Ancient History

Pop-Pop As A Mule Boy

My parents come from poor backgrounds. Depression era survivors who lived lives of deprivation I cannot imagine. My mother's family is descended from what are known in New Jersey as Pineys; people who lived in the vast tracts of pine forest that blanket a huge area of the central part of South Jersey. My mother's father we called Pop-Pop. He spent his boyhood as a mule driver on the canals along the Delaware River. One of my favorite photographs of him is as a young boy handling his mules. Mom's mother came from Austria when it was a part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was known to us all as Nanny. Nanny was great and wonderful. To know her was to know love and food and eccentricity. She had a gigantic black gas stove in her kitchen. She would let us cook hot dogs on forks held over the open flames of the burners. Nanny was always trying to put one over on you.

"Pancake?" she would ask, but you knew it was a corn fritter.
"Orange juice?" No,Nanny that's Tang, and you're not fooling me.
Pop-Pop had been many things in life: Policeman,iceman,muleboy, but when I was a kid he worked for the city of Woodbury at the town dump. He would bring home all kinds of toys that had been thrown out by stores and individuals. A visit to Nanny and Pop-Pop's was a fantastic day of adventure because you never knew what kind of stuff you would have to play with. My cousins and I played in their basement next to the coal furnace,getting black in the soot. We scrambled through the grape vines in the back yard and played house in the small shed farther back.
Nanny and Pop-Pop's was the center of our family. The hub in the wheel. We spent every Saturday night there, the whole family jammed into that small old house. Their kitchen was the center of the world and the grownups and older cousins gathered to play Bingo and Michigan Rummy and Po-Keeno. You knew you were grown up when you were invited to play the games instead of playing in the basement. It was warm, it was safe, it was family.
My father's family came from the hills of Maryland. His poverty was extreme. A two room shack was home for him. There was no running water; he had to haul it from the creek nearby. Dad never knew his own father. It's a story I cannot find out. My grandmother was a prim and proper pseudo southern belle who did not speak of improprieties. She was Grandmom and not as accessible as Nanny. She was aloof in her white gloved nature, at least in my eyes.
Dad's stepfather was Grandpop. He was a hill person, a farmer; an unskilled laborer who couldn't read. A stoic man I never knew too much about. Both my grandfathers were stoic men who showed little emotion to children.
The families all ended up in Woodbury, Gloucester County New Jersey.
My uncles were blue collar men. Baker,farmer,mechanic,bricklayer, municipal worker. My dad was a railroad man who was climbing up the ladder into the white collar world. Mom and all my aunts were of course stay- at- home mothers.
Dad survived the poverty and the Great Depression and World War II. He and Mom would move to Woodbury Heights and make a home for us, determined never to look poverty in the eye again. In time I would have a brother, the greatest dog in the world,and later on a sister. We were raised with love and discipline and a respect for family.
It was safe. It was warm. It was home.