Is Meets Was

Our family c. 1945. Our first record player was a wooden box affair, with a handle on the side. This handle was turned and turned, spinning the disk inside the box onto which a record was placed. In the box, on a pivot, there was an arm that held a playing needle. We swung the arm out and down until the needle touched the record, and then let go of the arm. The music began to play. Eventually, record players used electricity to spin the records and move the arm. Years later, some record players held multiple records that automatically dropped down when the previous record was finished. Then came Hi Fidelity players. The sound was much improved, but they were based on the same principle as the original players. Then some genius came along and started recording music on tapes. For this to work, you had to have a tape player. Soon after that came portable, battery-operated tape players. Then came earphones, etc. Now there are iPads and iPhones etc. But none of that existed when we li...

Billy c. 1947 Our grocery store was an old A&P located on the corner of Howard Avenue and Chauncey Street. The owner was Mr. Horan, and his helper was named Percy. (Thus, the name of my current dog.) Mr. Horan and Percy were both from Ireland, and Mr. Horan was married with a family. I don’t remember much about Percy. My mother shopped daily at the market and had a running account. She paid the bill weekly when my father got paid. Charges were written in pencil by Mr. Horan on an old beer advertisement cardboard. Each week he manually added the amounts. No one ever questioned the accuracy of the tallies. We just assumed everything was correct. Once a week, on Saturdays, my mother would place a large order which my brother, Billy, would deliver to our apartment. Billy was the delivery boy for the store. He worked for tips and for storage space for his current “hot rod.” Billy always had some sort of motor vehicle. I don’t remember if, or when, he got a driver’s license...

Sitting on our front porch, wearing my Easter corsage c. 1947. (From left to right: Cousin Leila, me, Freddy, and Cousin Mary.) The holidays were wonderful! Every Easter my father would get us girls a corsage and a box of Loft’s chocolates. There were always colored, hard-cooked eggs, chocolates for the boys, and jelly beans of course. There was a bunch of daffodils, purchased on the way home from Mass, for my mother. My father always managed to make a little overtime just before Easter, so somehow there might be a new pair of shoes or even a new outfit. I especially remember a suit that my sister, Mary, made for me while she was in junior high school, P.S. 73. It was a hunter-green gabardine with a pleated skirt and an Eisenhower-style jacket. Another year she made a jacket out of grey flannel with a dark blue bow at the neck. Me and our Christmas tree draped in tinsel c. 1952. (This was a black and white photo that I hand-painted.) Christmas was always magical. Our ...

Freddy and me c. 1946, about five years before we had a TV. One modern convenience we did have was a television. We got it about the time that the “I Love Lucy” show started. When the show first aired (October 1951), my brother, Fred, was 14 and I was 10 years old. Freddy and I were the youngest of the 6 children.  Freddy was always tinkering with radios and the like. He became “friends” with a store owner on Howard Ave. who operated a repair shop for radios and televisions.  Somehow, Freddy acquired a console TV that needed fixing. It was a monstrosity. It was almost as large as the refrigerator, with a picture screen of maybe 4 inches by 5 inches. Someone had to hold on to the antenna from across the room, and even then, the picture looked like a canceled postage stamp.  Freddy with our nephew, Jimmy, c. 1953. In time, the television was moved into the back bedroom across from the bunk beds. We thought that sitting on the top bed was like sitting on t...

Mary at the candy store c. 1949. Here there was a public phone. We didn’t have a telephone in our apartment until 1951 or 1952. Until then, if someone wished to get in touch with us, they either wrote letters or in an emergency, they could ring the public phone in the candy store on the corner. Close relatives had the number on that phone. If the occasion was serious enough, they could call the pay phone. Someone hanging out in the candy store would answer the phone, talk to the caller, walk to our place, ring our doorbell, and deliver a message. We would then tip the person, a nickel or a dime, for the courtesy.  This arrangement worked out well until my sister, Mary, got a boyfriend who lived on Long Island. If she got a phone call from a boy, the entire neighborhood would know it.  As it turned out, this boy was a friend of my brother, Billy.   Billy (center) and Joe (on the right). Billy and Joe met on the first day of school for sheet metal work...

Growing up in Brooklyn, especially on Chauncey Street, we didn’t know there were people with anything more than we had. When we had holes in our shoes, we patched them with linoleum, the floor covering of the time. If our socks had a hole in them, we sewed them. (0nly to cause a blister.) We didn’t have sunblock. There was a lot of sunburn.  When we went to Coney Island, w e didn’t have coolers to pack our sandwiches in. We used cardboard suitcases instead, and we didn’t get sick. Cold cut sandwiches tasted toasted when left in the sun for a while. Flotation water toys were air mattresses left over from World War II. Those lucky enough to own one had to blow it up manually, but what fun we had. We swam in the water at Coney Island, under the Belt Parkway bridges at Bergen Beach, or at Gerritsen Beach, all in Brooklyn. We did learn to swim, without the aid of swimming lessons. One time my brother, Bill, dove off one of the pilings of the bridge at Bergen Beach. My mother, ...

This anecdote is not intended to be educational, but to make you aware of the significance of our Catholic faith.  Mom (front left) with her family in 1917. Mom's mother died the following year. My mother, Aunt Dot, Uncle Fred, and Uncle Gil were left motherless by the Spanish flu epidemic. Mary Elizabeth Fitzgerald Merrill was taken away from her husband and children in 1918. My mother was only seven, and Aunt Dot was not much older. Some of the aunts and uncles that aided our grandfather, “Pup”, in raising his children were Protestants. Nonetheless, Mom and Aunt Dot stayed true to their Catholic faith. Unless you attended Mass with my mother or Aunt Dot, you would never understand the devotion and love of the faith these two sisters had. I was not more than 5 or 6 when I realized the importance of the Consecration of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of our Lord. You just had to look into the face of my mother, and you too would believe. Sometimes my...