Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  The Stopka children, however, were blessed with the invincibility of youth, and when they came in for Sunday supper, they greeted news of the attack enthusiastically: “Oh boy!” Jack whooped. “War!” “We’ll show those Japs who’s boss,” Toni declared. They then went on to debate who would do more damage to the Axis war machine: the Human Torch, Captain Marvel, or Superman. And say, wasn’t it almost time to listen to The Shadow?

  The next day, after President Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war on Japan, Congress followed up with legislation expanding the draft call, requiring all men from eighteen to sixty-five years old to register. The Selective Service would also reexamine the status of the seventeen million men aged twenty-one to thirty-five who were already registered—like Eddie.

  But this almost seemed unnecessary, at first. On December 9, the Army, Navy, and Marine recruiting centers in Newark were overflowing with men so eager to enlist that the offices had to remain open around the clock.

  Eddie was not immune: his first, patriotic impulse was to join the stampede on the recruiting offices. Already friends from the lumberyard, all bachelors, had signed up for the fight. Eddie wanted to smash the Japs as much as they did—but if he did, who would provide for his family?

  “Eddie, for God’s sake, don’t enlist,” Adele begged him. “I know how you feel, but we need you here, at home. How will I feed the kids?”

  “I could send you all my service pay,” Eddie offered.

  “Which is what? Forty, fifty dollars a month? How far will that go?”

  “I read in the papers, they’re already talking about providing some kind of allowances for servicemen’s wives,” Eddie said.

  “And what about our stand at Palisades? I can’t run it by myself.”

  “You can hire somebody to help out.”

  “You can’t trust an employee like you can family.” Adele said pointedly, “How many carnivals have you worked where concession agents have been holding out on the owner from the day’s take?”

  Eddie frowned. “A lot,” he had to admit.

  “That’s why the Mazzocchis and the Cunys are grooming their kids to take over their concessions.”

  She made a persuasive case, as did events later that day—when air-raid sirens blared raucously into life, all the way from Cape May to Boston.

  The various municipalities in Bergen County hadn’t agreed yet on a common air-raid signal; in Cliffside Park and Fort Lee, it was a siren wailing for two straight minutes. But in Edgewater it was four screeching blasts of a steam whistle, repeated four times—scaring the hell out of Adele when she first heard it, sending her laundry whites flying out of the basket and into the air like surrender flags. When she heard the rumble of planes overhead she raced to the windows—aware that this was the last thing she should be doing—and her heart pounded as she saw a squadron of planes bearing ominously down the Hudson River toward New York Harbor. But after a few moments she realized they were ours—Army Air Corps planes scrambling to meet enemy planes, thought to be coming in off the Atlantic.

  Eddie rushed home from work in time to hear on the radio that there had been no enemy planes—it was just a case of jangled nerves. Adele hugged him as if there were real bombs falling all around them. “Thank God you’re here, Eddie,” she said in a shaky voice, then began sobbing. He held her, kissed her head, stroked her hair, and promised her everything would be all right, as empty a lie as he had ever told in his life.

  Toni and Jack experienced the air raid at school and found it a good deal more exciting than did their parents. “Boy, that was fun!” Toni declared when she got home, and Eddie didn’t contradict her: he’d rather they thought this all a lark than be frightened, as some of their classmates were, by the raid. And he had to admit, for the moment he was glad he was here at home, where he could comfort his children—and wife—if need be.

  A meeting of the local Civil Defense Council drew fourteen hundred people to Cliffside Park High School, where officials noted that New Jersey’s many defense plants—with more factories retooling for defense every day—represented prime targets for German bombers. “It is a certainty,” one speaker said soberly, “that the New York metropolitan area will suffer at least a token bombing attack before the war is over.” This inspired scores of volunteers for civil defense and Red Cross first-aid classes. Adele signed up for the latter.

  But as it turned out it wasn’t Nazi bombers that New Jerseyans had to fear—it was Nazi U-boats.

  On the night of January 25, 1942, a German submarine torpedoed the Norwegian oil tanker Varanger, thirty-five miles off the coast of Sea Isle City, New Jersey. The concussion could be heard as far north as Atlantic City. Its forty crewmen survived the attack, but in March the American freighter Lemuel Burrows was sunk off Atlantic City, claiming twenty lives. A surviving officer said that the lights blazing along the Jersey shore “were like Coney Island. It was lit up like daylight along the beach” … perfectly silhouetting the Burrows, making it an easy target for the U-boat.

  Prowling the waters from Newfoundland to the Florida Keys, Nazi submarines were soon sinking freighters with impunity. The government ordered street and boardwalk lights extinguished all along the Jersey coast and banned illuminated nighttime advertising. (Night baseball was also three strikes and out for the duration.) Now, in the evenings, families like the Stopkas sat within the violet nimbus of a blackout lamp, the only other light being the green gaze of the radio’s tuning eye. Opaque blackout drapes were drawn across their windows, allowing no seepage of light to escape. Even Manhattan had lost some of its luster, its skyline dimmed with swaths of black where lights once burned all night long.

  Across the Eastern Seaboard families gathered, each in their own private darkness—yet still laughing at Bob Hope and Jack Benny, still keeping rhythm with Glenn Miller and Paul Whiteman, and listening attentively to news of the war, their war, the one they were living and fighting even now, here in their own blacked-out living rooms.

  * * *

  With remarkable speed, America’s economy shifted to a wartime footing. All civilian auto production was halted as car manufacturers—including the Ford Motor Assembly Plant in Edgewater—converted to the construction of tanks, tank destroyers, Jeeps, half-tracks, amphibious vehicles, aircraft engines, and munitions. Eddie, eager to contribute to the war effort, quit the lumberyard and applied for a job on the assembly line at Ford. Unemployment in America became, almost overnight, a thing of the past as the Federal government pumped billions of dollars into defense.

  But money couldn’t make ordnance out of thin air, and after the Japanese invaded the Dutch West Indies, rubber was instantly in short supply. Automobile tires became the first item to be rationed to the public, and to minimize wear, car owners were allotted four gallons of gas per week; the covers of the Gas Ration Books encouraged them to DRIVE UNDER 35.

  Soon joining the list of rationed items would be bicycles, kerosene, sugar, coffee (one cup a day), butter, meats and canned fish, and shoes.

  Conservation was the watchword of the day. Housewives like Adele were urged to save their beef drippings and bacon fat in a wide-mouthed can and take it to the local butcher in exchange for ration points. “Okay,” Adele asked one morning as she dutifully began draining pork grease from the skillet, “can someone tell me what earthly use the U.S. Army has for bacon fat? Do they grease the battlefield and hope the Nazis slip on it?”

  “They told us at school, Mama!” Jack piped up enthusiastically. “You make something called glycerin out of the fat—”

  “And they turn the glycerin into bombs!” Toni finished with a flourish. “BOOM!”

  “I’ve got to go blow up a few Nazis today myself,” Eddie said, kissing his family goodbye to go to work—where for eight hours a day he inspected engine cowlings on tanks which, the minute they rolled off the line, were on their way to Moscow to resupply the besieged Red Army.

  Toni and Jack did their bit for the war too, collecting all kinds of scra
p—rubber, rags, tin cans, bedsprings, even foil wrappers from chewing gum and Hershey’s Kisses—for salvage drives. Jack, in the ultimate show of patriotism, even turned in his old comic books for the paper drive. Like children all across the country, they prided themselves on being a part of the war effort. Even schoolyard play took on a different tone, as girls skipped rope to new lyrics to a song from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:

  Whistle while you work,

  Hitler is a jerk.

  Mussolini is a weenie,

  And Tojo is a jerk!

  Eddie, who closely followed the war news, found these mild epithets inadequate for an enemy capable of committing the kinds of atrocities that seemed to follow in their wake: In Hong Kong, on Christmas Day, Japanese troops invaded a hospital, shot the doctor in charge, and bayoneted fifty-six wounded soldiers. A month later, in Malaya, the Japanese ordered the mass execution of one hundred and sixty-one captured and wounded Australian, British, and Indian soldiers. Their bodies were heaped in the street and burned. And in February, after the British colony of Singapore surrendered to the Japanese, the occupying army began the systematic execution of thousands of ethnic Chinese believed “hostile” to the Japanese.

  Reports like these made Eddie’s blood boil, and for the first time in his life he started having trouble sleeping, haunted by the stories coming out of Europe and the Pacific. A safe stateside job on an assembly line, no matter how vital to defense, couldn’t erase his nagging guilt at not being overseas, in the thick of it, doing his part for his country.

  So in March, when Eddie’s draft number finally came up and he was ordered to report to his local draft board, he was secretly happy to go. But if he was expecting a rousing, patriotic call to arms with an underscore of George M. Cohan songs, he was grotesquely disappointed. At the draft board he and a hundred other draftees were ordered to strip to their shorts, and even less, for a series of tests. Eddie found himself in one of many long lines of naked men doing their best to ignore their own sagging testicles—to say nothing of the fat ass cheeks and ripe body odor of the guys in line ahead of them. Eddie was fingerprinted, had blood and urine taken, underwent physical and psychiatric exams. There was nothing rousing about a proctologist’s glove, though the mere suggestion otherwise would have been enough to keep a man out of the Army.

  When Eddie was told to put his clothes on again, his hopes were dashed as his draft card was stamped 3-A: “Married, with dependent children.” Neither the Army nor the Navy was yet drafting fathers—at least not fathers of children born before Pearl Harbor—and he was automatically given a deferment. Eddie felt a little sick to look at the paperwork he had been handed. He could’ve handed it back—demanded to enlist. But he told himself this was the way it had to be: he had a family to support. Nobody could fault him for that. Even so, as he walked out of the draft board, still a civilian, an increasingly large part of him couldn’t help feeling like a coward.

  * * *

  Palisades Amusement Park, as it prepared to open in late April, had firmly committed itself to the war effort. No new rides were constructed in order to save building materials for the defense industry. Jack and Irving Rosenthal refitted all of the park’s lighting to comply with the Federal dim-out regulations: all exterior lighting on rides and stands was to be extinguished, the neon spokes of the Ferris wheel going dark, and only interior lighting allowed to illuminate concessions. The huge scrolling electrical sign on the cliff would also go dark and the incandescent Palisades name would not be visible from New York City for the first time in decades.

  The Rosenthals held War Bond rallies at the park and instructed head gardener Mike Corrado to plant a huge Victory Garden to help inspire visitors to grow their own produce at home. On Wednesdays ten percent of gate receipts were donated to the Army and Navy Relief Funds, and servicemen were admitted free of charge to the park. As Irving Rosenthal told the press, “We in the amusement business have a definite and important part to play in our country’s war effort, and that is to provide wholesome outdoor recreation to bolster the morale of the people.”

  The park opened on April 25, accompanied by newspaper ads proclaiming MORE PLAY MAKES BETTER WORK. Despite the gas shortage, Palisades opened to big gate receipts and stayed there all summer.

  Eddie took a leave of absence from Ford to honor his lease with the Rosenthals. Meat shortages limited hot dog vendors to one per customer, but fortunately potatoes weren’t rationed and the stand’s Saratoga fries were cooked in corn oil, not butter. (The leftover cooking grease, collected dutifully by Adele, was surely enough to blow up a Panzer division.) Eddie told himself that the more money he made, the more his family would have in the bank against the day when the Army began drafting fathers.

  But he found it hard as hell to put on a jolly face when he knew men were fighting and dying outside the festive bubble of Palisades. He was reminded of this every day, with every soldier or sailor on leave—Hoboken was a major hub for servicemen shipping out to Europe and the Pacific—who came to the park for one last good time, an innocent taste of home and happiness before both became in very short supply.

  Keeping a cheery tone was mandatory for the park’s fortune-tellers, who each day had to read the palms of departing servicemen and reassure them, “All is not certain, but I believe things will turn out all right for you.”

  But after the park closed at midnight some of them, along with Adele and Eddie, went across the street to Joe’s for a few stiff drinks. One “palmist,” Opal, broke down crying: “Things won’t turn out all right for some of them. I feel like a lying louse. But what else am I going to say?”

  Adele said, “It’s what they want to hear, hon. Just tell them what they want to hear and they’ll go away happy.”

  “I know, I know,” Opal said, drying her eyes with a napkin. “But I wouldn’t blame them a bit if—God forbid—as they get hit by a Japanese mortar, they think, ‘That bitch of a fortune-teller sure steered me wrong!’”

  The departing servicemen weren’t always strangers but familiar faces from Palisades. Jackie Morris, the son of Charlie “Doc” Morris—who with his father had booked group excursions for the park—had actually been inducted into the Army a month before Pearl Harbor. Hugh McKenna, chief lifeguard at the pool, was next to enter the service, followed by Jimmy Hannan of the Lake Placid Bobsled and Bill Gomez of the Casino Bar. Dr. Frank Vita soon said his goodbyes, too, as did Roscoe Schwartz’s two sons, Roscoe Jr. and Laurent. Laurent was only nineteen when he joined the Marines.

  It shamed Eddie to think that while nineteen-year-olds were putting their lives in harm’s way, an old man of thirty-one like him was spending the summer risking nothing more than a hot splash of corn oil.

  Nor was Eddie alone in feeling left behind—Bunty Hill had been turned down for military service due to his age. “I’m only forty years old, for Chrissake,” he griped to Eddie on their lunch break. “I swim the goddamn Hudson every day. Do I look like I’ve got one foot in the grave?”

  “Maybe you’ve got too many dependents, Bunty,” Eddie said.

  “What? I’m single! Never been married. And I haven’t planted any seedlings along the way, either.”

  “I’m talking about all the lovely gals here at the pool who depend on you to take them out and show ’em a good time. Helen and Muriel and Edith and Rosalie—you’re a one-man morale industry, Bunty.”

  “Aw, shaddup,” Bunty said, but couldn’t help laughing as he said it. He tossed a copy of The New York Times to Eddie. “And by the way, while we’re cooling our heels on the homefront, here’s the latest shit the land of my forefathers is visiting upon the land of your forefathers.”

  Eddie took the paper—yesterday’s, dated June 27, 1942. He had read about the recent massacres in Poland—Jewish Poles slaughtered and stacked in mass graves in towns like Bydogszcz and Bialystok. He’d heard of the remark made by that pig Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS: “All Poles will disappear from the world.” But he was
still shocked by what he saw on the bottom of page five, two small paragraphs that read:

  According to an announcement of the Polish Government in London, 700,000 Jews were slain by the Nazis in Poland. The report was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was recorded by the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York yesterday.

  “To accomplish this, probably the greatest mass slaughter in history, every death-dealing method was employed—machine-gun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments and starvation,” the Polish announcement said.

  Eddie was stunned. Seven hundred thousand people? “Jesus Christ,” he said softly. “Gas chambers? You think this is true?”

  “I don’t doubt it for a second. The sons of bitches are doing the same thing in Paris. Paris fucking France, for Chrissake! Rounding up French Jews and sending them to a ‘labor camp’ called Auschwitz.”

  Eddie reminded himself that these were the same monsters who had gone into mental hospitals in Bydogszcz and shot to death more than three thousand mental patients so their inferior genes could not contaminate the pure Aryan gene pool. Why should he be surprised that the Nazis would embrace the greatest horror of the First World War—poison gas—and “improve” upon it, turn it into a mass assembly line of death?

  “God help us all,” Bunty said, “if these bastards actually win. How many of us do you think’ll be left once they start ‘purifying’ America? After they get rid of all the Jews, the Negroes, the queers…” He broke into a mordant laugh. “Christ, who’ll be left in show business?”

  Eddie laughed, but it was no joke.

  Toni and Jack, of course, followed war news of their own—the Axis-smashing adventures of Captain America, the Human Torch, and others—and that meant a weekly trip to Pitkof’s Candy Store on Palisade Avenue in Cliffside Park. Eddie drove them there in the morning before work. Pitkof’s was a small store with a soda fountain, confectionary, and most important, a magazine rack which contained all the month’s comic books. As Eddie pulled up to the curb he noted that one of the store windows was boarded up with plywood, but there was an OPEN sign on the front door. Inside, Jack Pitkof, wearing a gray service jacket, sat behind the counter reading a Yiddish newspaper. He was a quiet, mild-mannered man in his late forties who also served as a local Air Raid Warden. Eddie remembered him once telling him how he and his brothers had escaped Tsarist Russia “under cover of night, hidden under straw in wagons, and arrived in America with exactly nothing.”