I was a good customer of the Orange Public Library. Usually the first thing I’d do when I arrived was head over to the reference room and take Gray’s Anatomy off the shelf, then find a seat where no one could see what I was studying. It was the already ancient 1905 edition of Gray’s, all black-and-white hand-drawn, scrupulous and scary illustrations of the various parts of the human anatomy, especially the lady parts. It was a well-worn, thick book, and if you set it down on its spine, it would fall open automatically to the V’s.
The non-fiction, or what I thought of as the Dewey Decimal part of the library, was at the back of the building, spread over three levels connected by metal stairs. The floors between levels were of heavy, translucent glass and as much as you might strain and imagine, you couldn’t see anything of the people walking on the level directly above your head except the bottom of their shoes.
The library had a collection of classical music on 33-and-a-third LP albums; symphonies and operas. German/English and Italian/English side-by-side librettos were available, so I could sing along (“In fernem Land…”) in my living room until someone came home. My mother had no interest in opera of any flavor, but on Saturday afternoons we’d listen to the Philharmonic radio broadcast on NBC together.
There seemed no limit to the information available in the library. Here I found the recipe for gunpowder, and while browsing randomly stumbled on a book about witchcraft. When I took the book home, I found that one page contained about 20 demonic symbols that could Make Things Happen. One of them, if stared at long enough, would turn the starer into a werewolf. That didn’t seem like such a great idea for anyone, so I averted my eyes and tore out the page. I balled it up and threw it into a storm sewer next day on my way to school. Just a small public service.
After I got interested in building models I stole a thin volume called “How to Make a Ship in a Bottle”. That might be the first thing I ever stole. When my brother saw me reading it, he said “How to take a shit in a bottle” and laughed, and I got mad. I never did make a ship in a bottle, it looked pretty complicated.
Stickler Memorial Library, Orange, NJ, early 1900s. It’s still there, kids
In seventh and eighth grade, we have music class twice a week. The class is divided into two groups for tonal management of the parts we sing. There is an alto group, mostly boys, and a soprano group, girls and boys like myself whose voice hasn’t changed yet. Before each song, Miss Barnett blows a single note on her pitch pipe so we know what we’re supposed to sound like.
Not Miss Barnett
When not accompanying us on the classroom piano, Miss Barnett spends her time correcting and verbally abusing the sopranos. We can do nothing to her satisfaction. After a few weeks, I tell her my voice is changing. There is no test to confirm my claim; she simply tells me to sit on the alto side of the room from now on. Goodbye to twice-weekly stomach cramps.
Our repertoire comes from a long-out-of-print song book of standards, spirituals and other royalty-free music, for example “Comin’ ‘round the Mountain”. Music is timeless, and our thrifty school board agrees.
One song in regular rotation is Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe”. It has of course been modernized since then, but in our classroom Old Black Joe grieves for “my friends from the cotton fields away”, with the chorus
I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low, I hear those darky voices calling “Old Black Joe”.
In our class are two black kids, Joe Stokes and Richie Strickland. I don’t look over to see if they are singing along, but I’ll bet Joe Stokes isn’t.
Richie and I are friendly, and one day he arrives at my house with two fishing poles and we board the Number 20 bus to Branch Brook Park. As we pay our fares, I notice some of the other passengers nudge each other.
We try various spots around the lake but don’t catch anything. We come back to my house and sit in the sunroom, talking about baseball. After an hour or so, my grandmother takes me aside and says “Tell Richie he has to go home, we’re going to have dinner now.”
In grades seven and eight I had a science teacher that I really liked and admired, Mr. Fischer. He knew I liked science and science-fiction books, and was open to such classroom questions as, if light is really particles (turns out it isn’t), can it be used to push a spaceship along, even just a little bit? The atomic bomb and the possibility of atomic energy were also hot subjects in our classroom. Mr. Fischer was a gray-haired bachelor with a slight lisp and some fussy behaviors. Given what we know, or think we know, today, Mr. Fischer was probably gay. He was good friends with our music teacher Miss Barnett, who had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.
Miss Barnett offered Mr. Fischer a pair of tickets to see Aida, and he asked me if I wanted to go. My mom said fine with her, and off we went one Saturday on the bus to New York. On the way, we saw acres of empty steel drums stacked up in the meadowlands along the route. It later turned out they were not empty, as most of the world probably thought, and had been leaking toxic goo into the North Jersey soil for years.
We arrived at the Met, still in the original building at 39th Street, and climbed to our seats. This is not meant as a complaint about the tickets, but we were in nosebleed territory, the highest section in the house. The section was so steep that when I turned around, I was looking straight between the knees of the old lady behind me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole outing and thought the opera was fantastic. I know now that a lot of people think Aida is bombastic, not fantastic, but what did I know then, kids love bombast.
Now, here’s what I think happened next, deduced by putting together two and two and based on the available evidence,
One Mr. Grady, who lived two doors down from us on Rayburn Terrace, was the janitor at Cleveland Street School. He was a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning; he carried a rosary in his back pocket and could be seen fingering it from time to time. Mr. Grady hated Mr. Fischer for the predictable reasons, and had gotten wind of our opera excursion. Mr. Grady put a bug in my mother’s ear that perhaps Mr. Fischer was leading her son astray, and she should beware. My mother then confided in her boss, Mr. Edwards, with whom she was on friendly terms and maybe just a little bit office-romancy – Mr. Edwards would sometimes drive her home at night so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Was her bookish son being groomed as a Friend of Dorothy? Mr. Edwards considered the issue and came up with an plan.
Next, the only tangible evidence I have of all this speculation.
My mother came home from work one day and said “Mr. Edwards thought you might like this calendar.” Indeed I would, for it was probably the most risqué pinup calendar then available, Vargas Girls in provocative poses and showing as much skin as was legal. “Um, thanks!” I had never been given anything by Mr. Edwards before.
After a decent interval I was upstairs, the staples were out and my top four picks were on the wall alongside my Honor Roll certificates. I was cured.
My church, and I call it “my” church because East Orange Presbyterian was the closest Protestant church that my mother could get a neighbor to give me a ride to every Sunday, decided to give a minstrel show. I know what you’re thinking, but it was a long time ago, we didn’t know any better, and the nation was young.
Church members with an interest in show business volunteered for the various roles of minstrelsy, and rehearsals began on the fellowship hall stage. Maybe there is some sort of widely available, generic script for a minstrel show, for everyone seemed to know what they were doing. There was singing (Swanee River, Polly Wolly Doodle), tap dancing, and comic skits — for example, one included a small collection of fruits and vegetables, and a woman who says to her suitor “But darling, we…”, then holds up, wait for it, a cantalope!, as immediately recognized and shouted out by a willing audience.
Was there blackface? I honestly don’t remember, but yes, probably. Burnt cork is easy to manufacture, apply and remove, and also makes a fine beard for a Christmas Wise Man or Halloween hobo.
The players rehearsed religiously, seated onstage in the traditional minstrel-show semicircle of chairs. At only nine or ten years old, I was a stagehand, my sole duty being to open and close the curtains between skits. The show was scheduled for one night only, a Thursday. On that Thursday, as I was getting ready for bed, a stray thought crossed my mind and I froze and said to myself “Shit.”
I assume the show started just fine without me, but I never went back to that church and never knew for sure what happened that night at eight o’clock. Whenever I tell this story to someone, they always say “Wow, maybe they’re still stuck behind the curtains.” That’s crazy, right?
After I got the job at IBM Yorktown, I needed a place to stay during the week until we found a house in the area. Someone in the personnel department had the job of finding leads to short-term housing. There were always people living near the lab who were happy to rent rooms to IBMers, for if you can’t trust an IBMer, who can you trust? With my leads came a document that basically said “IBM takes no responsibility for whatever terrible things may happen to you there”.
One of the leads was to a room with private bath in Katonah, a quiet town on the commuter line to New York City and about ten miles from the lab. The room was expensive for the time, $300 a month. On my way over to check it out, I saw lots of roads that looked good for running. When I got there, I saw that the house was in a green, wooded area next to one of New York City’s beautiful reservoirs. The owner, Mrs. Fraser, showed me the room, which had an easy chair, a TV, a table and a bed — what more could I want? It was on the lower level of the house, with a private entry by sliding doors facing the woods. When I drove up from New Jersey the next Monday morning, I brought my suits and my running gear and moved in.
Mrs. Fraser’s husband owned a business in Europe and spent most of his time there, so I didn’t meet him for a few weeks. I don’t know how he felt about having a non-dweebish IBMer in the house with his wife, but I know my rent helped out with the bills.
On the day I have come to think of as BPD, Bachelor Panic Day, there was a surprise, late-season snowstorm, and at 10 o’clock in the morning IBM sent everyone home. Virtual bachelors like myself, who now had nowhere to get lunch, rushed the vending machines, emptying them completely of junk food and canned soup. When I got back to the house, Mrs. Fraser invited me to have lunch with her and her daughter, home from school on a snow day. It was the first I’d ever been upstairs.
Blue Dolphin diner, Katonah Avenue
Normally, there were plenty of small restaurants and diners where I could stop for a meal after work. I had a bottle of port wine I bought to keep me company in the evening, and on general principle I hid it so that Mrs. Fraser wouldn’t see it when she cleaned. I went for a morning run twice a week, saw lots of deer and once got lost in Pound Ridge Reservation – not Hansel-and-Gretel lost, but lost enough that I had to flag down a passing car and ask for directions.
Avery Cemetery in Pound Ridge Reservation. Photo by Howard Dale
For the Fourth of July, I was worried about traffic and decided not to drive home. I drove over the state line into Connecticut, where the town of Wilton was having an old-fashioned Fourth, with beer, fireworks and a parade. Norman Rockwell would have been completely at home in Wilton.
House hunting
The way it worked out, I drove home to the shore on Friday night and back to the lab on Monday morning. The trip took two hours each way and could be difficult, especially the trip home Friday evening. But, at only twice a week for a few months, it was tolerable. During the week, I’d look at houses with a realtor, Irene. She was really sharp, and after a while understood what I liked and what I didn’t, and we generally didn’t waste each other’s time. If she showed me a house I thought was a strong “maybe”, I’d bring Mimi up to Westchester on the weekend so we could look at it together.
One place I was shown was a townhouse in Bedford Hills. It was nice, but as we were about to leave, I realized the kitchen had a clear view of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a maximum security prison surrounded by razor wire and only a quarter-mile away. When I said I wasn’t in love with the view, the seller’s agent reassured me by saying “Oh, they can’t get out.”
On one of our cross-Westchester drives to see a house, we passed a beat-up Volkswagen bus parked alongside the road, where a woman had set up a sort of flower stand. She may have had other flowers too, but there were roses, lots of them. Mimi said “Oooh, look at the roses!” I said “Yeah!” in agreement, and kept on driving.
Amelia’s not-beat-up flower truck, photo courtesy KT Sura
On the way back, she said “There’s that rose lady again!” and when I didn’t respond, she gave up and said “Can we get some?” Well, I can take a hint, and I pulled over. I bought a dozen roses from the lady, who was acting all goofy, as through love was in the air and I was buying flowers for her instead of from her. I got back in the car and handed the flowers over to Mimi, saying something like “Here ya go.” Yes, I am aware this all makes me sound like a jerk. Mimi didn’t say anything, and both she and the flower lady seemed disappointed in my presentation. For the rest of the day, Mimi called me “Mr. Romantic”.
Driving in New York
Seeing a car with Jersey plates driving around Westchester County was like a thumb in the eye to the locals there. Also annoyed sometimes were the State Police. One Saturday morning out house-shopping with Mimi, I was doing about 75 on one of the expressways, along with everyone else, when a cop pulled me over. Once it became clear he was going to write me a ticket no matter what, I said I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t pulled over the black Jeep that just passed me doing about 90. He replied “I didn’t see him. I saw you.” After that, I decided it was time to become an official New York State resident, and switched my plates and driver’s license from New Jersey to New York.
Westchester signage. It’s actually pretty good
A lot of New Yorkers drive like idiots, and that includes both driving too fast and driving too slow. New York didn’t yet have the common-sense law that says “keep right except to pass”, so I’ll chalk up the slow-driving-in-the-left-lane idiocy as mostly the state’s fault.
After I switched over to New York plates, whenever I was back in Jersey on the Parkway, maintaining my speed in continuous traffic and passing in the left lane like I’ve been doing since I was seventeen, there was always some Jersey jerk coming up behind me and flashing his lights to get me to move over. By definition, if you have New York plates and are in the left lane, you are driving too slow. You just can’t win.
As I often say while recounting Everything That Happened, all good things must come to an end, and one day Mrs. Fraser knocked on my door and said their son would be coming home from school and they’d need the room by the end of the month.
I went back to the personnel department and told them I needed a new place to stay. They gave me the number of a woman in Peekskill who took in transient IBMers, Mrs. Garrison.
Mrs. Garrison
Peekskill is a working-class town on the Hudson River. Mrs. Garrison’s house looked old but was well maintained, with a long set of stairs leading up from the sidewalk. She appeared to be in her early 70s, and mentioned she was a widow. She began showing me around the first floor, starting with the front entryway. On the table there was a framed photograph of two men dressed to go fly fishing. She said the man on the left was her late husband Everett, and the other was Hoagy Carmichael. “Hoagy Carmichael?!” I said. Carmichael was one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters, hugely popular from the 1920s through the 1950s, and I reflexively crooned the opening of his theme song and greatest hit, Stardust:
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
the lonely night
Dreaming of a song…
Carmichael at work
Mrs. Garrison got all teary-eyed, and said “I never thought anyone as young as you would know that song.” I gave her my standard response to people that I somehow favorably surprise, a gentle “Well, I know some things.”
(FYI, Willie Nelson sings a lovely version of Stardust in his familiar, reedy voice.)
She showed me the room and I took it, even though I’d have to share the bathroom with two other IBMers who had rooms there, and pay a few dollars extra for electricity if I wanted the window air conditioner hooked up. Writing about charging for electricity makes her sound like a cheapskate, but she wasn’t; she was just trying to get by on her Social Security and some income from her roomers. She was a pleasure to chat with in the evenings, sitting in her ‘parlour’. The other IBM roomers were basically children, and had no interest in anything an old lady might have to say.
Classic parlour
Mimi and I eventually found a place we liked, an almost-new townhouse in the sleepy village of Croton-on-Hudson. The price was higher than we were comfortable with, and we tried to negotiate. The owner was an IBMer who was retiring, and he would not budge an inch. I think he expected the housing market would improve enough to meet his price if he just held out long enough. We hadn’t found anything else we liked, and now we had an offer to buy our house in New Jersey, so we bit the bullet and signed for the full price. The market was indeed improving, because when IBM cancelled my project eighteen months later and I transferred to Boca Raton, we priced the townhouse high, so high that Irene thought we were delusional, and made a profit.
Jumping back a bit, the day we moved into the townhouse I stopped by Mrs. Garrison’s to say goodbye, and I made sure to bring Mimi along to meet her. Mimi knew the words to Stardust too.
Yes, Dallas. Even sixty years later, that name brings sad memories to those who were watching television on November 22nd, 1963 and over the long weekend that followed.
From the moment we heard that shots had been fired at the President’s motorcade, then later heard Walter Cronkite’s announcement that the President was dead, we could not take our eyes off the screen.
Stunned, we watched over and over the motorcade turn into the Dealey Plaza ambush, the President be shot, Jackie reach for something, the limousine speed off to the hospital.
We watched the vigil outside the emergency room, we watched Air Force One’s return to Washington with the President’s body and the new President, we watched the thousands of mourners pass by the casket, we watched over and over Jack Ruby kill Oswald, we watched the funeral procession, we watched Jackie at the grave.
We had a Thanksgiving, winter came, we had a Christmas, then more winter.
Then, on February 9th, we watched a new band called the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show.
Somehow, when we went to bed that night, we felt like everything was going to be all right.
The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses, not that you’d know it from seeing any ball games. I have never heard verse 2, 3 or 4 sung in public. Verse 3 is especially interesting because it dumps all over that ‘band’ of dirty Redcoat bastards. It goes like this:
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion A home and a Country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
