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.
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.
Not Buddy, but kinda like him. Photo courtesy bilibili.com
Once in a while I’ll remember something that happened that wasn’t all that pleasant. Usually I don’t like passing along Debbie Downer stories, but in Buddy’s case, I’ll make an exception.
Buddy was a good-looking, friendly, black-and-white smaller-size dog, probably part spaniel. He belonged to the Dowd brothers, Roger and Theo, who lived near Vince’s.
Five or six of us kids were headed home from school, walking up High Street, when we spotted Buddy. He was near the railroad crossing, where the street is raised a bit so the tracks can be level. Another dog had been run over by a car earlier in the day and was lying in the street, dead. Maybe he was run over by a train and not a car, but trains rarely came by there and ran quite slowly, so the dog would have to have been pretty stupid. His body was mangled, and there was a lot of blood.
We noticed the blood right away because Buddy was out in the middle of the street lapping it up. We were instantly outraged and ran toward the scene, shouting “STOP IT, BUDDY!”, “GET OUT OF THERE!”, and “BAD DOG, BUDDY!”. Seeing us coming straight at him, Buddy broke off and ran for home.
Somebody said aloud, or maybe we all just thought it, “I didn’t think a dog would do that.” But I guess he would.
After that, we regarded Buddy with some suspicion because of his disloyal treatment of a fellow dog. But Buddy hadn’t done anything wrong, he was just being a dog himself.
These are some police encounters/interactions that I’ve had over the years. I hope this piece doesn’t come off as anti-cop; I’ve had many positive encounters with the police along with the negative ones, which are easier to remember. Society needs cops, and I am the first to call for the water cannon during large-scale bad behavior.
I wish I could say “at least I never got arrested”, but a municipal scam in Clarksville, Tennessee spoiled my record. The cops there were only doing what the town demanded of them: bringing in more revenue.
At about eight years old, I was in Newark Penn Station with my father, who was talking to a cop. I don’t know who initiated the conversation, but I doubt it was my father. More likely, the cop came over because his Spidey-senses spotted a drunk. I didn’t pay any attention to what they were talking about, but while they talked, I studied the cop’s holster and gun, and the other equipment attached to his belt. I asked him what the thing with the handle was for. I don’t remember if he told me, but he did show me, right there in front of my father.
Iron Claw Wrist Cuff with leather holster, courtesy liveauctioneers.com)
The Iron Claw Wrist Cuff has a locking ratchet; when the handle is pulled up, the claw gets tighter. The only pictures I have seen of the claw in action show it as a come-along restraining device tight around the subject’s wrist. However, the demonstration I received was of an “off-label” use, as an instrument of torture. In this usage, the claw is closed on the wrist like a letter C, with one arm of the claw closing down on the upper side, between the radius and ulna bones, and the other arm digging into the pressure point underneath. Try grabbing one wrist with your other hand, fingers on top, tip of the thumb digging in hard underneath. Hurts, doesn’t it? Now imagine that grip made of steel. Oh, and the claw’s handle can be twisted sideways to increase the pain. All in good fun, sir. Just showing your son how it works. Hug your babies tonight, officer. Hope you enjoyed it.
When I was in Cub Scouts, at maybe nine or ten years old, they took our pack on a field trip to a local police department. In particular, I remember they showed us the cells; I think there was an implied threat there of what could happen if we were not good citizens. They also took our fingerprints, sort of an interesting process to watch back in the days before you could see it done on TV twice a week. They made and retained for themselves a set from each of us. The reason they gave was “In case you get lost”, but what they really meant was either, “In case you are ever so hideously mutilated that you are unrecognizable”, or, more likely, “In case you grow up to burglarize the house of somebody important enough to warrant a full investigation”. A few years later I mentioned the fingerprinting to someone who said, “Oooo, FBI knows who you are now, better not do anything!”, implying that I might be the type to maybe “do something” some day. The army took my fingerprints too, so I guess the FBI has a double set.
One 4th of July, my high-school buddies and I had some firecrackers, nothing big or dangerous, just those little ones about two inches long that come strung together in a pack of 50 and go “bang” loud enough to make anyone who is unprepared jump. We were setting them off on the curb in front of my house, sometimes putting one under a tin can to see how far it would fly. We only had one or two packs, so we lit them one at a time to make them last.
(When we were younger, we lit them using slow-burning “punks”, skinny foot-long sticks of compressed sawdust, but there was no need for punks this year, since at least one of us always had a cigarette going.)
Anyway, one of the neighbors, probably the constant complainers from two doors down, called the police. When they arrived, one cop explained (as if we didn’t know) that fireworks were dangerous and illegal, and that they had to confiscate ours and “destroy” them, that’s the word he used. I have to give them credit – they destroyed our firecrackers right then and there, by driving two doors down the street, lighting the whole string at once, dropping them into the gutter and driving away.
I got a speeding ticket on Park Avenue in East Orange when I was 17; I know I was 17 because one condition to resolve the ticket was that I bring a parent to court so the parent could receive a lecture also. My mother was annoyed at first, but changed her tune when “The judge looked just like Gregory Peck!”
The Glen Ridge police once gave me a speeding ticket for doing 38 in a 35 zone on my way to work. Glen Ridge didn’t want kids driving crappy old cars through their classy town.
Traffic stop, courtesy law offices of Hart J. Levin
Other classy towns that didn’t want kids driving through were the Caldwells, a collection of towns in North Jersey. We would cruise around the area pretty much aimlessly, then maybe stop for burgers. One night we were driving around, four kids in the car, not speeding or anything, when the cops pulled us over. They explained there had been a warehouse break-in and burglary in the next town, and the night watchman had been knocked out. They asked what we were doing in the area and made us get out of the car so they could look us over. There was no search. They were satisfied and let us drive off. Next night, different car, different guys (except for me) out cruising in the same area, stopped by the same two cops. One comes up to the window and explains about a break-in and burglary in the next town, night watchman got knocked out. I asked him if it was the same night watchman that got knocked out the day before. They took a closer look at us, then said to keep moving. No apology was offered, and we didn’t expect one.
My friends and I generally hung out on the corner by Vince’s grocery store. Vince’s neighbors were mostly our own parents, aunts and uncles, so there were few objections to us being there. Some neighbors did object, though. One of them was Angelo, a special cop who lived on the second floor of the building next door. He had a new baby, so he was stretched pretty thin, and wanted us to keep the noise down. I don’t think we were ever noisy; it was just conversation; the boombox hadn’t been invented yet.
One day Angelo came out on his porch and shouted down to us to be quiet, adding that he was a cop. I knew he was only a special cop, and muttered “Let’s see your badge”, more as an aside to the group than directly to him. He went back inside, and a moment later was downstairs, walking up to me with a .45 automatic. He cranked the slide and pointed it in my face from about two feet away, saying “THIS is my badge. Now get out of here!” That was a tough argument to counter, so I turned around and started walking home, followed quickly by everyone else. I still remember how big the hole in the front of that thing looked from up close. I don’t know if Angelo ever got hired as a real cop, but I hope not.
When I worked at Foodland, employees were expected to keep an eye out for shoplifters. If we saw someone leaving without paying, we were supposed to intercept them, then bring them back inside to sign a confession form in which they promised to never again enter the store. I didn’t try very hard to catch any, but one Sunday I spotted a particularly egregious case. Right in front of me, without even looking around to see if anyone was watching, a fiftyish woman picked up a chunk of expensive cheese and put it into her purse. I approached her as she was leaving the store, told her I knew what she had taken and asked her to follow me back to the office. (Looking back, I am ashamed of being involved in this apprehension program. I wasn’t trained as a police officer. If stores have a shoplifting problem, they need a paid security guard walking the aisles to deter it, not untrained employees stopping people outside after it happens .)
She ignored me and kept on walking. Stupidly, I grabbed a nearby clerk and told him to come with me. I didn’t have a plan – we just followed her, with me occasionally entreating her to come back to the store. So, here’s the picture, a woman of a certain age wearing a Persian-lamb coat is being followed closely down the sidewalk by two young men wearing supermarket whites. My lack of a plan was resolved when a police car took interest, and after hearing our stories brought all three of us to the police station. After some conflicting explanations, the woman and I were eventually given a court date, a Thursday. When I explained to my bosses where I’d be the next Thursday, they said I’d have to take Thursday as my day off; in other words, they weren’t going to pay for my court time. I said in that case I wouldn’t testify, and they said that was fine. The punchline? My shoplifter was the mother of the store owners’ rabbi.
Driving home from work one Sunday evening, I was pulled over while headed north on Route 9 in Elizabeth. I had a ’51 Lincoln at the time, which at nine years old looked more like a hoodlum car than a luxury one. I had no idea why I was stopped. The officer, an older gent, asked if I knew the speed limit there; I replied 45 and he said no, it’s 35, but you were doing 45 exactly. I think he liked that at least I was observing my own imaginary speed limit, and for extra credit was wearing a white shirt and tie. He let me go with a warning.
One Sunday morning future wife Mimi and I were headed down Park Avenue in East Orange. It was early, traffic was light, and I was speeding. From a long block away, I spotted a cop on traffic duty, standing on the corner in front of a church. I tried to slow down, but not soon enough, and he stepped into the road to flag me down. Oddly, he was wearing motorcycle boots and the whole strap-across-the-chest deal, but seemed to be on foot. He walked up to the window and I rolled it down. As soon as the window was down, future wife leaned across me and demanded, “Where’s your motorcycle?” Oh shit, I thought, this isn’t going to end well. He replied with something like, “Oh, hi there!”, and went on to explain to her that he had had an accident with his motorcycle, and until it was repaired he was on traffic duty. “Damn!” I said as we drove away. “You know everybody.”
For the sake of completeness, I’ll mention the NYPD subway cop who refused to give me directions when I asked him the same question, at the same location, two days in a row. His response, “Same as I told you yesterday”, is a perfect example of the New York City attitude; it runs deep in the blood and I can’t fault him. In fact, I don’t bear a grudge against any of the cops mentioned here, except for that one sick bastard in Newark Penn Station.
Up the hill one long block from Vince’s store was Pop’s. Pop’s was barely wide enough for a sliding-top cold drinks case and a candy and cigar counter, with room for Pop on one side and one customer on the other. Pop was a sweet old man who resembled Pope John the 23rd of the future, and sold under-the-counter rubbers to kids who were afraid to ask for them at the drugstore. He called us all ‘Dollink‘ in his Greek accent and sold single Trojans for 50 cents each. Trojans then cost 50 cents for a 3-pack in the drug stores, but if you think Pop was getting rich at those prices, remember that his volume was low – nobody ever bought more than one at a time, and in the 1950’s, not very often. A just-in-case Trojan from Pop’s might last all the way through high school.
All that’s left1945 packaging, adweek.com“As Thin as a Shadow, As Strong as an Ox!”, courtesy adweek.com
At about 13 years old, I decided it might be a good idea to start smoking. I knew exactly what I wanted to start with, and I knew smoking was wrong, so Pop’s was the place to go. I put ten cents down on the counter and in my best just-running-an-errand voice said, “My brother wants a stogie”, a stogie being a thin, lumpy, aromatic Italian girl cigar. When I got back to my third floor bedroom, I lit that baby up. I don’t think I inhaled, I just puffed and admired myself in the mirror. In a few minutes, I was dizzy, nauseous and turning green.
How it was supposed to look
I questioned my own memory of ‘turning green’ there, but thanks to Mike Naughton, via Quora.com, we have the following:
When we feel nauseated part of the initial physiologic response is vasodilation which causes relaxation of our peripheral arteries (face, fingers, and toes). This will make us flush, increase the mucous membrane secretions, and make us feel dizzy or light headed because of the drop in blood pressure. The homeostatic reflexive response is to bring the blood pressure back up by constricting the arteries through release of the “fight or flight” hormones. The face, lips, fingers, and toes then become cool and pale. People with pale complexions will look white(er) or green. Those with darker complexions will appear paler as well, especially in the lips and mucous membranes.
A few troubled teens hung around Pop’s, not serious offenders, but mostly just neighborhood screw-ups who went to vocational school and got into minor scrapes with the law. Kids from Vince’s would walk up the hill occasionally to buy a balsa-wood glider or a rubber from Pop, but the only time I can remember any of Pop’s regulars coming down to our corner was for the annual post-holiday accidental Christmas tree fire.
Pop’s was always grubby and grimy; I don’t think I ever saw a girl or woman venture inside. Certainly my mother never set foot there until Pop retired and the place changed hands. The husband-and-wife new owners made a lot of changes – they washed the windows, they swept the floor, they cleaned the glass display case. However, it soon became clear that they were keeping the water bill down by not flushing the back room toilet except after Number Two. After patronizing the now-nameless store for a week because it was closer to the house, my mother realized that that faint background piss smell really was piss, and never went back. She was furious, and said of such economizing, “That’s a Dirty Irish trick.”
Some of the older guys in our group would make an occasional trip to one of the burlesque houses in Newark, either Minsky’s or the Empire. The minimum age for admission was 18, so that left me out.
Later I learned the dancers at Minsky’s would show their breasts sometimes, not so much at the Empire. At Minsky’s, a headliner like Lili St. Cyr might have hers out for most of her act. Wowzers.
And, oh yeah, there were some great comics, too.
Comics doing a bit, courtesy burlesquebabes.wordpress.com
At intermission, the house lights came up and the ushers walked the aisles, hawking overpriced candy and Crackerjack. Sometimes we’d spot one of our teachers in the audience – once Mr. Tischler, who taught social studies; on another occasion Professor Lewis, who taught biology.
I don’t know how Professor Lewis came to be called “Professor”, but that’s what they called him, even the other teachers. Maybe he lost a college position and the high school decided he could keep the title.
In class, the Professor was always dropping things and trying to look up the girls’ skirts – especially the skirt of Grace Scuderi, who sat in the front row and seemed cooperative and well aware of what the Professor was up to.
Sorry, I got ahead of myself there, let’s backtrack.
Being only 16, I worried that if I joined my friends on one of their expeditions, my age might be challenged, so I made a fake birth certificate. I already had an official one, so I knew how it should look. I sent to Newark for two fresh copies (one extra in case I made a mistake), and set to work.
The handwriting on the forms was just regular fountain pen ink. A quick dip in diluted laundry bleach made it disappear; the form’s printing and fancy embossed seal of the City of Newark remained. I rented a typewriter from the stationery store next to the library and filled in the now-empty form with my name and an improved birth date. The only thing still missing was the signature of the Newark city clerk. It’s tricky to imitate someone else’s signature, but after a lot of practice I was able to make a decent copy.
Until I got to be really 18, I carried that fake certificate in my back pocket each time we went to Newark. As it turned out, my worries were groundless – my age was never questioned, and I never needed to show it. But always, in the back of my mind, was the fear that I might need to show it one day, and I’d hear “Wait a minute, that’s not the signature of Harry S. Reichenstein!”
Vince’s neighbors generally had no objection to us hanging on the corner. Some did, however – as I mentioned elsewhere, Angelo the special cop once stuck his gun in my face when I failed to respect his authoritah. The pasty-faced Johnson family across the street was also against our hanging-out – when the number of kids on the corner reached some arbitrary maximum decided by them, they would call the police to disperse us.
Back then there was a form of street litter rarely seen today. Birth-control pills hadn’t been invented yet and there were no in-town motels, so used condoms lay wherever they had been plopped out of quietly opened car doors. If Frankie G spotted one near Vince’s after dark, he’d pick it up with a stick and hang it on the antenna of the Johnsons’ Studebaker.
Something like this, but he needs to pull the collar back and down for the trick to work
Local girls Honey and Rita never fell for the horse-bite trick. That’s not my Hudson, I never had a Hudson.
I’ve been thinking about how I’ll spend the money once my Powerball ship comes in. One thing I can see for sure, I’ll need to hire a good lawyer. Once the word gets out about my newfound riches, it’s almost certain I’ll be sued for some past misdeed, even if it’s for something that never happened. If you follow the news, you know what I mean. The only thing I might get Me-Too’d for was showing a new girl on our corner where the horse bit me. Horsebite tricks were rare and developed organically; they were sort of an unplanned initiation into the group. Here’s how it worked: The boy pulls his shirt collar open on the left side, exposing his neck and just a bit of upper back. He asks the girl if she wants to see where the horse bit him. The girl, curious, comes closer.
To get a clear look down the back of his shirt, she has to stand on her toes, curled against him as he pulls the collar down a little more. Meanwhile, his left arm hangs at his side. As the girl presses harder against the boy to get a closer look, she realizes her undercarriage is resting in his hand. Once she realizes, the boy gets slapped. Everyone laughs, even the girl, that’s the best part. Things were different back then, and I do apologize to the girls.
thief THēf/ noun- a person who steals another person’s property, especially by stealth and without using force or violence. – lexico.com
When I was in high school, I worked part time at the Kingsway supermarket in East Orange. I learned the shelf-stocking and floor-sweeping ropes from Pete, a crazy and charismatic kid who was two years older than me and working full time. Pete belonged to a Newark gang called the Roman Dukes. By legend, the Dukes were armed, and had discouraged an enemy gang incursion into downtown Newark by throwing its members off the balcony of the Empire Burlesque. Pete held some sort of leadership role in the Dukes .
Two rungs down from the Dukes, but you get the idea
Pete was a prolific thief. He would never buy anything he could steal, and anything he stole but couldn’t use, he sold. It was scary to watch him operate, but, having grown up in North Jersey, I knew and respected the principle of omerta. Pete liked me, and we got along.
Each morning, Pete backed his car into the parking spot immediately below the window of the second-floor employees’ lounge, and each evening he lifted one corner of that window’s screen and pushed out five or six cartons of cigarettes that he had smuggled away from the checkout stands by mixing them in with the trash. They landed right behind his rear bumper.
Pete got promoted to receiver and checker-in of all arriving grocery trailers, a position of responsibility that multiplied the opportunities for theft several fold. Pete’s new approach was to unstaple the multi-page invoice, remove the next-to-last page, and steal every item on it. Since the last few pages always included some carton cigarettes, this was much more productive than pushing them through the screen. When the department manager in charge of cigarettes, razor blades, candy and other things favored for employee theft later moved them into their double-locked storage cage, every item on the re-stapled invoice was present and accounted for.
One Sunday, the usual bunch was hanging around outside Vince’s store when Pete happened to drive by with some of his Roman Duke cohort. So, here we are, standing around in our All-American “Lakeside A.C.” jackets in the orange-and-black high school colors, and holy shit, here’s a carload of leather-jacketed Roman Dukes pulling over on the wrong side of the street right in front of us, Pete driving. Although our numbers were greater, we felt suddenly surrounded.
I was the only one there who had ever seen any of these Dukes, or for that matter ANY Duke, before, and there was great anxiety among us. When Pete greeted me with “Hey Paulie, is this where you hang out?”, we relaxed a bit, knowing that we weren’t going to take an immediate beating. We stood and exchanged cautious small talk with the smiling Dukes, all the while remaining alert in case they should change their minds, or Pete give them some sort of signal – not that he would with his friend from work there, but my bunch didn’t know that. After a while, Pete asked if we’d care for some beer. All we really wanted was to be left alone, but we each chipped in the two dollars suggested by Pete to pay for our order. The Dukes drove off, returning with a case of quarts. After we’d all had our fill, the Dukes drove off again, taking the empties and the remaining beer with them. We wondered how they had found a liquor store open on Sunday, but guessed the rules were different in Newark.
The next day’s Star Ledger helped us understand. East Orange police checking out a Sunday burglar alarm had found a Park Avenue liquor store’s back door kicked in and a case of beer missing. Later that day, the door was kicked in a second time and the empties returned.
Supermarkets were not open on Sunday then, so even the lowliest of clerks had the day off. One day the manager at Kingsway called all the part-timers together and told us to come in that Sunday; we would be cleaning the store. Reading our expressions, he added, “If you don’t come in Sunday, don’t come in Monday.”
I didn’t come in on either of those days. I was now seventeen and had my own car. I could work anywhere.
A few people from work
out to get lunch
you in the middle, me
on the right
all new employees, first time
we’re all together
You can tell how long ago this was —
that car had a bench seat.
On the floor there is a hump
where the car’s transmission fits
you have to keep your feet up on it, no choice
and keep your knees together, no choice
so your leg does not touch mine
I keep my knees together, too
so I don’t infringe.
Why, we hardly know each other.
It’s hard for a human to
keep both knees together
that long, but it seems we must
for miles and miles,
almost exhausting.
Me in my suit
you in your summer dress
your feet high upon the hump.
Mind if I relax, I finally ask;
you laugh, and you relax too.
Your leg is warm
through your summer dress
we are friends
nothing can come of this
in the cafeteria after hours
you had your checkbook out
and I asked you
to write me a check
how much you said
two million dollars I said
you wrote it and signed it
and passed it over
the background showed
the sun at the horizon.
I called it a sunrise;
you laughed and said
that was funny,
because you’d
always thought of it
as a sunset
My wife’s sister Marg went to parochial school at Saint Columba’s, just a couple of blocks from where we lived in Newark.
Marg’s friend Sandy was as innocent and bashful as any 16-year-old Catholic school girl could be. Her mother sent her to the butchers to get chicken breasts for dinner, but she was too embarrassed to say the word “breasts”, so she asked for “chicken chests” instead.
I was barely out of my own teens then, and I loved ferrying Marg and her girlfriends back and forth from their dances and other school events. It was like having a carload of ultra-cute nieces. Besides Sandy, the regular passengers I remember were Dolores, Geraldine, Loretta and Annette.
St. Columba’s class of about 6 years earlier, the only picture I could find
There was a Barbara, too, sometimes. She lived the furthest from the school, out by Ballantine’s brewery. I’ve always been partial to the name Barbara, so she was kind of my favorite; there’s just something about that name. I never had a girlfriend named Barbara, but I did have a cousin Barbara that I liked a lot when I was kid, so maybe that’s it.
School uniform models model school uniforms!
Writing this, I could picture one other girl, but couldn’t remember her name. I knew it sounded French and that I’d recognize it if I saw it. Google led me to a site promising “Top 1000 popular baby names in 1944”, the year Marg and probably most of the other girls were born. The site was babynames.it, the ‘.it’ meaning located in Italy. I began scanning the girls’ names column, stopping at times to recall a bit of life detail floated up by a familiar name. Eventually, at 307th in popularity, there it was, “Camille”.
Camille herself wasn’t French, though, she was Italian like most of the other girls. A few years later she stayed with Marg babysitting our kids when Mimi and I drove up to Expo 67. She was sort of a favorite too, and maybe a little more sophisticated than the rest. Later, she worked at Bamberger’s and let me use her employee discount to buy stereo gear, so that was nice.
Also at the baby names site, I learned how to pronounce the newly-popular girl’s name ‘Saoirse’, as in actress Saoirse Ronan. It’s properly pronounced SEER-sha, assuming we can trust the pronunciation of an unusual Irish girl’s name to an Italian web site. SEER-sha does sound like the way I’ve heard it, though.
I was working at the Foodland store in Elizabeth then, and companies like Heinz pickles and Sta-Puf fabric softener were always competing to get more shelf space for their products, usually by gifting store management with some thing of minor value. At Foodland, the definition of “management” was loose, extending all the way down to the bookkeeper, me.
Bobby Darin doing “Mack the Knife”
One company tried to curry Foodland favor with tickets to a concert by Bobby Darin, the teen heartthrob of the day — ‘Dream Lover’, ‘Beyond the Sea’, lots more. No one else was interested in going, so I collected their tickets and turned them over to Marg to pass along. I provided concert transportation too, but didn’t go inside.
Ball pen and record, a $2.78 value for only $1.39. Courtesy popsike.com vinyl records
One summer Mimi and I rented a house up at Lake Hopatcong for two weeks. I had just changed jobs, so I didn’t have enough seniority to take my vacation during the summer. I commuted daily from the lake to Newark on I-80, not finished yet but hosting light traffic. There were no police assigned to the stretch yet, so you could go as fast as you thought you’d still be able to stop for a deer, if that’s clear. Fortunately I never saw any deer; I think the new road and its shoulders were so wide the deer were afraid to venture into all that open space.
The house was right on the lake and we had lots of room, so Marg invited her girlfriends to stay, visiting in shifts. They were good kids, and we loved having them around.
I never lived in California, but I visited there many times on business trips and came to love it. Here are a few things that stayed with me from those visits, arranged in no particular order. If I have some details wrong or backwards, apologies to my companions on those trips, who became my friends. Writing this, I couldn’t remember a lot of detail about the actual work we did as a team, and didn’t try. But I remember very well the good times we had on side trips sightseeing and exploring California—or just hanging out—when we were not working.
Cars make their way down Lombard Street
Most of my California trips were to San Francisco, Santa Clara or other towns in “Silicon Valley”, the hub of America’s high-tech computer business. On a different trip I got to visit Los Angeles, but only for a three-hour layover between planes. I was alone on that trip and took a walk from the terminal building down to the bottom of the main road in, where I sat on a low wall to catch some sun. Sitting there alone, I felt as if every person who turned onto the airport road that day was checking me out. That’s no credit to me – in California everyone is checking everyone else out all day long. It is the land of opportunity.
Job interview
My first California trip was for a job interview. After working for Continental Insurance/Insco for a few years, I was looking for a change. I saw an ad for VM programmers at the Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, another Silicon Valley town. Amdahl was the new kid on the block then, making full-size mainframe computers and giving IBM a run for its money. I sent them a resume, we had a short interview over the phone, and before I knew it I was on a plane headed west.
The San Jose airport was so small that the entire rental car fleet sat right outside the terminal door. Japanese cars were just becoming popular, and the one I rented was the first I ever drove. I spent the evening getting a feel for California —just driving around the hilly green countryside, no other cars in sight. I forget what make it was, but it was peppy and fun to drive, and I gave it some exercise.
Fact sheet courtesy Wikipedia
The next morning I drove to Sunnyvale for my interview. First I met with the personnel manager and we had a nice, friendly conversation, mostly about California, its hot housing market, and our families. He seemed to be a happy person, but at one point surprised me by dropping “You’ll find that most people in California are very shallow” into the conversation.
Next I met with a pair of technical managers and told them about all the cool software modifications and tools I’d designed and added to Continental’s VM operating system. Unfortunately I got caught up in trying to show that I wasn’t just the usual inward-focused bit-jockey systems programmer, but also a team player and leader. I shot myself in the foot by injecting the words “we” and “my team” into the conversation too often. Free advice to job seekers everywhere: don’t be modest. I didn’t take enough credit for my own work that day, and I didn’t get the job.
Housing boom
On a different trip, I shared a taxi with a gent from back East who was headed to the same hotel. We were talking about the booming real estate market, and I mentioned a newspaper story that said many Californians were stretching to carry mortgages on second or even third houses, counting on big future profits. We were still shaking our heads over the madness of this when our driver, silent until then, said “I’ve got six.”
The project
For a while, Continental had a sort of flirtation with several computer companies to decide which could best replace the aging workstations in its 40 branch offices. Our team would test and evaluate proposed replacements.
I sometimes had my doubts about whether the project to find a replacement branch office machine was on the level. Our management was very conservative about choosing computers and computer gear, seeming to honor the adage “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” —meaning, if you chose IBM and it somehow didn’t work out, it was still a reasonable choice because IBM was the world standard. Any fault would be IBM’s, not yours.
IBM didn’t yet offer a suitable small machine, so maybe our management was stalling in hopes they would have one soon, solving the problem for everyone.
The team
Our first team trip will be to Convergent Technologies in Santa Clara. We’ll be testing their latest minicomputer. In a few weeks, we’ll do the same thing at Hewlett Packard.
There are four of us on the team, representing four different Continental departments. We don’t know each other yet. As team leader, I get to drive the rental and am generally deferred to. When our plane lands in California, it’s a sunny, pleasant day. Once we’re out of the airport and on our way to the hotel, I ask “Would it be a good idea to open the windows?” There is a happy chorus of YES PLEASE!
In the Castro
We have a free day before testing begins and decide to go to San Francisco. Looking for a place to have dinner, we wander into a busy neighborhood and get in line outside a restaurant that seems popular. We are three men and a young woman only two years out of college. She is pretty and sweet and smart, and by the end of the day each of the men is half in love with her.
A sign tells us we’re in the Castro District. She says “Oh, the Castro District! That’s the gay section!” Many of the people in line with us or passing by appear to be of the rainbow persuasion, some very much so. In an excited whisper, she asks “Do you think we’ll see any gay people?”
At Convergent Technologies
The Convergent people have set up a row of their workstation computers for us in one corner of their factory floor and we get started. Our hosts make us think of the Avis “We try harder” slogan – they are desperate for our business and it shows, sometimes to the point of being embarrassing. Spotting my half-empty cigarette pack on the table, one of them offers to go buy me another.
Convergent has a cafeteria, but a Mexican food truck visits our side of the factory several times a day and we come to favor the exotic food off the truck.
None of us has ever seen the Pacific Ocean, and one day after work we take a drive west to the nearest beach.
Not the same beach, but like it
The beach is wild and rocky, not at all like the friendly, flat beaches back home in New Jersey. No one will ever play in the surf here, or lie on a towel to work on their tan.
We roll up our pants legs, stow shoes and socks in the car, and walk into the chilly water. The ocean here is calm, with flattish boulders washed over by low, polite waves. As the tide goes out, tiny crabs and other marine life are stranded for a while in shallow pools on top of the boulders. If you put your hand into one it feels alive, and the salt water hot from the afternoon sun.
Free weekend
We’ll be testing at Convergent for two weeks, which gives us a weekend in between for sightseeing. Driving out of the city, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge and continue north. We are like children, staring and pointing at things not to be seen in New Jersey. We drive into a touristy redwood forest, where we sit together on the colossal stump of a thousand-year-old redwood as we eat lunch and marvel at our surroundings. We follow signs that lead us to a winery tour, then wear out our welcome at its sampling bar. On our way back we shout out in unison a town name we see on a highway sign, “SNAVELY!”
Lombard Street
Another day we take our rental for a ride down San Francisco’s Lombard Street, known as “The Crookedest Street in the World”. Lombard Street got that way in the 1920s, when the city installed eight hairpin curves to reduce its dangerously steep downhill grade. Over the following years, taking a slow ride down Lombard Street became a favorite tourist thing to do, with the street eventually becoming so congested it created a quality-of-life issue for its homeowners.
When Lombard Street is not too crowded, it’s a fun, careful drive, offering scenic views of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the suspension bridges to Oakland. When we took that ride years ago, we enjoyed it so much we made our way back to the top and went again, drawing annoyed looks from a few homeowners who remembered us from our earlier pass.
On the fault line
A few weeks after finishing up at Convergent Technologies and writing our report, we return to California to run the same tests at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, a town halfway between San Jose and San Francisco.
Much of California is on the 800-mile-long San Andreas fault. Map courtesy adobe.com
Hewlett Packard wants visitors to be aware its buildings in Palo Alto are on the San Andreas fault, the earthquake-prone sliding boundary between two of the Earth’s major tectonic plates. Hewlett takes earthquakes seriously and thinks visitors should too. Their buildings are low and stubby, and thus less likely to fall over. They are laid out around a central open quad with enough space for all employees to gather safely during a quake. If there’s not enough warning to get out into the quad, the next best thing is to crawl under a desk or other furniture. If that’s not possible, stand in one of the reinforced doorways.
Survival poster
I won’t detail the testing we did in the two weeks we were at Hewlett Packard because it wasn’t much different from what we did at Convergent. Nor will I detail any of the side trips or other fun we may have had outside work hours while at Hewlett. To any of my former management who might happen to have lived long enough to read this, rest assured that we all worked very hard and didn’t have anywhere near as much fun as it sounds.
What’s next for California?
I’m disgusted by the way California has gone downhill. The city I’m most familiar with, beautiful and livable San Francisco, is now often referred to as a third-world shithole. After following the news over recent years, I have to agree, and California is off the list of places I might ever want to live. Collectively, California’s problems seem unsolvable.
Smash-and-grab looting, consequence-free shoplifting, acts of violence against strangers (the knockout game). Release without bail of criminals with lengthy arrest records. Providing free drugs to addicts instead of forcing them into treatment. The criminal class has taken over, and the rule of law has ended.
Add uncontrolled wildfires, the end of standardized testing, the leftward tilt of the education system, the general failure of the schools to educate. I could go on and on.
I guess there’s always hope that something or someone will come along to fix California. Short of martial law or outright civil war, I don’t know what that might be. But I’m glad I got to enjoy California a bit before its destruction.
Driving home from work one Sunday evening, I was pulled over while headed north on Route 9 in Elizabeth. I had a ’51 Lincoln at the time, which at nine years old looked more like a hoodlum car than a luxury one. I had no idea why I was stopped. The officer, an older gent, asked if I knew the speed limit there; I replied 45 and he said no, it’s 35, but you were doing 45 exactly. I think he liked that at least I was observing my own imaginary speed limit, and for extra credit was wearing a white shirt and tie. He let me go with a warning.
