Surprise and Remembrance

When you were Italian and Catholic, Sundays always began with Mass.

You wore your best for church in the 1940s. One particular Sunday morning a young woman living in Providence, RI, in the Federal Hill neighborhood overlooking the downtown shopping area, then largely an Italian neighborhood, was dressing for Mass. Like most young women of the time, she took pride in dressing in the latest fashion. It was a cold December day, so she probably donned a long-sleeved blouse and a wool skirt, or perhaps a woolen dress. She would carefully pull up silk stockings, fastened in body-twisting motions to a garter belt, and then check and recheck in the mirror that her seams were straight. A prink here and a tiny careful tug there made it just so. Feet then slipped high-heeled pumps. She fixed her short wavy dark hair in the latest style, then made up her face, patting on just the tiniest bit of rouge and the bright red lipstick of the time.

Her parents also were dressed in their best for church, as well as her younger brother, slim and natty in his suit. They probably walked to church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, bundling their coats around them. Women wore dressy hats back then, but not the type that kept your ears warm; instead they were cute little creations in bright colors perched on top of your head, tilted at a saucy angle, some with decorative veils, others with a jeweled brooch. Gloves were also in fashion, sleek leather or perhaps thick wool for a Sunday eighteen days before Christmas. In church you would be elbow to elbow with others in wool coats, snug scarves, and fur collars. Presumably some of the coats had just come out of  storage and along with the scent of women's cologne and Old Spice was the faint trace of camphor. Sunday Mass was full of music and incense, the service in majestic Latin, the choir in full throat along with the pipes of the organ. It was Advent and the priest would be in vestments of violet touched with gold and white.

Post service, despite the winter wind, you would stand and talk with your friends for a few minutes until the lure of Sunday dinner took you home. If you wanted to receive Communion, you couldn't eat breakfast, so it was a particularly hungry family who arrived home. Putting on patterned full aprons to cover their Sunday dresses, the young woman and her mother boiled macaroni, tossed a big green salad with oil and vinegar, and stirred up the "gravy" that had been simmering on the back of the stove, redolent of tomatoes and garlic and meatballs. The table set, they gathered around, said grace, and enjoyed their Sunday dinner along with Italian bread fresh from the neighborhood bakery and some type of dessert, perhaps a lemon square or a sfogliatelle.

Sunday afternoon for this working-class family was for visiting or for a movie. Our young lady's father settled before the radio set, perhaps to listen to a football game or a concert. Younger brother went out to see "his girl." If he was flush they might go to the movies and have an ice cream sundae afterwards. Perhaps this Sunday they might only visit at her mother's house.

Our young woman and her mother set out to visit a cousin who lived nearby. Of course they walked; no one jumped in a car back then for distances of a few blocks. They bundled up against the cold with scarves and kerchiefs, strolling the sidewalk that lined the steps leading up to the triple-deckers and the duplexes.

As they passed the house of a friend, an upstairs window flew open, and a woman's head emerged. She was wildly excited, called out the name of the young woman and her mother. She wanted to know...had they heard the news on the radio?

They were astonished. No, they had left the house before Papa turned on the radio. What was wrong?

This was how my mother and my grandmother learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They rushed up the stairs of their cousin's house, only to hear the awful first bulletins on the radio. The newscasters' words were in English and Mother had to translate for her mother. She did so with tears in her eyes, for every woman who heard the news that day interpreted the terrible truth in one way: that their sons and brothers and fiances and husbands would be going to war.

Later they walked home. People were out on the street now, talking about the news. Some men boasted they would enlist the very next day. Others looked troubled. Women wept. How could one go home and sit in their living rooms or their kitchens, and drink coffee when this had happened? Just sit around and listen to the radio?

It was as if their thoughts coalesced into one. Grandpa rose from his chair and donned coat and hat to join his wife and his daughter, and they walked back to church. The doors were always open and one by one, in small groups or in lines of family members, they filed in, some crying, some still stunned. The church was warm with steam heat and still held the odor of incense from earlier Masses, plus the perpetual scent of the candles burning in rows upon rows in metal stands that clustered around the altar, flickering red and blue and gold in their jewel-bright glass candle holders. From the rectory the priests came out, one by one, their surplices still askew, to hold hands, to comfort, to pray.

Mother told me that story so many times that it is almost as if I were there myself, burned into me like my own memory. World War II, a quarter century earlier, was as real to me as Vietnam already boiling up under the children of the 1960s. Each time I hear Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech I still get gooseflesh. I can feel the December cold on my legs, smell the warm candles at church, hear the weeping of the mothers and the sisters and the wives. I know what they lost but will never know the total depth of that feeling on December 7, 1941.

Books I Have Loved

Title: Johnny Tremain
Author: Esther Forbes
First Read: Stadium Elementary School
When: 1966

When I went to Stadium School in the 1960s, most of the teachers were older. Even the kindergarten teacher was an older woman; I believe Mrs. Marandola might have been the youngest teacher in the school when I had her for fourth grade. However, Mrs. Grady, who was in charge of both the second and the fifth grades, trained student teachers, so in my seven years of elementary school, we had four student teachers.

I have forgotten the second of the two second grade teachers, but I vaguely remember Miss Fisher, who I startled so much by screaming when someone threatened to tear up the construction paper Easter bunny I was making in art class. The second of the teachers we had in fifth grade was Miss Ockelowicz (sp?), who was sweet and pleasant, but I particularly recall the first of the two student teachers that year.

Her name was Miss Greenberg, and she wore her blonde hair in a bouffant hairdo just like on television. She bought smart, fashionable dresses, as close to a miniskirt as schoolteacher dress regulations allowed, and I remember pretty flowered prints and geometrics. I wonder if we scared her at all, her first class, a bunch of kids mostly of Italian descent with names like Lanzi, Maiorano, D'Ambra, Iacobbo, Calabro, D'Agostino, and Campanini, plus a smattering of Callahan, Chatburn, Miller, and Leung, the boys in cotton or corduroy pants and collared shirts and scuffed Oxfords, the girls in dresses or skirts/jumpers with blouses, ankle socks, and strapped shoes (or, like me, in Hush Puppies) with hair held back with headbands or barrettes, or pulled back into a pony tail. Most of us had stay-at-home moms, dads who worked blue collar, and some pesky siblings. (The lucky ones, I knew, also had a dog.)

Soon after Miss Greenberg arrived, she told us she was going to try something different for us after lunch. Predictably, after being free to converse and goof off in the lunchroom for a half hour, we had trouble settling down to the next class. She thought she'd create a settling-down period, as well as expose us to something creative, by reading a book to us.

In our yesterdays, before televisions and radios, it was common for families to sit in the "parlor" after supper and have someone read to them as entertainment. Today we have psychologists and people like Jim Trelease telling parents it's a good thing to read to children, even older children. But in our day, it was chiefly little children who were read to, those who couldn't read for themselves yet, or not yet read well. It brought to mind Mom reciting nursery rhymes or reading from A Child's Garden of Verses or Dr. Seuss or your children's Bible. To us it sounded a little—well, patronizing! We were ten- and eleven-year-olds, and we'd be in sixth grade next year and old enough to graduate elementary school; wasn't reading to us kind of "baby"?

That first day, after lunch, she opened the book, and began.

"On rocky islands gulls woke. time to be about their business. Silently they floated in on the town, but when their icy eyes sighted the first dead fish, first bits of garbage about the ships and wharves, they began to scream and quarrel.
     The cocks in Boston back yards had long before cried the coming of the day. Now the hens were also awake, scratching, clucking, laying eggs.
     Cats in malt houses, granaries, ship holds, mansions, and hovels caught a last mouse, settled down to wash their fur and sleep. Cats did not work by day.
     In stables horses shook their halters and whinnied.
     In barns cows lowed to be milked.
     Boston slowly opened its eyes, stretched, and woke..."

And we awoke to a new world, day by day: Colonial Boston, talented and conceited Johnny Tremain, small but plucky Cilla and her sickly little sister Isannah and older sisters Madge and Dorcas, devout Mr. Latham, brisk and brusque Mrs. Lapham, lazy and oafish Dove and shy Dusty, avaricious and equally conceited Jonathan Lyte, the headstrong and determined Lavinia Lyte, Mrs. Bessie the cook, and the dedicated, full-of-life Rab Silsbee, who works for his Uncle Lorne at the "Boston Observer." We gasped when Johnny "broke the Sabbath" and burned his hand, were sad as he despaired at his handicap until he became an outcast, admired his courage as he learns to ride the beautiful horse Goblin, followed the ins and outs of Boston law and society and listened as the beginning of the Revolutionary War came to life in the story of a boy just a little older than us. I think, until then, we thought the American Revolution had been fought by a "bunch of old guys" (people in their 30s) who were perfect, two-dimensional characters who just existed in history books. We learned from Johnny Tremain that Samuel Adams and Paul Revere were no plaster saints, but people with faults just like ours, that the British weren't all bad guys, but folks who loved horses like Lieutenant Stranger or were flirting noncoms like Sergeant Gale.

Within a few weeks the two copies of Johnny Tremain in the school library were taken out and stayed out. No kid in the class could wait for Miss Greenberg to get to the end. Unable to even get on the waiting list, I pleaded with my mom to get me a copy for Christmas. You can walk into any bookstore today or order off any website that sells books and get a copy of Johnny Tremain, but back then it was out of print. Mom, who was unsuccessful finding a copy of Charlotte Baker's The Green Poodles for me, got someone—the Paperback Book store maybe? Read All? The Outlet Company or Shepards department store?—to order her a copy of a teacher's edition of the book and I had that for years until I finally bought a hardback copy. I still have the map of Boston from that teacher's edition taped in that hardback.

It wasn't until some years later that I actually saw the Disney film of the book, and I was so disappointed. Oh, it tells the story all right, but it's so much the Reader's Digest condensed version that it's colorless (except for the Liberty Tree song, and I like the actor who plays Paul Revere), and some of my favorite characters, like Isannah, Lavinia Lyte, Mrs. Bessie the Lyte cook, Pumpkin the deserter, Lieutenant Stranger, and Lydia, the African-American washerwoman at the Afric Queen who saves Goblin from being commandeered by the army (she is one of the first positive African-American characters I remember reading about) are missing. Film Cilla is amazingly buxom; she's supposed to be a skinny 13-year-old with a sharp tongue and a thirst for reading. Film Johnny is dark-haired, not blond. Film Goblin was black, the book horse was a magical creature, "a tall, slender horse, so pale he was almost white, but flecked all over with tiny brown marks. The mane and tail were a rich, blackish mahogany. His eyes were glassy blue." (And he was a Narragansett horse! From Rhode Island!) {SPOILER} Plus it's missing the sequence that gives the novel its punch, and even as fifth graders we knew it had to happen even if we were sorry that it did: Rab dies after the battle of Lexington. It was Johnny's final lesson of the story: that freedom is not won lightly, it sometimes takes the lives of those we care about, or of ourselves.

Miss Greenberg finally finished Johnny Tremain. She tried another Revolutionary War book on us, Hay-Foot, Straw-Foot I believe it was called [N.B.: it actually takes place during the French and Indian War], but the spell was over. After Christmas Miss Ockelowicz took her place. In eighth grade, we read Johnny Tremain "for credit" in Miss Wright's English class. We had to do a project of it, with a folder collecting all of our quizzes and tests and exercise papers, and decorate the cover. Of course I drew Johnny on a rearing Goblin, with his post bag slung over his shoulder.

And some time during junior high school I found Miss Greenberg's engagement announcement in the newspaper. It may still be in one of my boxes packed up when we cleaned up the house. I always wonder if she is happy. So if you're out there, Miss No-Longer-Greenberg—thank you. Thank you for Johnny Tremain.

The Neighborhood: From Trotters to Trolleys

Like everything before it, the old neighborhood at one time was open space, dotted with maples and oaks and sycamores, the brush a tangle of sumac, bittersweet, and aggressive poison ivy, populated by squirrels and rabbits, moles and voles, deer and bear. In spring the buds swelled on the trees and became tender shoots that morphed into green leaves and violets grew in the clearings. In summer, rabbits nibbled under the trees and foxes and mice raised their families in dens among the trees. In fall the sumac turned to waving scarlet fronds and the trees blazed gold and orange as squirrels stored their nuts in hidden caches and the birds headed south. In winter the bones of the trees cast blue shadows against the snow where mice noses emerged, testing for the scent of predators. Then civilization encroached; a factory was built only a few miles away, to utilize nearby water as its power, and beside it the trim white home of the factory owner. The factory prospered, the size of the white house doubled, and it became the home of a governor.

Governor William Sprague found that open space once filled with trees and wildlife a perfect place to exercise his champion trotting horses. In 19th century America where vehicles were horse-drawn, the trotter and his counterpart the pacer were king, and the harness-racing event the biggest part of the annual county fair. That now flat stretch of land next became Narragansett Trotting Park. This sprawling acreage had a grandstand so large that it contained a hotel, and financiers like Morgan and Vanderbilt formed its audience on opening day.

Fortunes come and go, and in the later 19th century the Spragues' 67-acre property became the state fairgrounds, and in 1896 a novelty attraction appeared at the fair: racing cars! These sputtering vehicles—so unreliable that if a car even finished a race it was considered a success—made occasional appearances, and the park was also used for other big outdoor shows: circuses, exhibition trotting races (including an appearance by the great Dan Patch, who held harness-racing records for years), and even Wild West shows, one attended by a small boy who would later grow up and buy a house and raise a family at the edge of the park. He remembered for years afterwards his wide-eyed amazement at the trick riding and shooting, the colorful Native people on prancing horses, and a "stagecoach robbery" sequence, the dust and the smell of horses and popcorn. Trolley cars wended their way down Cranston Street and its extension, Narragansett Avenue, to bring people to the park, men in ties and top hats, women in long skirts and parasols, and as always excited children in frocks or roundabout and knickers to ooh-and-ahh at whatever attraction played at the moment.

Soon the age of the horse and carriage made way for the horseless carriage, and not months before the United States joined the Great War, the park closed and re-opened with what was the first paved and banked oval track, in what was apparently the first super-speedway in the United States. Eddie Rickenbacker, a few years before his flying exploits in France, pushed the limits of automotive speed in the first race, driving a Maxwell motor car. Soon speed became the watchword as other then racing-greats like Barney Oldfield and Louis Chevrolet circled the track. Glenn Curtis, the aircraft designer, raced motorcycles there, and air races were even held around pylons added to the park for that purpose.

As the classic newsreel announced "Time marches on." The trolley cars that squealed and ground their way down the avenue now just called "Gansett" to carry fairgoers were bringing people who wished to live in the suburbs. By the time the 1920s were ending, the fairgrounds had moved out to East Greenwich and the cars to other venues. The racetrack left its mark on the street names—Chandler, Jordan, Overland, Cadillac, Packard and Fiat (Fiat Avenue was the backstretch)—and in the neighborhood's nickname, the Speedway, long into the 1960s, when you could have your hair cut at the Speedway barber and bowl a game at the Speedway Lanes, and when a leftover chain link fence from the Speedway, now separating two back yards, linked the little boy who'd gone to the Wild West Show and the little girl who grew up in the little Cape Cod house turned sideways to fit on the corner lot.