Reflections of a Lifetime

By Robert Carney

An eight decade memoir of life in the United States and international travel including:

Description of life in a tenement section of New York City during the Great Depression and WWII.

Survival after being hit and run over by a six wheel meat truck at age nine.

Significant contributions as an electronics engineer to the emerging aerospace, semiconductor, and computer industries.
Second career as an industrial engineer with the United States Postal Service specializing in equipment modification and development to improve productivity and decrease cost.

Expose of positive and negative, internal and external. practices effecting corporate performance of all the above industries.

Extensive tourist international travel to six continents to observe present day lifestyles and learn past history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Carney
• Release date: Jun 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301873944

Robert Carney

Octogenarian ,Electronics Engineer, Professional Engineer. inventor, author, world traveler

Book preview

Introduction

This memoir is a log of my life as I saw and remember. It is meant to describe life in the United States and travels to most of the rest of the world as it reflected back at me for eight decades.

The idea came to me after being interviewed by high school students in various senior citizen chat rooms. They were for class projects to go back in time as far as they could with a living person to find out what life was like. To those students and especially my grandson Diamond Harris, I dedicate this book.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Beginning

Chapter 7: Big Move

Chapter 9: War veteran

Chapter 13: Education

Chapter 14: Career

Chapter 25: Career Change

Chapter 39: Almost the End

Chapter 46: Travels

Chapter 66:: Documents

My Life

Chapter 1

The Beginning

I was born just outside Hell’s Kitchen in New York City (Manhattan) on May 17, 1930, as Irish, Democrat, and Catholic. My mother was 21 and father was 25. I am now Irish, unaffiliated, and unaffiliated. My mother and father were immigrants to New York City from the tiniest state, Rhode Island. They eloped, Dad with an 8th grade and Mom with a 9th grade education. That was the norm for the majority at that time.

I was the first to graduate high school in the family on both sides and the first to graduate college. My father’s father was born in North Ireland, now called Northern Ireland, and his mother was Scotch from Canada.

My first remembrance of anything was going with my father to get free groceries. It was Great Depression time. Jobs were hard to find and if found, they paid little. Later in life, I learned he had a candy store where he sold bathtub beer that he made in the basement. The greedy Irish cops, of course, raised the payoff so high that he had to close down.

My dad somehow had a connection with an infamous gangster. My recollection is that dad drove a jitney or cab, and I am not sure how he ever met him. The name Legs Diamond comes to mind, but I have no way of really knowing. It was during the polio epidemic of 1931 that Dad told him he was afraid I would be infected. Somehow, the gangster provided a limo and driver to take me to relatives in Rhode Island.

My guess is I stayed with Aunt Mae and Uncle Phil Healey, the reason being I went there every year to visit them in the summer time until WW2 broke out.

Yes, back then children could travel by themselves. I remember when I was 13 and told to tell the train conductor I was 12, if asked, in order to travel at the lower rate.

They did not want any part of me when I told them my dad was a Mason. I told them he had the ring, and that did it. I read somewhere it was because the Catholic Church refused to allow Masons to be members of the church. Dad never attended church; if Mom did, it was for special occasions.

My grandma died early in life and Mom’s dad remarried a woman that had some children. Details of how they ended up in Middletown, Ohio were never related to me that I remember.

The census of 1940 indicated she was born in Rhode Island. Stepmom was unbearable to live with so Ma, at the age of 10, took her brother, aged 3, to Rhode Island to live at grandma’s house. No one ever came after them or inquired about their whereabouts. There were no Amber alerts. She borrowed money from her step-ma’s pocket book and took off on a bus to Grandma Burns’ house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Chapter 2

Summer Vacations

My annual summer vacation visits to Rhode Island allowed me to bond with my maternal and paternal grandparents and some aunts,uncles, and cousins on both sides.

Uncle Phil was a carpenter and built the house they lived in. There was a root cellar where potatoes and vegetables were stored. Once a day a vegetable truck would come by to sell vegetables. Then there were the bread, ice cream, dairy, and newspaper deliveries. Uncle Phil did not have a car and was picked up by a car or used public transportation each day to attend work. He told me he wanted to be a professional baseball player but was told he was too small. He said he played baseball with a local team when younger.

I do not remember my brother William, who is two years younger than I, coming into my life. I do my sister Patricia, who is 7 years younger. Mom told brother and me a new arrival was coming. Did we want another brother or a sister? We voted sister. Dad’s sis was there in the middle of the night when the stork arrived. Only rich folks had babies delivered at hospitals at that time.

Doctors made house calls and general practitioners performed many specialists’ categories of today without an additional charge. Doctors lived in neighborhoods where they practiced. Health insurance was unheard of. The doctor’s home was their office and house calls were made as a general part of practicing. Someone went to their door to get them.

We lived in a tenement house that had four apartments on a floor with two chain pull toilets in the stairway hall of each floor. Two apartments faced Amsterdam Avenue and two faced the back alley. We lived at 90 Amsterdam Avenue. On the next street up Gertrude Ederle’s father had a butcher shop.

Gertrude was first woman to swim the English Channel and broke the men’s world record at the time by two hours.

Amsterdam Avenue below 59th street was named 10th Avenue. There was a bathroom with only a tub. Hot water was heated in the kitchen since there was no hot water supplied, hence the name cold water flat.

We had an icebox and kerosene stove. Icebox was a box that used blocks of ice bought from the iceman to keep food cold. Kerosene stove was turned off at night, not to conserve energy but to conserve cash. Ma was first one up and lit the stove in the morning. On cold nights, brother and I would each roll up in a woolen army blanket to keep warm.

Dad got a job at Allerton Hotel for Women at 137 East 57th Street as a stationary engineer who in addition to hotel maintenance had to keep the hotel refrigeration unit working. I assume he went to school to learn refrigeration. The family would walk over to the hotel every so often on Sundays for a short visit to see him.

We had electricity. A radio came into our lives, but not sure when, just remember turning out the light at night and listening to it in the dark. We also had roaches galore and mice. Turning on the light at night, one would hear the roaches retreating. There were so many of them.

Mousetraps were used to catch mice. Roaches, on the other hand, could only be chased when the apartment was painted once every so many years. Dad would paint it in lieu of a month’s rent. Not sure who supplied the paint.

During the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade of 1938, I became detached from my father and siblings. Somehow, I ended up in a police station and was bought an ice cream cone. Asked where I lived, I told them I knew where it was and was escorted home.

Chapter 3

Life Changing Event

When I was 9 years old, January 1940, on the way home from school, I for some reason I ran across Amsterdam Avenue and was hit and run over by a 6-wheel meat truck. Details can be found in My Health section. It resulted in a three-month hospital stay.

Mom’s best friend lived in an adjoining building. Her hubby died shortly after buying a refrigerator for her birthday. She returned home to where she was born and Mom bought the refrigerator for $5.00. No one that I knew of had such an appliance. We had to periodically defrost it.

Looking out one of two windows on our side of the avenue, there was a line of produce wagons against the curb. Get a 15 cent bag of soup vegetables, Ma would say, and down I went to get a large bag of potatoes, carrots, onions, celery and other soup ingredients in season. Then it was down to the meat market for a pound of soup beef. How was there room for vendors on curbs of a busy street? Easy, no one had a car (or could afford one) or a telephone. Therefore, there was lots of room.

Transportation was cheap. A trolley car line ran on our avenue. A nickel a trip by trolley, bus, elevated train line, or subway would take you any place in the city, including some boroughs. The fares had not changed as