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WALT TRIZNA: THE NEWARK DUMPS

THE NEWARK DUMPS

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 surrounding the port, all that was left was a hint of what was once the ocean’s promise.

Port Newark lacked that promise, referred to as “The Dumps”.  The area surrounding the dock was the home to tank farms, sewage treatment plants, junkyards and the polluting 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 of the city and sit by the water’s edge.  We would park along one of the perimeter roads and look at the freighters and container ships, from countries we could only dream of visiting – distant lands holding even more distant dreams.  On one road where we usually parked, you sat between the runways of Newark Airport and the moored vessels. This was before the age of jet airliners – props and turboprops ruled the skies.  If you watched enough airplane fly overhead, you would eventfully see a four-engine plane flying with one propeller lazily turning indicating engine trouble.

Sometimes, before heading for ‘The Dumps’, we would stop for a pizza. There was this elderly Italian man – he must have been at least fifty 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.

On hot summer nights, armed with a pizza, we would go ‘Down the Dumps’, to see the ships and watch the airplanes land and dream of distant cities and lands far away.

On weekends the roads of the port were mostly deserted, 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 seat belts 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.

  ‘The Dumps’ also was the site of two excursions that occurred when I was young.  Both were odysseys that have stayed with me, the details slightly blurred, but with time an impression remains.

Before I describe these adventures, there was another activity which we did for entertainment during the summer.  We went to the dumps to go fishing.  Now the fishing we did down the dumps was not your usual type of fishing.  In involve neither a pole, fishing line or hooks.  The fish we were after were kellies.  I don’t know if this was the actual name of the fish, but kellies is the name we know them by.  I do not know if they were saltwater fish for they inhabited tributaries near the ocean, perhaps they were freshwater for the flow of these bodies of water may have been going to the ocean, but kellies they were, and we caught them.  They were no more than two to four inches long and gray in color with a light underbelly.  No kaleidoscope of color for the fish surrounding the waters of Newark.  We usually went fishing after dinner, trading the heat of summer for the breeze coming off the water giving some relief from the hot day.  We would pile into the car, and my dad would head for ‘the Dumps’ trying to find a spot on the water near the bay or one of the various channels running through the dumps to the port.

Once we had located the ideal spot with only a small drop down to the water, we started to fish.  These were to days of delivering milk to the door.  Early in the morning the milkman would leave quart bottles of milk outside our door and remove the empties; it was the empty milk bottles that we used to fish for Kellies.  Torn-up slices of white bread were used for bait.  We would put bread in the bottle, tie a rope around the bottle’s neck and we were set.  Then sink the bottle in the water and patiently wait.  The waiting was the hardest part for I believe none of us were over ten.  We would wait for what a child thought was a reasonably length of time and then pull the bottle up, and if you were lucky, you had one or two Kellies swimming around in your milk bottle.  Any fish we caught we took home but they were short-lived pets.  Housed in a fishbowl, the next morning would find them all be floating belly-up, always.  We did not go fishing for Kellies often, but it was an adventure for us but misery for the Kellies.

Now for my dumps’ odysseys, my adventures that took place there.  They were journeys in more ways than one; one occurred when I was about ten and the other when I was about thirteen.  I now live in the suburbs where the houses have large yards and manicured lawns.  There is crime but it is usually minor and occurs at the malls which they never stop building.  Yet in this environment whenever our girls leave the house we want to know where they are going and whom they will be with.  When I was young I can’t recall being interrogated every time I left the house.  We were just going out to play, and if there was a plan it was not usually related to our parents.  If we were going far from home we would tell our mom where we were going, but all us kids just seemed to come and go.

The first journey to the dumps involved my sister Judy and I and two kittens.  Everyone knows I do not care for cats even though we have two living with the family now.  Our oldest cat is a pure white named Stimpy.  We adopted him when the woman who found him, as a tiny kitten lying next to his mother who had been hit by a car, determined that she was allergic to cats.  Stimpy has been with us for about ten years and has grown to be a big old cat.  The other cat in our family is Sally.  She was adopted by Lynn two years ago from the SPCA and is definitely Lynn’s cat.  She follows Lynn like a shadow wherever Lynn goes and wants nothing to do with me.  Sally will jump on my lap during the rare times when no one else is available.

 I can tolerate cat, but they are not my favorite animals.   When I was nine or ten I, and my sister Judy, who is three years younger, somehow obtained two kittens.  They were mostly black with some white markings and were very young.  Of course, we wanted to keep them, and I think we did for a day or two but it soon was discovered they were infested with fleas, for the whole family started to scratch.  Our parents said they had to go.  I now think of myself as an organized person.  My career has been in science for years now.  Every day I must deal with a vast amount of detail when I conduct my experiments and look for a successful outcome.  Back at the tender age of nine or ten details were not something I bothered with much.

 I told Judy I had a plan, a plan that would allow us to keep the kittens and no one would know anything about it.  Unfortunately, my plan lacked any detail.  I decided where we could safely keep them; we would take them down ‘the Dumps’.  We would build a shelter for them, and they would be safe, and we could visit them whenever we wanted.  And the place we would keep them was only two or so miles away – perfect.  How would they be fed or watered, where would they go to the bathroom, what happened if some of the wild dogs that populated the dumps found their hideout?  What happened if the weather turned bad?  These were details that my young mind did not consider.  Judy and I took some cat food and the kittens telling my parents that we were going to get rid of them but not telling them what my excellent plan was.

We set out down our street, Christie Street, towards ‘the Dumps’.  Our little legs took us past part of the Ballantine brewery complex.  We walked past the projects on Hawkin’s Street.  We walked under a darkened bridge where people parted with couches and other items no longer deemed useful, and reached the boarder of the dumps, which also meant the end of the sidewalks.  On we walked past a factory making headstones and other works from quarried stone.  We passed more factories, getting closer and closer to our destination.  Finally, we were in area of ‘the Dumps’ I decided it would be a perfect place to keep the kittens.  The site of our kitten sanctuary was across the street from the future site of the Newark Drive In, but that was still a year or two in the future.  We gathered pieces of wood and old crates and soon had shelter for our kittens.  As safe and secure as a nine- and six-year-old could hope for.  Once we were happy with our construction we put the kittens inside, left them some food but no water, we were unable to carry water, sealed up any exits and started our journey home.  We knew we had done the right thing.  We could keep the kittens and visit them whenever we wanted.  We only had to walk two miles each way.

We arrived home after being gone what must have been hours, and no one asked us where we had been.  I don’t know who broke first, but it was probably my sister.  The beans were spilled, the plan revealed, the journey exposed.  We all piled into the car to rescue the kittens from their secure abode.  As we approached the shelter we could hear their cries, they were still there.  We released them from their shelter and took them home but did not keep them; I do not remember what their final fate was only our attempt to save them down ‘the Dumps’, was a failure.  What I took away from that experience was that a plan without the details worked out might not be a good plan or maybe not even a plan at all. 

My next journey down the dumps came a few years later and was of a completely different nature.  This excursion took place with two other guys, one of which was my good friend Billy.  He told me he had explored an area on the edge of the dumps which contained a hobo camp, and that he was going again and did I want to come along.  Of course I wanted to go, exploring a hobo camp on a Saturday afternoon seemed like a brilliant idea.  The fact that we would be violating someone else’s home and property never entered our young minds.  Also, the fact that the hobos might be home was never considered. We were on a mission, an exploration.  After telling my mother I was going for a walk with my friends and would be back in a while, we set out on our adventure.

It was a good two or three mile walk to our destination.  Our journey took us to the more industrial edge of the dumps.  We walked past a series of large and small factories towards the far end of Wilson Avenue and our destination.  The hobo camp was located behind the East Side High School football stadium, the high school I was soon to attend.  The high school was located nowhere near the stadium, with land being at a premium, they located the stadium near the edge of the dumps.  After I left East Side High School, in a stroke of genius, they decided to build a new stadium.  The old stadium had plenty of parking. The new stadium, nestled among factories and an elevated railroad track, no closer to the school than the old stadium, had absolutely no parking at all, all the parking would have to be on the street.  I’m sure the residents of the homes that bordered the area of the stadium really look forward to football games.

This was a journey of discovery for me, exploring the hobo camp and discovering more while we walked and talked.  Somehow along the way, the conversation turned to sex with the introduction of the subject of how babies are born or more importantly conceived.  My friends asked me if I knew the facts concerning conception.  This was something I had thought about and felt I had it all figured out so I shared my knowledge with them.

You see I’m the oldest in my family and witnessed my mother’s other pregnancies.  I guess it was when my mother was pregnant with my brother, the youngest and ten years my junior, that I really started noticing things and figuring out what was going on.  I noticed that my mother started taking a strange pill when she was pregnant with my brother.  It all made sense.  To get pregnant you took pills, sold of course only to married women.  When the baby was to be born, a flap of skin opened on the women’s belly, the baby was born, and the skin healed over.  I shared this knowledge with my friends, and I thought they would wet their pants with laughter.

They now told me their idea of the matter of conception, and they were more on the mark than I was.  Oh no, pills did not get you pregnant; a far different deed did the job.  I was in shock.  My parents would never do the things described to me, described in great detail I might add.  And if somehow, someway even a little of what they told me was true; I surely would never perform what was needed to become a father.  My pill theory made so much more sense, my world was turned completely upside-down.  My young mind had a great deal to digest after this momentous walk.

This conversation caught my attention, and before I knew it, we were approaching the hobo jungle.  Soon we had the football stadium in sight.  I was familiar with the area long before the stadium was built for this was also the location of Rupert Stadium.  Rupert Stadium was the home of the Newark Bears, a minor league baseball team.  After the team folded, they transformed the stadium into a track for stock car races, which I attended with my father when I was quite young. 

Behind the football stadium, off in a large area of small hills and high grass was a series of small sheds made from whatever materials were available.  In this area there was a large mound of broken glass, which knows why, but my friends thought this added an important ambiance to the area.  To get to the hobo camp we had to cross a fairly wide stream, but there was a large plank set across the stream, so crossing was not a problem.  Did a flag go up in my young mind?  Did a small voice say, “Do you realize, dummy, that this is the only way out?” No small voices that day so of course we continued.  Once in the camp we just walked around observing the hobo lifestyle.  The place was empty, or so we thought.  Suddenly we started yelling at us from the area of the stream crossing. There was a hobo between the only exit and us.  He indicated to us that we were trespassing, more truly intruding in his life.  I don’t remember his exact words but I’m sure they weren’t friendly.  He was right though.  We were intruding on his life and when he stepped away we crossed the plank and beat a hasty retreat.

The adventure was over.  Time to return home to a tired but somewhat wiser individual with new knowledge gained on my walk to the hobo camp.

September 29, 2025 at 11:37 am Leave a comment