Life in West Oak Lane, Philadelphia 1950-1967 and other recollections
Did you know that JFK was driven down Washington Lane during his first Presidential campaign? I saw him while standing on the corner of Washington Lane (1700 block) and Lowber Avenue, outside the fence of the crematorium (Chelten Hills Cemetary). Yes, bodies were being burned in our neighborhood. The crematorium property ran from Washington lane until Upsal Street. There was a big lawn at the entrance where you could fly kites and, not surprisingly, usually no one around to throw you off.
Did you know that the Pit (the Bowling Alley on Stenton Avenue) as late as 1959 still employed human pin spotters? Their job was to set up the pins after a bowler knocked them over. I considered this a career option at that time.
Anybody ever take the number 6 trolley on Ogontz Ave to Willow Grove Park? With a coupon from the Food Fair on Washington Lane opposite Pennypacker Elementary School one was entitled to 20 amusement rides at the park for a dollar. The Food Fair was one of the first supermarkets in the neighborhood. The Food Fair- gave out Gold Square Stamps. I remember licking pages of these stamps for my mother until she had about twenty books full. I can still remember the taste. Then she sent me up to Stenton Avenue someplace to redeem them at a Gold Square Stamp Redemption Store. I remember that we had about 18,000 stamps in exchange for which I brought home three dish towels! The Food Fair also gave bingo cards with every purchase and you used these with a televised game (probably channel 10). When you completed a card with buttons you had to scream bingo over the telephone. You could also get free tickets from the Food Fair to the Robin Hood Dell. I and some other guys from the neighborhood worked at the parking lot of the Dell which was in Fairmount Park during the concert season a couple of summers in the early 60's.
The Renel Theater on Ogontz Avenue was notorious for its Saturday afternoon all cartoon feature program. It was a madhouse of kids and the ushers would go nuts trying to keep order. During intermission they had Duncan Yo Yo contests and a demonstration by some Olympic Yo Yo champ. I bought my Yo Yo's at Donalds also on Washington lane.
There was a beautiful park that stood between Germantown Ave and Greene St and it had a branch of the Free Library (Logan Branch?). Tremendous oak trees with a zillion squirrels you could feed. I first flirted with books here when my mother took me there as a tot. The librarian stamped out your selections with a return date stamp that was attached to the top of her pencil. We used to cut across the park to get to the YMCA on Greene Street after high school (Germantown) to shoot pool there. The Y had a whole lot of old pool tables and it cost maybe 25 cents an hour. The Y ran a summer day camp for boys called Camp Adventure which I attended a couple of summers. It was a melting pot type of camp with the common denominator being parents who probably couldn't afford a more expensive camp for their kids. The Y did not allow any swimming attire in the pool (for health reasons?) which was a bit traumatic.
The West Oak Lane Branch of the Free Library was close to home. This was on Washington Lane and Limekiln Pike opposite Temple Sinai. Every Monday night during the summer of 1963 I and a friend raided the trash cans of the library. The library apparently had to discard less popular books and so they tore a couple of pages or broke the bindings of these books and dumped them in the trash. It was really exciting and I built quite a library by the end of the summer.
In the 60's one could have a memorable breakfast experience of coffee and doughnut at Fats' on Germantown Ave right across from the school.
I took the H1 bus from the corner of Washington Lane and Lowber to GHS. Remember the PTC tokens?
We used to use the tokens for a game called "Penny Football" which was played on the lunchroom tables. Speaking of the lunchroom at GHS there was an old lady, a cashier, who sat in a cage and gave you change for your dollar if you needed to buy lunch and after she finished her business she would see if the coast was clear and scamper out of the dining room with her money box. For some reason she was frightened to death. Some of us were also frightened when we started GHS. Mt Airy and West Oak Lane were segregated white neighborhoods in the 60's. Pennypacker Elementary was totally white. GHS was to be our first real experience at crossing the racial barriers. It was a geat experience. There was a feeling of hope and optimism: "a new day coming on" to quote the Staple Singers. We were the vanguard of change. We were going to break the patterns of prejudice that we thought our parents had. This was around the time of Selma and the March on Washington. We all "had a dream!" We were blessed to be growing up at such a time.
I lived on the 1600 block of Mayland Street. Our families frequented the corner grocery store and drugstore on Rodney Street. You could get a chocolate soda for a nickel and an ice cream soda for a quarter at the drug store. We played basketball and football at Upsal (Finley) playground although Simmons Playground was just around the corner from us. We felt it was more Jewish and therefore safer. Simmons had an ice-skating rink in the late fifties which was very popular.
We used to live on hoagies from Lee's. Today we'd probably die eating one. The things we ate. Remember "Chicken Delight"? The delivery car had a chicken on the roof. When we ordered pizza we always asked for extra cheese. This stuff was murder. But we were tough. Still we wouldn't drink from someone else's soda bottle without first wiping off the germs. We weren't that foolhardy.
Miss Michael's was principal at Pennypacker for several generations. In fact she was always there probably since the early 1800's. I would think she still runs the place. She was a great collector of fine art. The school hallways were filled with Greek statues with missing limbs. It was frightening. She got the money for the art by having us kids collect old Inquirers and Bulletins for recycling. Pennypacker Elementary School held an atomic bomb drill when I was in 4th grade. We were instructed to go under our desks. We also did a tooth brushing experiment to prove the effectiveness of Crest, which I remember was advertised as "a dental decay preventing dentifrice which when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular care." That was us, the 4th graders at Pennypacker. (Hey, I can remember most TV commercials from those days but don't ask me where I last put my reading glasses.) Miss Barton ran the Safety Patrol. Any Safety Patrol boy from Pennypacker always ran the risk of having his badge bent by one of the boys from Saint A's. That was the parochial school nearby. Miss Riggs was my second grade teacher. She was high on science and brought a model volcano which actually spewed forth lava. Mr Bredt taught fourth grade. He was a nut on cleanliness. We had to have a nail brush and a handkerchief in our desk. He used to put our hands under the “opaque projector” and view our fingernails enlarged on the blackboard using his pointer to indicate places we had missed cleaning. We learned penmanship with the use of that same projector. We were probably the last generation to use scratch pens and ink. Speaking of elementary school, at least 4 of my teachers there were Miss, i.e., unmarried. Apparently this was not a career for a married woman. The system didn't want teachers going on pregnancy leave.
Our family doctor was Dr Gerson whose clinic was also on Rodney Street. He was a great doctor and human being. He did house calls. I always asked my mother to call him when I didn't feel well. Later we would go to the back door of his clinic for all of those inoculations needed for summer camps. I remember the big lines when Salk came out with his vaccine.
Did you ever play "wire ball" in the driveways? This was a popular game. Can you imagine that? We could have gotten electrocuted or blown out the electricity for all of West Oak Lane.
Our neighborhood was a gold-mine on Halloween.
There was a Mrs. Rose Phillips on the 1600 block of Mohican Street who gave candy apples to every trick-or-treater.
We came home for lunch during elementary school. Kids today wouldn't come home for lunch if they had to walk a few blocks. And if they did, they probably wouldn't find their mothers at home. Think about it! Almost all our mothers were at home and lunch was waiting for us. Our mothers were OK.
There was a carnival park off the parking lot near Pep Boys near Stenton Ave. Whenever I passed by, there was no one there. I get depressed thinking about it even now. Must have been too much competition with Willow Grove Park. That poor park manager had to compete with the various amusement rides that came down our streets quite often when the kids in our neighborhood were young.
Do you realize that the vast majority of kids in Mt Airy and West Oak Lane were Baby Boomers? Jack and Jill and the Good Humor man had a field day in our neighborhood. Especially since few homes were air conditioned in the 50's and everybody was outside. Life was on the streets.
Ah! Jack and Jill! Popsicles, creamsicles, fudgsicles, rockets. There was a menu pasted on the back of the truck and the kids would look it over to see what they could get for a dime. Traffic could be backed-up to Cheltenham Avenue because of one kid's indecisiveness. Usually two kids shared the dime because the popsicle had two sticks. And who didn't collect the sticks? The Jack and Jill man was a con artist. He would give out little souvenirs if you were a regular customer. These souvenirs included little booklets that when you thumbed down the pages you saw a little movie. But his best items were the tattoos. (I think they were called Cockamamies.) We didn't wash our arms for a few days after applying them. What they must be worth today! (The tattoos not our arms)
My father, of blessed memory, was the accountant for Esther Rosenberg who owned the Corset Shop on Stenton Ave. I used to visit him there in the back room. What an embarrassment for a young boy to walk in to such an establishment.
I was thinking how rare it was to see a patrol car in the neighborhood. In fact, when a police car came thru we used to walk up (or down) the block to see which house it might be going to. I mean this was big news.
And I don't remember anyone having their house broken into. Am I off the wall? There was a policeman, however, who spoke at our schools from kindergarten till senior prom. He was like a kind of PR man for the Phila Police and spoke at the schools in assembly. When we were in elementary school he talked about how to cross the street safely. Before the senior prom he lectured us
on drunken driving.
Do you remember the garbage trucks? They used to go up and down the driveways. One man stood on the garbage (the truck was open on top) and a man in the driveway tossed the metal garbage can up to him. After your garbage was dumped, the can was thrown in the direction of your house and usually winded up a few doors away depending on the wind's velocity that day and the garbage man's aim. It helped to have your family name painted on the can and the lid chained on. Everyone's can was smashed and smelly. This was before the era of garbage disposals and plastic bags. Do you remember the fruit salesmen also coming down the driveways with their clanging scales? There was also a guy buying old clothing shouting in a singsong with a yiddish accent: "I'm buyink old clothink."
There was a million vendors in the neighborhood. Fuller Brush Men, Avon salesmen, Walker Gordon Milk Man (Remember the frozen milk bottles?), the Bond Bread Man, the newspaper boys, the oil man, the gardeners for our tiny lawns, Girl Scout Cookies, the seltser man and the mailman who carried a big bag of mail and walked, that's right, walked.
About pretzels- I've been living in Israel 40 years and during this time I've met many people from many countries as well as many Americans from all the states, but if I ever come across someone eating a pretzel with mustard it's almost guaranteed that he's from Philly and quite often from our neighborhood.
If it's hot where you are right now like it is here you might want to remember the Italian Water Ice truck that plowed our streets at this time of the year.
My mother and father bought our house on the 1600 block of Mayland Street new in 1941 ($700 down and a $5,000 mortgage) so before that most of Mt Airy and my part of West Oak Lane must have been country.
OK friends try to test your memories:
I think it was 1963 and the Germantown Bears made it to the city championships in football against Gratz and nobody was allowed to see the playoffs.
Why?
Answer: There was tension between schools and threats of violence so only the drivers of the team buses were told where the game would be played (sealed envelopes?) so that neither of the schools knew which stadium.
Looking back after all these years it seems that things were far more idyllic. Were things really that bad?
Who won the championship?
Did you know that JFK was driven down Washington Lane during his first Presidential campaign? I saw him while standing on the corner of Washington Lane (1700 block) and Lowber Avenue, outside the fence of the crematorium (Chelten Hills Cemetary). Yes, bodies were being burned in our neighborhood. The crematorium property ran from Washington lane until Upsal Street. There was a big lawn at the entrance where you could fly kites and, not surprisingly, usually no one around to throw you off.
Did you know that the Pit (the Bowling Alley on Stenton Avenue) as late as 1959 still employed human pin spotters? Their job was to set up the pins after a bowler knocked them over. I considered this a career option at that time.
Anybody ever take the number 6 trolley on Ogontz Ave to Willow Grove Park? With a coupon from the Food Fair on Washington Lane opposite Pennypacker Elementary School one was entitled to 20 amusement rides at the park for a dollar. The Food Fair was one of the first supermarkets in the neighborhood. The Food Fair- gave out Gold Square Stamps. I remember licking pages of these stamps for my mother until she had about twenty books full. I can still remember the taste. Then she sent me up to Stenton Avenue someplace to redeem them at a Gold Square Stamp Redemption Store. I remember that we had about 18,000 stamps in exchange for which I brought home three dish towels! The Food Fair also gave bingo cards with every purchase and you used these with a televised game (probably channel 10). When you completed a card with buttons you had to scream bingo over the telephone. You could also get free tickets from the Food Fair to the Robin Hood Dell. I and some other guys from the neighborhood worked at the parking lot of the Dell which was in Fairmount Park during the concert season a couple of summers in the early 60's.
The Renel Theater on Ogontz Avenue was notorious for its Saturday afternoon all cartoon feature program. It was a madhouse of kids and the ushers would go nuts trying to keep order. During intermission they had Duncan Yo Yo contests and a demonstration by some Olympic Yo Yo champ. I bought my Yo Yo's at Donalds also on Washington lane.
There was a beautiful park that stood between Germantown Ave and Greene St and it had a branch of the Free Library (Logan Branch?). Tremendous oak trees with a zillion squirrels you could feed. I first flirted with books here when my mother took me there as a tot. The librarian stamped out your selections with a return date stamp that was attached to the top of her pencil. We used to cut across the park to get to the YMCA on Greene Street after high school (Germantown) to shoot pool there. The Y had a whole lot of old pool tables and it cost maybe 25 cents an hour. The Y ran a summer day camp for boys called Camp Adventure which I attended a couple of summers. It was a melting pot type of camp with the common denominator being parents who probably couldn't afford a more expensive camp for their kids. The Y did not allow any swimming attire in the pool (for health reasons?) which was a bit traumatic.
The West Oak Lane Branch of the Free Library was close to home. This was on Washington Lane and Limekiln Pike opposite Temple Sinai. Every Monday night during the summer of 1963 I and a friend raided the trash cans of the library. The library apparently had to discard less popular books and so they tore a couple of pages or broke the bindings of these books and dumped them in the trash. It was really exciting and I built quite a library by the end of the summer.
In the 60's one could have a memorable breakfast experience of coffee and doughnut at Fats' on Germantown Ave right across from the school.
I took the H1 bus from the corner of Washington Lane and Lowber to GHS. Remember the PTC tokens?
We used to use the tokens for a game called "Penny Football" which was played on the lunchroom tables. Speaking of the lunchroom at GHS there was an old lady, a cashier, who sat in a cage and gave you change for your dollar if you needed to buy lunch and after she finished her business she would see if the coast was clear and scamper out of the dining room with her money box. For some reason she was frightened to death. Some of us were also frightened when we started GHS. Mt Airy and West Oak Lane were segregated white neighborhoods in the 60's. Pennypacker Elementary was totally white. GHS was to be our first real experience at crossing the racial barriers. It was a geat experience. There was a feeling of hope and optimism: "a new day coming on" to quote the Staple Singers. We were the vanguard of change. We were going to break the patterns of prejudice that we thought our parents had. This was around the time of Selma and the March on Washington. We all "had a dream!" We were blessed to be growing up at such a time.
I lived on the 1600 block of Mayland Street. Our families frequented the corner grocery store and drugstore on Rodney Street. You could get a chocolate soda for a nickel and an ice cream soda for a quarter at the drug store. We played basketball and football at Upsal (Finley) playground although Simmons Playground was just around the corner from us. We felt it was more Jewish and therefore safer. Simmons had an ice-skating rink in the late fifties which was very popular.
We used to live on hoagies from Lee's. Today we'd probably die eating one. The things we ate. Remember "Chicken Delight"? The delivery car had a chicken on the roof. When we ordered pizza we always asked for extra cheese. This stuff was murder. But we were tough. Still we wouldn't drink from someone else's soda bottle without first wiping off the germs. We weren't that foolhardy.
Miss Michael's was principal at Pennypacker for several generations. In fact she was always there probably since the early 1800's. I would think she still runs the place. She was a great collector of fine art. The school hallways were filled with Greek statues with missing limbs. It was frightening. She got the money for the art by having us kids collect old Inquirers and Bulletins for recycling. Pennypacker Elementary School held an atomic bomb drill when I was in 4th grade. We were instructed to go under our desks. We also did a tooth brushing experiment to prove the effectiveness of Crest, which I remember was advertised as "a dental decay preventing dentifrice which when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular care." That was us, the 4th graders at Pennypacker. (Hey, I can remember most TV commercials from those days but don't ask me where I last put my reading glasses.) Miss Barton ran the Safety Patrol. Any Safety Patrol boy from Pennypacker always ran the risk of having his badge bent by one of the boys from Saint A's. That was the parochial school nearby. Miss Riggs was my second grade teacher. She was high on science and brought a model volcano which actually spewed forth lava. Mr Bredt taught fourth grade. He was a nut on cleanliness. We had to have a nail brush and a handkerchief in our desk. He used to put our hands under the “opaque projector” and view our fingernails enlarged on the blackboard using his pointer to indicate places we had missed cleaning. We learned penmanship with the use of that same projector. We were probably the last generation to use scratch pens and ink. Speaking of elementary school, at least 4 of my teachers there were Miss, i.e., unmarried. Apparently this was not a career for a married woman. The system didn't want teachers going on pregnancy leave.
Our family doctor was Dr Gerson whose clinic was also on Rodney Street. He was a great doctor and human being. He did house calls. I always asked my mother to call him when I didn't feel well. Later we would go to the back door of his clinic for all of those inoculations needed for summer camps. I remember the big lines when Salk came out with his vaccine.
Did you ever play "wire ball" in the driveways? This was a popular game. Can you imagine that? We could have gotten electrocuted or blown out the electricity for all of West Oak Lane.
Our neighborhood was a gold-mine on Halloween.
There was a Mrs. Rose Phillips on the 1600 block of Mohican Street who gave candy apples to every trick-or-treater.
We came home for lunch during elementary school. Kids today wouldn't come home for lunch if they had to walk a few blocks. And if they did, they probably wouldn't find their mothers at home. Think about it! Almost all our mothers were at home and lunch was waiting for us. Our mothers were OK.
There was a carnival park off the parking lot near Pep Boys near Stenton Ave. Whenever I passed by, there was no one there. I get depressed thinking about it even now. Must have been too much competition with Willow Grove Park. That poor park manager had to compete with the various amusement rides that came down our streets quite often when the kids in our neighborhood were young.
Do you realize that the vast majority of kids in Mt Airy and West Oak Lane were Baby Boomers? Jack and Jill and the Good Humor man had a field day in our neighborhood. Especially since few homes were air conditioned in the 50's and everybody was outside. Life was on the streets.
Ah! Jack and Jill! Popsicles, creamsicles, fudgsicles, rockets. There was a menu pasted on the back of the truck and the kids would look it over to see what they could get for a dime. Traffic could be backed-up to Cheltenham Avenue because of one kid's indecisiveness. Usually two kids shared the dime because the popsicle had two sticks. And who didn't collect the sticks? The Jack and Jill man was a con artist. He would give out little souvenirs if you were a regular customer. These souvenirs included little booklets that when you thumbed down the pages you saw a little movie. But his best items were the tattoos. (I think they were called Cockamamies.) We didn't wash our arms for a few days after applying them. What they must be worth today! (The tattoos not our arms)
My father, of blessed memory, was the accountant for Esther Rosenberg who owned the Corset Shop on Stenton Ave. I used to visit him there in the back room. What an embarrassment for a young boy to walk in to such an establishment.
I was thinking how rare it was to see a patrol car in the neighborhood. In fact, when a police car came thru we used to walk up (or down) the block to see which house it might be going to. I mean this was big news.
And I don't remember anyone having their house broken into. Am I off the wall? There was a policeman, however, who spoke at our schools from kindergarten till senior prom. He was like a kind of PR man for the Phila Police and spoke at the schools in assembly. When we were in elementary school he talked about how to cross the street safely. Before the senior prom he lectured us
on drunken driving.
Do you remember the garbage trucks? They used to go up and down the driveways. One man stood on the garbage (the truck was open on top) and a man in the driveway tossed the metal garbage can up to him. After your garbage was dumped, the can was thrown in the direction of your house and usually winded up a few doors away depending on the wind's velocity that day and the garbage man's aim. It helped to have your family name painted on the can and the lid chained on. Everyone's can was smashed and smelly. This was before the era of garbage disposals and plastic bags. Do you remember the fruit salesmen also coming down the driveways with their clanging scales? There was also a guy buying old clothing shouting in a singsong with a yiddish accent: "I'm buyink old clothink."
There was a million vendors in the neighborhood. Fuller Brush Men, Avon salesmen, Walker Gordon Milk Man (Remember the frozen milk bottles?), the Bond Bread Man, the newspaper boys, the oil man, the gardeners for our tiny lawns, Girl Scout Cookies, the seltser man and the mailman who carried a big bag of mail and walked, that's right, walked.
About pretzels- I've been living in Israel 40 years and during this time I've met many people from many countries as well as many Americans from all the states, but if I ever come across someone eating a pretzel with mustard it's almost guaranteed that he's from Philly and quite often from our neighborhood.
If it's hot where you are right now like it is here you might want to remember the Italian Water Ice truck that plowed our streets at this time of the year.
My mother and father bought our house on the 1600 block of Mayland Street new in 1941 ($700 down and a $5,000 mortgage) so before that most of Mt Airy and my part of West Oak Lane must have been country.
OK friends try to test your memories:
I think it was 1963 and the Germantown Bears made it to the city championships in football against Gratz and nobody was allowed to see the playoffs.
Why?
Answer: There was tension between schools and threats of violence so only the drivers of the team buses were told where the game would be played (sealed envelopes?) so that neither of the schools knew which stadium.
Looking back after all these years it seems that things were far more idyllic. Were things really that bad?
Who won the championship?