Posts tagged ‘travel’
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.
WALT TRIZNA: PILOT TRAINING, AN END AND A BEGINNING
I thought I would use the next series of posts to relate my experience while a member of the United States Air Force (1969-1973). I found my experience in the military to be rewarding. We will begin with my entering pilot training. For those who find these posts interesting you might want to read a past post about my time in college posted on 10/17/2025. This post leads into my time in the air force.
PILOT TRAINING, PART I
It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The class was loaded onto a bus and headed toward the runway. But there was no flying today. And we were headed not for the runways but to the grassy area between the runways.
It was parachute time.
The way this was accomplished was by putting a parachute harness with an exposed parachute on your backs. A couple men would hold the parachute open so that it would fully open when the 500-foot rope attached to the front of the harness and the other end attached to a jeep and the jeep began to move. When the jeep did start to move you ran for about two or three steps and up you went.
Before I went aloft one guy hooking up my harness looked into my eyes. They must have been fully dilated because he asked me if I was scared. I was scared shitless.
The ride up once the parachute was inflated was great. When you stopped gaining altitude and came to a stop, the view was fantastic. Then the rope was released from the jeep, and you were on the way down. This part was terrifying.
I remember looking down and thinking that I don’t want to impact the ground. How do I avoid impacting the ground? Of course, this was an extremely stupid thought for the ground was rapidly coming up to meet me. And before I knew it we did meet, and I didn’t break anything.
Now to the problems I had with flying.
To start off, when you were on the runway in the T37, before you took off, you ran the engines, holding down the brakes which were also the rudder pedals, up full. Turns out the engines were stronger than my legs and the plane would ever so slowly turn to the left. After straightening the plane, we took off.
My next problem was the windshield which, in the jet, had a different shape than the two propeller planes I flew. My mind could not make the change between the two types, so I was flying with the image of the prop plane in my mind. Therefore, I was constantly flying with a slight bank to the left. A simple look at my instruments could have corrected this. Didn’t do it.
Then there was the trim.
The trim was meant to make it easy to control the aircraft. There were small flaps on the tail trailing edges controlled by a button on the top of the stick. If you had the plane trimmed up right you could let go of the stick and the plane would not change the attitude in which it was flying. My instructor could let go of the stick while making a turn and the plane would just continue making the turn. He had the plane trimmed that well. If I was flying and let go of the stick we would have crashed. Never got the hang of the trim.
Now the major problem I had with the difference between the prop plane and the jet with power control.
With the prop plane, when you needed power you pushed the throttle forward and power was instantly available. In the jet you pushed the throttle forward and it took some time for the engine to wind up and provide the power you needed. You had to be able to anticipate your power needs. In fact, in the T37 there were thrust attenuators which came out behind the engines when you were set up to land. So, if you ran into trouble when landing you raised your landing gear, the thrust attenuators were retracted, and you instantly had more power.
With all these deficiencies it was determined that a check-ride was called for. That ride was scheduled for Labor Day, 1969. This flight would determine whether or not I should continue in the pilot training program.
Before you took off, you first had to complete the preflight checklist. I walked around the plane checking what needed to be checked. As I was about to climb into the plane, stepping onto the ejection seat the instructor was already sitting in the right seat. He looks at me and holds up a pin with a small red flag attached. Now, this pin was inserted in the bottom of the ejection seat to ensure that you did not accidentally eject yourself from the aircraft as you climbed in. I forgot to check the pin. The instructor had removed it and I didn’t notice it was missing. So, in reality I had probably failed the ride before I had even left the ground. The ability I demonstrated during the flight further sealed my fate.
To confirm what I was sure was true, while walking away from the plane the instructor asked, “Well, Lieutenant Trizna, what else would you like to do in the air force?”
WALT TRIZNA: PILOT TRAINING, PART II
I thought I would use the next series of posts to relate my experience while a member of the United States Air Force (1969-1973). I found my experience in the military to be rewarding. We will begin with my entering pilot training. For those who find these posts interesting you might want to read a past post about my time in college posted on 10/17/2025. This post leads into my time in the air force.
PILOT TRAINING, PART II
Every day we went to a classroom. We were tested on emergency procedures and then waited for out turn to fly. When not flying we also spent hours sitting in the cockpit of a T37 on the ground. The purpose was to facilitate ourselves with the location of all the instruments. This was so, that in a glance, we could see what was happening with the plane.
Along with classroom training on the ground there was a host of other training activities. One task was learning how to release yourself from a parachute harness when landing on a windy day. I think the enlisted men loved this training because they got to drag an office all over the ground. This training was done wearing an empty parachute harness with a rope attached. The other end of the rope was attached to a jeep being driven by an enlisted man the jeep began moving and off you went. The jeep did not go very fast but bumping along. The uneven ground was not much fun and did not make the release easy.
There was training conducted in an altitude chamber. They let us experience rapid decompression. They then let us become hypoxic. We teamed up with both of us wearing oxygen at an altitude where they would be required. One guy would take off his mask while the other kept an eye on him. After he passed out he would put his partner’s mask back on. This was so you got a feeling for what it was like when you were about to pass out from lack of oxygen.
Another bit of training was jumping into a swimming pool wearing your flight suit and swim to the edge of the pool and get out. Thankfully you were allowed to wear sneakers instead of the combat boots you would normally wear while flying.
Then there was the ejection seat experience. There was an ejection seat mounted on a vertical rail. Now in the T37 there was something like a large shotgun shell to get you out of the plane. The next trainer was the T38, a supersonic jet and this plane had a rocket attached to the ejection seat. You could eject on the ground if you had enough forward speed.
There was another difference between the two trainers. The T38 stood taller than the T37. There was a set of cables at the end of the runway because in the event you could not stop the plane the cable would stop you. This was only for the T38. You see the T37 was a lot shorter than the T38. If you were headed for the cables in a T37 you were instructed to run the plane off the runway. You see, because the T37 was much shorter than the T38 the cables would not stop the plane. Rather, they would roll over the nose of the plane and shear off the canopy, along with the head who was unfortunate enough to be sitting in the cockpit.
Then there was parachute training. The first step was learning how to fall. This was done using a platform about three feet off the ground into a pit which looked like a mixture of sawdust and mulch. You stood on the platform and jump, falling the way you had been instructed. I think in this training I used neck muscles I had never used before because when I woke up the next morning I could not raise my head.
Next came a touch of reality in parachute training.
WALT TRIZNA: PILOT TRAINING, PART I
I thought I would use the next series of posts to relate my experience while a member of the United States Air Force (1969-1973). I found my experience in the military to be rewarding. We will begin with my entering pilot training. For those who find these posts interesting you might want to read a past post about my time in college posted on 10/17/2025. This post leads into my time in the air force.
PILOT TRAINING, PART I
Not many days after graduation from Oklahoma State University I was instructed to report for pilot training at Craig AFB outside Selma, Alabama.
The class was made up of twenty to twenty-five, and the number steadily decreased as time went on. Most were air force second lieutenants with one Marine first lieutenant and three Iranian officers.
This was 1969 and this country was training Iranian pilots. There was one thing different with their future than with the Americans. They entered pilot training as officers with a career commitment. If they washed-out they still had a career commitment but as enlisted men.
The leader of the class was Captain Rotella. He had been a navigator and now wanted to be a pilot. I heard that after he graduated from pilot training he was assigned to C130 training. He was on an orientation ride on a C130 when an engine fell off the plane. The plane crashed and all aboard were killed.
The first plane we flew in pilot training was the T41 which was a Cessna 172. A four-seat plane slightly larger than the two-seat Cessna 150 on which I learned to fly. Interestingly, we went to a civilian airport where the planes were kept and were taught by civilian instructors. This makes a lot of sense because you wouldn’t want students flying prop planes while there were jets, also being flown by students, zooming around.
Since most of us already knew how to fly we were soloing in no time.
There is one incident I recall while flying solo in the T41 that was rather unusual. I was flying in the traffic pattern on the downwind leg when I received a radio call to exit the traffic pattern. Turns out there was an Iranian student also in the traffic pattern who was radioed to leave the pattern a couple of time and did not respond. They told me where he was, and I looked behind me to my left and a little below and there he was. We were flying in formation in the traffic pattern. With, of course, no knowledge of how to fly in formation. Things would have gotten very interesting when it came time to bank and enter the base leg. I exited the traffic pattern immediately.
Once we completed our T41 training it was on to the T37. This was a small twin engine straight-winged jet and flight training was now at the base. I found that flying a jet was much different than flying a propeller plane. More on that latter.
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: COLLEGE AND LEARNING TO FLY
Recently I’ve been posting chapters of my memoir started 25 years ago remembering my childhood in Newark, New Jersey. Now I’m going to share some memories of when I was much older.
COLLEGE AND LEARNING TO FLY
Previously, I listed my two dream professions, science and writing, and along the way you will see how things worked out.
One benefit I see in old slowly becomes apparent as the years progress. oh, there are all the aches and pains. Not being able to do the things you once did or want to do. But now you have time to think and reflect on your life. Looking at what you accomplished and failed to accomplish.
Let me say now that there is nothing I wanted to do in life that I did not do. My disappointment is not achieving the level in my accomplishments that I had hoped for.
One dream, which I mentioned earlier was learning how to fly.
Upon entering Oklahoma State University I enrolled in Air Force ROTC. One of the enlisted men working in the unit said those initials stood for ‘rapers of tiny children’ demonstrating a certain lack of his respect for future officers and probably what most enlisted men thought of second lieutenants. After taking a written test and having a physical, I found that I had qualified for pilot training. When you qualify the government pays for 36 and ½ hours of flight training during your senior year.
I was going to learn how to fly.
Now, Oklahoma can be rather windy at times. I flew twice a week. Once in the early morning and once in the afternoon. In the morning the air was like silk. The afternoons were another story. At times I felt as if I were one with the little two-seat Cessna 150 I was flying during those morning flights.
After about six hours of instructions, I was flying with my instructor shooting touch-and -goes when he had me stop on the runway got out of the plane and I was on my own flying the traffic pattern. Now, my instructor was not a big guy, but as soon as I took off I notice how different the little plane handled.
Now, about flying in the afternoon, conditions were quite different than my morning flying. In the afternoon thermals were beginning to develop. You would be flying over land and then over a lake and you and your plane got quite a jolt because of the thermals developed over both types of surfaces.
And the wind!
One windy day I came in for a landing. Tried as I might, I could not keep the plane over the runway. It was that windy. Finally, I had to go around, enter the traffic pattern, and try again. I might mention that on the runway where I was trying to land I had seen a Boeing 707 land.
There was another incident worth mentioning. I have no sense of direction. My family kids me about that. I was flying solo cross-country. Just a short flight of maybe a hundred miles or so. Shortly after taking off, I felt my instrument I was using for direction was wrong and decided to depend on my instincts. Big mistake. I had my map on my knee and soon there were lakes on the ground which weren’t on the map. Something told me those lakes were not formed since the map was published. I was lost. I saw a small town with a water tower. These towers usually have the name of the town on them. Not this tower. Finally, I saw a small airport. Looking at my map and the configuration of the runways I was able to identify the airport and now knew my location. I also noticed that railroad tracks ran from the tow to the route I was supposed to be on. So flying over the tracks I was back in business.
WALT TRIZNA: COMIC BOOKS
COMIC BOOKS
When perhaps the age of nine or ten, I recall making trips with my father to used bookstores to buy comic books.
The stores are now long gone, torn down and replaced by skyscrapers, but once there was a series of used bookstores, the only ones in the area, huddled together on Market Street, located where the uptown section of Newark began, just beyond Penn Station, the train station and accompanying railroad that bisected Newark. Once you left my area of Newark and made your way to Penn Station and under the elevated railroad you were uptown, walking toward Broad and Market, the heart of Newark, but more on that intersection later.
Off I would go with my Dad to buy comic books. The stores were old musty-smelling rooms filled with piles upon piles of books from creaky hardwood floor to the grimy ceiling. I love bookstores to this day, both old and new, and the smells of the used bookstores take me back to Market Street. The bookstores of Market Street had huge front windows crammed with books, and the store overflowed with books. And somewhere in this maze of books were bags and bags of used comic books. The comics had their covers removed (which might have indicated something illegal) and sold for a nickel each or six for a quarter and we would buy them by the stack.
There would be romance comics for my mother, science fiction and action heroes for me and for the younger kids there would be Nancy, Donald Duck, Archie and more. We would bring home a bundle of comics, along with the musty smell of the store, sit around the kitchen table and divide them up.
Taking part of my stack of comics and hiding some in the bathroom for nature’s calls did not endear me to my family. There was a water pipe running from floor to ceiling on the outer wall and I would hide my comics rolled up and wedged between the pipe and the wall near the ceiling. Of course, they were in plain sight. I just assumed no one would ever look up.
At the age of nine or ten comics were my entertainment; they were my entry to the world of reading and imagination. To this day I lose patience with computer games, get bored with TV and other electronic means of filling your day. But given a good book, I get lost for hours always needing to know what the next page holds.
WALT TRIZNA: THE NEWARK DRIVE IN
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.
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.
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