"New Jersey"

In 1951, we moved from our apartment in Queens to a rented house in Metuchen, New Jersey. It was really half a house, having been divided to accommodate two families, although we had the larger 'half' that included a wide front porch and big living room the other side lacked. The dividing walls were paper thin and we got to know our neighbors far better than we wanted to.

The house was on Middlesex Avenue, the busiest street in town, and my seven year-old mind found the name very funny. I decided that homosexuals must be the "middle sex" but, since there didn't seem to be any in Metuchen, I could not understand why they would name a street after them. All I knew was that we were getting farther away from Broadway and the life I'd loved.

I had no particular animosity toward New Jersey. I'd been spending my summer vacations with my grandparents and Uncle Ray in Atlantic City since I was two. But living in New Jersey all the time was another matter entirely. Even at seven I was something of a snob toward anything west of the Hudson. My biggest problem with New Jersey was that it wasn't New York.

The move probably had the least impact on my father. He commuted by train into Manhattan each day, continued as Unit Manager on "Kraft" and other NBC shows, lunched at the Lamb's Club with his old pals and was starting to make a pretty good living. And if he missed performing it only showed when he would be asked to sing at family gatherings.

We only lived in Metuchen for a year, second grade for me, kindergarten for my sister Liz (Elizabeth). And if I was less than thrilled with New Jersey, my mother was even less so. I'm sure she tried to make the best of it, but Metuchen made Queens seem positively cosmopolitan. And with another child on the way (my sister Ellen), whatever dreams she harbored must have seemed to be slipping away.

In 1952, with help from my mother's step-father, Parker Likely, we bought a house in Linden, New Jersey for the princely sum of $16,500. It's hard to find a new car for that amount today, but it was a lot of money then. Linden was a mostly blue-collar community of 30,000 and, in retrospect, not at all a bad place to raise a family. Our house was a small three-bedroom on Edgewood Road, a pleasant tree-lined street easy walking distance from the Myles J. McManus public school. So gradually, we all settled into life in the New Jersey suburbs.