Untenable, p.11
Untenable, page 11
They’re as skinny as a toothpick
Or as fat as a cow
If I was an Irishman
I would end it all now
Of the three, one was Albert. Another signed off as a “big fat guinea.” An Irish friend countered with:
Roses are red
Violets are Blue
I ain’t a guinea
And neither are you
“The past is a foreign country,” writes L. P. Hartley in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “they do things differently there.” That we did. When it came to exchanging barbs with other ethnic groups, we recognized few limits. Had there been a social media to capture our comments, none of us could ever have run for office, let alone hosted the Oscars. Although our language would shock our descendants, we were growing more inclusive, not less. If our progress had continued, we could have one day told jokes about Blacks to Blacks, and they would have told White jokes right back.
Our parents played by different rules. I was reminded of this on a long rainy drive to Yankee Stadium when I was about ten. My father and a police friend were in the front seat. The friend’s son, my brother Bob, and I were in the back. Everyone was miserable. Driving to the Bronx is ordeal enough, but driving in a downpour, suspecting the game will be rained out (it was), depressed us all, even my usually unflappable father. From the backseat, to lighten the mood, I volunteered a joke. “Dad,” I said, “why did God make the world round?”
Said my father, “I don’t know. Why did God make the world round?”
Ethnic jokes work, I should explain, only when they tap a fundamental truth. For me, Polish jokes did not work for the simple reason that all the Poles I knew were pretty smart. On the other hand, the joke that begins, “What’s an Irish seven-course meal,” and ends, “a six-pack and a boiled potato,” does work. It taps a fundamental truth.
Italians had their own quirks. In our world, their young men tended to hang out on street corners. The guys that hung out at Myrtle and Orange—a few years older than the Pigs gang—wore jackets with dice on their backs and called themselves the “7-11s.” They pitched dimes, harassed passers-by, and worked on their doo-wop.
“God made the world round,” I said, laughing as I answered, “to keep the Guineas off the corners.” Ethnic jokes work better, I should add, when you don’t embarrass your unsuspecting Dad in front of his Italian friend. When only Bob laughed with me—and he stopped quickly—I knew I had screwed up. The trip got longer still.
In the year that followed my grade-school graduation, Irish-Italian humor took a hiatus. The upcoming mayoral election would be the last in Newark to pit an Irish candidate against an Italian, and it would have ramifications for my family that we never imagined. The same winds of change that swept Kennedy into office were soon to sweep Newark’s incumbent Irish mayor out.
An old school pol, Leo P. Carlin was about to experience his last hurrah. Born in Newark in 1908, one of twenty-two children, he never did graduate from high school. He didn’t need a degree to work as a union organizer. His union work led to a seat on Newark’s City Commission. From that position, he led the successful drive to end the commission structure and introduce a strong mayor form of government. The people of Newark elected him mayor in 1954 and again in 1958, the second time with 64 percent of the vote.
Other than in the looks department, Rep. Hugh Addonizio, a seven-term congressman, matched up well against Kennedy: college football star, war hero, liberal Democrat, youthful vigor. Importantly for “Hughie,” he had something Kennedy did not, namely an Irish wife. He needed more than that to sway the old school Micks. “In every Irish parade or hall, you saw nothing but Carlin signs,” said one ancient politico, “and all over the city, you could see Addonizio banners. It was really something to watch in those days—like something you see in the movies with Spencer Tracy—that type of politics.”80
Despite their Irish roots, my parents liked Addonizio. Among other reasons, he was the benefactor of Troop 40, the Boy Scout troop that served the White remnant left behind in our old West Market Street neighborhood. Bob and I were members because Billy once was. Some months before the election in 1962, Addonizio gave nine of us our Eagle Scout awards. The photo accompanying the news story is a classic. With our studied scowls and slicked-back hair, we looked more like a street gang than a Scout troop.
My parents had a more substantial reason to back Addonizio. Although they had yet to lose their home, they held Carlin to account for the demolition to come. They were not alone. “The view of most civic groups was that Mayor Carlin was responsible for the disruptive redevelopment plans,” writes scholar and civil rights activist Robert Curvin in his useful book on Newark politics, Inside Newark.81
Carlin’s luck ran bad that election season. A crippling snowstorm found him in Florida, never a good place for a mayor to be when your city is paralyzed. A second disaster was of Carlin’s own making. During a campaign debate, an audience member asked whether he had concerns about his opponent’s integrity. If the question was a setup, it was a good one. Carlin took the bait. He responded that voters should be concerned about Addonizio’s associations, adding, “Beware the Black Hand.” In Newark no one needed to be told that the “Black Hand” referred to a turn-of-the-century Italian extortion ring.
Primed for the moment, an indignant Addonizio leaped out of his seat. “Are you accusing me of being tied to the Mafia?” he asked. “Are you making such accusations because I am an Italian American?”
As Addonizio’s Irish campaign manager would later acknowledge, “We pounced on it…it just riled up the Italians in Newark, the biggest voting bloc in the North Ward.”82 After this blunder, Carlin never had a chance. Addonizio walked away with 62 percent of the vote.
In the election of 1962, despite continuing population loss in the city, 19 percent more votes were cast than in 1958. Addonizio’s people did not need to cheat to win, but they probably did anyhow. Election fraud is a cottage industry in Newark.
I have no inside knowledge about 1962, but in 1982 I found myself with a ringside seat on a bruising battle for the mayor’s chair. I had just started work at the thousand-employee Newark Housing and Redevelopment Authority. I was hired as the special assistant to the executive director, an elusive title for a concocted job. I had two qualifications that endeared me to the Philippine-born woman who ran the show: my family lived in Newark public housing after we were forced out of Roseville, and I aced her borderline illegal IQ test. An elitist whose role model was the then little-known Imelda Marcos, my “Imelda” took me under her wing.
Ignoring all election laws, Imelda and her figurehead boss—a Black “judge” of some sort—threw the whole weight of the Housing Authority behind the incumbent mayor, Ken Gibson, a political ally of the judge. Like all the other senior staff, I was expected to pony up. I wrote in my journal, the only one I ever kept, “Am told that it would be useful were I to support Gibson. ‘Not perfect’ according to Imelda, but she believes him to be best for city.” I told Imelda I would oblige, but only if I could see how the political wheels turned. She agreed.
“Not perfect” failed to do Gibson justice. A year before my arrival, a federal prosecutor sought to indict him on tax fraud. According to the New York Times, he had allegedly taken money from his 1974 campaign fund and secreted “more than $75,000 in a Swiss bank account.”83 The Department of Justice would not allow the charges to be brought. Rumor had it that Jimmy Carter himself quashed the indictment.
By 1982, as Gibson sought his fourth term, Blacks dominated city politics. Gibson’s chief opponent was Black City Council president Earl Harris. Italians still wielded power, but it was largely behind the scenes. On March 31 of that year, about six weeks before the May election, a special Essex County grand jury indicted both Gibson and Harris for arranging a no-show job for an old Italian politico. No one expressed shock or even surprise. This was Newark after all.
Imelda ran the agency’s election effort. Sticking around after work each day and on Saturdays to finish my PhD dissertation, I watched as her mostly foreign-born staffers manned the agency’s phones. They were reminding the thirty thousand or so people who lived in the projects why it was in their best interest to reelect the mayor. Imelda’s staff also identified tenants of influence and made sure they got new refrigerators or even new apartments. And Imelda personally strong-armed senior staff, me included, to buy tickets for fundraisers of all sorts. Wanting to see how things worked, I attended the events. Some sample journal entries:
3-17: BB stops by to tell me I should attend reception at Thomm’s Restaurant for Gibson—purpose is to assess support within Housing for mayor. Very cynical, expedient process, but everyone participates.
3-31: Talk with DL about working for Gibson. “Do I have a choice?”
4-2: “I am now indicted.” First line of Gibson’s speech. Says that he did nothing he wouldn’t do again.
4-6: Group of people working with computer lists, turns out to be for election.
4-14: Given election sign-up sheet. Choice of days to volunteer. Must tell whether we are going to use vacation time or personal leave time.
4-26: Large crews of housing workers rounded up to canvass voters.
5-6: Resist pressure for more election work with variety of excuses…. Crews to work through weekend.
5-7: [Imelda] starts reaming me for skipping out. I explain my position. I’m not interested in Gibson. I don’t want to campaign. I don’t care to do it merely to keep my job.
7-16: Condition of [judge] keeping job, I suspect, is to purchase 250 $100 tickets for KG’s campaign fund.
Sometime that spring I learned that I had been awarded a Fulbright to teach for a year at a French university, starting in September. Now with a graceful exit assured, I could really start having fun with these people. As the May 11 election approached, Imelda informed the staff, hundreds of us, that we were expected to volunteer a vacation day to help get out the vote on Election Day. Playing along, I was assigned with old-timers Joe and Sal to the senior projects in the Italian North Newark where my grandmother lived. Our job was to go door-to-door and escort the little old ladies to the polls, reminding them that if they wanted to keep their apartments, it would pay to vote for Gibson.
We never left the local coffee shop. These guys had great stories to tell about past elections and all day to tell them. The best stories were about the 1970 election, the election in which Gibson ousted Addonizio. Pointing to the polling site across the street, Joe said, “I voted there six times that day. I was dead people. I was old people. I was all kinds of people. And don’t think they weren’t doing the same thing on the other side of town.” I took him at his word and asked him to pass the cannolis.
After my day near the polls, if not exactly at them, I headed back to the office and spoke to my young Black secretary. She was sporting a Gibson pin as big as her head. “Our man gonna win?” I asked.
“Don’t matter who win,” she answered. “Both them n*****s goin’ to jail anyhow.” What she feared most, what everyone feared, was that no candidate would get a majority of the vote. None did, which meant a runoff between Gibson and Harris and another vacation day squandered at the polls.
No longer trusting me to man the polls, Imelda assigned me to deliver fried chicken to the “volunteer” poll workers for the runoff vote. I countered by scheduling a knee operation for that same day. Imelda appreciated the moxie of my gambit.
Despite my absence, Gibson prevailed. A month later Imelda called the senior staff into a conference room in flights of about eight. She told my group, as she told the others, that to retire his campaign debt Mayor Gibson was inviting all of us to a victory breakfast. Knowing what that meant, most of the staffers pulled out their checkbooks. The only thing that surprised them was the amount—$250 or about $750 by current standards.
Imelda went around the room one by one and requested the check. “Is this mandatory?” one fellow asked timidly.
“Only if you’re interested in job security,” she smirked.
When she came to me, I dutifully pulled out my checkbook, smiled, and said, “Should I make the check payable in Swiss francs?” The room froze. Then Imelda laughed, and the whole room laughed with her. In Newark, everything was funny, especially elections.
Political Considerations
Elections, as they say, do have consequences. Carlin’s “Black Hand” slur hit close to dead center. Right after the election, Hughie appointed Dominick Spina, a police inspector, to head up the Newark Police Department. When FBI tapes were made public during a later trial, Tony Boy Boiardo and co-conspirator Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo were heard agreeing that Spina was the right guy for the job. At one point, DeCarlo tells Boiardo, “It’s your call.”84
Spina served as the new mayor’s hatchet man. Although my father stayed out of politics, his captain—“Murphy” by name—had not. For Addonizio, it was payback time. By 1962, my father had received successive merit raises in his promotion to the rank of detective first grade. Under Police Director Joseph Weldon, such promotions were merit based. Each morning, Monday to Friday, Dad walked to a precinct three blocks from the house in a coat and tie. He had achieved a level of respect and respectability that he likely never anticipated in his Dickensian childhood. Within months of the election, all that was stripped away.
In 1965, at a grand jury hearing over a gambling raid gone bad, Spina conceded that he was the one who “makes the decisions regarding the transfer of personnel.” He admitted, too, that he used his own standards, “particularly in regard to the rank of plainclothesmen and detective.” The mayor, to be sure, often intervened in the process. Said the grand jury in a presentment: “Political considerations seem to override all else in the assignment of officers to plainclothes and gambling details.”85
Recounting my father’s career, a subsequent newspaper story read, “He recently transferred from the Youth Aid Bureau to the First Precinct.”86 The word “transferred” suggests a parallel move, possibly at my father’s request. The editors apparently did not want to dig too deeply. They failed to mention that my father’s new hours were midnight to 8 a.m., that his new assignment was to man the station’s front desk, that he had to wear a uniform, and that he had to take a bus downtown and back so that my mother could use the car in the morning to get to her job as a school crossing guard. No one volunteers for this kind of transfer. My father was collateral damage in an ethnic war ginned up for political reasons among peoples who had long since become allies.
The newspapers did mention, “Cashill’s invalid mother, Mrs. Marie Cashill, and her sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Smart,” as having been in another bedroom on the second floor. There is more to this story, of course. A year before the election, Gramps died in Florida. In that era, certainly among the working class, adult children took care of their dependent parents. In the personal stories I reviewed for this book, I could see that the “grandmother” often factored into a family’s decision to stay in the neighborhood or leave.
My father’s “Aunt Lil,” Nana’s older sister, came as part of the package. Nana could not have lived without Lil’s round-the-clock care, but good God did these two women despise each other. Confined to a single room, the sisters sat in opposite corners and hurled the most vile—and creative—imprecations back and forth all day long. If these ladies played the dozens, the cleverest Black kid in Newark would have had a hard time hanging in with them.
That first year they lived with us, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? came to our neighborhood theater. The movie, starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, struck home. The plot summary read as follows, “A former child star torments her paraplegic sister in their decaying Hollywood mansion.” In our decaying, soon-to-be-demolished house, the wheelchair-bound Nana did most of the tormenting. Bernie had clearly paid his dues taking care of this unhappy lady.
Even if Nana had been the Blessed Mother, her presence would have caused problems. My parents had to give up their bedroom and sleep on a foldout couch in the living room. Sixty years later, there is still not a comfortable such contraption. Patient soul that he was, my father would have endured a querulous mother-in-law. My mother did not have that patience. In Irish households, angry women do not shout. They simmer. The boil was low enough we didn’t really notice. My father did. In years past, he might have found escape in painting the house or finishing the basement, but the Highway Department had rendered such efforts futile.
On the afternoon of January 6, 1963, a Sunday, my father took the Christmas tree down as he always did on the Epiphany and retreated upstairs to the small bedroom my brother Billy had just vacated upon getting married. Sometime later, my mother came home from the movies, her retreat, and headed upstairs. My brother and I were watching The College Bowl, one of us screaming out the answers before the other could. I had just turned fifteen, Bob sixteen. Nine-year-old Maureen was just waiting for the show to end so we would shut up, and she could watch Lassie.
When I first saw the hint of a strobe from up the street, I thought, Oh, cool. Some excitement. Then the whoops stopped in front of our house, and the strobe pierced directly into the living room. The thunder of male footsteps on the stairs leading up to the second floor completed the equation. “It must be Nana,” said Bob anxiously.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It’s Dad.” There was no mistaking the urgency. The cops had come for one of their own.
My brother Bob had to make the phone calls to our brother Billy, our uncle Bob, a Newark cop, and then my uncle Andy, who had moved with wife Ellen to suburban Cedar Grove months before. “Get down here right way,” Bob told Andy. “Don’t bring anyone.”
