Jim Worden takes us on a nostalgic trip down memory lane and invites us to add our recollections of life in Ossining (which you can do by clicking the post a Comment link at the bottom).
Looking Back At The Class of ‘59
by Jim Worden
Unofficial, Self Appointed, Anecdotal Class Historian
(with a lot of time on his hands)
Looking back over the years, I can see signs wise men saw... Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of those wise men. I was just as swept up in day to day events as everyone else, leaving it to 20/20 hindsight to get the proper perspective on what was happening back then. At any rate, come along with me as I take a slightly myopic and perhaps irreverant trip back in time and examine some of our shared experiences.
First of all, to put our class and our generation into perspective, we need to realize that we were all born in the first half of the last century! In the same half century that most of our parents were born. And for the most part, in the weeks and months just before Pearl Harbor and World War II. Eisenhower was still a Colonel and George Patton had just gotten his first star. Before Raymond Hughes ever slept in a pup tent! But then, we’re not really getting older, we’re just getting better!
But to start at the beginning, lets go back in time to the naming of our town. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the way Ossining was named: it came from the Sint Sink (or something like that) Indians who lived in the area around Nelson Park or maybe up near Camp Woods. Hence the derivative Sing Sing Prison and Town of Ossining.
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What troubles me somewhat is that I can look at a map of the US and easily come up with several Lincolns, Washingtons, Peorias, Glendales and even Albanys. There might even be another Briarcliff somewhere. I still search in vain for another Ossining! It means that we are either unique or it was just a name that was tried and didn’t seem to work anywhere else. But then again, maybe residents of Tuckahoe, Yonkers & Haverstraw also feel slighted to some degree. One never knows, do one?
But then, I digress. The year in which most of us were born (1941), our parents could buy a new car for just under $1,000; gas cost 19¢ a gallon and a new home cost about $7,000. Stamps were only 3¢ for first class and the stock market was at 110. The average annual salary was just over $2,000.
By the time we all made it to kindergarten. a new car was up to $1,400, gas was 21¢ and that new home would cost almost twice as much: $12,500. The stock market had progressed to 177 (10% compounded growth). This means that if your mom & dad put $1,000 in the market in your name on the day that you were born instead of buying that new car for $1,000, you would now have $140,000 (a 7.4% return). Enough to buy a very nice car or a very marginal house in the NYC area. Sounded like it was going to be a lot more didn’t it?
Did someone mention milk? In 1941 it cost 34¢ per gallon and 5 years later was 70¢ per gallon. But it was how we got it that mattered. Several times a week a delivery truck would come by, pick up the used bottles left by the back porch and replace them with new. Then there was the tricky process of separating the cream that had collected at the top of the bottle. It wasn’t until the late 40’s that Franz Joseph Homog, the Swiss inventor, came up with a process for keeping the cream mixed with the rest of the milk all the time. From then on homoginized milk was everywhere! But back to the delivery truck; as a kid, if you were lucky and the delivery took place in your area later in the morning, you could talk the delivery man into chipping you off a little piece of the ice used to keep the milk cold.
Do you remember having to bring your milk money to school each week so that you could get one of those little glass bottles of milk to go with the cookies that you never remembered to bring or else had already eaten on the way to school?
Back then in the early 40’s, there was no television to announce the events of the world right up to the minute. All we had for a while was radio; usually a big box of a thing that for some reason we would sit around and “watch” Jack Benny, Amos and Andy or The Shadow.
When TV finally arrived later in the 40’s, there was only a small screen, perhaps augmented by a magnifying lens in front and maybe even one of those stick on, multi-colored celluloid sheets that gave the impression of colored pictures that you could buy down at Woolworths. But, since programming only started at 5:00 in the afternoon with cartoon shows, Charley McCarthy, and Howdy Doody, we would watch anything. The first RCA TV introduced in 1947 cost $352. About 1/5 the price of a new car! That same year the first world series game between the Yankees and the Dodgers was televised in September. Howdy Doody first appeared in December. However there were still only 350,000 TV sets in the country at that time and the NYC area accounted for over 1/2 of them. Even by 1948 only 1 in 10 Americans had ever seen a TV program. Only 42 hours of TV programming were available per week. But by 1949 Captain Video made its debut and there were now over 2 million TV sets in existence. Still almost 1/3 were in the NYC area.
Speaking of major league baseball, we usually got to listen to the World Series in class if our teacher was so inclined. Those were the days when the games were played in the afternoon as they should be. Usually we
didn’t have to make a time conversion calculation for games being played on the west coast or elsewhere. Most of the time all the games were played right here in New York City.
By the time we graduated from High School, there were 42 million TV sets around the country and we still had to get up out of our chairs to change the channel. Ahead of us still were: remote controls, VCR’s, DVD’s, cable boxes, dish antennas, color TV, plasma, LCD, HD and probably a bunch of other stuff I haven’t even found out about yet. A new car now cost $2,200 and a house $18,500. The stock market had shot up to 679 (about a 10% return) and the average working salary was now $5,500. Gas was still only 20¢ per gallon.
These were the days of one car families. In our case it was a 1935 Ford convertible with a rumble seat. V-8, three speed manual transmission, a leaky, manual top, no back seats and no radio. Can anyone beat that? This car lasted until 1950.
Many of us have since moved away from Ossining, but at the time we were born I now realize we lived 1 hour away from the biggest, most exciting, most cosmopolitan city in the world. It had 3 professional baseball teams, the tallest building in the world, the Statue of Liberty, 2 airports (one of them called Idlewild), Rockefeller Center, museums that were the envy of most other cities, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Central Park and on and on. Yeah, Chicago and Abilene and the Alamo existed out there somewhere west of the Hudson, but they didn’t matter to us.
Ossining was no slouch either as far as little towns go. We had two 5 and 10 cent stores right next to each other for some reason, several “Army Surplus” stores, Ben’s Stationery store, many shoe stores where you could get your feet exposed to X-rays in your new shoes, churches, banks, hardware stores - many of them perched precariously on the side of a hill or down on Spring Street with little (or none) of the parking we have since come to expect when we go shopping. Somewhere down on lower Main Street, there was a hotel; the Ossining Hotel. Do you know of anyone who ever stayed there? We even had two movie theaters for a while. A Saturday matinee was only 25¢, good for 1 or 2 movies and a cartoon or two. Plus “Movieton (or something like that) News” with a bunch of blond athletes jumping over one of those gymnastic hurdle things. There were also 4 or 5 Drug stores where you could get a real ice cream soda and a Vanilla Coke, mixed before your very eyes. The Coke was only 5¢.
If you went into one of the little candy stores that existed near every grade school, you could get a 6 1/4 oz Coke in a uniquely contoured bottle for only a nickle, plus a 2¢ deposit. If you were industrious enough, you could manage to scrounge up 3 or 4 bottles somewhere with which to finance your next bottle of soda. We were the first recyclers.
We had Lincoln (for a while), Washington, Roosevelt and Park schools. Somehow it seems we ran out of Presidents names. And unless you lived all the way over in Briarcliff, you walked to school. And as I frequently tell my kids, “I had to walk 3 miles to school each way, uphill, and delivered coal on the way.”
Usually everyone had only one telephone, firmly anchored to the wall by 5 feet or so of cloth covered wire. No privacy. If you wanted to call someone, you picked up the hand set and told whoever answered who you wanted to call, at first just a 4 digit number. For fun, if you had a party line, you could listen in on someone elses conversation; until they discovered you were listening. The Ossining phone book was only 1/4 inch thick.
We were able to have Christmas parties at school. Could even have a Christmas tree. In the week before Xmas vacation (now known as winter break or something), everyone in class would draw a name from a hat to find out who you were to buy a Xmas gift for at the Xmas party to be held on the day before vacation. With a 50¢ limit on spending, I would work my brain feverishly to come up with the perfect gift for this person. I shopped the hell out of Woolworths and Newberrys. At gift opening time, we all searched under the tree to find our gift. Even with all my efforts, I believe that I received 2 Ticonderoga, #2 pencils for 2 or 3 years running! Were you one of these gift givers?
Being probably the smallest kid in grade school, I never got to be window or blackboard monitor because the teachers probably felt I wasn’t tall enough or strong enough to accomplish these tasks like Jack Donahue or Jack Skerritt. Or even Margo Traino!
School trips were another benefit of living here in Ossining. There was the Bronx Zoo, Yankee Stadium, the Statue of Liberty, the Museum of Natural History. All bus trips for some reason had to be accompanied by singing “99 Bottles of Beer on The Wall” both coming and going. Absolutely guaranteed to drive any normal teacher up the wall.
There were other school trips I remember but on a far smaller scale. One involved our class walking up from Park School to Roosevelt School to hear Darla Scripter sing “Poor Little Buttercup” in HMS Pinafore. And then walking back home. Do you think this would be allowed now-a-days?
Remember the “Miller Property” in back of the high school on Walden Road? Back before it became a soggy soccer and practice baseball field. Sometime in October or November, the rain or the Town would flood the area so that those of us in the area could go ice skating. We also skated at Narragansett Pond, the flooded tennis courts at Nelson Park, Echo Lake & Mannheimers Pond.
Did our parents have to put up with fervent requests to go to Disney Land or Disney World? Obviously not. The most we could do was to talk them into a trip to Playland or Palisades Park. They said we could “skip the bother and skip the fuss and take a public service bus”! However I never could figure out where to catch one of them.
And how did we ever make it through high school or even college without ever making a “Xerox” copy? I think I made my first one sometime in 1965.
We all remember Vietnam. A very sad time for us all I’m sure. I was in the Army at the time stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and almost every day as I walked home I had to pass an Army National Cemetery and many many times there was a military ceremony for some soldier killed in Southeast Asia. A very sad and humbling time. I’m sure many if not most of you have a similar, sad recollection of that period.
What about the Citizen Register. Was that a great paper or what? Somehow they managed to get the previous day’s Little League, Pony League and High School baseball/basketball/hockey/soccer scores reasonably correct and even mention someone’s name now and then when they did something special. Are Ossining Little League teams still named Lions, Elks, St. Anns, Fire Dept., PAL, Rotary???
Are OHS teams still called “Indians”? Or, have they been PC’d into “Native Americans” or “Original Inhabitants”?
Remember when a lap top was something you sat on! And still not a type of dance. A computer was just not something that became part of our world until 1985 or so and the internet a few years beyond that. Until then, in school we all had to go to the library to do our research and then copy the information we needed word by word. Even this most menial of tasks was hindered by someone having cut out pictures from the reference books for their report the previous year. I’m sure no one in our class ever did that. I also wonder why no teachers ever figured out where all the pictures in the reports came from.
Even calculators were devices to be had only far in the future. Every math, statistics or physics calculation had to be done manually well into the late 1960’s. Some of us could get by with a slide rule to get a kind of rounded off estimate of the answer. Have you seen one of these lately?
Have I left anything out? Forgotten something? What about where we went swimming? Did anyone else go down to the Hudson at the PAL beach near the RR station, or at Sparta or even the old quarry at the end of Spring Street? Chilmark Pool? How about Stillwater lake near Steve Zinners?
What about submarine races at Scarborough Station or many other parts of town?
Someone who has led a more exciting life back in those days needs to fill in the blanks that I left out. For now I’m exhausted documenting my little trip down memory lane. Please forgive my moments of incorrect grammar, punctuation and spelling and the many gaps in my memories.
Jim Worden
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