Everything That Happened

to me and sometimes to other people

Category: School

Parochial School

By

On October 7, 2019

In Family, Religion, School

A statue of Jesus Christ is lowered off the roof of St. John’s School after it toppled during a wind storm on Sept. 19, 2012. – Julio Cortez / AP

A lot of the kids in my neighborhood went to Saint John’s parochial school, not a majority, but enough that they were a danger when they were set free in the afternoon. Local public-school kids  knew to stay out of sight when Saint John’s let out. The St. John’s kids’ spirits were so crushed, and the boys so full of pent-up anger, that anything could happen. The exception to this was the Doheny kids; there were six of them and they could go off at any time, not just after school. Anyone who fought a Doheny kid had to fight all of them. They lived a block away from me, but their house was not on the way to my school, a public school, so I could avoid them.

Saint John’s parochial school, aka Columbus Hall, 1915

St. John’s school took up one corner of St. John’s cemetery. On top of its domed roof was a floodlit statue of Jesus Christ . At night, the statue seemed to float above the dark cemetery, its outstretched arms either comforting or threatening, depending on the state of your conscience.

When I walked home  late at night from my job setting up bowling pins, I encountered a double dose of creepiness. From two blocks away I could see floating Jesus; next I came to the cemetery itself. I walked on the opposite side of the street, because its high, stuccoed walls always seemed to be bulging outward. I knew the level of the earth inside the walls was higher than outside, and that the graves were old, with some burials done at least two caskets deep, so I imagined a great pressure against those walls. It didn’t help that I had been reading a lot of Edgar Allan Poe.

Years later I was doing family research, and someone in the church rectory told me my great-grandmother Bridget owned a family plot there. When I located the plot it was mostly grass and bushes, with very few grave markers, none of them with a family name. I think some fishy stuff goes on  with ownership in these old cemeteries.

My wife went to parochial school, in Pennsylvania. She had a story she told me in private, but I have repeated it so often that I might as well tell it one more time. I call it “The Fart-Detecting Nun”. When my wife was in the early grades of parochial school, Sister heard somebody fart and demanded to know who had done it. When none of the girls confessed, she searched the classroom by sniffing her way up and down each aisle. That’s it, that’s the whole story, it’s not much but I think it’s funny.

Vocal performance in the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart

One last creepy story. When we lived in Newark, we sent my older son to the parochial school at Sacred Heart Cathedral because the Newark public schools were failing. On rainy days, if his class had to travel between the school and the church, they went underground, through the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where deceased parish priests and higher ranking members of the clergy were said to “await the Lord’s return” in their marble vaults. My son said it was ‘spooky’.

Three-minute YouTube tour of the crypt – courtesy egermainet

Epilogue

St. John’s parochial school closed in June 2018. The diocese now rents its classroom space to the Orange public school  system.

Credo, more or less

By

On September 20, 2019

In Musings, Religion, School, Teachers

My father was a Catholic, nominally. I don’t think he ever went to church as an adult. One of my aunts said when he did go to Mass as a child, he always managed to avoid the collection plate.

Similarly, my mother was a Protestant, nominally. I don’t think she ever went to church as an adult either. Her way of staying right with the Lord may have been simply to make sure I attended Sunday School. She accomplished this by finding neighbors who attended a nearby Protestant church and were willing to give me a ride each Sunday. She didn’t seem  fussy about which flavor of Protestant services I attended; I remember Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist, depending on where we were living. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Eick, pronounced “Ike”, of Linwood Place, for giving me a weekly ride to the Washington Street Baptist Church in your rumble-seated car, and for sometimes treating me to a second breakfast if I showed up for my ride too early.

Full immersion baptism, Chestnut Mountain Church, Flowery Branch, Georgia

I was baptized a Catholic at the age of one month, so even if the rules about who gets into Heaven are as stringent as I’ve heard from some Catholic sources, I remain eligible. In the Baptist church, baptism (full-immersion, y’all, Acts 8:38, Mark 1:5) is reserved for those “able to make a mature confession of faith”; most baptisms I’ve seen were of young people in their early teens or a little younger; certainly mature enough .

Somehow, the Baptists never got around to baptizing me; that’s probably just as well, because there are some doctrinal problems with being baptized twice; your mileage may vary. The closest I have come to professing the Baptist faith openly was having “BAPTIST” stamped on my army dog tags, along with my blood type, “O”.

Soon after I opened my first checking account, a  local radio station aired a feature story about an orphanage in Kearney (next to Newark) burning down, and soliciting contributions to rebuild. The fire sounded pretty devastating, and I had once written a book report on Oliver Twist, so I was ripe. I broke out my new checkbook and wrote Sacred Heart Orphanage of Kearney a check for something like five or ten dollars, not a trivial sum then. When my first bank statement arrived, I asked my mother to help me understand it. As we reviewed the half-dozen or so cashed checks, we came to the one to Sacred Heart, and she said “What’s this?!” I relayed the whole burnt-down orphanage story, which only seemed to anger her. Raising her voice just a little, she said “The Pope doesn’t need your money.” End of discussion.

I married a woman who was raised Catholic; this never posed a problem because she was not a churchgoer either. Back when Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday, she ignored the rule; the only time it ever came up was once when we were out shopping – she said “It won’t feel right to eat meat on Good Friday”, and I said “Okay, let’s get fish then.” We started both our kids along the Catholic path of confirmation and first communion, because that way they can make up their own minds later on, right?

During a confirmation ceremony, the officiating bishop asks the candidates several questions from a predefined list. The kids get advance coaching in the questions and the correct answers from adult volunteers; those kids who have not attended parochial school find the questions and concepts more difficult. Despite my protests, I got volunteered into coaching my older son. To keep my own conscience clear while still following the study guide, my practice questions took the form “Now, if the bishop asks you ‘How does the Holy Spirit help us?’, what are you going to say?” On the day of the ceremony, I got some holy water sprinkled in my face as the bishop’s procession entered the church. It didn’t burn, so I guess that approach was okay.

Imagine this seven years older, green and much less shiny

One thing I did in high school was definitely a Bad Thing, religion-wise, as was confirmed by Miss Riley, our world history teacher. I had a ’47 Pontiac, and in the morning I might pick up a few friends, then, once at school, if I was not planning to stick around, ask “Who’s going in?”. Those remaining in the car would drive around aimlessly with me for the rest of the day, or at least until it was time for me to go to work. I was not at all familiar with the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and one Ash Wednesday my friends wanted to get their ashes applied before school. I drove around town under their direction, but the churches all had long lines. Some of them decided to get out and line up anyway, leaving just me and one passenger. Knowing that the only excuse to arrive late to school that day was to enter through the attendance office with ashes on our foreheads, I suggested using the ashes in the car’s ashtray. I don’t recall whether my passenger joined in or not, but I decorated my forehead with a smudge similar to those I had seen walking the streets all morning and entered the school without difficulty. I should have thought to wash off the ashes as soon as I got past the attendance office, but did not. When I got to world history class, Miss Riley, who had attended this very high school with my mother and knew her well, took one look at my smudge and squawked “YOU’RE NOT CATHOLIC!”. She didn’t know, of course, that my ashes were fake; that would have been so much worse; she was angry at my assumed (by her) decision to present myself to a priest as Catholic to obtain an excuse to be late to school. She told me I should be ashamed, and to wash my face and think very hard about what I’d done. I was ashamed, or at least I am now, for disrespecting someone else’s religion; I did wash my face; and I do continue to think about religion, although not so hard any more.

Thoughts

Back in the day, my wife and I liked to explore old cemeteries. While admiring the statuary and mausoleum architecture of a Catholic cemetery in Westchester, we noticed off at one side two rows of tiny headstones. There were maybe 30 or 40 in all, each very close to the next, and marked with numbers instead of names. We wondered what that was all about, and one day my wife called to ask. The woman who answered asked her in turn “Are you Catholic, dear?”. Getting an affirmative, she explained that section was the unconsecrated part of the cemetery, and those were graves of unbaptized babies and stillbirths. I don’t know what we expected, but that made us sad.

Church dogma then said the unborn and unbaptized were consigned to Limbo., which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “Limbo, in Roman Catholic theology, the border place between heaven and hell where dwell those souls who, though not condemned to punishment, are deprived of the joy of eternal existence with God in heaven.”

However, according to Wikipedia, “Recent Catholic theological speculation tends to stress the hope, although not the certainty, that these infants may attain heaven instead of the state of Limbo.” So that’s at least something.

The editor of the syndicated newspaper column The Ethicist once responded to a question from a lapsed-Catholic-gone-atheist reader who had been pressed into service as a pallbearer in a Catholic funeral ceremony. The main point of his response was “Your participation in the service was not hypocrisy; it was an act of compassion and affection for your family. To join in some parts of the service does not require you to join in every part.” I commented to the editor:

I liked what you wrote in your “pallbearer” segment. As a non-Catholic married into a large Catholic family, I have been in that situation several times. The trick when participating in any Catholic ceremony is to finagle things so as to never be seated in the first row. One can then take the cue from others to stand, sit, or slide forward in lieu of kneeling – without seeming disrespectful, and optionally without praying.

There is a bumper sticker that  says “God is who, evolution is how”, an attractive simplification. The real truth may be so deep and complex that no human has yet even imagined it.

Plainfield Courier-News, Nov 1, 1958

6,350,400 cans of beer on the wall…

By

On September 3, 2019

In Family, History, NYC, NYPD, School, Working

My mother had connections with New Jersey politicians and businessmen through her position at the Newark Athletic Club. Among them were the officers of People’s Express Trucking, and she got me a summer job with People’s the year I turned 17. Once, she had thought she might get me an appointment to West Point through the same connections, but that dream disappeared when I started screwing up in high school.

As background, problems at Schlitz’s Milwaukee brewery have impacted production, and the company is shipping, by rail, a few million empty beer cans for filling. The role of People’s Express is to get the cans off the freight cars, onto trailer trucks, and then to the local brewery. My role, and that of several other youths, is to do the actual work.

International Harvester, Cars-from-UK.com

The first day, we meet with our crew chief at the People’s Express offices on Raymond Boulevard. Three of us will drive an International Harvester pickup truck daily to the railroad yards in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the others will drive in with the crew chief in his car. I volunteer to drive the truck,  I’ve had my license for almost three months now, I like driving and have lots of confidence. (I was unaware that by law one must be 18 to drive in New York City, the issue never came up.)

The Williamsburg rail yards are about 15 miles away: across the Jersey swamplands, through the Holland Tunnel, across lower Manhattan, over the Williamsburg Bridge, then on through Brooklyn to the yards.

Red and green together mean yellow

Traffic lights in Manhattan come in two colors , red and green. If the red comes on during a green, that’s the same as a yellow, act accordingly. The system worked fine; I don’t know why they changed it.

The Williamsburg bridge is old and narrow, it was built for horse-and-buggy traffic. It’s difficult to drive through the tighter spots without scraping a running-board; I do that about once a week.

On the return trip to Newark, the traffic is generally worse.

Canal Street across Manhattan is always stop and go;, when it’s bad we seem to tie for speed with the pedestrians. One day we are neck-and-neck with a gorgeous woman walking with a man, they get ahead, we get ahead, as we breathe teenage sighs and make comments among ourselves about her ass. Uh-oh, he’s heard us! He walks up to the passenger window. What if he has a knife?!  He speaks… “Would you boys like to fock her?” Relieved, we explain that no, we have to get back to Newark.

One day we are stuck inside the Holland tunnel for so long that we unzip and piss into the vents along the curb.

In the rail yards, freight cars are jockeyed around to align their center doors with our work platform. There are 48 empty 12-ounce Schlitz cans in each cardboard case. After we build a pallet of 35 cases (seven tiers, five cases per tier, 3 x 2 then 2 x 3, alternating), we use a pallet jack to get it into a trailer, 28 pallets per trailer; lather, rinse, repeat, it isn’t rocket science. I think we filled about three trailers a day.

Not beer, but you get the idea

We fall into a routine; on our morning break we have grape soda and pastries or pie. At lunch, we buy sandwiches and more grape soda, or beer, then sit on the end of an East River dock to look over at the Manhattan skyline or watch what floats by. A visitor from England once said about the East River, “All you Americans seem to do is defecate, fornicate, and eat oranges.” I would have said bananas.

We are sometimes drunk. The college guy has a ‘bit’ he does, I guess it’s a fraternity thing. He stands in the middle of Kent Avenue, drops his pants, and shouts “I KNOW ABOUT THAT, LADY, BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS?” Near the end of the summer he falls out of a freight car and breaks his arm.

Our truck has an on-the-floor gear shift, nothing new to me, but I’ve been using it wrong. Believing it’s a standard H pattern, I think I am shifting 1-2-3, 1-2-3 like normal people do, when actually I’ve been shifting 2-3-4, 2-3-4 for two weeks. So far, I’ve never needed reverse. One day they send me to get something at the hardware store. I park behind someone, and when I try to back up to leave, what is reverse for normal H people is actually low-low for me, and I keep creeping up on the car ahead. I finally go back inside and ask for help. The guy behind the counter comes out to show me, and I learn that I also have to push the stick down at the same time to get over and down to R. Ohh, I say, thanks! When I get back to the yards no one is the wiser.

We work six days a week and when the loadings seem to get behind, we are asked to come in on a Sunday. People’s Express manager Mr. Bruno drives up in his top-of-the-line baby-blue Cadillac to help us, parking  next to our platform. He’s wearing sandals and some sort of crotchless wrap-around terry loincloth, and that is all. Every time he bends over,  his nuts hang out. Two NYPD officers arrive, they see Mr. Bruno’s outfit and look at one another. They are here on a blue-law complaint, non-emergency labor is not allowed on Sunday. Mr. Bruno tries to talk them out of it, but oddly enough gets no respect; we pick up and go home.

We finally run out of empty cans, but there is still some summer left. People’s is nice enough to transfer the crew to the Continental Can Company, which I guess is some sort of sister company that shares directors with People’s. Continental Can, whose logo of three nested C’s can be found everywhere, is located in Paterson, New Jersey. Here, we are introduced to the Steam Jenny.

Part 2: My summer of Jenny

Modern pressure cleaner, used. Courtesy Auctions International

 

A 1950s-era steam jenny burns kerosene to boil water to make steam to clean dirty trucks and whatever else. It’s dangerous, and if you don’t get burned by steam, or knocked off your ladder by the nozzle kickback, it might blow up because you neglected some element of its care and feeding. Attention, attention must be paid to such a machine; this is drummed into our heads over and over by a wizened yard worker who seems genuinely afraid of the thing. Jeez, we get it, enough! Maybe he’s seen some steam-jenny carnage in his day.

We train by using the jenny to blast steam up and down the sides of a particularly dirty trailer; we use a housepainter’s ladder to get on top and clean there too. The company finds enough jenny work for us to last out the summer; we are careful, and somehow we survive.

From Google, top answer to steam jenny safety tips

People also ask

Can a pressure washer cut your finger off?

Because he received near immediate treatment at the emergency room he was able to keep his index finger, although some of its function was lost. It doesn’t matter if the fluid is water, grease or paint – all can cause permanent damage and even amputation when injected at high pressure.

Through the summer, we have been paid as grown men; we even get  time-and-a-half for overtime. Those paychecks spoil me for going back to school: why return to pointless boredom when I can be earning money instead? I don’t attend school very much during my senior year, and I drop out towards the end. I do stop in to pick up my yearbook, though, and years later I have an observant visitor who wonders why no one ever signed it. That’s a long story, I say.

How I fought Hitler

By

On September 1, 2019

In Early days, History, School

4.2.7

When I was born the war hadn’t started yet, but Hitler was already well known and widely hated. Fighting him would come naturally, even to little kids. Fortunately, after the war ended, Hitler was forgotten, and his name never mentioned again.

Here’s how I did it.

How I fought Hitler – Starting when I was in kindergarten or maybe first grade, we won the war by bringing in peach pits and tin cans. As the teachers explained it, peach pits were baked into charcoal and used in gas mask filters; tin cans were melted down into tanks. After both ends of the can were cut off and placed inside, I got to flatten my family’s tin cans by jumping onto them off a kitchen chair. Back then, cans were made of tin-plated steel, not the cheesy aluminum they use today. In my teen years, it was a benchmark  of strength to be able to fold a beer can in half with just one hand.

The U.S. paid for the war by selling war bonds. They sold for $18.75, and could be cashed in for $25.00 ten years later (that’s 2.9%). War savings stamps were sold as a way for kids to participate in the war as well. At my school, we were each given a booklet to be filled with 10-cent war savings stamps, with the goal of saving up enough to trade in for a war bond one day. I don’t recall the exact stamp-buying procedure, but if you showed up without your dime on the scheduled buy-and-paste day, teacher was not happy.

How I fought Hitler, part 2 – Here is a link to my recollections of the day the war was over, along with some other early childhood memories. Apologies for some rough language further on, but that Happened too.

How I fought Hitler, part 3 – I didn’t find out about this last way until 25 years afterwards. After my first son was old enough to be toilet trained, I asked my mother if she had any ideas on the ‘when’ and ‘how’. When the subject of ‘aiming’ came up, she became uncomfortable – she had always disapproved of the method, but admitted that when training me, my father had made it a game by having me pretend Hitler was in the toilet.

Nimm das, mein Führer!

Enough said.

Austrian war bonds ad, WW I

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking ’bout an invasion

Music class

By

On July 31, 2019

In Music, Race, School, Teachers

In seventh and eighth grade, we have music class twice a week. The class is divided into two groups for tonal management of the parts we sing. There is an alto group, mostly boys, and a soprano group, girls and boys like myself whose voice hasn’t changed . When not accompanying us on the classroom piano, Miss Barnett spends her time correcting and verbally abusing the sopranos. We can do nothing to her satisfaction. After a few weeks, I tell Miss Barnett that my voice is changing. There is no test to confirm my claim; she simply tells me to sit on the alto side of the room from now on. Goodbye to twice-weekly stomach knots.

Our repertoire comes from a long-out-of-print song book of standards, spirituals and other royalty-free music, for example “Comin’ ‘round the mountain”. Music is timeless, and our school board believes deeply in that thrifty adage.

One song in regular rotation is Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe”. It has of course been modernized since then, but in our classroom Old Black Joe grieves for “my friends from the cotton fields away”, with the chorus

I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low,
I hear those darky voices calling “Old Black Joe”.

In our class are two black kids, Joe Stokes and Richie Strickland. I don’t look over to see if they are singing along, but I’ll bet Joe Stokes isn’t.

Richie and I are friendly, and one day he comes to my house with two fishing poles and we board the Number 20 bus to Branch Brook Park. As we pay our fares, I see other passengers nudge one another.

We try various spots around the lake but don’t catch anything. We come back to my house and sit in the sunroom, talking about baseball. After an hour or so, my grandmother takes me aside and says “Tell Richie he has to go home, we’re going to have dinner now.”

 

  • ►2019 (56)

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén