 E ALL come from somewhere! For some folks
"Where you from?" is a painful
question. Richard Farina, the sixties folk/rock dulcimer player, was born on a
ship between Havana and New York. This gave him dual citizenship...Some people
born in small hamlets outside a big city or even a place the size of Bedford,
Indiana will say, Bedford when they answer the question, then proceed from there
if there is further interest. Imagine not being able to go back "Home" because
the tenement you were raised in isn't even there any more...
 HESE IMAGES you see are some favorite haunts
in my "home" town of Rockaway.
They were snapped on a visit May 1, 1999. So some of my "there" in the Steinian
sense IS still there. The trestle runs over the Rockaway River in the Boro of
Rockaway. The buildings behind are early 19th century mill works. They were first
powered by water wheels running leather belts, which ran machines...the mill race
entrances were under the tracks just behind the dam, which was constructed for
this reason, to provide water power. Though it was dangerous and illegal, my
brother and I spent many hours crossing that trestle inside the steel structure,
with nothing but ten feet of space between us and the river if we
fell.
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| HE TRACKS were part of
the NJ Central
RR. Originally, they went out
to
the Hibernia iron mines where my mother's father would come to work, from
Poland.
100 years ago, there were 4 passenger trains a day. When my brother
John and I were walking around this place, we even found a chunk of iron ore
which
had fallen off a car decades before. I would have kept it but it was too heavy to
carry in my back pack...
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 UT ALL OF THAT is history, we
also visited
the adit entrance to the very mine my grandfather labored in
- nothing but a home
to millions of bats, now...A concrete plug designed to keep humans from
danger was altered to give the bats access...(the photos above were taken
on May 1, 1999 - more pictures here. My
first visit to my home town in over 10 years. The original narrative continues below)
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 ROGRESS KEPT COMING. The steel forge where my
father was a hammersmith's helper,
received subcontracts for titanium steel gear blanks for Pratt & Whitney
Aircraft,
a defense contractor. The National Defense Highway Act built Interstate 80 through
our woods, a mile or so over the ridge from our house. I still remember the
day we were hiking the deer trails in those woods and found the survey
stakes. I
asked my brother what they were. He knew they marked the place where the "cut"
would be made for this road, which would alter extremely the character of the
countryside through which it passed. So we started pulling the stakes out! The
next day, more stakes had replaced the ones we yanked...we gave up. Since then, I
have traversed nearly two-thirds of I-80, from coast to coast.OR  Music Education  Y MUSIC education was what one might expect
in a small town in the fifties. A chum in the second grade got me
interested in playing music in the second grade.
His parents had bought him a flute. I thought music was really cool, and
wanted to have a trumpet or clarinet. My folks couldn't afford to buy me
either one of those, so I learned my music scales on a dinged-up
hand-me-down trombone. It was not my choice of instrument, but simply the
only one left available. I remember not liking the smell of the oil used
to lubricate the slide. Also, lugging that heavy case a half mile back and
forth to school got old fast (...those were the days before school bus
programs). As my friend and I grew older, he introduced me to his father's
classical music vinyl record collection. His father subscribed to the
Vanguard Recording Society plan...I still remember Vivaldi's "Four
Seasons." Then, there was the day he showed me the new Joan Baez
album...I became aware of Jazz.
Louis Armstrong was an
Ambassador to the
world at large for the Music, as Jazz players liked to call it (read about
Armstrong's audience with Pope Pious XII sometime...). Eventually, during
the late seventies, I would get to see some of the Music's stellar names
like Dizzy Gillespie and Sun Ra play the Bluebird
tavern
in Bloomington, merely for the price of doing the postering for those
shows.OR Temporarily Like Twins Y BROTHER and I were like twins, in some ways,
until he became a teenager. John
is 22 months older. There's hardly a play activity that either of us did, that
we didn't do together. (I've met women who said they had the same childhood
experience with a sister, then puberty changes things...people take on individual
personalities with a vengeance...it seems.) We learned all the childhood
playground songs, played softball with the neighborhood kids on the dead-end
street near our house, and explored the whole town with our bycycles. I got good
at stealth in Hide-and-Seek - finding a place as close as possible to the
telephone pole we used as home base in the game, gauging how far away from the
pole to the let the kid who was "it" go, and then leaping from my bush, beating
the kid to the pole and shouting "alley, alley, oxen free..." We got
real good at the teeter-totter, at the Park Lakes playground. Our record
was seven kids! Two on each end, and three in the middle, with the two ends trying
to fake the three on the board over the balance beam into making the wrong move.
Guess who was in the middle of the three, co-ordinating the other two
kids? All of
this ended when my older brother went to high school. I'd tested high in
them aptitude tests students were given in the late fifties, and saw college as a
goal by the eighth grade...my brother told me that Morris Catholic, the new
regional Catholic school was not accredited by the association that established
admission standards for college, so I was quite relunctant to attend. There was
pressure from my parish priest. He didn't come right out and say you'll burn in
hell...but that was the drift of the conversation. Add more weight to my young
fellow's decision to begin questioning the absolute authority of the "Holy
Roman Catholic Church" in matters spiritual and moral...My brother and I
didn't become strangers overnight, but going to two different high schools for the
two years we were in high school at the same time sure changed my focus. This is
when I began to delve more deeply into athletics and music.OR Those STEEL Wheels...Skateboarding in "the good ole daze"  OMEWHERE around this time, the skateboard
craze happened, with the steel wheels.
John'n'I got good at it fast. We'd go to the next town, Dover. There was a two
level parking lot for the Erie-Lackawanna (since Conrail) commuter trains station.
In the summertime, when the sun didn't set until 8:30pm, an express passenger
liner - the Owl - would go through right at sunset, on its way to Chicago. By the
time the passengers were loaded and those diesel horns blew for the grade
crossings, dusk had fallen. I remember a tremendous longing to be looking out one
of those windows as the train headed west. To where? I didn't care...just wanted
to be anywhere else...there wasn't any woodstock festival to dream I'd been born
too late to go to...The
parking
lot for the station was partially on a steep incline, which made it
a great skateboard run, especially after all the weekday cars were gone. There was
an access drive from the bottom of this part of the lot down somewhat to a flat,
much larger lot. To go from the top of the hill to the bottom required a "Z"
shaped run. At the top of the hill, John'n'I would face each other sideways,
sitting on our boards, tucking ankles over each other's hips and reaching past our
backs, respectively, and holding the outside edge of each board behind the other's
backs with our hands. Then, as we approached the first part of the "Z" turn, I'd
lean back parallel to the pavement and John'd lean over me as far as he could,
until his chest was on my legs. All the while, I was still holding the farside of
his board, so that it wouldn't flip out from under him, which would have wiped us
both out, pronto. Major gnarly, like, totally. We'd make the
turn, and then at the other end of the ramp we'd reverse the routine and finish
the run. Did we ever wipe out? Some things may not need to be recalled, right? No
one had pads for their elbows and knees, yet...Nobody else who came to the lot
seemed willing to do the run. They just told us we were "crazy" for
trying such a stunt. Guess I got used to being called crazy early in my career.
Eventually, I learned to respond this way, "Crazy? Why, that's so far
back down the road, I can't even remember where it is...couldn't draw you a
map, either! Now, if you want to drive yourself there, I'd be happy to give
you a dollar for gas..."Ever hear about SUBWAY SURFING? Read all about it at Jesse's CYBER CAFÉ |
