Beauty and the Beer

Growing up in Irvington, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark, I walked to school from kindergarten through high school. My route took me past a tavern on my corner. We never called it a bar and certainly never called it a pub. I know of a few places still called taverns but the term isn’t as popular now. A tavern serves alcoholic beverages and a rather simple food menu. The word derives from the Latin taberna whose original meaning was a shed, workshop, or stall. It doesn’t sound very elegant and our corner tavern wasn’t very elegant. Of course, I never really saw it until I was older. More on that later.

An article in The New Yorker, September 21, 1957, asked “In what American election is the greatest number of votes cast? The answer is, of course, the Presidential election. In what American election is the next-greatest number of voters cast? The answer is the annual Miss Rheingold contest. In 1956, the vote totaled just over 23 million, this year it promises to be even bigger.”

I remember the contest which ran from 1941 to 1964. I was too young to care much about beauty contest girls and honestly, they looked more like someone’s mom than bathing beauties. They were described as being “clean-cut All-American, lovely, friendly, warm, and graceful – a nice girl.” No cheesecake bathing suit photos.

Pictures of six young women were displayed everywhere Rheingold beer was sold (which was Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine). I never saw the ads in a bar, but I saw them on bar windows and in delicatessens, grocery stores, the package goods liquor store that was next door to the corner tavern and probably on TV.

Actress Tippi Hedren was a Miss Rheingold contestant (she didn’t win) in 1953, years before Alfred Hitchcock would terrorize her and me with his film The Birds.

Rheingold Brewing Company was based in Brooklyn but did have another brewery in New Jersey for a time. The Miss Rheingold contest probably helped make the beer New York’s most popular brew in the 1950s and 1960s. It had been around since it opened in 1883 in Bushwick on “Brewers’ Row,” with other German-American beer companies.

New Jersey has a long beer history too. The first brewery in the state was established in the settlement of Pavonia (now Hoboken) when NJ was part the Dutch New Netherland colony. That is far enough back that it was destroyed by a band of Lenape in 1643.

The large German immigrant populations in Newark and Jersey City led to the establishment of a healthy brewing industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it became the fourth-largest industry in Newark. Kruger, Hensler, and Feigenspan were among the leading industrial beer families in Newark. Later, Ballantine, Rheingold, and Pabst, among others operated large breweries in Newark and surrounding towns.

During World War I, accusations of German propaganda and some persecution of German-Americans sent some of these brewers to relocate in the Midwest. Rheingold is a name alluding to the German river Rhein as well as Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold. Newark had 27 breweries before Prohibition. None of them exist today. Ballantine closed up in the 1960s, Rheingold in 1977, and Pabst held one until 1985. Some of those brands have been resurrected by other brewers in the past few decades.

Though the state now has many craft breweries, the biggest brewery is Anheuser-Busch at the edges of Newark near Liberty/Newark Airport.

Miss Rheingold ended in 1964 when sales of Rheingold beer were falling off. But also by the mid-1960s businesses could no longer advertise their brand with six smiling white women. I heard that there was an attempt to revive the contest later with contestants that were a more diverse group of female bartenders.

My Irvington corner tavern (I never knew its name – if it had one – we just called it the corner tavern) was still in business when I graduated high school. New Jersey lowered its drinking age from 21 to 18 in 1973 while I was in college. I always suspected some state politicians had kids my age and changed it see they could drink legally in college. It was raised it to 19 in 1980, then back to 21 in 1983. I guess all the state senators’ kids had graduated by then.

My recollection (not to be trusted) is that the corner tavern was a Ballantine beer place that supported the New York Yankees and had Yankee’s promotions. I think the NY Mets were connected to Rheingold. My first entry into the dark, hops and malt den of the corner tavern was when we would go in on Halloween. If the guys (never any women that I saw) were feeling good, you’d get some quarters or even a dollar bill in your trick-or-treat bag. One year I was dressed as Mickey Mantle (we share a birthday) and that was a very good Halloween visit to the tavern.

I went to the bar legally during my days home from college. I was shocked that a draft glass was only a quarter. How had we missed going here? But the clientele was not college kids or long hair-friendly. My last visit was after my friend Dan’s father’s funeral. We went in to toast his father who had been a regular at the corner tavern. Everyone knew him and we drank free and freely that night and got really drunk.

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In researching this essay, I came across “Beauty and the Beer” which is a documentary about the Miss Rheingold contest. It has archival footage, interviews with former Miss Rheingolds, and some of the “Mad Men” advertising executives who worked on the campaigns. It’s online at vimeo.com/185674784/f05e7c3023

Halloween, Martians and Radio Terrorists

On Halloween back in 1938, Martians invaded the United States.

They did it in the form of a radio play. Orson Welles was behind this invasion and he used H.G. Well’s classic story, The War of the Worlds, as the blueprint.

I have written before about when the Martians landed in New Jersey that Halloween (October 30, 1938) but I had listened to an episode of Radiolab that told me more about not only the events of that day but about the similar events that have occurred since. (The episode unfortunately does not seem to be available anymore.)

The 1938 broadcast fooled over a million people when it originally aired. That includes regular folks listening to their radios, particularly in the area around Grover’s Mill, New Jersey where the Martians supposedly landed, but also the military, police and government officials.

The amazing thing I learned is that the broadcast was imitated a number of times since then in places like Santiago, Chile, Buffalo, New York and in a quite tragic fashion in Quito, Ecuador.

In this age of heightened security and alerts, it is strange to learn that when Orson Welles played his little Halloween stunt he was labeled by the FCC as a “radio terrorist.”

The audience’s reaction of panic and mass hysteria was more than Welles had expected, though he loved the attention. It certainly had something to do with the pre-WWII atmosphere of that time. Radiolab said that some reports in New Jersey that night were that Nazis had invaded.

In the broadcast, Welles plays the role of a Princeton professor of astronomy who is called on as an expert.

I would assume that an audience today listening to the original broadcast would not be fooled by its corniness. It mixes “real” radio music and talk with the radio play and that was why listeners were taken in by it. The news breaks – which were a fairly new radio thing – get more frequent until they become all that we hear.

Of course, anyone in 1938 could have turned to another station and discovered that no one else was reporting news of an invasion by Martians. But most people didn’t change the channel.

Welles on the air

Some people after the broadcast suggested that it was all planned by Welles, but that is like planning a viral video. It just doesn’t work that way. If you are a conspiracy theory fan, you’ll like this Wikipedia report:

“It has been suggested that War of the Worlds was a psychological warfare experiment. In the 1999 documentary, Masters of the Universe: The Secret Birth of the Federal Reserve, writer Daniel Hopsicker claims the Rockefeller Foundation funded the broadcast, studied the panic, and compiled a report available to a few. A variation has the Radio Project and the Rockefeller Foundation as conspirators. In a theatrical trailer for his film F For Fake, Welles joked about such theories, jesting that the broadcast indeed “had secret sponsors.”

The Martian “landing site” now has a monument in Van Nest Park in West Windsor Township, New Jersey.

I actually drove to the “Martian landing site” near Princeton. I didn’t expect to see Martians, but I was hoping for a few UFO conspiracy people to have a conversation with – but it was deserted.

Go ahead and listen to the War of the Worlds original radio broadcast and you will probably be amused and a bit bored. That is how I reacted to hearing it years ago. And that is why I was so interested in the Radiolab show that took it further.

Could it happen again? Could more modern audiences be fooled? In 1949, Radio Quito did the play in a version for their Ecuadorian listeners and it was taken quite seriously and resulted in a riot that burned down the radio station and killed at least seven people.

I think the story of how people reacted to news of a “cylindrical meteorite” landing in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey is a fascinating study in psychology. When that meteorite unscrews and a tentacled Martian comes out and blasts the crowd with a heat ray, all hell breaks loose.

Why Martians? They were well established as the lines to worry about in the science fiction of the 1940s and 50s.

In the program, police, firefighters, and the NJ state militia get involved, Martial law is declared in Jersey. The Martians get out their tripod machines and soldiers, citizens, power stations, transportation, and buildings fall before them.

The “Secretary of the Interior” advises the nation and there are reports of cylinders falling all across the country. Tripods cross the Hudson River and attack New York City. A reporter atop the CBS building in NYC is knocked out by some strange gas. Then we hear a ham radio operator (How did he get on the CBS bandwidth?) calling, “2X2L calling CQ. Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there…. anyone?”

After a station identification, the announcer reminded listeners that this was all a story. But by then people must have been packing and heading outside. My parents, who lived through it and listened to it live, told me that people in our hometown of Irvington, NJ headed for the South Orange Mountains. People reported smelling poison gas. There were reports of flashes of light – ray guns – in the distance.

If you hung in there for the end of the original program, you got the same ending as in H.G Wells’ original The War of the Worlds novel. The Martians were defeated not by our weapons, but by our own “alien” germs and bacteria that killed them off. Orson Welles told listeners for the third time after the play that the show was just a Halloween story, but the damage (or fun) was already done.

More To This Story

• About the Mercury Theater of the Air
• Read the Original Script
• News Coverage of the Incident
• listen to the War of the Worlds original radio broadcast
• Read More about the Quito Panic
• One More Time in Chile

Dr. Williams, Jersey Poet

Williams in his 1921 passport photo

It’s the birthday of poet William Carlos Williams, born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883. He the first of two sons of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry. Growing up in New Jersey, I was interested in Jersey poets when I was in high school and discovered Williams through a used copy of his Selected Poems that I found at a yard sale. Seeing that it was his birthday, I took that old paperback off my shelf and read some breath into his poems again.

When Williams was in high school he decided he wanted to be both a poet and a doctor and saw no clash between the two professions. He pursued both vocations with equal passion for the rest of his life. He wrote poems on the back of prescription slips, and he drew from the passions and pain of the patients he visited in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City and, later, in his practice in Rutherford.

In my high school days, I fell under the spell of his contemporaries Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and poetry that “sounded like poetry” and that took some digging to understand. I found Williams’ poems oddly simple and almost “not poetry.”

Apparently, Williams admired those poets too but found them “too European.” But along with Pound and H.D., he is considered a leading poet of the Imagist movement. It became his aim to capture a uniquely American voice. He wanted to use the plain speech of the local people whose lives he became part of in his medical practice.

In the second half of my poetic life, I lost interest in the most “poetic” poets and found my reading and writing closer to Williams, though more narrative in form.

The sixteen-word unrhymed poem from 1923 below is among Williams’ most famous poems.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

“The Red Wheelbarrow” should be called  ‘XXII’ since it’s the 22nd poem to appear in Williams’ 1923 collection Spring and All and that is how it was listed in that collection – but everyone refers to it as “The Red Wheelbarrow.” When I first became really interested in Williams, this poem intrigued me. It is so simple and yet its “meaning” is not so easy to explain.  That wheelbarrow is a metonym for something greater. The fact that it is “glazed” by rainwater is very much “Imagist.”

Williams’ poetic reputation was slow to form because it was a time Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was considered the pinnacle of English poetry. It was in the 1940s and beyond that Williams gained wider recognition, and his five-volume poem Paterson, (1946 – 1958) is considered his masterpiece.

It is a much more complex and difficult poem on first reading. (It is available online if you can read text on a screen – I can’t, so I prefer to read it on the paper page.) Yes, in high school, I took a copy of it to read beside the Great Falls of Paterson, New Jersey feeling very much a poet myself. Corny Romanticism, I suppose, but I still visit those falls quite regularly, without his book but usually with my notebook and camera.

But another of his best-known poems is this very short one that reads like a note left for his wife.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

The poem is very much “modernist and imagist” and so we look at it as dealing with temptation, guilt, and life’s simple pleasures as he apologizes and yet doesn’t apologize.

This post is not to say that all of his poems are so simple on the surface or difficult to understand as poems.

Take this opening of his straight ahead and rather erotic poem “Arrival.”

And yet one arrives somehow,
finds himself loosening the hooks of
her dress
in a strange bedroom–
feels the autumn
dropping its silk and linen leaves
about her ankles…

And I do love the idea of and this line “Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?” from his poem “Danse Russe.”

He certainly was a prolific poet. His Collected Poems take two volumes.

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This post originally appeared on my poetry blog
connected to the website for POETS ONLINE.

The Long Tail of Greasy Tony’s

Greasy Tony’s in NJ once upon a time

What is it about a short, simple post about a New Jersey food joint that went out of business that keeps it appearing in the top 10 posts read here?

Back in 2008,  I posted a story called Greasy Tony’s Reborn in the Desert.  Tony’s was I place I frequented in the early 1970s as an undergrad at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

It had good, fast, greasy food. Nothing extraordinary. It vanished in 1992, a victim of the university’s expansion. The students who made it popular caused its demise.

Whatever following Greasy Tony’s place might have had, it doesn’t explain why the post has “legs” (or a “long tail” as it is known online).

Is it the title of the post – reborn in the desert? Was it the mention of James Gandolfini (a Rutgers grad) eating a cheesesteak in the resurrected eatery in the Arizona desert?

Mr. Greasy Tony, Tony Giorgianni, died in 2008, so that is not topical news.

If you found that post, or this one, how about a comment here about why you came here. It puzzles me.

Update: 2022

A sharp-eyed reader let me know that they spotted a Greasy Tony’s t-shirt in the movie Revenge of the Nerds being worn by Booger. I guess someone connected to the film knew of the place. Perhaps this explains why some people search online and find these posts.

Utopia, New Jersey

Nightly discussions occurred around the Helicon Hall fireplace

I remember being introduced to the idea of a utopia back in junior high school and becoming fascinated with the idea of creating a society of perfection. It was the same social studies class that introduced me to the idea of a sharing community where all were equal and work and the rewards were shared. Then our clever teacher told us this was called Socialism and Communism. Of course, we were taught that those were bad things, but they sounded pretty good to us.

But the idea that Sir Thomas More had back in 1516 in his book, Utopia, stayed with me. I particularly liked More setting his utopia on an island because I have always had a thing for islands.

Utopia has been used to describe “intentional communities” that attempt to create an ideal society,  I wrote here earlier about Henry Ford’s failed attempt at a utopian community in the Amazon which he called Fordlandia.

New Jersey would not be the first place that comes to mind when you bring up utopian communities, but one example is an experiment by the writer Upton Sinclair. Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” He was no fan of commercial society.

Upton was born in 1878. When he was 15 years old, he started supporting himself by writing “dime” novels. He continued to write pulp fiction to get himself through Columbia University and he wrote a novelette a week all through college.

When he got an assignment from a socialist weekly to investigate working conditions in the meatpacking industry of Chicago, he was shocked at what he saw. He used his research to write The Jungle. The manuscript was rejected a number of times, so Sinclair published it himself in 1906. He had already published five novels, but The Jungle was his first real success. It motivated people to demand reforms in the meatpacking industry. It was said that President Roosevelt received a hundred letters a day demanding reforms.

The success of The Jungle allowed Sinclair to start a utopian experiment in New Jersey.

Upton Sinclair and son, David, 1904

As unlikely as that may sound, there have been other utopian experiments in the state, as documented in Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden. The cooperative colony in Englewood, NJ was founded by Upton Sinclair in 1906.

A fire would end the experiment after only six months, but the dream remained with Sinclair for the rest of his life.

It was called Helicon Home Colony. It was hardly perfect. There were sex scandals that were written about in the press right from the beginning. They had a policy that specifically excluded non-whites. But Sinclair really believed his experiment was the future of American living.

Matt Novak wrote a good piece on Helicon that goes deeper into this story.

Sinclair considered his Helicon Home Colony (AKA Helicon Hall) as living based on reason and science. His ideas came from his reading of other 19th century socialist utopians.

Meta

My reading about the experiment makes me think that Sinclair wanted to get away from an unhappy family life.  He was not getting along with his first wife, Meta. He didn’t like being a father. He had just spent  three years secluded with them on an isolated farm in order to finish The Jungle.

He wanted freedom to write and a private community would allow him to write while others kept his wife occupied and the community raised his son.

He did have some progressive feminist beliefs and wanted the community to have things like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing done by those who could do it best without regard to gender. Creative pursuits could be followed by anyone who desired them.

Sinclair wrote some articles, including one in the New York Times, to set out his principles and solicit people who might want to join the experiment.

The plan was more ambitious than what he had the time to actuallycreate. He wanted to have as many electrical conveniences as possible and their own power plant, plus their own food-producing farm.

Although Sinclair was a self-avowed socialist, he didn’t call the community a socialist experiment and he didn’t want political beliefs to be part of the experiment.

As I said up front, it was hardly utopian in who was welcome to join.  Race, religion and profession were to be considerations. Writers, musicians, academics, artists  and creative types were invited to live there.  There was a board of directors and members owned shares in Helicon. Sinclair controlled about 70% of the board’s vote and could have overruled anyone.

One of the rumors that immediately started being said about the community was that the 46 adults (along with 15 children)  were just a sex cult of free love.

Helicon Hall in Englewood

Sinclair didn’t want to employ traditional domestic servants and preferred using local students as interns. Interestingly, one of those interns was Sinclair Lewis who was then a budding author himself and who is often confused with Upton Sinclair. Sinclair Lewis would go on to write Babbitt, Main Street, Arrowsmith and other books and became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The interns did not work out and they ended up hiring servants which sounds less than utopian.

Whether or not Upton Sinclair’s idea of utopia would have succeeded will never be known.  A fire, on March 16, 1907, burned Helicon to the ground.  A carpenter died in the fire so there was an inquest. The hearings were a local sensation and exposed the “free-love nest” story back into the newspapers, but no charges against Sinclair or anyone else were made. Members of the community got back their investments from the insurance money, but Sinclair was broke.

Sinclair considered starting over again in California, and Fairhope, Alabama and in Arden, Delaware, but nothing ever came of those plans.

Upton Sinclair was prolific throughout his life and went on to write almost 100 books. In his 1919 book, The Brass Check, he wrote:

“I look back on Helicon Hall to-day, and this is the way I feel about it. I have lived in the future; I have known those wider freedoms and opportunities that the future will grant to all men and women. Now, by harsh fate I have been seized and dragged back into a lower order of existence and commanded to spend the balance of my days therein.”

He may have idealized Helicon more because he never got to see it fail and so he always believed that it could have worked.

Follow the River

The river of my childhood imagination

I grew up in the very urban Irvington, New Jersey. It borders the state’s biggest city, Newark. As you went west from town, you entered suburbia.

There is the South Mountain Reservation about 4 miles west and as a kid growing up in the 1960s my friends and I often rode there on my bike to “get into nature” and looked for adventures. It has Hemlock Falls, a mill pond where we fished and lots of trails in its more than 2000 acres. It was the closest thing I had to wilderness.

My only neighborhood oasis from urban life was the Elizabeth River which ran along the bottom of my street. I probably passed it almost every day. We called it “The Brook.” I don’t think I knew it was actually the Elizabeth River until I started getting into maps when I was 10 years old.

We played along and in that river all the time. We threw rocks. We made dams. We made little boats and tried to see which one would make it the furthest downstream. I imagined that some might someday make it to the ocean and to some other country. I put messages in my bottles asking the finder to write to me. I even included a self-addressed and stamped postcard in a few of them. No one ever responded.

Our parents always warned us not to go there. The water certainly wasn’t very clean and after heavy rain, it was full of rainbow eddies from gas and oil runoff from the streets. There were no fish for anglers, though were very small fish in some sections that attracted some big birds, such as night herons.

In my childhood days, there were several times when we read stories in the local newspapers about a kid getting drowned along the river because they were caught by stormwater. We imagined a wall of water gushing down the river. I would go there when it rained and stand on the bridge over Allen Street watching for a wave. I never saw one. The water just gradually rose.

The Elizabeth River isn’t a Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn kind of river. When it passed through my town it was captured by concrete walls.
It is confined all along the way in this artificial channel that was built in the 1920s and 30s and as part of the WPA projects.

When I was in sixth grade, I had a fairly detailed map of waterways in the state and decided to try to find the source of the river. The headwaters of the Elizabeth River are actually buried beneath East Orange in Essex County. I assume it is fed by underground creeks and streams. It doesn’t see the light of day until it is at the border between Irvington and the Vailsburg neighborhood of Newark. From there it goes pretty much in a southern direction through the center of Irvington.

My neighborhood was near that place where it emerges from underground. You could enter the underground tunnel part to the north when the water was low. I tried it with a few friends but the fear of the darkness, crazy rats, maybe even bats, and that sudden wave of floodwater prevented us from ever going very far underground.

I was happy to walk the full length of the open sections, In a dry summer, the water was restricted to an even smaller channel at the center, so you could walk most of the way on either side. We slipped on slimy rocks and got our sneakers and pants wet many times. There were places that had a kind of metal ladder to climb in or out but for most of the way, it would be tough to climb the walls.

There were times when older kids and even the police would see us down there and chase us out.

Through Civic Square

Past my neighborhood, it flows past our area park and Irvington High School and along the east side of Civic Square with the library, town hall, and police and fire departments.

Further south, it forms the west boundary of the 19th century Clinton Cemetery. I always found this to be a creepy section, and then at the southern end of the cemetery, the river passes under the Garden State Parkway near Exit 143 and disappears as a surface waterway again. That was the end of the river for most of my young life.

The river goes back underground

When I was able to drive, I consulted maps and did some research and I decided to complete my river journey to the end of the river. It reemerges just south of the Union County line near the Parkway again.

By car and foot, I was able to track it to the Arthur Kill, a tidal strait between Staten Island, New York and New Jersey’s Union and Middlesex Counties. That strait is a major navigational channel for the Port of New York and New Jersey. The river’s mouth is Raritan Bay which is fed by the Passaic River, Hackensack River, Rahway River, and Elizabeth River.

Perhaps a few of my messages in bottles actually did make it along the river carried by heavier rains to this heavily used marine channel where you can see ocean-going tankers. They went out into the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe they are still adrift, searching for a shore to land upon.

The oddly-named Arthur Kill is an anglicization of the early 17th-century Dutch achter kill meaning “back channel.” It probably referred to it being located “behind Staten Island.” During the Dutch colonial era, the region was part of New Netherland. The Dutch kill comes from the Middle Dutch word kille, meaning riverbed, water channel, or stream. The area around Newark Bay was known as Cull Bay during the British colonial era. and the sister channel of Arthur Kill is called Kill van Kull which refers to the waterway that flows from the col (ridge or passage).

South Front Street Bridge at the river’s mouth at the Arthur Kill

The channel is not a pretty part of the Jersey coast. It is primarily edged with industrial sites and is sometimes referred to as the Chemical Coast. The Staten Island side is primarily lined with salt marshes and is home to the Staten Island boat graveyard. It creates a border for Fresh Kills Landfill and Freshkills Park.

The Passaic River is the New Jersey River that gets the most attention. Its headwaters are in the Great Swamp which was once Glacial Lake Passaic as the Ice Age melted and the waters found their way counterintuitively north. It is still mostly unchanneled and above ground. It flows over hard, black volcanic basalt cliffs at the Great Falls in Paterson and empties into Newark Bay.

Still, my Elizabeth River holds a much stronger hold on my memory and imagination. To a small boy, “The Brook” was Twain’s Mississippi River even if I never was able to float on a raft downstream.

A strange “face in the wall” along the river