I was a good customer of the Orange Public Library. Usually the first thing I’d do when I arrived was head over to the reference room and take Gray’s Anatomy off the shelf, then find a seat where no one could see what I was studying. It was the already ancient 1905 edition of Gray’s, all black-and-white hand-drawn, scrupulous and scary illustrations of the various parts of the human anatomy, especially the lady parts. It was a well-worn, thick book, and if you set it down on its spine, it would fall open automatically to the V’s.
The non-fiction, or what I thought of as the Dewey Decimal part of the library, was at the back of the building, spread over three levels connected by metal stairs. The floors between levels were of heavy, translucent glass and as much as you might strain and imagine, you couldn’t see anything of the people walking on the level directly above your head except the bottom of their shoes.
The library had a collection of classical music on 33-and-a-third LP albums; symphonies and operas. German/English and Italian/English side-by-side librettos were available, so I could sing along (“In fernem Land…”) in my living room until someone came home. My mother had no interest in opera of any flavor, but on Saturday afternoons we’d listen to the Philharmonic radio broadcast on NBC together.
There seemed no limit to the information available in the library. Here I found the recipe for gunpowder, and while browsing randomly stumbled on a book about witchcraft. When I took the book home, I found that one page contained about 20 demonic symbols that could Make Things Happen. One of them, if stared at long enough, would turn the starer into a werewolf. That didn’t seem like such a great idea for anyone, so I averted my eyes and tore out the page. I balled it up and threw it into a storm sewer next day on my way to school. Just a small public service.
After I got interested in building models I stole a thin volume called “How to Make a Ship in a Bottle”. That might be the first thing I ever stole. When my brother saw me reading it, he said “How to take a shit in a bottle” and laughed, and I got mad. I never did make a ship in a bottle, it looked pretty complicated.
Stickler Memorial Library, Orange, NJ, early 1900s. It’s still there, kids
My parents lived in Bloomfield, New Jersey but I was born in Saint Michael’s Hospital in Newark. My real last name (I call myself Paul Smithee on this site) looks Italian because it has a vowel on the end, but we are of traditional pale German-Irish stock. When the time came to bring baby Paul home from the hospital, my mother was quite upset with the nurses when “they tried to give me a little Italian baby!”. I am satisfied any other attempts at a switch also failed, for I look pretty much like my brother Dick.
A couple of other things that I was told but don’t actually remember: one time I got out of the house naked and walked pretty far down Olive Street before anyone noticed. Once I pulled a chest of drawers over on myself but Dick heard it fall and got me out from under there. Thanks, bro.
My brother Dick was nine years older than I. Because of the age difference, we moved in different circles, and there wasn’t much we did together, at least not until I got older. Here are a couple of unfortunate exceptions, but I’m not mad, bro.
One night when I was about four, he climbed out of his bedroom window, crossed the porch roof and stood outside mine. Maybe the moon was full that night, or there was a streetlight behind him, but he maneuvered his shadow onto my screen and proceeded to lurch about and make what I’ll call “scary monster noises”. I guess he hadn’t thought his prank all the way through, because once the noises woke me and I saw his shadow, I freaked out, and ended up with everybody in the house in my room to see what all the screaming was about. Perhaps predictably, I don’t remember anything else that happened that night.
“Shadow Monsters” show by Philip Worthington, courtesy feeldesain.com
Somewhere else here I mentioned, without explanation, that “I broke my brother’s radio”. That could have been in revenge for his scaring me that night, but I’m not 100% sure that the two events are connected.
Another evening, I don’t know whether before or after the porch roof incident, my mother and father were in the front room, seated at one corner of the table, my brother’s radio between them. They were leaning in, as people did then, listening to music. I simply walked up and shoved the radio off onto the floor, a wordless and terrible act. I don’t know the reason why, but I certainly knew the reason then.
I was not punished or reprimanded in any way for my act of violence, and heard nothing further about it, which suggests that my parents regarded my breaking the radio as some sort of frontier justice.
1940s Emerson table top radio, courtesy worthpoint.com
Unrelatedly, on another evening my mother sent me to pick up something from the grocery store at the end of the block. My brother sneaked out of the house ahead of me and climbed a low tree overhanging the sidewalk. When I got underneath, he reached down out of the dark to grab my face. Somehow I had sensed him there a few seconds before, so I just swatted his arm away and kept walking.
Years later, I asked him if he remembered the radio incident. I wanted to apologize for destroying his radio, and maybe find out what his actual offense was, if it wasn’t scaring me like that. He didn’t remember his porch roof prank, or even his radio. I guess some people are just not good at holding grudges. I know if it was my radio, I’d sure as hell remember what I did that got it destroyed.
Our small house at 402 Berkeley Avenue, current (2024) Zestimate $532,400. Wow.
One day during the summer my mother takes me on a bus trip to New York City to visit her cousin. I was never in the city before that. As soon as we get out of the bus on Eighth Avenue, I am impressed by the rich stink, not the garbage-and-urine city stink we know today, but the honest, heavy stink of cows and massive amounts of cow manure. We are at the blocks-long cattle pens of the West Side stockyards, in the city’s slaughterhouse district. My mother half-apologizes for the stink and we start walking east. After a few blocks the air freshens and we go into an Automat, the fast-food restaurant of the day. At the change booth my mother pushes two dollar bills across a marble sill and a brass chute delivers a shower of nickels.
There are walls of sandwiches, pies and much more, each on its own clean plate and behind its own swing-up glass door. Drop enough nickels into the slot, turn the knob, lift the door, slide out your choice. Coffee is a nickel – grab an empty cup, insert your nickel, turn slowly the S-shaped handle to dispense an exact cupful. We grab a table for four, sitting across from each other. Very soon a man approaches and asks “Is this seat taken?”. It isn’t, we say, and he takes a seat between us. Unlike myself, my mother is unfazed by this. There is minimal but cordial conversation. We finish, say goodbye to our new friend and leave. The Automat did not expect its customers to bus their tables.
We head eastward to Third Avenue, home of the Third Avenue Elevated, sort of an above-ground subway line. When we get to our cousin’s building, it stands facing the El and about fifty feet from the tracks. Her apartment is on the third floor and the windows are open. I remember our cousin apologizing for the train noise but it really didn’t seem so bad after a while.
After the ladies get settled in the kitchen, I go back to the front room. Trains come by in one direction or the other every five minutes or so. I am old enough to read and I lie on the carpet by the window and read my Bucky Bug comic.
I was on vacation between first and second grade. We were living at Uncle Jim’s house. One day all the grownups started acting crazy and laughing and hugging and hollering and crying. I asked them what was going on, and they said the war was over. I asked them who won, but they just ignored me. I ran up and down the front steps for a while. I knew it was important. I had on my brown and orange striped shirt.
Before we lived there we had our own house. A few other things happened. I got hit on the head with a rock. I broke my brother’s radio and looked at a girl’s hiney hole. Italian kids moved in and came to my kindergarten. I asked my mother what two very bad curse words meant. My father stopped coming home. My teacher made me hide my face in her lap. I had to clean the school steps with a bucket and scrub brush because I wrote on them. While I was scrubbing my mother walked by on her way to the store but she didn’t look over at me. I cut off the tip of my finger slicing bread and got a red wagon for not crying too much on the way to the doctor’s.
At Uncle Jim’s house I jumped off his garage roof with an umbrella. I broke off enough roof shingles to build a fort but he made them not punish me. He had his grandfather’s Civil War rifle hanging on a rafter in the cellar.
When we got our own house again I used to play under our dining room table and make believe it was my fort. There was a metal lever there to pull the two halves of the table tight together and I would slide it back and forth and pretend it was the speed control on a trolley car. I wrote ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ in chalk on the underside of the table and the day the movers took the table apart to bring it to our next house they walked past my brother and me with the words facing out and he laughed but didn’t tell anyone.
“Atom Bomb devastating”– an ocean of contemporaneous news coverage, courtesy Jamie Bradburn’s Tales of Toronto
After the war was over, my brother Dick, Mom and I moved out of Aunt Elizabeth’s and Aunt Frances’s houses and into our own rented house on Linwood Place in East Orange. Grandma joined us there; I think she had been staying with Aunt Mabel.
With the troops coming home, there was a national housing shortage, and my mother decided to bring in some extra money by taking in roomers. They would have the large bedroom at the front of the house, and share the single bathroom with us.
Our first roomers were the Turners, a pleasant couple in their thirties. I was unaware of their nighttime activities because my room was at the far end of the house, but apparently their lovemaking was so loud and frequent that my mother and grandmother came to doubt that they were married. The Turners were asked to leave, whether because of the noise or the not-being-married I don’t know.
Our next roomers were two girls in their early twenties, blond Charlotte and exotic Betty K. They formed a close friendship with my brother, then about 17, which ended when the three were caught by my grandmother “rolling around” on the double bed. There were no further roomers.
As you might guess, the shared bathroom was often in use when I got up in the morning to get ready for school . An empty milk bottle was kept on the top cellar step for when I couldn’t wait. Someone, I assume my mom, emptied and rinsed it later.
I once read a science fiction story about a town where there was a mysterious death-by-poisoning almost every day. The police were unable to determine how the victims ingested the poison. A mad scientist had developed a poison so strong that it remained effective no matter how much it was diluted. Method of delivery? One drop in an empty milk bottle. After the bottle was picked up and returned to the dairy to be washed and refilled, enough poison remained to take another life. Do you see where I’m going with this? After reading that story, I imagined tiny amounts of my childhood pee distributed to milk drinkers across Essex County and beyond.
In Sunday School at Washington Street Baptist Church, our teacher informed us that that day was Children’s Day. I didn’t pay close attention to her full explanation, because I (reasonably) assumed Children’s Day would parallel Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, that is, gifts would be given, and I let my mind wander. I had never heard of Children’s Day, either at home or on the radio, so this was a pleasant surprise. Checking Wikipedia today, I see that Children’s Day was
Proclaimed … to encourage all countries to institute a day, firstly to promote mutual exchange and understanding among children and secondly to initiate action to benefit and promote the welfare of the world’s children.
…which sounds like a great idea, but it didn’t do anything for me.
When I got home that day, I looked around for my gift, or gifts. Failing to spot anything wrapped in shiny paper, I asked my mother straight out, reminding her that “Today is Children’s Day!” She said “What?” and looked over at my brother, who offered no help. I think I must have repeated “It’s Children’s Day! Children’s Day!” but couldn’t provide any further explanation. They both remained bewildered, and said they’d never heard of it. I was wordless and fuming, and my brother was laughing. And that is why, to this day, I do not celebrate Children’s Day. Indeed, I am the Ebenezer Scrooge of Children’s Day.
Two weeks after I first posted this photo, I took a closer look at the background and noticed there was only one stocking hanging up; that seemed odd. (It’s tacked to the doorframe because that house didn’t have a fireplace/mantel.) Probably that was my brother’s stocking and I had already taken mine down to see what was inside. People didn’t buy Christmas stockings then; Christmas stockings were just regular boy’s dress stockings pressed into service for the day, and filled with gifts too small to wrap – a single orange all the way from Florida, a half-dozen walnuts, some pencils, a pack of Black Jack gum. That Christmas orange makes me think now of the Godfather II scene where young Vito brings home a single pear from the grocery store; we see it sitting in solitary splendor on the kitchen table as his wife exclaims “Oh, what a beautiful pear-a!”
Christmas eve, I would psych myself to wake up at about four in the morning to see what Santa (or later, whoever) had brought me. I would open the wrapping paper just enough to see what was inside. Any playing with, using, reading, eating, or trying things on would wait until the sun came up. My curiosity satisfied, I went back to bed. The only exception to this rule was the Christmas I got the camera. I was excited, and I studied the instruction booklet, loaded the camera and took my first picture, this time exposure of our tree. I can tell I broke my no-early-using rule that year; in the photo it’s still dark outside.
I have a dim memory of a very young me sitting on Santa’s lap and getting a small, flat box of modeling clay as a gift from his employer, probably Hahne’s, my mother’s favorite department store. I had good fun with that simple pre-Christmas toy, making coiled snakes and pipe figures.
There wasn’t a lot of money for Christmas gifts, but my mother always managed. I remember an Erector set with real nuts and bolts and enough curved steel sections to make a Ferris wheel. A year or two before that, Lincoln Logs, with the logs and roof boards made of real wood, not the plastic crap they use today. Lincoln would weep.
One year, probably 1949, my mother took me down to Newark, “just to look through the stores”. She was trying to find out what I wanted for Christmas. That year atomic energy was a hot subject as the Cold War heated up, and in one of the toy departments I spotted an atomic energy kit, specifically the “Gilbert U-238 Nuclear Physics Atomic Energy Laboratory”. Its price was an astounding $49.95, over $500 in today’s money, so I knew I wasn’t going to be Geiger-countering any uranium ore. That Christmas I ended up with a modest-sized basic chemistry set, which was fun and dangerous and educational too.
Gilbert U-238 Nuclear Physics Atomic Energy Laboratory, with four jars of radioactive ore in the upper left corner, cloud chamber parts in the center – courtesy Webms/Wikipedia
Soon after New Year’s Day, neighborhood kids would drag their family’s Christmas tree and any other trees they could find to the double vacant lot across the street from Vince’s, to await the annual post-holiday accidental Christmas tree fire. There they sat, the pile growing each day, as if nobody knew what was going to happen. There were usually 20 or 30 trees gathered before a sensible limit was reached and agreed on and someone lit a match.
The trees were of course dry by then, and they went up fast, like a genuine forest fire; it was spectacular. Local grownups and even the kids from Pop’s would come to watch. One year someone had thrown a dead cat onto the pile as it grew, and we made mental bets on how long it would take the fire to consume it entirely.
Finally, one year we collected too many trees, and soon after that fire ‘broke out’, a neighbor called the fire department. That particular fire melted the insulation off the lot’s overhead telephone wires. After that, the city began hauling the trees away before an ignition-worthy critical mass could accumulate, and eventually the lots were taken over by garden apartments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hobo sign, courtesy subversify.com
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
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.
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
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
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.
courtesy lossoprano.tv
courtesy fubar.com
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.
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.
Culver Lake, 1939
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.
Tacking, courtesy gosailing.info
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.
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.
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.
Early in January of 2020, I heard a television newsreader use the phrase “Roaring Twenties” to identify the new decade. It wasn’t her fault that it sounded dopey; she was only reading out the words written by some dopey newswriter. Please, anyone who’s trying to make “Roaring Twenties” happen, stop. The world already had a Roaring Twenties – it started a hundred years ago, it lasted ten years, and now it’s over. Based on what we’ve read in books and seen in a thousand black-and-white movies, it was a pretty good time to be alive, except of course for the last few months of the final year.
Maybe a few years from now, let’s say 2026, we can look back to see whether the preceding years were ‘roaring’ or not, then decide if we’ve been in “Roaring Twenties II” all along. Until then, if it really needs a name, let’s just call the decade we’re in now “the twenties”, or “the current decade”.
I have several photos of my parents taken in the 1920s, when they were in their twenties and in full flower. The photos are puzzling – my working-class parents are wearing what look like expensive clothes, and in one case, special clothes just to ride horses. So, at one time there was money to spare – what happened? Did they go bust in the Crash, as so many others did? I’ll never know. Meanwhile, I love this picture and seeing how happy they were then.
Later, during the 1930s and 1940s, my family wasn’t ‘poor’ – we were far from being Dorothea Lange subjects. Even after my father flew the coop in 1943 and my mother had to go back to work, we got along just fine, maybe occasionally borrowing a scuttle of coal from the neighbors until payday and our next coal delivery. After the next delivery, we returned the scuttle heaped as high as possible. That’s what neighbors do.
I once emailed my brother a long question about our family, and part of his answer was that there was “a lot of history there that we will never find out about because everybody just came and went without doing much talking.” Yep, that’s my family.
Mom and Pardo before the Crash. They would last another 10 or 15 years
Our first roomers were the Turners, a pleasant couple in their thirties. I was unaware of their nighttime activities because my room was at the far end of the house, but apparently their lovemaking was so loud and frequent that my mother and grandmother came to doubt that they were married. The Turners were asked to leave, whether because of the noise or the not-being-married I don’t know.
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. 
