"Year Round"

We had lived in the house on Edgewood Road for nearly six years when my parents decided in 1958 to build a new house on the other, somewhat more 'fashionable' side of Linden, New Jersey. We found a corner lot on Georgian Drive and the whole family, in varying degrees, had a hand in its design. It was a four-bedroom split-level with four levels (not including the basement and attic). We all loved the new house but would only live there for two years.

Trouble was brewing on several fronts, most prominently my mother's drinking. She had never been much of a drinker until the mid-1950's (her early thirties) when casual, social drinking began to accelerate into something far more serious. When still in the Edgewood Road house, about 1956, she'd had a fall in the middle of the night and knocked out half her teeth against a bedpost. Another night, we awoke to horns honking and found her car in the middle of the road. The birth of a fourth child, my sister Catherine (Cat) seemed to have crushed whatever dreams she still had.

By 1958, her dancing school, which had been so successful, began a long, slow decline as parents became aware of her increasingly erratic behavior *. Student attendance and revenue began to shrink dramatically. The annual dance recitals, that had been so lavish and professional, began to look slapdash, especially as my father's participation steadily diminished. The strain in their relationship was becoming obvious and the financial pressure of the failing dance studio only added to their mutual misery.

And there were other problems. My father was becoming concerned that Linden was not the best place for any of us. I was not living up to expectations (based on several IQ tests) at Linden High School and my father felt the boys my sisters were seeing were unsuitable working-class lugs. He had an image, partly a fantasy, of the sort of young men they would find in Atlantic City where his uncles, aunts and cousins had deep roots even after the deaths of his mother and brother in 1959. He imagined blond-haired, blue-eyed, athletic, college-bound lifeguard types, like my cousin Paul (Hartman). The reality was somewhat different.

So in 1960, we sold the house in Linden and moved to an eight-bedroom, five-story near-beachfront behemoth in Ventnor, New Jersey, just 'down beach' of Atlantic City, to live year-round. Of course, Atlantic City is 140 miles from New York and far beyond any reasonable commuting distance for my father. Perhaps by design, thereafter we saw him only on weekends and, before long, not every weekend. While this arrangement may have been good for my father, it was not at all easy for the rest of us.

My father took a room at the Lamb's Club in New York and, in his absence, I became the titular 'head of the household', a thankless job to put it mildly. We felt abandoned and, as much as I loved my father, I could not forgive him for the situation he put us in. For the first year or so, my mother usually drank herself into oblivion and treated her children with 'benign neglect'. There were no trips to the dentist or the doctor. Later it became far darker. We had a housekeeper for a while, who cooked and cleaned, but, when she didn't get paid, she finally quit.

Our Aunt Rose, the matriarch of the family, came down from Philadelphia and stayed as long as she could, but my mother could not abide her obvious disapproval and ordered her to go home. We lived in what many considered a mansion but there was often no food in the house.

There were problems at school as well. Many of the students at Atlantic City High School had known each other since kindergarten. I was entering as a Junior and my sister Liz as a Freshman. We were an alien species and did not feel at all welcome, at least at first. But I was luckier than Liz. On little more than a whim, I joined the Journalism Club and the Stage Crew. Both would have a significant impact on my future, but it was in Stage Crew that I met the person who would become my best friend, Steve Berger.

I remember the moment it happened. I was in the stage-right wings, trying to get the sound system to feed to the auditorium, when Steve came by and offered me a handful of cashews. I said, "Jesus, Jack. Is that all you got for the cow?" He blinked for a moment, then doubled over laughing. I have no idea where that line came from but Steve was practically rolling on the floor and we became friends from then on. And he introduced me into his circle of friends, including Gary Allen **, Marc Lovitz (the biggest organ in Atlantic City, apart from the Wurlitzer at the Convention Hall) and a number of other members of the "Jewish mafia".

Thanks to Steve, they adopted me as the "token goy", even made me an honorary member of their fraternity, Phi Delta Pi. I will be eternally grateful. In many ways they not only saved me, they turned me from a C-and-D student into an A-and-B student. I had hated Linden High and it showed in my grades. But ACHS would be very different for me. But, as I said, my sister Liz was not as lucky.


* Joanne Woodward gave a witheringly on-the-nose performance in the film "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds" that caught her perfectly at this point. It would get much worse later on.

** Gary Allen died in an auto accident less than a year after graduation.


NEXT: "Back to New York"