RIOTS
During my years in Newark I witnessed the good and the bad. This was the ugly.
MEMOIR
RIOTS
It was a summer’s morning in 1967. The buses were running late, and I soon found out why. I think it was the lack of knowledge I had that morning that, helped in part, to make me the news junkie that I am today.
I was in college now, and had two summer jobs, I still had my job at the newsstand working my usual Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights. I had also started a new job. With a strong interest in science, I was studying biochemistry in college and wanted to find a job where I could gain some kind of practical laboratory training. I wrote to all the hospitals I could think of in the Newark area and asked if there was a lab job available. To my great surprise I got a positive reply from Presbyterian Hospital and an offer to work in their hospital laboratory. I found out later that most of the summer positions went to doctor’s children, and at the last moment, someone decided that the job was not for them. I guess my letter must have shown up at just the right time.
When I reported for work at Presbyterian Hospital to begin my summer job, I was shown into one of many small rooms that made up the hospital laboratory and was giver the job of dipping urinalysis sticks into urine samples and told that someday I might be able to spin down the urine and look at it under the microscope. This was not the exciting summer job that would bring me the lab experience that I had hoped to gain. But beggars can’t be choosers so I decided to stick it out for the summer. After a few days of dipping into urine, someone came around the lab and asked for volunteers to go across the street and work in the Children’s Hospital that was affiliated with Presbyterian. I figured that the job could not get more boring than what I was doing now, so off I went.
After I had volunteered, people around me told me that I had made a major mistake and that soon I would see the error of my ways.
The next day I showed up for work at Children’s Hospital and asked for directions to the lab. When I found it, I was greeted not by a huge anonymous operation, but a rather small room with just a bench for each area such as urinalysis, hematology, along with microbiology and blood chemistry. The hospital was fairly small so I should have anticipated this but, of course, I didn’t. I did find out why I had been discouraged from coming to this lab. For there was no place to hide and you really had to work.
With a little training, I went from dipping urinalysis sticks to doing all the complete urinalysis for the hospital every day, making out the reports and initialing them. If the doctors only knew who W.T. was, would they have been surprised. After I was done with the urine, I would drift over to blood chemistries and with some training was soon reporting results from that bench. I was having a ball. And as the summer progressed and some of the technicians went on vacations, I was covering all the urinalysis and blood chemistries. This was also before the days of strict laboratory practices when dealing with human samples. I was mouth pipeting human serum and plasma with what are now old fashioned glass pipettes and of course wore no gloves, but I had a great time and felt I really contributed something because they were so short-staffed.
I began my workday at the hospital laboratory at 8 o’clock in the morning, worked till about four then went home, and on my days at the newsstand, had something to eat and worked at the newsstand from 6 to 11 P.M.
One morning when I knew I would be working both jobs, I prepared to go to work at the hospital. My main task was to have some breakfast and get to the bus stop on time. I seldom had time for the news. The buses ran fairly regularly, but for some reason today the bus was late – very late. Finally, when I did see the bus coming, my bus was part of a convoy of about four buses. So I got on, found a seat and was ready for the usual thirty to forty minute ride to work, but this ride would be different than any ride to work that I had had before.
As I rode past the intersection of Broad & Market Streets, and past the newsstand where I was to work that night, I could see flames rolling out of the storefronts of some of the nearby businesses. The streets were crowded with fire engines and police cars. The streets were unusually full of activity.
Once I made it to the hospital, I found out what was going on, riots had broken out in Newark, starting the night before in the downtown area. All that day I could look down on the street from the lab window and see convoys of state police cars and jeeps with mounted and manned machine guns, a truly eerie sight to witness in your hometown. During the workday, I called my boss at the newsstand and asked if he was going to stay open that night. At first he said he would but later changed his mind, much to my relief. I think that in all the years I worked there, this was the first time the newsstand had been closed without there being a major snowstorm.
That afternoon, instead of catching the bus home, my cousins called and asked if I would want to be picked up after work, that sounded pretty good to me. While riding home, I saw sandbag emplacements with machine guns in the middle of the downtown area. The city had changed – scarred forever. Anger that had long been buried rose into full view. I also found out the next day that a man had been shot and killed at my bus stop.
The nights in the Down Neck section were quiet for the next few days due to the curfew in effect for all of Newark. Our area of the city, being far from the riots, was like a ghost town. There was no activity on the streets at all.
I have not recently revisited the area of the riots, so I have no idea what the area looks like now. I do remember that for years after the riots, once the burned-out homes and stores were torn down, the lots remained vacant, whole city blocks where nothing existed, only the rubble of human folly, anger and injustice.
One can only imagine how lives were changed forever on that day that the buses ran late.
SUNDAY DRIVES
MEMOIR
SUNDAY DRIVES
There existed a tradition back years ago that has not survived to the present, at least not to the extent that it existed back then – the Sunday drive. With today’s complex society and fast-paced lifestyles, to say nothing of gas prices, no one just drives for the sake of driving, unless you’re a teenager with a brand-new car. Every time you get in the car there is a definite destination at the end of the trip. But when I was a kid, many times the trip would start at home and finish at home with nothing in between except burning gas.
On Sunday afternoons my family would pile into the old Chevy and off we would go, unencumbered by seat belts, piled high with blankets if the drive was during the winter – which was rare. The blankets were necessary because, back then, heaters were an option and our Chevy was a bare-bones model. The route we took was more or less the same every week. It got to where I would know when my father would turn, when we would change lanes, never straying from the usual Sunday afternoon course.
We would leave our house in the city and venture out into the ‘country’. For me, the country was anywhere where the houses did not sit one beside the other, places with lawns and an occasional open field and a total lack of any kind of industry. On our journey we would go, past housing developments and until finally sighting an open field or pasture. We would journey down roads bordered by store after store, but being Sunday, many of the stores were closed. The only stores open for business were grocery and drug stores.
You see, these were the days of the ‘blue laws’ in New Jersey. On Sunday, there were certain items you could buy and certain items you couldn’t. For example, you could buy food but not any type of clothing. We had these huge Wal Mart type stores that sold everything, the section that sold food was open but there were ropes across the aisles that sold clothes. This could be the reason for Sunday drives! You see malls did not yet exist – and if they had most of the stores would be closed or at least partially roped off. We all know, especially those of us lucky enough to have teenagers, that the mall is The Destination. There were also small shore communities that would, on Sundays, put sawhorses across the streets leading into town. No cars allowed on the streets on Sunday.
Our journey would last long, hours, but they were never far. My father was the opposite of a lead-footed driver. He was more of a feather foot. It was before the interstate highway system came into existence, so speedy travel did not exist as it does today and my father was not a fast driver. There were times we would take a ride ‘down the shore’ towards Asbury Park. My mother would pack a lunch and halfway there we would pull over onto the shoulder and eat, then continue on our trip. When I was older, and started to drive, I would retrace this journey and it would take me less than an hour.
There was, however, one detour that we kids loved. On our Sunday drives, we would occasionally make a stop at the doughnut man’s bus. This was before there were any doughnut store chains. This made the outing a great joy for everyone. The man had bought a school bus and converted it into a mobile doughnut shop – complete with cooking facilities. He parked his brown and white school bus on the shoulder of a four-lane highway – always the same place of course – and sell doughnuts, either plain or powdered sugar. How we kids loved those doughnuts, most of the time still warm. One of the kids would get out with mom to go up to the window to make the doughnut purchase. If he saw a kid, he would present the buyer with a bag of doughnut pieces – mistakes that occurred during the doughnut making. And of course the bag of doughnut pieces was free. I know people like that still exist. Business people whose bottom line is to see a child’s eyes light up, but they are few and far between.
The other destination that might be visited was the driving range. This stop I could never figure out – not to this day. Here was my father, a toggler in a tannery, who to the best of my knowledge, had never even been on a golf course, stopping to hit some golf balls. I never even saw my father play miniature golf, but there were the Triznas at the driving range hitting buckets of balls. I of course would aim for the jeep driving around with its protective cage gathering the golf balls, later on I actually would hit for distance. I can’t remember how long our driving range phase lasted, a few months, maybe a year, but it soon slipped into the past. As we got older we kids played miniature golf. But after our driving range phase was over, my father did not pick up a golf club again.
GRANDPARENTS
MEMOIR
GRANDPARENTS
My father’s mother and father lived only a few miles from us in Hillside, New Jersey. But driving from Newark to their house was like entering a different world.
They came to this country from Czechoslovakia, although my father’s birth certificate listed his parent’s home country as Hungary. The boarders of European countries frequently changed in the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to World War I. They brought with them one daughter and first settled in Newark and then moved to Hillside, which was where my father was raised.
Hillside is a quiet community composed of one and two family houses giving it a less dense population than my area of Newark. It had some industry, Bristol Myers had a plant located along the main street of this small community, but for the most part it was a quiet place to live. And even though my grandparent’s street ran perpendicular to the Bristol Myers location, there was very little through traffic. It was a quiet street and to me a place of refuge.
My grandparents owned a double lot with a small house on one side and a garden and lawn on the other. My grandmother loved flowers, especially roses. I recall two long rows of flowers with space between for tending and weeding. The garden area facing the street was where the rose bushes grew. She had a large assortment of types and whenever we visited we usually came away with a bouquet of roses.
We would visit on summer evenings after we were finished with supper. After driving for ten or fifteen minutes, we would be parked in front of their house. Now, in reality, we would be visiting only my grandmother for my grandfather would be fast asleep. Every day of the year, for as long as I could remember, he would be in bed by five o’clock. He would have an early dinner then go into the cellar for his one cigarette and his one bottle of beer for the day, then off to bed. When we arrived, we would pull out the chairs stored under the back stairs and talk with my grandmother, watching the evening approach and looking out at the lightning bugs.
Life was slow-paced there. You didn’t feel the underlying tenseness that you felt many times while walking Newark’s streets. Even as a young boy I could feel the relaxation coming on as we entered Hillside.
When I was perhaps ten years old, I started going to my grandparents for summer vacations. I was the only child in my family to do this. I would pack my things and spend a week in Hillside, an oasis to me, a change of pace from the city life in Newark.
There were a few boys my age that lived on my grandparent’s street. My first few summers there I spent in the garden catching butterflies by day and lightning bugs at night. During the summer, even in Newark, the bathroom window would be crammed with jars full of various insects and spiders – all for the study of a pre teenage boy. But after a couple of years catching insects in my grandparent’s yard, I ventured out onto their street and made friends with a couple of the other kids in the neighborhood. Then one summer I spent most of my week on the other kid’s front porches, just hanging out, talking and spitting. For some reason they all spit a lot and I acquired the habit.
Another favorite pastime of my vacations in Hillside was walks with my grandfather. We would set out for long walks in the neighborhood or sometimes we would walk to Weequahic Park, more than a mile away, so this was a real adventure. He must have been in his 70’s by then. He always seemed to be rather formally dressed for walks with dark pants and dress shirts, no shorts and tee shirts for grandpa. And he always wore high-topped shoes that would crunch small stones on the sidewalk, for some reason that crunching sound has stayed with me all these years, the confident step of an elderly man who knew the way, and allowed me to follow. His eyesight was poor, the result of his profession, an engraver. He also had this way of clearing his throat whenever he was about to say something
On our long walks we would talk, but I never got to know my grandfather, not really know him, he never talked about himself. This was long before men were supposed to bear their souls, beat drums and hug. The same was true of my father, never really talked much about what was important to him in his own life, and to some extent the same is true with me. Many times, when there is something really important to me I tend not to discuss it; although I’m sure my children would agree that I can beat a subject to death over dinner. But sometimes the overwhelming daily grind and my personality get in the way of really communicating. So looking back on those walks and my life with my father, I am truly their grandson and son.
A POEM FOR MY GRANDMOTHER
ROSES
Roses were her love,
Great flowing rainbows of pink, red and white.
Her children, their children would come
And each take home
A fist full of gaily-colored affection.
Roses were her love,
And when rest had finally come from roses
Roses were hers,
Elegant creations of empty colors
Looking out on empty eyes.
Roses were her love,
And now her small garden
Has yet to discover
A rose.
THE NEWARK DRIVE-IN
MEMOIR
THE NEWARK DRIVE IN
On the far eastern edge of Newark, tucked between the Jersey City and New York City bound bridges, stood the Newark Drive In. The drive in was directly under the flight path of nearby Newark Airport, which tended to make listening to the movie something of a challenge. When approaching the drive in, you were greeted by the swampy, musty smell of Newark Bay. A resident of ‘The Dumps’ (what the locals called the area surrounding the theater) added to the odors of its refineries and sewage treatment plants to the ambiance of the area.
The drive in was surrounded by a tall wooden fence marking its boundaries with a total lack of landscaping of any kind, being true to the Newark life style – bare essentials is all that you get.
On warm summer nights my family would pack into the old Chevy with food and pillows and head to the drive in. The smaller kids would already be in their pajamas in anticipation of not making it to the second movie of the double feature. Being the oldest, I was given the opportunity to sit up front and in those days of front seats being bench seats, providing plenty of room.
Arriving at the drive in just before dusk, my dad paid and was given the PIC and off we would go. PIC was an insect repellent product. It was a flat spiral affair. You lit the end and it would give off a pungent aroma daring mosquitoes to venture near. I really don’t know if it worked because we would also douse ourselves with insect repellent to ward off the visitors from the nearby swamps.
During this period, mosquito-borne encephalitis (sleeping sickness) was a constant threat. On summer nights in Newark, trucks would go through the city streets emitting clouds of insect repellent.
On these same summer nights in our flat, ineffective screens would keep all but the largest and dumbest insects out of our house. When all were in bed, my mother would walk the length of our flat spraying insect repellent while telling all of us to close our eyes. As we lay in bed, you could feel the particles of spray falling on your body.
Once in the theater, we’d find our spot and park the car at just the right angle on the mound that ran the length of the theater to get a perfect view of the screen for everyone. The smaller kids, in their pajamas, would head for the playground and run around till they couldn’t see what they were doing which also indicated that it was time for the movie to begin.
One movie I recall seeing was entitled Macabre. The movie was supposed to be so scary that you were issued a life insurance policy when you entered the drive in. It was good for the length of the movie and if you should be unlucky enough to die of a fright-induced heart attack during the movie you collected, or you next of kin anyway. The movie was a real bomb; the cartoon was scarier. I wondered though what would have happened if someone would have dropped dead of your usual run-of-the-mill heart attacks.
There was always an intermission between movies, time to advertise the goodies available at the snack bar. The screen would be full of dancing hot dogs and talking cups of soda all counting down the fifteen minutes till the next show. The audience was your typical Newark crowd, the women in their smocks and the dads in their handlebar tee shirts. They thrived on meat and potatoes, with hot dogs and sodas would be your typical snack. But one snack that was advertised every time I went to the drive in was Flavo Shrimp Rolls. The only place you could buy a Flavo Shrimp Roll was at the drive in, they did not exist outside their gates. I’m sure you could get other shrimp rolls someplace else in Newark, maybe in the small China Town on Mulberry Street, but I don’t think your typical Newark crowd ate many shrimp rolls. But up there on the screen, after the hot dogs had danced off you could see the cartoon characters lining up for their Flavo Shrimp Rolls. I think we actually bought one once, only once. It was a deep-fried affair running in grease. I would wonder who looked at the crowd coming into the drive in and said to himself, “These people will buy up Flavo Shrimp Rolls like there’s no tomorrow.”
The Newark Drive In is gone now, long gone. Last I heard, a movie theater stands where the drive in once existed. And I’m sure with the demise of the drive in went the opportunity for anyone to buy a Flavo Shrimp Roll.
READERS AND WRITERS CORNER
READERS AND WRITERS CORNER
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