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?
My father was a Catholic, nominally. I don’t think he ever went to church as an adult. One of my aunts said when he did go to Mass as a child, he always managed to avoid the collection plate.
Similarly, my mother was a Protestant, nominally. I don’t think she ever went to church as an adult either. Her way of staying right with the Lord may have been simply to make sure I attended Sunday School. She accomplished this by finding neighbors who attended a nearby Protestant church and were willing to give me a ride each Sunday. She didn’t seem fussy about which flavor of Protestant services I attended; I remember Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist, depending on where we were living. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Eick, pronounced “Ike”, of Linwood Place, for giving me a weekly ride to the Washington Street Baptist Church in your rumble-seated car, and for sometimes treating me to a second breakfast if I showed up for my ride too early.
Full immersion baptism, Chestnut Mountain Church, Flowery Branch, Georgia
I was baptized a Catholic at the age of one month, so even if the rules about who gets into Heaven are as stringent as I’ve heard from some Catholic sources, I remain eligible. In the Baptist church, baptism (full-immersion, y’all, Acts 8:38, Mark 1:5) is reserved for those “able to make a mature confession of faith”; most baptisms I’ve seen were of people in their early teens or just a little younger; certainly old enough to decide.
Somehow, the Baptists never got around to baptizing me; that’s probably just as well, because there are some doctrinal problems with being baptized twice; your mileage may vary. The closest I have come to professing the Baptist faith openly was having “BAPTIST” stamped on my army dog tags, along with my blood type, “O”.
Soon after I opened my first checking account, a local radio station aired a feature story about an orphanage in Kearney (next to Newark) burning down, and soliciting contributions to rebuild. The fire sounded pretty devastating, and I had once written a book report on Oliver Twist, so I was ripe. I broke out my new checkbook and wrote Sacred Heart Orphanage of Kearney a check for something like five or ten dollars, not a trivial sum then. When my first bank statement arrived, I asked my mother to help me interpret it. As we reviewed the half-dozen or so cashed checks, we came to the one to Sacred Heart, and she said “What’s this?!” I relayed the whole burnt-down orphanage story, which only seemed to anger her. Raising her voice just a little, she said “The Pope doesn’t need your money.” End of discussion.
I married a girl who was raised Catholic; this never posed a problem, because, like me, she was not a churchgoer. Back when Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday, she ignored the rule; the only time it ever came up was once when we were out shopping – she said “It won’t feel right to eat meat on Good Friday”, and I said “Okay, let’s get fish then.” We started both our kids along the Catholic path of confirmation and first communion, because that way they can make up their own minds later on, right?
During a confirmation ceremony, the officiating bishop asks the candidates several questions from a list. The kids get advance coaching in the questions and the correct answers from adult volunteers; kids who have not attended parochial school find the questions and concepts more difficult. Despite my protests, I got volunteered into coaching my older son. To keep my own conscience clear while still following the study guide, my practice questions took the form “Now, if the bishop asks you ‘How does the Holy Spirit help us?’, what are you going to say?” On the day of the ceremony, I got some holy water sprinkled on me as the bishop’s procession entered the church. It didn’t burn, so I guess my approach was acceptable.
1947 Pontiac. Imagine this with seven more years of wear, green and much less shiny
One thing I did in high school was definitely a Bad Thing, religion-wise, as was confirmed by Miss Riley, our world history teacher. I had a ’47 Pontiac, and in the morning I might pick up a few friends, then, once at school, if I was not planning to go to classes, ask “Who’s going in?”. Those remaining in the car would cruise around with me for the rest of the day, or at least until it was time for me to go to my afternoon job. I was not at all familiar with the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and one Ash Wednesday my friends wanted to get their ashes applied before school.
I drove around under their direction, but the churches all had lines. Some of them decided to get out and get on line anyway, leaving just me and one passenger. Knowing that the only excuse to arrive late to school that day was to enter through the attendance office with ashes on our foreheads, I suggested using the ashes in the car’s ashtray. I don’t recall whether my passenger joined in or not, but I decorated my forehead with a smudge similar to those I had seen walking the streets all morning and entered the school without difficulty. I should have thought to wash off the ashes as soon as I got past the attendance office, but did not.
When I got to world history class later that day, Miss Riley, who had attended this very high school with my mother and knew her well, took one look at my smudge and squawked “YOU’RE NOT CATHOLIC!”. She didn’t know, of course, that my ashes were fake; that would have been so much worse. She was angry at my assumed (by her) decision to present myself to a priest as Catholic to obtain an excuse to be late to school. She told me I should be ashamed, and to wash my face and think very hard about what I’d done. I was ashamed, or at least I am now, for disrespecting someone else’s religion; I did wash my face; and I do continue to think about religion, although not so hard any more.
Thoughts
Back in the day, my wife and I liked to explore old cemeteries. While admiring the statuary and mausoleum architecture of a Catholic cemetery in Westchester, we noticed off at one side two rows of tiny headstones. There were maybe 30 or 40 in all, each very close to the next, and marked with numbers instead of names. We wondered what that was all about, and next day my wife called the office to ask. The woman who answered asked her in turn “Are you Catholic, dear?”. Getting a yes, she explained that section was the unconsecrated part of the cemetery, and those were graves of unbaptized babies and stillbirths. I don’t know what we expected, but that made us sad.
Church dogma at the time said the unborn and unbaptized were consigned to Limbo, which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “Limbo, in Roman Catholic theology, the border place between heaven and hell where dwell those souls who, though not condemned to punishment, are deprived of the joy of eternal existence with God in heaven.”
However, according to Wikipedia, “Recent Catholic theological speculation tends to stress the hope, although not the certainty, that these infants may attain heaven instead of the state of Limbo.” So there’s at least some hope.
The editor of the syndicated newspaper column The Ethicist once responded to a question from a lapsed-Catholic-gone-atheist reader who had been pressed into service as a pallbearer in a Catholic funeral. The main point of his response was “Your participation in the service was not hypocrisy; it was an act of compassion and affection for your family. To join in some parts of the service does not require you to join in every part.” I commented to the editor:
I liked what you wrote in your “pallbearer” segment. As a non-Catholic married into a large Catholic family, I have been in that situation several times. The trick when participating in any Catholic ceremony is to never sit in the first row. One can then take the cue from others to stand, sit, or slide forward in lieu of kneeling – without seeming disrespectful, and optionally without praying.
There is a bumper sticker that says “God is who, evolution is how”, an attractive simplification. The real truth may be so deep and complex that no human has yet imagined it.
My Uncle Bert (Herbert, actually) lived in Temperance, Michigan, farm country just across the state line from Toledo, Ohio. He worked as a pattern maker and draftsman in the auto industry and was a car lover who had owned a Stanley Steamer in his youth. He was a good man who was like a father to me. I miss him and think it’s sad that he had to leave New Jersey to seek his fortune.
Uncle Bert, motor industry draftsman and gentleman farmer
A gentleman farmer, he had a house on eight-and-a-half acres of land and raised chickens as a hobby. The warm eggs were collected each morning by his daughters. They sold some, and Bert brought some to work.
Starting at age 10 in 1948, I was invited to stay with Bert and his family over two happy summers. My mother tried to give him money for the expense of feeding me, but he refused it.
His only son Herbie was born with Down syndrome, a disability I didn’t recognize until I was older. I thought he was just a person without a lot to say, not too bright and with thick glasses. When he did speak, he was hard to understand. He had three older sisters. They knew how to sew, and made their own clothes. As far as I know, their dressmaking wasn’t a money-saving thing, it was a country, small-town craft thing, and perfectly ordinary – they probably took sewing classes in high school . I think a high point for them was choosing from the local feed store’s 100-pound patterned-cloth chickenfeed bags whichever patterns would make the prettiest blouses. I remember Uncle Bert lifting and pulling the heavy bags, shifting them around to get to the ones his girls liked.
Feed Store, courtesy Nicolas Henderson via flickr
Unlike Bert, his wife Evelyn was Catholic, a woman of Irish background who raised their kids Catholic as well. Virginia, the oldest, was in training to become a nun until her order sent her home before final vows when she contracted tuberculosis. That pretty much did it for Bert with the church. Virginia got well, and she and her sister Charlotte became nurses, often working in the same hospital and vacationing together. Naomi, the youngest girl, became a teacher.
Herbie had a friend from one farm away named Alec, who was about 14, the same age as Herbie. I was probably four years younger. Thinking back, Alec may have been just a bit limited also, but he drew fantastically detailed and lifelike pencil studies of animals and birds. One evening Herbie and Alec invited me to come along while they looked in windows, I guess a regular practice. I went along but not enthusiastically. I was worried we’d be caught, and we didn’t get to see anything anyway.
We spent a lot of time together walking around the “neighborhood”, really just other farms. One day I noticed something different about some barbed wire we had just come up to, the barbs were longer and sharper than what I’d seen before. I mentioned this just as I touched the point of one, getting a healthy shock. My tour guides thought this was hilarious. Fun fact: electrified fences can be recognized by the white porcelain insulators holding the wire onto the fence posts.
One excursion that I won’t forget was a visit to a nearby farm that raised pigs, on Castration Day. I think I may have been brought there by my pals for shock value as much as for my education. The castration procedure is quick, but to this city boy even years later seems astoundingly cruel. A young pig is caught, held down, his back legs spread and his ‘gear’ vigorously cleaned with a stiff paint brush and pink antiseptic from a bucket. The testicles are squeezed together, sliced off with a straight razor and dropped into another bucket. The wound is then repainted with the pink antiseptic and the pig released. No anesthetic is involved, and the pig squeals/screams from the moment it’s caught. I asked one of the young guys involved the reason for the procedure; the answer was it makes the pig get fatter and be better behaved.
At night on Dean Road it was pitch black and dead quiet except for the crickets and frogs. I slept on the living room couch. The rare times a car went by it could be heard coming from far down the road, then its lights seen through the screen door as it passed. The traffic was so light and random it was hard to get used to. My hosts didn’t seem to have many books, at least not in the living room; the only one I remember was a hardbound illustrated medical book of chicken diseases.
Bert’s (healthy) chicken yard was maybe 30 feet by 30, with the coop where the chickens roosted at night at one side, and in the center a long-unused outhouse. When Bert and Evelyn had friends over who had never visited before, when they asked for the bathroom Bert would walk them out to the chicken-yard gate with a flashlight to see how far they would go. Just out of curiosity I used the outhouse once, it was smelly.
I had brought my cap pistol and holster along. Chickens wandered loose in the yard alongside the house, pecking the ground for insects and whatever looked interesting. I would walk up behind one, take aim and pop off a cap or two. After a while one rooster took exception to being a regular target, jumped up and spurred me in the leg. My pants were heavy enough that I didn’t need stitches, but I did bleed quite a bit. A couple of weeks later Evelyn was planning a chicken dinner and Bert asked if I had any thoughts on the subject. I pointed out my attacker and Bert caught him, then trussed him up so he couldn’t move. Bert was a civilized man, and didn’t like chickens running around the yard spraying blood after their heads were chopped off. I asked if I could do the honors and Bert nodded. He stroked the bird gently for a while, then stretched him out on the tree-stump execution block. I managed only one timid tap of the hatchet before Bert said “Give me that.”
There’s a lot more to a chicken dinner than killing a chicken, and I felt somehow deflated and a little sad watching his innards be removed, then his carcass soaked in scalding water so the girls could more easily pull out his feathers, a tedious task. When we had our Sunday dinner, I ate some, but not as much as I normally would.
“A statue of Jesus Christ is lowered off the roof of St. John’s School after it toppled during a wind storm on Sept. 19, 2012.” – Julio Cortez / AP
A lot of the kids in my neighborhood went to Saint John’s parochial school, not a majority, but enough that they were a danger when they were set free in the afternoon. Local public-school kids tried to stay out of sight when Saint John’s let out. The St. John’s kids’ spirits were so crushed, and the boys so full of pent-up anger, that anything could happen. The exception to this was the Doheny kids, perpetually in a rage; there were six of them and they could go off at any time, not just after school. Anyone who crossed a Doheny kid had to deal with them all. They lived a block away from me, but their house was not on the way to my school, a public school, so I could avoid them.
Saint John’s parochial school, aka Columbus Hall, 1915
St. John’s school took up one corner of St. John’s cemetery. On top of its domed roof was a floodlit statue of Jesus Christ . At night, the statue seemed to float above the dark cemetery, its arms outstretched, either welcoming or threatening depending on the state of your conscience.
When I walked home late at night from setting up pins, I encountered a double dose of creepiness. From two blocks away I could see Floating Jesus; then I had to walk past the cemetery itself. I stayed on the other side of the street, because the high, stuccoed walls always seemed to be leaning outward. I knew the level of the earth inside the walls was higher than outside, and that the graves were old, with many burials at least two caskets deep, and I imagined a great pressure against those walls. It didn’t help that I had been reading Tales from the Crypt comics and a lot of Edgar Allan Poe.
Years later I was doing family research, and discovered that my great-grandmother Bridget had owned a family plot there. When I located it, it was mostly grass and bushes, with very few grave markers, and none of them with a family name. I think some fishy stuff goes on with ownership in these old cemeteries.
Mimi went to parochial school, in Pennsylvania, where she grew up. She had a story she told me in private, but I have repeated it so often that I might as well tell it one more time. I call it “The Fart-Detecting Nun”. When Mimi was in the early grades of parochial school, Sister heard someone fart and demanded to know who it was. When none of the girls confessed, she searched the classroom by sniffing her way up and down the aisles.
Vocal performance in the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart
One last creepy story. When we lived in Newark, we sent my older son to the parochial school at Sacred Heart Cathedral because the Newark public schools were failing. On rainy days, if his class had to travel between the school and the church, they went underground, through the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where deceased parish priests and higher ranking members of the clergy were said to “await the Lord’s return” in their marble vaults. My son said it was ‘spooky’.
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.
I got into the wholesale bakery business by answering a newspaper ad after I was fired from Foodland for telling the manager it was stupid to wait until closing time to collect the carts from the parking lot. In my supermarket days I had watched different bakery route guys operate, and it seemed like a job I might like. I applied, and although I was only 21, they liked my supermarket experience and I was in.
I trained by going out on an existing route with a supervisor. An unspoken part of the first day on the job, for him, was observing whether the new hire could shift gears and steer a bakery truck without crashing or falling out the always-open door. That day it was raining and still dark when we left the garage. After a few blocks, we approached a red light where there was stopped a mobile construction crane, no lights on, its long boom lowered to windshield height and taking up 40 feet of road behind it. When I came to a gentle stop behind the boom, the supervisor sighed, as if to say “Why is this idiot stopping way back here?” Then he realized I hadn’t smeared us both against the unseen boom of the unlit crane, sighed a different kind of sigh and settled down on his wire-basket seat.
As the most-recently-hired driver/salesman, I had the least seniority, and thus ended up with the least desirable route. Its sales volume was low, meaning low commissions, and it was the longest, at about 120 miles through Morris County and parts of Essex. Some other drivers made little jokes about how long it was, but I had always loved driving and to me that was a plus. The route was also green and scenic; one ride-along boss came back claiming to have seen a bear chasing an Indian.
Drivers were required to be members of the Teamster’s Union, so after paying an initiation fee I became a dues-paying, union-book-carrying Teamster.
Union book. Local 37, baby!
Back at the garage one afternoon, I was surprised to see Pete, the crook and my friend from Kingsway Markets. He has had a sales route here for a while. We shake hands and he says in a low voice “Tips are good here, Paulie, tips are good.” Seeing us talking, the bosses are surprised and probably a little disappointed in me that I know Pete, about whom they have their suspicions. Later, one casually asks how I know Pete, and seems reassured when I say simply that we both worked at the Kingsway supermarket in East Orange.
Morris County was just then entering a boom phase, with new housing developments, apartments and supermarkets springing up all over. No thanks to me, my route became one of the best in the garage. The company even gave me a bigger truck.
During the Cold War, Nike anti-aircraft missile bases were sprinkled about the U.S. to defend against Russian attack. The Nike base in Livingston NJ became one of my stops, with a not-very-profitable standing order of 12 loaves of bread every other day. The base was surrounded by cyclone fence and razor wire, with a guardhouse at the gate. The procedure to enter was: halt, greet the guard, wait for the gate to open, drive through.
One morning the gate was standing open and I could see that the guard was asleep. It was still dark. I tapped the horn lightly, then again, with no response. I waited for a while, then drove slowly up the hill to the mess hall. As soon as I got there, the mess sergeant came up to me in his chef’s whites and said “If you ever come through that gate again without permission you will be shot.” I didn’t see any point in making trouble for anyone by explaining why I did that, so I stayed silent. Later that day, I calculated the sales commission on 12 loaves of bread three times a week, not much. The base was a bit away from the rest of the route, eating up my valuable time and the company’s gasoline. I decided not to go there anymore.
A customer in Rockaway wants a loaf of fancy, rich butter bread, which I don’t normally carry, once a month, on the Friday before the first Sunday of the next month. It will be cut into neat cubes and used for Holy Communion in his (likely Baptist) church. I need to order my stuff one day in advance, and it’s hard to remember to check whether tomorrow will be the Friday before the first Sunday of the next month. I am a monthly disappointment to my customer; each Friday before the first Sunday of the next month, he shakes his head in sad resignation and I say I am sorry, which I genuinely am.
For sale: lapel button, never worn.
Sometimes I disappoint my bosses instead of the customers. One supervisor hears of a store in Mendham, according to him “just a turn of the wheel” off my route, that would like to sell Dugan products. At home I check a map and see it’s about eight miles off my route, let’s see, 8 miles times 2 at 30 mph, that’s 32 minutes – how am I supposed to add this store of unknown sales potential to my route and still get home at three o’clock in the afternoon? I am a creature of habit, and for the next few days I forget to go to my theoretical new stop and the bosses stop bringing it up.
People sometimes order specially-made cakes but change their mind. Then the driver has to bring it back to the garage. There’s a raffle; anyone interested can buy a chance for a dollar. I win this time, and proudly bring home a sheet cake inscribed “Happy Birthday Jazzelle”.
One day I finish my route early and decide to stop home for lunch before going back to the garage. After my truck has been parked in front of the house for an hour, a nosy neighbor begins to suspect the house-to-house, retail Dugan man has something going on with my wife. She sends her child to our door to snoop, saying her mother’s been waiting to pay her bill. My truck is much bigger than his, so the whole notion is ridiculous.
All good things must come to an end, and in 1966, Dugan Brothers, “Bakers for the Home Since 1878”, is raped taken advantage of in a leveraged-buyout scheme, and soon thereafter files for bankruptcy and shuts down. My kids are sad – changing jobs means I won’t be home at three in the afternoon any more.
Once I took my five-year-old out on the route with me. It was a few days before Christmas and my customers treated him like a king. He still remembers that day, and calls that job the best job ever.
San Geraldo leaving St. Lucy’s church to greet the expectant crowd
Moving in
When Pennsylvania Avenue started going downhill, Mimi and I found an apartment in a two-family house in a nicer part of town, Highland Avenue in Newark’s North Ward. It was near Branch Brook Park and close to my job. For a few weeks before we moved in, I stopped by for a couple hours every day on my way home, painting and putting up wallpaper. The owners, Fred and Evelyn, lived in the upstairs apartment and were happy to see the downstairs looking nice again. Our rent was very reasonable, only $90 a month. A few years later, they raised it, apologetically, to $95.
The neighborhood
With some exceptions, our neighborhood was Italian, from the family-friendly bar at one end of the block to Celentano’s latticini food store and pasta works at the other. A fancy Italian bakery was a few blocks west on Bloomfield Avenue; small and casual Vesuvio’s restaurant was a half block east. A tiny grocery store, John’s, was in the middle of our block, two steps down into what was once someone’s cellar. On the narrow shelves along one wall, there was just enough room for four units of any item you might need to make a meal or do a load of laundry. After you left, John would go into the back room and restock the shelf.
One exception to the mostly-Italian rule lived a few doors down, an Irish gent so pale that our new neighbor Josie referred to him as Mozzarella Face. My family and I were also exceptions to the rule, the worst kind, new arrivals to the neighborhood. When the window of a garage behind our back fence had a rock thrown through it, the owner implied that our five-year-old was responsible, saying “There was never any trouble in this neighborhood until your kind moved in.” I asked my son about it later. He didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, but he finally told me who threw the rock. I was happy to tell the garage owner that she might want to talk to little Carlo Parisi, a budding sociopath from the other end of the block.
The Saint
It’s true – you don’t realize what you have until it’s gone. One day we heard the sound of a brass band, and a religious procession began making its way down our cobblestone street. If you’ve watched the Sicilian funeral procession that opens Godfather II, you know what they sounded like. Our landlady Evelyn ran downstairs to announce “The Saint is coming!” and asked “Do you have your money ready!?” Mimi and I just looked at each other. By nature, I am a suspicious type, and I asked why we needed money. She said “For the Saint! To put on the Saint!”, as though it was the dumbest question she’d ever heard. Mimi was brought up Catholic, but this was a new one on her too, and we looked at each other again. Evelyn said “You have to, it’s bad luck if you don’t!”
So we located some cash and stepped outside. I hate making another Godfather comparison, but if you’ve seen the feast day procession in Godfather II during which Don Fanucci meets his end, you’ve seen the feast day procession of Saint Gerard too, Saint Gerard’s on a smaller scale of course. When the procession paused for a moment, someone gave us pins and we pinned our offering to the statue of Saint Gerard Majella, patron saint of motherhood, pregnancy, and those trying to conceive.
Adorning the Saint with donations
Summer fun
During the summer, portable kiddie rides like the Whip and the Ferris Wheel came by and parked for a few hours. Looking at the pictures now, the rides look pretty tame, but the smaller kids were crazy about them. A Good Humor or Mr. Softee ice cream truck usually tagged along.
Portable whip
Portable Ferris wheel on a day off. Courtesy morfar.info
For personal fun, Fred made radio-controlled airplanes in his cellar workshop, big buzzy ones with a four-foot wingspan. I went flying with him once out in the boondocks. It was fun, but I think he was disappointed that I wasn’t interested in taking it up as a hobby myself.
Raw beef tripe, courtesy ruthatkins.wordpress.com
The North Ward seemed to be hosting the last hurrah of the horse and wagon. A wagon carrying fresh, green produce clopped down the street regularly, and every Friday a peddler of tripe, a local favorite, came by shouting “a-tree-po! a-tree-po!”. For anyone wondering, tripe is the stomach lining of a cow. I have not tried it. Occasionally the ragman’s sad wagon came by, with him calling out his offer to buy rags and old clothes.
I was making good money on my sales route, and we bought a window air conditioner, one of the first on the block. I put strips of red reflective tape on the sides so no one coming up the alley after dark would walk into it. With Fred’s blessing, I hired an electrician to add another circuit to our box downstairs. Under the air conditioner’s friendly hum, on Memorial Day 1964, Mimi and I made another baby.
Toward the end
The father who was treasurer of our son’s Cub Scout pack skipped town with the proceeds of a candy sale they held to finance a trip. I was elected the new treasurer. When I called Scout headquarters to ask what the Scouts could do about the stolen money, basically they said “Tough”, and that the kids were out of luck. So, the kids did not get to go on their trip, and justice was not served. I regret now that I didn’t threaten to notify the newspapers; that would have made them step up, I’m sure. Of course, nowadays the Scouts have bigger embarrassments to worry about.
A young Hispanic couple moved into the second floor of the building across the street. Their electricity wasn’t on yet, but I could see generally what was going on. She was leaning with folded arms on the windowsill, watching traffic. He stepped up behind her, flipped her dress over her back and together they christened their new apartment. I didn’t watch all of it, but it was sweet. May their first child be a masculine child.
While still on Highland Avenue, I finished computer school and got my first programming job, at Condé Nast Publications in New York City. Looking back, Condé was the best place I ever worked. I loved working there, but I didn’t love getting there — if it weren’t for the commute, I probably would have stayed there until they carried me out. Instead, I took a programming job at Hess Oil in Woodbridge, with the goal of eventually moving my family to the shore.
Moving out
While I worked at Hess, we took the next step. We found a winter rental at the shore and made it our base while we looked for what optimistic people call their “Forever Home”.
Our Newark neighbors, including Mozzarella Face, whose real name was Tom, helped us load the U-Haul.
I began commuting from the shore to Hess, 40 minutes each way, always keeping an eye out for a job closer to home.
Saint Lucy’s Church, home to the National Shrine of Saint Gerard Majella
Three unrelated things I’ve seen that people seem reluctant to believe when I tell about them. Your mileage may vary.
As a child, I saw two or maybe three Civil War veterans riding in the back seat of a convertible in a patriotic parade in Bloomfield, probably on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) 1943. I remember because I came down with measles that same day and threw up across my mother’s chenille bedspread.
I have always enjoyed watching faith healers such as Jimmy Swaggart and other noisy, lovable fakes. In the 1960s, at nine o’clock on Sunday nights on one of the local channels in Newark, there was a black preacher who practiced Faith Dentistry, although not by that name. He did the standard laying-on-of-hands, fall-backward-into-the-catchers, send-me-the-money show, but he also had testimony from those who had been cured of dental afflictions.
“…and when I woke up the next morning, my cavities was filled!” “What were thy filled with?” “They was filled with… SILVER!”
Google is no help tracking down this preacher or his show, so good luck to you and keep me posted.
One winter day in the early 1960s at about seven o’clock in the morning I was sitting in a bar in Dover (the Dover in Morris County) New Jersey. Don’t judge me, I was trying to stay warm until my route customer next door opened, and you can’t just walk into a business and not buy anything. Anyway, the TV news came on, and one of the first stories was about a huge explosion in Russia, much damage, thought to be a meteor strike. (I was guessing nuke accident.) Nothing about it in any of the newspapers next day, no follow-up on TV, nothing on Google now. Mysteries abound.
