Posts tagged ‘Newark’
NEWARK RIOTS
A scar on my memory
It was a summer 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 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, and I had started a new job. With a strong interest in science, I am 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 after I had started the job 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, and 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. So, 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 and blood chemistry. The hospital was fairly small so I should have anticipated this but, of course, I didn’t. But 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 chemistry 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 vacation, I was covering all the urinalysis and blood chemistry. This was also before the days of strict laboratory practices when dealing with human samples. I was mouth pipetting 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, had something to eat and worked at the newsstand from 6 to 11 P.M. I awoke one morning when I knew I would be working both jobs and got ready 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 usually 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. There also seemed to be more activity than normal on the streets.
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 and that sounded pretty good to me. While riding home, you 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 revisited the area of the riots for years, 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 when the buses ran late.
NEWARK: SUNDAY DRIVES
A long gone tradition.
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 are 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 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 it was 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. Businesspeople 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.
NIGHTS WITH JEAN SHEPERD AND CRIPPLED JOE
NIGHTS WITH JEAN SHEPERD
AND CRIPPLED JOE
It was a time before cell phones, before computers and instant messages. It was a time before people felt obligated to be at the beck and call of anyone who has anything to communicate no matter how insignificant the information might be. To many today, the ability to communicate – to use technology – is more important then the content of what they have to say.
The past was a time of relative freedom, when you hen people did not feel uncomfortable to be out of the loop, for to a great extent the loop did not yet exist. We were individuals, not part of a grid. It was a time when people were allowed to live their lives without the constant intrusions that today we consider to be normal – no telemarketers, no SPAM. You could answer the phone at dinnertime and be fairly sure it was someone you wanted to talk to instead of someone trying to sell you something.
Growing up, my family did not have a phone. We lived in a four-family house and only one family had a phone, a family on the second floor of our two-story house, and you only asked to use it if there was a real emergency. I’m talking seizure or some other life-threatening event. About the time I entered my teenage years we did get a phone, but in those days it was on a party line, and, with our plan, you were limited to thirty calls a month, then you paid extra for every call over thirty. Imagine those limitations today in a family of six that included two girls.
But don’t get me wrong, when I was young the exchange of information was important – there was just so much less of it. Or maybe it is that today, what we call information is not information at all, only considered information by those who generate it.
I watched my share of TV while growing up, maybe more than my kids do now, but I would never admit that to them. I listened to the radio, there always seemed to be a radio on in the house. That is why now, when I hear just the first few bars of a song from the late 50’s or 60’s I can usually share the song’s title and the artist singing with my children although they could care less about this information. I would listen to talk shows. Back in the 60’s, radio seemed to be more genuine, didn’t seem so full of itself, or maybe I was too young to be observant of what I was hearing. These days I still listen to quite a bit of radio, usually National Public Radio when I’m not listening to an oldies station.
I listened to Jean Sheperd broadcasting on WOR weekday nights from 10:45 to 11. What a fantastic storyteller. When he died at the age of seventy-eight, his obituary read, “A Twain of the radio.” He would start each show and off he would go on a forty-five-minute monologue about what it was like when he was growing up in Indiana or his observations of what life was like around him, and you never knew where he would end up by the end of his show. He was genuine, one of life’s observers, and listening to him relate his memories and thoughts was a true treasure. He would conjure up stories of his childhood, remembering things that happened to us all but taking a slightly different slant in his observations and in doing this create those wonderful views of his youth. Jean Sheperd wrote A Christmas Story which is now a Christmas tradition.
I would listen to Jean Sheperd during the final hour of my shift working in a newsstand at the corner of Broad and Market streets, the heart of Newark. I would be counting the papers and magazines and getting the place ready for my relief. I worked at this newsstand for most of my high school and college years and came to know quite a collection of characters. Some were old men haunting the nights on Newark’s streets. Talking to one another, carrying newspapers days old and talking to me because I was a regular of Newark’s night too. One individual, who could have been a character in a novel, was the man who would relieve me, a man with the most impolitically correct name I have ever had the honor to hear – his name was Crippled Joe.
Now Crippled Joe must have been in his 50’s and walked with the use of a cane. His deformity was one leg that had an almost ninety-degree bend in the top before it entered the hip. Crippled Joe had worked for my boss, the owner of the newsstand, for years and years, working the 11 PM to 6 AM shift and he was my relief of the Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays that I worked. And every night all papers and magazines would have to be counted, and the money counted and locked up for Crippled Joe would try to steal whatever wasn’t accounted for, and my boss knew this and that was the relationship they had, Crippled Joe could be trusted as long as he was not given an opportunity not to be trusted.
Joe also had a little side business going. He used to run a numbers racket at the newsstand. Everyone knew about it, my boss, the other workers – everyone, yet every night Joe would complete these secret transactions, and I suppose he really thought they were secret. Men would come up while I was changing over with Joe, whisper something in his ear and handed him some bills but would never take a newspaper or magazine. Being just fifteen or sixteen when I started to work, and quite naive, I soon figured out what was going on and used to think it funny that, after all the years I worked there, every night he would still try to hide these transactions.
I worked year-round while in high school and summers while in college. The newsstand was a good-sized booth with the front open to about waist level. We sold all the Newark and New York City papers. Back then Newark had two daily papers and New York at least five. We sold comics and magazines and some kind of dream cards that told you which numbers you should play according to the dreams you were having. Working at the newsstand during the winter was a real challenge. The wind would whip around into the booth, and all the papers had to be held down with heavy metal weights. The change was kept in a metal change holder, a series of metal cups nailed in front of where you stood in the booth. When it was cold, I mean really cold, the change would freeze to your bare fingertips. You kept gloves on when no one was buying anything, but when the time to make a sale came, off came the gloves and those warm fingers would freeze right to the coins. Snowstorms were a challenge also. I had what some might determine to be a twisted sense of duty. During one particular storm, the snow was drifting against the door inside the booth. We had electric heaters but unless you were right on top of them you froze. I kept the stand open even though no one in his or her right mind was out on a night like this. Finally, I got the word to close down. It was the first time I ever saw the newsstand closed.
During the summers of my high school and early college years I worked days and ran the newsstand for my boss who would drop by once a week to pick up the deposit slips and see how things were going. It was about this time that my well-established hormones began to really kick in and along with fantasies about some of my customers. I can recall one short-haired blond girl, who must have been a secretary, and every day would pick up a paper – perhaps for her boss. I was in college at this time and she was about my age, probably working right out of high school. By the time I would sell her a paper I was dirty with newsprint from the early morning rush hour. I would see her every day, and she would never say a word. Thinking back, it was probably good that she hadn’t for I probably would have answered with some garbled message. So, I would have my fantasies of meeting for a soda after work, maybe a movie but all I did was keep folding her papers and taking her money.
There was another girl I remember but she haunted the nights. I first noticed her while I was still in high school. She was about my age, maybe seventeen, not pretty but not unattractive either. She was very slim with long red hair and would hang out on the corner where I worked. She usually had other kids with her, but she was the oldest. I never knew if the other kids were siblings or just friends. She was not well dressed and just looking at her, you could tell she had very little money. I just wondered what she was doing night after night on that corner. Even now, when I think of her, I can hear Frankie Vallie singing ‘Rag Doll’. I wonder what became of the ‘rag doll’ as I wonder about other people that crossed my path during those nighst and days I spent selling papers.
On Mondays and Wednesdays my shifts were from 6-11PM, but on Fridays I went to work straight from school starting at 3PM and working until 11. I got quite a few stares and have to do some explaining after gym as I was putting on my long johns in preparation for a winter’s night work.
Fridays, I would get home about 11:30 have some dinner and go to bed. My bed by now was a single pull-out bed in the parlor next to the kerosene stove which, during the winter, you could almost sit on and have no fear of injury. The stove was useless. But my radio listening for the day was not yet over, or just beginning, depending on which way you wanted to approach the time of day, for another of my favorite radio shows was about to begin – Long John Nebal whose talk show on WOR radio ran from midnight to about five in the morning. The topics would vary but the subject that stirred my interest was flying saucers. He would sometimes have on his show the editor of Saucer News. Saucer News was a local magazine type publication although calling it a magazine was quite a stretch, and of course I immediately sent away for a subscription. It was just a few pages long and would be filled with pictures of flying saucers along with local sightings and editorial comments. The funny thing was that most of the editorial comments were about the editor’s ongoing divorce. For some reason I’ve always been drawn to slightly wacko subjects, here’s where my kids could provide an editorial.
Anyway, I would listen to these shows as late into the night as I could. Now I wouldn’t use my newsstand radio for that would be a waste of batteries, I used my crystal radio. Let me explain what this is, although my theoretical knowledge may be a little rough. The radio contained a crystal and onto it pressed a thin piece of wire called a cat’s whisker. The pressure generated electricity and it was also the way you tuned in a station, by moving the cat’s whisker around the crystal. My radio was in the shape of a rocket and about six inches long, a black and red beauty. Coming out the rocket were three wires. One wire ended in and alligator clip for the ground, one wire was an earpiece, and the last wire was the antenna. The antenna was rather long, somewhere between twenty and thirty feet and I would stretch it through the whole house before climbing into bed. I tend to toss and turn in my sleep so I would always wake up all wrapped up in the earphone and antenna wire, but no electricity was wasted although every night I listened to my crystal radio I risked death by strangulation.
Looking back, they were rough days, hard days but good days. I was easily entertained. I worked hard, and ever so slowly I matured.
WALT TRIZNA: A NEWARK MEMORY
GRANDPARENTS
My grandparents, my father’s mother and father lived only a few miles outside Newark in Hillside, New Jersey, but they lived in 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 changed in the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to World War I and this might explain discrepancy. 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 mostly 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 grandparents’ street ran perpendicular to the Bristol Myers location, there was very little through traffic. It was a quiet street where you could always find a parking place.
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 remember two long rows of flowers with space between for tending and weeding. The garden area nearest 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 usually visit my grandparents on summer evenings after we were finished with supper. We would climb into the car and in 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. So we would arrive at their house in Hillside, pull out the chairs stored under the back stairs and talk with my grandmother, watching the evening come on and looking out at the lightning bugs.
Life seemed to be 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 vacation. I was the only child in my family that did this. I would pack my things and spend a week in Hillside, which seemed like 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 grandparents’ street. During 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 grandparents’ 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 vacation on Hillside was walks with my grandfather. We would set out for long walks in the neighborhood or sometimes we would walk to Weequahic Park, which was 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 a dress shirt, 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. You could always tell when grandpa was about to say something, which wasn’t often. He had this habit of clearing his throat before he spoke and his voice always sounded a little forced.
On our long walks we would talk, but I really didn’t get to know my grandfather, not really know him, for he never talked about what was important to him. 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.
WALT TRIZNA: ANOTHER NEWARK MEMORY
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.
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.
WALT TRIZNA: ESCAPE FROM THE CITY
There are quite a few more chapters of my memoir I want to share. Along with those posts I will occasionally post opinions, websites and the occasional story to provide some variety. I hope you will find this mixture interesting and worthy of your attention.
ESCAPE FROM THE CITY
As a youngster I was a member of scouts for years, going from Cub Scout to Boy Scout and on to Explorer. Along the way I earned an Eagle Award and learned and explored many things a city boy would not normally encounter. One of the activities I enjoyed the most was the opportunity to go camping.
An hour’s drive northwest of Newark was a Boy Scout campground near Booton, New Jersey. My troop would camp there several times a year, mostly in the winter. Cabins of various sizes dotted the campground. The only source of heat was a fireplace, and cooking was done on a wood-burning stove. One winter, the weather was so cold that the pipes to the old hand pump burst, and we had to melt ice for water. It seemed the harsher the conditions; the more we enjoyed the outing. City boys were facing nature head on.
The camping trips were formal outings organized by troops. The less formal day hikes to the local Boy Scout area located in the South Orange Mountain Reservation, would be organized spontaneously, when a group of us were just hanging around with nothing to do. For a group of boys ranging from maybe eleven to thirteen, these trips were a real adventure. The beauty of these outings was that the city bus could take us to the base of the mountain. No adult input was required, once permission to go was obtained.
We usually caught the bus fairly early in the morning because once we arrived at the base of the mountain; it was at least an hour’s walk up the mountain to the Boy Scout area. Sitting amongst commuters going to work or out to do some shopping, we were ladened with packs and canteens and any other camping paraphernalia we thought we might need. We rode through the Newark downtown area, then north through some of the blighted areas of the city, and finally on to the more affluent suburbs. The bus would leave us in the shopping district of South Orange, where we would start to trudge up the hill to what us city boys considered wilderness. We hiked past stately homes with manicured lawns, a far cry from our homes in Newark. Finally, the houses were replaced with trees and the sidewalks with a dirt shoulder – we were almost there.
Our destination lay down on a dirt road branching from the main highway. The area was large and open, set aside where scouts could build fires and cook their meals. Across a stream bordering the area and up into the trees, stood a few cabins for weekend trips. The day hike area was also supplied with a generous amount of wood provided by work crews trimming trees. For a bunch of boys who thought starting a charcoal fire by themselves was an adventure – this was nirvana.
Everyone’s lunch usually consisted of hot dogs and foil-wrapped potatoes and onions. The fire built to prepare these meager meals was immense to say the least. Once everyone tired of throwing on wood, we had a fire too hot to approach to do any cooking. Either you waited for the flames to die down or had to find a very long stick to cook our hot dogs.
Late afternoon we found us journeying down the mountain to catch the bus home. People on the bus would stare at us because we smelled of smoke on our ride home to Newark.
WALT TRIZNA: DOWNNECK NEWARK
DOWNNECK
I began my life on August 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, the Down Neck section, and lived in that city, in the same house, the same cold water flat for nearly twenty years. This section of Newark is still known by this name for a few years ago, on a train to New York with my wife and two daughters, we passed a sign for a pizza place that stated, ‘ A DOWN NECK TRADITION’. My hometown is along the eastern edge of the city, not far from Newark Bay and the bridges leading into Jersey City. It is also referred to, as the Ironbound Section, gaining its name from the railroad tracks that ring the area and known for the light and heavy industry. Small factories existed amongst the two and four family homes and tenements that predominated the area. The mingling of homes and factories was a mixture ready for disaster. Even the Passaic River, flowing through the area was known to catch fire.
One Good Friday afternoon, during my teenage years, while getting ready for church I noticed the sky turning black. At first I thought a storm was approaching but soon realized that somewhere a huge fire was burning. I went outside to see what was going up in flames. Immediately, I was being joined by scores of people seeking the same exciting rush of a fire. Walking up Ferry Street, one of the major streets of the area, I could see that the coke trestle was on fire. As I approached to within a couple of blocks of the source of all the smoke, fifty-five-gallon drums full of God knows what began to explode. The situation went from the usual spectacle of a fire to people running for their lives as the drums shot flames into the air and rained debris – smoking pieces of trestle – down around the scattering people who had moments before been spectators. Needless to say, everyone got out of there fast. Some had to go home and wet down their roofs because some of the debris and embers were falling and starting other houses on fire. This made for a memorable afternoon; ten to fifteen houses along with the trestle were lost.
Our house was lucky, because we stood literally in the shadows of Balentine Brewery. Across the street from our house was a four-story building, which was part office building, part garage and truck wash located on the lower level. This structure, along with many others on the surrounding city blocks, owned by Balentine, created Newark’s life’s blood, Balentine beer and ale. This building stood between the fire and us, so it bore the brunt of the embers and debris raining down on the houses on my block.
The reason I mention this event is to lend a flavor to what life was like back then, and what life was like in Newark. Life happened and the consequences accepted – right or wrong – that’s how it was and when life went less than perfectly, you just moved on. Life did not always treat people well, but they endured, didn’t whine about their state in life. They took responsibility for their actions. They all didn’t prosper, yet people didn’t step on one another to get ahead.
Things were not always politically correct either. In fact, I cannot recall anything about my time as a youth in Newark that was politically correct. For example, I once had a math teacher toward the end of my high school career with a bit of a temper. One day during class, there were a few guys talking in the rear of the classroom. My teacher blew up. He yelled at the class, “Do you know what is wrong with you guys? Not enough of you drop out of school. If you don’t want to learn, you’re wasting everyone’s time by staying in school. You’re just holding people who want to learn back.” I do not think there exists the honesty today to say that before a class of unruly students.
People were once able to observe the world, analyze their surroundings, draw on their common sense and speak their mind. That age is long gone, but it still echoes Down Neck’s past. The talking heads of today say we all have the same potential if only given the right circumstances or drug therapy. Nonsense! Twelve years or more of education are given free to each member of our society. Granted, the conditions under which the education is applied varies along a wide spectrum. And when there is a breakdown in the educational goals meant to be accomplished, as happens all to often, it is always the fault of the system and never the individual. The usual solution is to throw more money at the problem, but until the real problem is addressed, this will never help. The individual student along with their parents carries the burden of responsibility and the older the student the more directly responsible for their education. These seem to be times of a total lack of responsibility of the individual. Whenever someone makes a really boneheaded move, there is always something that happened to him either done by his family or society that was the cause of that action. We live in a time of not guilty because of whatever reason other than my own actions. Of course, in some cases a person’s life gets completely out of control, but the excuses people create these days for their actions is sometimes unbelievable.
The theory that we all have the same potential also totally negates that one thing that has, in my eyes, an influence equal to education in persons potential, the influence of personality. Those who succeed are those who realize they must seize the opportunity, the knowledge and go forward. It takes personal drive, ambition and purpose along with a strong education. This is the combination that makes a successful individual.
And what is success? This can mean so many different quantities, depending on an individual. Does success mean money, fame, family, a life free of conflict or a life full of conflict and challenge? The levels, the goals we attain, depend to a large extent on education. But what we do when we arrive at our goals and the life we mold around those accomplishments depends on personality.
I know I digress, but the purpose of this effort is to point out my view of the mindset of today and how my upbringing, my environment has formed my mindset. So we’ll return now to my past, to Newark’s past, and see this mindset take form.
Balentine brewery ruled the Down Neck section of Newark, with a major factory and office complex that stretched for blocks. Across from our house was the office and garage. Next to that building was a parking lot that stretched to the next parallel street, and taking up the last third of the block was the catholic school, which was part of Saint Aloysius parish. The brewery’s lot was a remarkable sight when a storm was approaching, with workers just standing there waiting, leaning on their snow shovels looking toward the sky. God help the first snowflake that fell and all its partners for they were gone in an instant. Our street was never clogged with snow; the beer trucks had to roll out of the parking lot unhampered. They did not move the snow they removed the snow, taking and dumping it in the Passaic River. At times, long after the parking lot was cleared of snow, the city streets were opened. The beer was delivered but the city government took a while to get going.
As I mentioned earlier, the building across from our house housed the truck wash for cleaning the beer trucks and the tractor trailer cabs, an endless procession of dark blue trucks sporting three golden rings. Our street was a narrow street with parking on both sides, and the locals knew not to park their cars directly across from the truck wash exit. Now the reason lies in the fact that they knew that instead of coffee breaks some of the drivers took beer breaks. Once the truck was washed, they would have to exit the building and make a sharp left, and sometimes the left was not quite sharp enough, as the unsuspecting person who found a good parking spot and could not figure out why it was vacant found out when they returned to their slightly bent automobiles.
Some of the trucks used for the brewery were themselves interesting. They were old trucks with hard rubber tires and driven by a chain drive connected to the rear axle. But somehow these trucks did not look out of place going down my street because for much of my early youth my street was paved with cobblestone. So, these trucks would rattle down my street carrying their loads of used grain from the brewery, stubbornly resisting progress.
Change seemed to come slowly to Newark in its vehicles and its people. We lived just four blocks from Hawkins Street School. Hawkins Street was a typical ‘Down Neck’ street with parking on both sides and just enough room for two-way traffic. It was the same elementary school my mother attended. In fact, her family once lived across the street from the school. While I was attending elementary school, two of her sisters and a brother, all of whom were unmarried, continued to live in the same two-family house rented by their parents.
While attending Hawkins Street School, I had the same first grade teacher my mother had and after that another two or three teachers that taught her. When we had an open house, and my mother would walk with me through the corridors of the school she once attended, she would point out changes in the school that had been made since she attended. The gym in use while I was there was new, however, the faded markings of the basketball court from the old gym were still on the floor of some of the nearby classrooms.
I have not returned to my grammar school since I graduated, with the exception of one of my sister’s graduations, but I have heard reports of the changes that have taken place from my nieces who also attended Hawking Street School. The changes were not for the best, gone is the library – classrooms, the cafeteria – is being used for classrooms. Changes happen to old cities and schools, and they are not always for the better. But people endure. People who want to learn, who want to succeed, seem to be able to do so in spite of the circumstances, in spite of what life has dealt with them. That is why, to this day, and it seems to increase with age, I have little sympathy for those who complain that everything is not going as it should for them to reach their full potential. I honestly feel that there is something inside us all – call it a spark – call it will or destiny – call it a road we start at birth and end at death, but we must be more than just a traveler, we must take control. Too many times, we look around and see what the world seems to offer and settle for the inevitable. Our future is in our hands if we only have the courage to grasp our potential and pursue our goals.
My mother’s fate was tied to Newark and so was that of some of her friends. I became friends with two boys who were the sons of friends my mother had in school. With one of these friends, I completed twelve years of school. I chanced to meet this friend after I had attended an out-of-state college and spent four years in the military, he had not left home. We no longer had anything in common. It was not the fact that I had left, and he had stayed, people just change.
The old neighborhood seemed to resist change. It was small, compact, and is to some extent to this day. You walked to church, you walked to school, and even downtown Newark was a short bus ride or a healthy walk away from my home. Nowadays, my kids have to be driven everywhere. They make no decision about whether or not to attend mass; I the driver have that power. When I was a kid, you looked out the parlor window and saw the church steeple two blocks away and heaven help you – literally – if you missed church. When you could walk, you were in control.
These are some of the memories, the feelings that remain with me of ‘Down Neck’ Newark, New Jersey. Time tends to erase the harsh memories; time and distance tend to smooth the rough edges. What I wanted to show here was that my hometown was not perfect, it was real. I know that there were better neighborhoods than mine, many not too far away, but I look at where I have come from and what I am and see the mark my youth has left. The past I carry within me, for better or worse, has made me the person that I am. And sometimes, in the situations that life presents, I am glad I carry within me a small part of ‘Down Neck’ Newark, and approach life not to grieve for what I don’t have but rejoicing for what I possess.
WHO IS WALT TRIZNA?
WHO IS WALT TRIZNA?
Who is Walt Trizna? Well, you’re about to find out.
I’m going to occasionally take a break from posting short stories and websites and let you know something about who is responsible for providing these posts.
These posts will be remembrances of my youth growing up in Newark, NJ. There will be sections of a memoir I began in 2000. Next will be memories of my college days, my experiences in the air force and then my career in science.
I have been very lucky that I have had two overlapping careers. As a scientist, I spent thirty-four years working from 1974-2008. I have been working as a writer from 2000 to the present and hopefully beyond.
I hope you will find these posts interesting.
A ST. PATRICK’S DAY MEMORY
Here is a memory I rekindle this time every year.
DOWN NECK ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE
A NEWARK EVENT
During my youth I lived in a section of Newark, New Jersey referred to as the ‘DownNeck’ Section of Newark. The area was also known as the Ironbound Section due to the many factories in the area. The title ‘DownNeck’ was acquired, which I once read, due to the shape of the Passaic River running past the area. And on the Sunday afternoon, nearest to St. Patrick’s Day, the residents of this area and my street, Christie Street, were treated to what had to have been one of the shortest St. Patrick’s Day parades in existence.
The local Catholic Church sponsored the parade, whose steeple I could see from my parlor window. Across the street from my house was the parking lot for the Balentine Brewery’s trucks. Weekdays were filled with the rumble of Balentine Brewery trucks set on the mission to quench the thirst of a parched city. Sunday was a day of rest for the trucks, making the parade possible.
Magically, sometime before the parade, a green line appeared down the center of our street, harbinger of the gala event. I never witnessed this line’s creation, but every year it materialized. At approximately 1:30 in the afternoon the residents began to gather on the sidewalk. Since the brewery and Catholic Church’s school took up one side of the street, the number of residents was few. Of course, there were always the annoying boys riding their bikes down the center of the blocked off street before the parade began. I was proud to be one of their number.
The parade began around the far corner from my house, on Market Street. With a band, not a school band, but one made up of adult men most of which had almost mastered the instrument they were assigned. Before the band came a few ruddy-faced Irish men, decked out in their top hats, waving to the minuscule crowd. At the front of this procession were the parish priests. The parade was half a block long and took thirty seconds to pass. The procession turned the corner onto Ferry Street, melting into the Down neck neighborhood, ready to continue the tradition next year.
Walttriznastories's Blog 