Excepted from a letter I wrote to my 5 year old grandson, Jules, on the occasion of his 5th Birthday
In 1948, shortly after my baby brother, David, was born, my family bought a “summer” house on a cozy little cove in Short Beach, a small beach community in Branford, Connecticut.
Driving to Short Beach
One morning in June, shortly after my 5th birthday, the whole family piled into our big Buick car to drive to Short Beach from New York City where we lived during the school year. There were 6 of us in the car. In the front seat sat my father (who drove), my mother, and between them lay my baby brother David. In those days, there were no baby seats or even seatbelts in cars. In the back seat, my little sister Bobbie (who was almost 3) and I sat on either side of our live-in house-keeper, Violet, separated so we wouldn’t annoy each other and get into a fight.
In those days there were also no interstate highways, so the fastest a person could drive a car safely was about 50 miles an hour. Today, the drive between New York City and Short Beach might take about two hours. In 1948, it took us at least three hours, more if there was heavy traffic or a long back-up due to a serious accident—which seemed to happen frequently, mostly because there were no median dividers between the outbound and inbound lanes of the highway.
So what did we do during those long drives to keep from getting bored? Of course, in those days, there were no Kindles or any other portable devices on which to watch movies or play games. So, we had to entertain ourselves. One thing we did on these drives was listen to my mother tell us stories about her childhood in Germany. We never tired of hearing these tales, even ones she'd told us many times before. Her childhood seemed to us to have taken place in a completely different and strange land compared to where and how we were growing up. We were fascinated to hear about the interesting things they did and the unknown (to us) places they went.
Another thing we did on these long drives was sing. My mother had a very nice singing voice with which she sang folk songs, mostly from her childhood in Germany, but also American and English folk songs she’d learned since coming to America in 1938. My father and we kids would join in on the choruses. Sometimes we all sang rounds like “Row Row Row Your Boat” or “Frère Jacques.”
Of course, Bobbie (who is now called by her full name, Barbara) would sometimes play with her doll Camey; and I would sometimes organize and study my baseball card collection. But the most fun we had was playing “car games,” most of which we or my parents made up.
First, we would usually play “License Plates.” This involved observing the license plates of each car we passed or that passed us to identify the state from which it came. Whenever we’d see a state’s license plate for the first time, we would write it on a list. Then each time we’d see a car from that state again we’d make a mark next to that name. After some period of time, we’d count how many cars we’d seen from each state.
My First Day at Short Beach
As soon as we arrived at our new house and my father had stopped the car, I jumped out onto the lawn and ran toward where I expected the beach to be--- in front of our new house. And there it was, just on the other side of a concrete and stone seawall, built to prevent waves and high tides from washing up onto our lawn, especially during storms. I walked along the seawall until I found the stone stairs that went from our yard several steps down to the level of the beach.
The beach seemed huge to me. Of course, I was just a little boy so it was huge compared to me. It also looked bigger than it actually was because, as I was to learn, the tide was out so that much of the sandy seabed of the cove was exposed. When the tide came in, most of the cove filled with water and the beach was actually quite small (even to me), especially at very high tides, when the water came all the way up to the seawall.
Then I spotted it: a sunken rowboat…right there on the upper part of the beach, practically against the seawall. I decided to investigate. I walked around it and looked over its sides. It was filled with sand and in the sand were a number of toy trucks. Wow! I climbed over the side of the boat and began to play with the trucks in the sand that filled the boat more than half way up its sides. I built roads through the sand for the trucks, but was unable to build tunnels or houses because the fine sand was too dry. Every structure I tried to build immediately collapsed.
I was so intent on what I was doing that at first I didn’t notice the shadows that had fallen across my network of roads through the sand. But when the shadows moved a bit, I was startled and looked up. There, watching me suspiciously, were four children ranging in size from a head taller than me to a head shorter than me. I looked at them. They looked at me.
Then, in unison, the four of them said: “You’ve got Johnny Clark’s trucks.”
Well, I knew I had someone’s trucks but I didn’t know whose, and I certainly didn’t know who Johnny Clark was. I wondered: maybe his family owned the house before we bought it and he left his trucks behind. So I said the first thing that came to my mind: “Who’s Johnny Clark?”
And much to my surprise, one of the four kids--- the one about my size--- said: “I am.”
I was startled by this statement. I’d assumed the four kids were talking about someone else, not one of them. I mean, if he was Johnny Clark, why did he say that I had Johnny Clark’s trucks? Why didn’t he say: “You have my trucks?”
I never did find out the answer to these questions, but I did become good friends with Johnny Clark, his very tall sister Leslie, his little brother Jeffrey, and the rest of the kids who lived along the little street that ran down to our cove.
In fact, in a “small world” coincidence, we were to discover that Johnny Clark’s father had gone to college with my father, both graduating in 1936 in the midst of the Great Depression. And, another coincidence: In 1961, Johnny Clark and I ended up going to the same college as our fathers had and, more coincidentally still, in 1970 when I was supervising student teachers at Lee High School in New Haven, Johnny Clark was a teacher there! Small worlds, indeed.
The Harbormaster
How did I get the title of harbormaster? I’m not sure who first suggested it, but I do know that my father often reminded me of it when I got older. According to him, even though I was a little guy and a number of the kids on the street were a year or two older than me, I was the ringleader of the gang.
I organized many of the activities in which we kids engaged:
- fishing for porgies and eels off the Clark’s dock
- collecting little sea creatures stranded at low tide in the tidal pools of our cove
- playing elaborate games of “cowboys and indians” (as we called it in those days) which spread out over a dozen backyards along our street
- sneaking under the fence to investigate the scary “rest home” next door to us or around the fence on the rocky point at low tide to spy on the wealthy Stanley family that lived in the compound of big houses hidden behind the tall hedges at the end of our street.
- dressing in costume for the Labor Day parade (of course, I took it one step further and rode a horse)
Apparently, I also hung out with the adults and got them to do things I wanted them to do.
- At my insistence, my father and our neighbor, Ed Talbot, salvaged and repaired the abandoned rowboat on our beach so that my dad and I could row it around the cove. My father later incorporated a story about this into a paper he wrote that was published in a professional psychoanalytical journal.
- Ed’s elderly mother, Mrs. Mathewson enjoyed my company so much that she’d invite me to watch her tiny television with her in the evenings (her TV was the first I’d ever seen and probably the only one in Short Beach at that time). We watched “Man Against Crime” with Ralph Bellamy and the Camel News Caravan in which John Cameron Swayze presented 15 minutes of news, sponsored by Camel Cigarettes!
- I somehow convinced my father to buy a little sailboat even though he had no idea how to sail one and capsized it the first time he used it, much to my horror and my mother’s. As we watched the boat with its lime green sail tip over and fill with water about 50 yards from shore, I think we all thought my father would drown.
- When Junior, our housekeeper’s 19-year old son stayed with us during his two-week leave from the Army, I accompanied him everywhere. I remember once walking up to the little village with him where he played pinball at the local diner. The sight of this uniformed “Negro” and his 5-year old charge must have created quite a stir in that 100% white beach community, although I probably wouldn’t have noticed it since, at the time, I had no idea about racial differences. To me, he was just "Junior" and he looked great in his smart uniform.
And so it was that my parents and their friends began to call me the harbormaster.
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