An Interesting Life, So Far

Despite his crudeness I liked Harry who was easy to like. There were parties at his large house in West Philadelphia, then fashionable before the Jews and most other ethnic groups fled the city, and many other cities, especially Camden, before that period’s black invasion. (The Italians in South Philadelphia were the only whites who stayed.) He gave me my first tastes of various alcoholic drinks (my mother disapproved) and I remember us cooking steaks with onions, mustard and much black pepper. He had some notion that after my father’s death I should stay with them while going to a synagogue and recite Hebrew prayers, a foolish idea that was tried and soon dropped.

Rose and Harry had two sons, a few years apart. Buddy (Herbert), the younger, was two years older than me, and although he had inherited his father’s crudeness was attached to his and my mother. Albert, the older son, seemed more relaxed, knowledgeable, sociable. He would go on to study at the University of Pennsylvania, and I could discuss history and literature with him, unlike Buddy who acted as if culture was pretentious and to be jeered at. After his father’s death in 1950 Buddy worked with Rose to expand their meat business into one of the world’s largest pork processors. Buddy was head and Rose vice-president. They became millionaires by processing pork into Ham that they sold under the Bluebird Food label. Bluebird kept acquiring other processors and became the largest of its kind in the USA. When the company went public my mother was given several thousand shares (I wonder what became of them?). After Bluebird Food was sold to others, Rose, Buddy and friends seemed stymied and tried to start a similar company, the fate of which I know little. My mother would not eat pork. Rose loved pigs and loved to be given figurines of them for her collection. Rose also enjoyed an active social life and men. She bought an apartment in Fort Lauderdale and commuted to Philadelphia where she had another apartment on Rittenhouse Square. Her friends remained Jewish—I suppose many immigrant families stayed close to their ethnic communities, my generation may have been the first to move beyond—and she remained close to my mother who spoke of Rose as her younger sister.

Rose remarried, changed her name to Rose Cook Small, and after her second husband died had other men friends, but felt it would create too many legal problems if she remarried once more. My mother would be upset by Rose living with her lover, but Rose, then one of the higher paid woman executives in the USA, winner of a Horatio Alger award in 1977 and retired in 1980, was beyond such pettiness. She enjoyed dancing and when we stayed with her in Florida she gave us the keys to the apartment and said that she and her boyfriend would be out all night at a party. There was food in the fridge but in case we wanted to go out she gave us the name of a good place to dance.

Her men were the kind who gave head waiters big tips for the best tables and seemed to display their wealth, but Rose would save coupons from newspapers for discounted foods and was always alert for bargains. She had much commonsense. After meeting and listening to Henry’s articulate but flighty daughter, Rose observed that the young woman would talk herself into and out of a job at the same interview. I enjoyed Rose’s company the few times I saw her. We would talk about the raising of pork in Poland, why Italian fennel sausages would not be commercially successful in the USA, and even detective novels that she had started to read. I had the feeling that she thought Florence, her elder sister, was a snob, and regarded herself as an example how you could rise in America from an impoverished immigrant background to success without losing yourself to other social models.

She was Democratic in her politics and life. Like many Jewish families of that time her hired help at home were black—although as time passed they were more likely Haitian than African-American—and she would take an interest in their lives and sit down and eat with them. She was loyal. Friends of her sons often became central to managing Bluebird Food; they would remain so in her son Buddy’s businesses. She listed my mother as Bluebird staff so my mother would have medical coverage. Rose paid for the apartment my mother took to care for Florence after her stroke and she paid for Florence’s medical care. Later, I have the impression that she or Buddy paid for my mother’s care when ill. Although I admired her I seldom saw Rose as she aged but she had become the head of a large family of grandchildren and spent her final years suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. I realized how little I had known of her early life when to check my facts I looked her up on a Google search and learned that she had pawned her engagement and wedding rings to help Harry’s meat businesses to expand.

Buddy and I always seemed to be at war. He admired my mother, I admired his. In my early teens, after my father died, I would sometimes stay during the summer at an apartment Rose rented in Atlantic City for the use of her sons, their friends, and family. Buddy would mock the books I was reading or trying to read, and I felt he wanted to get at me. He had a reputation as a tough who could bang three heads together and whom it would be foolish to cross. His friends spoke of him as almost crazy when angered. One day, however, when a group of us were playing basketball Buddy and I got into a punch up. I don’t remember the cause but he kept shouting that I mistreated my mother. I survived bruised but wonderfully surrounded by the women who were part of the group, and became for a time the hero who had fought Buddy as an equal.

His friends were older and more experienced than me, Albert’s even older, and knew one another from Philadelphia. They shared cultural and social assumptions of which I was unaware. I felt an outsider until the fight on the basketball court, an incident lost in the fog of memory until about a year or two ago someone spoke to Buddy and he complained that he still had a scar from when, he claimed, I bit him on a finger during that fight. Did I really do that? Good for me.

That might have been the same summer when I once more found myself promoted from ugly duckling to swan as some of the group had heard me on a late night jazz record radio program. By my mid-teens I had become a serious jazz fan, had become a friend of the announcer on the one major Philadelphia jazz show, and as I was underage to go to jazz clubs I would accompany him unquestioned to late night places. I would first go to the station and talk with him on air about records before going to a night club with its visiting band followed by a jam session. I would not get home until morning. It did not happen often but to be heard on the radio by high school and college students gave me status.

While Buddy went on to head Bluebird Food and other companies and was, I think, on the board of several banks, and his children increased and multiplied and became parents themselves; his older brother Albert had become a gynecologist, had an affair with his nurse, was divorced by his wife whom had dated since school days and whose family were friends of the Cooks, a divorce which cost Rose much money and the scandal risked Albert being debarred from practice. He moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey, near Trenton, married an orthodox Jewish woman who insisted that she be called “Doctor” because of her Ph.d. and had a brilliant child who was not encouraged to read children’s books. When I visited him he had become a practicing orthodox Jew, or at least a well off American version of one. He wore a kippah and he and his wife had two ovens, two dish washers, two of everything, because it was forbidden to mix this with that. His life as an orthodox American-Jew gynecologist was supported by his mother’s and brother’s decades of processing pork into ham. He had many forbidden swine to atone for.

Albert still remained relaxed, good natured, full of advice and I was glad to be given a book by his wife about mid-life crisis as this was such a period in my life and I had never heard the term before and did not understand why I was unhappy and quarrelsome. Albert was over-weight and had been to a Duke University program for those who had heart problems. I was sorry to learn some years later that he died of a heart attack.

Lillian, Rose and Florence had three brothers. Al, was an athlete who married, moved to Allentown Pennsylvania, and died young. I think he played baseball professionally. I do not remember the story and I doubt that there is anyone still living who can fill in the picture. Harry married a non-Jew, became a butcher, travelled in a butcher’s truck and lived in a poor section of Camden. I think my mother looked down on him for his marriage. I disliked him the few times I saw him because of his crude speech and his expressions of dislike for “niggers”. As I was a jazz fan we quarreled when we met, which thankfully was only when he dropped by our pharmacy and that was seldom. He had a son and daughter whom I occasionally met when I transferred from Gloucester to Camden High School and whom I would sometimes run into at a restaurant when I returned to New Jersey to see my mother. I think they became accountants. I knew little about them but we were friendly towards each other and my mother regarded them as model children who remained near home close to their parents.

Henry, the other brother, the youngest of the six, grey eyed, good looking, played basketball when younger, always appeared relaxed, had a quiet sense of humor, and a narrow moustache, was sought by women, and was evasive. I have the impression he lived with his mother when he was in the area. In Atlantic City when he sometimes stayed in the apartment Rose rented for the summer, we knew to say that he was not there when women telephoned for him, which they often did. He worked in the betting stalls at horse racing tracks which he followed around the country, in his car, as the season shifted to Florida, New York, California, wherever. He would work in New Jersey at Cherry Hill, Atlantic City and Monmouth. He was always in contact with his sisters Lillian and Rose, part of the immediate family. In my teens I thought him cool and enjoyed listening to him until one time he began telling me about a young woman whom he was interested in and with whom he got no place. I never told him that she was someone whom I had gone to school with in Camden and who I thought was interested in me but whom I regarded as not having enough good looks to make up for her lack of brains and cultural knowledge. One day I had driven her home and felt offended by the vulgar mirrored halls and walls of the family’s apartment. She was impressed that I was going to Columbia, but I ignored suggestions that we meet more often. Could Henry really have been attracted to her?

He seemed the perpetual bachelor, someone without a home who drifted here and there. When he did marry it was to a hairdresser who already had children by her first marriage. I at first thought she had a nice hard experienced cynical tone, but soon discovered that she was a middle class wannabe without taste of her own. If her neighbors had tat she felt she also must have tat. She seemed to have been destined for suburban life. Poor Henry, how could he have made such a mistake? Especially as after he was injured she mocked his manhood. He became house-ridden and depressed after a fire broke out at a race track and he was badly affected by smoke inhalation. He spent the remainder of his years a semi-cripple stuck in a stuffed soft chair listening to a snappish wife and a pampered daughter who blamed him for all her own failures.

As my mother felt she owed Henry—there may have been a loan of money at some time—the daughter became my replacement in her life. The loan might have been one of those stories that my mother invented to justify what she wanted. Besides thinking she could save Henry’s daughter from the vices of the world, she also wanted someone to care for and comfort her as she had her mother and as she had taken care of Florence after her stroke. It was the fate I was always fleeing.

So unlike McCarthy’s Italians we had only taken two generations to progress from impoverished immigrants to assimilated Americans and being spoiled, rebellious and resentful children. Progress or early decadence?

Chapter 2: Fleeing

Gloucester, Philadelphia and Camden 1933–50

I imagine that there is some place, person, incident, or situation from which every person flees throughout his or her life. For me it is Gloucester, New Jersey where I lived during my youth until I left for New York and Columbia College. Gloucester, outside Camden, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, was a small working class town where no one went on to university or sought further education after graduation unless it were a teacher’s training college, and where my class mates, when not part of warring gangs or beating up homosexuals, would graduate to the local ship yard, work as mechanics in garages, join the police, and get drunk every Friday and Saturday night before going to church on Sunday.

Gloucester was my equivalent of the dry dusty deserted southwestern tumbleweed exhausted inbred otherwise forgotten village from which writers, movie stars, and serial killers flee. When I lived there I had a recurring fear that I would be slipping away one morning when I would be noticed and told I had to throw a party to celebrate my departure. The drink and food would cost everything I had saved and I would need start again and the next time I would be caught once more and still need to start preparing for my departure once more. Every dream of leaving seemed to come to the same anti-climax. I travelled around the world for decades fearing I would be forced to return to Gloucester. When I did return on a visit half a century later I was stunned that it appeared just an uninteresting, seeming harmless small town. There was now even a black bank guard.

I was born in Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital on New Year’s Day, January 2nd. That is correct. Philadelphia was notorious for its “blue laws” and one was that no drinks could be sold and that there could be no public celebrations on a Sunday, and New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday in 1933. So on New Year’s Day, Monday, January 2nd, I was born to the sounds of the Mummer’s Parade, a parade famous for attracting cross dressers, transsexuals, and other gays. Although I am not sexually transgressive, it seems an appropriate start for my life in which things have been often a bit odd. I was also born as Alvin G King, the Alvin compounded of Al and Irving, two of my father’s brothers, and the G for my mother’s family name, Americanized from Goldberg to Gilbert. Before many years I also wanted to change my name to something more American or British and I chose and have stuck with Bruce (sometimes Bruce A.) on the model of a comic strip character such as Clark Kent who was really, like me I wished, Superman. I would spend years seeking my Lois Lane.

I have a few confused early memories beginning with that awful tiny room in Trenton, New Jersey, with the iron pipe bed held up on one corner by a rope or tied together clothes. My mother told me it had existed but I could not have remembered it and must have heard about it. I remember being at her mother’s house in Camden, New Jersey where there was a large brown chow dog in the garden, a memory that merges with one in my early teens of being taken by a family friend to visit a farm and being told to open the front door. A massive dog knocked me over and began licking my face, while people laughed. On my back facing upward all I could see were the dog’s two immense balls and the green fields beyond. Perhaps there were cows or goats but of little importance. That is still my image of farmland, a perspective of greenery with animals seen beyond dog balls. I am an urban dweller.

I had a pet duck which I must have been given soon after its birth and which was attracted towards me as its parent. I understand the correct term is imprinted. It followed me to school. Years later when I felt that I could no longer eat four legged animals I decided I did not want to be a pure vegetarian and should still consume fish and fowl. Ducks, however, presented an emotional problem. I had to harden myself. Even today, living by the Canal St Martin in Paris, I often become excited and exclaim about migrating ducks that are a feature of the canal. I also had a pet turtle that would mysteriously disappear for months and then when it rained reappear. I still regard turtles as creatures of mystery, ritualistic. (A chef I know in California also had a pet duck. Hers was named “Lash Larue”. It must have been when she was older.)

Other kindergarten memories include awareness that the other children had large erector sets and other building materials, often passed down from brothers and sisters. We were middle class and I could read and count, but they already had mechanical skills that I would never master. The boys would mistreat girls in the schoolyard, hitting them, pulling their hair, and demanding the names of their boyfriend. I rescued the two prettiest, and for years thought of them as somehow mine. Then in Junior High School both disappeared. The working class brunette ran off to be a dancer and when she reappeared several years later her older brother, who was a friend of mine, remarked that a woman would always love the man who took her virginity. That left me out. The other one, a blue eyed blond from a middle class family, whom I thought resembled the Norwegian figure skater and movie star Sonja Heine, moved to another town, developed a disease, lost her looks, and married young, by which time I had other women to idealize.

School seemed a waste of time. The teachers were only concerned with getting the others through, who often left as soon as they legally could, indeed sometimes before. I was supposed to educate myself. If the class was learning from one volume of world history during the year, I was told to read on my own the dozen or so volumes in the set. If the others found algebra difficult I went on to advanced mathematics, calculus, and imaginary numbers. Left to my own superiority I learned little and would be stunned a few years later when I met those who had genuinely mastered areas of which I had only a superficial knowledge. It seems to me that I had very little schooling. Latin was the worst. Although we were the elite-stream only one other person would go to on to further education (at a small college in Pennsylvania). There was no pretense of teaching or learning any Latin. How could we? We had never been taught even English grammar, which would trouble me later when I tried to learn French.

Some of my ignorance was my own fault. For Biology I lost the dried frog we were supposed to dissect and assembled instead on a board for display a miscellany of chicken and other bones. I labeled the parts with seemingly appropriate names that I found in my biology book. Faced by this absurdity the biology teacher started laughing and dismissed the class. What else do I remember of Biology except the teacher regularly selling pickled cucumbers from a barrel and a required dissertation which we mindlessly copied from one written decades ago, each year increasing the misspellings, datedness and obscurity of the text.

I indiscriminately read E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, comic books, Major Douglas’ books on Social Credit economics, New Directions annual anthologies, Lucretius, Homer, any books I could get my hands on provided that my high school teachers had not mentioned them. That was easy as they seemed to know nothing. For a time while in high school I subscribed to books published by one of the Classics Editions that had proliferated on the model of the Harvard five-foot shelf of great works that everyone needed to be educated. I wrote a book review (our project) of William Bradford’s history Of Plymouth Colony, which was a Classic Club selection, supposedly the first book written in America, and was told by my English teacher that the book did not exist and I had made it up. She was one of the more lettered teachers in Gloucester; I disliked her intensely. At one point she was trying to teach poetry and did indeed explain the common forms of a sonnet. We were told to write a poem and I produced a not so subtle satire about her that she told me to read before the class; she said some people now write such stuff and consider it poetry. I do not remember whether it rhymed (probably did in odd ways), or its rhythm but it was certainly lineated like verse, and would have shown such influences as e e cummings, William Carlos Williams, and whoever was in that year’s New Directions Anthology. My attempt was no doubt horrible, but yes some people did consider my models poetry.

Most of my teachers were even worse. We were required to take state examinations in some subjects but were never told the results. When I hear complaints of terrible American public schools I feel I was already there, although now they are even more violent.

Gloucester was once part of history, a history recalled by a few old cannons at the city park facing the Delaware River. I cannot remember those Revolutionary War events that I looked up beyond a general who crossed the Delaware into New Jersey in search of clothing and horses. A hotheaded disciplinarian who led his troops into battles he was called Mad Anthony Wayne. Betsy Ross had lived in Gloucester and I made up a story that she was George Washington’s mistress and had used his underwear for material to sew the first American flag. I told the story so many times over the years that I forgot I had made it up as a joke until my daughter said that her classmates claimed it was nonsense. Nonsense? Then I remembered, of course I had invented it. And in my version Mad Anthony Wayne kept crossing and re-crossing the Delaware, a parody of Washington’s famous crossing.

Gloucester was a Jim Crow town with no blacks allowed. Black taxi drivers from over the river in Philadelphia would object when asked to take passengers to Gloucester, and any black with sense would make certain to be out of the town before night fall if not sooner. Teaching The Merchant of Venice, with its emblematic choice between three caskets, the vice- principal, appealing to racial horror of miscegenation, told my class what it must feel like if the Prince of Morocco had picked the one that would have made Portia wed the Negro. A girl with kinky hair who we thought of as Greek was not taken on the school trip to Washington DC because it was feared she might be part-black.

In the late 1930s a KKK cross had burned in front of a Jewish store in nearby Brooklawn. We were one of the few Jewish families in Gloucester and throughout junior and senior high school I was called a Jew whenever someone was angry with or wanted to embarrass or intimidate me. A school friend’s father once asked me whether the world’s troubles would end if “all the Jews were drowned”. The English teacher with whom I had quarreled told my mother that she would not accept such conduct from “one of her own”. During a school argument over a presidential election I was told that all Jews were Republicans (actually our family was divided with my father being extreme left Democrat and my mother loyal to the Republicans because of her sister); a fist fight developed and I was chased home by a rapidly formed mob shouting “get the Jew” or a similar chant. My mother found me hiding and told me to return to school and face the mob. A few years later when I had a close black friend from another city and brought him home, my mother treated him as if this were not unusual although I knew that some of the customers in our drug store were making comments.

We were not practicing Jews and being called one felt strange, as it would often seem when it occurred later in life. The Irish and German Catholics who made up most of the town appeared like inhabitants of another planet with their punch ups, warring gangs, drunken evenings, worship of sports, and lack of study. A short period of memorizing what needed studying was bound to get me an A, while they hung out in gangs on street corners or were seeing available girls. I felt that I would have more and better girls later after I graduated school. There were often bitter territorial battles between the Catholics who went to the Catholic school and those who attended what Americans term public (state) school. Some battles were with chains and knives in the local park at night. To go to a dance at the wrong school was risky, punishment included being forced head down into a filthy toilet bowl. I tried to walk the thin line between the two groups but there were times I had to defend myself against louts, usually including at least one of my classmates.