For Roman Catholics, August 15th was and remains a Holy Day of Obligation, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. It was also my Uncle Pat’s birthday. After we moved from my Aunt Norah and Uncle Pat’s house in August 1945, and after the drunken Christmas Day debacle at my grandmother’s, my mother and my Aunt Norah were no longer on speaking terms.
While I pined away in Olney for my paradise lost, it never occurred to me that our moving out might also have had a major impact on my aunt and uncle. Norah and Pat were childless, and after more than seven years of our living there, the departure of my younger brother and I from their house must have left an emotional black hole in their lives.
How my brother and I first came to go back over to my Aunt Norah’s, how the arrangement was brokered, I don’t know. It was toward the end of the summer of 1948, a full three years since we’d seen Norah or Pat, or for that matter, any of my father’s family. I was less than a month short of eleven years old, and my brother had just turned nine. On an ordinary summer morning while I ate my breakfast, my mother casually announced that my brother and I were going over to Aunt Norah’s to spend the night. If Bugs Bunny or President Truman had suddenly appeared in our kitchen that morning, I wouldn’t have been anymore taken aback. Before I could fully absorb the rush I felt at hearing my mother’s astounding pronouncement, she followed it up with the second punch in her one-two combination. Because it was Uncle Pat’s birthday, she said, as if it were self-explanatory, he and my Aunt Norah were taking my brother and I to the seashore for the day.
Despite the fact that we lived less than sixty miles from the Atlantic Ocean, I had never been to the shore. Every summer, Kenny Bergman from up the street went to Stone Harbor with his family. “Stone Harbor,” just the name swept me off into visions of a towering lighthouse high above a rock-strewn coast with huge frightening waves tossing white spray high into a bright blue, gull-filled sky. And of course the horizon was filled with white sails. “Shipbottom,” where Joey Barbone and his family went, generated a fantasy image of great, gutted red-bottomed ships, torpedoed relics of the recent war lying on their sides in the surf off of a wide, deserted beach. “They’re taking you down to Atlantic City,” my mother said. All that Atlantic City would conjure up was the taste of chewy salt-water taffy and the ads that pictured a woman in a red bathing cap astride a diving horse. Still, I thought I’d never get to sleep that night.
With my brother and I wearing matching khaki shirts and pants, my mother walked us down the street, and waited with us on the corner for the Route 47 Car. My brother and I each carried a rope-handled department store shopping bag with everything we would need for our trip. I held our carfare and two extra nickels for phone calls in case anything went awry. We didn’t have a telephone and my instructions were to call Hurtle’s candy store on the corner to let my mother know we had arrived safely at Norah’s. This would be the first time my brother or I had ever been away from home overnight.
When I paid our carfare, I asked the conductor for transfers to use on the “R” bus that would take us over the Boulevard to the Bridge Street Terminal and the Route 66 Car up Frankford Avenue to Norah’s. When we went to climb up into the 66 Car, my brother couldn’t find his transfer. I remember my feeling of panic as I began trying to explain our situation to the motorman. He just smiled and waved us in toward the back of the trolley. Getting closer to our stop at Robbins Avenue, the sights began to look vaguely familiar. The three years since our move started to fade away, and I felt a sense of a nostalgic homecoming, or at least as much nostalgia as a ten year old could draw upon.
We got off the trolley car; by now dazed and bedraggled from what to us was an epic journey across time zones and neighborhoods as large as continents. Everything looked almost as I’d remembered it, and yet strangely different. Aunt Norah must have been watching as each trolley stopped, and was waiting for us on the corner. My father once noted his sister’s emotional volatility by saying that “Norah could cry whenever an El train left Bridge Street.” We were smothered in hugs and kisses all accompanied by tears. Each time she settled down, she was good for a couple of minutes before blubbering all over us again. There was lunch waiting in the kitchen. The house had the same smells and the same look that I had remembered, but like the familiar and yet unfamiliar streets we’d passed through, everything was somehow different, not really the same. After lunch, when we rushed out into the driveway to play, the old playmates either weren’t around or had changed in ways that made the remembered easy ways tentative or even uneasy.
We weren’t out long. When we came in, Aunt Norah was looking upset. She asked me if I had been supposed to call Hurtle’s with a message for my mother. My mother had called, and the voice-to-voice, unmediated conversation, their first in almost three years, must have been difficult for both of them.
My brother and I spent the remainder of the afternoon in Aunt Norah’s dark living room in front of their new Dumont television set. Since we didn’t yet have a TV, the snowy, nine-inch black and white screen was compensation for the unsettling effects of my less than triumphant return from exile. The set had a horizontal picture tube, and the image was reflected up onto a small, slanted mirror that could be unhinged and lowered when the set wasn’t in use. It was not an idea whose time would ever come.
My Uncle Pat, a taciturn Yin to my aunt’s demonstrative Yang, came home from work and made as big a fuss as he was capable of making at the renewed presence of my brother and I in their house. After dinner, as it began getting dark, I was too worn out and disoriented to raise even pro forma objections to an early bedtime. After three years spent yearning for this tree-shaded magic place, the only place I ever thought I’d been truly happy, the reality hadn’t quite measured up. Even the prospect of seeing the mighty Atlantic Ocean for the first time couldn’t reconcile me to the fact that not only had the place of my dreams changed, but I had changed too. I went right to bed and right to sleep.
Other than when we moved to our house on Delphine Street, that morning at my Aunt Norah’s was my first experience of waking up in a strange bed. The strangeness was mitigated by the presence of my brother with me in the double bed. That was still the arrangement at home. With the realization of where I was, and what was in the offing, my excitement kicked back into full gear. My brother and I dressed in shorts and shirts from our shopping bags, and after a hint from Aunt Norah, we remembered to wish Uncle Pat a Happy Birthday.
There was no figuring Pat’s age. He was much older than Norah, an old man, some said when they married. Years later, Pat told me of his walking barefooted out an unpaved Susquehanna Avenue to Broad Street to see the parade of soldiers returning from Cuba after the defeat of Spain. He must have been born somewhere around 1890. After a quick breakfast, we followed Aunt Norah and Uncle Pat out of the house and retraced our steps back over to the car stop on Frankford Avenue.
My Aunt Norah was a twin. Like her sister, my Aunt Nelly, she was a large woman. And like Nelly, she was given to extravagance in dress and in her passion for costume jewelry and dramatic accessories. A decade later and just out of the Army, I’d taken an entry-level office job in center city, and was trying hard to create an impression that I was a young man of serious intellectual awareness. In the evening rush hour, riding the Market-Frankford Elevated, I hung from a strap with one hand while the other held several ponderous tomes, all of them turned spine side out. At the Susquehanna-York station, in the momentary quiet before the train started again, I heard my name being called. From the other end of the car came two shrill voices in discordant harmony, “Pete! Pete! Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo, Pete! Down here. Yoo-hoo” Every head in the car turned as I looked and spotted my Aunts Norah and Nelly, two ample ladies of a certain age, identical twins, dressed perfectly alike in outrageous splendor. My father told me that when Norah and Nelly were children, the novelty of their being twins was lost in the fact that there was barely enough money for necessities let alone costuming. Late in their middle-age, when they and their husbands moved in with each other, Norah and Nelly proved that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. They took up look-alike dressing with an oblivious enthusiasm.
On this workday summer evening, they were both wearing large-print floral dresses with contrasting multiple-strand, large-bead necklaces. Several layers of bracelets on each wrist matched the necklace beads. Under huge straw picture-frame hats adorned with artificial flowers that picked up the dress material print motif, they sported the same oversized, jeweled, pussycat framed eyeglasses.
If there had been anyone in the crowded car who hadn’t noticed them before, all eyes now moved from them to me and back to them as I did my “excuse-me, excuse me” through to where they stood at the other end of the car. While I was allowing myself to be inundated with hugs, kisses and “Oh, look at how grown up you look” and so forth, it dawned on me that we were a source of genial amusement to almost everyone around us. My embarrassment was slowly tempered by a new awareness, one that would grow with the years to come, that maybe I’d hadn’t been born into a dull, gray world of bricks, concrete and colorless people whose lives could never be of any interest to me. I wondered if there were any other people on that car, or even anyone I knew, who had a pair of wonderfully flamboyant twin aunts with names like Norah and Nelly.
On the morning of our seashore trip, when we got to the Bridge Street Elevated terminal, we had to wait for Uncle Pat to climb the three flights of stairs up to the platform. Pat had a “bum” leg. Working the night shift for the Reading Railroad, he had been a brakeman, and the story I remember had something to do with his having fallen off a boxcar and injuring his leg. My father attributed some of Pat’s bitter attitudes to the chronic pain he suffered from the bad leg. The leg hadn’t healed properly, or Pat hadn’t gotten the right care, and with each year the pain intensified and Pat became less and less able to get around.
Desperate for relief from his pain, but soured on the medical profession, Pat answered a magazine ad for an expensive electrical contraption. A complicated, patented apparatus, it came in an impressive red plush-lined wooden box with brass fittings. Stripped of its trappings, it was probably nothing more than a variation on the magnetos used to boost the spark in a car’s electrical system. One summer morning between first and second grades, when I was supposed to be out playing in the driveway, I was lying instead on the floor of the upstairs landing, daydreaming and looking down through the railings into the living room. I watched silently as Pat opened the grain-finished box, took out a strange looking piece of equipment and plugged a cord into an outlet. He lay down on the floor, opened his old bathrobe, attached electrodes to his bad leg, and threw the switch. It took about ten seconds of sharp crackling of static for the unit to build up a full charge. Then came a loud crack like a gun going off and an arcing flash of blue light. Pat’s leg flew involuntarily up into the air, causing his entire body to convulse and twitch. I was impressed. After that, whenever I could, I would sneak back to my post on the landing in hopes of again witnessing this strange and scary, but exciting, ritual. I spent a lot of dull time lying quietly on the hall carpet, but on several occasions I was there when the sparks flew, and that kept me coming back. On the morning it all came to an end, everything began as before. But after the shock and after Uncle Pat’s leg returned to the floor, he lay there without getting up. I heard a sobbing sound and realized that he was crying. Other than my seeing Aunt Norah and my mother in tears, I didn’t know that grownups could cry, and never a man. I didn’t know what to do. Before I could crawl back down the hall and hide in the bedroom my brother and I shared, Pat sat up. With a face contorted in pain and tears, he yanked the cord from the wall. Picking up the machine, box and all, he threw it across the room, parts of it knocking over a half dozen of the knick-knacks that crowded every flat surface in the room. I heard him gasp, and then cry out “lousy son-of-a-bitch.” I heard the sobbing continue as I crawled, as quietly as I could, back into my room and under my bed.
When we lived at Norah’s, Pat was still able to take lengthy if difficult walks, and he usually took my brother or me with him for company. He’d rant the whole time on the terrible state of the city, the country and the world as if we were knowledgeable adults who could be convinced of his points-of-view. Whether it was the leg or not, Pat was an angry, unhappy man. He would spend his mornings reading in the small sun parlor, turning with great frequency to my brother or me with a “now listen to this.” He would then read aloud an account of some new outrage on the part of those in positions of power, wealth or public trust. Almost everything he read to us validated his view that all of life was a theater of betrayal. No one ever rose in the world that it wasn’t at the expense of someone else. All forms of success were suspect, and anyone in a position of authority or power would invariably betray those they were supposed to protect. There are those who might argue that my Uncle Pat’s worldview was not an entirely unreasonable one.
Over the years, the presence of my brother and I in his house opened some breaches in Pat’s armor. He had a genuine if guarded affection for us. My brother was two years younger than me; he was just six when we moved away. I think my little brother’s dreamy vulnerability ate away at the hard shell of Pat’s cynicism. “The big one,” that was me. “You can talk to him. But that other guy lives on different planet.” Pat would tell my mother, “Rose, if you don’t keep an eye on that kid, he’ll get hit in the ass by a trolley car.”
Pat repeated over and over the story of the day he bought my brother and I double-scoop ice cream cones. My brother had hardly begun to lick his when he walked face first into a mailbox squishing the ice cream into his face and dropping the cone on the sidewalk. Pat couldn’t seem to get over the fact that my brother didn’t even cry, that he just stood there accepting what had happened as if it was simply more evidence of the inherently impersonal nature of the universe. What Pat always left out of the story was that he hurried right back to the store and bought my brother another double-scoop ice cream cone.
In his own way, Uncle Pat’s fashion sensibilities were a fitting complement to my aunt’s. For our trip to Atlantic City, he wore a shiny dark brown, double-breasted Palm Beach suit with a white shirt and bright floral patterned silk tie, the tie held in place by a large jeweled stickpin. The silk band of his off-white Panama hat matched the necktie. The whole ensemble was pulled together with a pair of highly polished, two-toned, brown and white wing tips. That he had to lean upon a lacquered cane just added to the overall effect. Taken together, he and my Aunt were a dazzling sight.
With the swarms of people going to work, the four of us got off the Subway/Elevated at Second and Market Streets. In the hazy, early morning sunlight of an August day, we walked the two blocks down to the ferry terminal at the foot of Market Street. At Front Street, we picked up the first whiff of rotten eggs, the smell that announced the polluted waters of the Delaware River. Even though the adjacent Delaware River Bridge had been in operation for over twenty years, the Pennsylvania Railroad still operated a fleet of large, grimy ferries carrying cars and passengers across the river to the terminal of the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Rail Lines in Camden, New Jersey. It was my first ever boat ride, and that old, dirty Delaware River ferryboat could have been the Ile de France. Not the smell of the river, not the disgusting color of the water, not even the tide-driven carpet of floating trash and garbage could dull my excitement about crossing the river on a ferry boat. I would have been happy to stay right there, going back and forth all day.
The Pennsylvania and Reading railroads operated jointly with daily excursion trains from Camden to the popular southern New Jersey shore points. If the river crossing had been my first nautical experience, this was, despite the fact that we lived within fifty yards of a busy railroad line, also my first time on a train. I was on experiential overload. We found the waiting Atlantic City train and boarded a nearly empty car. This was not the Santa Fe Chief or the Broadway Limited. The coaches were worn out relics and the engines were coal-fired steam locomotives. The only air circulation was what came in through the open windows. When the wind shifted, you could get a stinging face full of gritty coal soot. Even worse was the occasional cloud of evil-smelling, sulphurous smoke that could induce fits of gasping, coughing and choking. But what did I care? I was on a real train, the same kind of a train that was attacked by hostile Indians in the movies I saw at the Colony Theater on Fifth Street. I was aware that there were no hostile Indians between Camden and Atlantic City, but then again who really knew?
My brother and I both got a window seat with Norah and Pat taking the aisle. I was up front with Uncle Pat, who once the train began moving, had to keep reminding me not to put my head out the open window. Downtown Camden gave way to blocks of row houses just like our own. Then there were factories and warehouses, and then the suburbs; Collingswood and Haddonfield, places that looked like pages from the Dick and Jane Reader or stills from an Andy Hardy movie. I leaned my arm on the sill, and managed to keep my face into the slipstream without actually being outside the window. Very quickly, it was all farms, flat fields bordered by distant tree lines. The ground wasn’t brown dirt like the open lots around the neighborhood. It was sand, bright white in the morning sun. I never got bored with the sameness of the view flying past us. After nearly an hour, my excitement rose again when we crossed the first marshes and tidal channels. With increasing frequency the fields opened on reeds, cattails, muddy banks and watercourses very unlike the dirty, rock-filled creek near where we lived. The smells in the air began to change, becoming moist, sharp and, and hinting of salt.
Without warning, we burst out from the last of the trees and fields. We were over water. The train raced along now over a raised roadbed above an immense salt marsh. In the distance, the sun glinted off an open expanse of blue water. The train itself, it seemed, was going right out into the ocean. I shook Uncle Pat out of his snoozing. Pointing to the blue water, I shouted “the ocean, the ocean.” Pat corrected me, telling me that it was the bay we were crossing. “The Great Egg Harbor Bay,” he informed me. “ The bay? Egg Harbor? The associative leap in my mind was predictable, a sea of floating eggs. As I stared at the blue water speeding by beneath us, Uncle Pat said, “Atlantic City.” Shouting to be heard above the rush of the open windows, he continued, “Atlantic City is on an island, between the bay and the ocean.” With the word “island,” the images of eggs moved off the screen in my head. Islands were the stuff of pirates, of Robinson Crusoe, and action-filled landings by the Marines. In just a few minutes, we were going to be in Atlantic City, on an island.
We walked through the imposing Atlantic City train station, a mini-cathedral complete with dust motes dancing in shafts of sunlight. Emerging on to the street, I thought “where’s the seashore.” I could have been at Cottman Street and Frankford Avenue in Mayfair. “It’s down there,” said Uncle Pat, “at the end of that street.” The closer we got to the boardwalk, the more things changed. We began passing bars and rooming houses with their doors open to the sidewalk. Under multi-story buildings that were strung with wooden porches and intricate exterior staircases, people were selling beach supplies; umbrellas, buckets, chairs. Dark-skinned men in vest undershirts with garden hoses were squirting sand off the shaded sidewalks. “There it is,” said Aunt Norah pointing to the sunlit boardwalk now less than a block away. I wanted to run toward it, but somehow restrained myself until we reached the bottom of the ramp where I broke loose and ran up on to the boards.
There it was, the Atlantic Ocean. I scanned it knowing that somewhere, just beyond that flat horizon, lay the coast of England. Looking across the crowded boardwalk, I could see the mass of people and umbrellas already on the beach. Just in front of the lifeguard stand, the blue-green water turned white where the surf broke and splashed. I was so excited I could have run across the boardwalk, down the beach and jumped fully clothed into those waves. We went down the far steps onto the deep, loose sand, our shoes sliding sideways. My brother and I were handed towels and our bathing suits from the shopping bags and sent under the boardwalk to change. It was dark and sandy under the boardwalk, the air damp and filled with the buzzing of big, green-headed flies. Nervous and embarrassed at getting undressed where people on the beach could see us if they cared to turn around, we struggled into our wooly and belted bathing trunks.
When we came back out into the sun, Aunt Norah and Uncle Pat still buttoned up in their traveling finery were seated on towels in the sand, the spot where they would spend the next several hours while my brother and I jumped up and down in the surf. Going in, the cold water was a shock. Within minutes however, it became surprisingly warm. Neither my brother nor I knew how to swim, and I was intimidated by the capricious power of the surf. It was scary, almost malevolent and I think I took it personally. We had been told to stay directly in front of the lifeguard stand where Norah and Pat could also keep an eye on us. My brother, after being knocked down a few times by the waves, was content to sit in the shallow water and play around with the wet sand. Wanting more than that, I swallowed my fears and went out into the waves all the way up to my waist. I jumped up with each new wave, thrilled by the feeling of buoyancy as the moving water lifted me off my feet. It was more fun than any of the rides at the Willow Grove or Woodside Amusement Parks. I was astounded by the fact that the waves just kept coming and coming. If you didn’t have to eat or go home, you could jump waves forever. You certainly didn’t have to leave the ocean to take a leak. Aunt Norah came down to the edge and waved us in. It was lunchtime. She had gone up on the boardwalk and had come back with hot dogs, orange drink and French fries. I was goose-bumped and chilled blue. I had sand in every crevice and orifice, and my fingertips were wrinkled like prunes. Based on the popular mythology of the day, we were made to sit on the beach for a full hour after having eaten our lunch. Supposedly, going into the water after eating anything at all would cause painful cramps that would always result in drowning. After another all too brief hour or so in the water, we were back under the boardwalk changing back into our clothes. Every grain of sand that touched my neck and shoulders told me that I’d also picked up a dose of sunburn.
Dressed and packed up, we slipped and staggered our way across the sand and up the steps to the boardwalk. What now? I had no idea. Norah and Pat found an empty bench in the shade and set up our second base camp of the day. Aunt Norah opened her pocketbook and handed my brother and I two dollars each. While Pat waited on the bench, the three of us, scattering pigeons as we went, headed across the boardwalk toward the giant McCrory’s five and ten cent store. “That money is yours to spend on anything you want,” said my aunt. Two bucks! Until that time, I had never had discretionary funds of that magnitude at my disposal.
Inside the huge five and dime, my brother and I went into a frenzy. What to buy? What to buy? When we finally emerged back out on to the boardwalk, we had tin water pistols that leaked from the first time we filled them, and we were both wearing propeller beanies and awful flower-printed Hawaiian shirts. And, we both had change left over from our original two bucks. Two dollars in 1948 was probably the equivalent of twenty or thirty today. Aunt Norah discreetly suggested that we spend our leftover cash on something to bring home to our parents. The Planter’s Nut store on the boardwalk seemed like a great place to buy gifts for my mother and father, but the costumed Mr. Peanut who greeted us going into the store succeeded only in frightening my brother into near hysterics. Since we couldn’t get my brother through the door, my mother and father ended up with a one-dollar and twenty-five-cent cardboard barrel filled with James’ Salt Water Taffy from a store down the boardwalk. Aunt Norah made up the forty-five cents we were short.
With Uncle Pat leading the way, we made our way down off the boardwalk, our shopping bags heavy with wet bathing suits and with our purchases from McCrory’s. He was taking us to a place on Atlantic Avenue where, he said we would get a decent supper. The context for this segment of our great adventure was that up to this point in my life I couldn’t recall having eaten in a restaurant more than once or twice. Maybe I had, but if so, I couldn’t remember.
From my perspective, the establishment we entered that afternoon could have been Atlantic City’s famous Knife and Fork restaurant, the Grand Dining Room of the Chalfont Haddon-Hall Hotel, or a tiny five-stool luncheonette with a counter and two small tables against the wall, which is what it was. Aunt Norah told us we could order anything we wanted. The variety of choices on the menu threw me into absolute confusion. “Uh, uh,” I stammered when asked what I was having. My brother being younger than me, showed that he was oblivious to the protocols of the occasion and our surroundings by saying, “I want a hot dog.” Even I recognized that as a gaffe. Hot dogs are for lunch. Aunt Norah came to my rescue. “I think you’d like the breaded veal cutlet,” she said. “That’s what we’re having. It’s very good here.” I agreed to take that gastronomic leap, and nodded that I too would be having the breaded veal cutlet, whatever it was.
There was no waiter or waitress, and the counter man in his spotted white tee shirt turned from his grill and asked “well, what are you folks having.” Aunt Norah ordered for us, asking my brother if he didn’t want to reconsider his choice. No risk-taking there, he was sticking with hot dogs. It was at this point that my Uncle Pat let us in on one of the determining criteria for the selection of this particular place to eat, one that made considerable sense to me at the time. “I always come here,” he said, “because you know your getting fresh stuff.” He paused and looked at my brother and I so that we could absorb the full import of the lesson he was about to impart. “When you order peas in here, or corn, you always know what you’re getting.” Another slight pause while he looked up to where the counterman was laboring away. “Because,” he said with finality, “when you sit right here where I’m sitting, you can watch that guy up there open the cans after you give them your order. And that’s the only way,” he said conclusively, “ that you can be sure you’re really getting the fresh stuff.”
The breaded veal cutlet was like nothing I had ever tasted. I had had no idea that things like this actually existed in the world. There were little pieces of celery and onion in the tomato sauce, a sauce that tasted a lot like the Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup my mother gave us for lunch on cold days. For years to come, on those infrequent occasions when I found myself seated in a restaurant with a menu in my hand, I was able to handle the situation with confidence. “I’ll have the breaded veal cutlet, thank you.” My brother continued to order hot dogs.
It wasn’t quite dark by the time we straggled back to the train station. Tired from the long walk to the station, sunburned, and sandy, I followed Aunt Norah up and into a hot, stuffy coach half-filled with other tired silent seashore day-trippers. We took up the same positions as we had on the outbound trip but my heart was no longer in it. The car’s weak overhead lights were a dull yellow and surrounded with swarms of insects. It seemed the adventure was over and I think I just wanted to go home. I probably had been starting to doze off when a crowd of noisy men began pouring into the coach. Some were smoking cigars, most held bottles or cans of beer, and two of them were manhandling a large metal ice chest. They were party boat fishermen down for the day, a day that had probably begun before dawn. And from the looks of them, they had been hitting the beer all day. While they were probably in worse shape than my brother and I, they weren’t yet ready to give in. There was much back and forth and up and down in selecting seats. Amid yelling, catcalling and heckling, cans and bottles of beer kept passing from hand to hand. I had never seen grownups acting like this, and I thought it was great fun. As I watched, two of the laughing, sweaty men jumped from their seats and began pulling large fish from the ice chest. As they started moving down the aisle toward us waving wet flounder in the faces of their fellow passengers, the conductor came aboard and put a stop to the party. The train began moving and my brother was the first to fall asleep, followed by the party boat crowd, and that was the last I remembered until I was awakened in the Camden terminal. A quiet ride on a nearly empty ferryboat, the hot El train, a deserted 66 Car up Frankford Avenue, the two-block walk to Aunt Norah’s house and bed. The only time I had ever been up this late had been the previous New Year’s Eve when I’d managed to stay awake until almost eleven thirty.
The next morning when Aunt Norah saw us off at the trolley stop, she told my brother and I that we didn’t have to mention to anyone that we hadn’t managed to make it to mass yesterday. I knew it had been a holy day of obligation, but by then I had already decided that the bodily assumption of the Blessed Mother into heaven wasn’t all that big a deal. I mean, could it have been any more of a miracle than the day I had just had? I didn’t think so.
Tags: 1945-1955, andy hardy, atlantic city, boardwalk, broadway limited, bugs bunny, campbell's cream of tomato, chalfont haddon-hall, collingswood, colney theater, dick and jane reader, dumont television, egg harbor, haddonfield, knife and fork restaurant, market-frankford elevated, mayfair, mccrory's five and ten, memoir, mr. peanut, olney, philadelphia, president truman, robinson crusoe, santa fe chief, shipbottom, stone harbor, the blessed mother, willow grove, woodside park
