Category: Post World War II America

A JERSEY SHORE CHRISTMAS

12/24/2016

When I thought of writing about “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” I realized I’d actually done it several years ago, when my grandson, then age 8, was collecting family history narratives from all his grandparents for his Cub Scout Bear Trail badge. One of the questions was, “What did you do as a child during the holidays?”

My response started out, “Christmas was the biggie.” The rest of this post is adapted from the essay I wrote for him then.

Our Christmas actually started with Thanksgiving - and anyone who denies that it began so early back in the "old days" or blames Hallmark for rushing the season is mistaken. We usually went to my father’s parents' home in Oakland NJ, a couple of hours' drive from Neptune, along with my uncles Quentin and Sid (my father's brothers), their wives, and Quentin’s three children, who were about our age. Of course we had turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings. My mother made apple and mincemeat pies and to let the steam out, she took a sharp knife and made dotted lines in the crusts that read TA ['tis apple] and TM ['tis mince].

Once we recovered from the soporific effects of the feast, my grandfather, a concert pianist whose skills had sadly grown rusty from arthritis and disuse, reluctantly succumbed to my grandmother's pleas and sat down at the piano, his ever-present cigar dangling from his lips, and we all sang Christmas carols. Then my sisters and I, having raided our grandmother’s wonderful costume trunk full of scarves and bolts of exotic material, belted out all five verses of "We Three Kings.” I always claimed the role of Balthazar because I loved the dark melodrama of his lines: "Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in a stone-cold tomb." (Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, also about the gifts of the Magi, was written and first shown on TV in the early 1950's. My sisters and I took to it instantly, probably because we were already devoted fans of the three wise men and felt we had a special connection with them. We spent many happy hours reenacting the songs from Amahl - and thus a new holiday tradition was born.)

As soon as Thanksgiving was over, the Christmas season began in earnest. My mother made two fruitcakes, one dark and one light - the locus classicus for my own compulsion to bake fruitcake every year whether anyone likes it or not - which she doused liberally with brandy once a week until Christmas. Around the same time, my father scheduled the family Christmas card photoshoot, a ritual he truly adored. He set up lots of spotlights, and some years he also draped the room with sheets to provide a neutral backdrop. Elaborate scenarios were developed (clutching our pets; reading to the younger children; my sister at an easel pretending to paint), and a primitive version of Photoshop was applied to the results. His children didn’t always share his enthusiasm (as unfortunately can be seen from our glum expressions in some of the photos - re-do's weren't as easy as with an iPhone!). We had to sit very still, with our pasted-on smiles, and the spotlights made the room hot as an oven. Today, of course, I am inordinately grateful not only for the memories my father made for all of us by staging this event but also for the photographic record of how we all grew and changed and added to our number over the years. Wish I could tell him so now.

The cards began in 1943, when I was 10 months old. There was no card for 1944. After that the series remained unbroken; some years there were actually two different versions. The only year my parents appeared was 1950. Note the extra-special gift we received in 1953! Our last Christmas in Neptune was 1955; the cards continued for a few more years at our new home on Long Island.

A couple of weeks before The Day, we decorated the house. My mother had a creche that we set up on the mantle, and even though we weren't particularly religious, I loved the baby Jesus and the whole family tableau. (I still do.) Right below them hung the stockings awaiting Santa's attention - an interesting juxtaposition of Christian and pagan symbolism, though not one we thought much about at the time. We also had a little cardboard village with colored cellophane windows and holes for Christmas lights, which she arranged on the piano. A wreath went up on the door.

My father set up the tree in a semi-finished "game room" in the basement, near the pingpong table. The beloved box of ornaments came down from the attic, and we competed to be allowed to hang our favorites. Another predictable squabble was sparked by the silver foil icicles: I liked to hang them slowly and painstakingly so they would look like real icicles, while my sister preferred taking clumps of the stuff and flinging them at the tree. These mini-crises resolved, we artfully arranged our gifts under the tree - all but the ones from Santa, who didn't visit till Christmas Eve after all of us (including, we supposed, our parents) were sound asleep. (I'll never forget how proud I was when I was deemed old enough to be dropped off at Woolworth’s in Asbury Park to shop on my own, using the money I saved from my allowance by depositing fifty cents per week in a "Christmas Club.")

My parents always hosted an Open House for all the neighbors (children and adults alike) on Christmas Eve. During the preceding week, we made dozens and dozens of cookies - including sugar cookies, which we decorated with red and green sugar, and Tollhouse cookies, made by following the recipe on the back of the Nestle’s package, which magically and consistently produced the Best. Ever. Chocolate. Chip. Cookies. Out came the two fruitcakes, dark and light, for one last splash of brandy. Just before the party my mother prepared two batches of eggnog, nonalcoholic for the kids and most definitely alcoholic for the adults. We donned our Christmas finery and were allowed to stay up late. Years later, one of the neighborhood girls told me she was so inspired by these parties that as an adult she has always given a Christmas Eve Open House of her own.

After all the guests had gone home, we put on our foot pajamas and snuggled up to listen to "The night before Christmas"; then it was off to bed with us so we wouldn't be too tired the next morning. Not a problem for me; I was almost always the first one up. But we still had to wait for our parents to get up before we were allowed to go down to the basement and start opening our gifts - which seemed like forever but was probably more like half an hour. We had made our Christmas lists and I usually got exactly what I'd requested, plus lots of other stuff. One year I asked for a Nancy Lee doll but stipulated that I wanted her wrapped so I could be surprised when I opened the package. This turned out to be a bad call because she didn’t come in a box, and her gorgeous red hair ended up with a bad case of "wrapping paper head" that never quite went away no matter what I did.

When I was around five, my father bought us an electric train. After we went to bed on Christmas Eve, he stayed up long into the night laying the track so that the train would disappear down a hallway and a couple of minutes later reappear through the dining room. That year he, not I, was the first one out of bed on Christmas day. The train was a big hit with all of us but no one was more excited than my dad. If you want to make an engineer happy, just give him a model train and a whole day with nothing else to do but play with it.

No portrayal of Christmas in Shark River Hills, or any other holiday for that matter, would be complete without mentioning the firehouse on Brighton Avenue. The firehouse was more than just headquarters for the volunteer fire department, it was the beating heart of the community, serving as a meeting place for scout groups and other organizations and an event center for community parties and celebrations. My mother was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, even though my father was not a firefighter. Here is a photo of the Christmas party in 1953, at which 73 children were in attendance, including both my sisters (#27 and #57), my BFF Joyce (#36), and practically everyone else I knew (plus a few I didn’t). Where was I? I guess I must have been ill that evening; surely I didn’t have anywhere else to go! (For awhile, identifying the 73 children became a Facebook obsession among the SRH crowd, including a circulating excel file that ended up with about 3/4 of the names filled in.)

By around Christmas there was usually plenty of snow on the ground, which meant the long, winding Riverside Drive hill would be cordoned off and sledding allowed. Wish I had a photo of that! Instead, I’m including a little home movie, taken by my dad, of my mom sledding down the driveway with me. Notice how my mother was dressed.

The end of the Christmas season was marked by an enormous bonfire at the edge of the Shark River, fueled by dozens of spent, dried-up Christmas trees. Both my sisters are in this photo, taken in 1951. (Where was I, I wonder?) On the right, in the background, you can see the mothers - again, barelegged, in skirts. Thanks to my sister Sherry for reminding me about this event.

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THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY

12/7/2016

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Today marks a grim milestone in American history - the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy,” as FDR famously referred to it in his call for a declaration of war. Early that morning, a Sunday, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or damaging 18 ships and destroying 188 aircraft. In all, 2,403 were killed - mostly service personnel but also including 68 civilians - and 1,178 wounded. Since the US was not at war, all the victims were noncombatants.

Congress quickly heeded Roosevelt’s call for a declaration of war. Four days later, unhappy about Japan’s unilateral, unannounced initiation of hostilities but realizing American participation in World War II was now inevitable, Germany and Italy declared war on the US, which immediately reciprocated.

Although the US had kept a wary eye on developments in Europe (Asia not so much), until now it had maintained a staunch neutrality, its populace deeply divided on whether America should be involved in the war effort in any way. All that changed with Pearl Harbor. Within hours America was on a wartime footing. Soon films about military life and lovers separated by war would crowd out Citizen Caine and Dumbo in the movie theaters. Soon “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “I’ll be Home for Christmas” would dominate the airwaves, along with revivals of World War I hits like “Over There.” Soon deprivation and shortages of building materials and consumer goods would become the norm. Soon admonitions like “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and “Loose lips sink ships” would become part of our daily conversation.

Much has been made of the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Both were unexpected attacks on iconic homeland targets, both inflicted a shocking amount of damage, both resulted in thousands of casualties, and both brought a sudden reveille to those who thought the world outside our borders could simply be ignored. Both drew the US into many years of armed combat. Whether the long-term ramifications of 9/11 can possibly match the political, economic, sociological, and cultural dislocations that followed World War II - the decades-long dominance of the US on the world stage, the Cold War, the increasing pressure for gender and racial equality - remains to be seen. But the analogy is useful in giving those too young to remember Pearl Harbor at least a hint of its transformative effect on life in America.

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For both the men and women of the Camp Evans community, the impact of Pearl Harbor was, if anything, magnified by the circumstances in which they found themselves - that is, in a new, ad hoc community, with nothing in the way of roots or shared traditions; and with all the men suddenly on high alert, aware that if the Axis powers knew what was going on at Camp Evans it too could become a prime target.

My father’s story was perhaps typical. His first job after graduating from the Cooper Union in 1936 with a shiny new degree in electrical engineering was as a “student engineer” for Pan American Airways, where his chief duty was painting antenna poles. After a series of “starter” jobs with gradually increasing responsibilities, he eventually landed in Washington DC in a Civil Service position in the Signal Corps, in which he advanced from Junior Engineer at $2,000/year to Assistant Engineer at $2,600/year. As the new decade dawned, my father, finding his job too long on administrative duties and too short on research (in a word, he was bored), sought a more stimulating position, one that would draw more extensively on his hard-won electronics skills. He was just on the verge of accepting a job at the Bureau of Standards in Washington in early 1941 when the Signal Corps countered by offering a promotion to Associate Radio Engineer at their radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth in NJ. He jumped at the chance.

Much of what I know about this era of my father’s life was gleaned from an oral history interview I conducted with him in 1979. He told me his initial assignment was at Fort Hancock, “an isolated peninsula up near New York City; but we were eventually transferred to the old Marconi Radio Building down at Belmar [which the Army had only recently acquired].” To minimize his commute and allow him to ride his bike to work sometimes (they only had one car), my parents moved at around the same time from Long Branch, their first NJ home, to Shark River Hills.

If my dad was looking for excitement, he almost certainly found more than he’d bargained for. My parents and their friends were of course keenly aware of the war in Europe - how could they not be, given my father’s line of work? - but it was someone else’s war, not theirs. Preoccupied with unpacking their boxes, adapting to their new life, thinking about having children (a question of when, not if), they were as oblivious as most other Americans were to the fact that war was about to lap up to our own shores, and even more surprisingly, at the hands not of Hitler but of the Japanese: “Pearl Harbor...was a tremendous shock to us. I guess if we really stopped to think of it, we would have realized that something like this was inevitable, because Hitler's intentions were very clear - dominate the world! - and he would form whatever alliances and whatever he needed to do it. But when the shoe dropped, as it were, it was a great shock. It was a Sunday morning, and we were madly telephoning - how can we get out and man those radar sets and do something about it? - a panic, pretty much of a panic.”

My father added, “[It turned out] there was no attack on the East Coast, at least not at that time - although there was some later.” I didn’t pursue this almost offhand observation at the time and neither did he. It now appears that U-boat attacks on shipping along the East Coast were more extensive than was ever officially revealed, and I can’t help wondering if my father knew more than he was letting on.

Several workplace changes resulted almost immediately from the attack on Pearl Harbor. Security, already tight, was strengthened even further. My father's work took on a laser-like focus on the military applications of radar: “I eventually wound up heading what was called the Special Developments section with about 15 or 20 people in it and we did some very interesting work in radar [including the Army’s first moving target search radar].... I think some of it was very original.” Another dramatic change was in their work schedules: “Overtime became the rule rather than the exception - in fact, we worked pretty much a six-day week.”

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When the Camp Evans wives were parachuted into the unfamiliar Jersey Shore culture, they found themselves quite isolated, their social circle largely defined by their husbands’ work ties. After the sky fell on December 7, 1941 and their husbands started spending more and more time at work, they clung to each other all the more tightly for solace and companionship.

My mother’s closest friend from that era was Mary Jane Evers, an outgoing woman with a wry sense of humor. (Decades later I named my black cat after her black cat, “Rasputin.”) Mary Jane had a way with words and for many years wrote an amusing column in the Asbury Park Press called “We Took to the Hills” that went well beyond the demands of the genre (which tended to focus on who had tea with whom or presided at the ladies’ auxiliary meeting). In 1996, when I asked her to contribute to a “collective memoir” on my mother, she responded with a charming, breezy essay, scrawled in longhand, portraying both the impact of Pearl Harbor and her evolving friendship with my mother.

Although she was still living in West Long Branch at the time of Pearl Harbor, she was obviously already very tuned into life in “the Hills” and the Evans Lab community: “You must remember we were all ‘strangers in a strange land,’ so to speak. Our husbands had been assembled from all over to nurse the infant Radar labs and then the electronics labs. None of us had family nearby; shortly after we met, the attack on Pearl Harbor [occurred]; we each had 4 gallons of gas a week for the family car, and meat and sugar rationing. We lived in a summer development, in homes not equipped for year-round living, and about 3 macadamed roads which the Army had done to get to their own properties in the Hills and to allow the personnel to get to work.”

My mom and Mary Jane didn’t formally meet until sometime in 1944, when each of them had a toddler daughter and Mary Jane was pregnant with her second child. By late fall, Mary Jane was going through a very rough patch. Her new baby had recently died at the age of three months, and her husband Jim, who like my father had joined the Radar Division at Evans shortly before Pearl Harbor in 1941, was away on “travel duty.” Impulsively, my mother phoned and invited her to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. Their friendship was cemented with that gesture.

Mary Jane with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)

Elsa with Cindy

Mary Jane was keenly aware of how unlikely, in many ways, their friendship was: “We were very different people and from different backgrounds, but I believe that being thrown together in need, we grew to respect each others’ views and to treat our children a bit differently [than we might otherwise have done]. She was very loving (almost doting with you!); I saw children as little beings who would grow, hopefully, into individuals I would like. I have certainly achieved that!” (To be honest, I have no idea what those differences might have been - from my child's-eye point of view, the two women were a perfectly matched pair of moms. Politics? Whatever the differences were, clearly they were apparent to Mary Jane and presumably to my mother as well.)

Aside from their children, the other perennial conversation topic was money, or more accurately, the lack of it. According to Mary Jane, the pay was not generous even by wartime standards: “Civil Service personnel were not among those getting raises in Congress. The general public, from what I have learned, figured they had had money all thru the Depression when everyone else was broke, so they could just wait.”

“Budget problems were ever on our minds," she went on to say. "Your [parents] would have some ‘interesting’ discussions when the bills came in. My daughter Barbara vividly remembers hearing Elsa say, “There’s always too much month at the end of the money!” The women raided their kids’ piggy banks (we all had piggy banks, which were supposed to teach us to save our money), and as my mother commented to Mary Jane, “By the time I pay the children back, I’m broke again!” Elsa and Mary Jane bartered babysitting time by deliberately joining organizations with different meeting schedules: “She was in the AAUW and I was in the League of Women Voters; she was a member of the local Fire Auxiliary and I was a member of the Hospital Auxiliary.“

At the end of this litany, Mary Jane worried she might have left me with the impression that the lives of the Evans wives were all about “money-grubbing.” Of course, none of us was suffering from malnutrition or doing without the basics of food, clothing, and shelter. The point was that money was needed not only to provide the necessities of life but, in a world filled with bad news and uncertainty, to allow for the comfort of a few extras - “a spot left over for simple parties, cheap beer and soda and birthday cakes.” Making things come out right, making ends meet, making it possible to have birthday cakes as well as Spam - that was a job that fell to the women. It was part of their contribution to the war effort, and they took it seriously.

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How did the children of the Camp Evans community fare during Pearl Harbor and its aftermath? I was born just over a year after Pearl Harbor and have only fleeting memories - if indeed they are authentic memories at all - of the War years. Many of the facts of wartime life were part of the air we breathed. Yes, we ate Spam for dinner. Yes, we observed blackouts and dim-outs to avoid bringing unwanted attention from the German U-boats to American supply ships. Yes, we shared in the American love affair with the radio and tracked the terrifying narratives it brought into our homes. Yes, a chronic state of low-level deprivation was a part of our daily existence.

But in some important respects we were sheltered. The men - whether they were in the military or, like my father, civilians employed by the military - were doing work deemed critical to the War effort and therefore spent the War years on the homefront. They may have left for work early in the morning and arrived home late at night, but at least they were there, not thousands of miles away like my father-in-law, who spent four years on the Italian front as an Army surgeon. Our uncles and cousins may have been in uniform overseas, but not our fathers.

Jim with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)

King with Cindy

And perhaps partly for that reason, our moms were stay-at-home moms, quite unlike my stepmother Rose, a real life "Rosie the Riveter" who worked as a welder in a Grumman Aircraft plant on Long Island. Although to say the Camp Evans wives bore the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities would be an understatement - and without benefit of Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose revolutionary book on child care wasn’t published until 1946 - at least “Just you wait till your father gets home” was not an empty threat. (Not that my own mother said that, ever, but I certainly knew children whose mothers did.)

So in a way we Camp Evans kids got the jump on the Fifties. At a time when other families were struggling to adjust and create a new normal, we were already there. The Baby Boom was already in progress. Sally, the oldest Evers child, was born on September 11, 1942 - 39 weeks to the day after Pearl Harbor. My mother suffered a miscarriage before I was born; otherwise my parents too would have had a “Pearl Harbor baby.” Perhaps that’s why, whatever arbitrary cutpoints the demographers adopt, I’ve always known in my heart of hearts that I’m a “Boomer.”

Our mothers also didn’t have to be hounded out of their jobs and back to domesticity, they’d been there all along. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, the resurgence of feminism rooted in the wartime increase of women in the workplace ever touched my mother. Much later she took a few education courses in the hopes of translating her college English major into a marketable skill, but by that time her health was starting to fail and her retooling scheme never got off the ground. Her ambition for her three daughters was that we should marry well, so that we too could have the privilege of staying home to care for our children. We all remember her saying, only half-jokingly, “It’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.” Fortunately for us, in light of subsequent economic shifts that made the one-income family a luxury, as well as our own ambitions, we got quite a different message from our father, who presented his women colleagues as role models and urged us to take all the math and science we could cram into our schedules.

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My parents and their friends were part of what Tom Brokaw called the “Greatest Generation” - men and women born between 1901 and 1924, who came of age during the Depression and World War II, who shared a common core of values including honor, service, love of country and family, and personal responsibility, and who more than rose to the occasion when duty called. For better and for worse (don't forget the internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent, or the abuse my pacifist uncle suffered as a Conscientious Objector during World War II), they shaped America as we know it today.

As Brokaw observed, it was sometimes difficult to coax their stories from them because of their conviction that they weren’t doing anything special, just honoring their commitments and doing what they were supposed to do. In this context, I feel fortunate to have obtained, without really planning to do so, the two eyewitness accounts on which the above narrative largely rests. And a big shout out to Bill and Helen Evers for sharing their childhood family photos with me. For more about the Evers's and their friendship with the Stodolas, read my post dated February 27, 2016 and elsewhere in passing.

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OUT AND ABOUT ON THE JERSEY SHORE

5/3/2016

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America’s love affair with the automobile was going full throttle in New Jersey when I was a little girl. Construction of Garden State Parkway began in 1948, followed shortly after by the New Jersey Turnpike, both predating Eisenhower's signing of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created the Interstate System that changed not only the face but the heart and soul of America.

A subtle but transformative change introduced by this new kind of road was a different idea of the size of our country, of the normal tempo of life, and, on a smaller and more local scale, of the scope of an afternoon's outing. Because going for a ride in the car was exactly my father's idea of the perfect family outing, there were many such Sunday afternoon jaunts in my life. I remember my mother gently touching my father's arm to remind him to slow down - "King, you're going 45 miles an hour." The Burma Shave signs, a series of small road signs on which a clever rhymed advertisement gradually unfolded - much beloved by children including me - presaged their own demise with safety messages like "If you dislike / Big traffic fines / Slow down / Till you / Can read these signs / Burma-Shave," since it soon became impossible to travel slow enough to do so. My father, in what I suppose would now be called a humble brag, wryly told his friends that his Oldsmobile would pass anything on the road except a gas station.

I suppose part of the fun lay in the optimism and newness of it all. There were no media campaigns to compile and publicize grim nationwide statistics about what happened when things went wrong, or about vehicles that were probably "unsafe at any speed." There were no seat belts, no airbags, none of the many safety features now routinely required by law. Consider, for example, the rumble seat - an upholstered bench that unfolded where the trunk should have been. The last American cars with rumble seats were manufactured in 1938, but used cars with rumble seats must have remained available for at least a another decade. Our friends the Evers had one, and we all vied to be one of the two lucky ducks (three, if we wheedled persuasively enough) who got to ride there. It was probably about as safe for a kindergartener as riding unrestrained in the back of a pickup truck, but at that time, who knew? (The Evers family also had a Willy’s Jeep. They had all the good cars!)

This is a stock photo, not the actual Evers car; but of all the photos I found online, this is the one that most closely resembles their car as I remember it.

Cars of the 1940s were unreliable by today’s standards and much more subject to breakdowns - breakdowns that could be repaired not by replacing one electronic component with another but only by someone’s getting truly down and dirty. In our household that someone was my father. For him, engineering wasn't just a profession he checked at the Evans Lab door when he came home from work. He was a gadgeteer through and through, and keeping the family chariot in shape for trips to the Cracker Barrel was the perfect busman’s holiday for someone who spent his work week tinkering with equipment for sending radar waves on trips to the moon. Among my most vivid weekend memories of my dad are images of his disembodied legs emerging from under Nancy Nash or Ollie Oldsmobile or whatever our current rolling stock happened to be. (For some reason I felt compelled to name them all.) There was always something that needed repair, if you looked long enough and hard enough, and he kept his trusty toolbox and flashlight close at hand.

Flat tires were commonplace. One of our many family legends about my father originated with my cousin Tricia, a dozen years my senior and a frequent summer visitor from Massachusetts, who was astonished to hear my father explaining torque to me as I “helped” him change a tire; I was four years old at the time. This was quite typical of my father, who tended to treat children like miniature adults and made little accommodation to our tender years. (My daughters remember their grandfather in much the same way; some things never change.) However unorthodox his pedagogic methods, they must have had some merit, because the tire changing session my cousin witnessed sticks in my mind to this day, complete with my dad’s detailed demo of the right way to tighten the bolts, skipping one in between, and the accompanying explanation of torque.

In the summer, a lot of our outings were trips to the beach - with perhaps a stop on the way home for soft ice cream at the new Dairy Queen or Carvel shops. (From my most-embarrassing-moments file: I once threw the unwanted remainder of an ice cream cone out of the Evers's car window, hoping no one would notice I hadn't finished it - and the window turned out to be closed. Oops.) The journey from Shark River Hills to the ocean beaches, short as it was, included two potential hazards peculiar to the local terrain. One was a large drawbridge that might need to be opened at any time without much warning. Because it could involve a wait of unknown length, beach-bound drivers were reluctant to get caught on the “wrong” side of the bridge, and we watched a number of close calls with bated breath while the guards shooed the cars back in time for the boats to continue through the channel.

The other notable hazard was a railroad grade crossing, and it was there that I experienced what may have been my childhood's biggest "Rosie moment" (my term for a grave danger of which one is totally unaware, based on the wonderful children's book Rosie's Walk, in which a clueless hen is stalked by a hungry fox but remains oblivious to the repeated dangers she narrowly escapes during her morning ramble) - when the double arms of the gate descended with my mother trapped between them, a train bearing down on us and her children squirming in the back seat. I have no idea whether the car stalled or she just miscalculated, but in retrospect I can only imagine how terrified she must have been. Fortunately the attendant noticed her plight - the gates were operated manually in those days - and raised the arms in time for us to escape. What, me worry? I never doubted my mom would get us out of that predicament, just as she always did.

Wish I had a photo of my father repairing our cars when I was a girl. Not sure when or where this photo was taken, but clearly he'd had a lot of practice by the time he was explaining "torque" to me.

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THE TOM THUMB WEDDING

4/13/2016

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The Wedding Party

Awhile ago Bill Evers, younger brother of my childhood friend Sally, sent me a photo of the wedding party of a “Tom Thumb Wedding” in which I participated at the Shark River Hills Clubhouse - thus doubling my collection of photos from this event. (I’ve since acquired one more - all three are included here.) Bill remarked at the time that the concept of a mock wedding for children was foreign to him. I too think it odd - not only from my adult perspective, but I actually remember finding it difficult to wrap my brain around at the time. (Remind me, why are we doing this?)

So I did what I always do at such moments - googled - and found that the event was part of a tradition inspired by the real-life wedding of Charles Stratton, a dwarf who performed and traveled with PT Barnum as "General Tom Thumb", and Lavinia Warren, only a few inches taller than her groom. It is almost impossible to recapture the excitement generated by this event, which was probably the closest American equivalent to a royal wedding. Details about the bridal gown and trousseau were bruited about in the press, costly gifts were forwarded from around the world, and socialites vied (and paid) for invitations to the ceremony at Grace Episcopal Church in Manhattan on February 10, 1863. The wedding and its associated festivities provided a war-weary nation with a welcome respite. President and Mrs Lincoln themselves became involved, hosting a lavish reception in the diminutive couple's honor and inviting them to honeymoon in the White House.

Shortly thereafter, reenactments of the wedding started being staged by schools and churches all over the country, as youth activities and fund raisers, and also to teach children "values." The practice seems to die out from time to time, only to spring back into vogue. Even today, reports and photos of recent Tom Thumb weddings can be found in the press and online. (A modern twist: A gofundme site appealing for contributions to support a boy's candidacy for the role of groom!) Small children (usually under the age of ten) formed the cast, although sometimes the minister was played by an adult. In the one in which I participated, which took place on July 27, 1950, all the characters were played by children, minister included, with music provided by a couple of slightly older kids. Participation was maximized by including not only a full wedding party but also guests - prominent members of the community also impersonated by children.

Leslie and Cindy Stodola

I won’t say it wasn’t fun. My sister Leslie played a bridesmaid and I played Bill and Sally’s mom, Mary Jane. I think she supplied the silky navy blue dress I wore, heavily altered to fit a seven-year-old; possibly the hat was hers as well. I felt very dignified, though in retrospect I wonder what she made of her pint-sized doppelgänger, bedecked in her finery and tottering around in high heeled shoes that were several sizes too large. My “husband,” Jim Evers, was played by a boy named Eddie Jackson, whom I didn’t know very well and might not even remember except for that chance coupling (in which, by the way, no consent or choice was offered - all the decisions including casting were strictly top-down). The two of us appear side-by-side at the far right of the front row in the group photo of the wedding guests (below).

Did this spectacle provide anything beyond amusement for the participants and spectators? Did it instill an appreciation of commitment and responsibility? Did it help to prepare us for the adult world? Did the pomp and pageantry promote community spirit? Did it, on the other hand, encourage us to cling to a stereotyped set of middle-class mores and discourage openness to other life choices? Did these elaborate charades have the effect of reducing what is meant to be a solemn occasion to a circus sideshow?

According to historical novelist Melanie Benjamin, blogging in the Huffington Post, Lavinia Warren Stratton “never really knew how to view these staged weddings; were they tributes to her great love? Or mockeries?” If Lavinia herself was puzzled, I guess I can be excused for my own mixed feelings about the Tom Thumb wedding.

The Wedding Guests

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REMEMBERING SALLY

2/27/2016

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Sally and I in the tire swing.

My childhood friend Sally died in 2010 after a brief illness. I am reprinting here a remembrance I wrote for her memorial service.

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Sally was my very first real friend. In fact, in a way I knew her before I was even born, since our parents were already friends with each other. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Sally.

When you’re very young, everyone seems to be one-of-a-kind and larger than life, and my memories of Sally are almost psychedelically vivid. They are largely confined, however, to our first twelve years, before my family moved away from Neptune. We were truly just kids, and when I told [Sally’s sister] Helen I’d write a brief memoir I forgot about how solipsistic kids are. Most of my childhood recollections of Sally are actually at least as much about me as they are about Sally. There was the time I told Sally the “facts of life,” after having “the talk” with my mother, for example, and the time I gave Sally the lowdown on Santa Claus - both of which landed me and my big mouth in deep hot water with Sally’s mom Mary Jane! Harder to remember are the kind of anecdotes that would reveal Sally’s character or shed light on the really nice kid she always was and the adult she eventually became. That said, I’ll do my best with this task and hope Sally will shine through.

When I was very young my family lived in a rented home (or part of one) down near the river and I can’t remember exactly where the Evers lived, though I think it was far enough that you had to drive to get there. But when I was around five we moved to the corner of Pinewood Drive and Hampton Court, and not too long after that the Evers’s moved to Riverside Drive near its intersection with Pinewood Drive, just a couple of blocks away. From that time on, the children from the two families were inseparable. Mary Jane became my “other mother,” and Sally and Helen both told me how warmly they remember my mom. (I was always a tiny bit afraid of Jim, Sally’s dad!) The black cat with whom my own children grew up was named after the Evers’s black cat – Rasputin. It’s a great cat name and I learned a little Russian history in the process.

Life as a child in Shark River Hills in the 1940s was in many ways quite idyllic. We went out to play in the morning and often didn’t show up again till it was time to eat. (If moms did that today they’d probably have Social Services on their doorsteps, but somehow we managed to thrive.) Here are some of the things Sally and I did together: bike rides down the hill (how steep it seemed then! and we did it “no hands”) and on to the Cracker Barrel to buy a candy bar or an ice cream cone; scary safaris in the deep, overgrown ravine next to the Evers’ house; hikes in the woods in search of acorns (plentiful) and lady slippers (rare); catching box turtles and painting our initials on their backs in hopes they’d return the following year; long lazy summer days on our front porch playing jacks, pickup sticks, Parcheesi, and canasta. And of course no account of Shark River Hills in the 1940s and 1950s would be complete without a mention of the Clubhouse, a community center near the river where everyone young and old gathered for activities ranging from knot tying classes to potlucks to beauty contests. I recently sent Sally a jpeg file of myself in a “Tom Thumb Wedding” at the Clubhouse, in which Eddie Jackson and I played Jim and Mary Jane Evers. (Sally ruefully complained that her memory was horrible – she couldn’t remember Eddie Jackson at all.)

Good-sized families were the rule rather than the exception in those days. At first there were only Sally and me and the “Little Kids,” Barbara and my sister Leslie, whom we played with, fought with, hid from, and (I fear) teased mercilessly. (Sorry, guys!) The Evers clan eventually expanded to include Sally Jane, Nancy Jane who died in infancy, Barbara Jane who played with my sister Leslie, Billy (who understandably believed his name to be Billy Jane), and Helen Jane who played with my sister Sherry; five years after Sherry my brother Bob arrived, and sometime around then came Susan Jane, with whose birth Sally finally outstripped me in the sibling department – 4 Stodolas and 5 surviving Evers’s in all. We moved too soon for Bob and Susan to be fully incorporated into our little social system, though I well remember what a cutie little Susie was. In fact, all the Evers kids were attractive children. Sally was an adorable little girl, with straight strawberry blond hair, maybe a little tomboyish - a real kid’s kid. I should add that she was always quite a bit taller and heavier than I was, and I sometimes ended up with her hand-me-downs. When I left Neptune I was still a lot smaller than she was – so what a surprise to return for a visit and discover that I towered over her by 3 or 4 inches. She had stopped growing but I had not – my first lesson in the diverse patterns of child development!

Later in childhood we both branched out and developed other friendships. I became very close to Joyce Traphagen and Sally began a deep and lasting relationship with Anita Danko, to name a couple. But for as long as the Stodolas remained in Neptune, the strong bonds persisting from the time when we were almost sisters and essentially shared two mothers never entirely disappeared. Although then, as now, interactions among groups of girls could become complicated and even stormy, I can’t remember ever seriously quarreling with Sally. We must have had our share of tiffs, but unless someone or something else competed for our attention, we just sort of naturally gravitated to each other, as you can see in the Brownie troop photo I sent [BELOW].

bottom row: Nancy Imboden, Donna Ayers, Joyce Traphagen, Val Rinalder, Sally Evers, Cindy Stodola; top row: Joyce Nelson, Carolee Birch, Betty Ann Boyce, Susan Wall, Shirley ???, ???.

In 1956, the summer after we graduated from 8th grade at Summerfield Elementary School, my family moved away from Shark River Hills, and at that point Sally and I pretty much lost touch with each other. I think this was more Sally’s choice than mine, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps she thought our paths in life had diverged beyond reconciliation and that being childhood companions wasn’t a sufficient basis for an adult friendship. Perhaps she was simply preoccupied with launching her own life and career in the City. Maybe she just wasn’t a letter-writer. Whatever the reason, for quite awhile I heard from her only infrequently, and then only when contact was initiated by me.

Later on, thankfully, all that changed. In 1996, after I wrote to Mary Jane soliciting a contribution to a collective memoir of my mother, Sally volunteered her own reminiscences. “I remember your home very well,” she wrote, “and I think that…is because Elsa [my mother] made it a welcoming place. When I’m ‘home,’ I walk my dog around Pinewood [Drive] and I always look at the Stodola’s house and am glad it’s there.” After that Sally and I remained in fairly regular communication. She was very thoughtful about relaying messages to and from Mary Jane and later about updating me on Mary Jane’s condition. Her e-mails, though short, were always so sweet and gracious and self-effacing that they left me with a warm glow for the rest of the day. After Mary Jane died, she wrote to say: “Mother passed away on Sunday. It was peaceful and I’m very grateful for that. Just wanted to let you know since she was a part of your life, too, and she really enjoyed hearing from you.” She added that my mother had meant a lot to Mary Jane, who continued to the end of her life to tell “Elsa stories.”

One last interaction that I’ll always think of as pure Sally: In early 2010 she wrote to congratulate me on the publication of my self-help book for women smokers and added, “Being one of the absolute idiots who is still smoking, I shall go look it up.” When I offered to send her a copy, she replied, “Please, please, please DON’T send me your book! I’ll get it myself and you can autograph it for me at the reunion! I MUST support literary endeavors!!” She later reported that she had indeed bought the book from Barnes & Noble and was looking forward to reading it. That was one of my last e-mails from her.

The reunion she was referring to was of course the Neptune High School Class of 1960’s 50th, scheduled for late September, 2010. Sally warmly welcomed my plans to attend as an “honorary member” and reconnect with old friends from Summerfield, and we both looked forward to seeing each other again. So I was shocked beyond words when I arrived at the event, asked about Sally, and was told she had just died. My immediate reaction was that they must be talking about Mary Jane. I kept asking, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” But no, sadly, it was in fact Sally, taken from us far too early, only a few months after her mother passed away. That’s not the way things are supposed to happen, and how I wish it had been otherwise. Rest in peace, Sally. You will always be an important part of my childhood iconography; but I’m also glad we got back in touch in later life and grateful for the opportunity to find out what a kind and generous person you turned out to be – not that I’m a bit surprised!

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PROJECT DIANA

1/10/2016

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Seventy years ago today, on January 10, 1946, the US Army Signal Corps gloriously succeeded in bouncing radar waves off the moon, and the age of radioastronomy was born. It also marked the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication and launched the space race that consumed the American psyche for the following several decades. The men who collaborated in this effort dubbed it Project Diana, after the Roman goddess of the moon, initiating the tradition of naming space missions after ancient deities.

News of the experiment made banner headlines and flashed on movie screens across the country and around the world. The local newspaper, understandably reveling in its scoop, described it as "one of the most brilliant scientific accomplishments of all time." Anyone old enough to have lived through the Apollo 11 era, and to remember how that "one small step for man" captured the public imagination, probably has a fair idea of the impact made by Project Diana.

Project Diana and its culmination on that chilly winter morning came at an almost magical moment in time. For Jack DeWitt, leader of the project, it represented a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity. His team, at the height of its powers and uniquely configured to carry out a wartime mission that was no longer needed, was about to be disbanded. DeWitt's script called for him to retreat quietly into civilian life. Instead, in his few remaining months at Camp Evans, he chose to attempt one last tour de force and fulfill his longtime dream of shooting the moon. It also occurred at a singular nexus in American history - looking back on our emergence from isolationism and the deprivations and horrors of World War II, and ahead to the baby boom, suburbanization, the Cold War, radical changes in the lives of both men and women, communications breakthroughs, and an astounding acceleration in the pace in scientific development.

I originally conceived Project Diana: The Men Who Shot the Moon as a tribute to Col DeWitt, the other four members of his team, and their Camp Evans colleagues on whose additional contributions the team depended. But always, in the back of my mind, lurked the niggling sense that there was more to be said, and that Project Diana might constitute an interesting lens for examining some of the transformations and dislocations occurring in the US in the aftermath of World War II. Today, on the 70th anniversary of the first moon bounce, I am launching this blog to extend the website's mission through explorations of Project Diana's historical, sociological, political, and scientific context, as seen from the perspective of the tiny coastal New Jersey community where fate in the form of Camp Evans deposited my parents and their neighbors.

I believe I'm reasonably well-poised to chronicle the life and times of Project Diana. Although I'm not a professional historian or sociologist, I grew up in Diana's shadow on the Jersey shore. My father, E. King Stodola, was the project's chief scientist, and I have numerous documents, photographs, and clippings pertaining to his work. My earliest playmates were other Project Diana and Camp Evans "legacies." And although I'm not an expert in RADAR or EME, I boned up enough to earn my amateur radio technician's license and reclaim my father's call sign, W2AXO. (My husband, Ovide, an active ham who shares my affection for Project Diana, has agreed to try to keep me out of trouble on the more technical aspects of the feat.) I hope my readers will add value to this endeavor by submitting comments, corrections, and contributions.

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CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)

A JERSEY SHORE CHRISTMAS

THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY

OUT AND ABOUT ON THE JERSEY SHORE

THE TOM THUMB WEDDING

REMEMBERING SALLY

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PROJECT DIANA

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

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TO THE MOON AND BACK ​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

A JERSEY SHORE CHRISTMAS

﻿THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY

OUT AND ABOUT ON THE JERSEY SHORE

THE TOM THUMB WEDDING

REMEMBERING SALLY

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PROJECT DIANA

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories

TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)

THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY