These memories do not belong to me - they
are my mother's. I have heard her stories so many times, as a child requesting that she
tell them over and over, until now they live on in my own head. My mother
was born in 1931, the third of six children, and lived in a run
down cold water flat on Emmet Street. The family was very poor, and
struggled to stay together. Many times there was no food at all
to
eat, never any new clothes, no heat in the winter. But her childhood
was certainly colorful, and very interesting to a girl of my
generation. These are some of the things she told me about:
There was, of course, the ice man, who would bring his ice on
the back of a horse drawn wagon, the animal's hooves and the wagon
wheels making quite a racket on the then cobblestone streets. My
mother and her five brothers once came upon an old discarded pair
of roller skates and tried to skate on that street - very difficult
with all the stones! From time to time, another man would come down
the street, this one hawking rags for sale, and his raucous call
of, "Raaaaaaags!" was crooned with such an utterly creepy
tone, that all the children in the neighborhood would run and hide
whenever they heard him coming. There were other door-to-door salesmen,
too, but my grandmother didn't have any money for them.
My mother actually grew up across the street from Sharpe James,
the
former mayor of Newark. She always said that as a little boy, he
was
very outspoken and feisty. She also always said that Mrs. James,
Sharpe's mother, was a good and strong woman.
One of my mother's brothers was always bring all sorts of stray
animals into the house, some of the domesticated variety, some not.
Among the typical parade of dogs and cats that one might expect,
he
once brought home a wild goose that he had wrestled all the way
home
from a local park.
My mother and her brothers attended St. Columba grammar school.
My
mother was so smart and such a good student that she went on full
scholarship. She used to tell us about having to walk past a tanning
factory on the way to school, and reported that the stench from
this
place was incredibly bad. The kids would run at top speed every
day
to get past it as fast as they could. The school was strict, and
the
nuns took no nonsense from any student. My mother was very well
behaved, but routinely observed all manner of corporal punishment
being heaped upon her fellow pupils. Students were reprimanded for
all kinds of transgressions, from tardiness to bad posture. My
mother always felt that the nuns had a soft spot for her, though,
and
treated her with kindness.
One Thanksgiving, my grandmother had absolutely no money for the
dinner. She was weeping in the bedroom over it, when suddenly the
doorbell rang. My mother opened the door, and there stood two women
from St. Columba, each holding a big basket overflowing with
everything one would need to make a huge and glorious Thanksgiving
feast. They said that my mother had won the food baskets in a
drawing she had entered at school. My mother knew that she had never
entered any such drawing, but she didn't tell my grandmother, because
she wanted to protect her pride.
There was a family on the other side of Emmet Street whose children
had no common sense. One of the boys once almost blew up his head
by
dropping a lit match into a barrel of kerosene to see how much was
in
it. This same child ripped the lips clean off his face by putting
them on a frozen iron porch railing, and then yanking them off.
My
mother still recalls the image of the bloodied lips stuck to the
cold
metal. The boy's sister broke her arm one day climbing over the
school fence as a short cut because she was late to school. Some
time later, she broke the same arm again doing exactly the same
thing.
There are many more stories, of course, but this is enough for now.
When I was growing up as a girl in the early 1970's, one of my
favorite after school television shows was called "Our Gang,"
and
also "The Little Rascals." I always imagined my mother
as a girl
growing up in Newark in the 1930's fitting in with these ragamuffin
children quite well, from their odd poor clothing, to the nutty
adventures they had, with the nostalgic music soundtrack that played
right along. These memory stories are precious.
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