THE MOVE TO NEW BRUNSWICK.George Snedeker

 

 

 

 I remember the two well-dressed men who knocked on our front door. They said they were interested in buying our farm. My father laughed and said, “We don’t want to sell the farm.” One of the men responded, "If you don’t sell, you’ll be surrounded by factories. Everyone around here has sold. We’re going to build an industrial park. If you don’t sell, you’ll be standing in the way of progress.”

The sign says “Renaissance,” but the rebirth of what? Fifty years later, rows of condos were thrown up for people on the road to success! The real estate agents promised an industrial park would be built. That’s how they got my parents to sell their four-acre farm. The factories never got built, only the condos.

Real estate speculators bought up the whole area for a projected industrial park which was never built. I guess they did not know about the plans for the deindustrialization of America. It was prize land because it was located near the Pennsylvania Railroad line from New York to Philadelphia and points south and west. My parents did not want to sell the farm but they didn’t want to be surrounded by smokestack industries either, so they signed their names to the bill of sale and we moved to New Brunswick.

I often think that the loss of our farm was the turning point in my life. It showed me the power of the market and its agents who pressure people to sell what had been theirs for years and displace them from a simple but meaningful way of life. We raised a few chickens and grew a few vegetables, most of which we ate. But the air was clean and the land was ours. My father had inherited it from his first wife’s family when she died. It was not that we deserved the farm, it was more a stroke of luck, and now it had been taken away from us by some mysterious god called real estate. I have never forgiven those real estate agents for the loss of our farm. Of course this grievance lacks a certain level of rationality.  Who can be rational all the time?

The farm once generated a cash income, but by the end of World War II, we grew food to eat. My father’s wages were low so growing food supplemented his income and helped keep us out of the poorhouse. Prior to World War II, my mother ran a chicken and egg business, but with the rise of the national grocery store, her egg business ended. After World War II, my mother kept a few chickens for eggs, but she no longer sold eggs to neighbours.

In 1956, real estate agents coerced my parents into selling their four-acre farm by telling them and all of the other people who lived in the area that they were buying up land to build an industrial park. My parents were told that if they did not sell their farm, they would be surrounded by factories. This is probably the same story the real estate speculators told everyone in the area to get them to sell their homes. The real estate agents were only interested in the land so people could take their houses with them if they chose to do so. Some people moved their houses. If they did not move their houses, they were demolished. Someone took our barn and made a house out of it. 

Some of the families who lived near us moved their houses to land they had purchased in other parts of the state. Since the real estate speculators were only interested in the land, they did not care whether or not people took their houses with them when they moved. If they left the houses, they were demolished to clear the land. Our farmhouse was too old to be of any value so it was demolished soon after we vacated the farm, as were the chicken coops.

         Before my mother married my father, she had worked in a cigar factory and in her father’s general store. While living on the farm, she managed a chicken and egg business until the end of World War II when the expansion of grocery stores forced her out of business. She had two hundred chickens and four working chicken coops. When I was a child, this had been reduced to only one chicken coop and about thirty chickens who laid eggs that we ate. On occasion, we also ate one of the chickens along with the vegetables that we grew and that my mother canned for the winter months.

With the sale of the farm, all of this was over. Now it was a matter of finding a new place to live in some housing development or in New Brunswick where we ended up. I remember that my parents drove around to take a look at several of the Levittown-type housing developments that were being built in the area but that they did not like any of the houses very much. Perhaps this was because all the houses looked the same. We ended up buying an older house in New Brunswick, the nearest town, about five miles away.

The house my parents bought was located only one block away from three blocks of low income barracks-like houses where poor families lived. I was a little surprised that my parents would buy a house so close to a three-block slum of mostly poor families. Crime was not an issue and the kids who lived in these barracks houses were not much different from the working-class kids who lived in private houses. About two years after we moved to New Brunswick, the families began moving out of the barracks houses so that a new high school could be built there. I later found out that the barracks-like houses were built during World War I for the families of soldiers, since New Brunswick was not far from a military base, later named Camp Kilmer. It is now a community college. After World War II, the military barracks were converted into low-income housing units for civilians. After the poor families moved out, my friends and I went into the empty barracks like houses to see what they looked like on the inside. They were small and poorly constructed, one-story, attached houses but they did not seem to be terrible places to live. I always wondered where these families moved to when they were forced to leave. Instead of real estate speculators, it was the government that kicked them out of their homes.

 

         New Brunswick had three department stores: Newberry’s, Woolworth’s and Fishman’s. My mother often took me shopping in each of these. My favorite sections of the department stores were the lunch counters, the candy counters and the toy sections. I also liked riding the mechanical horses and rockets and weighing myself for a penny on the scales they had in front of the stores. I found the rest of shopping to be a real bore as I still do. I avoid shopping whenever I can.

I was twelve when I went to my first shopping center. They weren’t yet called “shopping malls.” It was in North Brunswick, a couple of miles from where our farm used to be. I could walk or ride my bike to it when I had nothing better to do and stroll around in a store called E. J. Korvette’s, which was one of a dozen or so stores there. I liked walking around in the record and the sporting goods sections. 

My friends, Ralph and Bobby shoplifted clothing in Korvette’s but I was too afraid of getting caught to do this. They also climbed over the fence of the local Pepsi factory and stole bottles of soda that we all drank, until one night when they got nabbed by the police. They tried to quickly throw the bottles of soda into the woods and run away but this didn’t work. Their parents were called into the local police station and Ralph and Bobby were let go. Ralph had an older brother named Sammy who was always getting into trouble with the law. Ralph and Sammy are now both construction workers. Neither finished high school. I can’t say what happened to Bobby. He’s probably working in an office somewhere. 

         Ralph, Sammy and Bobby taught themselves how to play guitar and formed a band, which was a very popular thing to do back in those days. They practiced in Ralph and Sammy’s basement. I sat behind a set of drums and tried to play along with them but I had no rhythm. I would hit the drum and cymbals with the drum sticks, and worked the bass drum by pressing my foot on the pedal but this sounded really bad. I couldn’t understand how the drum was supposed to fit in with the playing of the guitars and singing. I tried to teach myself to play the guitar like the others had done but no luck there either. I have always been tone deaf. I would hang out with these guys in the basement while they were practicing their instruments as if I had some connection to what they were doing. They would shout at me to stop playing the drums since it threw them off in their playing. I soon stopped hanging out with these guys and stayed at home listening to music on the radio or dreaming of a future which would be less lonely.

Ralph hitchhiked to high school rather than take the local bus which cost six cents if you bought bus tickets. He did this to show he was a rebel without a cause. After tenth grade he dropped out of high school and joined the army, as did Bobby. I think they both were sent to Vietnam but I never discussed this with either of them. I heard from my sister who knows Ralph’s mother that Ralph is living in California where he works in construction and teaches yoga on the side. His brother, Sammy, is a carpenter in New Brunswick and can bench press three hundred pounds. Ralph, Sammy, Bobby and I used to lift weights together but my muscles never got any larger or harder. I lost about thirty pounds weightlifting. I had always been a little overweight as a teenager which was probably due to eating junk food and a lack of exercise.

By the mid-sixties, New Brunswick was becoming a ghost town. Most of the stores had begun to close because of the shopping centers, which were being built in the nearby suburban areas where there was much better parking and more choice for shoppers. There used to be four movie theatres, three department stores and a bunch of smaller clothing and jewelry stores in downtown New Brunswick. There were also several buses that ran either to or through the town and lots of people walked the several blocks of the downtown area. The local bus that ran from where my house was located, about a mile and a half away, stopped running at nine in the evening and did not run at all on Sundays, so as a teenager I often walked to the downtown area and back. There was a town square that had a soldiers’ memorial where they put up the names of the guys from New Brunswick who did not go to college and were killed in Vietnam. Melvin Diller and I read the names to see if there were any guys that either of us knew in high school. Melvin did not go to college, but he had a medical deferment because of his bad heart so he was not drafted.

I lived in New Brunswick until I went away to college. Melvin Diller was my best friend in high school. He was born with a hole in his heart and wore his hair in a D.A. just like Elvis. He was a school clown who would make jokes in our classes. He drove our World History teacher, Mr. Wilson, crazy with all of his jokes. One day he raised his hand and when he was called on, he asked Mr. Wilson if the Common Market gave Green Stamps. Back in the 1960s, when you bought food items in the grocery store you received Green Stamps. When your Green Stamp book was full you could trade it in for an item like a toaster for example. Since then the Green Stamp company has gone out of business.

Forty years later I looked Melvin’s phone number up on the internet and called him. We had dinner together in the Village. I also met his wife. He is now a successful barber near Princeton, New Jersey. His personality has not changed very much. He still tells jokes. The strangest thing about Melvin and I is that we were born on the same day and in the same hospital. We did not meet again until high school. Because of the hole in his heart, the Board of Education paid for a taxi to drive Melvin to school. 

New Brunswick had its slum areas. I had to walk through one of these to get to the projects where Melvin lived with his mother. While at dinner, Melvin told me that the projects had recently been imploded. This was apparently part of New Brunswick’s gentrification policy.

 

When I visited Melvin, His mother, whose name was Rose, called me a langa luchenwith her broken Polish accent. Because I was very tall, she was calling me a “long noodle.” Melvin and I laughed and continued our card game. 

When Melvin was a senior in high school he had open-heart surgery which caused his purple lips and fingernails to take on a normal color. He and I never ate lunch in the school cafeteria. Instead, we sat on a ledge in the hall and made fun of the other students who couldn’t care less what we thought of them!  

 

In home room, we were forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance, except for a girl named Pat who stood silently. She was a Jehovah’s Witness, who believed saying the Pledge was a form of idolatry!