Chapter 1
Sean, Comments on 1952
Gramps said that the city smelled and felt different in 1952. Sausage and peppers, pineapple, and papaya, cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes blended with wet newspapers and garbage, creating a unique odor that was New York. The end of the war brought about the era of white flight. In the fifties, families fled Manhattan to the Jersey Shore, unlike their pre-war counterparts who’d headed into Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island. The trip to Manhattan from the Jersey was a sixty-minute commute, but the consensus was it was better “for the children.” Gramps lived in Chelsea on Sixteenth between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. It was a four-story double-sided walkup. He and Grandma had a front-facing apartment on the second floor and Great Grandma Molly lived with Dad’s sister Kate on the next floor up.
Gramps was one of those left behind, who didn’t make it out to suburbia in the first, pre-war exodus. Most of the families that stayed were single paycheck families with fathers who were Union Men, AFL-CIO, teamsters, dockworkers, truckers, along with some firemen, policeman, sanitation, and other city workers. They lived alongside the garment workers, department store clerks, and occasional artists, writers, and musicians in Chelsea, with the others who couldn’t afford the pricier Greenwich Village and didn’t want to live in the “so-called” East Village, which Gramps said, was a made-up name for one of the nastier parts of the Lower East Side.
The lives of Chelsea wives revolved around the neighborhood. Life was the kids, the church, Tommy the butcher, the A&P and the laundromat. Occasionally, they headed down to the Chinese on Seventh Ave between Fifteenth and Sixteenth to treat themselves to some chow mien and won ton soup. Most stayed home with the kids and dreamed of a house at the Jersey Shore or somewhere on Staten Island.
Life for the mostly Irish/German male population of Chelsea in ‘52 revolved around their jobs, their families and, depending on the particular male, his church or his bar. For Gramps, it was Burns Tavern. The local tavern was a man’s escape from the female population of Chelsea. No respectable woman would enter one; therefore, a man could relax, enjoy a cigarette or cigar, and talk sports without someone nagging him to clean the windows or the carpet.
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Colin, December 1952
He worked the four-to-twelve both that night and the next, and the following day was Christmas Eve…That meant Christmas would be on Sunday, and he still hadn’t gotten Babs her Mucky Ducky. He and Edna had argued again. Momma came down to take Babs and Kate came with her. Kate, of course, took Edna’s side.
Momma wouldn’t interfere; However, he’d be damned if he could understand why it would be such a sin for Kate to take one day off to go to his company’s Christmas party with Babs. They would be giving out gifts to the kids and door prizes to the adults and he and Edna hadn’t danced together since the war was over.
Momma said she’d watch the “little lambkin;” but Kate had a fit. She told him in no uncertain terms that she lived in that apartment with Momma and had to put up with the brat five days a week and wasn’t going to do it for six. Edna didn’t care if Babs missed the party, and she absolutely refused to let Colin take her alone.
He had his usual reaction. He stomped out of the house like a stupid child and headed out for Burns. Colin wasn’t a mean or a sloppy drunk, just a gregarious one. He was a natural born storyteller, a raconteur. This night, however, he had nothing to say. He sat on the last stool against the bar and asked for a Ballantine on tap with a Canadian Whiskey Chaser. Putting a twenty on the bar, Colin instructed Dick, the bartender, to keep them coming.
He sat on the stool at the end of the bar and got lost in the dark forest of his memories. He’d been only seventeen when he figured out Edna was interested in him. He was encouraged by his sister Kate to ask Edna out. Colin was stunned when she accepted his invitation. He never could figure out why Edna wanted to date, much less to marry him. Kate had done everything she could to keep her family away from Edna and all of a sudden she started to push them together eight weeks before he was going to ship out to boot camp. He had just turned eighteen. Colin was flattered that Edna, a woman of twenty-eight would be interested in a soon-to-be private. However, Colin worked at grown men’s jobs since his fourteenth birthday and always pulled his own weight. He was proud of the fact that she wanted him. After all, she was educated, a registered nurse, and he didn’t finish grammar school. They married the day before he shipped out and had a one-night honeymoon.