Robert Howard Goldhamer was known in his family as a fantastic storyteller. His oral history, conducted when he was 83, included many recollections of the love and humor in his family and the sights and sounds of his neighborhood. This is the second excerpt from my interviews with him. He passed away when he was 94.
“A number of our family members lived with us when I was small. This included my mother's parents and her sister, my Aunt Helen. I remember Aunt Helen reading to me, with me sitting in her lap, every night. She read “Uncle Wiggly” from the funny papers, and she once bought a book, “A Child's Garden of Verse”, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and read that to me. When I liked that, she bought his book, “Kidnapped” and scared the daylights out of me when she read it. I don't remember much of the story except that, at that age of four or five, the idea of kidnapping really grabbed me.
When I later went to kindergarten at a school that was a few blocks away from home, I was very aware of strangers who paid particular attention to me. One day, coming out of school, I was sure that a young woman was coming after me, and I ran like blazes to the first haven I could find, which was the Frish's back door. I breathlessly burst in on Mama Frish in her kitchen, and she said, “Bobby, what's the matter?” I said, panting, “Give me some jelly bread!” She always had wonderful homemade bread and homemade thick purple grape jelly, which she was always glad to give me. I guess it was the only thing I could think of in my terrified state. I got the jelly bread, and didn’t get kidnapped.
I recall many sounds from my childhood. In the 1920s, newspapers were sold cheaply on street corners by vendors and when there was an “extra addition” of the paper, newsboys would go up and down the streets in the middle of the night, yelling, “Extra, Extra!” House lights would go on and people would come out and call the news boy over and buy a paper. When President Harding died suddenly, that was an “Extra.” I remember lying in bed and hearing that sound.
Another noise I used to hear–one that I dreaded–was the sound of the rags-paper men. These were old men—at least they seemed ancient to me–who would rent a horse and wagon and drive down the streets calling for people to bring out waste paper or junk. They would buy these items, and load up their wagon and resell it. They were junk men, more or less. As they came down the street, they would call, “Rags, papers, rags, papers!” You would hear their voices, and the sounds of the horse's hooves slowly walking by. You'd hear the creak of the wagons and the sound of the steel rimmed wheels on the brick street as it came closer and closer.
I think I had been told that bad boys were given away to rags-paper men. There was one that used to come around our neighborhood occasionally who really had me frightened. So I remember diving under a bed upstairs as soon as I'd hear him coming down the street, and staying there, terror-stricken until the poor man went on his way.
Another horse-drawn wagon that was familiar very early in the morning was the milk wagon. His route was usually around 6:00 a.m., so he woke people up. In summer and winter, you would hear the different sounds as he went down the street, stopped his wagon in front of your house, clinked the bottles together in the carrier, clinked them together as he left them next to your door (or in the milk chute if you had one on the side of your house) and his footsteps as he walked his horse to the next stop.
A small percentage of the population had automobiles when I was a child. Dad got his first car when I was around four. He had a Buick touring car which had a front and back seat and a little jump seat in the back which you could pull down. There was a top that was convertible. When you raised it in order to enclose the car, there were window panes made of a substance called isinglass that were kept in special containers in the doors. You hooked those on special fasteners to fill the openings, so the car was completely enclosed.
I remember when I was probably five years old that we drove in our touring car to have a picnic. The road was brick-paved for a good part of it and then we got onto a dirt road. It had rained the day before, and when we got within three quarters of a mile of our destination, we had to stop because Dad couldn't get the car through the mud. Then it started to rain again. One of the first things we had to do when it rained was to put up the isinglass windows so no water would come in. Then we just had our picnic there at the side of the road. It was quite an outing.
My father did most of the driving, though Mother knew how to drive. But when she drove a car, it was as if the car was some kind of an animal that she was in charge of. She showed this by holding the steering wheel very tightly, as if she had that animal around the neck. Then, when she wanted the animal to do different things, she would proceed in her way to pass the message along. For instance, if she wanted to shift from low into high, without going into second, she did it. If the car objected, that was too bad. If she wanted to shift without stepping on the clutch sometimes, she did that. She forced the car to do her bidding.
Sometimes Mom had problems, like not putting the parking brake on all the way, and this caused one of our favorite family stories. Fortunately it didn't involve any person getting hurt, though it did damage to the car and some other property. We used to beg her to tell this story. She'd parked the car on the top of a small rise in the road, gotten out of the car and gone to shop down a block or two at several stores. On her way back, she noticed there was quite a crowd in front of one of the stores that was at the intersection.
In telling her story, she'd say, “I saw this big crowd in front of the A&P ” And we'd ask, “What did you do, Mom?” She'd say, “Well, I went and looked to see what they were all there for.” “And what'd you see?” “Well, there was a big hole in the front of the store. The window was out.” “And what else?” “Well, I looked in, and there was my car, inside the produce section!” “And what did you do then, Mom?” “Well, I went inside to the manager, and I said, “That's MY car!” And of course, we all howled, because the way she said it, it was as if to say to him, “What are you doing with my car in your store?”
My father was a very precise and organized person. I remember one particular clash between my mother's way and my father's. In the Fall, she and my grandmother always put up canned fruits and vegetables for the winter. My mother would drive down to a wholesale produce company and come back with crates of fruits and vegetables of all kinds. Then she and my grandmother would spend every day for a week or more canning fruits and vegetables.
There was a whole process of boiling the Mason jars from last year, making sure they were perfectly clean and then getting the fruits and vegetables ready for processing. It was a lot of cooking. Then they filled the jars and sealed them up tight with the proper paraphernalia–covers and rubber seals and so forth. Then they took the jars down to what was called a fruit cellar, which was a little locker with shelves in it, and these shelves would be loaded with the fruits and vegetables and jellies and jams and sometimes homemade wine.
When Mother said,”go down and get some raspberry jelly,” you would look at the jelly section, and you'd see through the glass that looked like the color and the texture of raspberry, and you'd bring it up. If it wasn't the right thing, she would tell you, but usually you were able to get it, because you could see whether it was pickles or jam.
Well, my father had an objection one year to this system, because he couldn't always tell what was what. So he arranged with Mom that he would type out labels and she would label the jars appropriately. So they had a whole new system. Not only were the jellies with the jellies, but every jelly had a label on it, telling what kind of jelly it was. That was marvelous, and we went through the whole winter with that system. My dad undoubtedly was very pleased, and my mother, I'm sure, couldn't have cared less, because she had no trouble at all with the system she'd had before.
When we came around to the next year, my mother and grandmother got ready to do canning. They took all the old jars and boiled them out and filled them up. On some of them, the labels stuck and on some they didn't, but it didn't matter, because neither my grandmother nor my mother gave a damn. They put whatever they wanted into any jar. I'm sure if my father wanted to re-label the whole bunch, they would have let him, but they really weren't too concerned, and he could see that it would be a losing battle, so he gave up. So we only had labelled canned goods one year.”
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