Frankford Gazette » History

Growing Up in Frankford Part 10

Gil — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:00:01 +0000

Continuation of Lyle (Corky) Larkin remembers:

Toasters

They were made of metal and were shaped like a pyramid with slots running up all four sides. You placed them on top of the gas stove and placed the slices of bread upright against the sides. As the heat reached up inside the toaster, it would blacken or if you were lucky, brown the side of the bread. You would then have to turn the slice over to get it done on both sides. Many a burnt finger was caused by this process.

Hangouts

We as teens, hung out at “Big Boys” drive-in on the Boulevard near Cottman Ave. They had the cutest waitresses with short skirts and sweaters as uniforms, complete with “Bobby Socks”. Pull your car into one of the many parking spaces and have a girl come out and take your order. In just a little while, she would return with a tray full of food and hook the tray on your car door. The milkshakes were the best! Even if you didn’t have any money for food, it was fun and the accepted thing to drive very slowly through the parking lot (cruise) to see who was there that evening. It was also a great place to be seen with your date.

The Front Porch

The front porch was probably the most important part of keeping a neighborhood together; it was also a way to escape the heat. During the summer months, it was a relief just to be able to get out of these hot houses. Each afternoon, people would wander out of their houses to enjoy the cool air. This was before air conditioning. Almost every house had it’s own front porch, complete with a decorative railing to protect you from going off the edge. Some were furnished with swings suspended from the ceiling with chains, or gliders others had wicker furniture, complete with coffee tables and upholstered sofa and chairs. Toward late afternoon, many of the folks would be sitting on their porches having iced tea and chatting with their neighbors. However, they were never too busy to stop and greet the people who were coming home from work as they walked down the street. There were no strangers on my block. Moms and dads would use this vantage point to look out for each others children who might be playing outside. If a skirmish might rise up, it was the unspoken duty of any grown-up within shouting distance to keep things under control. The magic part of all this is that the kids had enough respect instilled in them to “Listen To Their Elders! When you walked home, many times you would say hello to as many as twenty neighbors and even catch up on the latest news. Some of the folks used to sit on their porches from early morning till dusk, reading the paper, catching up on the sewing or even doing some of the preparation for that night’s dinner. Many times my grandmother and I would sit there and snap beans or peel potatoes. As time went by, some of these porches were glass enclosed and they were called Sun Porches. This process made them useable during part of the colder months as well as the summer. It was not unusual to come out of your house during a rainstorm and find one of your neighbors taking refuge on your porch. (“Just till the rain lets up a bit.”) It was also a great place for the kids to stay out of the weather and it was large enough to accommodate the kids and their toys. A lit porch light was always a sign of “Welcome”, it was also an indication that you were in trouble for being late if you were a kid and just getting home! I‟ll wager that many lasting romances began on these very porches Perhaps your parents began their courtship on one of them.

Imagining Frankford in Our Own Words

Gil — Sun, 13 May 2012 17:09:24 +0000

Dear Frankford,

We have been so honored to spend the past 6-9 months with you, hearing
your stories and learning about the neighborhood- its past and the
hopes you have for it.

You can now go online to catch a glimpse of what you have shared with
us: http://www.youtube.com/user/imaginingfrankford

Thank you for being so welcoming and generous! We hope that you will
share these videos with your fellow community members. Because there
were so many, it is going to take us a moment to edit all of them. As
they are completed they will be added to the website.

In the meantime, Cesar is working hard to design the 5 corridor
murals. Please check your in-boxes in June for news about this process
and how you can participate in the final mural design meetings.

Thanks for your support,

Netanel and Cesar
http://muralarts.org/explore/projects/imagining-frankford

Netanel Portier
Project Manager
City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program
The Lincoln Financial Mural Arts Center
at the Thomas Eakins House
1727-29 Mount Vernon Street
Philadelphia, PA 19130
215-685-0725 (office)
856-906-0078 (cell)
215-685-0757 (fax)

Make your donation to the Mural Arts Program today! Visit muralarts.org/support

Three (Not Two) Frankford Institutions Named to the Northeast Hall of Fame

Gil — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:05:37 +0000

Sister Francesca Onley, CSFN, President of Holy Family University, and Dennis M. O’Brien, Philadelphia City Councilman At-Large, announced the 2012 inductees into the Northeast Philadelphia Hall of Fame at a press conference April 26, 2012 at Holy Family University.

Unity Monthly Meeting at Unity and Waln Streets

The 2012 inductees – two historical figures, two living individuals, and one group of institutions – include Inventor and Solar Power Pioneer Frank Shuman (1862-1918), Civil Rights Leader and Anti-apartheid Activist Reverend Leon Sullivan (1922-2001), Business and Community Leader Ed Kelly, Astronaut Chris Ferguson, and seven Northeast Philadelphia houses of worship at least 200 years old, to be inducted as a group: Unity Monthly Meeting Frankford, founded 1682, and Byberry Monthly Meeting, founded 1683, both among the earliest Quaker meetings in Pennsylvania; Pennepack Baptist Church, Bustleton, founded in 1688, Pennsylvania’s oldest Baptist Church; Trinity Church Oxford, Lawndale, in existence since at least 1698 and one of the oldest Episcopal churches in Pennsylvania; Presbyterian Church of Frankford, founded 1770; All Saints Episcopal Church, Torresdale, founded 1772; and Campbell AME Church, Frankford, founded 1807, the nation’s second oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Campbell AME Church

The inductees were chosen by the Hall of Fame Selection Committee, an eight-member panel of experts in various aspects of Northeast Philadelphia life. The committee is chaired by Sister Francesca Onley. The public participated in the selection process by suggesting candidates for the committee’s consideration.

The inductees will be honored at a ceremony to be held Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 1:00 PM in the Education & Technology Center building at Holy Family University, 9801 Grant Avenue, Philadelphia, PA, 19114.

Inductees into the Northeast Philadelphia Hall of Fame must be Northeast Philadelphia residents past or present whose lives or careers have been marked by high achievement, or individuals or organizations that have had a lasting, significant, and positive impact on the Northeast Philadelphia community. Past inductees have included Pennsylvania’s first Surveyor General Thomas Holme, Signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush, Abolitionist Robert Purvis, Industrialist & Philanthropists Henry and Mary Disston, Humanitarian & Catholic Saint Katharine Drexel, Educator & Historian Harry Silcox, Jazz Drummer Butch Ballard, NBA Hall of Famer & Elected Official Tom Gola, Former Philadelphia City Councilwoman Joan Krajewski, Homeless Advocate Sister Mary Scullion, and social service agencies Aid For Friends and SPIN (Special People in the Northeast).

The goal of the Northeast Philadelphia Hall of Fame is to foster civic values and a sense of community in Northeast Philadelphia, along with a greater awareness and appreciation of the area’s rich history, by honoring the lives and accomplishments of its most distinguished citizens.

The Northeast Philadelphia Hall of Fame is sponsored by the Mayfair Community Development Corporation in partnership with Holy Family University, Historical Society of Frankford, The Northeast Times, and Philadelphia City Councilman At-Large Dennis M. O’Brien.

Ninety One Years Ago in Frankford 4/21/1921

Gil — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:07:16 +0000

It was only 91 years ago but back then the big news in Frankford was the El which was nearing completion. There was talk too of the Frankford War Memorial which was to rise on Wakeling between Large and Rutland Streets.

The Remmey’s of Northwood

Peter Dawson — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:20:01 +0000

MY FAMILY: “THE FAMILY THAT SPOILED THE NEIGHBORHOOD”?

Some group or other is always the minority, in any society. And I imagine that when our Catholic family of two parents and three children moved into a home on Wakeling Street in a substantially Protestant section of Northwood in 1956, and when the little ones kept popping out of our mother every few years, the Old Blood families of Frankford surrounding us groaned and thought. “There goes the neighborhood!”

But the neighbors quickly got used to us. In between running errands for elderly neighbors, we kids played step-ball with pimple balls on the back steps, and kick-the-can on Rutland Street on hot summer nights. With tips earned carrying groceries at the Harrison Quick Shoppe grocery store, at Harrison and Large Streets, we purchased comic books and bubble gum at Schwartzy’s Drug Store on the corner across Large Street. Schwartzy was my introduction to Judaism. He was one of the kindest, gentlest souls I ever met. If anyone goes to Heaven, it will be Schwartzy. And if he doesn’t make it, none of us will.

ONE OF NORTHWOOD’S MATRIARCHS

One of the matriarchs of Northwood, descended from one of the “Old Blood” dynasties of Frankford, the textile-manufacturing Garsed family, was Edyth Holden Remmey, who after her birth in 1905 had lived for years over on Allengrove Street, between Rutland Street and Castor Avenue with her husband and children. Her Garsed ancestors had owned a group of textile mills arranged in a crescent around the west end of Frankford, some of them visible in Smedley’s 1863 Atlas of Philadelphia.

Above, arrows point to the circled locations of the Garsed textile mills on Frankford’s west end in the 1860s.

a drawing of one of the Garsed mills.

It was John Garsed who built the Frankford “Y” building at Arrott and Leiper Streets. Even as the residence was being constructed in 1864, Mrs. Remmey later told me, the Garsed mansion was nicknamed “Garsed’s Folly,” as acquaintances of the Garsed’s saw construction being inhibited by materials shortages and an economy shocked by the changes generated by first the commencement of, and then the termination of, the American Civil War. Lo and behold, John Garsed was forced by economic difficulties to sell his home to his bother Richard Garsed, famed for his patented high-speed steam-powered looms, who in turn was eventually compelled by a post-war economic bust to economize by re-selling it to William Bault, one of the principals of Globe Dye Works.

“Garsed’s Folly,” the Frankford “Y” Building.

Several generations down the line, after Mrs. Remmey, as Edyth Holden, met and married Paul B. Remmey, soon to be a prominent commercial and landscape artist, descended from the dynasty of Remmey ceramic- and brick-makers, with a large factory on the banks of the Delaware in Bridesburg, she memorialized her Garsed family ancestry by naming her daughter Nina Garsed Remmey.

When Edyth Holden, born 1905, was courted by Paul Baker Remmey, born 1903, in the 1920s, Mr. Remmey was an art student, earning recognition and awards for the excellence of his work He was descended from the dynasty of makers of ceramic, brick, and heat resistant materials for handling steam heat, who first came to the American colonies from France in the early 1700s. As the Remmey family integrated their expertise into American industry, they built at least two factories in our area, one on the Delaware, on Hedley Street in Bridesburg; the other on the north side of what is now Aramingo Avenue, but what, back then, was Aramingo Canal, east of Cumberland Street. (Yes, Aramingo Avenue used to be a canal.)

The Remmey brick factory which used to be on the Aramingo Canal east of Cumberland Street

After their marriage, Mr. Remmey became a prominent water color artist, exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1930s, in the Philadelphia Art Alliance and in the Art Institute in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1940s. His works are exhibited in museums to this day. The American Watercolor Society issues an award in his name every year to budding watercolor artists. Their home on Allengrove Street in Frankford featured a third floor converted into a large, well-lit studio.

The Remmey’s gravesite can be seen today in Cedar Hill Cemetery. The gravestone reads, “Paul B. Remmey, 1903-1957, American Artist” and “His Wife, Edyth Holden Remmey, 1903-1987.”

After Mr. Remmey’s death in 1957, Mrs. Remmey had a special problem: Mr. Remmey had left his wife dozens of valuable paintings, stored in racks in the basement of their Allengrove Street home. Because the basement tended to be much more humid and damaging to paintings in the Summer, every Spring dozens of paintings had to be carefully moved from the basement to the storage racks in the third floor studio, and every Fall the paintings had to be carefully moved again back to the storage racks in the cool dry air in the basement. At first Mrs. Remmey did this herself, a few each day. But beginning around 1962, Mrs. Remmey couldn’t manage the job any more, and she called on “the Dawson boys” — me, at age 9, and my brother Chris at age 11 — to help her. We did this for years — up and down, up and down, up and down we took the paintings, third floor studio to basement, basement to third floor studio, year after year — and that is how we came to know Mrs. Remmey.

THE INTERESTING GRANDFATHER CLOCK

Mrs. Remmey had a grandfather clock in her living room which intrigued me very much as a child. She said that it dated from the Revolutionary War, and that the hole in the side was made by a Revolutionary War bullet.

MATCHING ME UP WITH MISS FRANKFORD

Mrs. Remmey had a special place in her heart for me, I think. To a certain extent, she came to view herself as my “second mother.” Once around 1973, as I filled-in some plaster cracks in the walls and ceilings of the stairway to the basement, she called me over and asked, “Peter, do you have a girl friend?” I answered, “To have a girl friend you really have to have a car, Mrs. Remmey. And I can’t afford a car now because I am paying for college.” “Well,” she answered,. “It is time for you to have a girl friend! And I have found just the girl for you!” “Who?” I asked, very surprised and somewhat cautious. Mrs. Remmey picked up a copy of the Frankford newspaper called The News Gleaner and pointed triumphantly to the pretty girl, just elected “Miss Frankford,” in the picture on the front page and said, “Her!”

She put down the newspaper, found the scrap paper with the girl’s family’s telephone number which had found in the telephone book before calling me over that morning to do the plaster work, and began dialing!

Alarmed I said, “Whoa, whoa, WHOA! Mrs. Remmey, you can’t just call a girl out of the blue and say, ‘Here, date this guy!’ It doesn’t work like that!”

MRS. REMMEY AND MY SEXY FIANCÉE

When, about 6 years later, I brought my gorgeous fiancée over to Mrs. Remmey and introduced them, I think that Mrs. Remmey thought that she was too sexy looking. When I stopped by Mrs. Remmey’s a few weeks later, she expressed disgust at the clothing my fiancée had been wearing! However, Mrs. Remmey recovered, and the following October was generous in her wedding present to us — she gave us some cash, and another gift.

THE REMMEY CHILDREN

Mrs. Remmey had had two children by her prominent artist husband — a son Paul, Jr., who was born in 1930 and passed away in 2009, and a daughter Nina, who I think was born a few years after her brother. I met Nina, long since moved-out and married, a few times, when she visited her mother. She struck me as having a wonderful, generous heart. Her brother Paul, Jr., on the other hand, seemed very troubled. In the 20 years I knew him, from around 1962 to around 1982, I never saw Paul, Jr. smile even once.

PAUL, JR.’S INTELLIGENCE WORK

Since I was prone to being a “bookish,” nerdy guy, I perused Paul, Jr’s bookshelves, and I asked Paul about the Russian language books in his bookcase. He explained that he had learned Russian and then, as a State Department employee during the Cold War, translated Russian documents for the American intelligence services in the Far East. He told me that he had met a Japanese girl while stationed in the East, but that she had died at a young age.

ANGRY UNCLE BUNNY

Though Paul Remmey, Jr. was “nerdily bookish” like myself, his surly manner put me off. Though we kids in the neighborhood nicknamed Paul, Jr. with the seemingly gentle title “Uncle Bunny,” there always seemed to be a high level of tension between Paul and his mother. I was never nosey, but I should have been. Mrs. Remmey seemed only persistently kind toward her son, but he responded only with persistent distancing behavior and anger. He may have felt justified, but my internal response to the anger I saw was the thought that Requirement #1 for getting into Heaven is, “Do not bring hatred with you. Forgive.”

There is a saying along the lines of, “In the little things we can see the big.” When Mrs. Remmey use to call us and ask “the Dawson boys” to cut her grass, Paul would be out there on the back lawn on his folding chair, not getting up, reading, while we cut the grass around him. I used to think, “What is the matter with him? Is his leg broken?” The same thing would happen when we were called over to move the paintings again. Paul, Jr. would be sitting in the living room, reading, while we walked past him, 20, 30, and 40 times, carrying paintings up or down.

A HAMMER AND SCREWDRIVER AS WEAPONS

One day, around 1975, when I was around 22 years of age, a very strange thing happened. Mrs. Remmey called and said, “Peter, would you please bring a hammer and a screwdriver over?” As I walked up her driveway toward the front door on Allengrove Street, I saw that her car was in the driveway rather than in the garage, and that one corner of the car was raised up on the car jack and a tire removed and laying on the ground. Assuming that Paul, Jr. would never stoop to manual labor, I thought, “Mrs. Remmey tried unsuccessfully to change a flat herself and needs help now?” When she greeted me at the door, I saw that Mrs. Remmey, 70 years old at this juncture, had a big black eye. “Mrs. Remmey,” I exclaimed, “What happened???!!!”

“Something bad happened at dinner last night, Peter. Paul just sat there, in front of his plate, saying nothing, when he suddenly got up and punched me in the eye.”

“Well,” I asked, holding up the hammer and screwdriver, “Did you want me to finish changing your tire?”

Mrs. Remmey answered, “Forget that right now, Peter. You can do that later. Right now I want you to help me with something special. Is that car I see you driving sometimes” — it was my brother’s Chris’ Buick LeSabre — “available for use right now?”

“Sure!” I said.

Mrs. Remmey took the hammer and screwdriver from me and held them up. “I want you to take these and go to Paul’s room and brandish them in front of Paul to force him downstairs into your car and then force him to go into Friend’s Hospital!”

Completely astonished, I said, “Mrs. Remmey, it doesn’t work like that! He either has to go voluntarily, or else a judge has to ‘commit’ him — force him by court order to go and stay there. The problem with going into a mental hospital voluntarily is that he can leave any time he wants. But an involuntary commitment takes time. To get Paul out today, you’d have to file criminal charges against him, for punching you, and they’ll set bail and he’ll end-up at the Detention Center on State Road. If you don’t want to do that, Mrs. Remmey, the best I can do is try to talk Paul into a voluntary commitment.”

She answered, “Well, Peter, I don’t want to file criminal charges against him. There’s a lot of trouble hidden in that. So, please try to persuade Paul to commit himself voluntarily.”

I went and got my brother Chris’ permission to use the LeSabre if I filled his gas tank, and I parked his car in front of Mrs. Remmey’s house, and went in and quietly went upstairs to Paul’s bedroom. He was sitting up on his bed, pretending to read. I said, “Paul, I saw your mother’s eye. Paul she’s 70 years old, and she’s a lady, and she’s your own mother. What you did is really, really bad. If a policeman saw a man your size punch your own aged mother in the face, he’d draw his gun and be sorely tempted to shoot and kill you. Most judges would send you to jail for a long time for punching a lady her age, Paul. What happened? Why did you do it?”

He just sat there, silent.

I continued, “Look, Paul, your mom could have you arrested, cuffed, and jailed today. Who knows? — that might still happen! I think that it would look good to the outside world, and it would be good for you, if you let me drive you over to Friend’s Hospital and you committed yourself there, voluntarily so that they could figure out why all of this happened.

“So, please, get in the shower, get dressed, pack a bag of clothes, and I’ll drive you over.”

Surprisingly, despite the age difference — Paul was 45, and I was 22 — Paul permitted himself to be impacted by my argument, and agreed. I drove him over to Friends Hospital and introduced Paul to staff, and after Paul was shown to his room I explained the circumstances to Friends Hospital Administrators and gave them Mrs. Remmey’s telephone number.

Arriving back at Mrs. Remmey’s house, I advised her to change her locks and call the 15^th District Police Station and tell them the circumstances and ask them to keep an eye on the house. I asked her why her son Paul had seemed so angry for so many years. “After his wife died many years ago, Peter, he never seemed to recover from that. He was always sad and prone to anger. I think that he is angry with God.”

I was told shortly thereafter that Paul walked out of Friend’s Hospital the following day, but that he did not return to his mother’s house. At least, not immediately…

PAUL, JR. BARGES INTO MY PARENTS’ HOME

Months later, Mrs. Remmey called me over to move her deceased husband’s artworks from her basement to the third floor studio again. She said, “Peter, when you are finished, I want you to be paid in a special way, for your work here today, and for your support over the years. From the unframed canvases, I want you to pick out your favorite three paintings.”

From among the unframed items I picked out two small paintings comprising magazine cover illustration drafts, and a small colorful landscape painting.

Two of the three paintings by famous artist Paul B. Remmey,

given to me by his wife Edyth Holden Remmey some 35 years ago

A few days later. as my family stood in the kitchen talking, the back door was flung open and Paul, Jr. barged in, pushing past my father. He said with a loud, angry voice, “I understand the woman paid you with three paintings! The woman had no right to do that! I demand to see the paintings!”

I felt ashamed that my activity had caused an angry man to push his way into my father’s house. I also sensed danger, in light of his prior willingness to punch his own aged mother. So, to calm Paul, Jr. down I shook his hand warmly and told him that I would retrieve the paintings. When I brought them down from upstairs, Paul pronounced the magazine cover paintings, shown above, to be worthless, but seized the colorful landscape painting and ran out.

That was the last time I saw Paul Remmey, Jr., except for one strange encounter.

LIVING IN A VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE?

In 1978, while I was still in law school, I began to work as a paralegal in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, in the Centre Square Building, behind the giant clothespin across the street from City Hall.

In 1979, when I was coming out of the Centre Square Building at around 5:15 p.m. one day to go home, I saw a yellow Volkswagen Beetle illegally parked on Market Street directly in front of the Centre Square Building. I thought, “Sheesh! What a place to park! And during rush hour! That person’s car will be towed in a few minutes!”

As I looked at the car, to my astonishment Paul Remmey, Jr., after having been curled-up on the back seat asleep or unconscious — I couldn’t tell which — sat up in the car, dirty and unshaven, and peered out the window at me, looking sleepy and confused, and, to put it bluntly, “down and out.”

As I put out my hand to open his car door and talk to him, an angry policeman came along and yelled to Paul, Jr., “Are you out of your mind, parking here! Get that car out here!” and Paul, looking under-nourished, climbed over the seats into the front, started the motor and drove away.

And that was it — the last I saw of poor, angry Paul Remmey, Jr. His mom died several years later, in 1987. My wife and I attended her funeral service. Paul died 22 years later, in 2009, I hope in a state of humility and forgiveness, and friendship with God. And I hope that his sister Nina and her children and grandchildren are thriving.

Frankford/Northwood Spring Resource Fair

Growing Up in Frankford Part 9

Gil — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:00:49 +0000

Continuation of Lyle (Corky) Larkin remembers:

Spick and Span

The people took great pride in our neighborhoods. You never saw trash on the streets. The women cleaned the steps in front of their row houses every Saturday, with buckets and scrub brushes. Fall was always a pretty time of the year. The streets were lined with trees of all shapes and sizes, ours had maple trees, which turned a bright gold with the first frost. Now came the fun part, when the leaves began to drop the neighbors would keep them raked into huge piles that gave us kids a perfect place to romp in. We would dive into these piles and sometime ride our bikes through them. After the piles would begin to get big enough to get out of hand, they would be burned right on the street. Somehow, it never seemed to hurt the asphalt. Everyone watched out for us kids, and if we were out too late as it got dark – the women would call to us “the lights are on, it’s time to go home now”. In the pre-air conditioning days of Philadelphia, everyone in our neighborhood would come outside after dinner and sit on the front steps. The adults would chat, and we kids would play. It was all very friendly.

Taprooms

The Brown Jug, Flanagan‟s, Northeast Bar & Grille, Duffy‟s Tavern Now they‟re called BARS. The neighborhoods used to call them “Taprooms”. These places were totally different back then. They were “Meeting Places” for the people in that neighborhood. Complete families would gather for a night out. The atmosphere was always a friendly one. Nickel beers, regular Hard boiled eggs or Pickled Eggs and pigs feet in gallon jars on the bar, baskets of peanuts, take-out beer in a pail, which were called “Buckets” that looked like a miniature milk can. These buckets would hold about two quarts and would cost fifty cents each. You were always expected to return them on your next visit. When the adults gathered at home , there would be several trips to the local bar with a bucket or pitcher to bring home the beer. Taprooms always had a separate ladies entrance, either at the side or rear of the building. No self respectful woman would walk through the front door of one of these establishments.

Wissinoming Park

We would fill the trunk with empty gallon jugs and get into the car and drive here on Sunday afternoon, just to get the spring water. We would actually stand in line, waiting our turn. Sometime, we would just stop for a drink of fresh spring water that flowed from a 2-inch metal pipe hanging out of the bank. The water led to a good size shallow pond that we used for ice-skating during the winter months. During the summer months, this was a great place for family outings, baseball games and picnics. To be continued…

Growing Up in Frankford Part 8

Gil — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:00:34 +0000

Continuation of Lyle (Corky) Larkin remembers:

Scooters

You couldn’t buy one at the store because all of them were hand made by us kids. The materials needed to build one of these beauties consisted of a three or four-foot piece of 2X4 lumber and a discarded orange crate. Add one, old steel wheeled street skate taken apart, which now gives you two sets of wheels. Nail a set of wheels to each end of the 2X4 and turn it over and nail the orange create to one end of it with the open part facing toward the other end. Next, make yourself a set of handlebars. Take two short pieces of lumber and nail them to the top of the create forming a “V” with the pointed end facing toward the closed end of the create, tack some plastic streamers at each end of the bars. Next step was to decorate the sides of the box with bottle- caps. You can spell out your name or make different designs. Take two empty soup cans and nail them to the front and you now have a set of headlights. We used these to get all over the neighborhood, whizzing down hills and leaning into the turns to keep from turning over. If your buddy didn‟t have a scooter, that was OK because he could sit inside the crate while you did the scooting. Each one of these scooters was unique as they portrayed the individual who constructed it. Some kids even made “Low-Riders” by using a longer 2X4 and it would sag in the middle almost touching the ground. We were more than happy to oblige when mom asked us to go to the store for her, for we now had “CARGO” for our scooter. It was not an unusual sight to see a band of kids each with one of their legs “pumping” the street with a “Keds” sneaker at the end of that leg burning up the street in a big rush to go nowhere. Some Saturdays you could find us at the top of the Wakeling St. hill getting ready for the big race of the day.

Street Games

This is kind of like the boy with a stick and a hoop; it just takes a little imagination to make a game out of anything. We would take the cap from a soda bottle and fill it with melted wax. Most times this was from mom’s candles when she wasn’t looking. We had games both with and without wax. We also spent a lot of time smoothing the bottom of the caps against the concrete to make them slide better. We then met on the street or sidewalk with a piece of chalk and drew our playing field. A large square was drawn, with numbered boxes at the corners and the middle of each side. In the middle of the square a skull and cross bones was drawn. The object of the game was to flick the bottle cap from one end of the square into each of the numbered boxes. The first person to do so was declared the winner. If a bottle cap happened to land on any part of the skull and cross bones, that person was out of the game. Some of the grown-ups used them as chips while playing cards, they had a value of one penny each.

Games played around the neighborhood in the streets and alleys were some strange derivatives of Baseball called Stickball, Hose-ball, Wallball, Half-ball, Step-ball and Wire-ball. Ya just gotta live in the city to experience these games. Bats, when required for a game, were old broomsticks. Believe me, hitting anything as small as a tennis ball with a broomstick is no easy task. In those days, one of the types of balls that could be purchased in stores was called a „pimple ball‟. This was probably an unofficial name but its the only one I recall. It was a white rubber ball with bumps of about 1/8″ diameter all around it. Hence, the name „pimple-ball‟. These were the balls eventually used for Half-ball; once they developed a hole in them and lost their air, they were cut in half at the middle to make two half-balls. We started recycling a long time before it became fashionable.

To celebrate the 4th of July holiday, all of the kids in the neighborhood used to decorate our wagons, scooters and bikes with red, white and blue crepe paper, and ride them around the block in a mock parade. Another thing we did to our bikes was to tie balloons in a position near the wheels so the spokes would rub against them and make a noise similar to a motorcycle. We would also tape small American Flags to our handlebars.

To be continued…

Rare Duffield Surveyors Compass Rediscovered at the Historical Society of Frankford

Gil — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:49:57 +0000

Tuesday night at the first 2012 meeting of the Historical Society of Frankford, Torben Jenk and Joe Menkevich were taking advantage of the behind the scenes tour of the building to look into the corners. In the process, a rare 18th century Duffield Compass caught their eye. This instrument is over 200 years old. It has been in the collection for a long time but it takes an expert eye to see the significance of an item of that kind. There may be a program in the fall to discuss the significance of that find.

In other news from the meeting, Jim Young, President of the Society laid out plans for further improvements to the building this year made possible by a grant. This will include finishing up exterior gutter replacements, interior painting and upgrades to the rest room on the lower level. Young says this year the budget is balanced.

There are additions to the board which were voted on and approved at the meeting. Several new volunteers have come into the group this year who will lend valuable expertise in several areas that heretofore have been lacking.

The next meeting of the Historical Society of Frankford will be on Tuesday April 10th with a presentation by Allen Hornblum on K & A’s SECOND STORY MEN. Allen is a great storyteller. You won’t want to miss seeing him.

Miracle of The Re-Appearing Loaf of Bread

Peter Dawson — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:00:42 +0000

This installment of my articles about life as we knew it in Frankford as I grew up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s contains some somewhat “racy” material. Names have been left out, “to protect the guilty,” and adult readers may want to refrain from encouraging the kids to read this one.

There were nine of us kids, in our Wakeling Street house across from Frankford Stadium. If we wanted spending money, we had to work.

THE HARRISON QUICK SHOP

So, beginning in 1965, when I was 12, I worked after school and on Saturdays at the Harrison Quick Shop, a Unity Frankford grocery store at 1100 Harrison Street on the southeast corner of Harrison and Large Street. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Matus, were a German-speaking couple from Czechoslovakia. They taught me to do everything at the store. By the age of 16, I was filling in the Unity Frankford wholesale order sheet, unloading the truck, “doing the count” to square the invoice with what was delivered, stocking shelves, filling customer orders, delivering groceries, cutting lunch meats, cutting steaks and chickens, and manning the cash register.

Mr. Matus’ English was about 80%, with a heavy German accent. He would sound like this: “Peee-TAIR, get ten dozen ahx from duh vall-kin bahx” — “Peter, get 10 dozen eggs from the walk-in box,” the big walk-in refrigerator. He knew that sometimes he was hard to understand, and he would have fun with that.

THE SPECIAL IRISH LADY

The people were generous with their tips. We delivery boys all shared the big tippers. There was one house the older guys never shared with me, though, until one day one of them said, “Do you think that Pete’s old enough for the Irish lady’s house.” “Yeah,” said the other, “I think he’ll survive.” I was about 14 at the time. I thought, “What are they talking about?”

The Irish lady’s house was a home in the middle of the block of Harrison Street opposite Frankford High School. I carefully lifted the large box of groceries off the bike, walked up the steps, knocked on the door, and an Irish lady in her thirties, completely au naturel from the waist up, answered the door. And, sheesh, was there ever a lot there for a young man to see and be concerned about!

Inside the house there were all of these little kids running around in their underwear or naked as jay birds. The woman’s state of dress left no doubts about how there came to be so many.

I carried the groceries into the kitchen, pretending that there was nothing about the lady to gape at, received the money for the groceries and my tip, and left. There was another residence like that. The girl, a pretty lady about 10 years older than me, was always fully dressed when I delivered groceries, but she knew when I would be passing her home at night, while walking the dog, and she would often stand in window “in the buff.” I was just too naïve to do anything about it, to tell the truth — a good thing, correct?

INJURIES

I was injured a few times at the store. Once the biggest frozen food fixtures in the store developed a problem which caused it to malfunction. I was ordered to transfer the frozen food to other freezers, defrost the broken one, and wipe it down. No one knew that the problem causing the freezer to break down was a short circuit in the basement compressor and heat exchanger which transferred 440 volts up a copper coolant line into the body of the freezer in the store. When I finally touched the electrified metal surface, there was a loud flash and bang at my left hand, and 440 volts ran up my arm and through my body, and fired me across the aisle, crashing me into a shelf of stacked cans. My hand was still smoking when Mr. Matus and other employees turned the corner at the end of the aisle to investigate the explosion sound, and saw me laying in a pile of canned vegetables.

Though those deli slicers really are designed to be as safe as they possibly can be, dealing with the customers while you are slicing cheese and lunch meat made the occasional accident with them an inevitable thing. When those slicers took off a fingertip, sometimes the cut was so clean you didn’t even realize it at first. On one very busy Saturday, as I was cutting lunch meat, one of the customers noticed, before I did, that the lunch meat wrapping was becoming covered in blood. I looked at the other guys cutting lunch meat. No cuts. Finally one of the others said, “Pete, your right index finger.” And it was gushing blood. I had cut off my fingertip, and I was so busy that I did not realize that I was squirting blood everywhere. The thing which worried me was that I could not find my fingertip. After we carefully bandaged-up my right index finger, a grim but sympathetic customer came in with her lunch meat and said, “Pete, you sold me your fingertip.”

Losing your fingertip in a slicer was the most terrifying, and terrifyingly painful, accident at the store. Electrocution by 440 volts was a “walk in the park” compared to the week of screaming pain which followed loss of a fingertip in the slicer. Every beat of the heart sent a shocking throb into the brain, which made sleep impossible.

Sometimes Mr. Matus became caught-up in “work fevers.” He would push himself, and us, the employees, with eleven hours of focused hard work. Once, just before the holidays, a giant order came into the rear store room from Unity Frankford. I could tell from the thoughtless, high-energy way Mr. Matus was working and pushing his employees to work that an accident was inevitable. So, I became angry, and I yelled, “Mr. Matus, slow down! Someone is going to get hurt!” Mr. Matus responded with an angry, “Peee-TAIR, keep vorkink hart!” Just then, a ten foot high stack of boxes collapsed and fell, knocking me to the floored and covering me with a pile of 25 pound boxes! Mr. Matus was shocked and ashamed. He quickly uncovered me. He told the other guys to continue working, and he and his wife quietly took me upstairs to their dining room and fixed me dinner and waited on me hand and foot. It was a strange experience.

A NEW BOSS

In 1969 or 1970, the Matus’ sold the store to a new couple, whom I shall not name. The husband believed that cleverness, and slick personal behavior, made money, not hard work. The wife, always at the cash register in the front, was hard-working, but very, very naïve. The husband, in the meat-cutting area in the rear of the store, always had his hands on the pretty girls and women coming into the store, “slobbering all over them.” He had amazing “radar” for the pretty ones who would also cooperate. His wife’s naiveté about this behavior just shocked me out of my shoes. I tried to get her off the register and back into the accounting area next to the meat case, so that she could keep an eye on him; I did this because tattle-taling would have ended my job. The wife refused, I think because she felt that I wanted to steal out of the cash register! One day, I walked back there as the boss was standing behind a striking, very ample, very willing brunette, about 19 years of age, and fondling her through her shirt. I thought, “How can he do that, with his wife 20 feet away in the front of the store???!!!” I pretended to be unconcerned. I think that to involve me as much as possible, he said, “Peter, just look at those eyes! What do they look like to you?” Struggling to stay uninvolved, I responded dispassionately, in a technically accurate fashion, “They look like deer’s eyes.” The girl appeared deeply struck by my accidentally-complimentary words, and ignored the new boss from then on and always waited for me to wait on her, which upset the boss.

I could tell that my days at that store were numbered. I asked to be the store circular deliverer, to get me out of the store a few days a week.

THE WAGER

The thing which caused me to be let go, finally, was a bet. One day, I was in the back, cleaning the large band saw used to cut hind-quarters of beef into smaller pieces. Though the inward camber — the tilt — of the blade-riding-surfaces on the drive wheels of the band saw is what kept the band saw blade in place, every band saw features a “blade guide” which doubles as a safety mechanism to grip the blade and hopefully keep it from decapitating or cutting off the arm of a saw user in the event of a malfunction.

The new boss came back and said, “Pete, reinstall the blade guide so that I can cut some meat.”

I responded, “It’s in the back, soaking in hot, soapy water right now. I just put on a brand new blade. It will work fine without it,”

“NO IT WON’T!” he yelled with impatience, mostly generated, I think, by his perception that I was a “Goody Two Shoes” who might tattle to his wife about his bad behavior with female customers someday, “IT WON’T EVEN TURN ON WITHOUT THE BLADE GUIDE IN PLACE.”

Surprised that he did not know this, I calmly responded, “Mr. Matus has run this for years without the blade guide being in place. It will work!”

Gustav Wear, the assistant butcher, and the two other employees attracted by the ruckus in the rear of the store, both sided with the new boss, saying, “The boss is correct, Pete. It won’t even turn on.”

The new boss went into the walk-in box and brought out a large piece of beef and said, “Okay, cut that! I’ll bet you $1,000 cash that it does not even turn on!”

Everyone fell quiet. I thought to myself, “If I take the bet, and win, he’ll never pay me, and laugh it off, and look for a reason to fire me. If I back down, I’ll just look like a fool, and last here a while longer while I search for another job.” And then I thought to myself, “Suppose, while he is here in the store by himself at night, he installed some kind of safety switch that I don’t know about?” THAT was the deciding factor, for me.

So, I backed down.

About one half hour later, after I had completely cleaned and reconstructed the band saw, but just before I brought the cleaned blade guide forward from the utility room and re-installed it, the new owner and Mr. Wear came back and threw a piece of beef on the saw and sawed it through. I held-out the blade guide in front of them. They both stared at me, the new owner with a deceptive smile. At the end of work that day he told me that he was giving me my two weeks’ notice.

A NEW JOB

Within one week I had a new job, at the Unity Frankford Store, on the corner of Sanger and Saul Streets. The owner was an easy-going man of Dutch descent. A remarkable array of strange customers made working there very interesting. There was “Mick the Orangeman,” who greeted the grocery delivery boys with anti-Catholic epithets spoken with an Irish brogue. We were all church-going Catholics, but we loved him anyway. Then there was “The Fanatic,” who always came to the store equipped with literature “demonstrating” that Jews, Communists and Freemasons were engaged in a conspiracy to do-in the world. It was from him that I first heard about the ridiculous anti-Semitic document, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which readers can look up on Wikipedia. And then there was the lady we called “The Smoker.” She was a small woman, about 75 years of age, who had lost her vocal cords to throat cancer, and also had a tracheostomy — a permanent hole in her throat held open by a plastic ring to assist her breathing. Astonishingly, she would entertain us at the store by coming in and placing a cigarette into the hole and lighting-up and smoking the cigarette in the hole — a deeply, deeply bizarre sight!

THE HOT ICE CREAM PROBLEM

As I approached the store for the first time, I saw a big sign in the window, “HOT ICE CREAM SALE!” I thought, “What?” And, low and behold, every single neighbor who shopped at the store bought Dolly Madison ice cream at greatly reduced prices that weekend. I knew from experience that this store’s retail price was lower than what Mr. Matus’ wholesale price had been at the other store, and I was puzzled, but initially I said nothing.

A few months later the boss asked me to stay late with the other employees and help unload a full truckload of Dolly Madison ice cream. I innocently asked, “Why doesn’t the Dolly Madison delivery guy come in the daylight hours, like all of the other jobbers?”

“Oh,” he answered mysteriously, “He can’t drop off a load like this when it is light out!”

Still too naïve to comprehend what was occurring, I helped to unload a full truckload of Dolly Madison ice cream into the store — much, much more than the freezers could hold. My boss then paid the Dolly Madison driver with cash instead of the usual check, and the driver left. The boss then carefully covered the freezers, overflowing with Dolly Madison half gallons, with blankets, and got out his “HOT ICE CREAM SALE” sign and taped it to the front of the store for the next day, and the truth finally sank in through my teenage naiveté — the ice cream was being stolen from the warehouse and off the loading docks at Dolly Madison Ice Cream Company, and the words “HOT ICE CREAM SALE” on the sign were alerting the entire neighborhood, “HEY, NEIGHBORS! I’VE GOT ANOTHER LOAD OF ULTRA-CHEAP ICE CREAM FOR YOU, STOLEN FROM THE LOADING DOCK!” The Dolly Madison delivery guy, the store owner, and the whole neighborhood were in on the theft!

Oh, I felt so guilty! I had just helped to unload thousands of dollars of stolen ice cream! Over the following weekend, watching the stolen ice cream go out the door in the bags of smiling customer after smiling customer made me sick! I thought to myself, “From a womanizer’s store to a thief’s store! Always a problem! Is it possible to get away from such difficulties?”

I felt deeply, deeply conflicted. The Dolly Madison delivery man was supporting several children. The owner of this new store was otherwise very kind and gentle. If I tried to stop the crime, both would probably go to jail. What could I do?

I was 17 at the time. I confess that I finally “snapped” from guilt and called Security at the Dolly Madison Ice Cream Company. The guy from Security sounded disinterested. When, after a few weeks, nothing happened, the boss pulled me aside and said, “Pete, don’t make a call like that again. Security in Dolly Madison is in on it. They watch it go off the loading dock at night. So is the policeman who patrols this area. How else could I put a sign like that in the window? They all get ‘a piece of the action,’ too!”

At that time in my life, I didn’t have the “moxie,” or even the maturity, to know how to compete with such a criminal structure. Also, I smelled danger. So, to be perfectly honest, I did nothing else to stop the shenanigans. At age 17, it was simply too much for me, in all ways.

THE MIRACLE OF THE RE-APPEARING LOAF OF BREAD

The store was otherwise wonderful. We worked hard, and we shared good tips from deliveries to customers. Shortly after the boss trained me to work at the new cash register, a kind of a miracle occurred.

The single most profitable customer of the store was an old lady who lived in a home we all nicknamed “The Hospital.” She had some kind of frightening allergy condition with the consequence that the air in her house was specially filtered, at enormous expense, and she walked around in her home wearing an oxygen mask, towing a tank of oxygen behind her in a wheeled cart, and eating extremely expensive, scientifically-formulated food, specially delivered to the store for re-delivery to the old lady at enormous profit.

The single most expensive food item, per unit of weight, was a loaf of bread that even back then cost $17. We called it “The Hospital’s bread.” The customer loved it, and insisted that the special bread be delivered with every order.

On the first day I began working alone on the new cash register the boss placed “The Hospital’s bread” on the counter in front of me and said, “Now, Pete, set this aside and don’t let any other customer buy it. You know who it’s for!”

I put it on the counter beside me to keep an eye on it, and I began doing check-out work.

After a while, the boss came up to see how I was doing with the new cash register, and as he stood there one of the ladies came in and said, “You gave me $20 too much in change,” right in front of the boss, who eyed me suspiciously.

I was very flustered, for the next little while — so flustered that I sold “The Hospital’s bread” to another customer, without thinking twice! And, for a mere 45 cents (because it resembled another bread)!

A little while later, I was in the back, working behind the meat counter. The owner said, “Pete, where’s ‘The Hospital’s’ bread? I don’t see it up here. It’s time to deliver it with the rest of the order!”

At this point in my life, I absolutely, positively had to have my job. I had begun to pay for college, then. So, my heart jumped into my throat at these words, as I remembered that I had blithely sold the special bread to another customer while I was flustered from the $20 business. I said a brief prayer in my mind, “Oh, God, help me out of this!” and just to buy a few more seconds I yelled a lie, in response, “It’s in that nook to the right of the cash register, boss!”

Then, as I waited to be fired, he yelled, “I got it, Pete! Thanks!”

I thought, “Wha-a-a-a-at???!!!” I ran to the front of the store — and there was the bread, in the nook to the right of the cash register!

Apparently the customer I had sold it to looked at the label when she got home, saw that it was an unusual scientific formulation, brought it back to the store, and placed the loaf in the nook and traded it for another loaf of the same price! It was pure coincidence that I had named the right location for it!

I surely would have lost my job, at that point, after the “hot ice cream” business and the giving away of the $20! So, how’s that for an answer to prayer???!!!

No related posts.

Frankford Civil War Memorial Rededication

Gil — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:32:14 +0000

There will be a rededication ceremony for 33 newly installed Federal military gravestones for the Union veterans buried in the “Circle of Honor” surrounding the monument at the Civil War Memorial in Cedar Hill Cemetery on May 12th. I met Tony Matijasick on a freezing cold day back in January to see what had been done and took some video.

The 33 new stones mark the graves that surround the monument. The funds for the installation of the stone was mainly contributed by the reenactment groups that the soldiers would have served in during the war.

Now the monument itself is in dire need of preservation, so funds are needed once again to complete this project. The lettering listing the names of all the soldiers from Frankford who served is barely readable today and it is time to restore it.

Below is a short video.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.