Chapters 8-12 of Return to Muddy Brook
Albie Dawson enters the world - but as a boy instead of the hoped-for girl. The Dawsons move to 50 Ridge Street and a bigger house. The Ablondi family joins the story. Growlers and frequent visits to Ablondi’s Bar and Grill. The Korean war. Sports in Pearl River.
Chapter 8
The town of Pearl River was growing by leaps and bounds with new streets being added and new buildings going up all over the little Hamlet. Quite a difference since Julius Braunsdorf, bought the large amount of land in 1870, which was then known as Muddy Brook. He had also started the Post Office in Pearl River NY. In 1872, after the famous pearls were found, and became the town’s first Post Master. The town had a new school, right in the middle of town on Central Avenue and on the end of the football field stood the Pearl River Hook and Ladder Fire house, which preceded the school, and was built in 1903. Sometime later in years, another fire house was built on the other side of town, over the train tracks, was the Excelsior Engine Company, organized in 1912.
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Mom had thought about going back to work before finding about the baby coming, but that was put on hold. Frankie had started kindergarten last year, and would be going into first grade when he turned six years old, the next September. That’s when school started in Pearl River. The school was just two blocks away from Martin Place and Frankie would be able to walk there with a few other children that lived on the block. It wasn’t back then, like it is today when you have to watch every move your kids make, and know where they are all the time. Perverts and child molesters were not that active in these years and things like that didn’t happen. Frankie was happy when he was told that there was going to be possibly a baby sister to play with in November. He told all his friends the good news, and couldn’t wait until she arrived.
The spring went by quickly and seemed to go right into summer with hot weather. Mom had to carry the baby through the hot days and stay as cool as she could. Dad was busy at Rockland State Hospital, and when the new power house was completed, the state opened up some funding and started a maintenance department, for the facility. Carpenters shop, electrical shop and a plumbing shop along with a blacksmith’s barn and forge. He saw his opportunity to get in on the ground floor, and switched over to work for the State of NY, in their plumbing shop. The money was a little less, but he would have full health insurance, a retirement plan and a secure working place for as long as he wanted. This meant a lot, with the new baby coming in the fall.
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November was here and Mom was getting close to having her little girl. She went to the doctors office for a checkup and all was well, he told her that he thought that the baby wouldn’t be here until the first week of December, to go home and rest as much as possible.
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Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. Dad went and got a nice big turkey and was going to have it cooked at the bakery down town so Mom didn’t have to cook it and that was fine with her. She would make the stuffing and the vegetables and that was okay with her too. Well, the best laid plans of mice and men do go astray. The turkey did not get cooked, at least not on the 26th and not at the bakery, because surprise, surprise on Saturday night at 9 o’clock, Mom had to go to the hospital with labor pains. Dad was nervous as hell and had to wait down stairs in the waiting room. He was there about three hours, smoking one cigarette after another until just after midnight on November 22. At 12:07am the baby was born and Mom was fine and the baby was fine also. All was real fine except for one small fact. When the doctor came down to tell Dad the good news, he informed him that he was the proud father of a big bouncing baby boy. That’s right Boy! Mom was just waking up and still drowsy, she knew about the baby and the name was not going to be Elsie after her Mother. To say that she was happy that all was well with the baby and that there were no side effects from the Scarlet Fever that Dad had. That’s how I came into the world with the help of God, Mom and the good doctor.
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Dad had gotten a second job, back at Lederle Labs, part time, helping to make medicine for the wounded soldiers at war. He also joined the CIVIL DEFENSE GROUP, to help direct folks to shelters in case we were attacked by bombers or any other emergency.
I was coming up on three years old now and it was getting quite cramped in the small bedroom with my big brother Frankie. He was almost nine years old and all my toys were taking up his space, as he put it to mommy. My crib had been converted into some kind of small bed, Dad was handy at adapting things, like cribs, and a lot of other things, and anyway it was too crowded in the room. Mom had made up her mind; it was time to get a bigger house. Of course she didn’t say anything to Dad, she would tell him when she had found a house that she wanted and the she would let him know, in her normal, gentle way that we were moving. This is the way that she knew how to get around arguing with my father and it worked.
They were both busy by this time; Mommy had gotten her job back at Lederle, part time during the day, about four hours. She had found a nice next door neighbor to watch me at these hours and if she was late for any reason, it was ok with the woman. Frankie was in school all day by then, in the fourth grade, and she would be home by the time school got out for the day.
Chapter 9
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Chapter 10
Well in mom’s spare time, she went house hunting with one of her friends from town, Gertrude, and they spent about two weeks looking before they found a nice three bedroom house at 50 Ridge Street. It was a two story house, three bedrooms up stairs, kitchen, living room and dining room down stairs. It was just what the doctor ordered. Now all she had to do was to tell Frank Sr. that we were going to move. Easier said, and then done. The rent was a little more than at Martin Place, but the house was almost twice the size, and as far as mom was concerned, it was a done deal. She gave the owner a deposit on the next month’s rent and then she will tell dad tonight, while he is relaxed and sitting in his easy chair.
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Ridge Street was a quiet street just off of Franklin Ave. It ran north and south, parallel to Main Street and it was about three quarters of a mile long, south down to Gilbert Ave. William Street was behind our house, and also ran north and south, down to Gilbert. This is the way that Mr. Braunsdorf set up many of the streets of MUDDY BROOK before it became PEARL RIVER. The houses were pretty much the same design, some bigger, but a lot of look-a-likes down the whole street. Many of these houses were built to house employees of Braunsdorf’s factory, Dexter Folder Co. just two blocks away. Back then, in the early forties the roads were not black topped, but were oiled with heavy black oil and then gravel was spread on top to make a kind of smooth surface. The gravel would collect on the side of the road and everybody went out and scooped it up and put in their driveways.
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A lot of people on Ridge Street already knew each other, two boys next door were going to school with Frankie and a girl across the street was in the same class, her name was Rita and her Mother and Father worked at Rockland State Hospital, where Dad worked. Mom’s good friend Gertrude lived four blocks away on Main Street. Her husband worked at Dexter’s factory and they had four sons. One son was in my brother’s class and one of the other sons was my age. She had her hands full with her boys as Mom did with her two sons.
It was a shorter walk to school for Frankie than it was on Martins Place, all he had to do was walk through our back yard, go across William Street and get on the path through a small wooded area and go across Franklin Avenue right by the school about a five minute walk.
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August had arrived and The President, Harry Truman, had made a major decision. On the 6th of August, he ordered that the Atom Bomb, be dropped the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and on August .8th, another bomb, be dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Millions of people were killed and Japan was devastated. By this act of war, Truman saved many of our soldiers’ lives. On August 15th, 1945, Japan surrendered and the war was finally over. In Europe during the war, Hitler had exterminated over six million Jews and tried to erase them from the face of the earth. Thank GOD he failed, but in doing this he committed the worst crime on humanity the world has ever seen. Our boys were coming home. It was September, I was two months short of five years old, but I could start school, and was going into Kindergarten. I was really getting excited and could hardly wait.
My teacher was Miss Jersey and I thought that she was great. She looked a lot like Mommy and she liked me too. I had a few friends that lived on Ridge and William Streets and we all would walk to school together the same way Frankie did. We all went to the same school on Central Avenue.
Dad was settled in a pretty good in his garage with his plumbing tools and he had bought a 1939 Chevy pickup truck so that he could carry his tools to the side jobs we has doing to make extra money. Remember, I told you Dad was not lazy and would make a buck whenever he could. He did a lot of work for Mr. Ablondi across the street. He had a tavern on Main Street called Ablondi’s Bar and the back door to the tavern let out onto Ridge Street. He also owned five small stores in the same row as the bar, with a small house that he rented at the end of the stores. Dad did a lot of plumbing jobs for him and his stores, and became good friends with the Ablondi family. Their home was also on Ridge Street about two blocks from ours. Right next to our house and Mr. and Mrs. Spooner, a very nice Italian family. They all called John Spooner, sponajohn, he spoke broken English and was very friendly to all of us. He had a very big garden, all kinds of vegetables and he took pride in it and would work in it most of the day. He was retired and all he did was to take care of the garden and the big six bedroom house, next to ours. Between the two houses there were two big cherry trees and would bring forth gobs of cherries for both families, for pies, jams and jellies. Mom could bake a great pie and would jar up lots of jam for us and her friends.
Chapter 11
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Giggy and Al would come up from the city to see Poppy and mom and spend the day on Saturdays or a Sunday. Mommy would cook dinner, chicken of course and mom would tell me to go over to Mr. Ablondi’s back door, and knock on it, and wait for him to open it. She would send with me, two small tin pales, called GROWLERS, which would hold beer in them, with lids on top, so that it would not spill out. This I did often when my uncles came from the city. My mother and her brothers, all loved beer and poppy was no stranger to it either. I did what I was told, grabbed the pales and knocked on the back door of the tavern. Mr. Ablondi came to the door, told me to stay there, and he returned in a short while with two full growlers of beer. I gave him the thirty cents that Giggy gave me, to pay for both pailes. When I got back home, he gave me a dime for going. I was rich!!
Dad didn’t drink that much because he couldn’t drink well at all. Two or three glasses were his limit. He would get shit faced rather quick, and then fall asleep. That was fine with mom; she had seen enough drinking and drunks in her life, and not to be married to one, suited her just fine. Her brothers and her father were drinkers, and nasty ones at that. She was the best drinker in the whole Runge tribe, and they all knew it. Mom loved beer, could drink a lot and could hold it very well for a small person. After I was born, mommy didn’t lose a lot of weight, she wasn’t fat, just well rounded, and only being five foot tall, looked heavier then she really was. Unlike the rest of the Runge’s, she didn’t get nasty, just mellow.
They were drinking pretty heavy this time. I had to make four more trips across the street to Ablondi’s back door. The clincher was when pop brought out a bottle of schnapps and the men drank that, with the beer. Dad was sleeping in the living room chair by then, and things started to get testy at the dining room table. Mom saw what was coming, and she put a stop to the crap, before it got started. She reminded them all, that this was her home, and they could go into the living room, and sleep it off, and go home, to the city in the morning.
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Like I said before, Dad was not a drinker and three was his limit. Poppy on the other hand thought he had no limit. A lot of times, Dad would have to go across the street and usher pop up to the room. Big brother Frank Jr. sometimes had to do this duty also. This did not please my mother, but as long as he didn’t get hurt, she tolerated it. Mr. Ablondi knew when to cut pop off, and watched over him. They were both immigrants, and understood the ways of growing their families up in their new country, America.
Poppy would get on this good behavior kick and not go across the street too much. He told me to go around the neighborhood and collect all the brown bottles I could find and bring them to him. I got about a dozen, and he gave me a nickel for each one. He asked Dad to pick up a bushel of green and ripe apples when he went up to Spring Valley. Back then all the spare land was apple orchards, and Conklin’s Orchard was the biggest around. Dad did as pop had asked, got the apples and asked mommy what the hell pop was doing with all those apples. The following week, the same thing, more bottles and more apples, finally, mom had enough and had to find out what the hell was going on with pop. Well, come to find out pop had a still going on in the kitchen sink, in his flat, and was making apple jack booze. Well mom flipped out, he was selling the stuff to some of his old crony friends, on the two blocks and even some customers from up in town. The Pearl River Hotel Bar customers got wind of the business pop had going on, and they were coming down to buy some hooch.
It got so bad, with poppy making the apple jack, that the one liquor store owner told dad that pop had to stop making the stuff, it was hurting his business. Pop stopped and things quieted down. My brown bottle collecting came to a halt. Shortly after that time, poppy became very ill. The doctor told him and mom, that he had to stop drinking and smoking that GOD awful LIBERTY pipe tobacco. It was killing him, and it finally did do just that. When he passed away, we went up to the flat to clean it out and found fifteen brown bottles of apple jack, curing in a dark closet. He started out brewing beer in Germany and ended up making booze here in the U S. I missed him, he was my buddy.
Chapter 12 (unabridged)
I was about nine years old when poppy died. Frankie was fifteen and was wrapped up with sports all over the place. Dad had built him a basketball back board and net on a pole, in the back yard. They got some garden lime and marked out the boarders and the foul line. It looked pretty sharp. The next door neighbor’s boys, Jim and Pat, would come over with some other kids and they would choose up teams and play well into the evening. Mom would have trouble getting him in for dinner, and then blame dad for building the dam thing. She didn’t really mind, but it sounded good. There could have been a lot of other things he could have been doing a lot worse than playing ball in the back yard and the neighbors’ families felt the same way.
He was good at basketball and baseball too. He even got his picture in the LEDERLE magazine one month, swinging a bat while in a makeup game out on their field. Mom and dad were proud of that, because they both had worked at the plant during the war. One of his home town hero’s was Bruno Ablondi, who lived just down the street from us.
Bruno was one of two sons that Mr. Ablondi had. His one son Mario went to Pearl River High School a few years ahead of Bruno who graduated in 1947. He was a gifted, athlete and was ALL COUNTY, in football, basketball and baseball. I remember him slightly, but Frankie idolized him, and wanted to be just like him.
The Korean War started in June of 1950, and ended in July of 1953. Almost thirty seven thousand of our troops were killed. One of them was Bruno, and the whole town went into shock, he was loved by all. Frankie was devastated, his hero was gone forever. I think that’s what drove him to be a good athlete himself. The family closed the tavern for a week, while they mourned their son. Mario, the oldest son, stayed on to work for his father at the bar, for many years, until his dad passed away. They were a nice family.
Frankie was in high school in 1951, his second year and playing junior varsity sports, and doing very well. His coach Ira Shuttelworth liked him and knew that he was going on to bigger and better things as a junior and senior. He was the center on the football team, guard on the basketball team and catcher on the baseball team. Three sports, like his hero Bruno. In the spring of 1952, I was ten years old and was playing a lot of baseball myself, with a lot of my buddies. One of my friends found out that we could play baseball for his uncle, Harry Jackson, in a junior league at the Memorial Park in Spring Valley. We had about nine players and were ready to go and play.
1952 and we all were about ten and eleven years old. We had a chance to play ball together as a team for the first time, ever, and we even won the league championship that year. Mr. Jackson even got us uniforms, we were hot stuff. Whenever we had a game, we would all ride our bikes to Jay’s house, and his mother would pile us all in her old Studebaker car, and off we’d go to Spring Valley. Jay was our third baseman. There was Chucky, Teddy, Frankie, Larry, Johnny and me as well as Jacky and Gene Jackson, Harry’s two sons. After the season was over we had a party at restaurant that we would never forget.
The following year a fellow named Art Hopper and some businessmen started the Pearl River Little League in our town. They built a baseball field down by the original Muddy Brook. The land donated by the Dexter Company. We had dug-outs, bleachers and a fence around the whole field. It was sharp. Only one thing wrong, all us boys that played together in Spring Valley, had to split up and play for different teams of the league. Frankie, Jay and Sammy, went to other teams, but Chuck, Larry and I stayed together, and played for the same team. Chuck and I were in the homerun race that year, and I beat him out with eleven homers, he only had eight. Teddy and Johnny couldn’t play that year because they were too old. You had to be born before a certain date to be eligible to play that year. That was a shame, we all missed them. My team, the Giants, only finished in second place.
While I was playing little league baseball that summer, my big brother Frank was playing American Legion Baseball in Rockland County. He was playing first base and catching on and off. He was getting to become a very good player and in his up and coming senior year, Coach Shuttelworth or Uncle Ira as everybody called him, expected Frankie to be selected for All County Baseball and he was. That was the spring of 1953. Football and big brother excelled at that too, and in a game against Nyack High School he punted a 79 yard kick, the longest to this day in Rockland County. Uncle Ira coached all three sports back then and had brother playing basketball too. This was his favorite sport, played all four in his high school year. He loved the game, had a good outside set shot and could rebound with the best of players. I guess Dad building that basketball makeshift court and backboard in the back yard did pay off. We all went to his games when we could, Dad had to work a lot of those times, but Mommy and I went.
He did not equal his hero’s records, but Bruno would have been proud of him, I know that my family was. During his high school years he found another hero, Uncle Ira. He looked up to him and wanted to be a coach just like him. After graduating high school in 1953, he could have had a shot to go to Michigan State, but because of financial funds, he could only afford to go to a state college in upstate New York. Cortland State was a good school and had a great basketball team. That was right up his alley. He excelled there also.
The town was changing back then. Ridge Street was now paved with black top as well as most of the other streets. New businesses were coming into town and new buildings being built. A far cry from the time that Mr. Braunsdorf had first bought the parcel of swamp land in 1870 and started to lay out the roads and build his sewing machine factory in the middle of town. At that time the majority of people that came to the new town were of German and Scandinavian decent, machinists and skilled workers that came to work in his factory, to build his machines. But this would change, more and more folks would work at Lederle. The town was on the move in the upward direction. With the increase in population came new zoning laws. One new law said that Dad’s chicken coop had to go, as well as all the others, at private houses. Gardens were ok, but not chickens. After all the years of putting ashes from the furnace on the ground of the pen, around the coop, Dad decided to plant a small garden. With all that chicken shit that was spread out over the years, and the ashes, it was a prime spot. He turned over the mixture and dirt, and put in three dozen tomato plants and some corn seeds. Needless to say that he didn’t need any fertilizer for his garden. Spooner john gave him some pointers on gardening, and with all that fertile ground Dad had tomatoes the size of softballs, and corn for us the whole year. He would do the same as he would with the chickens, trade off for other veggies and fruit. Our time, growing up on Ridge Street, was the nicest part of my life and the memories I have, will last forever.