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I first visited the Newark Museum on a field trip from grade school. The mechanical models exhibit was perfect for a kid like me who always wanted to know how things worked.
The models, maybe 80 or 100 of them, were each mounted on a 15-inch square wooden panel. Each had a visitor-operated pushbutton to set it to work performing its own unique, pleasantly noisy motion.
The catalog described the exhibit as “a dictionary of mechanical movements”, and promised to show how one type of motion can be converted to another; and to answer such questions as “how can hundreds of pounds be lifted with a one-pound pull?”
Reciprocating rectilinear motion
Pulley lifts (block and tackle)
The exhibit was commissioned by department store magnate and philanthropist Louis Bamberger, and modeled on a 1928 exhibit at New York City’s Museum of the Peaceful Arts. The Newark Museum’s building itself was funded by Bamberger.
I spent many hours operating those models and studying how they worked. Sadly, a 1980s museum renovation removed the exhibit, and it no longer exists.
Ratchet wheels and drivers
Rotary into rectilinear motion
I didn’t grow up to be a mechanical engineer, but some of my jobs in the world of computing did come with the title software engineer. The only motion involved was the massaging and moving of invisible zeros and ones, much quieter than operating mechanical models, but still rewarding and fun.
Visitors to the Museum of the Peaceful Arts operating the steam-power group, 1930
All images courtesy allmyeyes.blogspot.com
Many thanks to graphic designer and artist Linda Eckstein, for her invaluable article on elemental kinematics, the motion of objects.
“On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia — ‘Mollie’ — Maggia. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. Everyone present knew what that meant.” –The Radium Girls, Kate Moore
Dial painters, 1922- courtesy Argonne National Laboratory
The Radium Girls were factory workers who from 1917 to 1926 hand-painted watch and clock dials with a glow-in-the-dark paint called Undark. The paint’s luminescence came from the radioactive silvery-white metal radium, then a recent and exciting discovery. U.S .Radium’s managers and scientists were aware of the paint’s dangers, but did not share that knowledge with the workers, who were encouraged to lick their brushes to bring them to a sharper point when applying the paint, ingesting tiny bits of radium. Some workers also painted their fingernails, hair and even teeth to make them glow at night. Within a few years, dozens of workers began showing signs of radiation poisoning.. They developed illnesses that included anemia, bone cancer, and necrosis of the jaw, known as “radium jaw”, which is as terrible as it sounds. By 1927, more than 50 had died.
At the Orange, New Jersey plant where the women worked, the company also extracted radium from raw ore, by a process called radium crystallization. Approximately half a ton of dusty ore was processed each day, with the radioactive waste dumped both on-site and off.
A 1981 gamma-radiation survey by airplane found about 250 sites throughout Orange, West Orange, and South Orange, many of them residential, where radioactive waste had been dumped or used as construction fill. Sites in Montclair and Glen Ridge were also contaminated, earning them their own Superfund designations.
The basements and adjacent soil of houses built using contaminated fill had to be dug out and replaced, with the contaminated material shipped cross-country for burial in Utah. At the site in Orange, the top 22 feet of soil had to be removed.
U.S. Radium had two other dial-painting sites, one in Illinois and one in Connecticut, that also required remediation.
EPA findings and actions
“In 1979, EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) initiated a program to identify and investigate locations within New Jersey where radium-processing activities had taken place. The former U.S .Radium Corporation processing plant was included in this program. In May 1981, EPA conducted an aerial gamma radiation survey covering approximately 12 square miles centered on the High and Alden Streets processing plant. This aerial survey located about 25 acres around the High and Alden Streets processing plant where elevated readings of gamma radiation were detected. This same survey identified areas of elevated gamma radiation in the nearby communities of Montclair, West Orange and Glen Ridge; the affected properties in these areas comprise two other Superfund sites, the Montclair/West Orange Radium site and the Glen Ridge Radium site.” — July 2011 EPA Review Report, full text available here.
Why I care
During the early 1950s, starting at about age 12, I played often at that site, No one knew about the contamination, not for thirty more years. Then on June 25, 1979, the New York Times published an article titled “Radiation Found at Site of Radium Plant Dating From the 1920’s“.
New Jersey’s humble Second River (to locals, simply ‘the brook’) flows alongside the site on its way east from First Mountain to join the Passaic River and Newark Bay. Who knows how much radioactive waste U.S Radium dumped into that little stream over the years? I played in that brook too, just a few blocks downstream, where minnows swam in the clear water.
I played in the yard between the paint application building and the brook. Railroad tracks ran through the yard then, and there were usually one or two freight cars sitting there awaiting loading or unloading. Adjacent to the tracks were the too-grimy-to-play-on portable conveyor belts and sturdy bins of the neighboring Alden Coal Company. I enjoyed playing ‘railroad engineer’, climbing the rungs to the top of a car and twisting its parking-brake handwheel back and forth from one extreme to the other.
By then, the paint application building was occupied by Arpin Plastics, makers of the “Arpin 75 Special Repeating Water Pistol”. (I don’t know why anyone would buy a non-repeating water pistol .) They also made a Tommy gun, with greater water capacity and firepower. Weapons that didn’t pass inspection were tossed into a dumpster behind the building, from which they could be rescued and rehabilitated by anyone willing to put in a little effort.
Apparently I didn’t spend enough time at the site to develop any sort of radiation poisoning. Thanks for asking!
Recent (May, 2018) Google Earth view of the main Orange Superfund site. Per the EPA, remediation is “essentially complete” and the site is being monitored . All that seems necessary is to add flowers and grass. Not sure what that wettish spot is.Hand brake, Jason StussyManufacturer’s ad for Undark, 1921 – courtesy Wikipedia
“You have to make something explode to truly understand it. You have to examine the tiny particles while they’re on fire.” — Charles, mental patient in Sling Blade
After school I experimented in my room with various combinations of the three ingredients of gunpowder, purchased at three different drugstores. In article Library Card, I said “There seemed no limit to the information available in the library. Here I found the recipe for gunpowder…”
Fortunately for my eyesight and my fingers, there was a limit to the information available in the library. Although the three simple ingredients of gunpowder have been known since the 14th century, without a Wikipedia or an internet, I never found the proper portions for maximum explosive power.
I tried various mixes, a little more of this, a little less of that, placing tiny amounts of each ingredient on a sheet of heavy glass, mixing them together into an slightly larger pile, then applying a match to see which combination produced the biggest flash.
My experiments never came anywhere near the “correct” 75%, 15%, 10% ratio the article mentioned above spells out. Even the best mix I found was not very powerful. If I had had Wikipedia, I could have earned myself a nickname, like my friend Jimmy, who stole blasting caps from a construction site and tried to get the insides out of one by tapping it against the sidewalk. They called him Jimmy Three Fingers.
Fuses were hard to make. I can’t tell you how to make one because I honestly don’t remember, beyond a lot of trial and error and sparkly experiments with doctored twine.
Another buddy and I had some thoughts about making guncotton, a fairly powerful and uncomplicated Civil-War-era explosive. Again fortunately, we couldn’t figure out where to get two of the key ingredients.
My mother never asked about the burnt sulfur smell lingering in the house when she came home from work at night. I guess she trusted me not to do anything crazy.
I won’t mention any other lame-brained experiments, actual or proposed. It’s all out on the internet now, kids, and ten times more dangerous. Be careful to wear safety glasses.
About ten years ago there was a news story about a woman whose grandfather had died, and while cleaning out his garage, she found a hand grenade pushed way back on a shelf. The Army sent someone from Fort Dix to collect it, and sure enough it turned out to be a real, live, WW II grenade. My wife wondered why someone would want to keep a thing like that around, and I explained that you never know when you might need one.
After my two summers at Uncle Bert’s farm in Michigan, more about that later, I think Mom thought it was her turn to take a vacation, and she made reservations for us at Culvermere, a lake resort in North Jersey. I don’t know if she ever had a real vacation before that. When she showed me the brochure and I saw they had sailing, I was sold. I went to the library and took out a how-to book. After I studied it for a while, sailing a small boat seemed pretty straightforward.
Culver Lake, 1939
Once we got to Culvermere we didn’t see much of each other except at mealtime and at the evening entertainments, which were pretty good. They had comics, singers and a band, sort of a Borscht Belt South.
Mom stayed in one of the single-ladies dorms, if dorm is the right word. I think guests were assigned dorms by general age group. I was in a single-men’s dorm with five or six guys in their 20s, mostly from Brooklyn. Couples stayed in the hotel proper. At age 12, I was probably the youngest person there. I almost wrote “the youngest person at camp”, but I never thought of it as a camp, or heard anyone else call it that. But the postcard above describes the view as “Culver Lake from Camp Culvermere”, so there you have it. Summer camp for grownups.
Culvermere had one of those noisy characters who gets paid to make sure everyone stays busy and happy, not always a bad idea, and I took a few tennis lessons. There were also hard-fought softball games where I continued work on my lifelong reputation of “Can’t field, good for a single”. Mostly I dove off the floating platform and swam.
There were bicycles available, and roads around the lake to explore. One day I went to take out a bike and there was this girl there at the same time, Rachael, so we started just riding along together. She was a couple of years older. After a while she said “Let’s rest”, and we stopped in a woody spot under some trees where you could just see the lake on the other side of the road. You think you know where this is going, don’t you? Well, you don’t, because I was too young to pick up on the signals. Sorry,Rachael — it wasn’t you, it was me.
Catboat taking the wind, areyspondboatyard.com
Culver Lake is about a mile and a half long and a half-mile wide. It covers 550 acres, with a maximum depth of fifty feet. For fellow New Jerseyans, it’s up in the woods near Stokes State Forest and Kittatinny Mountain.
I asked one of the guys from Brooklyn, Greg, if he wanted to go sailing, and we signed out a single-sail sailboat pretty much like the one above. I’m not sure if they made us put on life jackets; people weren’t 24/7 safety-conscious like they are today. Greg sat at one side and took it easy while I pulled up the sail and got us started toward the other end of the lake.
We had the wind behind us, so there wasn’t much to do sailing-wise except stay on a straight line. We just coasted along while I steered. When we got near the other end and it was time to turn around, I said to Greg, “I think I understand the next part but I’m not a hundred percent sure, I know we have to zig-zag back and forth to go against the wind.” Instead of confirming my generalization of what needed to happen next, he said “What!? Didn’t you ever do this before?”. He didn’t seem scared, but he was definitely upset. I said “No, but I think I know how to do it.”
When I realized Greg didn’t know how to sail a boat, I was surprised. This was before television began painting parents and most other grownups as idiots, so it was still natural for children to believe that any adult could do anything.
Tacking, courtesy gosailing.info
I took the tiller again and began doing what the book had said, doing what you see in the diagram on the left, tacking – going back and forth across the wind. A sailboat can’t sail directly into the wind, so the idea is to angle the boat to keep the wind coming from roughly ten o’clock or two o’clock, propelling the boat forward.
The tiller is a lever attached to the rudder, which helps control the angle and direction of the boat. At the beginning of this diagram, the boat starts out with the sail set about 45 degrees to the wind, which is coming from the boat’s ten o’clock. As the tiller is adjusted to bring the boat around to point more directly into the wind, the sail flutters, then swings across to the other side. The boat loses a little speed, but its momentum completes the turn as the boom swings across the boat and the sail fills again. Now the wind is coming from two o’clock, and forward progress continues.
An unseen centerboard projects below the boat, resisting the wind’s efforts to push the boat sideways, and helping to maintain forward motion.
As the sail swings across the boat during each turn, those aboard duck under the boom and move to the other side. Some of this might sound complicated, but it all becomes routine after a while, and the boat will try to help.
Summing up the return trip, the laws of physics operated as expected and the trip was uneventful. When we got back to Culvermere and returned the boat, Greg laughed, shook my hand, and said “Thanks for the ride!”
I’m not sure how long Mom and I were at Culvermere, whether it was one week or two. Whichever it was, it felt like just enough. We had lots of fun and did get to meet some Mighty Nice People, but I think we were both happy to get home. Given the opportunity, I would have gone back the next year, but that’s the year I spent two weeks at Bible camp, which was fun too, in a more restrained way.
The day we went home, Greg slipped me a Tijuana Bible, one of those wallet-size eight-page comics that depicts famous cartoon characters getting jiggy with one another, in this case Dagwood, Blondie and Mr. Beasley the mailman. I hid it in my bedroom along with my cigarettes and other valuables, behind the loose board over the space between the two windows where the sash weights hang in the dark.
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.
Here’s everything you need to know about Yogi Berra.
Yogi was a catcher for the New York Yankees. He charmed and puzzled the world with his child-like musings and malaprops.
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi
He made enough money playing baseball to afford a nice house in Montclair. In fact, he made so much money that he could afford to buy a second refrigerator, just for beer, and get it installed on his front porch.
Two of the older guys from our corner worked part time delivering heavy appliances. They were thrilled that they’d get to meet Yogi.
They lugged the new refrigerator up the porch steps and got it over to where he wanted it. They made it level and plugged it in.
He gave them each a dime.
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi
I never got an allowance and never asked for one, although I did steal money from my mother’s purse once, thirty cents to buy a pet turtle. I never lacked for anything that was truly necessary. My brother and I mostly wore hand-me-downs from our Uncle George’s youth; Grandma must have saved everything he ever grew out of – in my 3rd-grade class photo I am the only boy wearing knickers. In high school I wore George’s wartime Eisenhower jacket, proudly. Until I got my working papers, which New Jersey requires for anyone under 18 to get a “real” job, money for things I wanted came from doing odd jobs and getting small handouts from my uncles.
Eisenhower jacket, courtesy monstervintage.com
Uncle George spent his early career years working for Western Electric, helping build the Mexican telephone system. He was there so long that in his photos he looks Mexican, maybe because of the mustache. During WW II he was a Signal Corps major stationed in New Guinea, fighting the Japanese and taking occasional target practice against stacks of canned Spam .
After the war he returned to Western Electric, picking up his career where he left off. He had a good job and a bit of money, and he owned a grand old house on Park Avenue (the Park Avenue in Orange, not the one in New York) that was divided into several equally grand apartments. His house was three blocks from ours, and sometimes I’d be sent over there on a Saturday morning to get me out of my mother’s hair for a while. Sometimes he would give me a quarter, equivalent to about $2.50 today, for no particular reason. He knew my name, but for some reason always called me Sport. Maybe that’s what he called everybody.
When visiting him, I pretty much kept quiet (he was usually lying on the couch, hung over in a gentlemanly way) while I read through his New Yorker magazines and tried to understand why the tiny cartoons embedded in the text were not funny. I later learned that they were not really ‘cartoons’, but just design elements to break up the text.
On one visit, I had recently read a magazine article about the excellence of Louisville Slugger baseball bats – how the wood was chosen, how carefully they were manufactured for maximum ball flight, etc. etc. Not owning a bat of my own of any brand, I tried to plant in George’s mind the idea of him buying me one. (I have a strange aversion to actually asking people for what I want.) Through the morning, I produced a slow trickle of factual nuggets from the article. Being hung over, he was uninterested in, and unmoved by, my low-key salesmanship. Bad timing on my part.
George had probably heard about my experience helping my father paint a house at the shore, and through my mother he asked whether I’d be interested in a job repainting the decks, railings and stairs of his apartment house. Yes, of course I was interested, and I spent many sunny days that summer working on his house. Aunt Louise kept me in iced tea and sandwiches as I painted my way through several gallons of battleship gray.
George and Louise met and married during the war; she was an officer in the WACs. The grownups in my family didn’t seem to like her very much; she may have been too boisterous for their tastes, similar to how they felt about my Aunt Sweetie, also an ex-WAC and a bit on the rowdy side.
Once all the painting was done, George shook my hand, said “Thanks, Sport!”, and handed me an envelope. When I got home and showed my mother how much was in it, she was astonished. How much did he give me? I don’t remember exactly, but it was a lot.
Uncle Bill, aunt Mabel’s husband, would give me a quarter once in a while too, for no particular reason. We didn’t see Bill and Mabel very often until Grandma started showing her age and went to live with them; then the two families would trade her off on weekends, with Bill driving back and forth from their house in Livingston. I especially enjoyed the drive back down the mountain; coming down Northfield Avenue at night there was, and still is, a spectacular view of Manhattan, stretched out and sparkling 15 miles away.
Bill was a production foreman at the Ford plant in Mahwah. He was not Italian, but I came to think of him as a gavone, a word I picked up from my neighborhood friends, defined as:
Cafone (also caffone, gavone)
Noun
1 A labourer; a peasant, especially one who is Italian or of Italian descent.
2 slang Especially in Italian-American usage: a coarse-mannered person; a low-life, a lout. – Lexico
That opinion was solidified when he came into our kitchen once after bringing Grandma home, hawked up a big one, and spat into the sink. I was offended, and without thinking gave him the stink eye. He responded with a sneer and after that, the Uncle Bill revenue stream dried up.
one had a choke
one was big and steady
one threw a rod on the garden state
one had no first gear
one bore kittens
one got new spark plugs
one got a tape deck
one got slippy seat covers
one got seat belts
one got seat cancer
we bargained for junkyard tires
we fixed our own flats
we patched blown mufflers
we sent oil down the storm drain
we didn’t know better
Apologies and thanks to Raymond Carver for the mostly subconscious influence of his poem “The Car”, copy here. My favorite of his long list of troubled cars? “The car that left the restaurant without paying.”
*If you’re under 18 in New Jersey, you need an employment certificate, better known as “working papers”, to get a job. What’s involved? First, a parent has to give written approval, then the school district arranges a physical. If the district is satisfied that the job hours and working conditions will not interfere with your school work or damage your health, they will issue your papers. Some occupations are forbidden – you may not operate a blast furnace, forklift or deli slicer.
Courtesy Cynthia Beach, via Pinterest
I got my first set of working papers at age 14, to deliver newspapers. The local paper wanted to boost circulation, and posted an ad for carriers. I was assigned to a few streets near my house, and early each Thursday morning I’d find about 120 copies of the Orange Transcript on my front steps. The paper provided a canvas bag with a strap, and I’d stuff as many copies as would fit into the bag and take off on my bike. The paper was a free one, with lots of ads, and I left a copy at the front door of each house on my street list, returning home as needed to refill the bag. I forget how much they paid me, but it was okay for one morning a week.
This went on for five or six weeks, then one day all the carriers were called to a meeting at the newspaper office. The paper would no longer be free, they said, and our job was to go to each house on our route and convince the people there to start paying for this “invaluable guide to shopping savings”. We would also collect for it once a month.
Armed with my pad of subscriber forms, I started off that evening at the top of my street. I’m sure the newspaper people gave us some good selling tips, especially to identify yourself as the person who’s been bringing you this great shopping resource every week, but I’m no salesman. I found it hard to convince people to start paying for something that had been free all along. After being turned down four or five times straight by otherwise pleasant people, I couldn’t see facing the same result at another hundred houses, and when I got home, I told my mother that I was going to quit.
She’d worked in the business world for many years, and thought it important to do things the right way, so she gave me a writing exercise. The next afternoon I went to the newspaper office, asked for the publisher, and handed him my Letter of Resignation.
Courtesy Gallery One Auctions & Estate Sales
Later on I had another job similar to the newspaper one; it was delivering that year’s official phone-company telephone books. They were big and fat, mostly yellow pages. We lived on the second floor then, and the day the books were dropped off at my house, I came home from school to find our first-floor entryway and one side of the stairs to the second floor clogged with stacks of phone books, along with a hand truck. The publisher paid on a piecework basis, so many cents per book delivered, and the money was decent. Because you couldn’t put more than 15 or 20 books on the hand truck and still be able to push it, it took me several days to deliver them all.
After my deliveries were finished, there was a surprise. In what I guess was some sort of early environmental program to not clog up town dumps with old phone books, the publisher offered a bonus, much higher than the delivery fee, for each old book collected. It sounded simple – all we had to do was walk up to the door and ask for the old one back. It seemed like easy money and I still had the hand truck, so I pushed it to the furthest point on my route and started knocking on doors. After a few houses, I realized that nobody wants to give up their old phone book. People write their favorite phone numbers and make other notations on the cover and inside, and they’re not going to give them up. A couple of houses promised that if I came back in a week they’d have all the information copied over, and they’d give me their old book then. That’s no way to run a business, so as far as I was concerned, the return program was dead.
The next two were just neighborhood odd jobs, no working papers involved.
One day Vince’s son Junior asked if I wanted to make some money weighing out a 100-pound burlap sack of coffee beans into one-pound retail bags. I pride myself on accuracy, and he was happy with the resulting 99 and-a-half bags. He gave me five dollars, pretty good for a couple hours work.
My buddy from the neighborhood and I tarred the roof of his uncle’s six-story apartment house. On what seemed like the hottest day of the year, we lugged 5-gallon cans of black tarry sealant to the roof and spread it around with brooms and squeegees. There were no railings, so the trick was to never turn your back on the edges and work outward from the center. I went home with a good day’s pay and a sunburn.
Caddieing is a good way for kids to earn summer money, and through her connections at work, my mother got me an introduction to the caddie house at the classy Essex County Country Club. To get there, I’d walk to the bottom of Mount Pleasant Avenue, then hitchhike the rest of the way up the mountain. One driver squeezed my knee and told me what nice strong legs I had for caddieing, but he was the exception. My fellow caddies were college guys, and one day that turned rainy they taught me how to play poker, an expensive but worthwhile lesson. Whatever skill level I may have today , I attribute much of it to those helpful lads.
I didn’t know anything at all about the game of golf, so I was a lousy caddie. The caddiemaster usually had me carrying bags for crusty old ladies whose satisfaction he wasn’t concerned about. Not knowing or caring anything about the game, for me each round was a long, often tipless trek, and eventually I stopped showing up at the clubhouse.
Great, but too late for me. Courtesy New Jersey State Golf Association
Up the hill one long block from Vince’s store was Pop’s. Pop’s was barely wide enough for a sliding-top cold drinks case and a candy and cigar counter, with room for Pop on one side and one customer on the other. Pop was a sweet old man who resembled Pope John the 23rd of the future, and sold under-the-counter rubbers to kids who were afraid to ask for them at the drugstore. He called us all ‘Dollink‘ in his Greek accent and sold single Trojans for 50 cents each. Trojans then cost 50 cents for a 3-pack in the drug stores, but if you think Pop was getting rich at those prices, remember that his volume was low – nobody ever bought more than one at a time, and in the 1950’s, not very often. A just-in-case Trojan from Pop’s might last all the way through high school.
All that’s left1945 packaging, adweek.com“As Thin as a Shadow, As Strong as an Ox!”, courtesy adweek.com
At about 13 years old, I decided it might be a good idea to start smoking. I knew exactly what I wanted to start with, and I knew smoking was wrong, so Pop’s was the place to go. I put ten cents down on the counter and in my best just-running-an-errand voice said, “My brother wants a stogie”, a stogie being a thin, lumpy, aromatic Italian girl cigar. When I got back to my third floor bedroom, I lit that baby up. I don’t think I inhaled, I just puffed and admired myself in the mirror. In a few minutes, I was dizzy, nauseous and turning green.
How it was supposed to look
I questioned my own memory of ‘turning green’ there, but thanks to Mike Naughton, via Quora.com, we have the following:
When we feel nauseated part of the initial physiologic response is vasodilation which causes relaxation of our peripheral arteries (face, fingers, and toes). This will make us flush, increase the mucous membrane secretions, and make us feel dizzy or light headed because of the drop in blood pressure. The homeostatic reflexive response is to bring the blood pressure back up by constricting the arteries through release of the “fight or flight” hormones. The face, lips, fingers, and toes then become cool and pale. People with pale complexions will look white(er) or green. Those with darker complexions will appear paler as well, especially in the lips and mucous membranes.
A few troubled teens hung around Pop’s, not serious offenders, but mostly just neighborhood screw-ups who went to vocational school and got into minor scrapes with the law. Kids from Vince’s would walk up the hill occasionally to buy a balsa-wood glider or a rubber from Pop, but the only time I can remember any of Pop’s regulars coming down to our corner was for the annual post-holiday accidental Christmas tree fire.
Pop’s was always grubby and grimy; I don’t think I ever saw a girl or woman venture inside. Certainly my mother never set foot there until Pop retired and the place changed hands. The husband-and-wife new owners made a lot of changes – they washed the windows, they swept the floor, they cleaned the glass display case. However, it soon became clear that they were keeping the water bill down by not flushing the back room toilet except after Number Two. After patronizing the now-nameless store for a week because it was closer to the house, my mother realized that that faint background piss smell really was piss, and never went back. She was furious, and said of such economizing, “That’s a Dirty Irish trick.”
Something like this, but he needs to pull the collar back and down for the trick to work
Local girls Honey and Rita never fell for the horse-bite trick. That’s not my Hudson, I never had a Hudson.
I’ve been thinking about how I’ll spend the money once my Powerball ship comes in. One thing I can see for sure, I’ll need to hire a good lawyer. Once the word gets out about my newfound riches, it’s almost certain I’ll be sued for some past misdeed, even if it’s for something that never happened. If you follow the news, you know what I mean. The only thing I might get Me-Too’d for was showing a new girl on our corner where the horse bit me. Horsebite tricks were rare and developed organically; they were sort of an unplanned initiation into the group. Here’s how it worked: The boy pulls his shirt collar open on the left side, exposing his neck and just a bit of upper back. He asks the girl if she wants to see where the horse bit him. The girl, curious, comes closer.
To get a clear look down the back of his shirt, she has to stand on her toes, curled against him as he pulls the collar down a little more. Meanwhile, his left arm hangs at his side. As the girl presses harder against the boy to get a closer look, she realizes her undercarriage is resting in his hand. Once she realizes, the boy gets slapped. Everyone laughs, even the girl, that’s the best part. Things were different back then, and I do apologize to the girls.
Setting up bowling pins paid pretty well, and I liked the predictability and orderliness of it. The customers were always 60 feet away, so they didn’t have to be dealt with, beyond making sure they got their ball back and didn’t throw a second one while I was still in the pit. Similar to my “cellar man” supermarket job later on, I could be alone with my thoughts and operate on autopilot.
In the 1950s, the Palladium in Orange had 24 lanes of modern semi-automatic pin setting machines, and eight older lanes where pins had to be set by hand. New hires were put in charge of a pair of the older, “peg” lanes, so called because each had a foot pedal to raise a set of steel pegs onto which the pins were placed. When the pedal was released, the pins stood perfectly aligned. The invention of the pegs eliminated the problem of mis-placed, or “mis-spotted” pins, and put an end to the most common bowler complaint about pinboys.
If you were a hard, fast worker, showed up for work on time and got along with management, you’d probably get promoted to the machines after two or three months. You may ask, how fast is “fast”? Truly fast pin cleanup and resetting looks something like a NASCAR tire change.
Working the pegs, courtesy Youbou Hall and Bowling Alley, via livevictoria.com. Note exposed steel peg, speed blur
The original Palladium had only the eight peg lanes; the machine lanes were added later. The peg side of the house was almost a separate room; when people came in to bowl, the desk manager assigned families with small children and anyone who looked like a troublemaker to a lane on the peg side.
The machines were only semi-automatic: you still had to toss a replacement pin into the slot for each one that got knocked down. The best feature of the machines was that they, not you, picked up the ball and got it started on its way back to the bowler. While I was working on the peg side, someone said I must get mad when a bowler throws a strike; I said no, because then I only have to pick up the ball once.
“The job was pretty much an OSHA nightmare. Pins often went flying, their wild arc broken by my feet or shins. Sometimes a pin came out of the pinsetter wobbly, and tipped over, so that I’d have to wriggle out onto the lane headfirst on my stomach after it, praying that the bowlers saw me.” – “Strikes, Spares and Bruised Shins”, Steven Kurutz, New York Times
Pinboys got 12 of the 50 cents bowlers paid for each game. This was decent money, and some “pinboys” were grownups supporting a family. About half were grown men, the rest were teenagers like me.
The air was smoky and the general atmosphere a bit seedy. Pin-setting work seemed to draw a lot of alcoholics. One of them was quite open about only wanting to earn enough to pay for his room and get a couple of bottles. Once he had enough, he’d go missing for a while.
Another pin setter carried a briefcase and wore a business suit to work every day. After he’d made his way down to the pits, he’d hang the suit up behind him and put on his coveralls. His wife probably knew what he did for a living, but his neighbors certainly didn’t.
Joe Pappas, who I think had Down syndrome, never got promoted to the machines. He was kept on the peg side, where the action was slower. Joe got paid 12 cents a game, the same as the rest of us.
Seedy or not, I never felt uncomfortable or unsafe there, except when I walked home late at night past Saint John’s cemetery and floating Jesus.
Automation today
Improvements in the machinery have made pinboys obsolete. The lanes now have automatic score sensing and tracking; bowlers no longer have to add up their score frame-by-frame across a paper form. If you can’t tell how many pins just got knocked down (the answer is ten minus the number still standing), or if you can’t clearly understand what just happened 60 feet in front of you, or if you can’t add a 1- or 2-digit number to a 2-or-3-digit number correctly and consistently, modern bowling technology has your solution.
A sad ending
Palladium destroyed by fire, Red Bank Daily Register, 3 July 1962
