This great old church building is coming down.

I happened by the Sweet Haven Assisted Living home today at 4827 Oxford Avenue.  There were banners flying, so I stopped to see what was happening.  They were giving away soup to anyone who happened to go by from noon to 2PM.  It’s a way of giving back to the community and of course, it is Lent.  The owner of the home is Gloria Tangco and the event was Co sponsored by Tropical Hut Philippine Cuisine which has a location up at the Forman Mills Shopping Center on Rising Sun Avenue.

The soup was well received by all who had the pleasure and on a cool but sunny afternoon it was greatly appreciated.  We have a number of folks living in rooms in the neighborhood, so a nice hot cup of soup seemed to be a welcome gift.

Now for all of you history buffs, do you know what that house and this link have in common.  Feel free to post your comments.  It has nothing to do with soup but I told the folks giving away the soup that it has some interesting historic link.

Hidden in plain sight is a cemetery that appears to go way back. I’ve passed this location hundreds of times and never noticed it until I got a tip a few weeks go.  I’m not sure if there is any documentation about who is buried there.  Cemeteries are a part of history that is easy to overlook.  Anybody have a clue?

Continuation of Lyle (Corky) Larkin remembers:

Block Parties

Another of the many things I have found to be unique to Philly were the “Block Parties.” During the warm months you would find police barricades at either end of a given block, prohibiting any traffic. Usually on Saturday morning the inhabitants of this block would get together and start setting up tables in the middle of the  street, complete with “oil cloth” table covers. (Mostly the white and red checkered kind.) Everyone would participate, bringing the “Specialty of the House” to his or  her own table. There were more varieties of deviled eggs than I knew existed, backed beans, luncheon spreads, homemade pickles, fresh baked bread and some of the  yummiest deserts I ever saw. There was either live music or someone would supply their “hi-fi” for playing records, but you could almost always count on somebody  in that block being able to play some kind of instrument, including the “Washtub & Scrub-Board”. Sometime the block party would last through till Sunday evening.

Wash Day

Behind the row homes, were alleyways. Which was a narrow path that separated the back yards, just wide enough for a horse and wagon to go through. The curbs had  a curved steel rail to protect it from the wagon wheels. For us kids, these alleys where a source of magic, for many of them interconnected and each turn had the  promise of a new adventure. Walking down these alleys you would always see women hanging out their wash in the back yard. Mondays seemed to be the designated  day for washing clothes. Women took great pride in hanging their wash out to show everyone how bright and white they got their laundry. There was almost an  unspoken competition going on with the neighbors. You could be sure the whites passed a rigid inspection before they were hung up. I remember a bluing process  that was used to make them look even whiter using ‘Unity Frankford Bluing’. We had a “Ringer” type washing machine down in the basement alongside a double compartment cement laundry tub, which sat on a metal frame. This tub had to weigh over two hundred pounds I remember some men broke it up with  sledgehammers when they removed it. The washer was set next to these tubs so the water that was wrung out of the clothes as they passed through the hard wringers would go down the drain and not back into the washing machine. The agitator would go up and down instead of in a circular motion like the ones of today. The was a  big red button on top of the wringers which was an emergency release in case you got your fingers too close while you were hand feeding the clothes through and the  wringers caught your hand. For the toughest dirtiest clothes, there was always the “washboard.” This was not the fanciest of devices, it was simply a two foot by three  foot wooden frame with a piece of galvanized ribbed metal that you placed upright inside of a tub and vigorously rubbed the piece of laundry up and down on until it  came clean. For many, this was the only source of washing! It seemed like just one step above beating your laundry on rocks down at the river. There was no such  thing as a dryer, so everything was hung out in the back yard to dry. Sometime in the winter the clothes froze on the line, so they had to be hung in the basement. The  clothesline had to be changed often due to being out in the weather, it would get dirty and leave marks on the clothes. Clothes poles were used to prop up the lines and  keep them from sagging in case there were too many heavy things on the line. Solid cast irons were used to make razor sharp creases in the shirts. We had a gas  stove in the kitchen where my grandmother would heat the irons. She had several of these so while she was using one, the other was getting hot on the stove. The  handles were removable so it was easy to switch those heavy irons once they cooled down.

Magic Radio

I can recall many Sunday nights, sitting in the living room on the floor and staring at the big RCA console radio. There was a small semi circle shaped dial in the  middle towards the top with a yellow light in it. We would all sit there watching the radio listening to programs such as Jack Armstrong, Inner Sanctum, The Green  Hornet, The Shadow, Charlie McCarthy, Burns and Allen, Amos and Andy, Sky King and finally, Walter Winchell with the news. This man could really sell the news; he made everything sound even more important than it was! “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press.” That‟s how he would begin each program. I could go on and on with the list of programs that kept us glued to that set for hours each week. These were good times. These were family times. These  were the times when you used your imagination to see things. These were the times before television.

To be continued…

The  gang  of   7  to  12  year  old  urchins   we  used  to  hang  around  with  in  the  early   1960s   in  the  Northwood   section  of  Frankford,  between   Castor  Avenue,  Wakeling  Street,  Oakland  Street,   and  Harrison  Street,   were  definitely  all  “scientists.”   We  formed  a  science  club   which  met  in  the  basement  of  Nicky  Macko’s  house  once   a  week.  Nicky  was  the  President  –  it  was  his  family’s    house,  after  all.    Each  of  us  would  go  to   Frankford  library  at  Frankford  Avenue  and  Overington  Streets  whenever  we  could  and  borrow  as  many  books  as  we  could  on   how  to  do  interesting    science  experiments  at  home.  We’d   study  the  books  with  rapt  attention.     Mostly  we’d  look  for  ways  to   turn  junk  into  science  experiments  –  much  cheaper!

Electronics  was  the  most  fascinating  science.    Those   were  the  glory  days  of  vacuum  tube  technology.   I  was  fascinated   to  discover  that   magnets,  held  close  to  the  vacuum  tubes  filled  with  ionized  gas  emitting  blue  light,    attracted   the  ionized  gas  to   the  magnet.      I  brought   my  AM  radio,  cover  removed,    to  the  next  meeting   of  The  Science  Club,   after  I  discovered  that  the  ionized  cloud  in  vacuum  tubes  was  attracted  to  magnets,  and  plugged  it  in,  and   everyone  “oooooooooooo’d”    and  “aaaaaaaaaaah’d”    as  they  moved  their  magnets  close  to  the  vacuum  tubes  and  saw  the  ion  clouds  in  them  move  toward  the  magnet.

We  discovered   static  electricity.    If   it  was  Fall  or  Winter,  so  that  the  air  was  very  dry,    we  would   recover  the  fluorescent   tube-type  bulb  from  someone’s  trash   (being  careful  not  to  break  it  –  they  explode),  put  on  our  best  shoes,  turn  off  all  of  the  lights  in  the  house,  and  walk  across  the  room,    shoes  sliding  on  the  rug,    while  we   carried  the   fluorescent   bulb  in  our  hands.  Lo  and  behold,  the  bulb   would  flash,    all  of  the  way  across  the  room!

Then  one  of  the  guys  –  I  forget  who  –   discovered  “exothermic  reactions.”   If  you  go  into  a  closet  with  a  roll  of  garden  variety  masking  tape and  close  the  door  behind  you,  after  your  eyes  get  used  to  the  darkness  if  you  pull  a  piece  of  tape  off  the  roll  you  will  see  light  coming  off  the  roll   at  the  point  where  the  tape  separates  from  the  roll  as  you  pull  it  off.

In  you  similarly  take  Wintergreen  Life  Savers  into  a  dark  closet,   and  snap  one  of  them  in  half  with  pliers,   you  will  see   the  Life  Saver  give  off a  tiny  flash  of  light.

The  really  annoying  productions  of  The  Science  Club,  from  our  parents’  perspective,   were   the  ones  requiring  that   strings  or  wires  be  strung   between  houses  or  trees  outside.

We  built   “foxhole  radios,”   a  kind  of  AM  radio  anyone  can  make  out  of  junk.   It  uses   a  piece  of  wood,  thumb  tacks,  insulated  copper  wire,  a  #2  lead

Foxhole Radio

pencil,    a  safety  pin  of  the  type  used  for  a  baby’s  diaper,   a  rusty  razor  blade,   and  the  cardboard   tube   from  the  inside  of  a  roll  of  toilet  paper.    The  only  non-junk  item  needed  was  a  pair   of   headphones.

We  would  construct  the  radio,    hang  a  50  foot  copper   wire  antenna  between  trees  or  homes   (so  that  the  ends  of  the  antenna   did  not  actually  touch   the  trees  or  homes,  but  instead  were   held  by  string   connected  to   trees  or   homes),    run  a  lead  from  the  antenna  to  the  “radio,”  run  a  separate  wire  from  the  “radio”  to  a  pipe  in  the  house,    and  hear  1210   AM    in  the   headphones.    No  battery  was  needed  –   the  antenna  itself  generated  enough  voltage  for  us  to  hear  the  radio  program   in  the  headphones.

We  also  connected  houses  with  the  tin  can  walkie-talkie  sets  –   just  ordinary  tin  cans  in  each  house,    with  taut  strings  running  from   tin  can  to  tin  can,  set  up  so  that  the  strings  touched  nothing   but  the  cans,  and  we   would  shout  massages  to  each  other  through  string.   The  vibrations  of  the  sounds  of  our  voices  were  conveyed  through  the  string  from  one  house  to  another.

And  I  guess  the  most  annoying  thing  of  all   to  our  parents  was  our  discovery  of  the  home  made   telegraph.    We’d  run  telegraph  lines  between  houses,  and  telegraph  Morse  code  to  one  another  at  night,  and  then  run  to  the  telephone  to  confirm  the  meaning  of  the  message.

As  we  entered  our  pre-teen  years,    much  to  our  parents’  dismay  we  became  more  skilled  got  at  collecting  junk   for  science.

Once  I  brought  home  a  TV  from  someone’s  trash.

My  father  sternly   warned,  “Don’t  you  DARE  plug  in  that  TV  –    it’s  dangerous.”

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