady, who lived two doors down from us on Rayburn Terrace, was the janitor at Cleveland Street School. He was a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning; he carried a rosary in his back pocket and could be seen fingering it from time to time. Mr. Grady hated Mr. Fischer for the predictable reasons, and had gotten wind of our opera excursion. Mr. Grady put a bug in my mother’s ear that perhaps Mr. Fischer was leading her son astray, and she should beware. My mother then confided in her boss, Mr. Edwards, with whom she was on friendly terms and maybe just a little bit office-romancy – Mr. Edwards would sometimes drive her home at night so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Was her bookish son being groomed as a Friend of Dorothy? Mr. Edwards considered the issue and came up with an plan.

Next, the only tangible evidence I have of all this speculation.

My mother came home from work one day and said “Mr. Edwards thought you might like this calendar.” Indeed I would, for it was probably the most risqué pinup calendar then available, Vargas Girls in provocative poses and showing as much skin as was legal. “Um, thanks!” I had never been given anything by Mr. Edwards before.

After a decent interval I was upstairs, the staples were out and my top four picks were on the wall alongside my Honor Roll certificates. I was cured.

2018-01-272024-07-05

Halloween

when you’re a poor kid
to dress up as a hobo
you needn’t add much

2018-01-272024-07-29

Secret recipe

“You have to make something explode to truly understand it. You have to examine the tiny particles while they’re on fire.” — Charles, mental patient in Sling Blade

After school I experimented in my room with various combinations of the three ingredients of gunpowder, purchased at three different drugstores. In article Library Card, I said “There seemed no limit to the information available in the library. Here I found the recipe for gunpowder…”

Fortunately for my eyesight and my fingers, there was a limit to the information available in the library. Although the three simple ingredients of gunpowder have been known since the 14th century, without a Wikipedia or an internet, I never found the proper portions for maximum explosive power.

I tried various mixes, a little more of this, a little less of that, placing tiny amounts of each ingredient on a sheet of heavy glass, mixing them together into an slightly larger pile, then applying a match to see which combination produced the biggest flash.

My experiments never came anywhere near the “correct” 75%, 15%, 10% ratio the article mentioned above spells out. Even the best mix I found was not very powerful. If I had had Wikipedia, I could have earned myself a nickname, like my friend Jimmy, who stole blasting caps from a construction site and tried to get the insides out of one by tapping it against the sidewalk. They called him Jimmy Three Fingers.

Fuses were hard to make. I can’t tell you how to make one because I honestly don’t remember, beyond a lot of trial and error and sparkly experiments with doctored twine.

Another buddy and I had some thoughts about making guncotton, a fairly powerful and uncomplicated Civil-War-era explosive. Again fortunately, we couldn’t figure out where to get two of the key ingredients.

My mother never asked about the burnt sulfur smell lingering in the house when she came home from work at night. I guess she trusted me not to do anything crazy.

I won’t mention any other lame-brained experiments, actual or proposed. It’s all out on the internet now, kids, and ten times more dangerous. Be careful to wear safety glasses.

About ten years ago there was a news story about a woman whose grandfather had died, and while cleaning out his garage, she found a hand grenade pushed way back on a shelf. The Army sent someone from Fort Dix to collect it, and sure enough it turned out to be a real, live, WW II grenade. My wife wondered why someone would want to keep a thing like that around, and I explained that you never know when you might need one.

2018-01-282024-07-10

I, (say your name), promise not to screw over the other Cub Scouts

When I was in Cub Scouts, our pack co-sponsored a minstrel show, with us selling tickets to our families and neighbors, first prize being a new bicycle. I sold tirelessly every afternoon after school and all day weekends, wearing my Cub Scout shirt and knocking on doors far afield from my own. If the lady (it was almost always a lady) answering had some lame excuse like “We have other plans that night”, I would say in my best sad-orphan voice “Well, won’t you buy just one ticket to support the Cub Scouts?”. This worked pretty well, and, after all, the tickets were only two dollars.

I got tired of selling tickets and stopped a week before the show. When my “friend” and fellow Scout “Glen” asked how many I had sold, I answered honestly with (as I recall) “176”. A week later “Glen” had sold 180 and had himself a new bike.

2018-01-282024-07-01

Presbyterian Minstrel Show

My church, and I call it “my” church because East Orange Presbyterian was the closest Protestant church that my mother could get a neighbor to give me a ride to every Sunday, decided to give a minstrel show. I know what you’re thinking, but it was a long time ago, we didn’t know any better, and the nation was young.

Church members with an interest in show business volunteered for the various roles of minstrelsy, and rehearsals began on the fellowship hall stage. Maybe there is some sort of widely available, generic script for a minstrel show, for everyone seemed to know what they were doing. There was singing (Swanee River, Polly Wolly Doodle), tap dancing, and comic skits — for example, one included a small collection of fruits and vegetables, and a woman who says to her suitor “But darling, we…”, then holds up, wait for it, a cantalope!, as immediately recognized and shouted out by a willing audience.

Was there blackface? I honestly don’t remember, but yes, probably. Burnt cork is easy to manufacture, apply and remove, and also makes a fine beard for a Christmas Wise Man or Halloween hobo.

The players rehearsed religiously, seated onstage in the traditional minstrel-show semicircle of chairs. At only nine or ten years old, I was a stagehand, my sole duty being to open and close the curtains between skits. The show was scheduled for one night only, a Thursday. On that Thursday, as I was getting ready for bed, a stray thought crossed my mind and I froze and said to myself “Shit.”

I assume the show started just fine without me, but I never went back to that church and never knew for sure what happened that night at eight o’clock. Whenever I tell this story to someone, they always say “Wow, maybe they’re still stuck behind the curtains.” That’s crazy, right?

2018-01-312024-07-27

Scene from a once great city

Metropolitan Museum cafeteria, courtesy Dorothy Draper & Company

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had a cafeteria-style restaurant with tables arranged around a central reflecting pool. Visitors would make a wish, throwing coins out toward the bronze fountains in the center, as though it were the Trevi Fountain.

Neighborhood kids occasionally made a surprise visit to the museum, stepping into the pool as a group and grabbing as many coins as they could before the waiters chased them out. We witnessed such a raid one day while having lunch. The waiters were obviously sympathetic to the kids, pretending not to see what was going on for several minutes, then finally ushering them out of the building. My own kids seemed shocked by the raid, and by seeing kids their own age in ragged clothes scooping up the public’s wish money. I don’t think they ever saw poverty before that, or had any idea of what it must be like to be poor.

2018-02-032024-08-01

Cats v. Smithee Family

We generally had a cat in the house. I don’t know where we got them or to which of us they belonged; if a cat can “belong” to anyone, probably to my grandmother. I mentioned elsewhere that I “convinced my grandmother not to throw the cat out the window”, so it’s probably a good idea to explain that here, so you don’t think she was crazy.

My grandmother lived with us, “us” being me, my brother and our mother, as long as I can remember. After my father left, my mother went back to work, taking a bus to the Newark Athletic Club every day, starting from when I was about seven. I give her much credit, it was a struggle for her, but we always had a roof over our heads and coal in the bin, and I never went to bed hungry.

With my mother at work, Grandma became my de facto “caregiver”, a perfectly good word, but one that always sounds to me like Orwell’s 1984 “newspeak”. I often argued with her about small things, sometimes just to have an argument. Once, exasperated by my logic, she told me I’d make a good lawyer—not meant as a compliment. She made my school bag lunches – usually a carefully-made sandwich on Wonder bread of Spam, or deviled ham, or if I wasn’t lucky, olive loaf, not my favorite. Those are the ones I remember; I’m sure there were others.

Behind our house on Berkeley Avenue was a sort of service alley, and one day a hobo came to our back door to ask for something to eat. Grandma gave him a glass of milk and made him a sandwich to eat on the back porch. He thanked her kindly and left. In a while she sent me to see if he had written anything on the back gate. He had drawn a crude cat, which I later found out tells other hoboes “A kind-hearted woman lives here”. A practical woman too, she had me wash it off.

One day while playing with our first cat, a gray-and-black tabby like #1 above (not the actual cats, heh), I decided his whiskers were unnecessary and cut them off, leaving about a half-inch. The cat did not object, and we continued to play. That night, after my mother had been home for a while, she said “What’s wrong with the cat?”, and after a moment or two figured it out. It turns out that cat whiskers do have a purpose; as it was explained to me that night, they tell a cat whether he can fit through a narrow space.

(I’ll say here that to my knowledge, neither of our two cats had a gender or a name; they were referred to simply as “the cat”.)

My brother left a large paper grocery bag lying open in the middle of the living room. Cat number two (see #2 above), an orange tiger-striped tabby, spotted the bag, circled it, then went inside to take a nap. My brother said “Watch this”, grabbed the bag, closed it, and shook it vigorously. When he set the bag down again, the cat burst out of the top and headed for the other end of the house. After a while, the cat returned, circled the bag, and worked his way back inside. Cats are either adventurous or stupid; my vote is for adventurous.

__———- FIX

One evening there was a family discussion about how cats are always able to land on their feet after a fall (pretty much true). Perhaps looking to start another argument with my grandmother, I said that seemed unlikely. In rebuttal, she picked up cat #2, walked over to our second-floor window, and said “Watch this”. I yelled “NO, GRANDMA!” and ran over to save the cat. She laughed and set the cat down on the floor. Maybe she’s where I get my sense of humor.

As will happen, Grandma got older, and the family got her her own caregiver, a longtime family friend, a sweet woman named Laura who stayed with Grandma and me while my mother was at work. After a while, Grandma went to live with Aunt Mabel, who could stay with her all day; next came the nursing home; then she died.

When I went back to school after the funeral, the girl who sat next to me in Latin II, Filomena, asked in her haughty way where I had been for three days. When I told her, after a second or two she burst into tears. She had never considered the possibility of losing her Nana.

Fort Dix 1951, headed to Korea. Aunt Mabel, Dick, Mom, Grandma, me

2018-02-032024-07-27

Stuff My Mother Threw Out

This is my version of the story everyone seems to have, Stuff My Mother Threw Out. My family moved from 224 Rayburn Terrace in Orange, right next door to number 222, when I was about 14 . This was during the time of the Korean War, and my brother knew he was being drafted.

After the move, I discovered all my military stuff was missing: my German spiked helmet from WW I, my copy of the WW II Aircraft Spotter’s Guide including photos and instant-identification silhouettes of every American, German and Japanese fighter plane and bomber, some random bullets, a dummy hand grenade, and my Uncle George’s WW II uniform insignia and medals.

I understand why. But I still miss my stuff.

2018-02-032024-08-12

Self defense

As a kid, I took boxing lessons at the Newark Athletic Club. My mother was the comptroller there, sort of a senior accountant. My boxing instructor and sparring partner was Solly Castellano, a lightweight (135 pound) former pro fighter who fought from 1925 to 1929. Solly’s professional debut was in January 1925, when he knocked out one Sandy Hook (sic) of the UK in the fourth round. Solly’s record was 44 wins, 8 losses, and 4 draws – not too shabby. He also won the New Jersey lightweight championship, in May 1928.

Solly must have been about 50 years old when he had what was to me his most memorable fight. According to the Newark News, he was standing in a store entrance on Broad Street, waiting for the bus, when two thugs decided the little guy would be easy to mug. He sent them both to the hospital.

I don’t remember much about my lessons except being taught to keep my hands up, watch my stance, and throw a punch when the opportunity arose. I had very few fights as a kid, but those lessons gave me a lot of confidence, and sometimes that’s enough.

Shortly after my family moved from East Orange to Orange and I entered my new school halfway through sixth grade, a kid named Joe Stokes approached me in the schoolyard and started what we now call “trash talking,” about my white socks and sandals, never a good look for a kid, especially a new kid. He put his hands up and so did I; as we circled around each other, a spectator said something like “He looks like he knows how to fight” and after circling some more, it all petered out and the subject was dropped without a punch being thrown. In defense of my white socks and sandals, at that time my feet were troubled by eczema, a skin condition that produces runny sores. Yecch.

Joe and I had one other run-in. During a fire drill, I was assigned to hold open one of the heavy hall doors, standing behind it so everyone could pass quickly. Coming back after the drill, Joe saw me behind the door, my back to the wall, and charged. My feet were planted, blocking the bottom of the door from moving, but the top flexed in, then bounced back into his face. As Nelson Muntz might say, “HA-ha!”. Life is good.

Another benefit of Mom’s job was my getting swimming lessons and using the club’s big pool. During the summer, I’d take the Number 20 bus down to Newark two or three afternoons a week. Some days I’d buy a bag of shelled peanuts at McCrory’s 5 and 10, then sit by the colossal Wars of America sculpture and toss them to the pigeons and squirrels.

Detail, Wars of America by Gutzon Borglum, 1926 – courtesy nj.com

I don’t remember much about my swimming lessons except kicking my way back and forth across the pool while hanging onto a board, which I guess is how everybody starts out. The club members were politicians, judges and business executives, and the club was for men only. Add to the list of things that were normal then but seem weird now, the swimming was nude, and there would be a half-dozen or so grown men swimming at the same time as me. I’m sure Mr. Bassini, the pool manager, towel-giver-outer, and Managing Director, kept an eye on me.

When I got tired of swimming, I’d take a ride on the club’s electric horse, which was pretty cool. Later, I’d hang around Mom’s office reading, or fiddling with the typewriter and adding machine. We’d take the bus home, maybe stopping for dinner at the Howard Johnson’s on Central Avenue. She could never talk me out of ordering my favorite, Salisbury steak.

About the Club

Military Park Hotel, originally the Newark Athletic Club, 1966. – Newark Public Library

“…the Newark Athletic Club (NAC), founded in 1919. At its peak, it boasted of 3,800 members which dwindled to less than 300 by 1938. The club’s original headquarters, later the Military Park Hotel, was demolished ]n 1993 and is the site of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The original idea for the club came from former Congressman E.W. Gary and former Gov. Franklin Murphy. Construction of the NAC began in 1921, and the doors opened in 1923 with Gen. George Pershing presiding at the ceremonies. According to the Newark News account, the club ‘immediately leaped to a position nationally known among organizations of its kind. Athletes bearing the NAC emblem won cups and medals in meets all over the country.’ As in the case of the Elks Club at Lincoln Park, the Newark Athletic Club boasted an elaborate sports emporium with a large swimming pool, gymnasium, bowling alley, billiard room, etc. But financial problems resulted in the club’s demise for the same reasons as its Elks Club counterpart. Thus, it, too, closed. As America and Newark began to change because of wars, depressions and general unrest, many of the city’s traditional agencies reflected the differences. New organizations, new people, and new moods were on the horizon.” — Courtesy Newark Public Library

2018-02-042024-07-01

The Electric Horse

Calvin Coolidge’s exercise machine, photo by Jim Steinhart

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time during the summer at the Newark Athletic Club, where my mother was the comptroller, sort of a senior accountant. There, the friendly staff taught me to box and to swim. Once I learned to swim, I could use the pool as much as I wanted.

When I got tired of swimming, I’d take a ride on the club’s electric horse, which was pretty cool. The one President Coolidge used for exercise in the White House is shown above. Looking at the photo, I think the club had the same model. Instead of reins, there were two hand grips attached loosely to the “head”. The horse had selectable speeds and four horse-like gaits, from walk to trot to canter to gallop, although the club may have had gallop turned off for obvious reasons.

To illustrate how kids are ready to accept any inconvenience as “just the way it works”, the club’s horse was a bit temperamental – it had a short circuit somewhere that would give you a shock if you didn’t mount it just right. As far as I know, no one ever reported this until now.

Other models

Learning to ride side-saddle, courtesy Beth Dalton via Pinterest

Mechanical horse at Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s holistic sanitarium, courtesy Gizmodo

2018-02-102024-07-11

Graffiti

Back in kindergarten, I wrote my name on the front steps of the school; they made me scrub it off with a brush and bucket of water. They teach you to write your name, then they get all upset when you put that knowledge to work.

The bus stop in Bloomfield center was right in front of a grand old bank building, and kids would hoist themselves up to sit on its window ledge while waiting for the bus. One day I noticed that my brother had etched our family name deep into the sandstone window frame, enclosing it in a perfect rectangle, Roman SPQR style. I could tell it had taken him a long time and many bus waits, and I was very proud.

In high school gym class I wasn’t famous for my athletic ability, so when sides were chosen up for a ball game, I was usually picked about two-thirds of the way back. (“Can’t field, good for a single.”) There was something I liked about rope climbing, though, and once I wrote a small “SMITHEE 56” in black marker on the gym ceiling with my free hand while I was up there. When Mr. Marucci discovered it weeks later and called me on it, he seemed equally annoyed and impressed. He was one of the good ones.

In the army, several guys in my unit went into town and came back with the same tattoo, a stalking panther. These days, every Tom, Dick and waitress seems to have some sort of body art. A girl showing me her ink asked if I had any of my own, then got mad when I said no, I never got that drunk. Actually, I do kind of wish I had gone into town with my buddies that day; I think I missed out on something important.

And then there’s street graffiti, the witty kind. Sometimes it’s just a few words of commentary scrawled in the margin of a subway poster.

Finally, there’s serious, wall-commanding, actual art. The world owes a lot to these artists.

Keith Haring, courtesy Keith Haring Foundation

2018-02-112024-08-06

Mighty Nice People

After my two summers at Uncle Bert’s farm in Michigan, more about that later, I think Mom thought it was her turn to take a vacation, and she made reservations for us at Culvermere, a lake resort in North Jersey. I don’t know if she ever had a real vacation before that. When she showed me the brochure and I saw they had sailing, I was sold. I went to the library and took out a how-to book. After I studied it for a while, sailing a small boat seemed pretty straightforward.

Once we got to Culvermere we didn’t see much of each other except at mealtime and at the evening entertainments, which were pretty good. They had comics, singers and a band, sort of a Borscht Belt South.

Mom stayed in one of the single-ladies dorms, if dorm is the right word. I think guests were assigned dorms by general age group. I was in a single-men’s dorm with five or six guys in their 20s, mostly from Brooklyn. Couples stayed in the hotel proper. At age 12, I was probably the youngest person there. I almost wrote “the youngest person at camp”, but I never thought of it as a camp, or heard anyone else call it that. But the postcard above describes the view as “Culver Lake from Camp Culvermere”, so there you have it. Summer camp for grownups.

Culvermere had one of those noisy characters who gets paid to make sure everyone stays busy and happy, not always a bad idea, and I took a few tennis lessons. There were also hard-fought softball games where I continued work on my lifelong reputation of “Can’t field, good for a single”. Mostly I dove off the floating platform and swam.

There were bicycles available, and roads around the lake to explore. One day I went to take out a bike and there was this girl there at the same time, Rachael, so we started just riding along together. She was a couple of years older. After a while she said “Let’s rest”, and we stopped in a woody spot under some trees where you could just see the lake on the other side of the road. You think you know where this is going, don’t you? Well, you don’t, because I was too young to pick up on the signals. Sorry, Rachael — it wasn’t you, it was me.

Catboat taking the wind, areyspondboatyard.com

Culver Lake is about a mile and a half long and a half-mile wide. It covers 550 acres, with a maximum depth of fifty feet. For fellow New Jerseyans, it’s up in the woods near Stokes State Forest and Kittatinny Mountain.

I asked one of the guys from Brooklyn, Greg, if he wanted to go sailing, and we signed out a single-sail sailboat pretty much like the one above. I’m not sure if they made us put on life jackets; people weren’t 24/7 safety-conscious like they are today. Greg sat at one side and took it easy while I pulled up the sail and got us started toward the other end of the lake.

We had the wind behind us, so there wasn’t much to do sailing-wise except stay on a straight line. We just coasted along while I steered. When we got near the other end and it was time to turn around, I said to Greg, “I think I understand the next part but I’m not a hundred percent sure, I know we have to zig-zag back and forth to go against the wind.” Instead of confirming my generalization of what needed to happen next, he said “What!? Didn’t you ever do this before?”. He didn’t seem scared, but he was definitely upset. I said “No, but I think I know how to do it.”

When I realized Greg didn’t know how to sail a boat, I was surprised. This was before television began painting parents and most other grownups as idiots, so it was still natural for children to believe that any adult could do anything.

I took the tiller again and began doing what the book had said, doing what you see in the diagram on the left, tacking – going back and forth across the wind. A sailboat can’t sail directly into the wind, so the idea is to angle the boat to keep the wind coming from roughly ten o’clock or two o’clock, propelling the boat forward.

The tiller is a lever attached to the rudder, which helps control the angle and direction of the boat. At the beginning of this diagram, the boat starts out with the sail set about 45 degrees to the wind, which is coming from the boat’s ten o’clock. As the tiller is adjusted to bring the boat around to point more directly into the wind, the sail flutters, then swings across to the other side. The boat loses a little speed, but its momentum completes the turn as the boom swings across the boat and the sail fills again. Now the wind is coming from two o’clock, and forward progress continues.

An unseen centerboard projects below the boat, resisting the wind’s efforts to push the boat sideways, and helping to maintain forward motion.

As the sail swings across the boat during each turn, those aboard duck under the boom and move to the other side. Some of this might sound complicated, but it all becomes routine after a while, and the boat will try to help.

Summing up the return trip, the laws of physics operated as expected and the trip was uneventful. When we got back to Culvermere and returned the boat, Greg laughed, shook my hand, and said “Thanks for the ride!”

I’m not sure how long Mom and I were at Culvermere, whether it was one week or two. Whichever it was, it felt like just enough. We had lots of fun and did get to meet some Mighty Nice People, but I think we were both happy to get home. Given the opportunity, I would have gone back the next year, but that’s the year I spent two weeks at Bible camp, which was fun too, in a more restrained way.

The day we went home, Greg slipped me a Tijuana Bible, one of those wallet-size eight-page comics that depicts famous cartoon characters getting jiggy with one another, in this case Dagwood, Blondie and Mr. Beasley the mailman. I hid it in my bedroom along with my cigarettes and other valuables, behind the loose board over the space between the two windows where the sash weights hang in the dark.

2018-02-122024-07-27

Anthracite

Coal delivery via chute, courtesy whippanyrailwaymuseum.net

We lived on the first floor of a two-family house in Orange. Each family had their own furnace and their own coal bin. For some reason, the builder put the bins at the rear of the cellar, unreachable directly from the street. When we got a ton of coal, it had to be hand-carried around the building to a cellar window.

The driver and his helper took turns pouring coal from a chute in the truck’s tailgate into wire-framed canvas baskets slung on their backs, then carried them down the driveway and behind the house. There they dumped the coal down a metal chute that ran through a cellar window and into one of the bins. My bedroom was directly above the bins; one day we got a coal delivery on a school holiday, and I took a weird pride in learning I had slept through the racket.

Coal delivery the hard way, courtesy whippanyrailwaymuseum.net

I was in charge of stoking our furnace when I got home from school. That meant shaking the ashes down through the grates and adding fresh coal on top. If the fire was ever allowed to go out, that was a major failure on the stoker’s part, and a major project for a grownup to get a new fire started. The remaining ashes and cinders had to be removed by shaking them through the grates, then a new fire laid, starting with crumpled newspaper, then strips of wood, then a layer of coal, followed by a match and a prayer.

One afternoon I forgot to tend the furnace. By the time I remembered, it was five o’clock, and when I pulled open the furnace door to add coal the fire was almost out, the last few embers dull red. I piled on some coal anyway, hoping against hope, but after a few minutes I could see it wasn’t catching. I got the idea of adding a little turpentine from the Mason jar we kept to clean paint brushes in. Well, it proved not possible to add just a little turpentine, because when I started pouring, the jar instantly caught fire. I dropped it into the embers and WHOOMPH there went my eyebrows.

The idea worked fine otherwise, and by the time my mother got home, the furnace was working, the house was warm, and I had washed my face. I’m sure she noticed my eyebrows, but my family doesn’t ask questions.

2018-02-162024-07-21

In hoc signo vinces

Those four Latin words are a Christian religious exhortation, meaning “By this sign you shall conquer”. I happen to know this because my mom smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. Pall Malls were named after an upscale street in London and pronounced “pell mell”, and the words appear on the banner beneath the Pall Mall coat of arms. Figuring out what the phrase meant was this curious child’s first encounter with Latin. What it had to do with the product inside the package is unclear, except that a little bit of Latin always adds class.

In eighth grade, students in my town chose the subject areas they’d study in high school. As best I recall, the options were English, math, business, science, and general studies. I chose science.

We were expected to take a foreign language, and I wanted to take German because I was part German and had heard German was the primary language of science. Unfortunately, anti-German sentiment at the time of the First World War got my high school’s German-language curriculum cancelled, and forty years later it hadn’t come back. My second choice was Latin, also a science-y language.

One of John Irving’s characters asks another, “Do you know Latin? The last international language, the—uh-hem—Esperanto of Christendom.”

On my first day of high school, I found myself assigned to Italian I, probably because my real last name looks Italian (ends in a vowel) and someone thought a mistake had been made. It took a few days to get transferred to Latin I, but meanwhile I found Miss Mercurio’s Italian class interesting and enjoyable. Looking back, I probably should have stayed there.

It turned out that I hated Latin. Well, not actually Latin per se, but its many fussy and complex rules of grammar. I could look up and list a pile of them here, but then you’d get bored and skip to the next article. Here is a single, miserable example, somewhat at random, “Nouns of the Fourth Declension“ for nouns hand, lake, and knee.

Courtesy Dickinson College Commentaries, dickinson.edu

Boredom with learning the rules of Latin grammar led me to cheating, probably the only class I ever cheated in. Our homework was often to memorize noun declensions, and next day we’d be called to the front of the room to write them on the board. As I stood there trying to look like I was straining to remember, I’d look down into my shirt pocket where there was a sturdy piece of paper folded into the general shape of a pack of cigarettes, with my crib notes written in tiny letters across the top. Writing about this now reminds me of something I’d totally forgotten – a girl working at the blackboard section next to mine looked over, spotted my visual aid, then got a fit of giggles that our teacher chalked up simply to her being a girl.

Somehow, I advanced to Latin II, where I ended up again doing poorly. At the end of that year, my only hope of passing and advancing to Latin III (why did I want to do that?) was to get a high mark on the final exam, which consisted of translating a large chunk of one of the classics from Latin to English. In this case the source was the story of Ulysses’ run-in with the Greek enchantress Circe, who transforms his ship’s crew into swine, then back to humans again, then engages in other shape-shifting pranks before she and Ulysses pair up and start a family. This choice of test material worked out nicely for me, because on my prior birthday , my mother gave me a book of mythology that included the tale of Circe. Knowing the story, I was able to ‘translate’ it into a nicely flowing English version, very much surprising Miss McGovern.

Returning to the subject of cigarettes, Mom’s Pall Malls were unfiltered, and to me the occasional one I stole was strong and nasty. After some trial and error, mentholated Kools became my brand of choice. Lots of people thought Kools tasted weird because of the menthol, and if someone asked me for a cigarette, they might say “Oh, never mind” once they saw what I was smoking.

Mom smoked at home and at work too, but she thought it was very un-ladylike for a woman to smoke in public, quietly tsk-tsking whenever she saw a woman smoking on the street. And of course she didn’t want her son smoking at all, certainly not at age 15. One day while I was smoking a Kool and telling a story on the corner by Vince’s, I seemed to be getting more laughs than the story deserved. As it turned out, my audience was laughing in anticipation, because they could see my mother headed down the hill behind me on her way to the store. She kicked me hard in the backside and said “Get rid of that cigarette.” My friends were greatly entertained, and I had to laugh myself.

In closing, Pro bono, pro rata, pro forma.

2018-02-162024-07-27

Ray put us out on the roof

At Orange High, I took mechanical drawing, known today as “engineering drawing”, for three years. Basically it’s a way of putting on paper enough design information about an object or machine part to enable its manufacture. The drawing below is not my own, I got it off the internet and don’t know what it is. It looks like some sort of metal wheel, 8 3/4 inches in diameter, made of two separate parts bolted together. There’s a side view and a front view that together provide enough data to enable someone to go to a machine shop and get one made. But what is it? We don’t know; without a name or description on the drawing, we’ll have to ask whoever comes back to pick it up. I would guess it’s part of a boardwalk amusement ride, but that’s the way my mind works.

Our classroom was on the Lincoln Avenue side of the school, on the third floor toward the rear, at the top of a flight of stairs that led nowhere else – not a room you’d ever wander into by accident. It had high windows that opened onto a flat, narrow roof with a wall around it about two feet high.

There were usually about 12 or 14 students in the class, all boys. One year there was a girl. I don’t know anything about her or what her story was, but good for her. Maybe she was sent from the future.

Our instructor was Ray Smith, who had a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute. He was a fine teacher, easy to understand and follow. Ray did not tolerate misbehavior in his class; if you acted up or did something particularly stupid, he was likely to punch you, punch your arm. How hard the punch was depended on your offense. Because he had grown up in Orange as friends with my Uncle Bert, Ray expected more from me, and paid me extra attention. One day he punched my arm so hard he almost knocked me off my stool. I don’t remember what it was I did, but I know I deserved it.

I don’t think Ray ever gave me an ‘A’ on a class assignment, because my descriptive lettering – the final, boring fill-out-the-form step necessary to complete a drawing – was rushed and sloppy. When it came to lettering, a downgrade to a ‘B’ was fine with me.

Some teachers punished bad behavior by sending the offender out to stand in the hall, with the next offense bringing a trip to the principal’s office. Ray’s approach was to raise a window sash and with a gesture usher you onto the roof, then close the window behind you. I was banished to roof isolation once, and it’s a strange feeling to be outside, alone and empty-handed, looking in as your classmates work on their projects.

One exile found a lost “spaldeen”, the lively pink rubber ball used in stickball and handball. He fought off boredom by bouncing it against the building, taking the return on the fly. It took Ray a while to figure out what that thumping was.

I kept my best work from Ray’s class for years, including my all-time favorite, a beautiful and perfect rendering of a small steam engine. Each time I changed jobs, I brought those drawings to my next house, in their cardboard box with my stock charts, childhood treasure maps and book reports.

We hired a well-reviewed company, Windsor Moving and Storage, to move us from Princeton, where I had just finished up my last contract-programmer job before retirement, to the Jersey Shore. I whimsically labeled that cardboard box of mementos, useless to anyone in the world but me, “Valuable Historical Documents”. Somewhere between Princeton and the Jersey Shore the box went missing; it was a year before I realized it was gone. I’m sure its contents were a great disappointment to someone.

2018-02-182024-07-28

A candle this high

The title is the correct answer to the popular high school riddle, “Do you know what burns my ass?”

When the person being questioned replies “No, what?”, the questioner provides the correct answer, demonstrating by holding out one hand, palm down, at hip level.

2018-02-202024-07-21

Credo, more or less

My father was a Catholic, nominally. I don’t think he ever went to church as an adult. One of my aunts said when he did go to Mass as a child, he always managed to avoid the collection plate.

Similarly, my mother was a Protestant, nominally. I don’t think she ever went to church as an adult either. Her way of staying right with the Lord may have been simply to make sure I attended Sunday School. She accomplished this by finding neighbors who attended a nearby Protestant church and were willing to give me a ride each Sunday. She didn’t seem fussy about which flavor of Protestant services I attended; I remember Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist, depending on where we were living. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Eick, pronounced “Ike”, of Linwood Place, for giving me a weekly ride to the Washington Street Baptist Church in your rumble-seated car, and for sometimes treating me to a second breakfast if I showed up for my ride too early.

Full immersion baptism, Chestnut Mountain Church, Flowery Branch, Georgia

I was baptized a Catholic at the age of one month, so even if the rules about who gets into Heaven are as stringent as I’ve heard from some Catholic sources, I remain eligible. In the Baptist church, baptism (full-immersion, y’all, Acts 8:38, Mark 1:5) is reserved for those “able to make a mature confession of faith”; most baptisms I’ve seen were of people in their early teens or just a little younger; certainly old enough to decide.

Somehow, the Baptists never got around to baptizing me; that’s probably just as well, because there are some doctrinal problems with being baptized twice; your mileage may vary. The closest I have come to professing the Baptist faith openly was having “BAPTIST” stamped on my army dog tags, along with my blood type, “O”.

Soon after I opened my first checking account, a local radio station aired a feature story about an orphanage in Kearney (next to Newark) burning down, and soliciting contributions to rebuild. The fire sounded pretty devastating, and I had once written a book report on Oliver Twist, so I was ripe. I broke out my new checkbook and wrote Sacred Heart Orphanage of Kearney a check for something like five or ten dollars, not a trivial sum then. When my first bank statement arrived, I asked my mother to help me interpret it. As we reviewed the half-dozen or so cashed checks, we came to the one to Sacred Heart, and she said “What’s this?!” I relayed the whole burnt-down orphanage story, which only seemed to anger her. Raising her voice just a little, she said “The Pope doesn’t need your money.” End of discussion.

I married a girl who was raised Catholic; this never posed a problem, because, like me, she was not a churchgoer. Back when Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday, she ignored the rule; the only time it ever came up was once when we were out shopping – she said “It won’t feel right to eat meat on Good Friday”, and I said “Okay, let’s get fish then.” We started both our kids along the Catholic path of confirmation and first communion, because that way they can make up their own minds later on, right?

During a confirmation ceremony, the officiating bishop asks the candidates several questions from a list. The kids get advance coaching in the questions and the correct answers from adult volunteers; kids who have not attended parochial school find the questions and concepts more difficult. Despite my protests, I got volunteered into coaching my older son. To keep my own conscience clear while still following the study guide, my practice questions took the form “Now, if the bishop asks you ‘How does the Holy Spirit help us?’, what are you going to say?” On the day of the ceremony, I got some holy water sprinkled on me as the bishop’s procession entered the church. It didn’t burn, so I guess my approach was acceptable.

1947 Pontiac. Imagine this with seven more years of wear, green and much less shiny

One thing I did in high school was definitely a Bad Thing, religion-wise, as was confirmed by Miss Riley, our world history teacher. I had a ’47 Pontiac, and in the morning I might pick up a few friends, then, once at school, if I was not planning to go to classes, ask “Who’s going in?”. Those remaining in the car would cruise around with me for the rest of the day, or at least until it was time for me to go to my afternoon job. I was not at all familiar with the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and one Ash Wednesday my friends wanted to get their ashes applied before school.

I drove around under their direction, but the churches all had lines. Some of them decided to get out and get on line anyway, leaving just me and one passenger. Knowing that the only excuse to arrive late to school that day was to enter through the attendance office with ashes on our foreheads, I suggested using the ashes in the car’s ashtray. I don’t recall whether my passenger joined in or not, but I decorated my forehead with a smudge similar to those I had seen walking the streets all morning and entered the school without difficulty. I should have thought to wash off the ashes as soon as I got past the attendance office, but did not.

When I got to world history class later that day, Miss Riley, who had attended this very high school with my mother and knew her well, took one look at my smudge and squawked “YOU’RE NOT CATHOLIC!”. She didn’t know, of course, that my ashes were fake; that would have been so much worse. She was angry at my assumed (by her) decision to present myself to a priest as Catholic to obtain an excuse to be late to school. She told me I should be ashamed, and to wash my face and think very hard about what I’d done. I was ashamed, or at least I am now, for disrespecting someone else’s religion; I did wash my face; and I do continue to think about religion, although not so hard any more.

Thoughts

Back in the day, my wife and I liked to explore old cemeteries. While admiring the statuary and mausoleum architecture of a Catholic cemetery in Westchester, we noticed off at one side two rows of tiny headstones. There were maybe 30 or 40 in all, each very close to the next, and marked with numbers instead of names. We wondered what that was all about, and next day my wife called the office to ask. The woman who answered asked her in turn “Are you Catholic, dear?”. Getting a yes, she explained that section was the unconsecrated part of the cemetery, and those were graves of unbaptized babies and stillbirths. I don’t know what we expected, but that made us sad.

Church dogma at the time said the unborn and unbaptized were consigned to Limbo, which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “Limbo, in Roman Catholic theology, the border place between heaven and hell where dwell those souls who, though not condemned to punishment, are deprived of the joy of eternal existence with God in heaven.”

However, according to Wikipedia, “Recent Catholic theological speculation tends to stress the hope, although not the certainty, that these infants may attain heaven instead of the state of Limbo.” So there’s at least some hope.

The editor of the syndicated newspaper column The Ethicist once responded to a question from a lapsed-Catholic-gone-atheist reader who had been pressed into service as a pallbearer in a Catholic funeral. The main point of his response was “Your participation in the service was not hypocrisy; it was an act of compassion and affection for your family. To join in some parts of the service does not require you to join in every part.” I commented to the editor:

I liked what you wrote in your “pallbearer” segment. As a non-Catholic married into a large Catholic family, I have been in that situation several times. The trick when participating in any Catholic ceremony is to never sit in the first row. One can then take the cue from others to stand, sit, or slide forward in lieu of kneeling – without seeming disrespectful, and optionally without praying.

There is a bumper sticker that says “God is who, evolution is how”, an attractive simplification. The real truth may be so deep and complex that no human has yet imagined it.