Tag Archives: 1960’s memoirs

THE BASEMENT

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The Basement in my childhood home held a certain fascination for me. Whenever my parents weren’t home, I would quietly make my way down the cellar’s stairs and snoop to my heart content.

Why? You may ask because that’s where my father spent most of his free time when he was home. He wasn’t home all that much. Well, that’s not entirely true. That is where he spent most of his waking hours. During my childhood, my father worked as the Head Dispatcher for PTC, the Pennsylvania Transportation Company (the bus company) in Philadelphia. It was later called SEPTA. He worked there for over forty years, either on the second or third shift, which meant he often slept during the day and worked at night.

Carberry Home Maple Shade, NJ 1950

His daytime sleeping schedule meant that everyone who lived in our house had to be quiet while my father was sleeping. No one wanted to risk waking my father up. Believe me. My father’s nickname was the Grouch and sometimes, the Old Bear. You know how you are never supposed to wake a bear in hibernation. It was the same with my father.

I was so curious about the basement that I wanted to know what my father did down there for all those hours. My father was a brilliant man. He had many hobbies. He was a voracious reader, interested in many subjects, including religion, although he was an atheist. He was fascinated by all things related to the Asian Culture, although he was prejudice against Asian people and called them all Chinamen regardless of their country of origin. My father was prejudiced against anyone that wasn’t white or Irish, for that matter.

He was an accomplished woodworker and builder. He had every type of woodworking tool that was available in the 1960s in his basement. My father took me for a ride one time and showed me a house that his friend Dar and he built. It was a Cape Cod Cottage which was similar to our house. He used to repair and replace electric wiring in our house. However, later after he passed, I learned that he always used lamp wire which wasn’t up to code. He painted our house inside and out. I have to admit that his choice of colors and his decorating taste were somewhat Avant Guard at the time. He was a gardener, and we had a beautiful rose garden in our backyard. I believe his love of gardening led me to become a gardener when I grew up.

And then there was my father’s private life. My father was a gambler. He had a group of friends that he played cards with every week, although I never met them. He was a regular at the Cherry Hill Race Track. He had a different group of friends there. I never met them. My older brother told me that my father had taken him to the track on several occasions and introduced him to his friends.

He had a bookie in Philadelphia that he placed his bets with on the phone, and occasionally he would take my mother and me with him to make bets we waited in the car. It was a treat for us since we rarely took a ride in the car. The only place my mother went was to Mass every day at the Catholic church, which was two doors down from our house, and she walked there.

My father also had a part-time job working at Johnny Marrow’s Auto Supply Store, located on Main Street in Maple Shade, where I grew up. So, as you can see, my father had a full life. Most of it spent outside our home. Much of it unknown to me until I was a teenager or older.

As a result, I was inquisitive about my father and all his activities. I would snoop in his basement to see what he was up to all the time when he wasn’t home. I knew that my father was a perfectionist. And he knew exactly where everything was in all his tool drawers, and cabinets, and on the shelves. And most importantly, on his desk. I, too, was somewhat of a perfectionist and was able to open all his drawers and look inside, and put everything back the way I found it. I inherited my father’s great memory.

The day I decided to look in his desk, I knew my parents would be out for at least an hour. The top of his desk was pristine. He only had his favorite pens and pencils all arranged in a line. Then there was a file drawer with all his papers. They didn’t really hold any interest for me. In the middle drawer, I found several magazines. I was about eleven years old at the time. And had never seen anything like them. They were Playboy Magazines. I was shocked by the pictures of the mostly naked woman. I had never seen any woman in my neighborhood that looked anything like these women.

But the thing that drew my curiosity and held it was a cartoon called The Naughty Granny. I was shocked by the depiction of an older woman barely clad whose intentions were clearly not anything I could imagine at the time. But somehow, I found it to be so shocking and funny and disturbing at the same time. I wanted to talk to someone about my discovery. But really, who could I ask? Certainly not my mother. I was sure she would not understand it. At least that’s what my eleven-year-old self thought. I couldn’t ask my father, obviously, since I was sure he would cut my head off for sneaking around his basement into his sacrosanct desk.

After I discovered the Playboy magazine, I looked at my parents in a whole new way. I no longer looked at them as just my parents. I looked at them as people separate from me who were individuals. People I didn’t really know as well as I thought. People with friends of their own and interest of their own. People who did more than go to work and come back. People with flaws.

It seems strange now as I reflect on this experience that the discovery of this magazine changed how I looked at my parents. They weren’t just my parents; they were people. My father wasn’t just the grouch who seemed to be mad at the world all the time. He was a man with friends and a job who went places and did things I didn’t know anything about.

And my mother was more than the person who loved me, and washed my clothes and cooked my meals, and went to Mass every day of her life. And she probably had friends too, even though I never met them.

And that is when I started talking to my parents and asking them questions about what they were doing and where they were going? I ask my mother one day,” Mom, what do you do for fun?”

My mother just stared at me. I realized that she didn’t really do anything just for fun. That her life was not as complicated as my father’s appeared to be. Her life was mainly taking care of the family and the house and going to church. But I knew at some level at one time during her life; she too had friends and siblings. And I hoped that somewhere during her life, she had the time to have some fun. My mother was nineteen when my parents were married, and she proceeded to have ten children in twenty years, six of who survived. I knew my mother had lost her parents. So, I knew she had loss and sadness in her life. I hope she had happiness as well. I rarely saw her laugh; she didn’t joke around. She rarely mentioned her childhood or her parents.

I think it was the first time I thought of my parents as people as individuals, not just my mom and dad. It made me start thinking about my life when I grew up and what I wanted to do with it. And I knew I wanted it to be more than getting married and taking care of kids, and cleaning a house. Although as I grew up, I knew I wanted to have children someday. But I wanted more than that.

I was a quiet and thoughtful child. I kept my thoughts to myself for the most part. Most people interpreted that as me being shy. But I wasn’t shy, just quiet, but always listening and trying to understand people and the world around me.

I never talk to my friends about their parents because I didn’t really know how to ask them. I thought they would think I was weird or something. But here I sit many decades later, trying to discover and understand the person I am now in this moment. And I know evolved over the many years trying to understand myself and the world I live in, and I fit into it. I am a part of the world, but I am also an observer.

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THE OLD BEAR

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Did you ever meet someone that seems to wake up on the wrong side of the bed every day? Well, I did. And that man was my father. My father was a grouch. At least that’s what I believed when I was a child. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized that my father was not so much a grouch as a perfectionist and with a dash of pessimism.

My father with his dog Andy

I look over at my dad on the other side of the dinner table. He doesn’t always eat dinner with our family. It depends on what shift he’s working on at the Philadelphia Transportation Company. He’s the head dispatcher for the city bus company. If he’s working the second shift, he works four to twelve pm; if he works the third shift, he works 12 Pm to 8 AM.

When my dad works the third shift, we have to be very quiet in the house. Because he is sleeping during the day. Luckily for us, he is deaf in one ear and has a tendency to sleep on his good ear. But woe is to you if you make too much noise and wake him up.

If he’s working the second shift, I usually get home from school right before he leaves for work. As I walk down our sidewalk, I look into the kitchen window and see my dad sitting at the kitchen table. As I rush through the door, I see my mother putting my father’s dinner plate on the table. He is sitting there with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. With his elbows on the table. The king of the kitchen. I see my mom is giving him his favorite dinner six hotdogs sliced up into little pieces and ketchup. My dad loves ketchup. Sometimes he water’s it down and drinks it. He likes to use the left-over pickle juice from the pickle jar and add all kinds of weird foods to it, like hard-boiled eggs and beets and relish and any other really spicy things. “Oh no, dad you’re eating that weird pickle juice stuff with the beets.”

“Ah, you don’t know what you’re missing, Susabelle.”

“Yuck.” One day I looked in the refrigerator and I saw a glass jar in there. I kept staring at it. Finally, I asked my mom, “What’s that in the jar in the back of the refrigerator?”

“Oh, that’s just your father’s cow tongue. He slices it and makes sandwiches.”

“Make’s sandwiches out of cow tongue?”  I thought I would puke. How disgusting can you be? Sometimes it’s better not to ask questions in my house.

One night last week, I was sitting at the table and watching him eat. He kept telling me to stop picking at my dinner. It wasn’t one of my favorite dinners, so I didn’t want to eat it. Sometimes, my mother would say, Susan, don’t waste your food. Think about the poor starving children in Africa.”

I really couldn’t understand why not eating my dinner would hurt the poor starving children in Africa. Where ever that was. So, I kept pushing the food around on my plate to make it look like I was eating. Then my father said,” Stop playing with your food, Susan.” I didn’t start eating, but I did start rocking my chair back on its back legs. My father got louder, “stop rocking your chair back and forth, Susan.” But, I didn’t, and all of the sudden my father reached across the table at me. I guess to smack me. Although he never hit me before. I guess I got on his last nerve. I figured he was going to smack me and I rocked back further on the chair legs. And over the chair went, taking the tablecloth with me and half the stuff on the table. As you can imagine he was really angry at me by then. And he roared at me, I can’t remember just what he said. But he did put the fear of god into me. And I started bawling like there was no tomorrow. “Get up, Susan, sit up. Are you happy now?”

I can’t really say I was happy, but I was relieved that he didn’t smack me. Although I probably deserved it.

My father kept his collection of pens on the counter behind his seat. And anyone who touched his pens was at risk of their lives. So, I always felt compelled to go over and move them around when he wasn’t looking. If he noticed he didn’t say anything. All the important things happened in our kitchen while we were sitting at the table. This included all of the conversations that we had as a family. Although, I tried to keep my mouth shut since I usually put my foot in it.

My father would sit in his seat, and behind him, he had a metal table fan that ran all year round. My father was a large man and he always felt hot and uncomfortable. He was the only one to have an air conditioner in his room and it ran all year round. In the dead of winter, he would go outside with just a wool scarf and a fake fur hat on his balding head.

My father is a creative man. He likes to make things out of stuff he finds or buys really cheap. He makes collages. He collects pictures out of magazines that he buys at the Lions Club. One of his favorite magazines is National Geographic. One of the collages is very large and hangs over our glass fireplace. Perhaps four by six feet wide. Within the collage are pictures of naked women. This collage became a silent battleground between my father and mother. My mother is a quiet person and a religious who doesn’t believe that pictures of naked women belonged on the living room wall for all the world to see.

My parents never talk about these pictures. Every time my father goes out to the store, or the track or to work my mother puts Holy Cards over the naked women in the collage. And when my father comes home, he uncovers the ladies. This went on for a long time until my father took up making String Art. The one hanging in our living room now is a huge piece over the fireplace. He made a spiderweb out of nails and string, and he found a giant plastic, hairy spider. When my friends came over, they all stare at it with their mouths hanging open. They look at me for an answer or explanation, I just shrug my shoulders. It doesn’t seem odd to me, because I love making things too, my father and I had that in common.

Yesterday my father said, “Susabelle, do you want to take a ride with me?’ I didn’t have to think twice. My father rarely took me anywhere.”

“Yes, I would. Where are we going?”

“Oh, not far.”

“We got in the car, and my father drove maybe five or ten minutes away. We were still in our town of Maple Shade, NJ. He drove down a street and pulled over to the curb and parked in front of a house. It looks similar to our Cape Cod house. “Do you see that Susie?”

“What that house?”

“Yes, that house, my friend Dar and I built that house?”

“It’s really great.” I looked at my dad and thought, my dad, can build houses. Wow. And then we went home, I never mentioned the ride I took with my dad to anybody. Because it made me feel like I was special because my dad took me to see it.

My father had our cellar filled with woodworking tools. He remodeled our kitchen and built a fence that was in our front yard for years.

Sometimes my father is in a bad mood, and he doesn’t want to talk to anybody. He’ll sit in his chair in the living room and watch one of his shows. Andy, our dog, will sit next to his chair, and my dad will pet his head all night. Until it is time to go to work or go to bed. Depending on the shift, he is working.  When he is in a bad mood. I stay far away from him. He can say cutting and hurtful things to me and my siblings when he is in a bad mood.

For instance, Christmas time is not always a good time for my father. He will put the Christmas lights on the rose arbor outside the front door. And put the big plastic Santa on the front step. And hang all the grandchildren’s stockings from the fireplace mantle. But then there are those times that Christmas seems to make him sad. He doesn’t want to talk too much. Everyone in my family goes out of their way to buy something that he will like. Sometimes He often refuses to open Christmas presents. Sometimes he will laugh and smile, sometimes silent.

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