My First Heroes

My uncles were my first heroes – after Dad of course. The Anderson brothers Gene, Al, Bob and Don and Mom’s brother Erik. To a little kid, these guys were all great, kindly giants.

Erik Olsen was my mother’s adopted brother. He was a big burly NYPD cop. He worked shifts and got extra pay for holidays so sometimes was not around for family gatherings, but if we were at Grandma’s house at 29 Treadwell Avenue on Staten Island, he would usually stop by (He was actually born in that house in 1921).

He was on The Emergency Squad and didn’t ride around in a regular black and white police car but in a truck that I remember being like a UPS truck. These guys are the SWAT teams, the special rescue teams, hostage negotiators and also the canine units.  

During WWII, Uncle Erik was in the Navy. He was two years out of Port Richmond High School and joined up right after Pearl Harbor. He became a Chief Petty Officer in the Seabees which was the nickname for the Construction Battalion. He and his men would land on the heels of the Marines as they island hopped across the Pacific building back what the Japanese and the Marines blew up.

Uncle Erik was thirteen years older than Mom. He and Ruth Lucker were married on May 24, 1947 and lived on Floyd Street on Staten Island. I think Aunt Ruth had a sister or two that lived in the same block. They had a daughter named Ruth Ann, who I remember  married a guy named Harlow and they had a daughter.  Haven't seen them in a long time, though, so not sure what became of them.

Uncle Erik was a great genial guy who looked to me like Santa without a beard. Back then, all of our parents and Grandparents generation were members of ethnic clubs or Freemasons or both. The women were in the Eastern Star. Uncle Erik was in The Sons of Norway, and The Vasa Order of America – both clubs like The Elks, but for people of Scandinavian heritage. Their social lives were built around these organizations and they all had regular parties and dances and picnics. As a kid, I always looked forward to those events.

One of my best memories of Uncle Erik was at some Scandinavian picnic at a park called Pigeon Hill in Morris Plains or Parsippany – I think it’s part of Powder Mill housing development now. Back then there were picnic tables, b-ball courts and a lake to swim in.

Well, the men had a galvanized metal tub about as big around as a garbage can but only half as tall. It was full of ice and clams and sitting on a picnic table. They were drinking beer and shucking clams and sucking them down raw. I never had one before. Uncle Erik cut one open with a pocket knife and handed it to me saying, “Here try that.  That’ll put some hair on your chest!” (They were big about putting hair on your chest).

You know, I sucked down that clam and was so grossed out I made a really hideous face, which got him and his buddies laughing like it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. Then he hands me his brown bottle of Rheingold Extra Dry to wash it down. So I had my first clam on the half shell and my first beer within seconds of each other and I was all of about 7 years old. I thought they were both disgusting at the time but, hey, I was one of the guys!

The big picnic every summer for the Swedes and Norwegians was at Vasa Park in Budd Lake, NJ. It was a private retreat for the Scandinavians. The went there from all over New York and New Jersey. If you go to Scanfest, that’s the place. Vasa Park had shuffleboard courts. We kids would try to get on the shuffleboard courts and play, but the old men would chase us off. Shuffleboard was to these guys like Bocce was to old Italians.

Vasa Park has a gigantic pool -- it’s still there. It was fed from a spring so the water was freezing cold. They also didn’t have skimmers so there was always grass clippings and about a million dead bugs floating around the edges. We didn’t care. I seem to remember learning to swim there. No one had life jackets or water wings or any kind of floatation. It was unheard of and probably for sissies, anyway. Dad threw me in and yelled “Swim!” so I did.

They had a slide and a diving board. I don’t think there were any rules except don’t go in for an hour after eating. I cannot remember any adult ever saying don’t do this or don’t do that around that pool. We ran (there was no concrete around it, just grass) jumped and dove off the sides. Jumped on top of other kids in the pool. Pushed each other in. Went down the slide headfirst. It was completely out of control and wonderful. My father was always right in there with us doing cannonballs and throwing us in the air.

I can remember they had a soda machine at Vasa Park and one time a kid stuck his hand up the chute to try to catch the can as it was coming down.  Well, the can dropped and jammed his hand up in there so they had to take the whole machine apart to free him. It was very funny. For us. Not so much for him. If I remember right, he was crying the whole time.

There was a concession stand, but we always brought hamburgers and hot dogs and stuff and cooked on the charcoal grill. There would be potato salad and macaroni salad and chips and pretzels and all kinds of other terrific unhealthy dishes, but the only Scandinavian food I remember was Swedish meatballs. The grownups always had plenty of beer.

After swimming and shuffleboarding and eating and drinking all afternoon, as it got dark Uncle Erik and Aunt Ruth and Mom and Dad and Grandma and all the other aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles and other ancients would gather in this big wooden open aired pavilion. It was a big building with a roof, no walls and a dance floor. There would be a band with (of course) an accordion player, and those old Swedes and Norwegians would start dancing the Polka. There had to be twenty or more couples at any given time flying around in a big circle on the dance floor spinning around and stomping their feet so the floor shook.

The party would go on and on and on. It seemed to me like the dancing lasted very late into the night, but since most of the Staten Islanders came up on buses, they could drink to their hearts content and sleep all the way home.

Uncle Erik’s moment of fame came in the Summer of 1965. Less than a year after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened (Brooklyn to Staten Island), he went up to rescue a would-be jumper. There was a photographer along who snapped this really powerful image of Uncle Erik standing out there on a girder in the dark, hanging onto the jumper and hanging onto a cable at the same time. The picture was on the cover of that summer’s issue of Spring 3100, the NYPD’s internal magazine. My grandmother had it framed and hung it on the wall.

Uncle Erik retired from the NYPD after putting in his twenty years or so and then he went to work for Farrell Lumber on Staten Island, working in the lumber yard. As he got older, his hair went from gray to white and his face got very red. He probably had sky high blood pressure and one day at the lumber yard he had a massive coronary and just dropped dead. I think it was 1984. He would have been 63. Aunt Ruth lived to be very old – close to 90 I think. Here’s that picture.

Norm Anderson: A Brief Family History

I'm writing characterizations of my family for my newly discovered nephew, Jerry. He has 21 years of catching up to do and I thought others might find them fun to read. These are solely my impressions and will likely piss some people off. Sorry in advance. Here's the first:

My Dad’s dad was Reinhold Eugene Anderson. One evening when he was a toddler, his father said to his mother, “Olive, I’m going out for a sack of tobacco,” and they never saw him again. Reinhold was raised by a single mother and spinster aunt in household of women. She was nearly forty and frustratingly superstitious when he was born, so it was an odd upbringing. He left home to be a doughboy and grew to manhood on the battlefields of France during WWI. Whenever he spoke of his time in France, it was clear he thought it all a wonderful adventure.

After the war, he came home to Monroe, New York and learned the carpentry trade. He met a girl from Newburgh. She came from a good family that had a little money. Her name was Marion Mapes. She was a suffragette and had been to business school – a rare accomplishment for a woman in that time. One thing led to another, and the couple ran off to New York City and got married. They had a bunch of children -- nine altogether, but only six lived past infancy.

They were a family of six when the stock market crashed in ’29. They were seven when he lost his job in ’31. He never found another one.

My dad remembered early childhood as fine time. He told me that he and his brothers would run down to the bus stop each afternoon to meet their father coming home from work. He carried his toolbox on sling across his shoulder. Their house was full of happy children and overflowed with love.

That changed in 1931. With no work, the electricity was sometimes shut off. No money for coal to heat the house meant the cookstove was the sole source of heat and hot water. Baths were in a galvanized metal tub in the middle of the kitchen. Food was delivered by charities. They ate a lot of beans. The in-laws in Newburgh sent money when they could, but it wasn’t very much. The last child came in ‘33. In summers the kids were sent to farms upstate where they picked berries for pennies.  Their teeth rotted for lack of dental care.

It was a bad time. After years of useless searching for a job that didn’t exist, my grandfather descended into a black despair and just gave up. The house he owned free and clear fell into disrepair and deteriorated around them. My grandparents fought bitterly. The Anderson brothers figured out soon enough that if they were persistent and scrounged for work they could make a little money for food, so they did. They all stayed in school and got good grades.

By 1940, the oldest brother, Gene, graduated high school and was able to find a job and that helped a lot. When WWII broke out, he joined the Army and went off to the South Pacific. My Grandmother got a job building PT Boats for the Electric Boat Company (ELCO)  in Jersey City and living got easier. In ’42, Uncle Al finished school and joined Gene in the Army. Both brothers sent money home to their mother.

Dad worked after school and tried to join the Marines when he finished high school in ’44, but they wouldn’t take him. Neither would the Army or Navy. An umbilical hernia made him 4F and he was humiliated. So he got a job working for Cunard Steamship Lines on Broadway in Manhattan and joined the NYPD Special Police. Everyone had to have a uniform. If you didn’t have a uniform, you were nothing.

In America after WWII, life was good. The Anderson brothers came home safe. My grandmother got a small inheritance and bought a new house but my grandfather wouldn't leave the old one. He was now physically falling apart. He developed a hump on his back and stopped shaving. After great effort, the brothers persuaded him to abandon the decrepit house and join them in the new place. But he was so emotionally broken he spent nearly all of his time in the attic.

In June of 1950, my dad had been at Cunard for nearly six years. He was climbing the corporate ladder when the North Korean Army swept across the 38^th parallel and invaded the south. Several weeks later he got a draft notice. Although he was 4F in WWII, the Army needed men and to Dad’s surprise (and delight), they took him. He was twenty-four and that was old. They took his two younger brothers, too. Dad was the only one who saw combat.

Dad figured if he was going to be in the Army, he’d rather do it as an officer, so he qualified for Officer’s Candidate School (OCS), got his bars, was assigned to the artillery and made a forward observer. He spent his war on the front lines with the infantry. 

Skipper Matthiesen, his boss and best friend in the bunker in Korea was a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point. This impressed Dad immensely. While Dad was in Korea, his father died. They called it a heart attack, but there was no autopsy.

When Norm came home from Korea, he got his old job back at Cunard and enrolled at Wagner College. He used the GI Bill to pay for it. A College Degree was another rung on that ladder away from where he’d started. He met my Mom while commuting to Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry in 1955.

Norm’s  parents

Mom: Marion Mapes Anderson b. 2/18/1900 d. 12/22/1991

Her parents Willard Mapes and Angeline Lendrum Mapes; Newburgh, NY

Dad’s Dad: Reinhold Eugene Anderson b. 4/24/1893 d.10/12/1952

His parents Olive Cooley Anderson 1855 – 1917 Reinhold John Anderson b.? d.? 

Olive is the last of our family buried in the Cooley Family plot in Seamanville Cemetery, Monroe, NY. Olive’s grandfather is Nathan Bailey Cooley b. 1802 d. 1861. Also buried in Seamanville Cemetery. I have a copy of his will.

These are our People…

Who's the Sucker?

I was talking with my friend Jack yesterday. We were lamenting the loss of thoroughbred horse racing in Virginia.

Jack became a horseplayer on a summer afternoon in 1975. He'd been caught smoking under the Seaside Heights boardwalk the day before. As punishment, his dad banned him from the beach for two days. So to enforce the penalty (Jack’s mom was a pushover), Dad dragged him off to Monmouth Park for the afternoon. Some punishment. Jack found his life’s passion at age 12.

Jack’s the kind of guy who wears boots, jeans and a cowboy hat even when it’s 90 degrees out. If he needs to dress up, he puts on a tie. He's never spent a single overnight on a farm. He also knows more about race horses, pedigrees, past performances, tendencies and so on than anyone else I have ever known.

“I really miss going out to Colonial Downs,” I said. “I always enjoy hanging out there with Kim and whoever else watching those horses run. It gets me all juiced up.”

He said, “If the track and the owners would just sign a damn contract, they’d open up the OTBs and we could at least go place some bets in town.” We were sitting in the shade on my back patio. He yawned and put his feet up on the table and I went to get us two more beers from the beer shed.

When I came back he said, “You really ought to think about picking up your game and learning how to make real bets. That two dollar nonsense is a waste of time.”

“Jack," I said, "An old Wall Street guy once told me any business deal that includes three or more people also includes at least one sucker. If you can’t easily identify the sucker, it’s probably you. Consider a bet on a horse race as a business deal. It definitely has more than three participants, so who’s the sucker?”

“Well, first you got the jockeys. A bunch of high energy highly competitive kids. They all know each other, like each other, hate each other, hang out together, run around with each other's sisters, brothers, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever. Their actions, inactions,  motivations and decisions directly impact the result of the race. There might be a sucker in there once in a while, but not likely.”

“Then there’s the trainers. Definitely not the sucker, right? The good ones are diabolical geniuses and even the less good ones are still the brains behind the horse’s campaign. Trainers directly impact the horse’s performance and the race’s outcome, so it’s not them.”

“Owners can be suckers,” he said. A little defensive because he knew where I was headed.

“Maybe, but not really as far as betting goes. They might be a sucker if they let a greedy trainer get in and drain their wallet, but that’s a whole different story.”

“So you’re telling me we're the sucker.”

“I love you man, but it's you. You’re the sucker. The guy in this mix who thinks he’s gonna get a return on his investment but everyone else in the deal has some impact on the outcome except you.”

“And your little two dollar bet doesn't count?”

“Nope. My two bucks is just payment for service. Buys me twenty minutes of anticipation and two minutes of adrenaline. All for less than half the price of a cheap beer.” I grinned.

“You’re a dick,” he said.

Actually, when it comes to thoroughbred racing in Virginia, we’re all suckers: trainers, owners, jockeys, horseplayers and casual fans. At least the owners of Colonial Downs have played us all that way.