Memories!

I matured during the 1940’s and 1950’s. I was actually born in 1939 and remember that a war (World War II) was going on. I wasn’t exactly sure about what a war was at that stage in my life. I only knew that there were good guys and bad guys, and we were the good guys. I am sure that there were German and Japanese children who thought much the same thing, only with the roles reversed. I knew people died during a war because I could see that in the movies. Sure, no blood was ever shown during a John Wayne war movie because Hollywood cleaned up the truth. It looked like it was a lot of fun to kids. Soldiers caught up in the horrors of war in these movies never used bad words or did bad things to prisoners or innocent people. Now that I look back on it, I was living in a dream world because, as we all know, the reality of war is far different. We were programmed into that dream world by a device called radio, as well as the movies.

Everything was rationed during the war. I still remember my mom going to the corner butcher or grocery store with her ration book and tokens in hand. Gasoline was 17¢ a gallon in those days, a bottle of coke was a nickel and an ice cream cone was a dime.

The biggest fear in those days was not the war, but a disease called Poliomyelitis (Polio, for short; also called Infantile Paralysis.) It usually struck children, but had also struck Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was an adult. It had also struck my Uncle Ben as a child, and he had to wear a brace on one leg for the rest of his life. When you saw the affected leg it was visibly thinner than the other because all of the muscle tissue had been wasted away by the effects of the disease. Polio frightened parents out of their minds, especially during the summer when it seemed to strike indiscriminately and without warning. Newspapers could start an outbreak merely by simply reporting five cases and calling it an epidemic. It sold newspapers. Parents were warned to make sure that their children washed their hands before eating and after going to the toilet. I doubt however, that this did much good beyond permitting parents to think that they were actually doing something to fight the disease. Roosevelt also started the March of Dimes, a foundation founded to fight the dread disease. Soon afterwards, Roosevelt’s image was minted on dimes to remind people to fight Polio and that they should contribute to the March of Dimes. After the Salk and Sabin vaccines were developed, Polio was no longer a matter of concern.

To keep the money rolling in, the March of Dimes changed their focus from Polio to birth defects. Like all charities, they try to develop an open-ended source of funds that will not disappear. Birth defects will probably never be fully prevented and consequently, business can keep rolling on, as a result.

Because of the war, most people were employed and made a lot of money with almost nothing to spend it on. Any resource necessary to produce manufactured goods was being used for the war effort. Steel and other metals, rubber, silk and other products were in short supply and most were severely rationed. The factories that made makeup, for example, were converted to the manufacture of firearms and ammunition. After the war, these same manufacturers used the identical mold they used for cartridges, to make lipstick and that’s why most lipstick looks like a bullet.

Most of the conveniences, which today are considered necessities, were the luxuries of the time and existed only for the well-to-do and politically connected. I still remember my mother using a wash board to scrub clothes. The wash board was a wood slat with rough ridges. My mothers used to take an item of clothing and rub it over the ridges on the board several times to clean it. At the time detergents did not exist—there was only good, old, reliable soap. For those not acquainted with the product, it left a film and tended to dry out skin. The coating left by the soap required my mother to rinse her wash in order to remove it. Sometimes she would just let the whole load soak in cold water for a period of time. Badly-soiled clothing required her to use the wash board once again during the rinsing process. If the clothing was white, she would use bleach to remove any sign of aging or yellowing and her product of choice was a product called No-Worry, which I believe is no longer manufactured. With whites that were badly yellowed there was another commodity called bluing and the leading company was LaFrance. When the laundry finally met with my mother’s satisfaction, she hung it on a clothesline to dry. Yes, my friends, few people had a clothes dryer then.

Actually, the clothesline was a product that present-day environmentalists would envy and probably advocate today, if people were not so lazy. It required no energy because it used free energy from the Sun to dry. It had an additional benefit because ultra-violet radiation from the Sun would further whiten clothing, as well as kill any bacteria. Moreover, the wind would freshen the clothing, giving it a nice clean smell that you cannot get from any clothes dryer. But there was still more work to be done.

There was no such thing as wash and wear, much less permanent press. Synthetic fibers were just coming into the picture and they were required (for example: rayon and nylon for tires) for the war effort. Almost everything that was made was from wool or cotton (which was scarce due to the war). Cotton was usually the fabric of choice, or necessity, depending upon your point of view. The problem with clothing made entirely of cotton is that when they came off of the clothes line wrinkled. Everything, from pants and shirts to underwear had to be ironed.

An iron was a heavy implement with a steel soleplate that had to be heated to exactly the right temperature. I remember my grandmother using non-electric irons. I say irons because she used two of them at the same time. While one was heating up on the gas range, she was using one that was already heated. The irons she used were heavy—about three pounds each I think. She would test these instruments before using them by spitting on them. If they bubbled just right, and frankly, I don’t know to this day exactly what she was looking for, she knew it was time to use it. If an iron was too hot it would leave a visible scorch mark on the clothing which was impossible to remove.

If the iron wasn’t hot enough, it would leave wrinkles in the clothing. If too hot—it would scorch or burn clothing. There was a fine line that couldn’t be crossed in either direction. My mom and grandma had a technique that, at the time, I thought ingenious and inspired. They would take an old glass bottle and fill it up with water (there was no bottled water in those days) and put a sprinkler top in the bottle. They would then sprinkle the water on clothing they were about to iron. This protected the clothing from being scorched or burned and additionally, created steam which helped remove wrinkles from the clothing.

My mother was more modern and used an electric iron but frankly, it wasn’t much better than the one my grandma used. The thermostat that controlled the heat was as inaccurate as the dial which was used to select the heat. Every now and then the thermostat would break down and, as a result, you might be ironing with the heat on the iron on high, instead of low or medium, which would ruin the clothing. My mother’s iron had only two advantages, as I look back on it now. It was much lighter than the one my grandma used and it was a bit more convenient. You only had to use one, instead of two, and you need not keep heating it up on the stove. But old habits die hard. My mother still spat on the iron to test it for heat as she had little faith in the thermostat, for good reason.

There was no such thing as vacuum cleaners in most homes in those days. I remember my mom cleaning the living room rug with a broom. The vacuums that did exist were big, clumsy and expensive monsters. Later, in the fifties, the Electrolux Company came out with a canister vac, which revolutionized home cleaning. It was primitive by today’s standards, but it was made out of metal, not plastic and they usually lasted a lifetime. They rarely broke down and there was no bag to continually replace. All you had to do was to empty the cup when it got full. It inspired a litany of competitors. However, most rugs were cleaned by brooms or, if possible, taken outside, hung on a clothesline and beaten.

Air conditioners were almost non-existent in most homes and we had to swelter through the long, hot days of summer. The only relief was an open window with, hopefully, a cooling breeze. Sometimes we would utilize a fan, but they weren’t much help. A hand fan made out of a couple of sheets of folded-up newspaper, a cold bottle of soda pop, a glass of lemonade, or an ice cream cone was the most frequently used method of cooling down. Sometimes we even would just suck on an ice cube or two. Our windows had screens but that did not seem to deter most mosquitoes, who were able to infiltrate their way into our home with little difficulty. It was not unusual for me to wake up in the morning with five or six mosquito bites. After the worst assault I once woke up with ten separate bites.

The only thing my mother had for mosquito bites was rubbing alcohol. It may have been effective against possible infection, but it did nothing for the itch. A couple of times my mom tried giving me calamine lotion but it provided little more than psychological relief. It left a white residue wherever you applied it and it made you think that it was relieving the itch. It wasn’t. To repel mosquitoes my parents sometimes used a citronella candle. It had a foul, unpleasant odor that was more effective in repelling people than mosquitoes. Frankly, I preferred the mosquito bites to the smell of the candle. I often think of calling this era, The Golden Age of Mosquitoes. It would have been a fitting title.

My family lived in a flat in Newark right next to the Avon Avenue Grammar School. Our home had three bedrooms, a sun porch, and another porch which I really do not have a fitting name for, a living room which we referred to as the parlor and a dining area. We also had a large kitchen, bathroom and a pantry. For this princely abode my parents were paying the outrageous sum of $60.00 a month. We had coal heat. Once a month, or thereabouts, we would get a delivery of a ton of coal. The truck would pull alongside our house and used a chute to send the delivery of coal into the coal bin in the cellar through a window. That delivery would cost my parents $20.00. Incidentally, every now and then, I would see the outline of a fossilized fern leaf in a lump of coal.

Coal had its advantages as well as its drawbacks. On the plus side, we didn’t need rock salt to melt snow or ice. Coal ash, thrown on snow or ice, was an effective means of melting snow and provided traction, preventing slipping or falling on the stuff. On the other hand, you had to go down to the furnace every two hours to throw a couple of shovels of fresh coal in the furnace to keep the heat flowing. Of course, as the youngest member of the family, it was my assignment to throw the coal into the furnace. I dreaded going down to the furnace, particularly at night, but I did what I was told to do. I feared my parents more than any monster I might meet in the cellar.

Thermostats did not exist then or, if they did, we did not have one. The only way to control the heat was with a little knob to the right of each radiator which would control the amount of steam flowing into it. It wasn’t very effective. We had only two temperatures that I can remember—too hot and too cold. There was also a little pan that you could hang on the back of the radiator which was filled with water. This would create moisture in the air thereby humidifying our home, making it feel warmer than it actually was. Just before we went to bed, I had to go down to the cellar and “stoke” the fire. I threw a couple of shovels of ashes on top of the flames. This would slow down the rate of burning to the point where there were only glowing embers. There would still be live embers when I went down in the morning and I need only throw a couple of shovels of coal on these embers to re-ignite the flames. Of course, it took almost two hours before we began to notice any real relief from the biting cold.

Many of our neighbors had ice boxes and the ice man would make daily deliveries to their homes. Bread and milk was also delivered to many homes. In our kitchen however, was a modern (?) Kelvinator refrigerator. It was not much better than a glorified ice box with electricity. The freezer in the unit only had room for a few ice cube trays and the refrigerator had to be defrosted on a regular basis. Ice would build up around the freezer and act like an insulator, making the motor for the freezer work that much harder and eventually break down. To defrost the unit, my mother would turn off the refrigerator, sometimes by simply pulling out the plug, and opening up the door. She would then put in several pots of boiling water, speeding up the thawing process. Stubborn pieces of ice would be chipped away with an ice scraper. When completed, she would then wipe the interior of the fridge clean and dry, and then restart it. The defrosting was usually done every two weeks.

There were only a few supermarkets in the 1950’s. Meat and many other commodities were either being rationed or were still scarce commodities. We had more than most because my father had “connections” on the Black Market. My dad was a generous man and often shared his largess with friend and relatives, a munificence which, I’m sure, they never appreciated.

Most shopping was done in small grocery stores and butcher shops. Occasionally, an open, horse-drawn wagon would come down our street selling fruits and vegetables and housewives would swarm out to buy whatever they were selling. This was kind of a mixed blessing because, especially during the summer, these wagons would attract great swarms of flies and other insects which fed on the unprotected produce. On the other hand, pesticides were virtually unknown at the time.

When my mother dragged me to the butcher shop right across the street from us, Mr. Kodila, the butcher, had a sign, Fresh-Killed Chickens. I don’t think this was quite accurate because all of his chickens were hung around a barrel by their heads, on a nail. And often, we would go several times a week and I would see the same chickens on Friday hanging from the barrel, that I had seen on Monday, or even a week (or more) earlier. Stomach aches were a common problem in those days and now I think I know why.

When my mom bought a chicken, Mr. Kodila would ask her if she wanted the feet and/or head. Nothing was wasted in those days. Neither he nor the grocer ever used adding machines, an abacus or calculators. They would simply list the items being bought on the side of a large paper bag, with a stubby pencil that had a sharp tip, and add the items right in front of the customer. No credit or debit cards either, just plain old American currency. The money was quickly put inside of a manual cash register and the proprietor would give the customer back her correct change. While we're on the subject, cash registers of the day had a key that no longer exists called—No Sale. Whenever a customer wanted change, without making a purchase, the proprietor would press this key to open it up and take out the required amount without registering a sale.

And, when my mother brought the bird home to cook, the fun would begin. Although the butcher had “cleaned” the bird, there were always pinfeathers to remove. Sometimes matches were used to burn them off but, more often, mom simply pulled them out with a pair of tweezers. She always depended upon what the butcher told her about the age and quality of the hen. Sometimes it was not exactly as she was told. Once, I clearly remember, a “roaster” turned out to be a “soup” chicken. Mom had been roasting the bird for over three hours and it was still as tough as shoe leather. Finally, in desperation, she threw it into the soup pot and the problem was solved.

The Birds-Eye company came out with frozen vegetables, but most women still preferred to buy fresh vegetables despite the convenience of the new product. Orange juice was still fresh-squeezed in most homes, but when Birds-Eye came out with frozen, concentrated juice, you could see the tide was turning.

In our dining room there was a small table with a black telephone sitting on it. Black was the only telephone color you could get and there was only one model which never changed. Telephones were rented—you were not allowed to buy them. The rental was cheap but you had to pay it as long as you had a telephone in your home. If you had the telephone, say for twenty years and the rental was about $1.00 a month (I forget what it actually was.) You would end up paying, over say a twenty-year lifetime, about $240 for a phone that had cost the telephone company (at the time, Bell Telephone which was a subsidiary of AT&T) perhaps $5.00 to manufacture.
And it was a simple device that never broke down or needed repair. When you moved, the phone stayed there because it was not your property, it belonged to the phone company, which was a public utility. To add insult to injury, we had a party line. That meant that more than one family used the same phone line (see the movie, Pillow Talk.) If someone else was using the phone, you could neither make nor receive calls. They even had to pass laws in some communities that required people to get off a party line in case of an emergency. Sometimes, of course, people would ‘fake’ an emergency to get someone off a party line. At other times, people would die because someone would not get off the line even though they had been told there was an emergency. This was however, one of those ’feel good’ laws that was put in place in order to make it look like our political leaders were doing something about a problem. Over the years, the “problems” may have changed, but the politicians haven’t.

The phone did not have push buttons, only a dial. You could only dial directly, those phones within your local calling area. The numbers started with a name such as Bigelow. And, most numbers within the state were not in your calling area. The called number would use the first two letters of a name (for example, in the case of Bigelow, it would be B and I), followed by a series of numbers. If you wanted to call out of your area, you needed an operator. If you got a good operator, you had few problems. However, not all of them fell in this category. Some of them like to eavesdrop on your call to pick up juicy little tidbits that they could share with their friends or, if they chanced to pick up evidence of a crime; this was shared with the police. Many times I remember that my parents used the operator system to their advantage. When my brother flew back to college after a vacation for example, he would call home, person-to- person collect. When my parents received his call they would tell the operator the person my brother was trying to reach wasn’t there. They were not charged for the call, my brother had spent no money making it, and my parents knew he had arrived safely.

Mass transit in New Jersey was operated in those days by PSE&G, which today supplies only electricity and natural gas to the public. (Incidentally, for a brief period of time in my early life, I remember that coal gas was being used and the switch to natural gas was highly publicized.) The bus ride was only a nickel and, believe it or not, you still heard people complain. The transit system into New York was run by the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Trans-Hudson Railways. You could go almost anywhere in the United States by train in those days. People shied away from airlines and were quite content to bear up under the inconvenience of transferring themselves and their luggage several times while changing trains, in order to reach their destination. The airlines tried to counter this by offering “Flight” insurance at bargain rates. You could purchase $50,000 worth of life insurance, and good only while you were in-flight, for about fifty cents.

The main mode of transportation then, as it is now, was the automobile. Gasoline, after the war, sold for about 17¢ a gallon. I know—it is almost enough to make you cry. When higher horsepower, more powerful cars were developed, it required a higher octane gasoline to reduce or remove engine ‘knocking’ or ‘pinging.’ This was done by adding tetraethyl lead to the gasoline. Besides polluting the air with cancer-producing compounds, it tended to cause mufflers and tailpipes to rust away. But who cared? There was that handsome gasoline attendant in the ad, smiling as he filled your gas tank with this noxious stuff, and who didn’t have a spot of grease on his ultra-clean, well-ironed uniform. Who wouldn’t trust a guy like that?

The tires on cars all had tubes and there was no such thing as radial tires. The glass in the windows was not made of shatter-proof glass like they are today. All of the brakes were drum brakes (not disc) and were located on the rear wheels. Rear-wheel drive meant that a universal gear was necessary which created a huge hump in the passenger section of the car. If the lining on the brake got wet you had to slow down by pumping them until the cars stopped. And there was no such thing as automatic brake systems. There were no computers, at least any small enough to fit inside of a car and you were on your own.

Cars were started differently as well. You turned on the ignition and then pushed a small button on the dashboard. When the car began to start there were two other knobs you had to manipulate. One was called a throttle and the other was the choke. Eventually, the throttle was eliminated, but the choke stayed with us for a long time. The throttle was used to adjust the speed of the engine and the choke was used to control the mixture of oxygen to fuel. Most cars were not automatic either; you had to use a stick shift. Later, GM came out with hydramatic drive and Chrysler came out with fluid drive. They were essentially the same thing however.

At first, stick shifts were cumbersome things. They were large sticks that came out of the floor on the right side of the driver—too bad if you were left-handed. You changed gears by depressing a pedal called a clutch, which was on the far left-had side of the driver, next to the brake pedal. And next to the clutch pedal, to its left and slightly higher was the button for the high/low beam. You went from the low beam to the high beam, or vice-versa, by pressing the button with your left foot.

Some of the things which are common-place in cars today were non-existent then. In addition to some of the things I have already mentioned, there were no power windows, power brakes, or power steering. There were no seat belts or safety bags. Almost no cars possessed automatic turn signals, automatic brake systems (ABS) or air conditioning, except as an expensive option that most people were unwilling to buy. There was also no such thing as keyless car entry; no fuel injection; no variable-speed window washers and certainly, no imbedded computers. Incidentally, when I began driving in 1959, car insurance cost me $250 a year for $25,000 of liability as well as collision. I just thought that I would throw that in for a good laugh.

Band-Aid

Some of these products are still with us, such as Band-Aid, made by Johnson & Johnson. But the product they sell today bears little resemblance to the one I remember. The advertisements of the time pictured a nice clean, adhesive bandage doing its job of keeping nasty old germs from infecting open wounds and cuts. The truth was far different. The bandage was made out of cloth which deteriorated rather quickly into a dirty brown color. It was a natural magnet for dirt. The adhesive that was used in Band-Aids was not very good either. Almost as quickly as the bandage attracted outside dirt, it would begin unraveling and would fall off at the first sign of moisture. The gauze section of the bandage, the part that was placed directly on the wound, had an unpleasant tendency to stick to the injury. Often, when the Band-Aid was removed by hand, it would pull off the scab that had formed, reopening the wound, exposing it to dirt and infection.

Getting back to radio for a minute—today, radio is little more than a conduit for foul music (if you want to call it that), continuous news programming and “shock” jocks. With the exception of the news, about ninety percent of today’s programming would not have been allowed on the air. I remember William B. Williams, who had inherited the Make-Believe Ballroom from Martin Bloch, refusing to play a song called Transfusion on the program. The song told a sarcastic story of the results of an auto accident. By today’s standards it was relatively mild when compared to Rap and hip-hop, with their litany of misogynistic sex and foul words.

Piels Beer

There were a great many commercial beers at the time—mostly lagers. I remember Schlitz, Blatz, Rheingold and Hensler, just to name a few. The one I best remember however was Piels Beer. Why is that, you ask? Well, Piels had a great television (and radio) commercial featuring a cartoon caricature of Bert and Harry Piels, the supposed owners of the brewery. The voice-over was done by the great comedy team of Bob and Ray, two of the funniest guys in show business at the time. Even their comic genius coupled with a great commercial could not save the beer. It was a lousy-tasting beer and, once someone had sampled the product, they would rarely return to buy it again, unless they were masochists.

Lifebuoy Soap

Lifebuoy had a catchy jingle they used to hawk their product.
Singing in the bathtub,
Singing with joy,
Living the life of Lifebuoy,
Can’t help singing ‘cause I know,
Lifebuoy really stops B.O.

It was 1939 and I remember that a war (World War II) was going on. I wasn’t exactly sure about what a war was at that stage in my life. I only knew that there were good guys and bad guys, and we were the good guys. I am sure that there were German and Japanese children who thought much the same thing, only with the roles reversed. I knew people died during a war because I could see that in the movies. Sure, no blood was ever shown during a John Wayne war movie because Hollywood cleaned up the truth. It looked like it was a lot of fun to kids. Soldiers caught up in the horrors of war in these movies never used bad words or did bad things to prisoners or innocent people. Now that I look back on it, I was living in a dream world because, as we all know, the reality of war is far different. We were programmed into that dream world by a device called radio, as well as the movies.

Everything was rationed during the war. I still remember my mom going to the corner butcher or grocery store with her ration book and tokens in hand. Gasoline was 17¢ a gallon in those days, a bottle of coke was a nickel and an ice cream cone was a dime.

To Be Continued (When, I do not know)