On a bad day in Newark......

I lived on Huntington Terrace from about 1949 to 1954.  Our block ran between Eckerd and Renner Avenues.   The street was filled with two and a halves.  These were separate houses with three floors.   They were called two and halves because the third floor apt was smaller than the first two because it was under the roof and eaves.  They had self standing garages and just a little dirt around them.  The Macklesses were our landlords and lived on the first floor.  My father and I called them the Mackleberries.   We lived on the second floor.  Since they were landlords, I had to learn not to drop and thump my shoes on the floor.   The Goldbergs lived on the third floor, and were were the first to get a TV in our neighborhood and I remember intensely my first look at that kinda round screen.

Our apartment was very large.   In fact it was larger than the house we later moved into in Springfield.   Besides 3 bedrooms (parents, me, Granddaddy) it had a living room, dining room (we used it as family room and ate in the kitchen) kitchen, walk in pantry (where my father had his floor scraping business office) one big bathroom, a sun parlor with jalousie windows, and an outside screened porch.   The bathroom had a fancy shower with jets that also shot at you from the side.   I still have the bathroom cabinet with enameled steel top under which I hid the books I sneak read while on the pot.

 I had at least 3 good friends and several other boys in my grade on the block:   I can almost, but not quite remember the names.    Something like Ronnie Rosen,   Howie Redless, Larry Shtier.   So play usually meant going outside and seeing who was around.   Sometimes you might knock on a door to find someone to play with.   On a really slow day I would go around the corner to play with the kids whose houses backed up into ours on Schuyler Avenue.   That was pretty rare.   I didn't really have to go off the block very often.

As I got older I used to hang out with kids further away.   My cousins Ted and Paul Green lived on Wolcott Terrace.   That was all of 3 short blocks away.   I also had a friend Danny Schiff who lived one block down the hill on Osborne Terrace.

Our play had no parent input, no organized sports.   What did we do?  We played stick ball.   We played stoop ball.  We flipped trading cards.   We played mumblypeg (with pen knives.)  We played marbles.   We also did a lot of just adventuring around.   We'd climb to the roofs of garages and jump from one to another.   Sometimes we got into snow ball or mud ball fights with kids from other blocks.   The empty lot on the corner of Eckerd and Huntington was a good place for a fight.   I see from google street view that it is still empty.   If we were really evil we we put ice balls inside the snowballs, or rocks inside the mudballs.

Sometimes we got creative.  Several of us had gone to native american themed summer camps.  We appropriated some clothes poles and made carved and painted totem poles out of them.

I remember that a few times we went into the coal bins of the Redless house and played strip poker (details redacted.)