When my wife and I first got married, we lived with her sister and mother on Pennsylvania Avenue in Newark. Her sister was about 16, and as she walked to school, boys in passing cars would call out to each other “Mira! Mira!”.
My wife took the bus to work every day, at the Grand Union store in Scotch Plains where she was the bookkeeper. I picked her up every night, and that’s where we bought our groceries. A hundred dollars’ worth of groceries filled the trunk and half the back seat.
At the end of Pennsylvania Avenue was a small, triangular park called Lincoln Park. The park’s claim to fame was that JFK’s motorcade was rerouted past it to counter a threat about traveling on Broad Street. My wife didn’t know Kennedy was in town, but she and our older son got to see him and wave as he drove by.
A little-noted Lincoln Park event months earlier was a battle between blacks and Puerto Ricans. During the fighting, park benches were disassembled and their slats used as lances and clubs. When I saw the fighting from a block away, I thought to myself, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not involved.” The police eventually arrived and broke it up. Helping to keep the city’s lid on, the newspapers made no mention of the event.
We seldom overslept on holidays, because if there was a parade involved it formed up in front of our house before moving to the main route on Broad Street. We shared our front steps with excited band families and early parade goers.
My wife and I went to the Mosque Theater, now Newark Symphony Hall, to see Nina Simone. We were shown to the balcony and seated there with the other white people, 20 or 30 of us. We didn’t care, she was fantastic.
My wife has read about a cooling summer drink called “The Pimm’s Cup”, which oddly enough requires 3/4 cup of Pimm’s #1 liqueur. She asks me to pick some up, and next day I stop at S. Klein On The Square, which has a liquor department. I ask the help for a bottle of “Pimm’s Cup”, having to repeat myself twice. They chortle, this is a new one on them, and they keep repeating back and forth “Pimp’s Cup, Pimp’s Cup” until they find one.
There was a small fire in the rooming house across the street. Even before the fire trucks arrived, the residents were outside on folding chairs, watching a ballgame on their rabbit-eared TV, an extension cord plugged into the vestibule of the church next door.
Our neighbor dies and while the family is at the funeral his house is robbed. The neighborhood is changing.