I was born during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was late October, 1962, and although I learned in high-school history this was a tense time in the U.S., neither of my parents can recall much about it. I guess they were too busy with surprise twins, delivered on the 20th, to be concerned with nuclear destruction.
I grew up in north Philadelphia’s Logan section, about 8 miles outside of downtown Center City. Logan was a neighborhood of row homes and small shops, and the neighborhood was nearly entirely Jewish. Rosen’s bakery was around the corner on 11th Street, across from the A&W delicatessen. Malmund’s Pharmacy was on the corner. It was populated by many Holocaust survivors – I recall the number tattooed forearms of many shopkeepers. Storefronts displayed neon signs in Hebrew, and menorahs lit up their front windows during Chanukah. Synagogues were everywhere, and we were one of only a few non-Jewish families on the block. My neighbors were the Finkels, Levines, Hornsteins; my grade school friends were Michael Brickman, and PennySue Gold. Looking back, it was an interesting neighborhood in which to grow up in the mid-1960’s, and I remember it fondly, until, suddenly, the neighborhood changed.
In June, 1970, we moved to Bucks County. The grass and trees of suburbia replaced the concrete and cement of the city; single family houses, each on their own quarter-acreage of land, replaced row homes and shops; mid-summer cicadas and crickets chirping in the backyard, replaced the twilight voices of neighbors sitting out on their stoops. I truly thought we had moved to the country, and in many ways we had. Life in Levittown was very different from today. Fruit-tree forested backyards ran together, uninterrupted, like one vast ribbon of grass. Nine kids lived on my lane, all within 3 years of age, all attending the same Catholic grade school. That first summer I mastered my first two-wheeler, caught my first frog, played my first game of man-hunt, took my first swim in a lake…
…To be continued…