When I was born, America’s involvement in the war was still three years away, but Hitler was already well known and widely hated. Fighting him would come naturally, even to little kids. Fortunately, after the war ended, Hitler was forgotten, and his name was never again mentioned. Ha, just kidding!
Here’s how I did it.
How I fought Hitler, part 1 – Starting when I was in kindergarten or maybe first grade, we won the war by bringing in peach pits and tin cans. As the teachers explained it, peach pits were baked into charcoal and used in gas mask filters; tin cans were melted down into tanks. After both ends of the can were cut off and placed inside, I got to flatten my family’s tin cans by jumping onto them off a kitchen chair. Back then, cans were made of tin-plated steel, not the cheesy aluminum they use today. In my teen years, it was a benchmark of strength to be able to fold a beer can in half with just one hand.
The U.S. paid for the war by selling war bonds. They sold for $18.75, and could be cashed in for $25.00 ten years later (that’s 2.9%). War savings stamps were sold as a way for kids to participate in the war as well. At my school, we were each given a booklet to be filled with 10-cent war savings stamps, with the goal of saving up enough to trade in for a war bond one day. I don’t recall the exact stamp-buying procedure, but if you showed up without your dime on the scheduled buy-and-paste day, teacher was not happy.
How I fought Hitler, part 2 – Here is a link to my recollections of the day the war was over, along with some other early childhood memories. Apologies for some bad language over there, but that Happened too.
How I fought Hitler, part 3 – I didn’t find out about this last way until 25 years afterwards. After my first son was old enough to be toilet trained, I asked my mother if she had any ideas on the ‘when’ and ‘how’. When the subject of ‘aiming’ came up, she became uncomfortable – she had always disapproved of the method, but admitted that when training me, my father had made it a game by having me pretend Hitler was in the toilet.
Nimm das, mein Führer!
Enough said.WW I Austrian war bonds ad, “And you?”Save those cansThinking ’bout an invasion
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.
Screenshot from Duck and Cover, a 1952 film targeted at school children to instill the constant fear of nuclear attack by the Soviets. – Wikipedia
“The film starts with an animated sequence, showing a turtle walking down a road, while picking up a flower and smelling it. A chorus sings the Duck and Cover theme:
There was a turtle by the name of Bert
and Bert the turtle was very alert;
when danger threatened him he never got hurt
he knew just what to do …
He’d duck! [gasp] And cover!
Duck! [gasp] And cover!
(male) He did what we all must learn to do
(male) You (female) And you (male) And you (deeper male) And you!
[bang, gasp] Duck, and cover!“
I did not grow up with a “constant fear of nuclear attack by the Soviets”, and for that happy truth I thank the Orange, New Jersey school board, which made the curriculum decisions affecting me and my schoolmates. We did have some fear, but it wasn’t constant. I’d call it more of a low-grade background concern, and a condition of life in the 1950s and ’60s.
We had only one duck-and-cover drill at Cleveland Street School, in sixth grade. I don’t recall being shown the Duck and Cover film, or getting any advance explanation for the drill, but one morning we were taught how to crawl under our desks and curl up in a ball. Our classroom was partly below ground level, with the window sills level with the asphalt playground outside. We were told that when we saw the flash we should not look out the window under any circumstances, but instantly get under our desks, facing away from the windows, which would shatter inward in just a few seconds when the blast wave arrived. We should keep our eyes closed and curl up with clasped hands protecting our necks, tricky when your desk’s iron legs are bolted to the floor.
If we happened to be outside when we saw the flash, we should drop down next to a curbstone, or lie down next to a log (assuming the town’s pioneer settlers left some unused logs behind, which they had not).
We never discussed that drill – in class with the teacher, among ourselves, or with our parents. and we never had another one. I think someone on the school board decided they were pointless, stupid and frightening, and said let’s not do that any more.
There was plenty of other propaganda around to influence us; I remember drawing a picture of a falling atomic bomb I labeled “Happy Birthday Joe”, and it was not Stalin’s birthday. Later, as a grownup, I would dream a few times a year of silo doors blasting open and missiles sailing out, whether their missiles or ours I never knew. These were not quite nightmares, I was a passive onlooker, but were not pleasant to wake up to at three in the morning. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the world felt safer and the dreams pretty much stopped.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, one of my customers asked if I had sent my family to stay with relatives at the shore, farther away from New York City, a likely target. He was wide-eyed and genuinely frightened, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t frightened too. That was a good question – I think I just couldn’t believe that either the Russians or us would do anything so crazy.
Fallout Shelter signs were posted on most public buildings; many remain
From a 1963 Department of Defense internal newsletter:
THE SHELTER SIGN. How many really understand the real significance of those black and yellow markers? There are six points to the shelter sign. They signify: 1. Shielding from radiation; 2. Food and water; 3. Trained leadership; 4. Medical supplies and aid; 5. Communications with the outside world; 6. Radiological monitoring to determine safe areas and time for return home. … It is an image we should leave with the public at every opportunity, for in it there is hope rather than despair.
Our teacher, Miss Smeaton, got married! She was our fourth- grade teacher at Franklin School in East Orange. The kids all loved her, but none of them loved her more than I did.
One Monday morning she walked into our classroom a few minutes late. She looked so happy! She wrote a strange name on the blackboard: “Mrs. Niedenstein”. She told us she was married now, and that was her new name. She wrote it one more time up in a corner of the board so it wouldn’t get erased. She said some things about how nice her new husband was, and added that she was very happy, as if we couldn’t tell.
The class was quiet, and maybe a little confused at this change to their worldview. Speaking for myself, I think I was a bit jealous: would this interfere with my own relationship with Miss Smeaton? Actually, nothing changed for anyone – if anything, Miss Smeaton, I mean Mrs. Niedenstein, was nicer than ever. However, fourth grade came to an end, and we went on to fifth grade, with a teacher whose name I don’t recall, then on to sixth.
Part way through sixth grade, my family moved from East Orange to Orange, about a mile and a half between houses. Orange had different school days off than East Orange, and I used those extra days to visit Miss Smeaton in her classroom, where she found work for me tutoring a couple of the slower students. Those visits ended when the school year ended, and I never saw Miss Smeaton again.
Writing this 70 years later, I wondered how old she was when she married. Sadly, the way such research usually starts is with a look through the obituaries, and I found one for her husband and one for her. I also found something oddly affecting – I learned that her first name was Alice. I had never thought of Miss Smeaton as having a first name at all.
She and Norman were both about 40 when they married; probably his war service had put their lives on hold, like many others. Later, after they retired, they lived in Ocean Grove for 24 years. Norman died there at 85, then Alice moved to Florida to be near her relatives. She died there at 95.
Kids never think of their teachers as having a life outside teaching, and I guess I’m still a child in that respect: I was surprised, and happy, to read in her obituary that “she was an accomplished ballroom dancer and won numerous awards in dancing competitions.”
So here’s to you, Alice Smeaton Niedenstein, ballroom dancer, and in a way my first love. I hope your last days were peaceful and happy.
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I first visited the Newark Museum on a field trip from grade school. The mechanical models exhibit was perfect for a kid like me who always wanted to know how things worked.
The models, maybe 80 or 100 of them, were each mounted on a 15-inch square wooden panel. Each had a visitor-operated pushbutton to set it to work performing its own unique, pleasantly noisy motion.
The catalog described the exhibit as “a dictionary of mechanical movements”, and promised to show how one type of motion can be converted to another; and to answer such questions as “how can hundreds of pounds be lifted with a one-pound pull?”
Reciprocating rectilinear motion
Pulley lifts (block and tackle)
The exhibit was commissioned by department store magnate and philanthropist Louis Bamberger, and modeled on a 1928 exhibit at New York City’s Museum of the Peaceful Arts. The Newark Museum’s building itself was funded by Bamberger.
I spent many hours operating those models and studying how they worked. Sadly, a 1980s museum renovation removed the exhibit, and it no longer exists.
Ratchet wheels and drivers
Rotary into rectilinear motion
I didn’t grow up to be a mechanical engineer, but some of my jobs in the world of computing did come with the title software engineer. The only motion involved was the massaging and moving of invisible zeros and ones, much quieter than operating mechanical models, but still rewarding and fun.
Visitors to the Museum of the Peaceful Arts operating the steam-power group, 1930
All images courtesy allmyeyes.blogspot.com
Many thanks to graphic designer and artist Linda Eckstein, for her invaluable article on elemental kinematics, the motion of objects.
“On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia — ‘Mollie’ — Maggia. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. Everyone present knew what that meant.” –The Radium Girls, Kate Moore
Dial painters, 1922- courtesy Argonne National Laboratory
The Radium Girls were factory workers who from 1917 to 1926 hand-painted watch and clock dials with a glow-in-the-dark paint called Undark. The paint’s luminescence came from the radioactive silvery-white metal radium, then a recent and exciting discovery. U.S .Radium’s managers and scientists were aware of the paint’s dangers, but did not share that knowledge with the workers, who were encouraged to lick their brushes to bring them to a sharper point when applying the paint, ingesting tiny bits of radium. Some workers also painted their fingernails, hair and even teeth to make them glow at night. Within a few years, dozens of workers began showing signs of radiation poisoning.. They developed illnesses that included anemia, bone cancer, and necrosis of the jaw, known as “radium jaw”, which is as terrible as it sounds. By 1927, more than 50 had died.
At the Orange, New Jersey plant where the women worked, the company also extracted radium from raw ore, by a process called radium crystallization. Approximately half a ton of dusty ore was processed each day, with the radioactive waste dumped both on-site and off.
A 1981 gamma-radiation survey by airplane found about 250 sites throughout Orange, West Orange, and South Orange, many of them residential, where radioactive waste had been dumped or used as construction fill. Sites in Montclair and Glen Ridge were also contaminated, earning them their own Superfund designations.
The basements and adjacent soil of houses built using contaminated fill had to be dug out and replaced, with the contaminated material shipped cross-country for burial in Utah. At the site in Orange, the top 22 feet of soil had to be removed.
U.S. Radium had two other dial-painting sites, one in Illinois and one in Connecticut, that also required remediation.
EPA findings and actions
“In 1979, EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) initiated a program to identify and investigate locations within New Jersey where radium-processing activities had taken place. The former U.S .Radium Corporation processing plant was included in this program. In May 1981, EPA conducted an aerial gamma radiation survey covering approximately 12 square miles centered on the High and Alden Streets processing plant. This aerial survey located about 25 acres around the High and Alden Streets processing plant where elevated readings of gamma radiation were detected. This same survey identified areas of elevated gamma radiation in the nearby communities of Montclair, West Orange and Glen Ridge; the affected properties in these areas comprise two other Superfund sites, the Montclair/West Orange Radium site and the Glen Ridge Radium site.” — July 2011 EPA Review Report, full text available here.
Why I care
During the early 1950s, starting at about age 12, I played often at that site, No one knew about the contamination, not for thirty more years. Then on June 25, 1979, the New York Times published an article titled “Radiation Found at Site of Radium Plant Dating From the 1920’s“.
New Jersey’s humble Second River (to locals, simply ‘the brook’) flows alongside the site on its way east from First Mountain to join the Passaic River and Newark Bay. Who knows how much radioactive waste U.S Radium dumped into that little stream over the years? I played in that brook too, just a few blocks downstream, where minnows swam in the clear water.
I played in the yard between the paint application building and the brook. Railroad tracks ran through the yard then, and there were usually one or two freight cars sitting there awaiting loading or unloading. Adjacent to the tracks were the too-grimy-to-play-on portable conveyor belts and sturdy bins of the neighboring Alden Coal Company. I enjoyed playing ‘railroad engineer’, climbing the rungs to the top of a car and twisting its parking-brake handwheel back and forth from one extreme to the other.
By then, the paint application building was occupied by Arpin Plastics, makers of the “Arpin 75 Special Repeating Water Pistol”. (I don’t know why anyone would buy a non-repeating water pistol .) They also made a Tommy gun, with greater water capacity and firepower. Weapons that didn’t pass inspection were tossed into a dumpster behind the building, from which they could be rescued and rehabilitated by anyone willing to put in a little effort.
Apparently I didn’t spend enough time at the site to develop any sort of radiation poisoning. Thanks for asking!
Recent (May, 2018) Google Earth view of the main Orange Superfund site. Per the EPA, remediation is “essentially complete” and the site is being monitored . All that seems necessary is to add flowers and grass. Not sure what that wettish spot is.
Hand brake, Jason Stussy
Manufacturer’s ad for Undark, 1921 – courtesy Wikipedia
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.
Here’s everything you need to know about Yogi Berra.
Yogi was a catcher for the New York Yankees. He charmed and puzzled the world with his child-like musings and malaprops.
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi
He made enough money playing baseball to afford a nice house in Montclair. In fact, he made so much money that he could afford to buy a second refrigerator, just for beer, and get it installed on his front porch.
Two of the older guys from our corner worked part time delivering heavy appliances. They were thrilled that they’d get to meet Yogi.
They lugged the new refrigerator up the porch steps and got it over to where he wanted it. They made it level and plugged it in.
He gave them each a dime.
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi
“What’s the craziest thing you believed as a kid?” – reddit
I believed that Van Gogh cut off his ear in frustration when he was painting a self portrait and couldn’t get the ear right. To me as a kid, it was the only logical explanation. I never discussed this with anyone, and believed it for a long time. There are many theories about why Vincent harmed himself, but the issue remains unsettled and the theories remain only that, theories.
I’ve seen varied accounts of exactly how much of his ear Vincent sliced off. When researching his Lust for Life biography of Van Gogh, author Irving Stone asked this question of Doctor Felix Rey, who treated Van Gogh in the hospital. The 2010 rediscovery of Rey’s response, which includes two drawings, gives us the answer: the entire ear, except for a small flap of the lobe.
Translated, the doctor’s comment next to the first drawing says “The ear was sliced with a razor following the dotted line”; the comment next to the second says “The ear showing what remained of the lobe.”
Along with the drawings, in his response Rey wrote
I’m happy to be able to give you the information you have requested concerning my unfortunate friend Van Gogh. I sincerely hope that you won’t fail to glorify the genius of this remarkable painter, as he deserves.
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
Cousin Walter wasn’t really my cousin, but I guess his being married to my real cousin Helen made him sort of a cousin-in-law, as if there ever could be such a thing. (Yes, there is such a thing, I checked.) Walter was an intelligent, happy and patient man. He sold cars for a living.
1951 Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe, courtesy cinemagraphcollection
Walter had several brothers and sisters who died young from heart problems. He was the only one left. Walter had his own worrisome heart problems, but was reluctant to get open-heart surgery. In the 1950s, open-heart surgery wasn’t far beyond the experimental stage, and had a high mortality rate.
One day after playing eighteen holes with his father-in-law Uncle Rob, he realized that during the round he had finished off an entire vial of his prescription nitroglycerin pills to stave off his chest pain .He decided to risk the surgery. It was a grand success, as proven by Walter living to be 87.
The 1920 U.S. census records show an oddity: according to the records, Walter’s parents were born in Russia but spoke German, and emigrated to the United States in 1909. At that time, Europe’s national borders were fluid, so “Russia” might have meant what later came to be called East Germany. Walter grew up speaking German.
During the war, he served with the U.S. intelligence agency Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. After the war, the duties of the OSS were assumed by the newly-established CIA. Walter never talked about what he did in the war, but he most likely interrogated German prisoners, and perhaps committed ungentlemanly acts of war similar to what the CIA does for us today. Here is an href=”https://arsof-history.org/articles/v3n4_oss_primer_page_1.html”>an overview of the OSS’s wartime activities.
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After the war, Walter sold cars for a dealership in Nutley, keeping his eye peeled for clean trade-ins for his family. I bought a nice, sensibly-driven used 1951 Chevy through Walter. A few months later, I tested his patience a bit when the car threw a rod on the Garden State and I got him to convince the dealership to repair it, even though it was well past its 30-day warranty.
After I enlisted in the army, I imposed one more time on ever-patient Walter, getting him to convince his dealership to buy back the car. Just one of the semi-unreasonable things that teen-age me expected people to do for him.
Thank you, Walter. You were a true patriot and friend.
I never got an allowance and never asked for one, although I did steal money from my mother’s purse once, thirty cents to buy a pet turtle. I never lacked for anything that was truly necessary. My brother and I mostly wore hand-me-downs from our Uncle George’s youth; Grandma must have saved everything he ever grew out of – in my 3rd-grade class photo I am the only boy wearing knickers. In high school I wore George’s wartime Eisenhower jacket, proudly. Until I got my working papers, which New Jersey requires for anyone under 18 to get a “real” job, money for things I wanted came from doing odd jobs and getting small handouts from my uncles.
Eisenhower jacket, courtesy monstervintage.com
Uncle George spent his early career years working for Western Electric, helping build the Mexican telephone system. He was there so long that in his photos he looks Mexican, maybe because of the mustache. During WW II he was a Signal Corps major stationed in New Guinea, fighting the Japanese and taking occasional target practice against stacks of canned Spam .
After the war he returned to Western Electric, picking up his career where he left off. He had a good job and a bit of money, and he owned a grand old house on Park Avenue (the Park Avenue in Orange, not the one in New York) that was divided into several equally grand apartments. His house was three blocks from ours, and sometimes I’d be sent over there on a Saturday morning to get me out of my mother’s hair for a while. Sometimes he would give me a quarter, equivalent to about $2.50 today, for no particular reason. He knew my name, but for some reason always called me Sport. Maybe that’s what he called everybody.
When visiting him, I pretty much kept quiet (he was usually lying on the couch, hung over in a gentlemanly way) while I read through his New Yorker magazines and tried to understand why the tiny cartoons embedded in the text were not funny. I later learned that they were not really ‘cartoons’, but just design elements to break up the text.
On one visit, I had recently read a magazine article about the excellence of Louisville Slugger baseball bats – how the wood was chosen, how carefully they were manufactured for maximum ball flight, etc. etc. Not owning a bat of my own of any brand, I tried to plant in George’s mind the idea of him buying me one. (I have a strange aversion to actually asking people for what I want.) Through the morning, I produced a slow trickle of factual nuggets from the article. Being hung over, he was uninterested in, and unmoved by, my low-key salesmanship. Bad timing on my part.
George had probably heard about my experience helping my father paint a house at the shore, and through my mother he asked whether I’d be interested in a job repainting the decks, railings and stairs of his apartment house. Yes, of course I was interested, and I spent many sunny days that summer working on his house. Aunt Louise kept me in iced tea and sandwiches as I painted my way through several gallons of battleship gray.
George and Louise met and married during the war; she was an officer in the WACs. The grownups in my family didn’t seem to like her very much; she may have been too boisterous for their tastes, similar to how they felt about my Aunt Sweetie, also an ex-WAC and a bit on the rowdy side.
Once all the painting was done, George shook my hand, said “Thanks, Sport!”, and handed me an envelope. When I got home and showed my mother how much was in it, she was astonished. How much did he give me? I don’t remember exactly, but it was a lot.
Uncle Bill, aunt Mabel’s husband, would give me a quarter once in a while too, for no particular reason. We didn’t see Bill and Mabel very often until Grandma started showing her age and went to live with them; then the two families would trade her off on weekends, with Bill driving back and forth from their house in Livingston. I especially enjoyed the drive back down the mountain; coming down Northfield Avenue at night there was, and still is, a spectacular view of Manhattan, stretched out and sparkling 15 miles away.
Bill was a production foreman at the Ford plant in Mahwah. He was not Italian, but I came to think of him as a gavone, a word I picked up from my neighborhood friends, defined as:
Cafone (also caffone, gavone)
Noun
1 A labourer; a peasant, especially one who is Italian or of Italian descent.
2 slang Especially in Italian-American usage: a coarse-mannered person; a low-life, a lout. – Lexico
That opinion was solidified when he came into our kitchen once after bringing Grandma home, hawked up a big one, and spat into the sink. I was offended, and without thinking gave him the stink eye. He responded with a sneer and after that, the Uncle Bill revenue stream dried up.
After the war, one day while I was in Michigan visiting my Uncle Bert and his family, I was nosing around in their cellar. On the top shelf of a wire rack over in one corner was a pile of almost-new comic books.
I have complained elsewhere here that there wasn’t any reading material in that house, at least not out in the open and available to me, other than Bert’s illustrated book of chicken diseases. But I forgot that beautiful stack of comics, which starred mostly WW II-era superheroes.
They seemed to have a common theme – at least one story in each issue had that comic’s hero slapping, punching, kicking, knocking down or otherwise humiliating either Hitler or Japan’s General Tojo. Mussolini didn’t suffer anywhere near the abuse the other two Axis leaders did, probably because Italy surrendered in 1943 and was a non-player for the rest of the war.
Superheroes were not the only abusers of the three Axis leaders and their armies; punishment could also be dished out by comic-strip celebrities such as heavyweight boxer Joe Palooka, or the band of rowdy grade-school boys known as the Commando Cubs.
As I read the stories, I had a fleeting thought that if a comic book writer could get a character close enough to Hitler to punch him in the face, why not just kill him? But I realized, since the war had already been over for three years, killing Hitler early would have put the world out of balance and messed up the space-time continuum, or something like that. Also to the downside, that writer’s superhero would have had one less villain available to humiliate in future issues. Finally, if our many years of post-war exposure to all forms of popular media have taught us anything, it is this: killing Hitler early always leads to unanticipated and undesirable consequences.
Outcomes, sans superhero intervention
After Italy surrendered in September 1943, Mussolini was dismissed from office by King Victor Emmanuel and imprisoned. He was soon freed by the Germans and restored to power as Hitler’s puppet. In April 1945, he was captured by Italian communists and executed by firing squad, then his body strung up for display. In a way, the terrible abuse inflicted on his corpse by the Italian people might be said to counterbalance his relatively light treatment in the comics.
Hitler committed suicide as Russian forces closed in on his bunker in April 1945.
Tojo attempted suicide as he was arrested by American soldiers in September 1945, but survived. He was hanged for war crimes in December 1948.
Here are some comic book covers from the internet.
Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk. Mussolini bit his weenie now it doesn’t work. – Carl Sandburg
My mother had connections with New Jersey politicians and businessmen through her position at the Newark Athletic Club. Among them were the officers of People’s Express Trucking, and she got me a summer job with People’s the year I turned 17. Once she had thought she might get me an appointment to West Point through the same connections, but that dream died as I lost interest in “applying myself” to my lessons.
As background, problems at Schlitz’s Milwaukee brewery have impacted production, and the company is shipping, by rail, a few million empty beer cans for filling. The role of People’s Express is to get the cans off the freight cars, onto trailer trucks, and then to the local Schlitz brewery. My role, and that of several other youths, is to do the actual work.
International Harvester, Cars-from-UK.com
The first day, we meet with our crew chief at the People’s Express offices on Raymond Boulevard. Three of us will drive an International Harvester pickup truck daily to the railroad yards in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the others will drive in with the crew chief in his car. I volunteer to drive the truck, I’ve had my license for almost three months now, I like driving and have lots of confidence. I was unaware that by law one must be 18 to drive in New York City, but the subject never came up.
The Williamsburg rail yards are about 15 miles away: across the Jersey swamplands, through the Holland Tunnel, across lower Manhattan, over the Williamsburg Bridge, then into Brooklyn to the yards.
Red and green together mean yellow
Traffic lights in Manhattan come in two colors , red and green. If the red comes on during a green, that’s the same as a yellow, act accordingly. The system worked fine; I don’t know why they changed it.
The Williamsburg bridge is old and narrow, it was built for horse-and-buggy traffic. It’s difficult to drive our truck through the tighter spots without scraping a running-board; I do that about once a week.
On the return trip to Newark, the traffic is generally worse.
Canal Street across Manhattan is always stop and go;, when it’s bad we seem to tie for speed with the pedestrians. One day we are neck-and-neck with a gorgeous woman walking with a man, they get ahead, we get ahead, as we breathe teenage sighs and make comments among ourselves about her ass. Uh-oh, he’s heard us! He walks up to the passenger window. What if he has a knife?! He speaks… “Would you boys like to fock her?” Relieved, we explain that no, we have to get back to Newark.
One day we are stuck inside the Holland tunnel for so long that we unzip and whiz into the vents along the curb.
In the rail yards, freight cars are jockeyed around to align their center doors with our work platform. There are 48 empty 12-ounce Schlitz cans in each cardboard case. After we build a pallet of 35 cases (seven tiers, five cases per tier, 3 x 2 then 2 x 3, alternating), we use a pallet jack to get it into a trailer, 28 pallets per trailer; lather, rinse, repeat, it isn’t rocket science. We fill about three trailers a day.
Not beer, but you get the idea
We fall into a routine; on our morning break we have grape soda and pastries or pie. At lunch, we buy sandwiches and more grape soda, or beer, then sit on the end of an East River dock to look over at the Manhattan skyline and watch what floats by. A visitor from England once said about the East River, “All you Americans seem to do is defecate, fornicate, and eat oranges.” I would have said bananas.
We are sometimes drunk. The college guy has a ‘bit’ he does, I guess it’s a fraternity thing. He stands in the middle of Kent Avenue, drops his pants, and shouts “I KNOW ABOUT THAT, LADY, BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS?” Near the end of the summer he falls out of a freight car and breaks his arm.
Our truck has an on-the-floor gear shift, nothing new to me, but I’ve been using it wrong. Believing it’s a standard H pattern, I think I am shifting 1-2-3, 1-2-3 like normal people do, when actually I’ve been shifting 2-3-4, 2-3-4 for two weeks. So far, I’ve never needed reverse. One day they send me to get something at the hardware store. I park behind someone, and when I try to back up to leave, what is reverse for normal H people is actually low-low for me, and I keep creeping up on the car ahead. I finally go back inside and ask for help. The man behind the counter comes out to show me, and I learn that I also have to push the stick down at the same time to get over and down to R. Ohh, I say, thanks! I get back to the yards with no one the wiser.
We work six days a week and when the loadings seem to get behind, we are asked to come in on a Sunday. People’s Express manager Mr. Bruno drives up in his top-of-the-line baby-blue Cadillac to supervise and help us. He’s wearing sandals and some sort of crotchless wrap-around terry loincloth, and that is all. Every time he bends over to pick up a case, his nuts hang out. Two NYPD officers arrive, they see Mr. Bruno’s outfit and look at one another. They have been sent here on a blue-law complaint: non-emergency labor is not allowed in New York City on Sunday. Mr. Bruno tries to talk them out of it, but oddly enough gets no respect; we pick up and go home.
We finally run out of empty cans, but there is still some summer left. People’s is nice enough to transfer the crew to the Continental Can Company, which I guess is some sort of sister company that shares directors with People’s. Continental Can, whose logo of three nested C’s can be found everywhere, is located in Paterson, New Jersey. Here, we are introduced to the Steam Jenny.
Part 2: My summer of Jenny
Modern pressure cleaner, used. Courtesy Auctions International
A 1950s-era steam jenny burns kerosene to boil water to make steam to clean dirty trucks and whatever else. It’s dangerous, and if you don’t get burned by the steam, or knocked off your ladder by the nozzle kickback, it might blow up because you neglected some element of its care and feeding. Attention, attention must be paid to such a machine; this is drummed into our heads over and over by a wizened yard worker who seems genuinely afraid of the thing. Jeez, we get it, enough! Maybe he’s seen some steam-jenny carnage in his day.
We train by using the jenny to blast steam up and down the sides of a particularly dirty trailer; we use a housepainter’s ladder to get on top and clean there too. The company finds enough jenny work for us to last out the summer; we are careful, and somehow we survive.
From Google, top answer to steam jenny safety tips
People also ask
Can a pressure washer cut your finger off?
Because he received near immediate treatment at the emergency room he was able to keep his index finger, although some of its function was lost. It doesn’t matter if the fluid is water, grease or paint – all can cause permanent damage and even amputation when injected at high pressure.
Through the summer, we have been paid as grown men; we even get time-and-a-half for overtime. Those big paychecks spoil me for going back to school: why go back to pointless boredom when I can be earning good money instead? I don’t attend school very much during my senior year, and I drop out towards the end. I do stop in to pick up my yearbook, though, and years later I have an observant visitor who wonders why no one ever signed it. That’s a long story, I say.
There’s a tree here in town just where the road starts a gentle curve to the left. It still has a scar from a drunk driver crashing into it 50 years ago. The car was packed with high school kids headed from one graduation party to the next. Some were killed, the rest injured. I didn’t know about the accident until I drove past years later with someone who had been in that class. She pointed out the tree and told me the driver’s name. He survived, and it turns out I know him. When I see him in town now, I try to avoid him.
There is no memorial at the spot, maybe there never was. The accident happened in the 1960s, and I don’t recall ever seeing any roadside memorials anywhere back then.
I like the idea of roadside memorials. Families and survivors usually place them near, or attach them to, any fixed object involved. They cause passers-by to think about how the memorial came to be, and in my opinion they probably save lives. It’s not always drunk driving that leads to roadside memorials, sometimes it’s just inattention or stupidity. Someone wrote a letter to the editor calling for all trees to be removed from the median of the Garden State Parkway, because people kept running into them and getting killed.
Some people don’t like the memorials because they can be tacky and garish. There’s a telephone pole across town that commemorates a more recent fatal accident. It’s covered with ribbons, photos and cheap plastic flowers. It’s directly across the street from someone’s house, and I know I wouldn’t want to see that out my front window every day.
The memorial I remember best wasn’t meant to be a memorial at all, it was simply a wrecked car put on display as a caution to young soldiers on my army post. The accident left the car mangled and lying on its roof, and it took a while to wrench it open and free the survivors.
Someone at headquarters had the idea of leaving the car on its roof and flatbedding it onto the post as an exhibit. There was a small rise just past the entrance, and the car was installed there, still on its roof, almost like an art exhibit, and allowed to ripen in the summer heat.
Over the next weeks, every soldier on the post was marched over to view the wreckage. Our NCOs made sure we got close enough to get a good look. In the silence as we reacted, we could hear flies, hundreds of them, buzzing around inside the car, attracted to the blood and vomit still pooled on the headliner. I don’t think anyone who saw and smelled that car will ever forget it.
Wear your seatbelts, kids. And don’t drive drunk.
These photos are from Bruce Wicks’ flickr album Roadside Memorials . There are over three hundred so far.
At its peak, the New Jersey resort town of Mount Freedom had eleven hotels and over 40 bungalow colonies. I wish I had better pictures, but the Catskills seem to have gotten all the photographer love.
I had a wholesale baked-goods route selling pastry and such, similar to what Entenmann’s sells today. My two customers in Mount Freedom, Max Shiffman and Hesh Steinberg, owned competing grocery stores about a mile apart.
Deserted colony, 2007, courtesy Carolyn via flickr.com
Max was the more enterprising of the two, bringing his wares direct to the customers. He filled his Volkswagen bus with baked goods, coffee, eggs, laundry soap and anything else he thought vacationers might need, and circulated through the colonies. On Friday morning I would leave a double or triple order with Max – weekend sales were brisk because all the hard-working fathers came down from the city to visit their families. Dugan products were kosher, so that helped too.
The 1999 film ‘A Walk On The Moon’ features life in a similar colony in the Catskills. We can consider Max a counterpart to the film’s Viggo Mortensen “Blouse Man” character. While Max sells pies and cakes to vacationing Holocaust survivors, Blouse Man’s truck is fitted out as a general store where he sells sexy blouses to frustrated housewives like Diane Lane.
Max had a wife who watched the store while he was out on his rounds, but Hesh did not, so Hesh’s business was limited to walk-in trade from the nearby bungalows. A while back I wrote about a memorable experience I had at Hesh’s when I accidentally disrupted a transaction.
With the construction of the Garden State Parkway came easy access to the Jersey shore and its nearby communities, and Mount Freedom began to fall out of favor as a vacation spot. The bungalows, built for occupancy only between May and September, were eventually classified as substandard housing and demolished, leaving only fond memories.
In the 1960s, the Morris County resort town of Mount Freedom was booming. The town catered to Jewish clientele from New York and Brooklyn, many of them post-war refugees from Europe. The town competed with the Catskills’ “Borscht Belt”, with a half-dozen hotels and more than 40 bungalow colonies.
I had a wholesale route for Dugan’s Bakery. One of my customers was Hesh Steinberg, who owned a grocery store convenient to the bungalows.
One day as I walk into Hesh’s to get his order, I see that he is concluding a sale to a dark-haired young woman. Because Orthodox Jews may not have physical contact with the opposite sex unless they are married, Hesh will deliver any change by dropping it into her palm.
Wearing my company’s gray uniform, I step next to her to wait my turn.
She sees that I see the numbers on her outstretched arm and snatches her hand back. Her change rolls on the counter.
In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood says to Eli Wallach: “There are those of us with guns, and those who dig. You dig.”
When we first were married, Mimi and I lived on Pennsylvania Avenue in Newark. After a year or two, we moved to Highland Avenue, in the North Ward, near Branch Brook Park and closer to my job. The neighborhood was safe, but I wanted to have a gun. Actually, I had always wanted to have a gun, just on general principles.
One day, an ad in Popular Mechanics caught my eye: A .22 caliber 9-shot revolver, capable of firing the more powerful .22 LR long rifle cartridge, was available by mail for something like 30 or 40 dollars.
Similar advert
There was a catch, however: New Jersey residents needed a purchase permit signed by their local police department. Police departments don’t really want private citizens to have guns, and, considering the social problems of the day, I knew I’d be unlikely to get a permit from Newark.
Paperwork
To keep my car insurance down, I was using my mother’s address in Orange on my registration and driver’s license. I asked the obvious question, she said fine with her, and I filled out the application and took it to Orange police headquarters. In the “Purpose” section, I put “target practice” rather than “home defense”, which in New Jersey is a frowned-upon justification and less likely of approval. I also provided the names of two non-related character witnesses.
Progress was slow. I stopped at police headquarters every two weeks or so to ask about my application, which needed the chief’s signature. Each time, they told me “It’s on his desk”, and indicated a pile of paperwork literally on one corner of his desk. Finally, out of exasperation, when no one was looking I walked into the chief’s office and started leafing through the pile to see if my application was there. One of the cops saw me and asked what the hell I thought I was doing. I explained, and got escorted out of the building. But two weeks later, my permit came in the mail.
I sent for the gun, received it, bought some ammo, and spent an afternoon at the range. Satisfied, I cleaned it and put it away.
Similar H&R Model 949, courtesy gunsinternational.com
A neighborhood commotion
One evening there was shouting on the street in front of my house. I looked out and saw my neighbors gathered in a loose circle. At first I thought they were watching a fistfight, but they were watching one guy in his twenties menace another one with a hunting knife. The guy being threatened would edge away a bit around the circle, the guy with the knife would follow, always a few feet away, swinging the knife back and forth and thrusting it menacingly.
Remember, I was a young guy myself then, and I too was prone to doing stupid young-guy things. It seemed as though someone was going to get stabbed or worse, so I brought my shiny new gun out on the porch, fired a shot into the air, and yelled “break it up” or some similar nonsense. The circle did break up, but the guy with the knife came over to my bottom step and stood there looking like he wanted to come up and use it on me instead. I cocked the gun, making what seemed to be a very loud click, and leveled it at his chest. We stared at each other for a few seconds, then he walked away. Thank God he didn’t start up those steps, because I would have shot him dead for sure and probably gone to jail for it. We were both lucky.
So anyway. I went back inside and the cops came, but they didn’t come to my house. I found out later they only wanted to know who had the gun, nothing about the fight. My neighbors were the greatest: nobody saw nuthin’. I also found out that the fight started because knife guy thought unarmed guy had been tapping his wife.
I think my bullet ended up in Branch Brook Park, or maybe on the roof of Barringer High. Don’t shoot into the air, kids. Also, mind your own business.
Early unrest
Problems were developing in the neighborhood even before the riots. A local figure named Tony Imperiale formed the North Ward Citizens Committee to protect the neighborhood from “bad elements” and future looters. Committee members in fatigues made regular foot patrols, although I never saw one on my street. The committee was said to have an armored car and a helicopter.
When I came home one afternoon, my wife told me that while out with the baby-stroller she was accosted by four teenage girls. She was upset and afraid she wouldn’t be able to protect our children.
Coming home another day, I saw something remarkable – a mounted policeman on Park Avenue’s median strip, trying to control his horse and simultaneously swing his nightstick hard enough to discourage the girl attached to his leg and trying to pull him off.
A long-brewing fight between blacks and Italians broke out in the Barringer cafeteria and spilled onto the grounds. This was not a food fight, it was a cutlery fight, with knives and forks and trays, and the police arrived in force. Barringer was located one block before my street on the way home, and I saw the police presence and wondered what was going on. I learned something important that day – if you’re dressed for the part, you can go anywhere. I was still wearing the Columbo–style trench coat I usually wore to programming school when I walked over to have a look, fully expecting to be shooed away when I got too close. A clutch of detectives nodded as I walked past them, and I realized they think I’m a cop, too. (Another simple trick to go places you don’t belong involves carrying a clipboard.)
1967 riots
By the summer of 1967, I was working nights at the A&P warehouse and going to school during the day. When rioting broke out in July, the Watts riots of two summers earlier were still fresh in everyone’s mind, and we knew how bad it could get.
The next day, I drove my wife and sons to the shore to stay with her kind and generous Aunt Peg for the duration. When I got back that night, I took a quick drive around the neighborhood and saw jeeps and personnel carriers on Bloomfield Avenue, and armed National Guardsmen posted on street corners. After I parked, I took a careful look around before I got out and went inside. So far, all quiet in the North Ward.
I still had the attaché case I bought as a prop for my unhappy career selling mutual funds, and I began taking the gun to work and to school.
One night at the warehouse we were sitting out front taking a break, when racing down Frelinghuysen Avenue came a state police car, no lights, windows bristling with rifle barrels. A moment later there was a burst of gunfire, followed by “Halt!”
There was a lot of pointless arson. One night a warehouse worker ran up to the office, yelled “I have to go home, they’re trying to burn my house down” and continued out the door. He was talking about his apartment building.
Fixed bayonets on Springfield Avenue, July 14, 1967. Courtesy NY Times
1968 MLK disturbances
Next year, the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked riots in over a hundred cities. Fortunately, Newark was not one of them. We had only “disturbances”, including arson and heavy vandalism. Ultimately, nothing came to our end of town, but we remained anxious and alert.
Four days after Dr. King was killed, I went into New York City for a job interview, and saw painted on the wooden panels surrounding a building under construction, “DA KINK IS DEAD”. The pure evil and just plain meanness of that always stuck with me.
After I got the job and started riding the subway, I switched from my bulky attaché case to an un-jostle-able leather portfolio, basically a piece of black cowhide folded in half with a zipper.
Later that year there was some national news, I don’t remember what, that created an expectation of violence, and for a few days I carried the gun in my portfolio. One morning on the train to New York as I walked down the aisle looking for a seat, I noticed a black girl looking at me and smiling one of the friendliest smiles I’ve ever seen. I smiled back, and as I passed her she said “Cool, baby.”
After I took a seat, I realized the gun barrel had pushed through the portfolio zipper and was sticking out the front.
Did I ever tell you about the time I was on a quiz show?
Merv with astronauts and their wives
I was the newest employee at my job, so I got last pick of vacation dates. I ended up with the third and fourth week of November. The weather was still pretty good, and Mimi and I took day trips into New York City – seeing a play, hitting the museums, wandering around taking in the sights while favoring the sights that were free. When we got to Rockefeller Plaza, we took the tour of NBC’s Radio City Studios, where we saw a taping of the game show Play Your Hunch. I’ll let Mark Evanier’s “TV relic” site, oldtvtickets.com (worth a visit) explain how the show worked. Thanks, Mark.
“Merv Griffin hosted for most of the run, and the show was pretty simple. Two teams of contestants (usually husband-wife) would be shown little puzzles, usually involving three people coming out on stage or three objects being unveiled. The correct answer to the question would be one of the three choices, which were labelled X, Y and Z. If you guessed right, you got points. That was it.”
After the taping, they invited anyone who wanted to be on the show and would be in town the next week to stick around. The next week was Thanksgiving, so not too many people stayed. Our interviewer liked us, and said to come back ready to play on Monday.
The show was broadcast in color, and male contestants were “strongly encouraged” to wear blue shirts, not white, because white sometimes confused early color cameras. I didn’t own a blue shirt, so before we left the building we visited the upscale shoppes on the first level. A camera-ready light-blue shirt was $30, about $25 more than I was used to paying, but we saw it as an investment.
On Monday, we chatted with the other contestants in the hour or so before the show. The first couple we would play against were a pleasant brother and sister from Australia, traveling the world as a gift from their father.
Another pair of contestants was a country clodhopper and his wife, in the city for the first time. They had tickets for the musical Purlie Victorious, where “Purlie” is the lead character, and the wife was quite excited. Her husband kept calling it “PURELY Victorious”, what a rube. I mean, I’m from New Jersey, so I don’t have anything to brag about, but at least I crack a newspaper.
Wally Cox. What’s not to love?
Before the show, Mimi and I got to meet some of the celebrities who would present the “problems”, as the show’s puzzles/games were called. Among them was Mitch Miller, who was later instantly recognized by our one-year-old watching at home (“Mehh Mrrrr!”, according to his grandmother). We also met Minnie Pearl of the price-tagged bonnet (“Howw-deeee!”), and shy science teacher “Mister Peepers” Wally Cox, who seemed to share a mutual attraction with Mimi.
As the show begins, host Merv chats a bit with the contestants. I’m not good at small talk, but Mimi covers for me nicely. I think Merv made a little dig about our chat imbalance, but maybe I’m too sensitive.
The contestants played their hunches, solving puzzles such as which of three students crossing the stage wearing graduation robes and oversized placards identifying them as student X, Y, or Z is transporting a stack of books between his knees. Yes, it was dumb.
Wally secret-signaled Mimi that the Swedish word “blyertspenna”, a word he enjoyed repeating, meant “pencil”, so we won that round.
We sailed along pretty well, but all good things must come to an end, and on the third day we were defeated by “Purely Victorious” and his smarter wife.
In the two years before Play Your Hunch first went on the air, a number of scandals revealed that some game shows were rigged.
The revelations eroded public trust and ended an era of prizes that for some shows could exceed $100,000. Play Your Hunch was never intended to be a big-money show, and for our run we took home $375, about four months’ apartment rent, so not too shabby.
No one foresaw the Game Show Network getting rich off reruns of old quiz shows, so the shows often reused their tapes, writing over earlier episodes again and again – what a loss. A few Play Your Hunch episodes have survived, making it to YouTube or a DVD collection, but apparently none of the ones we starred in. I recently spent some time on YouTube looking so you wouldn’t have to, and saw:
• Three pretty young women wearing knee-length puffy dresses take the stage, and the puzzle is announced:
“ONE OF THESE WOMEN” (you have my attention)
“ISN’T” (isn’t what?)
“WEARING ANY” (I am giddy, oh please please please)
“STOCKINGS” (feh, what a disappointment)
After someone hunches a hunch, the women, one at a time, pull a pinch of stocking away from shapely calves, but one of them cannot, BECAUSE SHE ISN’T WEARING ANY.
• I get a twinge of nostalgia when on another show I see a model dangle as a prize my favorite piece of 1960s techno-candy, the “Polaroid Highlander Model 80A Instant Camera”.
• On another episode, Merv flirts outrageously with the one songwriter out of three who wrote that year’s big Elvis hit.
“As Seen on TV”
• We were seen by my Dugan’s Bakery customer Mr. Bryan, who owned a grocery store where routes 46 and 10 intersect, at Ledgewood Circle in far-off Succasunna, New Jersey.
• Tony Imperiale, a neighbor who formed the North Ward Citizens Committee to protect our section of Newark from “bad elements” and future looters, shouted “I saw you! I saw you!” and waved madly from behind the fish counter at Food Fair.
• Jack Moore, a cousin on my father’s side who jumped into Lake Mohawk to save three-year-old me after I fell off the dock, called from Texas to congratulate us and say we looked great.
We have more friends looking out for us than we realize.
chair. Back then, cans were made of tin-plated steel, not the cheesy aluminum they use today. In my teen years, it was a benchmark of strength to be able to fold a beer can in half with just one hand.
How I fought Hitler, part 2 – Here is a link to my recollections of the day the war was over, along with some other early childhood memories. Apologies for some bad language over there, but that Happened too.
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.
