O Boy! Chapter 3 - My Life in the Roaring Twenties

History was over. The last thing in "history" was the World War (not the First World War‑‑it was inconceivable that the war to end all wars could ever be repeated.) Even a small child in the early 'twenties knew that war was a thing of the past. I remember thinking rather sadly that it would have been fun to live "in history" instead of what looked like unadventurous daily life of a seemingly endless present.

The Roaring Twenties may have been a time of wild abandon for some. But for a child born in 19l6 in a respectable suburban home of Englewood it was incredibly stable. Shade trees arched across the paved street in front of our house. "Paved" meant a tarred strip wide enough for two vehicles, with muddy gutters and slate sidewalks. There were no curbs until much later ‑‑curbs were a new adventure in walking.

Our house was set back about 30 feet from the sidewalk. The wide front porch was the focus of life on warm summer afternoons and evenings. It was a great place to drink lemonade or iced tea. From 5 o'clock on there would be a regular procession of commuters walking from the train station two blocks east, past our house on their way home from New York city. Most of the commuters were men, wearing conservative dark suits, derby hats or fedoras, gloves and often spats as well, and carrying a cane or umbrella. Straw hats were not reserved for barber shop quartets but were part of the male summer uniform.

The women were even more conservatively dressed except for some flapperish secretaries. Mrs. McLean was an example of a woman commuter. Her dark ribboned hat sat far down on her head; her ample figure was well concealed from her neck to her high neatly laced shoes. She strode resolutely. There was the suggestion that Mr. McLean was a creative ne'er do well, and poor Mrs. McLean would not have had to work in the city to support their four children otherwise. We were invited to their house one night to see lantern slides. The high point of the evening came when the slide machine caught fire and Mr. McLean picked up the machine and dove through the window with it.

The first party I ever went to without my parents was at the McLeans. Before I left the house my mother instructed me that, after the party was over, I must find Mrs. McLean and tell her that I had had a nice time at the party. "What shall I say if I don't have a nice time?" I asked. "Then you can say `thank you very much for asking me,'" she replied. I took this very seriously, but I was secretly sure that anyone would see through the latter remark. All my life I have listened for how people phrase their farewell words.

Not many of the commuters who passed our house were as well known to us as Mrs. McLean, but the men who were acquainted would doff their hats as they went by and the women would nod. During non‑commuting hours it was not unusual to have impromptu visits on the front porch. Marion Gude was a single teacher who often stopped by and chatted. Later she married Mr. Bates. George Bates seemed incredibly old. He was at least twenty years older than Marion, but they had been neighbors up the street for many years.

George was a true non‑conformist. A bachelor, he lived with his unmarried sisters on a small estate which was a labyrinth of experimental vegetation. As far as I know they had independent means and he didn't have to work for a living. Yet he was always at work on some special project, possessed of a brilliant mind, quietly contributing to the community. He had his hair cut once a year in the spring so that he looked practically bald; then he let it grow until it came below his ears, always neat and silky white, until the next year. Marion loved to talk and her terminal powers were nil. When it came to saying goodbye at the end of a visit, George would say, "Now Marion, you get their hopes up...and then you don't go..."

The porch was more than just a reception place. Frequently it was my chore to sweep it in the morning‑‑it was hard to fit the broom between the grooved railings and the modified wooden columns at the corners. But when the job was finished it was a place to climb, build blocks, play with dolls or trucks, tip the rocking chairs up to form houses and barriers. Toys were far less abundant than for a modern child, but there was encouragement to be inventive. The Montessori toys mother had invested in in 1911 lasted for many years. In 1984 I gave the last three of those original toys to a grandchild, still intact. They consisted of hard wood rectangular shaped blocks with different sizes of cylindrical blocks that fitted precisely. A few of the smallest pieces had been carefully carved by my father to replace original pieces that had been lost. But the rest of the 30 or so pieces were still completely unscarred in spite of having been played with by generations of children. They were used for trains, boats, barriers, buildings, musical instruments as well as for their original function of teaching shapes.

Three wide steps led down to the front walk from the porch. And each of the steps had quarter‑inch slots running down the middle for drainage. We children discovered how we could crawl under the porch one morning and became gloriously dirty in the process. One of the boys found a dime under the steps‑‑ apparently dropped carelessly through the slot. A dime in those days was the equivalent of a dollar in purchasing power. And of course we immediately began to dig and search in the hope that some other carelessly lost coin might turn up. It was a glorious day. We discovered quite a number of pennies, a nickel or two and even a quarter. It was only years later that we learned my mother had discreetly dropped more coins for us to find.

My father worked as a civil engineer for Linde & Griffith, a Newark engineering firm. It meant an 18 mile drive each way to get there, and he worked 6 days a week with a half day on Saturday. Sometimes he would take one of us children with him on a Saturday. The office would be relatively quiet and one could play with scratch pads or a real pencil sharpener. The secretary would always be very kind, and, even though it was a little boring, the importance of being with father was more than enough compensation.

Father had a gift for true friendship and real love. Looking back I realize that he also suffered from depression. He had a good mind and an extraordinary way of handling people. But he was incapable of exploiting other people. And I'm sure he suffered anxieties of caring for his expanding family even before the onset of the Depression. I remember how much he always added to a party. One of the first parties I was ever allowed to plan and give all by myself was an after‑school birthday party. I had made the cocoa and cup cakes with mother's help and planned all the games.

Father was later getting home than usual, and I remember how happy I was to see him walk in the door because he always had a way of livening things up, thinking of some extra fun thing to do or making some jolly remarks that made us laugh. It was deep twilight and the children were about to leave. To my surprise my father looked very uncheerful and brushed past me saying, "Where's your mother?" My friends were bundled off to go to their respective houses. And then I learned why my father was so upset. On his way home, about a half mile from our house, driving about 15 miles an hour, he had run into a pedestrian who had darted out into the street. Apparently the woman was not badly hurt, but my father was more distressed than I had ever seen him. He had to go to court, and the case was decided in his favor after several witnesses testified on his behalf. The only person who testified against him finally admitted that she only saw what happened while looking in the mirror of the compact she was using to powder her nose. This vindicated my conviction that my father was always "in the right".

In fact as I look back on my childhood I think that it was far less relativistic than that of a modern child. I wonder, is that true for all children, or am I right that black was blacker and white whiter than today? Situation Ethics had not been invented. The good people were my family, most teachers, the policeman, the minister, the doctor. Bad people were some of the kids on Pleasant Avenue who picked on my big brother, Mr. Kirk who went to prison for 10 years for embezzling, and Miss Griswold (the 6th grade teacher‑‑later I found out that she was quite human and even nice). Then there were people who were to be treated kindly, but who were clearly "beneath" us. This would include all the other kids on Pleasant Avenue, tradespeople, servants, and Laughing Walter.

In my earliest childhood I confused Laughing Walter with Abraham Lincoln because in my mind they looked very much alike. But Lincoln was dead and Laughing Walter was very much alive. He shuffled past the house every so often, dressed in shabby and ill‑fitting clothes. Today he would be living on SSI and have supervision at an opportunity center. He was "simple minded". He was paid a dollar or two for raking, digging or other manual odd jobs. My parents always made it clear that we were to be polite to him, but many of the children teased him unmercifully until he would raise his voice and start to chase them‑‑then he seemed rather scary. It was a cruelly sad and lonely existence for many years.

There were some nice human edges to things. You could always phone the grocery store and have a whole list of groceries delivered. A ten year old boy would trundle the groceries to your back door on his wagon. Instead of paper sacks, the groceries would be wrapped by hand in heavy brown paper with string that was carefully knotted and held in place with a handle fashioned from wire covered with tough cardboard. Ten cents was the standard tip for the boy. The milkman came daily; the postman twice a day; the garbage man once a week. But we also had a vegetable man who came in the summer, and special events were the pansy man and the huckleberry boy in season.

My earliest memories are of horse‑drawn vehicles lumbering along the street slowly and advertising their wares by shouting their products. It would be hard to convey the excitement of an event like "The Pansy Man". In those innocent days it meant a sunny Spring day and a wagonload of young plants in cartons (with a heavenly fragrance) brought from some greenhouse. To have plants to put directly into the ground was a great luxury, and whether to choose the deepest violet or the golden faced ones could be a major decision. One by one, these services were all replaced by trucks, so by the time I was 10, one would be more likely to anticipate the arrival of "Dugan's truck" making a weekly delivery of fresh doughnuts.

Constantine's, on the other hand, seemed like the epitome of snobbery. Hats were required attire for even little girls in Sunday School and Church. I had an outrageously large head size so I learned early in life that I must either endure a headache every Sunday from wearing a hat that was too small, or I must wear an "old lady hat". When my mother entered Constantine's she would be shown to a seat by a mirror, and the saleslady would produce one creation after another. It was an era when broad brimmed hats might be encircled with wreaths of flowers or brightly colored fruits or feathers. Disappointingly mother always rejected such frivolous numbers in favor of the most conservative. When it came my turn to be fitted, the saleslady would exclaim,"Yes she DOES have a large headsize doesn't she!" as if I were a sort of freak. After all the hats that I might remotely like were rejected as too small, there would be the inevitable old lady hat, and we usually emerged from the store with nothing to show for the expedition.

You could depend on some things. If you were late to school you stayed an hour, but you weren't late because teachers were more to be feared then. Teachers were not like parents because none of them were men and none of them were married. Except Miss Riley‑‑she became Mrs. Merz, but she was still Miss Riley to us. Two teachers generally lived together and took walks together‑‑ like Miss Dwight (whose "lungs" showed when she bent over in her V neck sweater) and Miss Emmett who was her best friend.

Cleveland School was the elementary school, grades 1 through 6, a quarter of a mile from our house. Miles may be measured in feet or meters, but a quarter mile to me will always be the distance to that particular school. There was one teacher for each class and one class for each grade at Cleveland School, except for the first grade which in 1922 was beginning to absorb the "war babies" and was the largest class in the school. You learned adding in 1b and subtracting in 1a, adding columns in 2nd grade; long multiplication in 3rd and long division in 4th; fractions in 5th; decimals in 6th. If you weren't smart enough to pass you got left back, and if you were slovenly or careless you might as well quit. A favorite expression of more than one teacher was,"I want this room so quiet that I can hear a pin drop." We would have to sit with folded hands until that state of exquisite boredom was achieved; then return to the drill work. Reading for pleasure was practically never allowed, but there was much pleasure in learning things in spite of that.

The first World War was not so remote but that there was a strong quasi‑military patriotism extending to very formal opening exercises, much marching and patriotic assemblies once a week. We always sang the Star Spangled Banner and My Country 'Tis of Thee (first and last verses) at the weekly assemblies, and we saluted the flag every morning with military precision. Mr. Spencer was our physical education teacher who came to drill us on the playground a couple of times a week. I was the shortest one in my class and since we were invariably lined up by height, it usually fell to my lot to lead the precision drill. Mr. Spencer would bark out the commands like a drill sergeant.

I loved the command "To the Rear March, Step, Turn", but I must have skipped the grade where they taught left and right. I lived in panic for fear of turning right when he barked "Columns left....MARCH." I finally caught on to the idea of thinking of your left hand and following it. Before that I just had a nebulous idea in my mind of a stage‑‑and was left HIS left since he was giving the command, or MY left since I was following it? North, East, South and West always seemed relatively simple.

My other big memory of kindergarten was the final picnic held on the schoolgrounds. My mother had provided me with a paper sack containing my sandwich. When I got home she asked me if I had found the 3 little brown sugar lumps in the bottom of the sack. I was devastated to know that I had thrown the sack away without finding them. How little it took in those days to spell joy or disappointment for a child.

First grade taught me that it was safe and comfortable to be teacher's pet. Miss Treadwell was known to be a bit of a tyrant, but she was always very kind to me. My worst memory is of the day that nine or ten of us stood in a row in front of the class to recite. It was nearly noontime and I suddenly found myself uncontrollably wetting my pants. I pressed my legs tight together, but a small trickle oozed down my legs and made a tiny river like a dark snake across the floor. It seemed to go on and on.

Finally Miss Treadwell saw the end of the trickle, and I can still see her intense eyes following its path until it led to ME. Catastrophe! Humiliation! But, when she saw who it was, she became suddenly kind, patted me on the shoulder and sent me home for lunch. I didn't come back to school that day‑‑I had some sort of childish illness and that was the end of the episode.

I got all A's on my report card except for a B in music. I couldn't understand the B because I always sang loud. I tried singing louder. And louder. The B went to a C. Then I tried singing very quietly so no one could hear me. Eureka! I got all A's. I continued to practice this way of singing throughout my school experience. Perhaps I would have had a fuller voice if I had not felt I must repress it. So I learned to please poeple and to be a little prig.

I skipped High First. The teacher discovered that I always did the first grade arithmetic during the assigned period and all the second grade arithmetic as well. This added to my feeling of being "special". Altogether I skipped three semesters which landed me in high school at the age of twelve.

In second grade I had another landmark experience of being teacher's pet. One sunny spring morning Florence Hamilton and I were walking to school together. At the corner of Tenafly road there was a vacant lot with a well‑worn path. We stopped to pick some wild flowers and seemed to forget about the clock. Suddenly my father rounded the corner driving the Buick on his way to work. He stopped to warn us of how late it was and drove us the rest of the way to school. We were late. Modern kids can hardly imagine how stern the penalties were for tardiness. One minute late chalked up against you on your report card in addition to time after school. But I solved the problem by bursting into tears, and Miss Dwight took me on her lap and comforted me.

Although I was good at school, I was certainly no paragon at home. But that comes later.

Playground equipment at Cleveland School consisted of 3 swings, two see‑saws (or teeter‑totters) and one slide for about 200 children. Recess and noontime had no organized games, but we were pretty resourceful in organizing our own games. A favorite winter game was "wagon wheel" consisting of paths tramped out in the snow in the shape of a large wagon wheel with spokes 30 or 40 feet long. Then we played wild games of tag restricted to the laid out paths. Between sliding, colliding, and blocking routes of access, the game would last until the snow melted.

Playground fights were strictly forbidden. And fist fights were unheard of among the girls though the tougher boys established their own pecking order this way. The bloodiest fight I ever witnessed was between a brother and sister. Helen Bellini, a sixth grader, was a year or two older than her brother Tommy. Their enmity had been smoldering for some time. Both were known to be "tough kids", but nobody was prepared for the violence of the battle that suddenly erupted one May noontime. A wide ring of awed spectators immediately encircled them. Most of us were too spellbound to seek for help, and of course there was no supervising personnel on the playground. School fights usually consisted of more sparring than blows meant to maim. But Helen socked her brother with bruising hammer blows, and he gave as good as he got. Finally Miss Emmett emerged from the building and led the bloodied victims into the office. Of course they were both expelled from school for the rest of the semester.

Tent caterpillars became a great pest in the 20's, especially in the choke‑cherry trees. The school was the collection agency for a bounty offered in the late cold months of winter for the shiny eggs sealed against the twigs. If you collected them you would receive one cent for every four turned in. But it was a cold and difficult job to clamber through the frozen rutted clods of winter and try to reach boughs where the eggs lay sealed. I would start out bravely enough, but everything hurt more in climbing cold trees, and the most I think I ever earned was $1.38.

Then there was the winter when I stored my valuable collection in the back pantry, forgetting that warmth was all the caterpillars needed to free them from their winter imprisonment. My father was pretty mad when he found them all hatched and crawling around. One spring when they were especially bad, I remember walking home from school and playing a game that you couldn't take a step unless your foot squashed a tent caterpillar. Evelyn Langmuir, my best friend at the time, felt a revulsion against what we were doing, and I felt ashamed of not being as tender‑hearted as she was, but I really couldn't feel any bond of life with those ubiquitous hairy creatures.

How many observations and perceptions are being exchanged in every elementary classroom! There was one little black boy in the school. His name was Charlie and he was in my first grade class. He had a nice smile and I liked him, but when I held hands with him in the circle games, there were some titters. What was the matter? We didn't stop holding hands. But there were differences. "Watch for differences", was the message. Don't be different. Even if you don't understand why. Don't be too different.

Then there was Tony Mancuso, an intense little Italian boy. Tony had been absent for two days when Miss Kerr, the principal, appeared in our classroom. We all held her in awe, and it was most unusual for her to visit. She said she had something very important to tell us. It seems Tony had been to the barber, and he had been given such a terrible haircut that he was ashamed to come to school. She had assured him that we would understand, and she wanted us to promise not to make fun of him, an admonition which we solemnly obeyed. A few moments later Tony appeared and slipped noiselessly into his front seat. The barber must have been drunk, because he had shaved his scalp except for one round tuft of black curly hair, and he did look funny, but nobody ever paid any attention as far as I know‑‑if anything we were all a little nicer.

I remember the day Carolyn Potter came to school. She was the new girl with soft curly hair and ever so slightly cross‑eyed. She wore glasses, but the most remarkable thing was that she had a different dress to wear every day, each in a pretty color. To me she seemed like a princess. The rest of us were lucky if we had a change once or twice a week.

Much of our entertainment had to be invented. Games and reading were as important a part of the weekly schedule as television is to a child of 1985. Sometimes boredom led to healthy inventiveness, sometimes to mischief. When we were exploring in our attic one day, some of us discovered a square opening that led to a crawl space over the back bedroom. It was just big enough for us to squeeze through, and, with the hopeful imagination of the young, we thought we might discover a treasure. Instead the most revealing find turned out to be some discarded 1899 newspapers. But somehow the treasure‑seeking bug had bitten us and we cast about for various ways of exploiting our new adventure.

I had scrounged some gold paint from somewhere. Seeing the newspapers, brown from age, gave me an idea. If we couldn't find a real treasure, perhaps we could play a game with a faked treasure. So we cast about for a plan. In the cellar we found an old wooden box about 12 or 14 inches long and so brown that it didn't need to be darkened to look authentic. Next we assembled an assortment of roundish rocks ranging from two to three inches in diameter. We used the gold paint to turn these into "gold nuggets" ‑‑ none of us had the slightest idea how big a gold nugget usually might be anyway. I had some lavender glass beads that were cut like crystal and these were drafted to become amethysts, etc.

Then we sat down to write the treasure note and the map. We had to decide where to bury the treasure and how to make the note seem plausible. It turned out to be quite an undertaking‑‑so many paces west of the wild cherry tree, so many paces south of the property line (in the field back of our house). Burying the box was a chore in itself. We didn't want to dig too deep, but we had to make the terrain look natural. Finally the note was complete, the handwriting given some extra flourishes, the edges roughened, the proper shade of brown achieved by toasting it in the oven, and we were ready for action.

By this time we were so involved in our "project" that we had lost all sense of proportion. We thought it would be a great joke to see how someone would react to finding our creation. Whom should we select? We didn't want someone too old or too young, too smart or too simple; we certainly didn't want one of our very best friends. We finally narrowed it down to Frances Wildrick. Frances was a lumpy only child, the daughter of the high school math teacher, and the right amount of gullible. A phone call summoned her. We tried desperately to seem natural although we were in a fever of excitement ourselves. We let her help us explore. Someone stumbled on the note. Frances expressed skepticism. So did we. Oh well, let's try to look anyway. We paced off the distance, being careful not to be just right the first time. Frances was hot and ready to quit.

"Well let's try just one more spot‑‑what about over here..."

"Here you take the shovel..."

When her shovel struck the box she was still almost ready to quit, but when she saw the glint of the fake gold nuggets and the "jewels", she squealed and screamed and danced about.

Suddenly our marvelous game and all our work turned to ashes. We felt stricken and had a terrible time telling her it was all a fake. I don't think I can ever remember a time in my life when I felt "too successful" more than that day. We all learned a lesson. We hadn't meant to hurt her. We'd never thought of the humiliation and disappointment that would seem so cruel to her. She went home in a towering rage and I'm not sure she ever completely forgave us.

Another time when I was guilty of causing some havoc occurred on a warm Saturday summer afternoon when half a dozen of us were cavorting around in the side yard. This time it was a silly impulse. I saw a woolly brown caterpillar which I thought was harmless‑‑just a furry sort of thing‑‑and in a mindless way I stuck it down the back of John's shirt. John must have been about 10 at the time, and I two years older, old enough to know better. Suddenly John clutched the back of his lap, screamed, and began to run and hop, yelling at the top of his lungs. My father, who had been puttering in the garage, came running across the lawn with that dead‑serious‑emergency look in his eye‑‑he lifted John by the seat of his pants and rushed into the house.

I ran after them and was intercepted by mother on the front porch. I listened, white‑faced, until the yelling ceased and John had been taken care of. Mother put her arms around me and said, "You've been punished enough already, haven't you." I had. John claimed that the scars remained until after he was an adult‑‑I never got to see the evidence, but I remember all the emotions ‑‑ consternation for John, horror at having been responsible, and gratitude for mother's understanding. Later she was kind enough to say that she wouldn't have been surprised if John had done it to me, but she couldn't understand my doing it to John.

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