Growing Up at Jack's Place

I grew up in the rural town of Nassau, Rensselaer County, New York. My parents, Jack and Rose, owned a bar and gas station called "Jack's Place". They bought it in 1937 from James Lukenbill, who bought the property in 1924 and established the business after the end of prohibition. Like many other farmers, my father was doing poorly raising poultry and dairy cattle on the family farm a few miles away. Although he knew nothing about operating a bar, he noticed that while Lukenbill was in deep financial trouble, all his employees were driving new cars. When my father bought the property, he promptly fired the employees, having decided that they must have been stealing since they appeared prosperous while Mr. Lukenbill was going broke.

Jack's Place was located 16 miles east of Albany, 3 miles east of the village of Nassau, and 23 miles west of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The house was on the northern side of Route 20, at its intersection of Coldwater Tavern Road and Old Route 20. On some maps, it is shown as “Jack’s Corners” Our house was a nondescript white frame house with a covered porch in the front. It was a basic two-bedroom house with one bathroom, a kitchen - dining area, living room, and an unheated storage room that usually had beehives in the uninsulated walls.  Between the living room and stairs leading to Jack’s Place, there was another room that originally held a large, mahogany desk, but which became my bedroom as I grew old enough for my two older sisters, Lelia and Sylvia, and me to want privacy. My room was actually a hallway, through which everyone in the family walked when going to or from the bar. One side of the room was a series of windows covered by Venetian blinds, looking out to the bar’s parking lot, which was reasonably brightly lit. When I lay in bed in the evening, I could listen to the activity in the bar, including the television and the din made by the customers, most of whom were “regulars.” I also would hear the traffic on Route 20, which was only across the driveway.

Jack would usually close the bar around 11 pm, but it was frequently open until almost 1 am on Friday and Saturday nights. The bar noise would slowly subside, and eventually, Jack would come through my bedroom into the house. State Liquor Authority rules prohibited the house and bar from being directly connected. This regulation was designed to prevent the operation of a bordello in conjunction with a tavern. My father got away with the violation by disguising the door (as seen from the bar) with a plywood face that ran from ceiling to floor and appeared to be just a wall. There was no door handle on the bar side, just an inconspicuous black knob to pull. During World War II, there was a "Buy Bonds" poster tacked on it.

In addition to being a bar, Jack’s Place was also a gas station. There were three tanks and pumps out front, two regular and one “high test.” Oil and some auto polishes and additives were also sold, and we stocked fan belts, tires, and automobile light bulbs, but did not install them. Tires were usually stacked up in front of the tobacco cases, and some were kept in the dance hall, which had been closed since the early 1940s. Although the motor oil was kept in a wooden bin out front, the other automobile fluids were usually stacked on a beam near the ceiling over the back bar, where customers could view them. Hanging from the beams were cards of other items for sale. Some were items such as corn cob pipes, “Honey Bowl” pipes, plastic coin purses, but most were foodstuffs such as packaged nuts and “Slim Jims.” There was also a counter with various candies, and a glass case of pipe tobacco, and “roll your own” cigarette tobacco and paper. Racks of potato chips and corn twists sat on top of the tobacco cases, as well as boxes of Cracker Jack. There was an old, white GE refrigerator with beige painted coils on top. Heinz ketchup bottles sat on top of the refrigerator. One of my jobs was to combine partially filled catsup bottles. Sometimes a cheaper brand of catsup was substituted. The left compartment held quart bottles of beer, and the center and right compartments held hot dogs, ham, and blocks of cheese. Next to the refrigerator was a black ice cream freezer containing Borden’s ice cream in tubs, but later in quart containers, as well as Frostiks, Dixie Cups, and Drumstiks. Wine bottles were displayed on top of the ice cream freezer, and unopened liquor bottles were on a shelf above the cigarette racks. Open boxes of candy bars were on a portion of the bar next to the tobacco cases.

Above the ice cream freezer were racks of open cartons of cigarettes. The popular cigarette brands were Camels, Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, Chesterfield, and Old Gold. These brands were sold for two packs for 23 cents, and later two packs for 27 cents. On the low price end was Wings, which sold for two packs for 17 cents, but I think that the only customer for them was Gene Miller, who usually stopped at night on his way home from work for two quarts of beer and some cigarettes. We also stocked Fatimas and English Ovals on the high price end, which came in a rigid gold box and were oval instead of round. They sold for 30 or 35 cents for a box. I don’t remember who smoked them, possibly Mrs. Aylward or Mrs. Paddon. [I first experimented with cigarettes when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I took a pack of Old Gold cigarettes from the bar,  went down to Mort Miller’s Creek,  and lit one up. I coughed a lot and threw the cigarette into the creek. I hid the pack of cigarettes by the creek and tried it again a few days later with the same results. I didn’t try smoking again until I was a freshman in college.] Boxes of cigars were kept to the left of the cash register. White Owl was the most popular brand of cigars that were stocked.

The bar itself was curved, dark wood. There was a brass foot rail along the outer edge. A spittoon was in the far corner, next to the men’s room. The spittoon was always vile, and I don’t believe it was ever cleaned. Fortunately, it was not used much. Underneath the bar (from an inside view) was a bar sink, beer cooler, and shelves. The floor was dark wood. It was never washed, but from time to time, Jack would coat it with linseed oil. The noticeable trash on the floor would be swept daily with a wide broom that was stored behind the refrigerator.

The open liquor bottles were on the back bar. Imperial was the "house brand" as it was cheaper than some of the other brands. Occasionally Jack would pour Imperial into the more expensive Canadian Club bottle, saying that the customers couldn't tell the difference anyway. Open bottles of sherry, port, and muscatel wines were kept at the far end of the back bar. One customer, Louis Fox, frequently went through a bottle of muscatel in one sitting. Jack did not serve fancy mixed drinks. The usual highballs consisted of a shot of liquor in a glass with ice and ginger ale, tap water, or Saratoga Vichy. Customers could order a Tom Collins, as well as a gin and Squirt. Jack made Manhattans for Mr. and Mrs. Paddon, but I don't recall anyone else getting a drink that elaborate. Sometimes a stranger would come in and ask for something more exotic than the usual offerings, and Jack would suggest that they go to one of the taverns in the village of Nassau. Jack became a fan of Saturday night wrestling on television. When the wrestling came on, Jack would pull up a chair and sit among the customers to watch the show. If one of the regulars needed a refill during the match, they would usually just go behind the bar and serve themselves or wait for a commercial break.

One of my regular jobs was to stock the beer shelves. The beer was delivered to a wooden loading dock in the back. My father (or I, if I was there when the beer was delivered), would bring the beer cases into a storage room. When the shelves needed restocking, I would bring out cases of beer and fill the shelves under the bar, where the bottles would be convenient to fill the beer cooler. There was also a soda cooler under that portion of the bar where candy was displayed. There were no shelves for the soda, so I would stock the soda directly into the soda cooler. Initially, both coolers were cooled by block ice which was delivered daily in 50-pound blocks. We would use an ice pick to break the ice up, and the beer and soda were cooled in ice water. Later, Jack modernized to electric coolers, which were welcome because we didn’t have to reach into the icy water to get the beer or soda. The bottles were glass, and occasionally one would break in the cooler, which was particularly hazardous when the bottles were in a water-filled cooler. I still have a slight scar on a knuckle from a broken bottle. The bottle caps fell into a container when the beer or soda was uncapped, and these were just thrown onto the back driveway from the loading dock.

There was a kitchen of sorts. It consisted of 3 propane burners for cooking and a propane grill used to toast hot dog rolls. I frequently toasted a hot dog roll and filled it with sliced American cheese and mustard for myself, although I liked to eat a toasted roll filled only with mustard. I have never since been able to toast a hot dog roll as well as I could in the bar’s kitchen. One of the propane burners was dedicated to heating a pan of oil cooking hot dogs, and the other two were for cooking western egg sandwiches. The license to sell alcoholic beverages required that it be incidental to the sale of food. In order to meet the requirements, Jack had to "cook the books" to make more of the reported income appear to be for food. The bar customers loved his sandwiches. He made the western egg sandwiches with three eggs and lots of ham and sweet Spanish onions. Jack bragged that he never cleaned any cooking utensils; he just kept adding Wesson Oil until the pans burned through. He also never washed his hands before cooking, so the sandwiches might be flavored with a bit of gasoline or Lubrite motor oil. The bar customers didn’t really mind since they were usually half snoggered, the sandwiches tasted good, and the price was right. I recall the price was 20 cents for a hot dog and 35 cents for a western. Before WW II, Jack sold foot-long hot dogs. Another of my chores was to clean the grease from the propane burners. About once a month I would take the cheese knife and scrape the layer of grease that would form on the top of each burner. Then I would take a piece of wire, poke it into each burner hole, wiggle it around, pull it out, and wipe off the grease. Then on to the next hole. It was very tedious. After each burner was done, I would light the burner, note which holes were still not burning brightly, and redo those holes.

There was an exhaust fan in the kitchen, and it blew the smells of the hot dogs and westerns cooking right into our bedrooms. The plates were ceramic, of various colors, and mostly round with scalloped edges. Today, similar patterns are sold as a “retro” look. There was a dark brown teapot in the kitchen cabinet. Tea was not served; Jack used the teapot to hide cash. He believed it was safer to hide excess cash away rather than leaving it in the cash register, where it might be stolen, mainly since he frequently left the bar without supervision when he had to tend the gas pumps. He also carried a large wad of bills and coins in his pocket so that he could quickly make change when selling gasoline.

The bar was heated by two round, brick-lined, “Warm Morning” brand steel stoves. One was behind the bar flanked by the ice cream freezer on one side and the cash register on the other. The second one was in the customers’ seating area, but its location changed once that I can recall. Large sheets of asbestos paper were used to keep adjacent wood surfaces from scorching. The two stoves were joined by steel stovepipes, which then exhausted through a common chimney. Jack would constantly adjust the stove dampers in an attempt to regulate the heat. The stoves were fueled with wood and coal. Every fall we would get a truckload of split firewood dumped behind the building. Jack and I would bring some in and store some in the small closet behind the bar. The firewood was used primarily in the fall and spring to heat the bar room rapidly, but the wood was consumed rapidly and required a lot of tending. Once the weather turned very cold, coal replaced wood as the primary fuel. The coal was stored in the small basement below the back end of the bar room. Although there was an exterior door to the basement, the coal was usually brought into the bar room through a trap door in the floor. One of my jobs was to descend into the basement, shovel coal into 5-gallon pails, and haul them up the steep, rickety stairs. I would dump a pail full of coal into each stove and then bring up a couple of extra pails of coal for later use. Each morning, and at least once more each day before adding more coal, the ashes would be shaken down into a metal pan and emptied, usually by throwing them off the loading dock onto the driveway.   The ashes were frequently thrown on the front driveway in the wintertime to make the ice less slippery.

During the mid-summer, Jack made dill pickles. There were 2 large oak barrels behind the bar. Jack would get the newly harvested pickles from his brother Harry and put bushels of them into the barrels, add salt and dill, and fill the barrels with water. A bushel basket top would be placed on top of the pickles, weighted down by large rocks. After a while, when a white scum formed on the surface of the barrel, Jack would declare that the pickles were ready and would start dishing them out by the plate full. They were always very salty, and the customers wolfed them down. Because they were so salty, Jack sold a lot of beer. Sometimes, he made dill green tomatoes as well. He also converted some of the dill pickles to sweet pickles. Jack would slice up dill pickles and put them in gallon jars. He would then fill the gallon jars with a boiling concoction of vinegar, water, and sugar. These “sweet pickles” would garnish the westerns when the dill pickle season had passed. During tomato season, Jack would also add slices of tomatoes. The barrels were filled with water when not being used for the pickles. This kept the wood from drying out and shrinking. The water-filled barrels were an attractive breeding site for mosquitos, and sometimes I would watch the larvae swimming up and down in the barrels.

Hot dogs were ordered with mustard and/or relish. Although not offered, diced onions were also available. The mustard and relish were purchased in gallon jugs. Jack thinned the mustard with beer left in customers’ beer bottles. American cheese sandwiches were also available but not as popular. The cheese was bought in large bricks. Hot dogs were purchased in 5-pound boxes. The hot dogs were connected by cellophane casings, and I frequently had to cut them apart and remove the casings so that they would be readily available in the old GE refrigerator. Other available foods included Polish Kielbasa and sometimes pickled eggs, which were kept in gallon jugs in the bar area. Uncle Max Honig, who lived about ½ mile away on the Canaday farm for many years, raised chickens, and he supplied Jack’s Place with farm fresh eggs for sandwiches and also sold them by the dozen. They were stacked at the end of the bar, divided into single and double yolks.

My jobs included sweeping the floors, putting lemon oil on the bar, tables, and chairs. Although some tables had a black patterned linoleum top, most tables and all of the chairs were painted red. I think that the color was chosen because Socony Vacuum (later Mobil) supplied Jack with quarts of red enamel to be used on the gas pumps and light poles, and the paint worked well on the furniture. My chores also included emptying ashtrays and wiping them clean, stacking beer into the shelves and the coolers, washing glasses and dishes, filling catsup bottles, picking up trash from the parking lot, raking the parking lot stones smooth if they became rutted, selling gasoline and oil, making hot dogs and cheese sandwiches (I never made western egg sandwiches), and, of course, selling drinks. Jack said that the State Liquor Authority complained that it was illegal for me, being under the age of 18 years, to sell alcoholic beverages. Jack’s responded that he was entitled to teach me the only trade he knew, and they backed off.

Jack rigged up an electric bell to alert me to assist in the bar or gas station. There was a button in the tavern connected to a dry cell battery, which connected to a bell in my “bedroom.”  When the bell rang, I was obligated to come into the bar to help there or to tend the gas customers. Sometimes the bell rang while I was eating. If I jumped up to respond to the bell, Rose would tell me to finish eating. When I didn’t promptly respond to the bell, Jack would open the plywood door and yell for me to come.

On pleasant afternoons, if there were no customers in the bar, Jack sat on a gasoline tank fill pipe and read. Every summer, he planted zinnias in front. In the early days of my memory, the gasoline was branded “Socony-Vacuum,” which later became Mobil. When the Hi-Test was low, Jack sometimes had me pump Regular into the Hi-Test tank.   Sometimes, he would have the delivery driver pump Regular into the Hi-Test tank to improve his profit margin. Eventually, Mobil decided to discontinue supplying marginal dealers, and Jack secured AMOCO as a supplier. AMOCO advertised that its premium gasoline was clear, which precluded Jack from substituting or mixing Regular gasoline into the Hi-Test tank. During World War II,  gasoline was rationed, and ration stamps were needed to buy the fuel for some time after the war.   Some of the regular customers gave Jack their extra ration stamps, which Jack gave to soldiers who were on leave.

Automobiles used a lot more motor oil in the 1940s and 1950s than they do now. Most of the oil sold was the cheaper Mobil Lubrite, which was 25 cents per

quart. The empty cans were just tossed over the fence, down an embankment into a wetland that was part of the “swamp.” We had no garbage or trash pick-up. It was merely thrown over the bank into our “dump” behind the bar, along with empty cardboard liquor boxes and empty liquor bottles. Jack said that the law required that empty liquor bottles had to be destroyed so that they couldn’t be used by bootleggers, so the empty bottles were usually thrown against a rock in the dump and smashed.  Bags of household and bar trash were also thrown into the dump, which was periodically set ablaze.

The “restrooms” in the bar were not up to today’s acceptable standards, or probably up to the acceptable standards of the time. The men’s restroom, located at the end of the bar, consisted of a low trough under a window. It was “caulked” with tar and sometimes painted a light green color. There was a water faucet above it but no towels were supplied. The restroom was identified with a sign that read “Used Beer Department.” The room had a distinct urine odor to it, although disinfectant cakes were thrown in. The lady’s restroom was a narrow, windowless room near the entrance to the closed dance hall. Originally there was no washbasin, but the county Health Department eventually forced Jack to install a minute wash basin, although I don’t remember towels being supplied. Fortunately, I was never directed to clean the restrooms. I think that the cleaning of the men’s room was limited to refreshing the tar and paint.

There was a two-compartment outhouse in the back next to the dump. I believe that in the 1930s it was the only restroom for the bar and was reputedly used by Eleanor Roosevelt when her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was governor. She came to the bar with her bodyguard on their way to Tanglewood. She asked to use the phone, and when Rose heard her voice she asked her whether she was Eleanor Roosevelt. Then Rose told her that she had once voted for her husband. Rose asked if her daughters could shake hands with her, which they did.

Jack frequently used the outhouse if one of the family watched the bar when there were no customers. I went into the outhouse on a couple of occasions, but it had a horrible smell, as I imagine all outhouses have. Jack probably didn’t mind because he had grown up without indoor plumbing and did not have a toilet until some time after he was married. Birds used to nest in the outhouse, but they apparently didn’t mind the odor.

The disposal of sanitary waste was crude. There were no municipal sewer systems in rural areas. Sanitary waste disposal today is regulated by state and county health department standards, but if there were such standards when I was growing up, they were not enforced. The waste from the bar simply went into a pipe that led past the dump into the wetlands. Since the discharge was mostly water, there was never a problem with backup or odor. The waste discharge from the house was another matter. The discharge went into a cesspool about 20 feet from the house. Unlike a modern rural septic system in which the waste is carried into a sealed 1,000-gallon underground container where bacteria breaks it down, and the purified effluent then drained into an extensive leach field where it evaporates, our cesspool consisted of an unlined pit dug into the ground and covered over by wooden boards. There were bacteria in the cesspool, which would also break down solid matter to a degree, and the effluent would then just drain through a pipe into the wetlands. Eventually, the cesspool would fill up with solid matter, as do modern septic tanks. In a modern system, this is cleaned out by a specially equipped tank trunk. In our system, Jack would remove the boards when the smells got very bad, or the toilet backed up because there was no more room in the cesspool, and shovel the solid waste matter out. Not a nice job.

There was a “dance hall” on the westerly side of the bar. During the 1930s, and possibly during the early 1940s, there were square dances on Saturday nights. The onset of World War II brought an end to the square dances, and I have no memories of the dance hall being opened. It was closed from the main bar by large sheets of plywood that formed a dividing wall. There was a small stage on one side with an upright piano that Sylvia occasionally played by ear. Painted wood booths lined the outer walls of the dance hall, and there was a large “Orange Crush” soda poster at one end. Jack used the dance hall for storage. There was also an attic that could be reached by climbing a ladder and moving a trap door. When rationing was threatened during the Korean War, Jack hoarded sugar and cooking oil in the attic.

There was a circa 1930s jukebox in the bar that held twenty 78 rpm records. Jack didn’t buy new records too often, and some were kept on for years. I remember that the “Too Fat Polka” was popular as well as "The Freckles Song," "Roll Me Over in the Clover," and "Rosalita." I also remember “Home on the Range,” “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” and “In the Furher’s Face.” The cost was 5 cents per play. When alone in the bar, I frequently took money out of the register to feed the jukebox. To the right of the jukebox was the dartboard.

Shooting darts was a favorite activity among the customers. The dartboard was natural wood with alternating green segments and a red bull’s eye. We used large wooden darts with feathers. Customers played “baseball” and “21," and shot bull’s eyes for a Nickle each. After several years of practice, I became quite good at the game, mainly since I had so much practice time while tending the bar. I could play with the best of the customers and usually beat them, more so as they continued to imbibe during the games. At the “peak of my career,” I could hit the bull’s eye at least once in three tries and could hit it at least once in six tries throwing the darts backward. Canned beer in 6-packs was stacked below and to the side of the dartboard. If the player hit a beer can, the beer would stream out, and the customer was expected to buy the 6-pack. The only customer who consistently beat me was a customer, Jack________, who brought his own small, English metal darts. He came with his mistress, Suzanne, a very attractive young woman who sounded as if she were from England but actually worked as the private secretary to a bank president in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Jack was a very interesting character. He had a white crew cut, and cut a handsome figure, usually wearing a sports jacket with slacks. He allegedly had been with the OSS during World War II, and at the time that he frequented the bar, he still had some spy or secret agent job. He would get a new car a couple of times a year. I was extremely impressed when he showed me a new green and cream 1955 Pontiac hardtop. The engine was supercharged, and when he pressed a button under the dashboard, the electric radio antenna changed height and the radio became tuned to a police frequency. They abruptly stopped coming in when it became public that Suzanne had also been having an affair with the bank president, whose wife hanged herself when she found out.

Lelia, Sylvia, and I were given access to the cash register to take money for legitimate expenses. I recall that school lunches were 25 or 35 cents, and I would get the money out of the register each morning. Jack ran a tab to give credit to some of the regular customers. We would mark charges on little pieces of cardboard that were kept in one compartment of the register, with a notation whether it was for gas or beer. Nothing was dated, and very few customers ever failed to question or pay off their tab.

Once in a while, I would get a tip from a customer whose car I filled and performed underhood services. As the gasoline attendant, I was also expected to clean the windshield and sometimes add air to the tires. Tips never exceeded a quarter and probably totaled less than $5.00 per year. On two or three occasions, I had a gasoline hose burst while I was pumping gasoline. Through use, the hoses grew weak near the point where they connected to the nozzle. This wear was increased when the hose was stretched and then sharply bent to get the nozzle into the fill pipe on the far side of a vehicle. When the hose burst, gasoline would pump at full pressure until the pump was shut off. On one occasion, the hose burst, and I was drenched with gasoline, literally from head to toe, and in my eyes. I remember shutting the pump off, yelling to Jack, and then racing into the shower. My eyes and skin burned for hours. In the 40s and 50s, the gasoline pumps did not have nozzles that automatically clicked off when the tank neared its capacity. Also, automobile gasoline tanks were not well vented, and the result was that in practically all fill-ups, gasoline would spurt back, sometimes on my pants but almost always on the car’s fender. If the vehicle was in good condition, I would usually pour some water from the water bucket over the gasoline spill on the fender. Some vehicles were vented so poorly that they would spit back every few seconds, even when nearly empty. We gave a 2 cent per gallon discount for fill-ups. 

One of our gasoline customers was a self-employed trucker, Paul Apker, who had a green 18 wheeler. He drove back and forth between Akron, Ohio, and Boston, hauling tires and rubber products to Boston. I do not recall what he hauled on the return trip. He always filled up and had a western egg sandwich. Sometime during 1946 or 1947, I mentioned that I needed some string for fishing. He went to the truck and brought me back a wooden spool of nylon tire cord. I not only used it for my fishing line as a young child, but I kept that spool and it was still not empty when I moved to Florida in 2004. Paul told Jack that he had a wife in Akron and a “woman” in Boston. When his Boston friend died, she left him a great deal of money, which enabled him to retire. Once in a while he would show up early in the morning before Jack’s Place was open. He would knock on the front door to get gasoline, and since my bedroom was right there, I would get up and fill up his truck. On busy summer weekends I would sit outside and tend the gas pumps, and Rose would help Jack in the bar. Jack would park his car in front of the bar to show that it was open, and I would sit in the Buick and listen to the radio between gasoline customers. I resented having to work on the summer weekends when other young people my age were usually enjoying swimming or other vacation activities.

There was a lot of truck traffic on Route 20 before the Berkshire Spur of the New York Thruway was opened and connected to the Massachusetts Turnpike, late Interstate Highway 90. Route 20 was the main highway that linked western New York with Boston. During all times of day, I could hear the cars, trucks, and buses come roaring down Lord’s Hill eastbound at high speed and the trucks downshifting as they lost speed climbing Lord’s Hill westbound. One Sunday night after we had fallen asleep, an eastbound 18 wheeler, loaded with automobile engines and foam pillows, struck a westbound automobile head-on. I was awakened not by the collision, but by a passerby who came on our porch holding a lit red railroad flare. He banged on the door, yelling for us to call the State Police. The car was so devastated that there was nothing to tow away; pieces were picked up and put in pickup trucks. The 18 wheeler’s cab stayed on the highway, but the trailer broke loose, crashed through the guard rails, and landed in the swamp next to the road. For several years the rectangular outline of the trailer, where it crushed vegetation, was clearly visible. For months after that, I would lie in bed before falling asleep, listening for the sounds of a crash when I heard a large truck speeding past the house. Fortunately, there was no recurrence.

Route 20 was a three-lane highway. The Village of Nassau was located 3 miles to the west. The road was a gentle rise to the west near Jack’s Place, but shortly it rose relatively steeply for almost a mile and then started a 2-mile descent into the Village. One late winter afternoon during late 1954 or early 1955, we had a blizzard. Because it came on quickly and heavier than expected, the highway crews did not start to plow and sand the highway when it first became slippery. Cars and trucks going in both directions started getting stuck in the snow or sliding on the icy road surface. Trucks jack-knifed, and cars got stuck trying to drive around them. Eventually, Lord’s Hill became impassible, with 3 lanes of eastbound traffic meeting 3 lanes of westbound traffic at the top of Lord’s Hill. It was a cold night. Traffic became backed up for several miles in each direction. The drivers of the stuck vehicles had to keep their engines running for heat, and soon they were walking to Jack’s Place to get gasoline. Jack kept a couple of cans and glass gallon jugs around, but eventually, we ran out of gasoline. I don’t remember whether Jack’s Place ever closed that night because there were stranded people coming in to get warm and inquire about gasoline. It took the State Police and the Department of Transportation all of the next day to clear the traffic snarl. An account of the traffic snarl was the second lead story in the New York Times the day after it was cleared. After that, the Department of Transportation assigned a snowplow and sander just to Lord’s Hill.

Another chore I had was to be the Sunday morning “lookout.”  The law in New York prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages before 1:00 pm on Sundays. Regular bar customers would stop in before one o’clock for a drink while Jack and I would be cleaning the bar in preparation for the day’s business. If there were no strangers around, I would be sent outside in good weather or to stand in the doorway in inclement weather to watch for strangers, who might be State Liquor Authority inspectors. Jack would illegally sell the drinks, usually shots of liquor which the customer could quickly down. Jack would also reluctantly sell customers bottles of beer with the understanding that any remaining beer in glasses or the open bottles would be disposed of if I signaled the approach of a “stranger.”

Sundays were always particularly busy during the beginning of trout season in April or during the deer hunting season in November. Jack became an accomplished trout fisherman, learning the location of the “holes” in the Kinderhook Creek where he could usually catch trout. Jack was a worm fisherman. He never had much of a desire to learn the art of fly fishing, although I remember that he had a fly rod and fishing reel with a yellow line that he took on our 1946 trip to the west. He wanted to make a fly using long hair. During deer season, a hunter stopped by the bar for a few drinks and to show off the buck that was strapped over the fender of his car. Jack went out with a knife and cut off the deer’s tail to get hair, greatly displeasing the hunter. On warm, wet evenings, I would walk around with a flashlight. The nightcrawlers (large worms) would come to the surface but would start to retreat into their holes when the light of the flashlight showed upon them. The trick was to grab them and pull them back out without breaking them in two, which frequently happened. For a while, we had an old manure pile behind the shed, which was always good for some smaller red worms during the cooler weather. He once bought a fly-making kit and tried to manufacture his own flies and lures, but I don’t believe that he ever caught a single fish on his homemade lures. Jack loved to get up early and go fishing. He would usually use nightcrawlers for bait that I would catch for our use. The legal limit was 10 trout of a minimum length of 8 inches, roughly the spread between the tip of my thumb and the tip of my outstretched middle finger. If Jack caught his limit reasonably early, he would bring them home, eat breakfast, and go back to catch more until it was time to clean up the bar. He would delight in having his limit of trout laid out on a beer tray in the refrigerator and to bringing it out to show the unsuccessful or less successful fisherman at the bar. Sometimes he would wait until a fisherman - customer opened his creel to display his morning’s catch, and then Jack would trump him with his tray of fish. Once the bar was lined with fishermen, and a black man came in. He was duded up in the finest of fishing attire as if he had stepped out of an Abercrombie and Fitch ad, in sharp contrast to the dress of the average fisherman who only had hip boots to distinguish them. After a while, the black man announced that he had caught some large trout. He opened his creel and displayed some large creek suckers, which he obviously didn’t recognize and thought to be trout. Suckers were not a protected game fish, and most fishermen threw them back, although when the water was cold in the spring, small suckers tasted almost as good as trout when dipped in egg batter and fried. Sometimes I could only tell the difference by the profusion of small bones in the suckers. The other fishermen followed Jack’s lead and mumbled their compliments to the black man on his fine trout catch.

One Sunday morning in April, probably in 1954 or 1955, the bar was lined up with fishermen. They would start coming into the bar around noon for hot dogs or western egg sandwiches. Jack wouldn’t risk selling alcohol before one o’clock when there were more than one or two regular bar customers. We followed an established routine for determining the time. When the Four Roses clock over the register pointed to one o’clock, Jack would have me dial the telephone operator and have her confirm the time. Then, I would turn on the switch over the jukebox that would light up the Jack’s Place neon sign on the roof and the beer signs on the screen porch. Jack would then start serving alcoholic drinks. On this particular morning, the bar was lined up with fishermen, except for one young man in a suit at one end of the bar. Jack started serving drinks at the far end of the bar, and when he served this young man a highball, the young man pulled out a badge identifying him as a New York State Bureau of Criminal Investigation detective. He then placed Jack under arrest for selling alcoholic beverages before one o’clock, even though it was then about 10 or 12 minutes after one. He put Jack into the front seat of his unmarked car and drove off, and I continued running the bar. Jack said that he offered to hold the highball while the officer drove, but the officer refused, apparently distrustful, thinking that Jack might just destroy the evidence. He drove Jack to the home of Morris Zweig, an attorney who was one of the two town Justices of the Peace, for arraignment. Morris declined to arraign Jack since Morris was Jack’s attorney. The trooper then drove Jack to the other side of town to the home of Dwight Taylor, a land surveyor who was the other Town Justice of the Peace. Morris followed, and Dwight arraigned Jack on the charge and set the trial for the following Saturday. I couldn’t go to the trial because I had to run Jack’s Place, but Jack soon returned triumphantly. He reported that the trial was moved from Dwight’s house to the local school because of the crowd, primarily fishermen who had been in the bar and had come to testify. Their testimony was unnecessary because, at the start of the trial, Morris announced what time his watch showed, and asked Dwight and the arresting officer and two State Police sergeants who accompanied the arresting officer what times their watches showed. Everyone had a slightly different time, and Dwight dismissed the charge. Although the outcome was undoubtedly just and proper, it should be noted that Dwight was not only one of the frequent customers of Jack’s Place and one of the known town drunks, but he had the reputation of never convicting any local person of any motor vehicle charge, which may have accounted for his overwhelming popularity on election day. In any event, the sergeants apologized to my father for the arrest, explaining that the officer had been sent to check into reported Sunday morning sales at a bar further to the east. He saw all of the cars in front of Jack’s Place well before one o’clock and decided to stop there instead. A few days later, Jack received a call from “Red” _______, the head of the Rensselaer County Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, who told Jack that the arresting officer had been summarily transferred to New York City, and asked Jack if he had anything to do with the transfer. Jack said no, but that he would have done so if he could. Note: Although the “ABC Board” exercised licensing and regulatory authority for the State Liquor Authority in the county, Red would buy his own supply of liquor from Jack (who did not have a license to sell bottled goods) because Jack sold it to him at Jack’s wholesale cost. Even though operating a bar is considered a high-risk business because of alcohol-related accidents, Jack never had liability insurance and was never sued, even though I know of a couple of instances when customers left the bar and got into severe automobile accidents within a short distance. 

Jack enjoyed a good relationship with many of the state troopers who were his contemporaries in age. State troopers usually were assigned to barracks in their own communities after a few years at various locations throughout the state. Jack was a good source of information for them, and he also sold some of them their bottle liquor at a reduced rate and gave them free drinks in the bar if there were no customers present, because they obviously could not be seen drinking on duty. On some occasions, they would simply pull the police car to the loading dock in the back and have a drink. I remember one hot afternoon when a trooper, “Blackjack” Jack Stewart, was parked by the loading dock drinking a Tom Collins when a customer emerged from the men’s room and excitedly announced that there was a trooper’s car parked in the back. Jack gave the customer some explanation which satisfied the customer. Trooper Stewart was called “Blackjack Stewart” because a photograph of him appeared in the New York Times in 1949 in connection with a story on the Paul Robeson riot in Peekskill. The picture depicted him walking through the crowd with a nightstick in each hand, and another trooper carrying more nightsticks for him, as he was breaking them, hitting rioters. Stewart was a drinker and never rose above the base rank of trooper. During his last years, he was assigned as a guard at the Governor’s Mansion in Albany.

In addition to the usual sales at Jack’s Place, we also sold corn, squash, and pumpkins. Uncle Harry would bring several burlap bags of corn from his fields, which we would resell by the dozen. Harry also had a stand in front of his house. We grew our own squash and pumpkins on rented fields. Jack always loved farming. During WW II, he felt that it was a patriotic duty to raise food crops since so many of the farmers were away in military service. He planted about 25 acres on Bingham’s Flats in Brainard, about 3 miles to the east on Route 20. Shortly after the war was over, a flood ruined the field by washing away most of the topsoil, leaving stones and downed trees over the field, and cutting off some of the acreage by deep ruts. Jack sued the State of New York for damages based upon the improper design of the bridges over the Kinderhook Creek, and eventually recovered $7,500.00, less legal fees to Morris Zweig.

With the large field no longer available, Jack sold the Oliver 70 tractor and bought a used Massey Ferguson tractor. That tractor was much more stable than the Oliver and had its front wheels widely spaced to match the rear wheels. The Oliver had two small front wheels, close together, which made it unstable on hillsides. At various times Jack would rent fields from William Canaday on top of the hill behind Uncle Maxy’s house, from Harold Spilton, or even part of the Bingham flats that could still be cultivated. Jack taught me how to hook up the plow, harrow, and cultivators to the tractor, and as I got older I would plow and harrow the fields. Jack would usually plow on the side hills as it was more dangerous. Sometimes the plow would be in the ground too deeply, and the front of the tractor would rotate up. I had to quickly put in the clutch to keep the tractor from turning upside down and then raise up the plow. Since we usually kept the tractor at the field, Jack would drive me to the field and drop me off to plow or cultivate. In those instances, I would drive the tractor home when I was finished for the day. It was exciting to drive from the Bingham flats field over Route 20, which was a busy highway. The tractor had a top speed of about 20 miles per hour, and every car, truck, and bus going in the same direction had to pull around it, even though I drove with the right wheels on the shoulder. One day I got the idea that I could go faster down a long hill by shifting the transmission out of gear and letting the tractor freewheel. It worked, but as the tractor picked up speed I had difficulty controlling it. I was unable to put the transmission back into gear, and the brakes were not designed to really control speed. After that wild ride, I came up with another “bright idea.”  The next time I drove the tractor home, I just pushed in the clutch to let the tractor freewheel, thinking that I could slow the tractor down by simply releasing the clutch since the tractor would still have the transmission engaged. That ride was even wilder. I soon discovered that I couldn’t release the clutch because as I tried, it became immediately clear from the sounds and vibration that to do so would cause the clutch or the transmission to disintegrate. After that, I just accepted the slow ride to and from the fields.

We usually planted the squash and pumpkin seeds by hand, which was laborious. After the rows were marked with the cultivator, we would walk down the rows, and drop 4 seeds into the row every 2 steps, approximately 6 feet apart. Then we would kick soil over the seeds. After the seeds germinated and sprouted through the soil, we would come back and fertilize the “hills” by throwing a handful of granular fertilizer from a heavy bag next to each hill. Later in the spring and summer, the labor became harder. After we would drive the tractor down the rows with the cultivators, which would rip out weeds forming between the rows, we would have to walk each row and use a handheld hoe to cut out the weeds between the plants in the same row. That was hot, tedious work, which always resulted in blisters on both hands, even if wearing gloves. When school was in session, this was weekend work, but after summer vacation started, I could expect to be awakened by Jack early in the morning to have a quick breakfast and head for the fields. Another distasteful chore was the application of insecticide. There were two methods of applying insecticide, the blue-gray powder that Jack referred to as “dust." We had a green mechanical container, or “duster”, that was carried on one’s back. The duster was filled with the insecticide, and Jack or I would walk the rows. As we came to each hill, we would point the hose nozzle toward the plant with one hand and give the handle on the other side a short pump. The dust would billow out and coat the leaves with the dust. The other method was much cruder. We would carry a burlap bag partially filled with dust down the rows, briefly stopping by each hill. I would hold the bag about a foot or so above the hill, and then give it a quick downward jolt. The weight of the dust would allow some of it to penetrate the coarse weave of the burlap bag in a cloud and coat the hill (and probably my lungs) with the dust.

The harvest was enjoyable. The light-skinned butternut squash and the green acorn squash would ripen first, usually in early September. Before the flood, Jack had an old late 1930s light blue-green Ford pickup truck. What I remember most about the truck was that there was a small hole in the floorboard through which exhaust gasses from a leaky muffler rose. Being young at the time, my head was not far away from the hole in the floorboard.  I remember hating the ride from home to Bingham’s flats in that truck. After the flood, Jack sold the truck and the Oliver tractor, and there was a lapse in our farming for a couple of years before Jack bought the Massey Ferguson tractor. When we went back into “truck farming,” it was without a truck. Seed, fertilizer, dust, and hoes were brought to the field in the back of our green 1947 Buick Roadmaster. When harvest time came, Jack sometimes borrowed Harry’s pick-up truck, but we also would just pick the squash directly into the trunk and back seat of the Buick and bring it back to Jack’s Place. Some produce would be put in bushel baskets or half bushels, but a lot was just stacked on the ground in front of the house and bar. When the harvest was in full swing at the end of September and early October, there would be large mounds of blue and gray hubbard squash, pumpkins, butternut, buttercup, and acorn squash. The display would attract many customers, and I was kept busy on fall weekends selling squash and pumpkins, and at the same time, tending the gasoline pumps. As the fall season continued, I had to sort through the piles and remove squash and pumpkins that were getting soft or rotten. Also, once there was evening frost, I would have to cover the piles with old blankets or tarpaulins to prevent further damage. My compensation was that I was permitted to keep the money from any of the squash and pumpkins that I personally sold. Our family ate a lot of the small squash during the fall season. A favorite was acorn squash. Rose would cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake the halves filled with butter and brown sugar. I cannot recall her ever baking a hubbard squash, which she felt was inferior to the smaller squash.

We only had one telephone, and it was in Jack’s Place.  I remember the earliest telephone was an oak wall phone that was screwed into the wall by the windows, near the table where Roy and Jenny sat. The telephone was typical of that era, with two bells on top, a microphone at the end of an adjustable stalk, a handheld earphone that hung on the left side, and a crank on the right side. The telephone box could be opened to permit the three dry cell batteries to be changed when they became too weak to power the bells. We had a party line in common with seven or eight other houses. We were fortunate, as some telephone lines had more than twenty parties. Our telephone number was 117-F-21. The other parties on our line would also have a number starting with 117-F, but with two different last digits. When someone on our line received a call, everyone’s telephone bell rang. Since the last two digits of our telephone number were 21, everyone knew that the call was for us if the bells had two short rings and one long ring. Since everyone on the line was made aware of every call, it was common for others to “listen in” on other calls. When others on the line picked up their receiver, you would hear a click, but you had no way of knowing who was listening in, or whether someone else had picked up their receiver before you got to answer your call. Sometimes a request to people listening in to hang up was followed by clicks, but you were never sure whether the others were really hanging up or just clicking their receiver holders to make it appear that they had hung up. For privacy, some of the neighbors spoke to their families in a foreign language, primarily German. To make a telephone call, one would pick up the receiver and then turn the crank fast for a second. All calls, other than to telephones on your own party line, were connected by the operator. When you cranked your telephone, the operator would come on and ask for the telephone number, and then make the connection by connecting your party line to the telephone line of the called party and ringing the last 2 digits of their number. If you wanted to call someone on your own line, you simply cranked the phone to ring the last 2 digits of their number. The population was much smaller in the 1940s. The telephone operators seemed to have memorized most telephone numbers, so it was not uncommon for someone to just crank up the operator and give her the name of the party you wished to call. If someone else on your party line wanted to use the telephone when you were on a call, they would pick up their receiver repeatedly to give you a hint that they wanted to use the telephone. If the hint didn’t produce the desired result, sometimes they would just pick up and start cranking as if they didn’t know that anyone was using the telephone. I recall watching Rose making a telephone call to her sister, Sue, who lived with their father on College Avenue in the Bronx. Rose made the call at night after Jack’s Place was closed. Sue was not at home, and Grandpa Greenspan answered the telephone, which he was not comfortable doing. He apparently did not recognize Rose’s voice, and when she told him that it was Rose who was calling, he kept responding to her that Rose was not here. She grew more and more frustrated, finally yelling into the mouthpiece, “For God’s sake, Pa, it's your daughter, Reyzl, Reyzl” before hanging up. 

One winter during the late 1940s, we had an ice storm that devastated the telephone and electric lines. They were so coated with ice that their increased weight caused them to break and fall. Telephone wires and electric lines were usually strung on the same poles. As a result, we were without electric power for more than a week, but we did not have telephone service for months. Instead of just repairing the downed telephone lines, the local telephone company replaced the telephone service completely, stringing cable instead of individual wires and exchanging dial telephones for the old crank telephones. Our new telephone was moved from the wall to a location behind the bar, where it was kept inside the glass tobacco case. This arrangement was much more convenient for the family and gave us a modicum of privacy. It also restricted the customers from just using the telephone, which formerly had been in a wholly public area. Customers would have to ask to use the telephone, a privilege that Jack did not always grant to strangers, as he was wary of long-distance charges. I always disliked using the telephone to call friends or to arrange a date. I knew that my conversations had the background noise of the bar, and frequently when I was on a call when Jack would yell for me to pump gas or serve drinks if he was busy, and I would have to end the conversation abruptly.

There was a time shortly after WW II when it was common to see hobos or tramps - homeless men, walking Route 20. Every so often, one would stop at Jack’s Place and beg for food, or ask to work for food. Jack would never make them work, and he would never give them alcohol. He always would prepare a very large cheese or egg sandwich and give it to them with all of the milk they wanted. As they left, he would give them another cheese sandwich to take with them for a later meal. At the time I remember, we had our own Guernsey cow, Bossie, and chickens. Bossie had to be milked twice a day. She would be in the stall overnight, ready to be milked in the morning. To bring her in for the late afternoon milking, Jack or I would go to the fence and yell, “Come, Bos, Come Bos,” or “Ca Bos, Ca Bos,” a few times. Bossie would amble back to the shed, rewarded with a half pail of grain. I didn’t mind milking Bossie, although I disliked her urinating while I was milking, as I had to grab the pail and jump back off the milking stool to avoid being splashed. Also, I had to clean her stall daily by pitching the soiled straw out the back door and throwing in some fresh bedding for her. Jack had her bred each year, which was necessary to keep her producing milk. It was exciting when the calf was born, but the calves were always sold off shortly so that there would be no competition for Bossie’s milk. Once Bossie broke through the fence into Mort Miller’s cornfield and ate so much corn that she became bloated and unable to walk. Jack found her in the field and called Harry Zweig, the local veterinarian. He came and punctured her with a knife to release the gas, but she died, and we didn’t get a replacement.

We raised two types of chickens: Rhode Island Reds and Barbed Rocks, both of which laid brown eggs. We never raised White Leghorns, which laid white eggs, because while their eggs were equally desirable, they were not as satisfactory to eat for meat. I recall one time when Jack came back from Nassau with a box of day-old chicks, which he raised under a large round brooder until they were older. The chicks were all female, and Jack said that the newborn chicks were sexed by Japanese, who could differentiate the sex of the chicks, a secret that they kept to themselves and passed down to their children. As the chickens matured into hens, some were caught, placed in a burlap bag, and taken to Albany, where they were butchered by a kosher butcher. When they were brought home, usually two or three at a time, they had been plucked off their large feathers but still had their pin feathers. Jack would take them out behind the loading dock and build a hot fire of crumpled newspapers. He then would hold the chickens over the fire and rotate them, singeing off the pin feathers. The mature hens usually had immature eggs of various sizes, which Rose would add to chicken soup. Getting an egg in our soup was considered a prize. Also, sometimes the chicken feet would be skinned and added to the soup for flavor. Our chickens were what are now called “free-range” chickens. They were not confined to a chicken coop but were in a fenced-in yard, although some frequently escaped and walked about the back yards looking for edible bugs and worms. Sometimes my sisters and I would bring back a pail of little horned dace fish that we caught by the bridge at Mort Miller’s creek and feed the fish to the chickens. The chickens would peck excitedly at the flopping fish and eventually eat them. I enjoyed the daily routine of collecting eggs. The chickens laid their eggs in nests that consisted of wooden soda boxes that Jack had nailed to the walls in the shed. The nests were filled will hay or straw. Sometimes a hen would announce the production of her egg by a cackle, while others would just sit silently on the nest. There was a brown straw basket that I carried to get the eggs. Some of the nests had an egg or two clearly visible, but I would have to slide my hand under hens that were still nesting to check for eggs. The hens didn’t seem to mind and never pecked at me. Sometimes, for the sport, I would chase chickens around and catch them. Some would be very submissive and just crouch down to be picked up. Others would protest and flap their wings in an escape attempt. Jack frowned upon my chasing chickens and said that their being chased would cause their undeveloped eggs to break or become bloody.

Jack always claimed to suffer from a stomach ulcer and was always taking Tums or some other antacid. Someone suggested that he could be helped by drinking goat’s milk, so one spring, after Bossie died, Jack bought a Toggenburg nanny goat, whom I named Mickey. It was my chore to milk Mickey, but she was not as agreeable to being milked as was Bossie. Also, a goat’s teats are much smaller than that of a cow, and consequently more physically difficult to milk. The goat’s milk did not help Jack’s ulcer, and eventually, Mickey stopped producing milk and dried up. She continued with us for the summer and fall, becoming just a pet. She would follow me when I rode my bicycle to Nigger Bridge, and she would go for a swim in the Kinderhook Creek. In the fall, she would wait for the school bus and try to board it with me in the morning. Rose was not happy with her since, like all goats, Mickey would eat the few flowers and bushes around the house. When winter came, Jack sold Mickey. We had goats once before, when I was very young, probably around 1945. Jack’s father, Henry, was living in a small house (later Thoma’s Tires) on Bunker Hill, about 3 miles west of the Village of Nassau. He raised some goats, and once when a goat had twin kids, Jack brought them home in a bushel basket and gave them to Lelia and Sylvia. Lelia’s nanny goat was simply named Nanny, and Sylvia named her billy goat Buckey Boy. Lelia’s goat was eventually hit by a car and killed. Our neighbors, the Hastings, picked up the dead goat’s body and brought it home to butcher for food. Sylvia said that Jack sold Buckey Boy, and he also wound up as food.

The local swimming hole was a little more than a mile away on Old Route 20. It was one of three original bridges on Route 20 that crossed the Kinderhook Creek. When Route 20 was realigned during the 1930s, it was replaced with a new bridge as the highway route was shifted south. According to my father, sometime in the early 1930s, three black musicians from Pittsfield were killed in a one-car accident on the bridge. After that accident, the locals started referring to the bridge as “Nigger Bridge.” The water was deep below the bridge, and daring young men would dive off the bridge. There was also a shallow area south of the bridge that served as sort of a beach, although it was devoid of sand and had just river gravel, pebbles, and small stones.  It eventually became very popular as a swimming hole,  and it was not unusual to see the swimmers’ cars parked along Old Route 20 for about a third of a mile on weekends. I remember that one day a black man stopped by Jack’s Place to ask directions to the swimming hole, and even he referred to it as “Nigger Bridge.” It continued to be called by that name even though the steel bridge itself was swept away during a flood in the early 1950s. My mother disliked me going swimming there during summer heat because of the threat of polio.

I once had a pet skunk named “Petey.” A customer, Ed Komat, came into the bar one day carrying this very little skunk. He had dug up a den of them on his property in Brainard. After showing it off in Jack’s Place, he decided he didn’t want it and offered it to me, which I readily accepted. Jack said that the skunk could live in Jack’s Place, and fixed up a cardboard carton. We fed him pieces of hot dogs, and he was a great curiosity. I called Harry Zweig, the local veterinarian, and asked if he would remove the scent glands, but he refused. One day, when Petey was perhaps a couple of months old, Martha Alyward and her husband were sitting at the bar drinking. Martha held Petey in her lap, petting him like a kitten. She casually asked if Dr. Zweig had performed the operation, and I told her that Petey still had the scent glands. She slowly put Petey down, walked outside near the road, and started screaming, having realized that she could have been sprayed. After that, Jack said Petey had to move to the cow stable. I brought Petey out, and he made a home for himself under the floor, going in and out through a broken board. If I tapped the floor, Petey would come out for his hot dog. One day I tapped, and 2 skunks came out. I couldn’t tell which was Petey, and I fed them both. A day or so later, Jack said that he saw Petey walking toward the swamp, and we never saw Petey again.

Slot Machines at Jack's Place

 SLOT MACHINES (As told to me by my father)

Although slot machines were illegal in the mid-1930s, they were frequently found in taverns throughout much of the state, including Rensselaer County. The slot machine owners paid local law enforcement to ignore their presence.

Jack's Place had two slot machines.  They sat on a shelf behind two sliding panels behind the bar.  Periodically, the slot machine owners would come and open the machines when the tavern was closed.  The take would be counted and evenly divided by the owners and my father, as was the common practice.  The proceeds were not significant from the nickel machines, although my father said he could make a little more if he played the mechanical "one-arm bandits" early in the morning, as they paid off more when cold.

One evening in mid-March 1938, my father was at a meeting of the Masonic Lodge in Nassau while his brother, Harry, tended the bar for him.  During the meeting, a fellow member who was a Town Justice of the Peace told my father that as a result of some anti-corruption change in the county, the State Police were confiscating the slot machines.  My father rushed back to Jack's Place just as the Troopers were arriving.  Although they were supposed to confiscate the slot machines, my father asked them to wait a day, as he needed his share of the proceeds to pay the hospital bill for my birth. He called the slot machine owners, who came but wanted to take the machines away with them.  My father told them that he had made a promise to the Troopers that the machines would be available to be confiscated, and if they tried to take the machines, he would call them immediately, and they would probably arrest them. They reluctantly left without the machines, which were picked up the next day by the Troopers as agreed.

 

The Nassau Shul

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we three Jewish boys, Marvin, Herbert, and Arnold, were excused 15 minutes early from our class in the Nassau School so that we could walk down the hill to the Shul for Hebrew School. [The Catholic boys and girls got out early on Fridays to go to their church’s instruction]. Sometimes I would take a short detour to the Nassau Pharmacy and get a fifteen-cent sundae from Mr. Waters at the Nassau Pharmacy. I don’t know why we were released early since it was a short walk, and Mr. Cohen was never ready for us when we got there. He always looked the same and wore a brown, slightly rumpled hat and the jacket from an old brown suit. He had a mustache, but no beard, although he usually looked as though he had a couple of days’ growth of whiskers. His teeth were brown and crooked. They reminded me of the teeth of a woodchuck I once caught in a spring trap.

At least once a week, Mr. Cohen would start the afternoon by butchering chickens in the yard behind the Shul. That was always great fun to watch, as he would pick a couple of feathers off the chicken’s neck, murmuring a prayer before administering the coupe de Graz to the birds, which were usually carried around to the back of the Shul in burlap bags. The few older students who went to school by bus in East Greenbush got there a little later in the afternoon, so they missed this entertainment. The Shul originally had an enclosed wooden porch in the front, where there was an old wind-up Victrola and a few of the old thick 78 records. I remember one record that we played was nothing but gales of laughter, not like the laughter on a sit-com soundtrack, but almost as though the laughter was used as musical instruments. Sometimes, the laughter got on Cohen’s nerves, and he would come out to the porch and shoo us away.

When the Hebrew School was started, I was in the third or fourth grade. Initially, my sisters, Lelia and Sylvia, and my cousin, Leona, all of whom were in higher grades at Columbia High School, were part of the student body. A few days after the Hebrew School was first started, my sisters successfully petitioned my father to be excused from attending with the argument that girls didn’t get Bar Mitzvahed, so what was the purpose of going? Leona also dropped out a short time later.

At first, the plan was to teach us to read, write, and speak Yiddish. We had a thin black book, sort of a poorly illustrated Dick and Jane, without a Spot. I quickly learned and never forgot the phonetic, “Pamela kumpt arine mit a groisy tumult.” Unfortunately, that’s all I ever learned. The congregation was almost evenly split into two factions. One camp insisted that the children learn Yiddish, and the other group wanted us to learn Hebrew. The balance of power would shift every so often, and we put away Pamela and started to read similar-looking characters that made words that sounded different and meant something else. Then the powers would shift again, and out would come noisy Pamela! In the end, I never became trilingual, or even bilingual.

Twice a week was not enough to prepare for the Bar Mitzvah, and during the school year, we had a Sunday morning session. Mr. Cohen had a small farm on Duesenberry Hill Road, a couple of miles east of my family’s home at the foot of Lord’s Hill. He would stop his car in front of my parents’ home and wait for me, sometimes impatiently blowing the horn of his green 1930s Lafayette coupe. We would stop to pick up Arnold, who would always be dutifully waiting in front of his parents’ fruit stand. Sometimes I would pretend to sleep late, and after a while, Cohen would drive off without me. Riding with Mr. Cohen was an adventure. His eyesight wasn’t too good, and he wore thick glasses with yellowing clear plastic frames and smudged lenses. He relied on me to look for traffic when he pulled out. “Moshe, give a keek.” Our fate was in my ability to judge whether he could get the Lafayette across Route 20 before a tractor-trailer slammed into us. 

As I studied for my Bar Mitzvah, Mr. Cohen taught me to chant the appropriate passages in Hebrew. I remember asking him to translate the passages for me, but he dismissed my request, telling me that I didn’t need to know what it meant, only to be able to say it. To this day, I have no idea of the meaning of my Bar Mitzvah chanting. 

A Bar Mitzvah was not a social event in my childhood in Nassau. There were no invitations sent out. My mother came, but my sisters and uncles didn’t. My maternal grandfather, David, who was very orthodox, came from the Bronx for the occasion, bringing me a new tallis and tefillin. He clucked over me as he wrapped the leather straps of the tefillin around my arms and head that morning and chanted along with me. After the ceremony, we all had the usual round of liquor and honey cake and went home. I have never taken the tefillin out of its burgundy bag since that day.

After my Bar Mitzvah, I only went to Shul on Yom Kippur. After the big supper late in the afternoon before the holiday, my father and I would pick up my uncle Harry and drive to Nassau. The car would be locked up in the parking lot of the Nassau Hardware Store for the night, with my father and uncle usually making some comment about the fact that the store’s owner, Sam Smith, not only didn’t come to Shul but that he openly drove on the high holiday. In my early years, my uncle Sam would also come for holiday services, spending the night at Harry’s house. The evening services were always the same. Naturally, the men sat in the few chairs set up in the center of the Shul or along the long tables on the right side. The women sat on the left. The evening (like the following day’s services) was an endless ritual of standing up and sitting down. I would read the English text without making any spiritual connection. Every so often, the leader would yell out the page where we were supposed to be, and pages would be turned. Once or twice Old Man Pollack would growl at my father and Harry to keep quiet when they would start talking about secular matters to each other. Sometimes the prayers would be interrupted so that Morris Gross could auction off the privilege of holding the Torah.

Until my father was in his late 70s and ill, we always walked home on Yom Kippur evening. Traffic was heavy in the early years since the New York State Thruway Berkshire Spur hadn’t been built, and Route 20 was the main road from Albany east into New England. We walked against traffic without a flashlight, and as each truck roared by, we got a blast of cold air in the face. I remember walking home some years when it was still warm, but I also have memories of walking in the bitter cold and even in the rain. My father and Harry would talk all the way to Harry’s house, usually about the stock market and town politics. The next morning we would be up and out of the house by nine. For some odd reason, I recall that the weather was usually warm and dry for the walk back to Shul on Yom Kippur morning. Sometimes Harry would wait for us to come by, but if Sam was staying at his house, the two of them would usually strike out on their own. I always felt a bit self-conscious walking to Shul. Mostly, just bums walked the roads, and here we were walking all dressed up in suits. Every so often, probably six or seven times during the three-mile walk, a neighbor or one of my father’s tavern customers would spot us walking and stop to offer a ride. My father would thank the people and offer a brief explanation of why we were walking. I think that many of the same people stopped each year. My father’s youngest brother, my uncle Max, lived halfway up Lord’s Hill between our house and my uncle Harry’s home. Max was the family’s first atheist, and if he drove his pickup truck past as we were walking, he would wave and toot the horn. My father just ignored him on Yom Kippur.

If the weather was nice on Yom Kippur, it was traditional to go for walks around the village, particularly up Elm Street and Lake Avenue. The men would go together in groups. The less observant the men, the longer and more frequent the walks. Some of the boys would collect a pocketful of horse chestnuts from the big tree that stood in front of Kelly’s Hotel (now the closed gasoline station). They made good “stones” to throw on the school bus the following day. 

One year the congregation had an unexpected visitor for Yom Kippur. Maude Wagner, an eccentric older Christian woman who lived with her brother on Jefferson Hill Road, came to the Shul for Yom Kippur. She just marched in, announced that she was Jewish, and took a seat among the startled women. Most of the congregation was amused watching as she tried to follow the backward pagination. Some of the women tried to help her follow the progress of the services in the prayer book. Others scowled, but no one asked her to leave.

I remember some years when my mother walked to Shul on Yom Kippur, but those occasions were very few. She never seemed to have too much interest in religion, and I think she disliked having to sit apart from my father in Shul. She was resentful that her father, David, had not been a good provider for his family, as he spent most of his time in his Shul in the Bronx when she was growing up, rather than earning a good living to support his large family.

After my father died on Yom Kippur in 1979, I continued to go to Shul on Yom Kippur evening for several years. I would drive to my mother’s home in Nassau for the traditional dinner and then drive to Shul before sundown. After the evening services, I would drive to my home in the northern part of the county, but not come back on Yom Kippur day. At first, I felt a connection with my father and uncles while sitting at one of the long tables, remembering how things had been there, but eventually I realized that most of the faces were new and unknown to me, and soon I became a stranger in the Shul and stopped coming. 

All of the men who were the men of the congregation when I was a child are now long dead. I remember their faces and words each September when my sister Sylvia and I walk among the monuments in the Nassau Hebrew Farmers Association Cemetery, putting stones of remembrance on them. 

I am glad that the Nassau Shul continues, even though my family no longer takes an active part in it, and there are few, if any, of the founding families still actively associated with it. As a child, I envied the stately Methodist and Catholic churches in the village, but as I grew older, I realized that the structure was unimportant. For me, the Nassau Shul will always be Morris Cohen butchering chickens in the back yard, Morris Gross auctioning the Torah, and my father and uncles kibitzing while the old men dovened in some incomprehensible language.

A Trip to New York City

At least once a year my parents would drive the family to the Bronx to visit relatives.  My maternal grandfather and my maiden aunt Sue lived at 1421 172nd Street in the Bronx, and my mother’s siblings and some cousins who lived in the area would congregate there.  The big treat was the lox, whitefish, and other Jewish foods that they brought.  Our family stayed at the Grand Concourse Plaza Hotel.

One year, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, we arrived late in the day and stayed at the hotel for the evening.  My parents went to bed fairly early, but I stayed awake.  My father always brought some bottles of alcoholic beverages to the family gatherings, usually whiskey and blackberry brandy.  As children, we were given blackberry brandy as “medicine” for some upset stomachs and we delighted in its taste.  We also used to take a drink of it on occasion when we were in Jack’s Place, and no one else was there.  On this particular trip, I opened the bottle of blackberry brandy and took a drink, and then another, and I don’t know how many more, but I soon was drunk and staggered into my parent’s bedroom, laughing and barely able to control my movements.  My parents were not happy!

The next day, while all of the extended family was catching each other up on their families, my father decided to take a subway to Macy’s in downtown Manhattan.  I went along with him.  The subway platform was quite crowded, and the travelers pushed forward into the open car.  My father got on just as the door was closing, but I didn’t make it.  I vividly remember looking at my father through the subway window and the look on his face as he recognized me just as the train started to move.  He pointed and mouthed “next stop” to me as his subway car disappeared. Soon, another subway stopped, and I got on.  Fortunately, both subways turned out to be locals, and when the train arrived at the next stop, my father was standing on the platform waiting for me.

Picking Vegetables for Harry and Max

Menands Farmers Market

My Uncle Harry was a tomato, corn, bean, and cucumber farmer.  He could plant the vegetables and pick most of the sweet corn, snapping the ears off the stalks and putting 52* ears into a burlap bag.  Some tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers were sold on a roadside stand in front of his house on Route 20 at the top of Lord's Hill.  Every day, he would load his pickup truck with the morning's pickings and go to the Menands Farmers Market (http://www.capitaldistrictfarmersmarket.org), a wholesale farmers' market, but retail customers were allowed in.  He frequently had standing orders from some of the food wholesalers who had their facility at the market, but he always sold everything he brought.

Harry needed help picking beans and cucumbers since they were small and sold in bushel baskets.  His solution: child labor.  Certainly, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were no migrant laborers to pick these crops in our area, but there were schoolchildren with nothing to do for the summer.

Every morning during picking season, Harry would pick up boys and girls in the back of his pickup truck and take them to one of his fields to pick.  Picking beans was quite labor-intensive because it took so many of them to fill up a bushel basket for which we were paid fifty cents per bushel.   Harry would walk through the fields and check the bushels to see they were filled a little over the top.  He would then carry the bushels to the end of the row, where he would affix the cover.  Some workers would sometimes try to cheat by stuffing some of the bean plants into the bushel to fluff it up.  Once, Gerry Plumb put a rock in the basket to make it feel heavier, but when Harry discovered it, Gerry was forever banned.  It was hot work in the summer, but for many, it was the only chance to make a few dollars.  I used to bring a thermos of ice water, but my sister Sylvia and my mother joked about that and called me "Gunga Din."  

Picking tomatoes was easier than picking beans, but the pickers had to be careful to pick tomatoes that were properly ripe and not green or overripe.  Once in a while, some of the pickers would get into tomato fights with overripe tomatoes, but that didn't last long because Harry could easily figure out who the culprits were and threatened to ban them as pickers if there was a reoccurrence.

Cucumbers were not hard to pick, but the varieties that were grown then did not have the smooth skin we find in the supermarkets today.  Instead, they were covered with tiny spines that stung the hand.  Every day, after picking, Harry would sort the cucumbers according to size.  The smaller the "cukes," the higher the price per bushel.  No one really wanted the very large cucumbers, and we were instructed not to put them in the baskets when we picked them.

After the morning picking was over, Harry paid everyone in cash and drove them back to where he had picked them up.  After the pickers had been driven home, Harry would load up his pickup truck and head to the market.

Typical Strawberry Planting

My Uncle Max grew strawberries in a large field near his home, between Jack's Place and Harry's home.  Unlike other crops, which were annuals, strawberries usually needed a second year to yield well and didn't have to be planted every year.  Also, unlike most other summer crops, strawberries were planted as young plants purchased from a commercial grower.  Max had a tow-behind strawberry planter, and on some occasions, my father and I would help Max with the planting.  Max drove the tractor in a straight line at slow speeds, and my father and I would sit on a flat seat, almost touching the ground.  We would each have a box of young berry plants, and as the tractor pulled us forward, a small plow would open a shallow furrow.  We would take turns placing the young plants into the furrow, with the spacing controlled by the tractor's speed.  At the back of the strawberry planter, there were two metal wheels set at an angle to each other, and they would close the furrow, thus planting the berries. 

Strawberries were a June crop.  In addition to picking strawberries, at ten cents per quart, Max would sometimes hire me to sell strawberries at a wooden stand that he built on the side of Route 20, right next to the strawberry field. Berries were sold for fifty cents a quart, and business was always brisk because everyone knew that the berries were picked that morning. 

Max also raised chickens and sold eggs.  During the winter, he made "Adirondack Chairs" in a shop in his home and sold them.  Max had been a tenant at his home and farm but eventually bought a home on Route 9, several miles away, where he built a very nice permanent vegetable stand.  

* To Harry, a dozen ears of corn consisted of 13 ears to compensate for a possibly wormy ear; thus, a burlap bag contained 52 ears of corn.