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WALT TRIZNA: ANOTHER NEWARK MEMORY

October 29, 2025 at 5:53 pm Leave a comment

                                                            SCRAPPING HISTORY

Located on the eastern boarder of Newark is Newark Bay, a body of water leading out to the Atlantic Ocean.  I have always loved the smell of the ocean, the proximity of primal life.  However, by the time the ocean’s water mixed with the additions contributed by the factories, all that was left was a hint of what was once the ocean’s promise.

Located at the water’s edge is Port Newark, an area that we had always referred to as “The Dumps”.  The area surrounding the dock was the home of tank farms, sewage treatment plants, junkyards and a few factories.  It did not take a great stretch of the imagination to determine how “The Dumps” got its name.  On hot summer nights, the family would pile into the old Chevy and take a ride “down the dumps”.  It was a chance to escape the heat, get a change of scenery for what it was worth and hour or two away from the house.

We would park along one of the perimeter roads and look at the freighters and container ships, some from countries we could only dream of visiting – distant lands holding even more distant dreams.  On one of the roads where we usually parked, if you turned 180 degrees you could see the runways of Newark Airport. This was before the age of jet airliners – props and turboprops ruled the skies.  If you watched enough airplane fly overhead, I always looked up at the sound of their engines, you would sometimes see a four-engine plane flying with one propeller lazily turning, a sure sign of engine trouble.  Sometimes, when we were really extravagant, we would stop for a pizza before taking our ride.

There was this elderly Italian man – he must have been at least fifty – who decided to open a pizzeria.  So, what did he do?  He rented a garage, bought a pizza oven, a couple of small tables, and he was in business.  The garage was a freestanding cinderblock structure containing three one-car garages.  He rented one of the end garages, cut a door through the garage door and this served as the entrance.  Located on a narrow street, not more than an alley, it was a far cry from today’s chain-store pizza establishments.  Each pizza had a bubbly hard crust and stood as an individual creation – nothing massed-produced here.

Later, when the quality of his product became known, he rented the adjoining garage, knocked down part of the common wall and expanded.  Could this happen today, with all the zoning laws and chain-store competition, I don’t think so.  But back in the fifties he thrived and produced great pizzas.

So, on hot summer nights, perhaps armed with a pizza, we would go ‘Down the Dumps’, to see the ships and watch the airplanes land.  We could escape our tiny house and dream of a world that we might never see as we gazed at the ships and planes coming from and bound for far-off lands and distant cities.

On weekdays after supper was done, and on weekends, the roads of the port were mostly deserted.  With its many roads and parking lots, this area was an ideal place to learn to drive.  It was along one of these deserted roads that I almost put my father through the windshield.  While driving on one of these roads he instructed me to stop, not yet acquainted with the feel of the brakes, I performed this maneuver rather aggressively.  My early driving lessons occurred long before seatbelts were standard equipment, hence my aggressiveness resulted in my father flying unrestricted around the car.  I finally learned to drive some years later on the back roads of Alabama, after I had already learned to fly an airplane, but that’s another story.

At the northern end of Newark Bay there were a series of bridges leading to Jersey City and on to New York.  It was from the first of these bridges that you could look down on a complex devoted to scrapping ships for their iron and other metals of value.  It was during the 70’s that I remember this area looking like a floating World War II naval museum.  There would be row upon a row of Liberty Ships awaiting the scrappers’ torch.  There would be a destroyer and the occasional heavy cruiser.  Ships bathed in history waiting for oblivion.  I know they could not all be saved, but it saddened me to see history reduced to a dollar value.   It had been some thirty years since the war had ended; time enough for the whole-scale destruction of military equipment that routinely occurs after the conclusion of a war.  Yet there before my eyes floated a living history soon to be no more, it would be gone forever.

I witnessed the destruction of one ship, which touched me deeply.  This ship was perhaps the most famous American ship of World War II and for years the Japanese sought its destruction.  If ever a ship was worth preserving, to serve as a floating monument to the struggles of the United States Navy during World War II, this was the ship.

During my youth, I devoured books about airplanes; I read everything I could about aviation during World War I and World War II.  I rarely read books about ships, but my love for aviation led me to read one book that I have longed to read again.  To this day, when I get circulars in the mail advertising military books I always look for that title that impressed me in my youth.  The title of the book was THE BIG E, the story of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and that was the ship I saw doomed to the scrappers torch.

Having known its history, I could not believe that I was witnessing its destruction.  I would think back to the drama, the life and death struggles that occurred on that ship, but soon it would be no more.  More than once the Enterprise was reported sunk by the Japanese navy, but having been severely damaged in battle this great ship lived on to fight another day.  I know there were many ships during World War II, whose stories echoed with bravery and glory, but I knew the story of the Enterprise and this to me gave it a closeness I could not feel for the other ships torn apart.  There were many ships scrapped at this yard, but the only one I saw mentioned by name in the newspaper was Enterprise.  I was sorry to witness the loss to history of this great ship, but I was glad I had the opportunity to see such an important piece of our naval and aviation heritage.

Entry filed under: BIO, memoir, REMEMBERANCES, Walt Trizna, Walt Trizna's Stories, WALT'S OBSERVATIONS. Tags: fiction, history, memoir, military aircraft, military ships, Newark, science fiction, travel, Walt Trizna, World War I, World War II, writing.