by Zvi Baranoff
I was born in Camden, New Jersey in the late nineteen fifties but my family moved to Pennsauken, a working class suburb when I was still quite young, just over the border line into the perceived safety of an all white neighborhood, a few blocks east of the imaginary line that separated suburb from city.
I was born in Camden, New Jersey in the late nineteen fifties but my family moved to Pennsauken, a working class suburb when I was still quite young, just over the border line into the perceived safety of an all white neighborhood, a few blocks east of the imaginary line that separated suburb from city.
At the time, there was still some centering aspect to the city but it was quickly fading as the racial and economic shifting of the early sixties unfolded.
Camden had become a rough and deteriorating place but had not yet become known as the Murder Capital of the USA. There were two synagogues still in Camden. Most of the congregation of each had already moved eastward into the suburbs as part of the general white flight, but the synagogues hung on in the once Jewish neighborhoods that were by then mostly Black. The Conservative one that my family belonged to was near the old center of town and an Orthodox one was further east, on the other side of the town. There was a Jewish bakery and a Jewish deli on Marlton Pike which was part of a business zone just inside the city and not far from the place where I actually grew up. Both synagogues not much later followed their congregations, settling comfortably into Cherry Hill where shopping malls and expansive lawns defined the terrain. So did pretty much all of Camden's businesses and the city more and more took on the look and feel of a war zone.
In the early sixties, my father worked in the city and I attended a Jewish day school adjacent to the old synagogue with the big stained glass windows and wonderful acoustics. We carpooled to school back then, over a cobblestoned street, past Woodrow Wilson High School and a huge park with ancient oak trees. Woodrow Wilson was my father's alma mater. The school was all Black by this time. We would go to the football games on occasion to root for the home team, and wave the black and orange in solidarity with the team that my father had once played on. My sister by then was attending Pennsauken High, a loyal cheerleader for the red and blue, the Pennsauken Indians. It was all the same to me, still being a small fry.
When Martin Luther King was assassinated the classes at the synagogue school were cancelled, fears of Black rioting evident in the eyes of the adults in charge. This dynamic was certainly not lost on even our young and impressionable minds. The old synagogue building not long later was transferred into the hands of a Baptist congregation, the ethnic and religious transformation of that neighborhood completed.
The neighborhood where I grew up was made up of blocks of identically constructed duplexes. Each had a small closely cropped and fairly well manicured lawn, front and back, with two storeyed, three bedroom residents and a shared wall with families living separate lives on each side of that wall. The stairway was along the dividing wall and I am sure the neighboring family could hear me running up and down the stairs. My oldest sister's husband would call me T.H. which was short for Thundering Herd. We could hear the tea kettle whistle through our kitchen wall so surely they could hear my clumping.
Most of the houses had fenced back yards, four nearly identical lawns meeting at a corner. Families would personalise their residences with limited plantings as well as changes to the facades and minor construction and such but they were still cookie cutter units with every one of them pretty much the same inside and out. There was somewhat of a feeling of security in all that sameness. As a kid I would cut through the backyards and over the low chain linked fences rather than take the long trek around the block. One property even had a gate to make that crossing smoother. I had heard stories of men coming home late after a seriously heavy drinking session and ending up in the wrong house, asleep in the wrong bed. I suppose that is a possibility.
My family added a side entrance to the basement, or rec room as it may have been called to give it more of a suburban feel, and had a screened porch built on the side as well where we had family gatherings and Fourth of July picnics and such. My mother used the basement as her workspace, a seamstress she was, a trade that was built into her DNA perhaps as her father was a tailor amongst other things. Clients would come from Cherry Hill and other truer suburban areas to my mother and she would make or alter their clothes.
We had a large TV down there in our mixed use basement. The TV was on most all the time. My mother liked the background noise while she worked. I remember her sitting at the sewing machine almost all the time, often falling asleep with herself propped up at her work station.
I remember getting our first color TV set, a monster of a thing with a colossal tube in the back of it, nestled in a cabinet. My mother liked to watch her soaps and baseball games. I liked cartoons and Captain Kangaroo and Sally Starr, host of Popeye Theater which was a local children's TV show out of Philly. Sally Starr wore cowgirl outfits with boots and hats and rhinestones and all that. She introduced the cartoons. Her opening line was, "Hope you feel as good as you look, 'cause you sure look good to your gal Sal." She closed with "May the Good Lord be blessing you and your family. Bye for now!" If I needed to change clothes I would stand behind the TV because I didn't want Sally Starr to see my little pecker or bare ass. She would make guest appearances back then and autograph photos. I remember standing excitedly in a long line at the A&P Supermarket to get the chance of seeing her in the flesh and get my very own signed picture. Later, when her show went off the air the rumor I heard was that it was because she had been in the porn industry before she began a second career in children's television, or some said a burlesque dancer in her prime. She was a blonde and a large breasted beauty. This idea sat in the back of my mind, percolating on a slow burner. I always assumed it to be true but evidently that was just the wagging tongues of those that wouldn't let this cowgirl ride off peacefully into the sunset. She passed away in 2013 a couple of days after her 90th birthday. All told, I am glad the rumors of her wilder side turned out to be untrue.
The rich suburban ladies that came to see my mother perceived me as if I was a puppy or invisible, mostly. There was a bathroom in the back and some would go back there to change but others would change right where my mother would fit their dresses, standing about in panties and a bra, paying no attention to me whatsoever, or so it seemed while I watched TV and I paid no attention mostly although I recall feeling somewhat embarrassed at times as they would talk about this and that, shedding clothing and trying outfits on. There was a great big rack of clothes hanging in that basement, some finished and some waiting to be altered and I would run in and out between the dresses as a small child. My mom would pay me to take the pins out of skirts and dresses when she was finished sewing them. I got two cents for each skirt and a nickel for every dress. As I got older the women in their underthings made me more uncomfortable. Some of those suburban ladies must have enjoyed making me squirm as they continued to push the limits of common public standards as I grew from that age where one is a generic child and then transforms into awareness of being a male child.
Time and history are quite linear, perhaps. Events lead to events. Actions lead to reactions. But...There are key cultural, political, fundamental, historical, earth shattering moments that we may mark on a graph looking backwards but we miss or misunderstand at the time or they happen somewhere else or to someone else or our attention is somewhere else or we are just too young to understand.
Kennedy was killed and there was nothing on the television but a funeral procession, displacing the cartoons and soap operas and all for a while. That is how I remember the pivotal moment of American change when we lost that youthful and good looking fellow that so many Americans truly loved in a deep and personal way, his photo finding a place in many homes as would a religious icon. Years later, when I was too young to vote but old enough to make a small mark on electoral politics, I went door to door canvassing for the George McGovern Presidential campaign. In working class Catholic homes I would see the statues of saints and photos of the Pope and J.F.K. side by side.
The Beatles? I remember watching them on the Ed Sullivan TV show in Atlantic City at my grandparents’ place. I also remember wanting a Beatles haircut and my mom telling the barber to give me one, but cut it short she told him in a whisper. Afterwards I stood outside with tears rolling down my youthful cheeks, mourning the bangs that were not there and never would be.
The assassination of Martin Luther King I remember mostly because of cancelled school. Woodstock? I remember talking about it in the back seat of a car, a friend’s mom at the wheel. I thought it was cool, from what I had seen and heard of it through the lens of mass media. The mom at the wheel most definitely did not think it was a positive social phenomena. The police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Vietnam War and most of the anti war movement was also all second hand to me.
I abstractly identified with the Youth Movement at a young age but the great waves were happening to older people outside my circles and the waves were rolling and crashing on other shores. I do remember a very limited “underground” student paper we called The Printed Word - we got out one mimeographed edition if I remember correctly, maybe two. I remember a couple of us refusing to salute the flag and that may have gone on for two days. I remember shouting out a school bus window at a crossing guard something about police brutality in a most misplaced attempt to confront authority around the time of the Chicago riots.
I discovered more seriously underground newspapers at the Cherry Hill Library the year I was studying for my Bar Mitzvah. A few years later most of those papers had gone belly up. The sixties were over and I was in middle school.
I entered the public school system in ninth grade, which was at that time in a junior high school. It was a most awkward adjustment, or more accurately a maladjustment. There were six kids in my eighth grade graduating class where I was a big fish in a very small pond. I entered ninth grade to find myself to be one in a class of six hundred and felt seriously out of place, out of time and out of my element.
I spent a year in total panic. I withdrew deeply into myself. Every day, every moment was an existential threat on a personal, psychic level. In Southeast Asia the Vietnamese fought for their lives on a very physical plane. On the Homefront, the cultural fissures and political realities worked their way through the early 1970’s while I was stuck in the ninth grade of an overcrowded suburban Junior High School, done with what had come before and clueless about what is yet to be. I was certain, however that there must be more to it all. I searched for clues by dialing the FM radio to the far left and tuning into the discordant messaging from the underground via Philadelphia university student radio stations. Late at night secret messages were being sent out to kids like me throughout the listening range, seeding our innate anarchistic tendencies with rock and roll and the promise of sex and drugs and a life beyond what we could see.
