What House Did You Grow Up In?
For me? 530 Alden Avenue, Westfield, NJ. A suburb of NYC. That’s us in 1949. “Judy, Sue, Kenny Hugh. We all love you.” Mother would sing. I was a year old when we moved into that house. Fifteen years later we moved out to a new development near the end of Lawrence Ave, in an area we used to call “Egypt Hills”. It had been a barren, open field of dry straw grass where we hunted for insects with Mr. Ferguson, the Entomologist. His son Donny and I were best friends.
I thought we were rich moving into a new, split level out there. Everything sod green where the parched earth had been. Mom bought a new cage for her sun yellow canary that came with a matching yellow cover, a sure sign to me that we had gone big time.
Dad had a law firm at #5 Broadway, Mom ferried him to and from the train station five days a week. A goodbye & hello peck on the cheek, in or out, punctuated each ride. Dad’s idea of casual was a sports jacket on weekends, his uniform for pulling crabgrass in the front lawn while swearing under his breath about the world going to hell.
Mom was in charge of us kids, Dad brought home the bacon. You could do that in those days. Mom always made us “a good breakfast” to start the day. Eggs, bacon, toast, Kippered Herring, Cod fish cakes. Dad lived on Kent cigarettes, coffee and stress. He was exempt from Mom’s breakfast rules.
I walked to and from Franklin Elementary School five days a week, memorizing the irregularities in the sidewalks, playing a game with myself of only looking down to know my location. Sycamore trees shed their bark on both sides of the streets.
Donny Ferguson lived across the street. He and I rode our bikes like a couple of maniacs, racing down to the Mountainside News Stand every Saturday when we each got our $1.00 allowance. Cards in the spokes helped up pretend they were motorcycles even though they sounded like cards in spokes. Ten 5 cent candy bars and five 10 cent comic books. We spent all afternoon on his screen porch with Superman and a sugar high.
David Callahan lived behind us on Bradford Ave. We ran the smooth dirt path between our two houses, barefoot in the summertime. At night, fat slugs squished up between our toes when they came out to cross the path in the cool dark.
We strung a telegraph line between our houses. Bedroom to Bedroom, our first e-mail.
Choir practice at St Paul’s three nights a week, Boy Scout meeting at one of the guys houses twice a month. Dad was smart. He never hosted one. I still have the plywood Santa we cut out in Robbie Rink’s basement though. We finally got to finish them even though Jimmy Siebert had said the “f” word when a splinter went into his thumb and Mr. Rink almost had an aneurysm. He said that was the end of our meetings, no more. Where did you kids ever learn to talk like that? We met in his basement again two weeks later, finished cutting and painting our plywood Santa and no mention was ever made of the evil language.
When Joe, my sister Judy’s first boyfriend came over to our house one night, sporting a crew cut and looking like one of the Kingston Trio, he carried a huge suitcase with him. Laying it carefully down on the ottoman at the foot of Moms big living room chair, we all gathered around as he opened it up to reveal two panels of flashing electronics straight out of a Buck Rogers movie. It was the first tape recorder I had ever seen. Totally magical stuff.
Christmas days, Easter baskets full of candy, a bottle of liquid mercury from Mr. Robinson, the paint chemist who lived next door.
Our dark, musty basement had stairs with no backing. They allowed the long bony arms of the pale monster to grab my ankles if I were to only walk down, but I didn’t, I flew. Quickly throwing open the door to the furnace room, I scurried over to the lone hanging bulb and pulled the string furiously before dark creatures could grab me. The bulb was always burnt out. It never worked. I would freeze with panic, spider webs covering my face and hair, deciding my next move. All senses on full alert as I listened for shuffling feet. That’s when the huge oil furnace, covered in peeling layers of asbestos insulation like a fat grey leper with curls of dead skin hanging loose, would fire up. WHOOMP! When that thing lit up we both jumped two feet into the air. I still get a tachycardia rush with the memory.
Those were the days of Ant Farms, BB guns, white rats that got loose and colonized the entire third floor, fat tire bikes, a brand-new Ford Fairlane 500 with rocket wings…
Sister Sue wrote on the wall by her bed: “Elvis is 24!” It looked like it said that Elvis was only 4 though because the plaster wall was so spotted and damaged from a particularly wet squirt gun fight that ended with water balloons. The cream-colored wall looked like the spotted, flaking legs of my Aunt Jeedie. When she was in the old people’s home.
Elvis made his debut on Ed Sullivan
Weenie, our attack dachshund, got loose and tried to protect the entire neighborhood from the trash truck by running backwards and biting the wheels. Not a good plan. That truck turned poor Weenie into a hairy Frisbee.
Mom and I sat on the front stoop and cried when I got home from school that day.
We played “Ain’t no bears out tonight” after dinner on Summer nights until it was too dark to see and we all had to go back inside.
George Harris had a pet Raccoon that bit everything and everyone. I had rats, turtles, dogs, cats, snakes, toads, fish and birds, but a biting Raccoon? No way.
Flying June bugs on a long thread with a noose around one rear leg, catching fireflies in a jar, smearing our faces at night with luminescent war paint from sacrificial lightning bugs.
The smell of cap guns.
The whole neighborhood was excited to learn that one of our own, Jeffery Hamlet from up the street, would be on The Howdy Doody Show. After Buffalo Bob finished speaking with Mr. Bluster, the camera panned the peanut gallery. With families up and down Alden Avenue on the edge of their chairs looking to spot Jeffrey, there he was! His forefinger buried so far up his nose it looked like he must be scratching his brain. Oblivious to the camera, he slowly pulled nose oysters out from those damp cavities, examined them closely and licked his finger clean. A proud moment for the hood. Hell, even I was grossed out.
On his tenth birthday, David Callahan and I watched Steve McQueen fight “The Blob” in the Rialto Theatre.
Teresa from one block up. pulled the top of her bathing suit down in Kerry Hill’s back yard when we were all running through the sprinkler. We were both only nine but it still seemed like a big deal back then.
I regularly dragged a beat-up red wagon filled with coke bottles down to the Mountainside Drug store to recycle. Two cents each.
At a middle school dance in 1963, I was flopping around out there on the floor with a girl I didn’t know, but whose words would be forever burned into my brain: “You sure know how to Mash Potatoes!”
That was a turning point. Time to put away childish things and embrace even more childish things. I was ready for the big time, High School and a new house.
After suffering through the humiliation of riding the school bus for my entire sophomore year, much like the human equivalent of my dog wearing a clown collar, I bought a motorcycle as soon as I turned 16.
Back then I looked 14 and got stopped by every cop in town whenever I went out. In wintertime my hands were frozen into useless claws for the first three periods at school. Even so, a small price to pay.
New house, new ride, new school…I was cool
I assumed childhood to be in the rear-view mirror, that I was an adult by then, no clue that it would be another 20 years before I learned to legitimately carry that mantle.
