My earliest recollection of life in Newark,
New Jersey was in what I called the Army barracks. These barracks
were located inside of Weequahic Park on the east side near Haynes
Avenue and Dayton Street. I think the houses were all painted the
same color, a drab gray with a green trim but I’m not entirely
sure since it’s been over sixty years. Why I can remember
these kinds of things remains a puzzle to me but I offer it up for
your reading consumption since this past doesn’t really matter
to anyone except me. I was led to believe that a lot of ex-service
people occupied these barracks because they were cheap housing for
the postwar crowd of service veterans and their families. I always
thought that we lived there because Dad was in the Navy during World
War II. I don’t know if this was true or not but that’s
how it I remembered it.
Since I was not in school yet, I was probably about 4 years old
and the year was 1953. I couldn’t tell you much about the
interior of the house we lived in except that it was small and my
room was in the back of the house. We lived on a corner and around
this corner up the street on a hill were some friends of my Mom
and Dad. We often celebrated the summer holidays up there with them
but neither my sister nor I can remember their names now. Almost
all the barrack houses were identical to the house that my family
lived in but there were a few variations in the houses across the
street. Some were much larger than ours and they were probably for
the higher ranking officers at the time, one can only imagine. The
entire street was a city block long and it looked like Hollywood
movies set with its perfect repetition of houses and landscaping.
I knew one of the families that lived in one the bigger homes across
the street because I use to play with their kids. The boy was younger
than me but the girl was about my age and every time we would run
somewhere in the course of our play activities she would fall and
scrape her knees. She kept falling and one day I asked her Mother
why she always fell. She never answered me but my Mom told me that
the little girl had polio, a disease that paralyzed your legs and
could even kill you. Luckily polio is extinct now days but I stopped
going over there because I didn’t want her to get hurt while
she was playing with me or for me to catch this dreaded disease
of polio!
A fence isolated the park from the outside world but there were
entrances at certain points to allow the cars to flow in and out
of the park. Where we lived though there wasn’t any entrances
and so we were essentially isolated from the outside world in this
corner of the park. I used to watch the cars going by from our side
of the fence and it was like watching a different world altogether.
Across Dayton Street I could see the Weston Electrical Instrument
building on the corner of Haynes Avenue and Dayton Street. Weston
made electrical meters among many other things for the budding electronics
industry in America. They were one of the better companies in the
United States that was doing this type of work and it was due in
part by the ownership of the company by Ed Weston. He held numerous
American patents and was greatly respected in the electronics field.
The history books say that he had passed away by the time we lived
in these barracks but the company was still in business. My Aunt
Ruth used to work there and soldered the fine wires that were attached
to the meter movements that went into the Weston panel meters. In
my mind, I can still see her rubbing her eyes from the strain of
looking through a magnifying glass all day long!
There was a thick patch of trees along the fence and I would often
play amongst them believing that I was Davy Crockett in the wild!!
This fantasy was complete with a coon skin hat and toy rifle. On
the opposite end of our barracks lined street was an open field
with a hill on it that rose to about 10 feet above the street level.
I would climb the hill and wave to the passing airplanes as they
took off from Newark airport that was less than 15 minutes away
by car. I swear to this day that some of the pilots actually tipped
their wings to me as they passed! Of course they were all propeller
driven planes back then and they flew very low to the ground upon
takeoff. So low, that I could sometimes see one of the pilots looking
at me through his cockpit window. I would fly my paper kite on the
hill and was afraid that the passing planes would hit my kite! It
never happened though, no matter how long I made my kite string!
Later on in life I came back to this site that once held this little
community of barracks but there was nothing left of them. They had
even torn up the tar road and there was nothing left but an open
field. It seemed strange that something that was so real at one
time could be entirely obliterated to a point where there was nothing
left to tell you if your memories were real.
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