Those Good Old Days?
Fri., June 8, 10:48 AM
Whenever someone tries to remind me of the “good old days,” I find myself wondering if they really knew what it was like. Sure, a lot of things were simpler — maybe because we didn't know any better — but some things would be unthinkable by today's standards.
I remember staying overnight at a friend's house and being told I could take a shower. I didn't know how, because there was no shower in the House on Court Street. And I was too embarrassed to ask. I ran the water and washed, but I didn't shower.
My brother recently dug up a photo of our Uncle Joe that reminded us both of a trying experience, even more for him because he was the only boy. Uncle Joe had four daughters, which shamed his Old Country bias terribly, and he was delighted to have a little boy to show off. Joe was the younger brother of my maternal grandmother and lived in Toronto with his wife and the afore-mentioned embarrassing daughters. (Really, they were very nice girls.)
Brother remembers Uncle Joe as having the demeanor of a crude Russian peasant, kind of like Nikita Krushchev banging the table with his shoe at the UN. He pronounced his own name, “Joe” as “Dzoe.” His remaining discourse was equally incomprehensible.
I think I last saw Uncle Joe at someone's wedding, but whether it was mine or Sister's, I couldn't tell you. Actually, despite the peasant accent, he was a learned man in his own country. Canada had given him a home and a business when he needed it, but he surely was not going to worry about how to speak English. (His oldest daughter spoke English, French, Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish; he would always have a translator.)
In the summer of 1950, our mother took the three of us to Toronto by train. Dad, who worked for an ice cream company, could never accompany us on a summer vacation. Most of the description here comes from my seven-year-old Brother's memory. We traveled from Stamford to New York City, where we boarded a train for Toronto. The trip took more than thirty hours. Somewhere in upper New York State, we switched from an electrified engine to an old-fashioned coal-burning steam engine, and chugged noisily at about ten miles an hour with frequent stops for the remaining trip.
Always necessarily thrifty, my mom had reserved four seats that converted at night to two open Pullman berths. So Brother and I shared a tiny bunk above mom and our little sister, separated from the public aisle by only a black drape. Cramped as we were, we chose to complain all night, rather than sleep.
As we chugged along in the morning, my mother added water from the train drinking fountain to a mixture of powdered milk and something called Hemo, a chocolate powder similar to Nesquik. (Mom never learned that powdered milk is not instant, but needs about twenty hours to taste like real milk.) Within an hour, my sister and I “gave the mixture back.” Brother proudly showed masculine courage by somehow keeping the stuff down.
Uncle Joe picked us up at the Toronto station using his family vehicle. Since he was in the vegetable produce business, the family's only “car” was a large open truck, with a bed surrounded by open wooden slats. As kids, we had never heard of seat belts; so riding while standing in the back of an open truck with the wind in our faces seemed like great fun.
In a trip filled with logistical nightmares, however, the same truck later became part of the trip's worst night of horror. Uncle Joe drove us all — our family, his wife (aka Aunt Frieda), and two of his daughters — for a day trip to Niagara Falls. Though the trip was only about a hundred miles, all travel was by stop-and-go surface roads, so we spent at least four hours in the truck in each direction.
We did get to see the Falls, from the Canadian side, no less. (I have yet to see them from the New York side.) And the weather was beautiful for viewing them.
The return trip was after dark. It had begun to rain so Uncle Joe draped a smelly tarp over us kids in the back of the truck, for a trip that seemed endless. (A couple of the little kids had fallen asleep on part of the tarp, so we were kind of wrapped up like a strudel.) Somewhere along the way one of the girls needed to go to the bathroom. She stood up under the tarp and urgently banged on the truck cab's rear window, causing Uncle Joe to peevishly pull over. (Girls are such a nuisance. He didn't have to say it out loud.) Since there were no convenient rest stops, the two moms pawed through their picnic basket to find and wipe out a mayonnaise jar to be passed back for the urgent child's relief. My mom later told us that she was thankful that it wasn't one of her kids, and she prayed all the way back that we'd hold on. And so it went, three little kids gritting our teeth, determined to wait until we arrived home.
That is not the whole story of the trip, of course. I remember other parts that were quite as discomfiting, and I think they will remain untold. But I ask you, is waiting at the airport — where there are food courts and restrooms — any worse than this? Good old days indeed!
