We lived on Berkeley Avenue in Bloomfield, New Jersey, five or six houses away from Fairview elementary school. Before I got to go to school myself, I watched the bigger kids walk by on their way to school, and couldn’t wait. On my first day of school, I was so excited that I woke up at four in the morning so I’d be ready.
Kindergarten classes were only half-days, with a morning class and an afternoon class. They put me in the morning class, and in the afternoon I played in my front yard. The first time the kids in the upper grades walked by and saw me playing, they chanted “Kindergarten baby, kindergarten baby!” That made me cry, but when I went inside, my mother talked me out of it.
In higher grades, forced learning of cursive writing brings dismay. Courtesy Zaner-Bloser
I’m not positive on this, but I think the first thing they did was make us memorize our address in case we got lost. Somewhere along the way we learned to copy individual letters, then they bootstrapped on that by teaching us to print our names, first and last. One of the first things I did with that new knowledge was to write my name on the school steps, which earned me a session with a bucket and scrub brush. Can you imagine making today’s kids do that? You’d have a PTA riot. While I was scrubbing, my mother walked by but didn’t look over at me. I think she saw me but figured whatever I was doing I probably deserved it.
In first grade they taught us to read, or maybe they started in kindergarten. This is kind of a chicken/egg question, but do they teach you to read and write at the same time? I have absolutely zero memory of anything that happened in first or second grade, I don’t know why. But I did learn to read and write.
An interesting angle here – in high school two towns over, in freshman English we had an exercise where we each got a stack of index cards of author names, and the idea was to put them in alphabetical order. When we started, I suddenly realized I don’t know the alphabet, not in sequence, and had to fake my way through. Does ‘R’ come before ‘P’, or is it the other way around? What are the letters in between? We were never taught the alphabet song in Fairview, would that have been enough?
That night I went straight to my room after dinner and taught myself the alphabet in A-to-Z sequence, although I’m still slow at it and sometimes have to get sort of a running start from ‘A’ to get the letter-to-letter relationships right. I don’t know who to blame for this.
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
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.
In Sunday School at Washington Street Baptist Church, our teacher informed us that that day was Children’s Day. I didn’t pay close attention to her full explanation, because I (reasonably) assumed Children’s Day would parallel Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, that is, gifts would be given, and I let my mind wander. I had never heard of Children’s Day, either at home or on the radio, so this was a pleasant surprise. Checking Wikipedia today, I see that Children’s Day was
Proclaimed … to encourage all countries to institute a day, firstly to promote mutual exchange and understanding among children and secondly to initiate action to benefit and promote the welfare of the world’s children.
…which sounds like a great idea, but it didn’t do anything for me.
When I got home that day, I looked around for my gift, or gifts. Failing to spot anything wrapped in shiny paper, I asked my mother straight out, reminding her that “Today is Children’s Day!” She said “What?” and looked over at my brother, who offered no help. I think I must have repeated “It’s Children’s Day! Children’s Day!” but couldn’t provide any further explanation. They both remained bewildered, and said they’d never heard of it. I was wordless and fuming, and my brother was laughing. And that is why, to this day, I do not celebrate Children’s Day. Indeed, I am the Ebenezer Scrooge of Children’s Day.
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.”
As a kid, I took boxing lessons at the Newark Athletic Club. My mother was the comptroller there, sort of a senior accountant. My boxing instructor and sparring partner was Solly Castellano, a lightweight (135 pound) former pro fighter who fought from 1925 to 1929. Solly’s professional debut was in January 1925, when he knocked out one Sandy Hook (sic) of the UK in the fourth round. Solly’s record was 44 wins, 8 losses, and 4 draws – not too shabby. He also won the New Jersey lightweight championship, in May 1928.
Solly must have been about 50 years old when he had what was to me his most memorable fight. According to the Newark News, he was standing in a store entrance on Broad Street, waiting for the bus, when two thugs decided the little guy would be easy to mug. He sent them both to the hospital.
I don’t remember much about my lessons except being taught to keep my hands up, watch my stance, and throw a punch when the opportunity arose. I had very few fights as a kid, but those lessons gave me a lot of confidence, and sometimes that’s enough.
Shortly after my family moved from East Orange to Orange and I entered my new school halfway through sixth grade, a kid named Joe Stokes approached me in the schoolyard and started what we now call “trash talking,” about my white socks and sandals, never a good look for a kid, especially a new kid. He put his hands up and so did I; as we circled around each other, a spectator said something like “He looks like he knows how to fight” and after circling some more, it all petered out and the subject was dropped without a punch being thrown. In defense of my white socks and sandals, at that time my feet were troubled by eczema, a skin condition that produces runny sores. Yecch.
Joe and I had one other run-in. During a fire drill, I was assigned to hold open one of the heavy hall doors, standing behind it so everyone could pass quickly. Coming back after the drill, Joe saw me behind the door, my back to the wall, and charged. My feet were planted, blocking the bottom of the door from moving, but the top flexed in, then bounced back into his face. As Nelson Muntz might say, “HA-ha!”. Life is good.
Another benefit of Mom’s job was my getting swimming lessons and using the club’s big pool. During the summer, I’d take the Number 20 bus down to Newark two or three afternoons a week. Some days I’d buy a bag of shelled peanuts at McCrory’s 5 and 10, then sit by the colossal Wars of America sculpture and toss them to the pigeons and squirrels.
Detail, Wars of America by Gutzon Borglum, 1926 – courtesy nj.com
I don’t remember much about my swimming lessons except kicking my way back and forth across the pool while hanging onto a board, which I guess is how everybody starts out. The club members were politicians, judges and business executives, and the club was for men only. Add to the list of things that were normal then but seem weird now, the swimming was nude, and there would be a half-dozen or so grown men swimming at the same time as me. I’m sure Mr. Bassini, the pool manager, towel-giver-outer, and Managing Director, kept an eye on me.
When I got tired of swimming, I’d take a ride on the club’s electric horse, which was pretty cool. Later, I’d hang around Mom’s office reading, or fiddling with the typewriter and adding machine. We’d take the bus home, maybe stopping for dinner at the Howard Johnson’s on Central Avenue. She could never talk me out of ordering my favorite, Salisbury steak.
About the Club
Military Park Hotel, originally the Newark Athletic Club, 1966. – Newark Public Library
“…the Newark Athletic Club (NAC), founded in 1919. At its peak, it boasted of 3,800 members which dwindled to less than 300 by 1938. The club’s original headquarters, later the Military Park Hotel, was demolished ]n 1993 and is the site of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The original idea for the club came from former Congressman E.W. Gary and former Gov. Franklin Murphy. Construction of the NAC began in 1921, and the doors opened in 1923 with Gen. George Pershing presiding at the ceremonies. According to the Newark News account, the club ‘immediately leaped to a position nationally known among organizations of its kind. Athletes bearing the NAC emblem won cups and medals in meets all over the country.’ As in the case of the Elks Club at Lincoln Park, the Newark Athletic Club boasted an elaborate sports emporium with a large swimming pool, gymnasium, bowling alley, billiard room, etc. But financial problems resulted in the club’s demise for the same reasons as its Elks Club counterpart. Thus, it, too, closed. As America and Newark began to change because of wars, depressions and general unrest, many of the city’s traditional agencies reflected the differences. New organizations, new people, and new moods were on the horizon.” — Courtesy Newark Public Library
Back in kindergarten, I wrote my name on the front steps of the school; they made me scrub it off with a brush and bucket of water. They teach you to write your name, then they get all upset when you put that knowledge to work.
The bus stop in Bloomfield center was right in front of a grand old bank building, and kids would hoist themselves up to sit on its window ledge while waiting for the bus. One day I noticed that my brother had etched our family name deep into the sandstone window frame, enclosing it in a perfect rectangle, Roman SPQR style. I could tell it had taken him a long time and many bus waits, and I was very proud.
In high school gym class I wasn’t famous for my athletic ability, so when sides were chosen up for a ball game, I was usually picked about two-thirds of the way back. (“Can’t field, good for a single.”) There was something I liked about rope climbing, though, and once I wrote a small “SMITHEE 56” in black marker on the gym ceiling with my free hand while I was up there. When Mr. Marucci discovered it weeks later and called me on it, he seemed equally annoyed and impressed. He was one of the good ones.
In the army, several guys in my unit went into town and came back with the same tattoo, a stalking panther. These days, every Tom, Dick and waitress seems to have some sort of body art. A girl showing me her ink asked if I had any of my own, then got mad when I said no, I never got that drunk. Actually, I do kind of wish I had gone into town with my buddies that day; I think I missed out on something important.
courtesy lossoprano.tvcourtesy fubar.com
And then there’s street graffiti, the witty kind. Sometimes it’s just a few words of commentary scrawled in the margin of a subway poster.
Finally, there’s serious, wall-commanding, actual art. The world owes a lot to these artists.
Keith Haring, courtesy Keith Haring FoundationBanksy, courtesy metropoles.com
Those four Latin words are a Christian religious exhortation, meaning “By this sign you shall conquer”. I happen to know this because my mom smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. Pall Malls were named after an upscale street in London and pronounced “pell mell”, and the words appear on the banner beneath the Pall Mall coat of arms. Figuring out what the phrase meant was this curious child’s first encounter with Latin. What it had to do with the product inside the package is unclear, except that a little bit of Latin always adds class.
In eighth grade, students in my town chose the subject areas they’d study in high school. As best I recall, the options were English, math, business, science, and general studies. I chose science.
We were expected to take a foreign language, and I wanted to take German because I was part German and had heard German was the primary language of science. Unfortunately, anti-German sentiment at the time of the First World War got my high school’s German-language curriculum cancelled, and forty years later it hadn’t come back. My second choice was Latin, also a science-y language.
One of John Irving’s characters asks another, “Do you know Latin? The last international language, the—uh-hem—Esperanto of Christendom.”
On my first day of high school, I found myself assigned to Italian I, probably because my real last name looks Italian (ends in a vowel) and someone thought a mistake had been made. It took a few days to get transferred to Latin I, but meanwhile I found Miss Mercurio’s Italian class interesting and enjoyable. Looking back, I probably should have stayed there.
It turned out that I hated Latin. Well, not actually Latin per se, but its many fussy and complex rules of grammar. I could look up and list a pile of them here, but then you’d get bored and skip to the next article. Here is a single, miserable example, somewhat at random, “Nouns of the Fourth Declension“ for nouns hand, lake, and knee.
Courtesy Dickinson College Commentaries, dickinson.edu
Boredom with learning the rules of Latin grammar led me to cheating, probably the only class I ever cheated in. Our homework was often to memorize noun declensions, and next day we’d be called to the front of the room to write them on the board. As I stood there trying to look like I was straining to remember, I’d look down into my shirt pocket where there was a sturdy piece of paper folded into the general shape of a pack of cigarettes, with my crib notes written in tiny letters across the top. Writing about this now reminds me of something I’d totally forgotten – a girl working at the blackboard section next to mine looked over, spotted my visual aid, then got a fit of giggles that our teacher chalked up simply to her being a girl.
Somehow, I advanced to Latin II, where I ended up again doing poorly. At the end of that year, my only hope of passing and advancing to Latin III (why did I want to do that?) was to get a high mark on the final exam, which consisted of translating a large chunk of one of the classics from Latin to English. In this case the source was the story of Ulysses’ run-in with the Greek enchantress Circe, who transforms his ship’s crew into swine, then back to humans again, then engages in other shape-shifting pranks before she and Ulysses pair up and start a family. This choice of test material worked out nicely for me, because on my prior birthday , my mother gave me a book of mythology that included the tale of Circe. Knowing the story, I was able to ‘translate’ it into a nicely flowing English version, very much surprising Miss McGovern.
Returning to the subject of cigarettes, Mom’s Pall Malls were unfiltered, and to me the occasional one I stole was strong and nasty. After some trial and error, mentholated Kools became my brand of choice. Lots of people thought Kools tasted weird because of the menthol, and if someone asked me for a cigarette, they might say “Oh, never mind” once they saw what I was smoking.
Mom smoked at home and at work too, but she thought it was very un-ladylike for a woman to smoke in public, quietly tsk-tsking whenever she saw a woman smoking on the street. And of course she didn’t want her son smoking at all, certainly not at age 15. One day while I was smoking a Kool and telling a story on the corner by Vince’s, I seemed to be getting more laughs than the story deserved. As it turned out, my audience was laughing in anticipation, because they could see my mother headed down the hill behind me on her way to the store. She kicked me hard in the backside and said “Get rid of that cigarette.” My friends were greatly entertained, and I had to laugh myself.
At Orange High, I took mechanical drawing, known today as “engineering drawing”, for three years. Basically it’s a way of putting on paper enough design information about an object or machine part to enable its manufacture. The drawing below is not my own, I got it off the internet and don’t know what it is. It looks like some sort of metal wheel, 8 3/4 inches in diameter, made of two separate parts bolted together. There’s a side view and a front view that together provide enough data to enable someone to go to a machine shop and get one made. But what is it? We don’t know; without a name or description on the drawing, we’ll have to ask whoever comes back to pick it up. I would guess it’s part of a boardwalk amusement ride, but that’s the way my mind works.
Typical mechanical drawing
Our classroom was on the Lincoln Avenue side of the school, on the third floor toward the rear, at the top of a flight of stairs that led nowhere else – not a room you’d ever wander into by accident. It had high windows that opened onto a flat, narrow roof with a wall around it about two feet high.
There were usually about 12 or 14 students in the class, all boys. One year there was a girl. I don’t know anything about her or what her story was, but good for her. Maybe she was sent from the future.
Our instructor was Ray Smith, who had a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute. He was a fine teacher, easy to understand and follow. Ray did not tolerate misbehavior in his class; if you acted up or did something particularly stupid, he was likely to punch you, punch your arm. How hard the punch was depended on your offense. Because he had grown up in Orange as friends with my Uncle Bert, Ray expected more from me, and paid me extra attention. One day he punched my arm so hard he almost knocked me off my stool. I don’t remember what it was I did, but I know I deserved it.
I don’t think Ray ever gave me an ‘A’ on a class assignment, because my descriptive lettering – the final, boring fill-out-the-form step necessary to complete a drawing – was rushed and sloppy. When it came to lettering, a downgrade to a ‘B’ was fine with me.
Some teachers punished bad behavior by sending the offender out to stand in the hall, with the next offense bringing a trip to the principal’s office. Ray’s approach was to raise a window sash and with a gesture usher you onto the roof, then close the window behind you. I was banished to roof isolation once, and it’s a strange feeling to be outside, alone and empty-handed, looking in as your classmates work on their projects.
One exile found a lost “spaldeen”, the lively pink rubber ball used in stickball and handball. He fought off boredom by bouncing it against the building, taking the return on the fly. It took Ray a while to figure out what that thumping was.
I kept my best work from Ray’s class for years, including my all-time favorite, a beautiful and perfect rendering of a small steam engine. Each time I changed jobs, I brought those drawings to my next house, in their cardboard box with my stock charts, childhood treasure maps and book reports.
We hired a well-reviewed company, Windsor Moving and Storage, to move us from Princeton, where I had just finished up my last contract-programmer job before retirement, to the Jersey Shore. I whimsically labeled that cardboard box of mementos, useless to anyone in the world but me, “Valuable Historical Documents”. Somewhere between Princeton and the Jersey Shore the box went missing; it was a year before I realized it was gone. I’m sure its contents were a great disappointment to someone.
The title is the correct answer to the popular high school riddle, “Do you know what burns my ass?”
When the person being questioned replies “No, what?”, the questioner provides the correct answer, demonstrating by holding out one hand, palm down, at hip level.
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.
“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’.
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.
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 
