Chapters 5-7 of Return to Muddy Brook
A comment from Anne Silverman. (2/28/2017)
Yes enjoying this book. Brings back memories. My Mom and Dad moved to Pearl River around 1938. We lived in Nanuet then moved to Hansen Avenue. I was born in Good Samaritan Hospital 1939. Jay in 1941. We lived in Bob Schlickman's fathers house across the Street from the Rudy and Clora's Hansen whom became our parents best friends. My parents bought a house on orangeburg Road. I met Henry Groth as he lived on my way home. We all walked to school. My Dad built a house on Lincoln Avenue and we moved back to the other side of town. I met Joan Lobdel, Carol Staden, Tom O'Brien, Nick Degregory, Pat Grubs, and the whole. Crew from Lincoln. We mostly walked to school thru the sand pit. Remember that? These are my memories and I should read Al's.
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It's the late 1920's and 1930's. Anna and Frank Dawson meet, marry and settle in Pearl River. Frank gets a job at Lederle and then Rockland State Hospital. Frank Jr. (Al Dawson's older brother) is born.
Chapter 5.
It’s a good thing mama new nothing of what the boys were doing, she would not approve at all. I think my mother knew and she was sworn to secrecy, not to tell mama a thing. Things were going well and the secret was kept until Uncle Giggy got caught with a load of boot leg whiskey and during a scuffle that pursued, he shot a government agent with a 22 pistol. He was arrested and was convicted and sentenced to one year in Ossining Prison, north of the city. Thank GOD that the agent didn’t die and was only shot in the leg.
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1929 was just around the corner and folks were trying to get over the big bust up on Wall ST. The winter months in the city were harsh and the bread lines were long. The spring could not come fast enough for my mother. When it turned warmer, mama and Anna would go up to BARDONIA NY. by train, to see mama’s aunt and her daughter, Alviena, who lived on a small farm close to Nanuet. Anna and Alviena were about the same age, as was another cousin Irma. All the three girls were in their early twenties and all three were very pretty, Anna was the cutest of the three, and the smallest. Alviena and Irma both worked at LEDERLE LABRATORIES, between the two towns of Nanuet and Pearl River. Anna would go up to see her two cousins a lot that summer. It was only a one day trip, about seventeen miles by train and she could come back to the Bronx later in the evening. Sometimes she would stay overnight and spend the week end. Alveina had met this young man that worked in the plumbing shop at LEDERLE, and wanted to set up a blind date with him and Anna. She didn’t want anything to do with a blind date and that was that. After two or three weeks of saying no, my mother went out on the date with this plumber’s helper, FRANK DAWSON.
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My Father still lived at home with his Mother and two other Brothers Rob and George. He took the job at Lederle Labs after working for a plumber in Spring Valley for about a year. It was a good change for him; the train ran through the Lederle property into Pearl River. The plant was only about four miles from home.
This is where he met Alviena, who ended up playing cupid for him and Mom. Mom would come up from Tremont Avenue, stay at the farm with Alviena and they would double date with her new boyfriend Rudy. He was a great guy and worked for the Federal Government. He had some connections in NY and Mama Runge asked him if he could help to get Uncle Giggy out of Sing Sing in Ossining. He was able to help and got his sentenced reduced down to three months from a one year term and they release Giggy from jail. When he was released, he told his Mother that he was out of the boot leg whisky business for good.
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After dating Frank for close to a year Mom told him that she was getting tired of coming up from the city. They finally decided to get married and set the date. Dad went home and told his Mother that he was going to marry Anna, whom she had met once or twice. She was not happy about the news.
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She [Mom] informed dad that if he wanted to marry her, it was time that he stood up to his mother and let her know how things were going to be with them. They were getting married and that was it. It was Sunday and mom had to get back to the city. She had to go to work the next day, as did Frank. He would drive her back. He had bought a used 1917 HUDSON, PHAETON, 6 cylinders convertible and it being only twelve years old was in very good shape. It was kept in good condition and he took good care of it. They did not speak much on the trip to the BRONX; she had been hurt and did not know what was going to happen next. When they arrived at the apartment building on Tremont Ave, she got out of the car without kissing him goodbye, and told him that she needed some time to think about getting married. She needed to know if he was the man she had thought he was, or if he was going to be swayed by his mother. My mother wasn’t going to take 2nd place to her new mother-in-law and that was that. Not after she had said those nasty things about her. She told Frank that she would not be going up to Bardonia the next week end and that she would call him later on in the week. They said good bye and she went up stairs to the apartment where her mother, Elsie was waiting. Of course she wasn’t going to call him, and wanted him to stew in it for a while. After a week of not hearing from Anna, dad started to get nervous, he asked Alviena and Irma if they had heard from her, and of course they said no, which was a lie, the girls always talked during the week and they would fill mom in on what was going on with him and he had confided to Irma that he missed her, missed talking to her on the phone and that she said that she would call, and didn’t. He was starting to sweat and mom knew all about it, through her cousins. She was going to call him, but he beat her to it. He wanted to see her, he said that they had to talk and that he loved her and didn’t care what his mother thought and he wanted to be with her forever. He was hooked, her plan had worked so far and she was glad that he had called her first. The three girls started to make the wedding plans. Nothing too big, the small church and then a gathering of family and friends at the farm in Bardonia.
Chapter 6.
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LENOX Ave. A few weeks before mom and dad got married, they had rented a small one bedroom bungalow right across from the church where the wedding to place. It was not very far away from the farm, about five blocks. The rooms were not that big but it was just fine for the both of them. Mom left her job in the city and Alveina got her a job at Lederlie working with her. It was coming up onto 1933 and there were problems in Europe. This little guy named Hitler was stirring up Germany, and making threats to other countries, and acting like a big shot, but he was not bothering the United States, yet. Mom and dad were both working at Lederle, but dad was itching to make a move. He met a friend of his that just had gotten a job at a new mental hospital in Orangeburg NY, a few miles east of Pearl River. It was called Rockland State Hospital and the construction started in late 1927 when the broke ground and the first three buildings were still being completed and they needed skilled craftsman to work on the project. That was right up my dad’s alley. By then he was almost a full qualified mechanic plumber and he was ready to make the move. He talked it over with mom and they decided to go for it. He was hired right away and the money was more the he had made at Lederle. He started out working in the steam tunnels, installing steam pipes which would feed heat to the buildings. They were making a lot of tunnels because they planned to have about thirty buildings all toll and they all had to be heated. After the pipes were installed they were coated with asbestos covering to hold in the heat. Back then they didn’t know how dangerous asbestos could be to your health and lungs. He also worked on the power house that was being built to produce the steam for the heat. This work was done in the winter months, so at least he was working all year around. Like I said before, Dad was a good and hard worker and well liked. They were both doing fine and would plan to go to
see her mother and pop on the weekends.
It was a cold fall in 1934 and at Thanksgiving that year there was snow on the ground, not much just a heavy dusting. All the trees were bare and the pretty colored leaves were lying on the ground covered with a little snow. December was cold too, with heavier snow falling two days before Christmas Day. A white Christmas was just the right time for Mom to tell her husband that there was going to an addition to the family and he was going to become a Daddy. He was so happy and proud he went out and told everybody he saw. They had big New Years Eve party at the farm and brought 1935 in, in style.
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The weather did not get any cooler and was in the 90’s most of time in August and Mom had had it by then. She was ready to have this baby and make this back pain go away. Well she got her wish and on September 10, 1935 she delivered a baby boy, Franklyn Maural Dawson, Jr. Dad had his son and strutted around like a peacock. The baby was a good size, close to eight pounds, over twenty inches long and short blonde hair. Mom did not have an easy delivery, she being small and junior being as big as he was.
Grandma Runge stayed with Mom for about a month after Frankie was born. The little bungalow was getting smaller now with three adults and a baby. There was no room for a crib so the baby found that a dresser drawer would have to do for the time being. Dad told Mom that it was time to move on to bigger and better things and get a bigger house or apartment. This was a no-brainer and when Mom got stronger they went out looking for a bigger place to live. It took a while but they found a nice little house on a dirt road in Pearl River. They got help from Uncle George, Bill and some other friends and piled their things into a small old rack truck and moved into the first house they rented on Martin Place. What a nice quiet little street, it was only two blocks from Central Avenue and the main section of town.
Franklin Avenue was the next block over to the North and the small Methodist Church was on the corner. It was a great find for Frankie and the family to grow.
Chapter 7.
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The year of 1935 started off on the wrong foot. In February, a man named Bruno Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby. On September 8, two days before Frankie was born Hughy Long, the U. S. Senator from Louisiana was shot and killed. That was big news, except that Adolf Hitler was invading more of the small countries in Europe and it looked like he wanted to be king of the world.
It was a good thing that Dad had a steady job at the new mental hospital, with the new baby and moving to Pearl River. The power house at the hospital was almost fully built and ready to go on line and produce steam heat for the Administration building and the first of the other three being built, Male Reception in which would house the first of sixty male mental patients. New staff was being hired and trained. More buildings were being built, more tunnels dug and more steam pipes installed. The tunnel work had its drawbacks. In the winter months when it was cold, a lot of rats would come into the tunnels to stay warm, especially close to the kitchens of the buildings, where the garbage cans were outside for them to feed on. You would also see stray cats around the hospital grounds and they would help keep
the rat problem in check.
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Before they knew it, it was July of 1939 and on the 4th in Yankee Stadium, Lou Gehrig made his famous farewell speech when he said that he considered himself the luckiest man on the fact of the earth. He played first base for Columbia University and left college to play baseball for the New York Yankees. When he started with the team he was teased about his size, he was tall and lanky and Babe Ruth used to make fun of him until he started hitting the baseball as good if not better than Ruth. Lou was struck down with a cancer of the muscles and it was called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which became known as Lou Gehrigs Disease, which he died from in 1941. Also in September 1939 on the first day Germany invaded Poland.
The world was going crazy and nobody knew when or where it was going to stop. A lot of nervous people in the government and on Wall Street were watching things going on in Europe. This could be very important for the economy in our country. One of the good things was the opening of Gone with the Wind at the movies in December, just before Christmas. This gave the country a change to take their minds off of Hitler and Europe.
Christmas was going to be a big one this year. Frankie was four years old and knew that Santa Claus was coming soon. He told his Mommy that he had been a good boy and that they should tell Santa to bring him everything he asked for in the letter that he and his Mommy had written and sent to the North Pole.
The winter that year was very cold, not a lot of snow, but frigid, and dad had to by extra coal for the furnace. January of 1940 started off fairly well, the roads were fairly bare, and dad would grab his son and head up to Spring Valley to see Grandma Dawson and George and Rob on Sunday mornings. Grandma’s attitude had not changed much towards my mother. She softened up a little after Frankie was born but she still thought that mom wasn’t the woman, she would have picked for her son. There was no love lost on my mother’s side either, she knew what kind of woman Mary Dawson was, and was content to stay out of her way. Mom would stay home on those Sunday mornings and welcome the brake she had from her son. Her and grandma tolerated each other, and were civil to one another, for the sake of all concerned.
Dad had bought a newer car by then, a 1929 Hudson, R model, 4 door sedan, a real big car. Mom said you could get lost in the back seat, it was so big. They needed that size car, the way mom would pack up all the things needed for the baby. They didn’t drive down to the city much to see pop or the boys. Now that Frankie was running, not walking anymore, it was hard to control him.