Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself – PART III

I find it hard to believe that my overprotective mother actually sent me off to school without a professional bodyguard in tow.  Being the “baby” of the family and having a difficult sister, who my parents sent off to school hoping she would not return at the end of the day, was much inhibiting for me, to say the least.  Desly fought and won her freedoms and I received all the “babying” a youngest child often receives from his or her doting parents.

If you’ve ever seen the film, “A Christmas Story“, I was definitely Randy bundled up in his one piece snow suit.  Each weekday morning, mom released me into a
Norman Rockwell setting filled with rough and ready country kids wearing no coats in winter.  I might as well have hung a sign around my neck proclaiming me “Bully Fodder.” The “sissifying” of Marc LeVine was already underway, in earnest.

If this wasn’t enough to seal my hostile fate in Kindergarten, my teacher ended up being Aunt Dorothy’s "unpopular" (with her) sister, who also happened to be a Jew-hater. Since she was permanently on the outs with my adopted Aunt Dot and knew we were close as family with her, she liked us even less than other Jews. 

In fact, one day my mother came to school to pick me up early and was horrified with what she observed in my classroom.  Mom walked in and saw me in the center of a circle, surrounded by the teacher and my classmates.  They were all singing “dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew can’t tie his shoes.”

Mom was furious, but the superintendent of schools in those days had a well-known reputation for being even more anti-Semitic than my kindergarten teacher.  He told my mother that she couldn’t possibly have seen what she claimed and basically, called her a liar. In 2012, this would never have cut it and heads would roll.  But, in 1961 rural Englishtown, He had the upper hand.  The school board was made up of people just like him.  There was quite a bit of anti-Semitism in the area until Manalapan and Marlboro developed into the heavily Jewish populated communities they became beginning in the 1970s and beyond.  We ran into my old Kindergarten teacher around then (before she moved to Florida) and she asked my parents how they liked living in the area “with more of their own kind?”

Thanks to being an overprotected “hot house flower” and having had an anti-Semitic kindergarten teacher, a world of bullies was created to help make my life as a school age child absolutely miserable.  Going to school was an adventure every day. Would I come home with a split lip or a black eye?  Sometimes, I came home with both.

My own person betrayed me, too.  Always uncoordinated, I was poor at sports
and no one wanted me on their team.  Not helping the situation was our testosterone-loaded gym teacher Mr. Buecker.  Ever hear how the band “Lynyrd Skynyrd” got its name?  The band members hated their southern, hard-guy gym teacher Leonard Skinner, so they named the group after him.  Yes, Mr. Buecker was my own personal “Lynyrd Skynrd” nightmare. He had no use for me, because I was so bad at sports.  He fed into the Bully’s enjoyment of persecuting me.  Gym class was awful.

As a student, I was fair at best.  I never was very good at math and struggled
to laughs and ridicule of my classmates.

Compounding all of this misery further, was the isolation and social deprivation I faced while growing up on Taylors Mills.  During my time living there, there were few kids my age within walking distance to play with. There was nothing to do but play with my dog and cat.  So, I had to wait for my parents to bring me back and forth to other kid’s houses.  Most of them already had friends living nearby, so they didn’t really need me. 

It was hard to get to friend’s houses since Mom and dad were often tied up – especially on the weekends - selling rugs at Englishtown Auction and later selling wall-to-wall carpeting from a basement showroom and garage-like warehouse they had built behind our house in 1965.(They also built a side addition to our then very small house). Because they were so busy earning a living, I was often left to play by myself – alone.

My father didn’t have much time for me, either.  He was always busy working on his regular job and then preparing for the upcoming weekend in the family’s floor covering business.  Mom was his “boss” and he did all the labor.  Of course, behind every great man is a greater woman telling him what to do! Mom was the “boss” and poor dad was the “horse” they used to say.

During my childhood, dad’s regular jobs were night shifts as a foreman at Anheuser-Busch in Newark and at Ford Motor Company in Edison; a carpeting Salesman for Dean’s Floor Covering in Edison and finally; a floor covering salesman for Bamberger’s (Macys) in Menlo Park Mall, where he spent over 30 years until his retirement.  He worked a lot of long retail hours and would come home and go down into the basement to his workroom to bind carpet remnants into the wee hours of the morning.  We didn’t get to see many ball games together or anything like that.  He worked very hard to make sure that we had everything we needed, so I do appreciate what he sacrificed to succeed.  I gained my work ethic from him.  He was a good man.

When free time could be found, mom and dad did take us on the familiar regional trips that most locals took back in the 1960’s.  We went to Atlantic City (before gambling), Pennsylvania Dutch Country; Gettysburg, Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, Williamsburg, Virginia and of course, Washington, DC.  We did travel to Montreal - one year - and took my grandmother (Pearl) along with us. At the time, she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.  I’ll never forget how she yelled out: “I want American money, because it is better.” This to a desk clerk at our Montreal hotel, when he changed her US Twenty dollar bill into its Canadian equivalent.

We’d also spend a weekend – now and then - at a Catskills (NY) hotel like the Homawack Lodge in Sullivan County, NY; at Host Farms in Lancaster, Pa.; at Downingtown Inn, also in Pennsylvania or at Goldman’s Hotel in West Orange, NJ.  As I mentioned previously, my friend Bruce Canell often came along with us and shared the good times.

Mom was a pseudo-homemaker (she ran the rug business at Englishtown Auction on the weekends) while I was growing up, so she was around during the week to clean the house, make dinner (awful cook!) and shuttle Desly and me to music lessons (I took clarinet and later, guitar lessons). Mom also dragged me to Hebrew School at the Freehold Jewish Center, which I absolutely hated.  I made many friends in those Hebrew classes, but spent most of my time being punished in the hallway with two of them: Keith Berman and Lucky Dinkowitz.  We all got in trouble with our teacher, Mrs. Kagan, for trying to compete for the title of class clown. I just wasn’t into my Hebrew education. Not many boys my age back then, were. My sons weren’t either.  It is something we did for our parents and
grandparents to keep the generations going.

Fortunately, My grandparents – the Shapiros (on my mother’s side), rented half of a duplex on Route 9 in Manalapan, where Starbucks now stands, close to our home.  Their neighbors, the Kuchta’s had children my age and across the street on Franklin Lane lived the Shusters.  They were family friends and I was already going to school with the twins, Bruce and Barbara.  Bruce and I became very close friends during those years and we enjoyed playing together in the woods behind his house.  I would often sleep over at my grandparent’s apartment on the weekends, while my parents were selling at Englishtown. That allowed me to spend more time with grandma and grandpa and to play with the kids nearby.

I loved my grandparents, dearly. Because they lived with us for awhile and
then moved close by, I got to see them much more often than my father’s
parents, who lived in the Bronx. That grandfather (on my father side) was foreign born religious man and nowhere near as “cool” as my American born Grandpa Benny. Grandpa Max and Grandma Sara Levine were good grandparents, but they always treated us like second tier grandchildren, because their other son was a Dentist and they were more proud of him than they were of my dad, who left college (Northeast Missouri State) to enter the Navy during WWII. It just was never a really warm, relationship we had with that set of grandparents.

Grandpa Benny never came by our house without bringing us toys or without organizing plans to take my sister and me ice skating, horseback riding or to a boardwalk with rides and games.  Grandma Pearl was also very warm and loving,
so I enjoyed spending time with them.  I was their favorite grandchild, because Grandma and Desly never really got along very well.  My sister gave Grandma Pearl fits and she was often locked in the bathroom as punishment for mouthing off and misbehaving.

In any case, whatever friends I had back in those days, I needed a ride to and from their homes. If it wasn’t Bruce Shuster’s; then it was Willie Schaeffer, who moved into the Holiday Estates development around 1964. I loved visiting the
Schaeffers and playing with the many kids in his housing development. I envied
him that he could open his front door to a world of play every day.  There were so many kids around to play games with. I never had that on Taylors Mills Road.  My only close friend on Taylors Mills was Ricky Soden, who lived far up the road.  Still, too far to walk – per my overprotective mother.

Another very close friend, moved to the area from California at the end of fifth grade, Bruce Canell. We remain close to this day after having both roomed together at Syracuse University back in the mid 1970’s.  Bruce was always around and my parents often took him along with us on vacations. Bruce lived in Monmouth Heights development in Manalapan and I enjoyed going there too, since many of our mutual friends lived near his house. We were best friends and still are, today.

So, that was life on Taylors Mills Road.  Beautiful scenery, but rather lonely for a
child my age. 

By the time I got to Kindergarten, my sister was already a pre-teen.  There was a bit more for her to do in the area (i.e. Girl Scouts, Community Band, Piano Lessons, etc.) and she spent a lot of time with Carol Applegate, “next store”(Funny, how that became a country expression while I was growing up). 
Anyway, Carol’s cousin, Mary Guthrie lived behind us on Ikes Lane and was also very close with Desly.  There were a few other girls her age around town, too.  And besides, when Desly really wanted to go somewhere, she created such maelstroms that she often got her way just to regain the peace and quiet.  She was much louder and pushier than I ever was and she also wasn’t pampered anywhere near as much as I was – so she won more freedoms.

During my later years of grade school, Desly had many – yet to be famous – friends visit our house and accompany her piano playing and singing.  Bruce Springsteen crashed her parties. David Garrison (“Married with Children”) was her comedy side-kick; Jeff Keller (“Phantom of the Opera”) sang to her piano music. Kevin Sheehy (aka: Kevin Christopher of ESPN) was often her pal around town. Her eventual High School graduation class from Freehold High School was an impressive one, indeed.

On the rare weekends when my parents took off from work, we’d visit relatives and friends in New York and Northern New Jersey.  Mom was an only child and dad was estranged from his only older brother, so I had few relatives close in age.  It was only when we went to visit our friends the Roslers (Long Island) and Wolff’s (Staten Island) did I look forward to those infrequent (usually) Sunday visits.

On Mondays, it was back to school and the constant Bullying. By the way, there was another kid who was bullied as much as me.  His name was Emil Macho.  He was a nice, quiet kid, who was probably as uncoordinated as I was at sports.  With regard to my grade school relationship with Emil, there is something I am not very proud.  Somehow, I erroneously concluded that if I became a bully to Emil, the other bullies might embrace me as one of their own and leave me alone. Boy was I wrong.  Instead of being accepted by the bullies, Emil and I became the equivalent of their fighting chickens.  I’d attack him and we’d punch each other out, with neither of us gaining a single bruise. These battling stalemates became known as “the powder puff fights.” After we finished battering each other to a draw, the real bullies would teach us BOTH how to seriously beat someone up; to draw blood and inflict pain.

There was one aspect of school I particularly liked – the girls.  I got started early having crushes on female classmates.  First, there was Jeanne Struble; followed by Cindy Burke; and topped off by the beautiful Susie Colucci, who grew up to be a star girl punk rock group lead singer (“Candy Apple”).  Susie lived in Holiday Estates near Willie Schaeffer’s house.  When I visited Willie’s neighborhood, I had an alternative motive – to walk by Susie’s house and hope she was playing outside.  Willie once walked up to her - right in front of me - and told her I liked her.  She was cool with that and I appreciated her not uttering a loud “Ewww.”  Then again, she might have done that when she went back inside her house. Better that I not know!  I will say that despite all of the bullying I received in grade school, the girls were always very nice to me.

So, in the final analysis my grade school years are not my most memorable.  Fortunately, during most of those years, we summered at Bergerville (and later, Bradley Beach 1966-1971) and I enjoyed two full months of fun at day camp and afterwards, around the bungalow colony playing with friends and doing the things kids my age were meant to do.

In 1968 my grandfather died. The following year, mom got breast cancer just prior to my Bar Mitzvah. And, I left the public schools to attend The Ranney School in Tinton Falls. To be continued…