Everything That Happened .com – Page 3 – to me and sometimes to other people. An online magazine © 2019-2024. Quoted material may contain coarse language.

2018-02-262024-07-05

Yogi

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

No, you take it, Yogi. Take it straight to hell.

2018-02-272024-07-10

Vincent’s ear

“What’s the craziest thing you believed as a kid?” – reddit

I believed that Van Gogh cut off his ear in frustration when he was painting a self portrait and couldn’t get the ear right. To me as a kid, it was the only logical explanation. I never discussed this with anyone, and believed it for a long time. There are many theories about why Vincent harmed himself, but the issue remains unsettled and the theories remain only that, theories.

I’ve seen varied accounts of exactly how much of his ear Vincent sliced off. When researching his Lust for Life biography of Van Gogh, author Irving Stone asked this question of Doctor Felix Rey, who treated Van Gogh in the hospital. The 2010 rediscovery of Rey’s response, which includes two drawings, gives us the answer: the entire ear, except for a small flap of the lobe.

Translated, the doctor’s comment next to the first drawing says “The ear was sliced with a razor following the dotted line”; the comment next to the second says “The ear showing what remained of the lobe.”

Along with the drawings, in his response Rey wrote

I’m happy to be able to give you the information you have requested concerning my unfortunate friend Van Gogh. I sincerely hope that you won’t fail to glorify the genius of this remarkable painter, as he deserves.

2018-03-012024-07-27

Roaring Twenties? No.

Early in January of 2020, I heard a television newsreader use the phrase “Roaring Twenties” to identify the new decade. It wasn’t her fault that it sounded dopey; she was only reading out the words written by some dopey newswriter. Please, anyone who’s trying to make “Roaring Twenties” happen, stop. The world already had a Roaring Twenties – it started a hundred years ago, it lasted ten years, and now it’s over. Based on what we’ve read in books and seen in a thousand black-and-white movies, it was a pretty good time to be alive, except of course for the last few months of the final year.

Maybe a few years from now, let’s say 2026, we can look back to see whether the preceding years were ‘roaring’ or not, then decide if we’ve been in “Roaring Twenties II” all along. Until then, if it really needs a name, let’s just call the decade we’re in now “the twenties”, or “the current decade”.

I have several photos of my parents taken in the 1920s, when they were in their twenties and in full flower. The photos are puzzling – my working-class parents are wearing what look like expensive clothes, and in one case, special clothes just to ride horses. So, at one time there was money to spare – what happened? Did they go bust in the Crash, as so many others did? I’ll never know. Meanwhile, I love this picture and seeing how happy they were then.

Later, during the 1930s and 1940s, my family wasn’t ‘poor’ – we were far from being Dorothea Lange subjects. Even after my father flew the coop in 1943 and my mother had to go back to work, we got along just fine, maybe occasionally borrowing a scuttle of coal from the neighbors until payday and our next coal delivery. After the next delivery, we returned the scuttle heaped as high as possible. That’s what neighbors do.

I once emailed my brother a long question about our family, and part of his answer was that there was “a lot of history there that we will never find out about because everybody just came and went without doing much talking.” Yep, that’s my family.

Mom and Pardo before the Crash. They would last another 10 or 15 years

2018-03-022024-07-15

Ashes

The Gang, somewhere around 1915, Mom in the back row, second from right. Girl on extreme right next to her will grow up to be Miss Riley, my world history teacher. I’m guessing these are the official Orange High School gym uniform

Out of the blue one day, Mom told my brother and me that it was her wish to be cremated, not a common practice at the time. Maybe she’d read about it in the Readers Digest, or maybe her brother George had been cremated – he died young, a few months after Grandma, but he isn’t in any cemetery records.

When she died years later, we knew what to tell the funeral director. She looked nice in her lavender suit.

Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange has a wide, grassy park she loved. As a girl, she picnicked and hung out there with her school friends, “The Gang” she called them. Some of those friendships lasted all the way through to the bridge club that met every two weeks until her death.

After we received her ashes (not “cremains”, that’s an ugly, made-up word), my brother and I took a ride one evening to Eagle Rock. We walked across the grass, taking turns scattering the ashes until they were gone.

My brother was a construction crane operator. He took great pride in never having “dumped” a crane, and couldn’t understand how anyone could let that happen. When he died, his daughters scattered his ashes in the water at Sandy Hook, where his union brothers were building a bridge.

My dear wife died several years ago. She never expressed a preference, but she never said anything against cremation, so now I have her ashes in a rosewood box. I’ll have to figure out what to do with them one day. I thought about the ocean, she loved the ocean, but probably not there, given its current dirty state. As for myself, cremation is the way to go, no ocean for me either, thanks. Yes, I am feeling fine, thanks for asking.

Some people mix their parents’ ashes together after the second one dies. My younger son calls the practice “unseemly”, meaning improper. I’m not too keen on the idea either, I’m kind of a private person.

2018-03-032024-07-31

A favourite aunt

At the onset of World War I, my Aunt Alice’s family in England sent her here, at age 15, to live with relatives to avoid the bombing and anticipated invasion of England by the Hun. Here she met and fell in love with my Uncle Rob, a horse-and-wagon milkman and professional golfer who for a while was good enough to be on the tour with Bobby Jones. After they married, Uncle Rob entertained Aunt Alice inexpensively by bringing her along on the tour to watch him play, something she wasn’t enthusiastic about. After his golf game stopped earning a living, he went back on the milk wagon for the next 25 or 30 years.

Looking back, Aunt Alice was probably the most cultured woman I ever met. I think my Uncle Bert and his family thought she was putting on airs when she broke out the candelabra for Bert’s annual visit from Michigan (Bert would move it off the table “so we can all see better”), but she wasn’t being snooty, she was just being her sophisticated self.

When Uncle Rob’s company eventually sold their dairy farm to real-estate developers, he retired and became a school crossing guard. After he had a few accidents driving, his children forced him to give up his license. He said at the time “Well, that’s it, my life is over.” But it wasn’t.

Their daughter Helen babysat me during her teens, and years later enjoyed teasing me about it. An elegant woman who called her mother “Nonny”, she was a model and bridal consultant for Hahne’s department store.

Their son Robert Jr., aka Bobby, who was also a milkman, served in the infantry during WW II. When he got back from Europe, his much-hated-by-the-family wife Vera told him, in effect, “If you think I’m going to stay married to a milkman, you’re crazy.” So, Bobby went back to school, worked hard, got rich and became a genuine big kahuna in the insurance industry. In fact, his portrait still hangs in the boardroom of the insurance company he built. True story, kids. Stay in school.

1920s Milk Picnic, Eagle Rock Reservation: Grandma, Alice, Aunt Ruth. Bobby, Helen, Uncle Rob

2018-03-092024-07-11

Aunt Sweetie

Drinks in Germany, 1945 – National WW II Museum

After absent-mindedly addressing a lady friend as ‘sweetie’, I thought about my own Aunt Sweetie, a Women’s Army Corps WW II veteran. Her real name was Mary Adeline, and she was my father’s sister.

Her mother was also named Mary Adeline. The family called the mother ‘Addie’, while the daughter was called ‘Sweetie’. While this might seem like a lack of imagination on someone’s part when naming the younger Mary Adeline, it was most likely a sign of love and respect for her mother.

Having straightened that out, at least to my own satisfaction, back to our regular programming…

Aunt Sweetie owned a share in a beach house on the Jersey Shore, where she hosted a family get-together that included guests from my mother’s reserved, German side of the family, as well as guests from my father’s more outgoing Irish side.

By the end of the day, we had all come in from the beach and were having a casual meal at a long picnic table, most of us still in bathing suits. The grownups were enjoying some beer.

Just for fun, Aunt Sweetie put one hand under her damp arm and performed a staccato armpit-fart serenade. Those sounds intrigued me; it was a brand new way to make a rude noise. On our ride home, the scandalized German faction spoke of little except Aunt Sweetie’s behavior. As far as I was concerned, I thought she was wonderful, and I couldn’t wait to get home and try it myself.

Diagram courtesy wikiHow, as “Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook.”

2018-03-092024-08-06

Cousin Walter and the OSS

Cousin Walter wasn’t really my cousin, but I guess his being married to my real cousin Helen made him sort of a cousin-in-law, as if there ever could be such a thing. (Yes, there is such a thing, I checked.) Walter was an intelligent, happy and patient man. He sold cars for a living.

1951 Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe, courtesy cinemagraphcollection

Walter had several brothers and sisters who died young from heart problems. He was the only one left. Walter had his own worrisome heart problems, but was reluctant to get open-heart surgery. In the 1950s, open-heart surgery wasn’t far beyond the experimental stage, and had a high mortality rate.

One day after playing eighteen holes with his father-in-law Uncle Rob, he realized that during the round he had finished off an entire vial of his prescription nitroglycerin pills to stave off his chest pain .He decided to risk the surgery. It was a grand success, as proven by Walter living to be 87.

The 1920 U.S. census records show an oddity: according to the records, Walter’s parents were born in Russia but spoke German, and emigrated to the United States in 1909. At that time, Europe’s national borders were fluid, so “Russia” might have meant what later came to be called East Germany. Walter grew up speaking German.

During the war, he served with the U.S. intelligence agency Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. After the war, the duties of the OSS were assumed by the newly-established CIA. Walter never talked about what he did in the war, but he most likely interrogated German prisoners, and perhaps committed ungentlemanly acts of war similar to what the CIA does for us today. Here is an href=”https://arsof-history.org/articles/v3n4_oss_primer_page_1.html”>an overview of the OSS’s wartime activities.

After the war, Walter sold cars for a dealership in Nutley, keeping his eye peeled for clean trade-ins for his family. I bought a nice, sensibly-driven used 1951 Chevy through Walter. A few months later, I tested his patience a bit when the car threw a rod on the Garden State and I got him to convince the dealership to repair it, even though it was well past its 30-day warranty.

After I enlisted in the army, I imposed one more time on ever-patient Walter, getting him to convince his dealership to buy back the car. Just one of the semi-unreasonable things that teen-age me expected people to do for him.

Thank you, Walter. You were a true patriot and friend.

2018-03-102024-07-31

An imperfect man

So, here’s the deal with my father. He was a union housepainter, paper hanger and sometime bartender. He was a working drunk who eventually let everyone down. He had a barfly girlfriend named Millie with whom he had a bastard child. In the polite euphemism common among amateur genealogists seeking disappeared fathers and uncles, he “left the family”, his wife and two sons, around 1944.

His half-sister, my Aunt Frances, made room in her home for my mother and me; his sister, my Aunt Elizabeth, made room for my brother. I think they felt a familial guilt for his abandoning us. His sisters still loved him, and if they spoke of him at all, they mentioned his terrific sense of humor.

Although habitual drunkenness is said to be a genetic predisposition among the Irish, I don’t think genetics are a good excuse. I think habitual drunkenness is a character flaw, a weakness that can be overcome by power of will, or nowadays by psychiatric treatment. You’ll probably see a mix of love, anger and disappointment in what I’ve written here.

He was born in 1903 in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, in a tenement two blocks behind Lincoln Center before there was a Lincoln Center. I don’t know anything about his early life, but as poor Irish, I’m sure it was not easy.

His father’s given name was Bernard, and he lost out to my mother when he wanted to honor the Irish tradition of naming me after my grandfather. Although on paper he lost that fight, at home or away he never called me anything but Barney. His own name was George, but only his sisters called him George. All his friends, and my mother too, called him Pardo. Where that name came from or what it meant is lost to the ages.

He worked for Haas, a big painting contractor, and was a rabid union man. My Uncle Jim, Aunt Frances’s husband, had a successful one-man, one-panel-truck, non-union painting and decorating business. My father called him “Your scabby Uncle Jim”, notwithstanding that my mother and I were living under Uncle Jim’s roof when he said it.

He could be hurtful: my brother went to vocational school, which my father for no good reason called “dummy school”.

He was generous with money, and I once heard my mother say that while he was buying “drinks for the house” his family was being shortchanged. I always think of that, and say “Nothing for me, thanks” when some stranger in a bar wants to be a bigshot.

Here are a few memories from when my parents were still together:

One Sunday morning I sit on his lap helping to hold the paper while he reads aloud The Katzenjammer Kids comic page, speaking the words of Hans, Fritz, Mama and der Captain in a vaudevillian German accent. He is laughing and delightful; this is my happiest childhood memory. But my mother is not amused, she keeps trying to tone him down, I never understood why. Maybe he was still drunk from the day before?

He has a loud argument with an air raid warden who claims he can see light leaking from an upstairs window during a WW II blackout. My mother somehow settles it before the authorities need to be called.

I am playing a block away from our house one afternoon when I see my white-shirted father walking down the block to go to his part time bartending job. I chase after him, hysterical because he hasn’t said goodbye. When I catch up, it isn’t him, he hasn’t left, but I cry even harder.

I open the front door to a salesman who asks to speak to “your mommy”; I inform him that she’s in bed with my daddy. The grownups find this story very amusing, not sure why at the time.

After he left us, he would sometimes arrange with my mother to take me for a day or so:

He and one of his painter buddies made a deal with the absentee owner of a bungalow at the shore. They would paint it in exchange for a week’s free stay during the summer. I stayed with them for the few days they were painting. When the owner stopped by, she saw me helping to paint and asked if I was working hard. I repeated the expression I had heard them use many times, “Just slappin’ it on”. While we were there my father took me grocery shopping. Already a slave to radio advertising, I begged him to buy Cheerios; he said I wouldn’t like them but I argued and nagged and insisted, and we came back with Cheerios. The next morning, he served me a bowl of Cheerios and milk and they were nasty, just plain cardboard, nothing like the honey-nut stuff you spoiled kids have today. Giving credit where credit is due, he didn’t make me eat them.

When I was about eight, we went driving in the country with his girlfriend and her two kids, a boy about six and a girl about four, me generally ignoring the three of them. We stopped at a roadside custard stand with a few chairs in front. I was still ignoring them when I heard the boy shout “Mom! Sissie’s peeing!” I look over and Sissie is standing atop a metal chair, urine running down her bare legs and pooling on the seat. I take a close look at Sissie for the first time and, even to my own young eyes, there’s something wrong with her, she has what we recognize today as acute Down syndrome. Much later in life I realize that Sissie, who was eventually placed in New Jersey’s Vineland Training School, is my half-sister. When two drunks make a baby, it may not turn out well.

He would bring me with him to a favored workingman’s bar that had a free lunch, an elaborate spread of cold cuts and just about everything else. To drink, he favored boilermakers, which is a shot of whisky followed immediately by a glass of beer. I drank sarsaparilla, which is pretty much the same thing as root beer.

He had lots of friends and acquaintances in the bars. Once he introduced me to a friend the right side of whose face looked like a lopsided, swollen strawberry. He later explained that the friend was a mustard gas victim from WW I. Oh, I see. On the bright side, another friend would quietly salt the phone booth coin returns with nickels, then say, “Hey Barney, why don’t you go see if anybody forgot their change?”

He and some of his painter buddies shared a double room in a workingman’s hotel in downtown Newark.

My tasks at the hotel were to go to the diner next door and pick up a takeout coffee order, or to buy cigarettes. A cigarette purchase consisted of simply putting a quarter into the machine and pulling a knob, usually the one under the Chesterfields. Each pack of cigarettes included a few pennies sealed inside the wrapper as change from the purchase. These pennies were treated as a nuisance and tossed into a soup bowl kept on the windowsill.

When the painters go off to work in the morning, I am left to my own devices. I’m sure my mother knew very little about what went on when I stayed with my father, and she never quizzed me about whether his girlfriend was present (she usually wasn’t) or any other aspect of my visits. I was pretty much what they call today a free-range child, both at home and when visiting my father. Unsupervised children roamed the earth freely then.

I would take a handful of pennies from the bowl and spend them on games at the penny arcade a block or two away on Mulberry Street. The hotel room was on perhaps the fourth floor, directly above a green canvas awning. The awning had a swoop to it, and a penny properly dropped would shoot out into the street. I made a mistake in timing once and hit a car as it was coming by; the driver got out, looked up and cursed me. I guess he had seen me leaning out the window.

One night the painters put down a blanket in the next room and shoot craps. My father has to tell them to watch the language.

At the Painters Union annual picnic (his girlfriend is there), I take it upon myself to set up pins on the outdoor skittles-bowling lane. It is fun and I am good at it. Later I help out by running cups of beer and sarsaparilla between the outdoor bar and the table. I discover I like the taste of beer and get my first buzz on.

At the lunch counter in Newark Penn Station one morning, my father passes out and ends up on the floor. There are two firemen sitting on the other side of the U-shaped counter. I go to get them but they won’t help. Maybe they knew something I didn’t? After a while he revives on his own.

On a different day in the station, I get my arm trapped fooling around with the meshing bars of a full-height exit turnstile. A railroad mechanic sets me free.

One day we go to a tailor shop a few steps down from street level, where I am fitted for a suit. I get to pick it, and I choose a traditional style, in gray. The deal includes a hat, and I go with a snappy Jack-Lemmon-style businessman model. When I get home my mother likes the suit, and says that the color is called “salt and pepper”, which to me sounds kind of dumb. She checks the label, and says “Hmm, reprocessed wool”, which years later I learn is thought to be of inferior quality. I wear the suit next day to Sunday School, where I get ragged on for being overdressed, but mostly I get ragged on for the hat. I never wear it again.

Somewhere around this time he brings me to an indoor three-ring circus, maybe at Madison Square Garden. We are only four rows back from the action. There’s a clown with a bucking donkey, and part of his act is challenging anyone in the audience to ride the donkey. I stand up to volunteer, but my father puts the kibosh on the idea. Maybe it’s because I’m wearing my suit.

The circus sells pet “chameleons”, really just anole lizards that they collect during the off season in Florida. As sold, the creature has a thin chain around his neck that clips to your clothing, then he just uses his native abilities to stay stuck to your lapel or wherever you put him. My mother was not thrilled.

When I am about ten he calls my mother to invite me to a Yankees game. The trip is sponsored by the Eagles, an Elks-like social club for people of the Polish persuasion. I think most of his buddies in the painters union are Poles, e.g. his friend “Stash”, so he’s probably an honorary member. The day before the Yankees trip, he picks me up at home (probably using Stash’s car, he never owned one as far as I know) and we go to his room across the street from the Eagles lodge. There is a trundle bed for me. Millie comes by, then later his landlady. When I am introduced to the landlady, she says “I bet you’re happy to see your Aunt Millie.” I am both astounded and insulted, and say “SHE’S NOT MY AUNT.” Maybe I have confirmed something the landlady already suspected?

The next day the Eagles load up their chartered bus. Late arrivals make for a late start, then traffic is bad and we run into long stretches where the bus doesn’t move at all. There is beer on board, and after a while the call goes up for a bathroom break. The driver pulls over as far as he can and everyone gets out. My memory of this is of 10 or 12 men leaning with one hand against the right side of the bus, taking a wide stance, feet well back, as they piss in concert against the bus or half-under it. To anyone who doesn’t look closely, it looks like they are trying to tip the bus over.

When we finally arrive at Yankee Stadium it’s the 7th inning.

Once we are seated, I discard any notion of catching a foul ball, for our deck is deep under an even higher deck, and we are far back from the third-base line. In fact we are more just on the third-base side of the park. We are seated in two rows, me in the second, where I observe. There is more beer, and the Eagles pass pint bottles of whisky or such back and forth. I have a hotdog, soda, Crackerjack and a souvenir program. All-in-all, it’s a dismal experience.

He phoned my mother one more time to invite me somewhere a few months after the Yankee Stadium fiasco. That day had been sort of a last straw for me and I said “No” and never saw him again until he was dead.

My brother maintained a relationship with him to some degree, occasionally running into him in Bloomfield.

One Saturday afternoon years later, I had been out of the house for several hours when my wife received a phone call from Newark City Hospital. They wanted to know what she wanted done with Mr. Smithee’s body. She hadn’t thought about my father in years, and it took a few frightened moments to establish that the deceased Mr. Smithee was not me, but my father. His body had been in the morgue for a week.

Cause of death? He got mugged, or fell down his apartment stairs, or maybe a little of each, I don’t remember. In the big picture I guess it doesn’t matter.

Over the years, my mother had kept up a small death-benefit policy with Prudential. Our Bloomfield relatives oversaw the arrangements. It was the same funeral home Uncle Jim was buried from.

For the funeral director I set aside clean underwear and socks, a shirt and tie, and my second-best suit. It was the least I could do.

No one came to his viewing or funeral except the family.

2018-03-112024-07-01

Handouts from my uncles

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.

2018-03-132024-07-31

Gentleman farmer, part 1 of 4

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.

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.

Me in Michigan. The hat came with the house

2018-03-152024-07-27

Gentleman farmer, part 2/4: NO LUGS

In the first part of Gentleman Farmer I told how when I was ten and then eleven years old, I spent two happy summers at my Uncle Bert’s farm in Michigan. I traveled there by myself, the first year by train, the second year by air. Late every summer, Bert drove back to New Jersey with his own family to visit his mother, brothers and sisters, and I came back to Jersey with them.

Condom vending machine, courtesy ebay.com

The Pennsylvania Turnpike was still under construction, so the trip was not yet an easy, all-four-lane-highway one. It was over six hundred miles, so I imagine we stopped somewhere overnight, but I don’t remember that part. During one return trip, I spotted a tall, coin-operated vending machine in a gas station men’s room. It wasn’t clear to me what was being vended, so I asked Bert. He just laughed and said “Never mind, let’s go.” Another men’s room had a confusing sign next to a full-length mirror at the exit; it said “Please adjust your dress”. Before I could even ask, Bert said it meant “Make sure your fly is closed”. Why not just say so?

During my first visit, I mailed my mother a map of the farm, showing the creek that ran across it, the house, the barn, the garden, and a cloud-shaped blob labeled “razzberries”. It also showed where my cousins and I were surprised by a blue racer snake. I saw that map somewhere around here a year ago, but when I looked for it just now to put on this page, it had gone missing. Stay tuned. (April 23 – okay, found it, posted at Gentleman farmer, part 3: lost map found. Enjoy.)

In the barn there were cats, household junk, and farm tools including my favorite, a post-hole digger. Because they lived beyond county garbage collection routes, they buried their organic garbage in rows parallel to those of their vegetable garden. In time, a garbage row decays into the rich soil of a vegetable row, gets planted with seeds, and the cycle continues. I learned to use the post-hole digger, and enthusiastically lengthened the current garbage row until Aunt Evelyn said it was long enough for now. They burned their trash in a shallow ditch around the stump that doubled as the chicken-execution block.

I think they owned a radio, but I don’t remember ever hearing any music in the house. Naomi had a violin that was probably rented through her high school band program, but she wasn’t in love with it – I never heard her play it, or even saw it out of its beat-up case.

There was a dinnertime rule that you had to eat everything that was put on your plate. I don’t think it was Bert’s rule, he was too kindhearted for that; I think it was Evelyn’s. Maybe surviving the Depression had made her that way. There was no such rule back home, and I had a hard time with it, sometimes sitting at the table by myself long after dinner, trying to choke down what still remained. Evelyn was not a great cook — I remember in particular leather-like pork chops, and brussels sprouts, always brussels sprouts.

(I mentioned Evelyn’s rule, and how unjust it was, to one of my sons. He said “What?! You did that!” I told him he was crazy, I never did anything like that. Thinking about it now, I know I did say at times, but not all the time, “No dessert until you finish what’s on your plate”. But that’s not the same thing, nope. Pretty sure.)

Someone decided the house needed a fresh coat of paint, and one hot July day the project began. There were ladders and plenty of brushes in the barn, and my cousins made sure that I was provided a brush and a bucket of paint, the same as them. Painting was easy, and I was good at it. Thinking of the time I helped my father and his friend paint a lady’s beach bungalow, I just slapped it on.

Where there are barn cats there are bound to be kittens, and when Virginia inspected the latest litter, she saw one that looked like it wasn’t breathing. She went into her ER-nurse mode, putting her mouth over the creature’s muzzle and giving it tiny puffs of air, stopping at intervals to check for results. She did her best, but it was too late.

There wasn’t much to do in Temperance, it was as rural as it gets. Up at the next corner, about a 10-minute walk away, there was a gas station with a grocery store that had candy and comic books. I sometimes was sent there to pick up milk or whatever. I don’t recall ever going into “town”, if there was a town, unless you count going to the feed store. A charitable organization, maybe the Kiwanis, got the idea of having a movie night to give the local kids something to do. There was an empty lot behind the grocery store and that’s where they set up the screen. People brought blankets and folding chairs and waited for the dark. Once it was, they started the projector. Every moth and other flying insect in Monroe county spotted the light, and collected in dense bug clouds around both the projector and screen. Disgusted moviegoers began grabbing their blankets and heading home. I don’t know if anyone stayed for the whole show; we were among the first to recognize a bad idea and bail out.

One day Bert took us to Lake Erie to go swimming. It was a pretty long drive, not one you’d want to do every day. On the way, he had to slam on his brakes to avoid another car, and my throat hit the top of the front seat; no seat belts then. It was like getting punched in the voice box; I couldn’t make a sound. It seemed like a long while before I could breathe. No one noticed my difficulties; I think they were all too upset about the almost-accident and about Bert cursing. I just took in small gasps until my breathing came back. Once we got to the lake, nothing of note happened, except for my being disappointed that even lying flat on a blanket, you cannot see up inside ladies’ bathing suits. The skirts have matching underwear underneath.

Bert made the back field of his property available to a neighboring farmer, who planted it with wheat. After the neighbor harvested the grain each year, he brought Bert the baled-up remaining straw, to use on the floor of the chicken coop and as chicken bedding.

Steel lugs, courtesy cazenoviaequipment.com

One day Bert walked me across the creek into the field, where there was a tractor parked. It wasn’t Bert’s, it was the neighbor’s. We hooked it up to another piece of farm equipment and pulled it up and down the rows. The tractor didn’t have a steering wheel; it steered by pushing left and right foot pedals, Bert let me try steering when we got to the end of one row, but I didn’t have enough weight and leg strength to push the pedals hard enough to make a good turn.

After the field was finished, we drove past the house and onto Dean Road to return the tractor. Alongside the road there were signs that said “NO LUGS”. I’d only seen that word before in the comics, used to describe large, dim-witted people, and I asked about it. Bert said some tractors still used steel spikes, called lugs, instead of rubber tires, and the spikes would tear up the highway. Anything with lugs had to drive on the shoulder.

2018-03-152024-07-27

Gentleman farmer, part 3/4: lost map found

Blue racer, courtesy Peter Paplanus, via flickr

Okay, I found the map of the farm I drew on my first trip to Michigan. When I mentioned it in Gentleman Farmer, part 2, I said “It also showed where my cousins and I were surprised by a blue racer snake.” That’s not actually on the map, but it happened in the area labeled “garden”. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a picture of a blue racer directly above. Harmless, but scarier looking than I remembered.

A couple of things are hard to make out. The square in the corner of the chicken yard says “coop”; the line under “pump” says “51 ft. well”, which I guess was deep enough for someone to brag about. Where it says “garage”, think “barn”. Not shown is the chicken-execution stump, which apparently I was repressing at the time. Not to scale.

I also found a letter I sent home the same year. I think the typing is pretty good for a 10-year-old, but it probably wasn’t the first draft. Some typewriters didn’t have a number ‘1’ key then, you were supposed to use a lowercase ‘L’ instead, but nobody told me that and I improvised. The “Peggy” it mentions is a cat, not a person.

2018-03-162024-07-27

Gentleman farmer, part 4/4: Condolences

When Bert died years later at the age of 78, I drove to Michigan with my brother and Uncle Rob. We got to the funeral home in time for the last viewing. When I saw him in the casket, I stood alongside as long as I could hold it in, then went downstairs to the men’s room and sobbed like never before. I didn’t cry when my father died, but this was different.

When we got back to Dean Road, we sat in the living room to catch up on family news. Charlotte was there with her husband, a man named Royal. They still lived in Temperance; they had grown-up children and a grandbaby. She said the developers had been nagging Bert for years to sell out so they could expand their development, now right up against the wheat field.

The living room looked much the same as when I had last seen it 25 years earlier. Bert’s chair was still in the corner; it was empty, and I sat in it for a while. Trying not to be too obvious, I looked around the room for the chicken disease book, but it was gone.

2018-03-172024-07-20

Harassing Hitler

After the war, one day while I was in Michigan visiting my Uncle Bert and his family, I was nosing around in their cellar. On the top shelf of a wire rack over in one corner was a pile of almost-new comic books.

I have complained elsewhere here that there wasn’t any reading material in that house, at least not out in the open and available to me, other than Bert’s illustrated book of chicken diseases. But I forgot that beautiful stack of comics, which starred mostly WW II-era superheroes.

They seemed to have a common theme – at least one story in each issue had that comic’s hero slapping, punching, kicking, knocking down or otherwise humiliating either Hitler or Japan’s General Tojo. Mussolini didn’t suffer anywhere near the abuse the other two Axis leaders did, probably because Italy surrendered in 1943 and was a non-player for the rest of the war.

Superheroes were not the only abusers of the three Axis leaders and their armies; punishment could also be dished out by comic-strip celebrities such as heavyweight boxer Joe Palooka, or the band of rowdy grade-school boys known as the Commando Cubs.

As I read the stories, I had a fleeting thought that if a comic book writer could get a character close enough to Hitler to punch him in the face, why not just kill him? But I realized, since the war had already been over for three years, killing Hitler early would have put the world out of balance and messed up the space-time continuum, or something like that. Also to the downside, that writer’s superhero would have had one less villain available to humiliate in future issues. Finally, if our many years of post-war exposure to all forms of popular media have taught us anything, it is this: killing Hitler early always leads to unanticipated and undesirable consequences.

Outcomes, sans superhero intervention

After Italy surrendered in September 1943, Mussolini was dismissed from office by King Victor Emmanuel and imprisoned. He was soon freed by the Germans and restored to power as Hitler’s puppet. In April 1945, he was captured by Italian communists and executed by firing squad, then his body strung up for display. In a way, the terrible abuse inflicted on his corpse by the Italian people might be said to counterbalance his relatively light treatment in the comics.
Hitler committed suicide as Russian forces closed in on his bunker in April 1945.
Tojo attempted suicide as he was arrested by American soldiers in September 1945, but survived. He was hanged for war crimes in December 1948.

Here are some comic book covers from the internet.

Whistle while you work,
Hitler is a jerk.
Mussolini bit his weenie
now it doesn’t work.
– Carl Sandburg

2018-04-022024-07-05

Progress

47 pontiac
39 merc
49 merc
51 chevy
51 lincoln
57 pontiac

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.”

2018-04-092024-08-12

Working papers

*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.

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.

Test hover here — 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

2018-04-112024-07-31

Bad dog Buddy

Not Buddy, but kinda like him. Photo courtesy bilibili.com

Once in a while I’ll remember something that happened that wasn’t all that pleasant. Usually I don’t like passing along Debbie Downer stories, but in Buddy’s case, I’ll make an exception.

Buddy was a good-looking, friendly, black-and-white smaller-size dog, probably part spaniel. He belonged to the Dowd brothers, Roger and Theo, who lived near Vince’s.

Five or six of us kids were headed home from school, walking up High Street, when we spotted Buddy. He was near the railroad crossing, where the street is raised a bit so the tracks can be level. Another dog had been run over by a car earlier in the day and was lying in the street, dead. Maybe he was run over by a train and not a car, but trains rarely came by there and ran quite slowly, so the dog would have to have been pretty stupid. His body was mangled, and there was a lot of blood.

We noticed the blood right away because Buddy was out in the middle of the street lapping it up. We were instantly outraged and ran toward the scene, shouting “STOP IT, BUDDY!”, “GET OUT OF THERE!”, and “BAD DOG, BUDDY!”. Seeing us coming straight at him, Buddy broke off and ran for home.

Somebody said aloud, or maybe we all just thought it, “I didn’t think a dog would do that.” But I guess he would.

After that, we regarded Buddy with some suspicion because of his disloyal treatment of a fellow dog. But Buddy hadn’t done anything wrong, he was just being a dog himself.

2018-04-232024-08-05

Brushes with the law

These are some police encounters/interactions that I’ve had over the years. I hope this piece doesn’t come off as anti-cop; I’ve had many positive encounters with the police along with the negative ones, which are easier to remember. Society needs cops, and I am the first to call for the water cannon during large-scale bad behavior.

I wish I could say “at least I never got arrested”, but a municipal scam in Clarksville, Tennessee spoiled my record. The cops there were only doing what the town demanded of them: bringing in more revenue.

At about eight years old, I was in Newark Penn Station with my father, who was talking to a cop. I don’t know who initiated the conversation, but I doubt it was my father. More likely, the cop came over because his Spidey-senses spotted a drunk. I didn’t pay any attention to what they were talking about, but while they talked, I studied the cop’s holster and gun, and the other equipment attached to his belt. I asked him what the thing with the handle was for. I don’t remember if he told me, but he did show me, right there in front of my father.

Iron Claw Wrist Cuff with leather holster, courtesy liveauctioneers.com)

The Iron Claw Wrist Cuff has a locking ratchet; when the handle is pulled up, the claw gets tighter. The only pictures I have seen of the claw in action show it as a come-along restraining device tight around the subject’s wrist. However, the demonstration I received was of an “off-label” use, as an instrument of torture. In this usage, the claw is closed on the wrist like a letter C, with one arm of the claw closing down on the upper side, between the radius and ulna bones, and the other arm digging into the pressure point underneath. Try grabbing one wrist with your other hand, fingers on top, tip of the thumb digging in hard underneath. Hurts, doesn’t it? Now imagine that grip made of steel. Oh, and the claw’s handle can be twisted sideways to increase the pain. All in good fun, sir. Just showing your son how it works. Hug your babies tonight, officer. Hope you enjoyed it.

When I was in Cub Scouts, at maybe nine or ten years old, they took our pack on a field trip to a local police department. In particular, I remember they showed us the cells; I think there was an implied threat there of what could happen if we were not good citizens. They also took our fingerprints, sort of an interesting process to watch back in the days before you could see it done on TV twice a week. They made and retained for themselves a set from each of us. The reason they gave was “In case you get lost”, but what they really meant was either, “In case you are ever so hideously mutilated that you are unrecognizable”, or, more likely, “In case you grow up to burglarize the house of somebody important enough to warrant a full investigation”. A few years later I mentioned the fingerprinting to someone who said, “Oooo, FBI knows who you are now, better not do anything!”, implying that I might be the type to maybe “do something” some day. The army took my fingerprints too, so I guess the FBI has a double set.

One 4th of July, my high-school buddies and I had some firecrackers, nothing big or dangerous, just those little ones about two inches long that come strung together in a pack of 50 and go “bang” loud enough to make anyone who is unprepared jump. We were setting them off on the curb in front of my house, sometimes putting one under a tin can to see how far it would fly. We only had one or two packs, so we lit them one at a time to make them last.

(When we were younger, we lit them using slow-burning “punks”, skinny foot-long sticks of compressed sawdust, but there was no need for punks this year, since at least one of us always had a cigarette going.)

Anyway, one of the neighbors, probably the constant complainers from two doors down, called the police. When they arrived, one cop explained (as if we didn’t know) that fireworks were dangerous and illegal, and that they had to confiscate ours and “destroy” them, that’s the word he used. I have to give them credit – they destroyed our firecrackers right then and there, by driving two doors down the street, lighting the whole string at once, dropping them into the gutter and driving away.

I got a speeding ticket on Park Avenue in East Orange when I was 17; I know I was 17 because one condition to resolve the ticket was that I bring a parent to court so the parent could receive a lecture also. My mother was annoyed at first, but changed her tune when “The judge looked just like Gregory Peck!”

The Glen Ridge police once gave me a speeding ticket for doing 38 in a 35 zone on my way to work. Glen Ridge didn’t want kids driving crappy old cars through their classy town.

Traffic stop, courtesy law offices of Hart J. Levin

Other classy towns that didn’t want kids driving through were the Caldwells, a collection of towns in North Jersey. We would cruise around the area pretty much aimlessly, then maybe stop for burgers. One night we were driving around, four kids in the car, not speeding or anything, when the cops pulled us over. They explained there had been a warehouse break-in and burglary in the next town, and the night watchman had been knocked out. They asked what we were doing in the area and made us get out of the car so they could look us over. There was no search. They were satisfied and let us drive off. Next night, different car, different guys (except for me) out cruising in the same area, stopped by the same two cops. One comes up to the window and explains about a break-in and burglary in the next town, night watchman got knocked out. I asked him if it was the same night watchman that got knocked out the day before. They took a closer look at us, then said to keep moving. No apology was offered, and we didn’t expect one.

My friends and I generally hung out on the corner by Vince’s grocery store. Vince’s neighbors were mostly our own parents, aunts and uncles, so there were few objections to us being there. Some neighbors did object, though. One of them was Angelo, a special cop who lived on the second floor of the building next door. He had a new baby, so he was stretched pretty thin, and wanted us to keep the noise down. I don’t think we were ever noisy; it was just conversation; the boombox hadn’t been invented yet.

One day Angelo came out on his porch and shouted down to us to be quiet, adding that he was a cop. I knew he was only a special cop, and muttered “Let’s see your badge”, more as an aside to the group than directly to him. He went back inside, and a moment later was downstairs, walking up to me with a .45 automatic. He cranked the slide and pointed it in my face from about two feet away, saying “THIS is my badge. Now get out of here!” That was a tough argument to counter, so I turned around and started walking home, followed quickly by everyone else. I still remember how big the hole in the front of that thing looked from up close. I don’t know if Angelo ever got hired as a real cop, but I hope not.

When I worked at Foodland, employees were expected to keep an eye out for shoplifters. If we saw someone leaving without paying, we were supposed to intercept them, then bring them back inside to sign a confession form in which they promised to never again enter the store. I didn’t try very hard to catch any, but one Sunday I spotted a particularly egregious case. Right in front of me, without even looking around to see if anyone was watching, a fiftyish woman picked up a chunk of expensive cheese and put it into her purse. I approached her as she was leaving the store, told her I knew what she had taken and asked her to follow me back to the office. (Looking back, I am ashamed of being involved in this apprehension program. I wasn’t trained as a police officer. If stores have a shoplifting problem, they need a paid security guard walking the aisles to deter it, not untrained employees stopping people outside after it happens .)

She ignored me and kept on walking. Stupidly, I grabbed a nearby clerk and told him to come with me. I didn’t have a plan – we just followed her, with me occasionally entreating her to come back to the store. So, here’s the picture, a woman of a certain age wearing a Persian-lamb coat is being followed closely down the sidewalk by two young men wearing supermarket whites. My lack of a plan was resolved when a police car took interest, and after hearing our stories brought all three of us to the police station. After some conflicting explanations, the woman and I were eventually given a court date, a Thursday. When I explained to my bosses where I’d be the next Thursday, they said I’d have to take Thursday as my day off; in other words, they weren’t going to pay for my court time. I said in that case I wouldn’t testify, and they said that was fine. The punchline? My shoplifter was the mother of the store owners’ rabbi.

Driving home from work one Sunday evening, I was pulled over while headed north on Route 9 in Elizabeth. I had a ’51 Lincoln at the time, which at nine years old looked more like a hoodlum car than a luxury one. I had no idea why I was stopped. The officer, an older gent, asked if I knew the speed limit there; I replied 45 and he said no, it’s 35, but you were doing 45 exactly. I think he liked that at least I was observing my own imaginary speed limit, and for extra credit was wearing a white shirt and tie. He let me go with a warning.

One Sunday morning future wife Mimi and I were headed down Park Avenue in East Orange. It was early, traffic was light, and I was speeding. From a long block away, I spotted a cop on traffic duty, standing on the corner in front of a church. I tried to slow down, but not soon enough, and he stepped into the road to flag me down. Oddly, he was wearing motorcycle boots and the whole strap-across-the-chest deal, but seemed to be on foot. He walked up to the window and I rolled it down. As soon as the window was down, future wife leaned across me and demanded, “Where’s your motorcycle?” Oh shit, I thought, this isn’t going to end well. He replied with something like, “Oh, hi there!”, and went on to explain to her that he had had an accident with his motorcycle, and until it was repaired he was on traffic duty. “Damn!” I said as we drove away. “You know everybody.”

For the sake of completeness, I’ll mention the NYPD subway cop who refused to give me directions when I asked him the same question, at the same location, two days in a row. His response, “Same as I told you yesterday”, is a perfect example of the New York City attitude; it runs deep in the blood and I can’t fault him. In fact, I don’t bear a grudge against any of the cops mentioned here, except for that one sick bastard in Newark Penn Station.

2018-04-242024-07-27

Pop’s store

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.

“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.

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.”

2018-04-282024-07-27

No one under18 admitted

Miss Lili St. Cyr, courtesy famousboard.com

Some of the older guys in our group would make an occasional trip to one of the burlesque houses in Newark, either Minsky’s or the Empire. The minimum age for admission was 18, so that left me out.

Later I learned the dancers at Minsky’s would show their breasts sometimes, not so much at the Empire. At Minsky’s, a headliner like Lili St. Cyr might have hers out for most of her act. Wowzers.

And, oh yeah, there were some great comics, too.

Comics doing a bit, courtesy burlesquebabes.wordpress.com

At intermission, the house lights came up and the ushers walked the aisles, hawking overpriced candy and Crackerjack. Sometimes we’d spot one of our teachers in the audience – once Mr. Tischler, who taught social studies; on another occasion Professor Lewis, who taught biology.

I don’t know how Professor Lewis came to be called “Professor”, but that’s what they called him, even the other teachers. Maybe he lost a college position and the high school decided he could keep the title.

In class, the Professor was always dropping things and trying to look up the girls’ skirts – especially the skirt of Grace Scuderi, who sat in the front row and seemed cooperative and well aware of what the Professor was up to.

Sorry, I got ahead of myself there, let’s backtrack.

Being only 16, I worried that if I joined my friends on one of their expeditions, my age might be challenged, so I made a fake birth certificate. I already had an official one, so I knew how it should look. I sent to Newark for two fresh copies (one extra in case I made a mistake), and set to work.

The handwriting on the forms was just regular fountain pen ink. A quick dip in diluted laundry bleach made it disappear; the form’s printing and fancy embossed seal of the City of Newark remained. I rented a typewriter from the stationery store next to the library and filled in the now-empty form with my name and an improved birth date. The only thing still missing was the signature of the Newark city clerk. It’s tricky to imitate someone else’s signature, but after a lot of practice I was able to make a decent copy.

Until I got to be really 18, I carried that fake certificate in my back pocket each time we went to Newark. As it turned out, my worries were groundless – my age was never questioned, and I never needed to show it. But always, in the back of my mind, was the fear that I might need to show it one day, and I’d hear “Wait a minute, that’s not the signature of Harry S. Reichenstein!”