An American Motorcycle Diary

Jacksonville was a place to stay, make calls, do some research and take a breath. Ross, being smart about any purchase, picked up discount coupons at the Florida State line visitors center for a Holiday Inn. The hotel provided a breakfast, a pool and a  hot tub. The continental breakfast, also meant stuffing ones pockets with bagels, fruit, snack bars, pastries and whatever else, for lunch later in the day or for the evening dinner. American businesses can be so generous at times. When we checked in, the front desk clerk, “Edyta”  a Polish immigrant who had recently come to the United States, told me how to correctly pronounce my name. She was correct, if I was living in the land of my descendants. But I am not, and as in many instances, the English pronunciation of Eastern European names stays on for perpetuity. Sometimes the change occurred at Ellis Island, as families names were Americanized by the immigration officials. Sometimes its just pronounced the way it appears in English, and sometimes it’s changed completely for the sake of convenience of because it sounds too European. Some of those Europeans ended up in the working class sections of Buffalo’s Black Rock section.

Public School number 42 was located on Grant Street in the Black Rock section of Buffalo. The area is on the  northwest side of the city, and is bordered by the Niagara River on the west, the Squajacuada Creek on the south, and railroads and factories on the the south and east. The factories have since been shut down, burned down, torn down or turned into warehouses or junk yards with equipment from other closed factories. It was once a vibrant community with a bar or restaurant on every corner, where there wasn’t a small delicatessen or market.  Every Friday the air  permeated with the smell of fish fry from the local bars, and the smell of freshly baked bread and pastries made at the local bakeries. Families would meet at the corner bars and restaurants for freshly cooked fried fish and  large cut potato fries served with a coleslaw. Men often gathered at the bars to cash their checks to have a couple of beers with vodka chasers before walking home to their families. Drinking and driving wasn’t an issue in the late 50’s in Black Rock. If you lived there, you probably worked at one the factories with your father and brother. You walked to and from work  on the sidewalks because it was to close to drive, or you probably didn’t own a car. If you went out to have a beer, it was at a the local tavern down the street. If you got drunk, you walked home, or you were close enough to be carried home by the cohorts who probably  helped get you inebriated. If you were lucky you lived on the first floor flat and your friends could get you into the apartment. You were especially unlucky, if you lived on the second floor flat or the attic apartment, because even in the middle of January, your friends were likely to leave you on the porch steps for the night, where you would be found by your wife or parents in the morning under a cool layer of snow or frost. 

Everything you needed could  be found off Amherst Street or Grant Street. The pharmacy, the paint store, the hardware store, the lumber yard, the bowling alley, the churches, the clothing store, the shoe store, the shoe repair shop, the candy shop, the hobby shop and of course the factories that kept the community employed. Everything was packed into small lots with little or no front lawns, except for the Morrison Electric manufacturing plant. Housing in Black Rock consisted mostly of two family flats. It wasn’t unusual for parents to be living on one flat and another relative to be living in another flat in the same dwelling,  with other family members living three or four doors down the street.

Most shops had a residence attached to it with an apartment flat above the shops. Most of those who could afford a car were forced to park their car on the street  because most residences did not have a driveway, let alone a garage.  In Black Rock, there were first, second and third generation families of European decent. Irish, German, Poles, Hungarians and Ukrainians mixed in the families that lived in Buffalo since its’ inception in the early eighteen hundreds.

The less money you had, the closer you lived to the factories. My family lived right next door the former Linde Air Products Manufacturing Facility. Our home was unusual for the area as it was one of the few that was a single family home with a drive way, a three car garage in the rear and a large side yard. Nevertheless it was still adjacent to the Linde plant. From 1942 until 1947  , the Linde plant was part of the top secret “Manhattan Project and had  a Manhattan Engineer District contract with the U.S. Army to develop a gaseous diffusion process that helped produce the first uranium atomic bombs.. There is no evidence that radioactive material was used at the plant, at least that’s what they say, it is after all in the heart of  residential and industrial area.  Who would ever believe that that owners would place the community at risk. We didn’t move there until 1955 and the manufacturing at the plant stopped shortly afterward in the early 60’s. It’s been a warehouse for used factory equipment since then. It’s essentially an industrial  junk yard but to me it was the Swiss alps, a place to climb up the discarded equipment, or the the flag pole on the side of the building to get up on the roof. It  provided me with an adventure in technical climbs and made for interesting games of hide and seek with my friends as we crept through the large electric motors, the assembly line superstructures, or the over sized chemical mixing tanks. We didn’t  recognize we were trespassing. It was an environment to be explored and conquered, not unlike the New World of Christopher Columbus.

In 1962 there was a shortage of elementary school teachers. Typically at PS 42 all school grades had two teachers for each grade from first grade through the eighth grade. There was only one kindergarten teacher who taught one class in the morning and one in the afternoon . In in this particular year with a shortage of elementary teachers, PS 42 solved the problem by having only one third grade. To avoid the problem of overcrowding one third grade class, a third of the more promising second graders were promoted to the fourth grade where they were split up between the two fourth grade teachers. I happened to be placed with Mrs Jocylin along with about ten other youths who had skipped the third grade. Third grade was critical because it was where pupils were taught multiplication, and division, and were expected to learn to write in cursive.

Mrs Jocylin was a short women in her late forties or perhaps early fifties. She was fit for her age, had grey short cropped hair and wore black horned rimmed glasses. She was not sympathetic to the plight of the son of an immigrant as on numerous occasions, in front of the entire class, she referred to me, to my parents and my siblings as DP’s (displaced persons) as if we had come to the United States unwillingly. I was born in the United States but still had a  a bit of an Eastern European accent as I spoke primarily the language of my parents until I entered elementary school. When I introduced my self to Mrs. Jocylin as Tadzio(pronounced Tah-jaw), a nicknane my family called me, she told  my classmates and I, that this was not the “old country” and that I would be called Ted or Teddy. Having been taught to respect the wishes of parents and authority figures, I said nothing, nodded in agreement, wrote Teddy at the top of my assignments, and from then on the name stayed with me. Even to this day, almost fifty years later, when I meet some one from the old neighborhood or an old high school friend, I am referred as Ted or Teddy, the kid that lived to the next to the factory.

It wasn’t until I was in my last year of highschool that I began to question the decisions and actions of adults and other authority figures.