Slot Machines at Jack's Place

 SLOT MACHINES (As told to me by my father)

In the mid-1930s, although slot machines were illegal, 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 do the planting by himself and picked most of the sweet corn also, snapping the ears off the stalks and putting 52* ears into a burlap bag.  Some of the tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers were sold by 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) which was 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 in picking beans and cucumbers since they were rather small and were sold in bushel baskets.  His solution:  child labor.  Certainly, in the late 1940s and early l950s, there were no migrant laborers to pick these crops in our area, but there were school children 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 that they were filled a little over the top, and then carry the bushel to the end of the row where he would affix the cover.  Some of the workers would try to cheat, sometimes 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, 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 not as difficult as picking beans, but the pickers had to be careful to pick tomatoes that were properly ripe, and not green or overripe.  Once in awhile 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 too hard to pick, but the varieties that were grown then did not have the smooth skin that 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 the place 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, which was then between Jack’s Place and Harry’s home.  Unlike other crops, which were annuals, strawberries usually need a second year to yield well and didn’t have to be planted every year.  Also, unlike most of the other summer crops, strawberries were planted as young plants purchased from a commercial grower.  Max had a tow behind the 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 speed of the tractor.  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, I believe 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.  I think 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, and 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 bad ear; thus a burlap bag contained four dozen ears of corn.

Summer Jobs

I returned home to Nassau at the end of my freshman year at Syracuse University. Although I would continue to work part-time at my father’s tavern and gas station, I wanted a regular job. John Weaver, a high school classmate who lived in the Nassau Lake area, and I went to the Albany office of the New York State Labor Department, which operated an employment office where it matched employers with potential employees without fees.

 After checking in for a couple of days, we were offered a job at Latham Circle where the new Thunderbird Motel was being built. We were told that the pay was $1.90 per hour, which was not bad since the federal minimum wage had just been raised from seventy-five cents to one dollar per hour. The catch was that it would be hard labor work and that we had to be on the job by 5:30 in the morning. With no other prospects, we accepted the job and drove out to the job site the next morning. We were given pick-axes and shovels and started digging trenches for the foundation footers. The ground was heavy and stony and the work was much harder than we were used to. After the fourth day, John heard of another job opening that needed two temporary workers in addition to another college student who had been hired. The pay was less - $1.75 per hour, but the hours were regular and the work promised to be much easier. We quit the construction job, only to find out when we received our paycheck the following Friday that we were actually being paid $4.90 per hour. We tried to get rehired, but the jobs were taken. To this day I can never drive past the Thunderbird Motel without remembering that hard work.

Our new job was with the Gahagan Construction Corporation of New York City. Gahagan had been hired by the New York State Thruway Authority to complete a geophysical study of a small section of the “Berkshire Spur” that would connect the Thruway with the Massachusetts Turnpike. The particular section where we were going to work was near Chatham Center in Columbia County. The crew consisted of me, John, the other college student, and two full-time technicians from New York City. The baseline had already been marked out by a survey team, and this job was to determine the soil and bedrock conditions along that baseline. This was done by taking seismographic soundings. This was done by sending shock waves into the ground by exploding dynamite and recording the echoes using electronic sensors called geophones. The geophones were connected to a recording device in a laboratory mounted on a truck body. The resulting graph looked like a cardiogram. The soundings were made 220 feet along the baseline at a time. We would unroll two 110-foot-long cables, end to end along the baseline. A third cable connected the two cables with the instruments in the laboratory. The metal geophones, each a little smaller than a teacup, would be connected to the cables with connectors every ten feet. The shock waves were created by setting off three small dynamite charges simultaneously. I was selected to be in charge of planting the dynamite, something that I never told my parents until the summer was over. Each morning on our way to work, John and I stopped at a pull-off on Route 66 where the dynamite was stored. We had a key to a gate and another key to open the large metal storage box where the dynamite was kept. We would load a few sticks of dynamite and some blasting caps into the car and bring them to the job site. After work, we would return any dynamite and blasting caps that hadn’t been used back into the storage box.

John and the other student had the job of laying out the cables along the baseline and attaching the geophones. I used a steel crowbar near the ends of the cables and near where they met to punch a hole about 3 feet deep. I would run a wire from the laboratory to each hole and attach an electric blasting cap to the wire. I would cut the dynamite sticks in half, insert a blasting cap into the dynamite, push it into the hole, and then pack dirt back in. The technicians had explained that dynamite was actually quite safe unless triggered by a spark that was provided by the blasting cap. In fact, one could hold a match to the dynamite; it would burn but not explode. I carried dynamite and the blasting caps in my pockets.

We enjoyed the job. The work was not really hard and we weren’t rushed. There were many times when the technicians were doing their work, and we could just sit around, talk, and sometimes eat wild strawberries that we found.

One morning I screwed up. We had been given machetes to clear the path of any pricker bushes or wild raspberry vines that would prevent the cables from being laid straight. After the cables were laid I snipped at a vine with my machete and hit a cable. I didn’t completely sever it, but some of the wires inside were cut. The three of us had a quick conference and decided to say nothing. We went back to the laboratory where we would be safely away from the blast and waited. The warning horn was sounded, and the technicians detonated the dynamite. A couple of minutes later one of the technicians came out of the laboratory and traced one of the cables. He returned in a few minutes, looking grim. After he conferred with the other tactician, he said,  “Boys, someone cut the cable. I don’t know who did it, and I don’t care, but don’t let it happen again.” The technicians did not have a replacement cable with them, and they spent the rest of the day carefully splicing the cable together while we picked wild strawberries and wondered whether we would keep our jobs.

That job ended toward the end of June or the beginning of July. John got a job delivering ice cream that lasted him for the rest of the summer. George Reischuck, a neighbor and friend who was a year ahead of me in school, heard that Ft. Orange Paper Company in Castleton was hiring summer help. We went there and were hired.

The Ft. Orange Paper Company was located in Castleton, New York, a few miles south of Rensselaer and Albany. Its plant was near the Hudson River and consisted of a paper-making facility, a printing plant, and the company’s offices. The paper that it manufactured was really light cardboard, the kind used in small food boxes, tissue boxes, etc. The main ingredient was old magazines and newsprint, and truckloads of it were delivered for this recycling. George and I were employed in the printing plant.

The factory was very busy that summer, and it worked three shifts. Cardboard manufactured in the mill was cut into large sheets, probably four feet square. Pallets of the cardboard would be fed into large color printing presses where the designs for boxes would be printed and the outlines of the boxes scored. It was a marvelous process, as the sheets would go from one pallet through the press and be precisely loaded on a second pallet. Once printed and scored, “strippers” (employees with jackhammers with sharp blades) would trim the boxes and discard the selvage. The flat boxes would be moved to the shipping area and ultimately packaged for transport to the end-user.

Although Ft. Orange had several customers for whom it manufactured boxes, I only remember three: Chiclets boxes that held 2 Chiclets for vending machines, Hartz Mountain birdseed boxes, and Knox Gelatin boxes.

George and I started out on the day shift, working on Knox Gelatin boxes. These boxes, about the size of today’s Jello boxes, were brought to us on pallets. We had workstations across from each other, sort of like a partner’s desk. A pallet of Knox boxes would be placed on one side of both of us, and an empty pallet on the other side. Although the strippers had removed the selvage, there were 2 parts of the boxes that were scored, but too small to be removed with the jackhammers. One was a slot about 2 inches long and about 1/4 inch wide. The other was an area shaped like one-half of an arrowhead. Our job was to pick up a handful of the boxes, place them in a special wooden jig that had similarly shaped holes in the bottom, and then knock out those scored pieces with a mallet and slender chisel. It was tedious work, but not particularly hard. We were pretty much left alone after we showed competence in the work, and we could talk as we worked. After a few days, George was taken off that job and given other duties. I was left to continue with the Knox boxes.  They had a picture of a cow in the center of a circle, and most of the box was greenish-yellow. With George on another job, I had no one to talk to, and I developed a rhythm; pick up a handful of boxes, put them in the jig, hammer the slot and the half arrow, put them on the other pallet, and start over again. After I had been doing this for a couple of days, the shop foreman came to me and asked if I knew how many boxes I had finished that shift. I told him that I didn’t keep track, but apparently, he did. He said that I had done approximately 22,000 boxes so far and that the previous record for a complete shift was a little over 18,000 boxes. He said, “You’re going back to college in a little while, but management will expect the regular guys to keep up that production.” He said that he was going to mark my day’s work at 16,000 boxes and that I should “go read some magazines.” I went to the large shed where the magazines and papers awaiting recycling were stored and read magazines. After that, whenever I worked on the Knox boxes, I would punch 15,000 or so and then go and read magazines for the rest of my shift.

After a while, George and I were put on the evening shift, midnight to 8 am. That worked out well for us. We would go swimming in the Valatiekill near Castleton in the late afternoon and usually stop at a bar in Castleton to shoot darts, have a sandwich, and a couple of beers before going to work. (The legal age for alcohol was still 18 at the time). 

One of my chores on that shift was to move pallets to and from the presses and to and from the stripping areas. Battery-operated hand trucks were used to move the pallets.  The base would fit under a pallet and jack it just slightly off the floor. The worker would then lead the hand truck with a long handle, as the electric motor powered wheels. One evening I made a 90-degree turn too fast and approximately 50,000 penny Chiclet boxes fell off the pallet and fanned out over the floor.  No one got too excited about anything that happened on the night shift.  Many of the regular employees would catch a couple of hours of sleep during their shift since none of the higher management worked then.

Eventually, George and I were assigned to feed cardboard into a big four-color press that was printing Hartz Mountain Bird Seed Food boxes. We would together lift a stack of blank sheets of cardboard into the press. The sheets would then be lifted, one by one, into the press by a mechanical arm that grabbed each sheet, and moved it into the press. We became a little sloppy in feeding the press, and as a result, the mechanical arm once picked up two or three sheets instead of just one. The extra thickness of the multiple sheets of cardboard jammed the press and misaligned the plates. It took a couple of days to get the press running properly again since a repairman had to be brought in from the printing press factory to get it printing properly again.  The job at Ft. Orange ended just before Labor Day weekend when I returned to college.  Years later the company went into bankruptcy.

I came home at the end of my sophomore year at Syracuse University.  One evening, shortly after my return, I told my parents that I was meeting two high school friends, Bob Stewart and John Weaver and that I would be home by 10:00 p.m.  After I met Bob and John, we went to a bar in Rensselaer where we drank some beer and started shooting darts.  We were having a good time, and before we knew it, it was after 1:00 a.m. and the bar was closing, so we left.  

When I got home, I was surprised to see that the lights were still on in Jack's Place, and I went in to see why.  Both of my parents were there, and my father was on the telephone.  They had been calling my friends' parents, the State Police, and were getting ready to call hospitals since they were sure that something terrible had happened.  My explanation infuriated my father, and he announced that from then on, I would have to be home by 10:00 p.m. or I would have to move out of the house.

The next day I drove over to Camp Nassau, a children's boarding summer camp about five miles from home.  Camp Nassau was owned by the Krouner family and formerly had been a summer vacation destination, known as Krouners' Hotel, which had catered to Jewish families, mainly from New York City. The facility was about ten miles from Albany.  The Krouners knew my family, and their daughter, Risa, had been in kindergarten and first grade with me at the Nassau Elementary School before they moved to Albany. [Camp Nassau was initially operated by Ben Becker. The following year he re-established Camp Nassau in Guilderland, Albany County, and the Krouner family continued the original facility as Camp Schodack.)

I saw Lou Krouner and asked if he had any job openings, thinking that perhaps I could get a job as a counselor.  There were no counselor jobs open, but Lou asked if I would want to work doing such things as driving the van to Albany to pick up groceries, pick up campers at the bus or train station, and mow the lawns with a tractor.  I don't recall the wages, but the job included room and board.  I bunked with the counselors and went to social events. I had my own car there, and some evenings I would drive into Albany with some camp counselors and pick up submarine sandwiches at Mike's Subs on Central Avenue and State Street. Sometimes I would take the naive counselors on a tour of Green Street or Dongan in Avenue, Albany's notorious red-light district, where the ladies of the night would approach the car with their propositions or call out from windows with invites such as, "Come up and let me fuck your big cock."  

It was an enjoyable summer.  I would occasionally stop at home and see my parents. When the camp was over shortly before the fall semester started, I came home and observed the 10:00 p.m. curfew.

Following my junior year at college, I didn't get a job.  I was required to go to the Army ROTC summer camp at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, for six weeks, which made a summer job opportunity impractical.  Instead, before and after the ROTC camp I worked in Jack's Place just as I had done during summer vacations when I was in public school.

Growing Tomatos in Florida

My uncle Eddie was a full-time farmer. A bachelor for most of his life, he didn't own a home. Most years, he boarded with my uncle Max or with my uncle Harry during the vegetable growing season in upstate New York. Eddie didn't like winter, and at the end of the farming season, he usually drove his gray Hudson pickup truck to Florida.

Vegetable farming, or "truck farming" as it was generally known, did not require a great deal of equipment. The typical crops were corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, and various types of summer and winter squash. The primary piece of equipment was a tractor equipped with a plow to till the soil, a harrow or disc to break up the plowed soil, cultivators to destroy weeds growing in the rows, and a trailer to haul bags of fertilizer and hand tools throughout the fields and to bring the ripe produce to a central point. A lot of the work was manual labor: cutting the weeds away from each growing plant with a long-handled hoe.  

During late 1951 Eddie decided to try growing tomatoes in south Florida. The timing was perfect for him. The growing season for tomatoes didn't start until the growing season in upstate New York ended, and it was over in time for Eddie to return to New York. He shipped his equipment to Florida and rented a modest field near Homestead, south of Miami, where he successfully grew a tomato crop.

The following summer, he spoke enthusiastically about Florida farming to my father and convinced him that he should join him in a larger tomato growing venture during the coming winter growing season. 

Note Marking Periods 3 & 4

My parents would usually close their tavern for a winter vacation in Florida. The vacations had been limited when my sisters were in high school because they objected to missing classes, but once they both went to college and I was the only public school student, the vacation periods lengthened. I didn't particularly mind missing some school. Although the school administration objected to my leaving school for a time, my father told them that he and my mother were going to Florida, and did they expect them to leave me home alone?  While I was away, they marked my report card "on vacation" for the time I was gone. Only one teacher, Miss Bennett, the mathematics teacher, penalized me by not letting me return to geometry because she thought that I had missed too much while on vacation.

My parents and I drove to Florida at the start of Christmas vacation in 1952 to join Eddie in the tomato farming venture. My father rented rooms (possibly an efficiency apartment) at the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive near 8th Street in Miami Beach. The Beacon Hotel was in an area that primarily hosted Jewish families but is now in the heart of the tony "South Beach."

Shortly after we arrived, Eddie drove my father and me down to Homestead. It was strictly a farming country, a few years before the Air Force constructed the large Homestead AFB. The farmland was perfectly flat, with gravel or crushed white rock farm roads dividing the fields. There were ditches along the roads that always had a few inches of water in them. The fields were bare, as Eddie had arranged for them to be plowed and harrowed prior to planting. Unlike tomato growing in New York, where the farmers usually purchased small plants from greenhouses to get a higher-priced early crop, the procedure in Homestead was to harrow a stretch of soil along a road and sow the tomato seeds. When the fields were ready for planting, young plants were simply dug up from the roadside and replanted in the fields.

My father and I were probably the only active farmers living in Miami Beach. We dressed in our farm clothes most mornings and headed south in my father's 1947 Buick Roadmaster. We usually stopped at a diner in Coral Gables for breakfast and then met Eddie in the fields.  

One of the interesting aspects of farming in Homestead was natural irrigation. The water table was just below the deep topsoil. Some nocturnal soft-shelled land crabs moved into the fields during the summer when it was too hot and too wet to farm. Tomato farmers couldn't co-exist with the crabs because they would damage the plants. Accordingly, the first job that my father and I had was to poison the crabs. Eddie produced jars of an orange paste that contained poison and glowed in the dark. For a couple of days, my father and I walked the fields. Whenever we saw a crab's hole, we would put a dab of the poison paste on a wooden match-sized piece of dried reed and place it next to the hole. The crabs would find it at night, dine on it, and die. After the crab poisoning was completed, we had to stay away for a few days because the stench of the rotting crabs was too onerous.

When the time was suitable for planting, Eddie marked the rows by driving his tractor back and forth with a cultivator's tooth on either side down at the proper distance to separate the rows of tomatoes. It was at this point that the migrant laborers appeared. Our farm was not large enough to employ its own laborers, who required housing, transportation, and other amenities of life. Instead, Eddie subcontracted laborers as needed from a large grower with whom he had become friendly. Eddie was actually a social person. When not working, he was a dapper dresser with a pencil-thin mustache. He was very active in the Masons and became a Shriner. I believe that it was his Masonic contacts that provided the entre to the Homestead farming community.

Migrant labor in south Florida was quite different in the pre-Castro days. The migrant laborers were from Cuba, not Mexico, as is the case today. On the field, they were managed by a Black foreman who spoke enough Spanish to give directions. There was a chain of command: Eddie and my father would give directions to the Black foreman, who in turn would give directions to the Cuban workers. I was only about fourteen at the time and was too young and inexperienced in tomato farming to give directions. Although from time to time, I would drive the tractor to cultivate the tomato plants, I was given the chore of killing snakes. The ditches were home to snakes, and their actual or perceived presence was unnerving to the workers. Eddie equipped me with a double-barrel 20 gauge shotgun and a supply of cartridges containing lead birdshot. I would patrol the fields along the ditches and shoot snakes when I saw them, although most were black snakes not known to be poisonous. Perhaps, some were moccasins, but I didn't differentiate. If I was a snake, I shot it. One day I approached a foreman who was sitting under a tree having lunch. I noticed a snake in the tree above him, and without warning, I raised the shotgun and fired both barrels into the tree. I don't know if he was more frightened by seeing a white teenager suddenly point and fire a shotgun in his direction, or by the pieces of snake that rained down from the tree next to him.  

We didn't have to go to the fields on a day-to-day basis. As the crops grew, Eddie pretty much ran the show himself, and sometimes my father would go there by himself while my mother and I remained at the hotel or at the beach. My father's roots were in farming, and I think he enjoyed just being in the fields and talking with his brother.  

We had a Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio. It was a great radio in its time because it was both AC and battery-powered. It had several short wave frequency bands as well as the usual AM frequency. My father used to tune in some weather stations, and one day he learned of some severe weather system in the Caribbean but was thought to be heading towards Florida. Winter is not hurricane season in Florida, and the forecast was unusual. The possibility of a big storm was not even in the news media, which devoted most of the weather news to winter storms in the north, probably as an incentive to keep tourists in town. 

After some discussions, my father and Eddie sold the crop "on the field" at a discounted price to a local packing house. They received a check that they quickly cashed. Eddie loaded up his equipment and headed north. A couple of days later a massive rainstorm flooded the Homestead area farmlands and caused widespread destruction to the ripening crops. Eddie decided to quit Florida farming while he was ahead and restricted farming to upstate New York.

My First Date

The first date I ever had was in the spring of 1952 when I was 14 years old. The previous winter my parents and I were in Miami Beach during Christmas vacation and we stayed at the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive, I believe around 8^thstreet. My parents met another couple from Albany, Mr. and Mrs. Schneerson.  They were staying at the Colony Hotel, just up the street. They had a daughter, Sandra, who was slightly older than me.  Sandra was a student at Albany High School and was also a freshman.  The Schneersons lived on Myrtle Avenue, near Albany Medical Center.  I had some minimal contact with Sandra, who was always present with her parents when we all sat around on the hotel porch. 

Sometime that spring, I showed my aunt Sue a photo of Sandra that I had taken, and Sue prodded me into calling her for a date. It was awkward for me, particularly since I was too young to drive and lived 16 miles from Albany. I could only get to Albany by taking a bus or hitchhiking.

At Sue’s continuing urging, I telephoned Sandra and asked her if she would like to go to a movie with me on a Saturday afternoon. She agreed to meet me at the Palace Theatre, which was then the best of the several movie theatres in Albany.  The movie was “The Merry Widow”.  I bought our tickets and we sat next to each other on the lower level and watched the movie.  I don’t think that we spoke during the movie, and after it was over she took a bus home and I went to the bus station and took the Interstate Bus back home.  I never saw her again.

I never had another date until I was 16 and had a driver’s license.

Superman and Nedda in One Evening!

I was a senior at Syracuse University during the fall semester of 1958. Syracuse won an invitation to play Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day, 1959. Many Syracuse students were in the Miami area for the game, and I was there to photograph it for the Onondagan, Syracuse University’s yearbook. [Syracuse lost to Oklahoma, 21 to 6.] My parents and my sister, Sylvia, were in Miami Beach for the holidays before my parents left for their annual trip to California to visit my other sister, Lelia, and her family. I came to Florida separately, but stayed with my parents and sister at the Di Lido Hotel, on the ocean at Lincoln Road in Miami Beach.

I had a date for New Year’s Eve with some coed from Syracuse that I knew slightly. We were to double date with another couple from college. As I was leaving the Di Lido to pick up my date, I met Bob Penn, a classmate, who was standing in the hotel lobby. I asked him what he was doing at the hotel, and he said that he was picking up his date, a girl from New York City, who was staying at the Di Lido with her parents. We discussed a threatened airline strike, which was threatened for January second or third. I hadn’t given much thought to the possibility of a strike because I was planning to drive back to Syracuse with a couple of friends who were in Miami Beach for the game. Bob mentioned to me that when he met his date’s parents, her father had told him that if any of the students were stranded because of the strike, he would have room to take one person back in the family car. Just as he told me that, he pointed to the stairway where Nedda was descending to meet him and said that she was his date. I looked at her and told Bob that I thought I would be stranded by the airline strike and could use the ride to New York. He briefly introduced me to Nedda and told her that I needed a ride to New York. She gave me her family’s room number and left with Bob. I went on to pick up my date.

New Year’s Eve was spent with my date and the other couple in one of Miami Beach’s many nightclubs. It was a usual New Year’s Eve for the times: drinking, smoking, and dancing in a smoke-filled nightclub. The highlight of the evening was when we realized that an intoxicated gentleman at the bar was George Reeves, the actor who played Superman in the television series that had been very popular in the early 1950s. Although we were quite certain of his identity, he removed all doubt when, with a drunken smile, he loosened his tie, and opened his shirt to reveal the Superman top he was wearing beneath his suit. [Mr. Reeves was found dead of a bullet wound less than six months later, the cause of which remains an unsolved mystery.]

Although I was somewhat shy, I went to meet Nedda’s parents the next day and told them that I would certainly appreciate a ride to New York since the airline strike was becoming more certain. Although I had a tentative date for that evening with my New Year’s Eve date, I invited Nedda to go out that evening, and then canceled my tentative date with the co-ed, whose identity I have no present recollection of. I think that I took Nedda to a movie and purposely didn’t try to give her a good night kiss because I thought it would be very awkward if she were to be offended by a good night kiss on the first date. [Remember, it was the 50s!] I knew that Nedda was a high school senior, but she said that she was eighteen. A couple of months later I learned that she had recently turned sixteen.

January 1959

The following morning I said goodbye to my parents and Sylvia and met Nedda and her parents for an early morning start for our road trip to New York. It was a harrowing experience. I sat in the back seat of the family sedan with Nedda. She had her hair in curlers for most of the trip. She read magazines, chewed bubble gum, and chatted. Her father, Marty, drove like a maniac, and I doubted I would survive the trip. I frequently

Spring Weekend 1959

offered to drive, but he insisted on driving the whole trip himself. I remember crouching in the back seat while he drove through a late-night torrential rainstorm, passing slow-moving cars on a two-lane Georgia highway. I made no obvious headway with Nedda during that trip, being more concerned with staying alive. When her parents dropped me off at Grand Central Station in New York City where I could catch a train back to Syracuse, I had not even thought to get Nedda's address or telephone number. A few days later, when the terror of the road trip had faded, I called Bob Penn to find out if he had her address. He was reluctant to give it to me, but relented when I told him that I wanted to write a thank you note to her parents. Instead, I wrote to Nedda, and at the semester’s end in late January I drove to New York City for another date. During the following weeks, we corresponded frequently and she flew to Syracuse for Spring Weekend as I was able to arrange for her to stay at a dormitory.  After that weekend, I never dated anyone else. 

       We were married 2-1/2 years later.

My Military Service

As a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant, 1959

  

 ROTC

 

When I started college at Syracuse University in the fall of 1955, I could sign up for either physical education or Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Syracuse offered both Air Force ROTC and Army ROTC. There were two excellent reasons for me to choose ROTC: First, I never was very athletic, and the physical education classes didn't appeal to me; second, in 1955, there was Universal Military Training, which meant that all physically able males were supposed to serve either two years of active military service plus six years of inactive reserve service, or six months of active military service for training (ACDUTRA) followed by seven and one-half years of active reserve service. I knew that it would be much better to perform my service as an officer rather than in an enlisted status. Although I would have preferred to be in the Air Force ROTC, that service was looking for potential pilots, and my myopia disqualified me from the program. The initial ROTC commitment was for two years, the "basic" ROTC program. We were furnished with a homely brown wool uniform, consisting of a shirt, black tie, black shoes, greenish-brown pants, an "Eisenhower" jacket, a flat-folding cap, technically known as an "overseas" cap, but more commonly known as a "cunt cap," and a brown overcoat for winter wear. It was essentially an Army private's uniform. There was a shoulder patch and round brass insignia that identified us as ROTC students.

 

Every Tuesday and Thursday were drill days. ROTC students were required to wear uniforms on drill days and attend an hour of classroom instruction in military science and tactics, plus an hour of military drill. The drill was held on an athletic field in good weather and in a large field house in inclement weather. ROTC was a large program at Syracuse, and classes were held in a drab grey building devoted exclusively to the program. All of the instructors were active-duty Army officers, and the head of the program, a lieutenant colonel, was the Professor of Military Science and Tactics. The academic courses were monotonous but did not require any real class preparation, and I don't recall any homework or assignments.

 

The drill was more difficult. We were each furnished with a copy of the Army's drill manual, FM 22-5, which had instructions and how-to photographs on marching with and without a rifle. Drills were chaotic. Except for a few freshmen who had attended military high schools and a couple of first-year students who had served in the Army, most of us had no idea how to drill or march. Unlike soldiers in boot camp, who were taught by very experienced drill sergeants, our instructors were just upper-class ROTC students who had very little training themselves. The entire Army ROTC was called the battalion, and the top senior ROTC cadet became the battalion commander. The battalion was divided into five or six companies, which consisted of five platoons. The platoons were divided into five squads, each having six to ten members, depending on the total number of ROTC cadets. My squad leader, a sophomore chemistry major named Stan, was not proficient in drill himself. It was a struggle the first year to learn how to move correctly to the commands, but eventually, I could "dress, right, dress," "left face," "right face," "about-face," "present arms," "left turn, harch," "to the rear, harch," etc. [Note: for some reason, the word "march" was always pronounced "harch" in the Army.] In addition to the battalion staff, other seniors were company commanders or platoon leaders. Syracuse's star football hero, Jimmy Brown, was a company commander, but he frequently couldn't find his company and would wander about until some other senior led to the front of his company. Juniors and seniors were in the advanced ROTC and wore officers' uniforms. In the mid-1950s, the Army was switching from World War II-era style uniforms to a new style. The officers' Class A "pinks and greens," which were quite dashing, gave way to the all-green uniforms which, we were told, were supposed to more closely resemble a business suit.

 

Military protocol was followed on campus, and all of the ROTC students were continually saluting each other as they went from class to class across the campus. Only seniors became cadet officers. Instead of regular Army insignia of rank, cadets had silver circles or diamonds. A cadet second lieutenant had one dime-size circle; a first lieutenant had two, and a captain three. A major had one diamond, a lieutenant colonel had two, and a full colonel had three diamonds. There were no cadet generals. My freshman year squad leader, Stan, didn't elect to sign up for the advance ROTC in his junior year, and he would sometimes heckle me with a salute and a command when we passed on campus on a drill day.

 

At the start of my junior year, I signed up for the advanced ROTC. My mother was very upset, as she hated anything to do with war or the military. From my point of view, ROTC was an easy three credit hours each semester, and the advanced ROTC contract that we signed provided for payment of 90 cents per day during the school year. Juniors were issued brand new green officers' uniforms. Unlike the class that preceded us, which got new green uniforms like those issued to enlisted men, we were furnished with new high-quality officers' uniforms to be retained for our active duty service.

 

The highlight of advanced ROTC was the six weeks summer camp held between the junior and senior years. Syracuse University ROTC students were sent to summer camp at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina, one of several Army ROTC summer camps held throughout the United States. There were probably a couple of thousand cadets at the camp from many colleges. Cadets were housed in large open two-story barracks by platoons. The platoon leaders were all active-duty first lieutenants or captains, and the company commanders were full colonels. Cadets seemed to be randomly assigned to platoons, and I was the only Syracuse cadet in my platoon. Only four of us in our platoon were from northern colleges. The rest were from southern colleges such as the Citadel, Clemson, Wake Forrest, Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, and the University of Virginia. We started with one Black cadet, Hadley, from Ohio, but the southerners made him so unwelcome that he requested a transfer and was reassigned to another platoon with several other Black cadets. Gus Henning, a cadet from Michigan, whose cot had been next to Hadley's cot (we slept in alphabetical order), had tried to be friendly with Hadley, and as a result, awoke on a Sunday morning (when we could sleep late) to find that some southern cadets had painted his scrotum with liquid black shoe polish. After Hadley left, the only northerners were me, Gus Henning, and a cadet from Cornell, whose name escapes me. In the photo below, I am directly behind Hadley. Gus Henning is to my right. I am behind Hadley.

   

The southerners had an entirely different outlook on the ROTC program from us northerners. Most of the southerners relished the idea of military service, and many hoped to make it a career. The top ten percent of the ROTC class in each college were designated Distinguished Military Students and became eligible to receive regular Army commissions instead of reserve commissions. That was a goal that made some cadets very competitive. Our platoon leader was a regular Army first lieutenant who had graduated from some land grant college in the south.

 

Fort Bragg in July was not a pleasant place. It was sweltering, humid, and buggy. Part of our routine was to check each other for ticks when we returned to the barracks from the field. If we saw a tick with its head burrowed under the skin, we would hold a cigarette close to it until the heat made it back out so that it could be safely removed. Spider bites were worse. There were tiny brown spiders. I had a spider bite on my left wrist that was not only painful and itchy for several days, but the bite marks were visible for several months.

 

Although much of summer camp was hellish, it was not hell. I got a helicopter ride and shot a 3.5 rocket launcher, or bazooka as it was commonly called. I learned to iron clothing and disassemble and assemble my M-1 rifle. I also learned a lot about the attitudes of my southern contemporaries.

 

One day in mid-July, our scheduled training was abruptly canceled. We were loaded into trucks and driven to a training field, where we were seated in bleachers. Colonel Sam Razor, the ROTC summer camp commander, told us that the Marines had just invaded Lebanon and possibly the United States might be engaged in a war there. He then advised us that the contract we had signed for the advanced ROTC program provided that in a national emergency, the Secretary of the Army could elect to commission us at the conclusion of summer camp and order us to immediate active duty. Fortunately, the invasion of Lebanon did not escalate into a war.

 

Toward the end of summer camp, all of the cadets went on a three or four-day bivouac to expose us to simulated warfare. I went to the morning sick call just before leaving to get medicine for some cold-like symptoms that I had, and the medic gave me several bottles of the elixir of Turpin hydrate with codeine to take with me on bivouac. When we were about to start our long march to the bivouac area, our platoon leader told the Cornell cadet, Gus Henning, and me that we were the "platoon fuck ups," and he was assigning us to carry the 81 mm. mortar and its very heavy base plate. We struggled with it for perhaps a mile when some full colonel on the camp commander's staff rode by in a jeep and spotted us. He said that the mortar was too heavy to be carried any distance and told us to put it in the following truck to take us to the bivouac area, which we happily did. A couple of hours later, when our platoon arrived, we were sitting under a tree with our mortar, playing cards, and smoking. Our platoon leader never mentioned it, and I believe he was reprimanded for ordering us to carry the mortar. The bivouac was otherwise uneventful, and I enjoyed my medicine, which was commonly known as "GI gin."

 

Shortly before the end of summer camp, the Cornell cadet, Gus Henning, and I were each summoned to the company commander's office, and each told the same thing by our colonel. He said that based upon the report of our platoon leader, we would not be recommended for a commission in one of the combat arms: infantry, artillery, or armor. For a cadet hoping to make a career in the military, such news would have been devastating; for us, it was great news.

 

ACTIVE DUTY

 

During the second semester of my senior year, I received notice that I would be assigned to the Army's Adjutant General Corps. The Adjutant General's Corps was the branch of the Army that handled its administration and postal functions. I received written orders to report to the Adjutant General's School at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis, Indiana, in mid-July to start my six months of active duty for training. I graduated from Syracuse University on June 1, 1959, and the Professor of Military Scient and Tactics pinned gold bars on my new summer uniform.

 

There were 40 newly commissioned second lieutenants assigned to Officers Basic Course #2. We were each assigned a private room in the bachelor officers' quarters and were delighted to learn that we had maid service. The first two or three days were spent at the offices' club pool and buying short-sleeved summer khaki uniforms. One of the lieutenants from Texas, Homer Lee Tumlinson, brought Air Force khakis, which were a lighter shade than the Army khakis, but no one seemed to mind his individuality. Fort Benjamin Harrison, or "Uncle Benny's Rest Home" as it was commonly referred to, was the home of the Adjutant General's Corps and the Finance Corps. It had a very laid-back atmosphere. Most physicians and dentists assigned to the post medical facility wore regulation uniforms but spiffed them with penny loafers or tassel loafers. The father of one lieutenant owned a jewelry company, and he had all of his brass gold plated. 

The first phase of our course consisted of a couple of months of classroom instruction about the Army in general and the function of the Adjutant General Corps in particular. The AG school was in a modern brick building. Each student officer had a large office-style desk, and enlisted men arranged our books on our desks each day. Most of the classwork consisted of listening to lectures and occasional quizzes. Our classes started at 8:00 am with a ten-minute break every hour. After an hour and one half lunch break, we usually had another three hours of class and were done for the day. At one point, one of the school's instructors asked for a show of hands of all in the class who had not been through an infiltration course. We all raised our hands, but we were never put through any outdoor training. I never wore a fatigue uniform or handled a weapon once during my six months at Ft. Benjamin Harrison.

At the conclusion of the basic course, we were given a choice to take advanced training in either military postal service or data processing. These courses were taught as a mixed class of officers and enlisted men. The instruction was designed to educate the enlisted men who would work in these fields, mostly 18 to 20-year-old recent high school graduates. The lieutenants, all recent college graduates, found the work very easy. The enlisted men had a real \incentive to succeed – they were threatened with a transfer to an infantry unit in Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri if they failed. In 1959 the Army used large punch-card data processing machines since the computer age had not yet arrived. At the conclusion of the course, I received the military occupational specialty (MOS) of a machine records unit officer.

At the conclusion of the formal instruction, we were given a couple of weeks' leave. Upon our return, we found that the Army had no actual plans for us. Typically, we would have been sent to different military posts for the remainder of our six months of active duty, but we were told that there were too many lieutenants and not enough funds to justify our reassignment so that we would just spend the rest of our time at Uncle Benny's Rest Home. For our morning's work, we were given an empty classroom and told to take correspondence courses. No one monitored our work, and we could choose our courses and work at whatever pace we chose. For many, it became a morning card game, and some married officers who lived off the post just didn't show up for several days at a time. We were encouraged to find something useful to do in the afternoon, but it was not required. I took photographs for the public information office and later filled in as Assistant Post Adjutant. That job entailed scribbling my name on about 100 different routine documents each afternoon.

 

One memorable occasion occurred while I was walking near the post medical facility. An enlisted man walking towards me saluted as we passed, and we suddenly recognized each other and stopped. It was Stan. He had graduated from Syracuse University the previous year and started working for a drug company as a chemist when he was drafted. The Army didn't need chemists that year, so he was assigned to be a clerk typist in the post pharmacy. Stan almost cried when he saw me, and it made all of the ROTC Mickey-Mouse drills worthwhile.

 

When we were not in class or otherwise engaged, we could leave the post and go wherever we wished. We were told just to sign out and put the letters "VOCO" next to our signatures. The VOCO stood for "verbal order, commanding officer." Lt. Josef Levi, an artist, signed himself out and went to Spain for a couple of days after learning that a particular type of art was inexpensively available at a bazaar near Madrid. One weekend Dick Bryan, who grew up in Nevada (and later became its Attorney General, Governor, and United States Senator), wanted to see New York City. I called Nedda and told her I was coming in for the weekend with a friend. Dick and I put on our Class A uniforms and drove to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where we boarded an Air Force Reserve flight to Mitchell Field, not too far from where Nedda lived with her parents in Queens. We spent the weekend there and flew back on Sunday night.

 

I liked the Army. After living as a college student for four years, I enjoyed having a decent paycheck, maid service, congenial company, easy work, and the prestige of being an officer. Also, I had nothing better to do. I thought it would be great to extend my time on active duty and see some of the world. I asked the Commandant of the AG school if I could extend my tour of duty, indicating that I would be willing to accept a posting to any foreign military post, including Korea, but he told me that there were so many AG second lieutenants previously committed to a two-year tour of duty, or who had regular Army commissions, that I would need the backing of at least a United States senator to get an extension.

 

                   THE RESERVES

 

Under the Reserve Forces Act of 1955, I had an eight-year military reserve obligation which commenced with my commissioning on June 1, 1959. During the spring of 1960, I was assigned to an Army Reserve Postal Unit in Troy. It was the smaller of two postal units in Troy and was commanded by First Lieutenant Richard Hathaway. Lt. Hathaway was an older man, not too tall and with a wiry frame. He had served in an airborne ranger unit in World War II and Korea. He had been a sergeant in both wars and only reluctantly accepted a battlefield commission shortly before leaving active service in Korea. He loved the Army, and during our two-week summer camp at Camp Drum in Watertown, NY, he enjoyed the role of a soldier. On a night bivouac, he told his men that he would play the enemy and to be on the lookout for him. He would crawl up the hill in the dark and silently capture men half his age and twice his weight, pulling them out of their foxholes with his hand clasped over their mouths. Although hard liquor was not permitted on bivouac, Lt. Hathaway said that even the Army Military Police weren't permitted to search U.S. Post Office mail sacks, and on a day when the weather prediction was for a cold night, he took a mail sack into Watertown and brought back bottles of liquor, from which he offered his troops a shot at night to ward off the cold.

 

Shortly after entering law school that fall, I requested relief from attending weekly reserve meetings and was assigned to a "control group." Instead of weekly meetings, I took correspondence courses and was subject to being called to a two-week summer camp. After I got married, between my first and second year of law school, Nedda took over the correspondence courses for me so that I wasn't distracted from my law studies. Nedda would tell me all about the different weapons systems she had studied.

 

I spent the first summer camp at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, where I shared a room in the BOQ with an electrical engineer from Binghamton, NY, who worked for IBM designing the same type of IBM punch card data processing equipment used at Ft. Dix. Ironically, he was not permitted to touch the equipment since he did not have the proper machine records unit officer MOS, and the Army considered him a civil engineer. At the time, Ft. Dix was the headquarters of II Corps, which encompassed all Army reserve units and individual Army reservists in the northeast. Among the interesting things I learned from the head civilian bureaucrat who ran this section was that when the Korean War broke out, there was such chaos that privates were deciding which reserve officers to call to active duty. The unit would receive a list of officer ranks with specific MOS qualifications that the Army needed, and the privates, who were usually doing file maintenance, would look through the files and choose the reservists to send to war.

Following graduation from law school, I was assigned to the 364th General Hospital Unit in Albany. This was a large reserve unit that had no need for an Adjutant General officer, so I did a variety of training jobs. One summer, I was sent to Camp Drum in upstate New York and was put in charge of the ration breakdown warehouse, which provided the food for all the reserve and National Guard units for the two-week summer camp. It was the summer that I was learning to fly, and I supplied an Air National Guard unit from Connecticut with extra steaks for a barbeque in return for lessons flying the small, two-seat observation airplanes, known as the L-19 Bird Dog.

 

At the end of May 1967, my eight-year military obligation expired. I was considering extending my time in the reserves, but Viet Nam had started pressuring the Army to activate some reserve units. At my last meeting that May, I was told that an Army reserve general hospital somewhere in the United States would be activated the next day, but the unit's name had not yet been announced. Although I was scheduled to be promoted to the rank of captain at the next weekly meeting, I didn't want to take the chance of being activated, and I typed a letter resigning my commission. I also typed similar letters for two other officers. As it turned out, the Albany unit was not called to duty.

Now, many years later, I find that my military service entitles me to a 10% discount on purchases made at Lowes and a "Thank you for your military service" from the cashiers when I check out.