Mini-kid Moves to the Suburbs

Shell Shock!

In October 1957, my family moved to New Jersey Turnpike Exit 9— East Brunswick. We used to visit the house (and soon-to-be home) regularly. I was 8 years old.

Even after we moved in, the development, named “Lawrence Brook” after a local river, was largely unfinished. A giant mound of dirt ran across our backyard, our road ended in a cliff, and the driveways were unfinished.

Soon, other families of a surprising mix of nationalities moved in. They would quickly become our friends and neighbors.

My parents made friends with adults; we made friends with their children. It was the American dream in that heady period of the 50’s. One friend and I named the mound of dirt “Mount Blitzkrieg” and played World War Two-based war games on it.

We went to Sacred Heart School in New Brunswick, where the principal looked and sounded like Edward G. Robinson. “Myeah, see?” It was not as kind to me as the teacher’s at Incarnation in New York were.

When I was nine, we three kids got bikes for Christmas. This gave me the power to visit schoolmates who lived in other parts of the development.

One friend a mile and a half away introduced me to Jean Shepherd on WOR-AM. That was the only station my cheap little one-transistor radio got. He also introduced me to Stan Freberg with his father’s collection of hilarious Freberg albums. And he showed me films his father had shot of the 1939 World Fair. The Trylon and the Perisphere. My own personal “Twilight Zone!”

We celebrated Christmas big time. At ten, I was too old for Santa Claus, but my siblings weren’t, so my father started taking me to the store to pick out gifts. I felt like a big kid. At the store, often “Two Guys from Harrison,” he picked out gifts, asking me if my brother and sister would like them. He shopped for my gifts separately.

Part of your responsibility as a homeowner was to populate your yards with bushes, trees, and plants. One Christmas, my father decided he’d kill two birds with one stone. He would buy a live tree, which he’d later replant in the front yard. Great idea! The only problem was that the new tree slowly died in our living room. There was no way we could put electric lights on it, so my father bought a circular colored light projector that would shine the revolving colors of white, red, green, and blue on the tree.

I didn’t excel at sports. I joined a football team, the Lawrence Brook Wildcats, and didn’t have a clue at what I was doing. I had lived in New York City, and the closest thing I knew as a sport was stickball with a soft rubber Spaulding ball. The coach, later embarrassingly my babysitter, told me, “Go home and buy a book on football!” Sweet guy.

I was better at baseball, but not by much. Like so many dorks, I was relegated to right field. Our team was the Lawrence Brook Masons, named after our masonry firm sponsor. I was afraid of the hardball, especially when thrown by an ace fastball pitcher, and I never got a hit. However, in my final at-bat in my last year of eligibility, I got a foul tip. I was proud of that, if silently.

My one triumph was running from the opposite field to catch a deep ball that the center fielder seemed to be ignoring. The scoring run couldn’t advance, and as a girl I was sweet on watched, I proudly ran the ball into the dugout. People were making noise as I did, and finally, I made out what they were saying— “There's only two outs!”

Ignominy.

That was it for sports.

But when I was 12, my parents surprised me with a birthday gift—a Sony TC-100 reel-to-reel tape recorder. This experience changed my life, and I became fascinated with the audiovisual world, which would become my future.