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.”
Clarksville was right across the state line from the Army base where I took advanced infantry training in 1957. When we had a day off we’d put on our civilian clothes and hop the bus to get some beers or just a change of scenery. My earliest memory of the town, and of the South, came on our first trip, when I was walking along the sidewalk with a buddy. Two black guys about our age were on the same sidewalk, coming in our direction. Just as I stepped behind my buddy so the two parties could pass in single file, the two black guys stepped into the gutter and continued walking, not breaking stride, and all just as natural as could be.
Later when it came time to go back to base we headed for the bus station, stepping through its front door into a dim and dirty waiting room. It was crowded with people seated and standing, most of them appearing unfriendly or even hostile. Two older women in particular were giving us barely concealed dirty looks.
One wall of the room stopped about a foot short of the ceiling, and over it we could see bright fluorescent lighting. Assuming the space next door was a luncheonette or other place where we could get something to eat, we stepped out of the room we were in, walked 40 feet down the sidewalk to the first door we came to, opened it and stepped into… the white waiting room.
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.
After Mimi and I were married, we lived with her sister and mother on Pennsylvania Avenue in Newark. Her sister was about 16, and as she walked to school, boys in passing cars would call out to each other “Mira! Mira!”.
Mimi took the bus to work every day, at the Mega Foods store in Scotch Plains where she was the bookkeeper. I picked her up every night, and that’s where we bought our weekly groceries. A hundred dollars’ worth of groceries filled the trunk and half the back seat.
At the end of Pennsylvania Avenue was small, triangular Lincoln Park. President Kennedy’s motorcade was once rerouted past it to counter a threat about traveling on Broad Street. Mimi didn’t know Kennedy was in town that day, but she and our 3-year-old got to see him and wave as he went by.
A little-noted Lincoln Park event months earlier was a battle between blacks and Puerto Ricans. During the fighting, park benches were disassembled and their slats used as lances and clubs. When I saw the fighting from a block away, I thought to myself, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not involved.” The police eventually arrived and broke it up. Helping to keep the city’s lid on, the newspapers made no mention of the event.
We seldom overslept on holidays, because if there was a parade involved the sections formed up in front of our house before moving to the main route on Broad Street. We shared our porch steps with excited band families and early parade-goers.
Mimi and I went to the Mosque Theater, now Newark Symphony Hall, to hear Nina Simone. We were led to the balcony and seated there with the other white people, 20 or 30 of us. We didn’t care, she was fantastic.
Mimi has read about a cooling summer drink called “The Pimm’s Cup” which requires 3/4 cup of Pimm’s #1 liqueur. She asks me to pick up a bottle, and next day on my way home I stop at the S. Klein On The Square department store, which has a liquor department. I ask the help for a bottle of “Pimm’s Cup”, having to repeat myself twice. They chortle, this is a new one on them, and they keep calling back and forth “Pimp’s Cup, Pimp’s Cup” until they locate one.
There was a small, smoky fire in the rooming house across the street. Even before the fire trucks arrived, the residents were outside on folding chairs, watching a ballgame on their rabbit-eared TV, an extension cord plugged into the vestibule of the church next door.
Our neighbor dies and while the family is at the funeral his house is robbed. The neighborhood is changing.
