By Robert Heide
Growing up in the middle-class town of Irvington, New Jersey, a suburb of the big city of Newark during the time of the Second World War, I was often referred to as ‘Little Bobby’, a name tag I resisted as soon as I heard it. Yet, an older cousin of mine began to be called ‘Big Bobby.’ His father, my Uncle Fred, ran an attractive old-style enameled metal Deco diner with a neon tube sign reading Fred’s Diner in big letters. My father had come to America from Freiberg near the Black Forest and would often take me to Fred’s, which was located behind an Esso gas station. My sister Evelyn, who was fifteen years older took on a part-time waitress job there while still attending Irvington High School. The upper reaches of Irvington were primarily settled by German immigrants like my father Ludwig and mother Olga. She was of German-Russian descent and had come to America with her sister, my Aunt Emma. My grandma Amelia Straefel lived in Newark and was a woman of property and in the real estate business. She also sold fowl that she raised in her own backyard—ducks, geese and chickens—to the local butchers. One day she told me to watch her prepare the birds for slaughter—first strangling and then dumping them into a big pot filled with boiling hot water. With her knee-high boots and rubber gloves she would break the birds’ necks, throw them into the pot and at the same time strip them of their pinfeathers. As a little tot I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night calling out “Help!”
When the war began after the sneak Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Little Bobby was becoming taller but my brother Walter, 12 years my senior, signed up with the Army Air Forces as a tail gunner and returned several years later with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. We moved from a big house at 34 Franklin Terrace, around the corner to a bigger house at 214 Elmwood Avenue, experiencing air-raid lights-out drills and blackout curtains on the windows in both places. There was a two-car garage at Elmwood Avenue that was next to a stream separating Irvington from the more upscale Maplewood. My father, whom the neighbors called ‘Louie’, planted and tended a large Victory Garden while my dog Jiggs looked on. I was devoted to the smart little Fox Terrier but sometimes he would disappear, running around with a pack of wild dogs sometimes for days. I would be devastated by this, but once I saw Jiggs with his dog pals racing down the block, and he sadly ignored me. I always looked forward to supper that often consisted of a German dish they called Kugel, made up of mashed potatoes in a pot with pork chunks and thick sliced bacon which became my favorite particularly when homemade apple sauce came with it. My mother was a super cook, and made pies, Bundt cakes, chocolate chip cookies and her home made jam was always available, stored in cold basement cabinets.
My father manufactured needles for the Singer Sewing Machine Company and often spent time at their factory in Elizabeth. One day he brought Evelyn home a brand new wood and metal floor model sewing machine on which she made her own design clothes such as padded shoulder suits and dresses to save money. After graduating from high school she began working at the Prudential Insurance Company in downtown Newark and around that time our father brought home an upright piano and both Evelyn and I started piano lessons. We would sing songs together like, yes, Remember Pearl Harbor
History in every century
Records an act that lives forevermore
The thing that happened on Hawaii’s shore
Let’s remember Pearl Harbor
As we did the Alamo
We will always remember how they died for liberty
Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor
And go on to Victory
Included in my list of favorite songs were the Andrews Sisters’ Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me and When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again which was originally composed during the Civil War. Evelyn collected 78 rpm records which we would play over and over again and dozens of colorful song sheets stacked up which she stored in a compartment in the piano bench. Of course we went to the movie houses to see Since You Went Away and The Best Years of Our Lives and second features and cartoons and newsreels every weekend. I remember one particular Popeye cartoon, now banned, that caught my eye entitled Don’t Be A Sap Mr. Jap.
Two blocks from our house was a great old amusement playground built in 1840 called Olympic Park. For me and the other kids in the gang on the block—two brother and sister teams, Norma and Richie Edgar, Mathew and Matilda Fontana, Peggy Miller, Lois Hausman, Billie Burlew, Norman Rhinehartson, and Dolores Borowski the ‘Park’ was where we all went every chance we got. My parents and relatives flocked to the German beer garden there with beer served in big mugs and they would all get drunk. A bandstand featuring Joe Basile and his oom-pah-pah brass band could be heard at the great arch at the entrance way which proclaimed Olympic Park in bright white light bulbs. Once inside you would see a colored light water fountain, a huge roller coaster and an incredibly elegant merry-go-round (it was sold to Disneyland after the park closed in 1965). There were Dodg’em Car rides, a Caterpillar, a ride-a-donkey attraction and what was called a weekly entertainment section with bleachers wherein you could watch circus acts like Hildy’s Midget-Troupe which was composed of the famed Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. Bubbles Ricardo, an attractive blond became a singer with Basile’s Band crooning war songs like When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World… after a terrible fall from the high wire trapeze act which left her with a wooden arm which she covered with a long satin glove.
My father who kept rabbits and pigeons in cages outside the garage, for eating he said, and also liked to fish and go crabbing, and pickling eels, bought three bungalows in the shore town of Seaside Heights with its expansive mile-long boardwalk packed with games of chance and pizza and the fun time pier with the latest rides jutting out into the ocean and the great thing was that there was always a place to stay for extended family members who were invited for a week or two to hang out at the Jersey (some called it noisy-Joisey!) shore.
Robert Heide is the co-author, with John Gilman, of a book entitled Home Front America—Popular Culture of the World War II Era which chronicles further adventures of the gang at Olympic Park, as well as John’s stories of Hawaii, where he was born two months before the war started. See his Pearl Harbor Story in this (December, 2021) issue of Westview News. Heide’s latest book is Robert Heide 25 Plays which is available on Amazon.
