Memories From Jersey

It is hard to know where to go from here. I work so hard at life sometimes it seems impossible to take the time to work at my blog and writing. Somehow down deep this is important to me. Each day I have to go forward with life. My parents moved to Rivervale, New Jersey when I was 10. They enrolled me in St. Andrew's Catholic School in Westwood, New Jersey. We were now in what we thought was the country. The nearest dairy farmer came and wanted to deliver milk. He gave my mother a punch set for signing up. Each day we opened the door and on the stoop were two quarts of fresh milk in glass bottles with the cream floating on top. In the winter I could eat the cream off the top and it tasted like ice cream. The best part was the neighborhood brook. The neighbors all got together and sectioned off a part of the Hackensack River. They made a rock wall dam, pulled all the poison ivy out and made a sandy beach. We swam eveyday, all day every summer. It was a wonderful gift.

There was no bus and we had to walk everywhere. My brothers were still little and everyday my mom put them in the little red wagon and pulled them to town where she shopped and just had some destress time. It was not easy for her.

I have to sign off as it is night and I have to go to work in the morning.

Fort Lee to Rivervale, New Jersey

We moved from Fort Lee to Rivervale, New Jersey around 1953. In many ways it was sad to leave but it really meant a new life for our family. By then I had two little brothers and our family needed to move on. I attended St. Andrew's Catholic school in Westwood for grammar school and then went to Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale which was a regional high school. It was really difficult to get used to public school after attending a private school for 9 years. The first day in Algebra I got laughed at because I stood up when the teacher spoke to me. Also, we didn't have much phys ed in Catholic school. We had ballroom dancing instead. I did not know anything about athletics. It was difficult to make friends. Everyone already had their friends from grammar school. The school was 2 miles away and for the first 3 years I had to walk back and forth in the morning and the evening. By my senior year we had a regular warm school bus like all the other kids. It was an exciting time for, "Rock and Roll" was in full bloom with Elvis Pelvis on the Ed Sullivan show. I screamed at the TV set a lot.