Hometown of my Heart: Summer into Fall 1950’s Style

Fall is the beginning of time for me. I was born on August 30th, and each new year of my life coincided with the opening of school.

The night before the first day of school, I set out my clothing after looking through my drawers and closet a thousand times. One year, I had enough inventory to wear a different outfit each day for two weeks in a row, a triumph of “mix & match.”

My new teacher, who will it be? For kindergarten (in School #1 before McManus opened), it was Miss Standish of the thick braids, a vision of Pocahontas. First grade, Mrs. (Florence) Gare. For second grade, Miss Smith, with short strawberry blonde hair, porcelain skin, and sleeveless shirtwaist dresses (see photo above, with me and my brother Stuart on the left, Ethel Foster the blonde girl on the right, then Carole M. and her little sister). Third grade, Mrs. Bosco (like the chocolate syrup popular at the time).

Starting in fourth grade, male teachers like Mr. Scanlon, Mr. Martis, and Mr. Jacobson took over the serious subjects of geography, history, science, and math. For sixth grade, Mr. Kelly chose me to write the Friday history quiz in my pleasingly rounded script that stayed straight across the blackboard. Mr. Hirsch, a kindly white-haired gentleman, was the principal.

Mr. (Ted) Cooper, the coach/ LHS principal, lived behind us, on Robbinwood Terrace. Dr. (Emanuel) Bedrick, the superintendent of schools, and his wife Mrs. (Bernice) Bedrick, the junior high science teacher, lived next door on Orchard Terrace. I passed Mrs. Bergstedt’s house (also junior high science) on the walk to school. Mrs. (Rosalie) Ortner, the grade school gym teacher, and Mrs. Blackman, both lived further up Orchard. A star-studded neighborhood!

The newly one year older me greeted the fall and the first day of school in a carefully ironed white blouse paired with a plaid skirt and penny loafers, just like on the cover of American Girl magazine. My new blue canvas looseleaf binder loaded with fresh lined paper, No. 2 Eberhard Faber pencils in a Woolworth’s pencil box, and the stack of textbooks to cover with cut-up paper grocery bags — all held a promise that thrilled me.

The milkman delivered two quarts of Borden’s before dawn to the insulated metal box on the back porch. The breadman left a fresh loaf of Dugan’s at the front door twice a week. After my favorite breakfast of Rice Crispies with sliced bananas—and the freshly opened milk—I met the neighborhood kids on the corner of Orchard and Robbinwood. We walked the three blocks in a high-spirited pack to Myles J. McManus Elementary School (who was M.J.McManus anyway to get a school named after him?). Some of us walked the three blocks home for lunch. My mom always made my favorite dessert, chocolate pudding, still warm in the bowl.

Our parents didn’t give us rides in bad weather—the fathers took the only family automobile to work. Anyway, the wives didn’t have their driver’s licenses in those days. Our young mothers stayed close to home. Their neighborhood was their community. They took the No. 44 bus to downtown Wood Avenue once or twice a week to shop at the women’s clothing stores (Mary’s Corset Shop, BZ Shops, Nathanson’s), Babgold Shoes with the x-Ray machine, F. W. Woolworth’s with the formica lunch counter and red swivel seats, or go to the beauty salon, the community bank (which closed at two o’clock-banker’s hours)), the main post office, Westminster Cleaners on the corner of Wood and St. George.

They were back by 3:15 to welcome us home, after which we scattered to the then unfenced yards and played hard. Or, we played in the undeveloped lot across the street, until the hills and trees were flattened by bulldozers when the Sunnyside Library Branch was built. The moms kept an eye on all of us through the kitchen windows.

I remember when I moved into my house at the age of five in 1949 from an apartment in Newark. A contractor had built identical brick cape-style houses on four lots on Orchard Terrace, between Melrose and Robbinwood, for his three daughters, the Truegers, Chvats, and Kuskins. We moved into the fourth house (my mom lived there until 1992, when she left the area to move in with her gentleman friend in Revere, MA, and closer to me).

Did I make new friends at school? I can’t remember one way or the other. To me, school meant books and teachers and gathering each week in a circle around the white-haired library lady, Miss Violet Croucher, as she read a new chapter in “Charlotte’s Web” or a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in hushed but expressive tones. Mr. Tempkin succeeded her when the school changed over to a junior high. He was a qualified library administrator but he didn’t read us stories.

We owned a set of World Book encyclopedias which I leafed through to find and research topics for reports. My mom sold them door-to-door in her Linden and Roselle territory. If you had World Book in your home, most likely Rose sold them to you, and became friends with your family in the process. My classmate Marsha Warman recently told me that her mom Belle sold World Book too – the Google of its time.

During the Jewish holidays in early fall, I missed three prime days of school while sitting in services at Suburban Jewish Center on Deerfield Terrace. New Year’s Day in the dead of winter came and went without notice and didn’t feel new at all, not my season of new beginnings. But the last day of school was special for three reasons: dressing up, getting final report cards with next fall’s classroom assignment, and bringing the first day of school that much closer.

Another annual event in my life was the piano recital. I took lessons for two years from Rae Margulies, a friend of my mom’s, at her house on East Gibbons Street. I remember how she lined us up on the living room staircase waiting our turn in our new dresses and patent leather shoes, the anxious moment of starting our piece, then the applause. My inspiration was Elaine Tunick, her most advanced student (sadly, Elaine died at the age of thirty-seven R.I.P.).

Dressed for the piano recital

Sometimes fall meant changing schools, from elementary to junior high, from junior high to high school. I experienced that familiar rush of excitement when I entered my freshman year at Douglass College in 1962. I continue to feel a surge of anticipation in September whether I go to school or not, a permanent part wired into me, either nature or nurture. If the past year has not been the best, hope for the future rises when the slant of the summer sun changes, even at this time of my life.

The eight weeks of summer recess were pleasant enough. I spent the mornings making multicolored lanyards at the arts and crafts table at the playground. If I swept the pink concrete patio or watered the rose bushes behind our house, I earned a dollar for my bank account. I saved my allowance to buy U.S. savings stamps at school, pasting twenty-five cent denominations in the booklet for months until I had enough for a bond. It was a proud day when I walked up to the teacher’s desk to claim what was rightfully mine!

On Saturdays, we packed up for the overnight trip to Belmar Beach, down the Jersey Shore. We stayed with my grandparents in their rental cottage, one block from the boardwalk up a narrow sandy street. Grandma cooked kosher meals in the tiny, dark kitchen. She prohibited us from eating the grilled hot dogs from Syd’s or Mike & Lou’s** on Ocean Avenue in neighboring Bradley Beach.

Grandpa made up for that deprivation by reaching for the change jingling deep in his pockets when the Good Humor man rang his bell after supper. My little brother Stuart and I had every good choice in the world: orange creamsicles, toasted almond, grape ice pops, ice cream sandwiches. Dixie cups with wooden spoons dry against the tongue were not as appealing. Then, there was the salt water taffy from Doc’s** on the corner. We got to take home a little white paper bag full of flavors, bringing the sense of a shore breeze to the still, humid weekday air in Linden.

🔆  ⛱   🍦   🍦   🍦  ⛱   🔆

My dad set up the itchy wool blanket and beach umbrella in the sand, close to the water. My mom and my brother surfed the crashing waves together. I walked up and down the beach collecting stones and shells in my colorful tin pail.

Every one of these loving people in my young life is gone now.

I remember the vivid blue skies above me, the burning sand glistening with teeny silver particles, the foamy undertow pulling the wet sand through my toes and out from under my feet — but even so, my internal calendar sprung into action in August. I remember the excitement when the daily countdown to the first day of school reached single digits. I, the serious brown-eyed girl, held the promise of school days deep in my heart.

Now, sixty years later, instead of writing tests on the blackboard dictated by Mr. Kelly, I write a blog in my own words and share it with family, friends, and readers — including my childhood neighbors, classmates, and their parents, all special to me.

It’s mid-August, and the anticipation of the fall season — my 72nd — begins to stir.

**historic information supplied by Ellen Dubow Taller