Tales of a New York Yankee: Life in New York City and the Border States in the 20Th Century

By Louis Richard Baumgaertner

Lou Baumgaertner was born and bred in New York City, and although he also lived amongst the Border States, and even in the South, he was a New York Yankee to his dying day. Part of that, of course, could be attributed to his being a die-hard fan of the best baseball team in the world, the New York Yankees. But being a New York Yankee also meant so much more New Yorkers tend to be different from those who live in other regions, and frequently are easily recognized by others as either being different, or more precisely as being from New York. Sometimes that recognition is not accompanied by a warm feeling of acceptance.
But we New Yorkers know we are different. We have our own accent although those who live in New York City might argue its all the others who have accents we speak perfectly normally. Because we live in a Big City, we talk fast, we seem brusque, and we sometimes appear to lack patience with others. We dont mean to be rude, but the demands of surviving in a Big City (almost any Big City) require a no-nonsense attitude to life to avoid being run over by those around us. But once you get to know us, were pretty nice people.
We New Yorkers are proud of ourselves, and of our city, and we have a right to be. It may not be the Capital of the Country, but many New Yorkers often think of it as such to a true New Yorker, there is only one New York City! And New York City is the Business and Cultural Capital of the Country! This ubiquitous sentiment is why New Yorkers are so often accused of not playing well with the other kids on the block.
And New Yorkers are definitely Yankees. No one should argue with that point. We live well above the Mason-Dixon Line. We fought for the North during the Civil War. And although there are others who can rightly and proudly also proclaim themselves as being Yankees, these other Northerners dont also happen to have the best baseball team in the world residing in their city, now do they?
And so, by way of example, lets take a look at one particular New York Yankee. Lou Baumgaertner was a War Baby, born in the Bronx during the First World War. He spent his childhood in the Bronx and Corona during the Roaring Twenties, and began to mature in Corona and Manhattan during the Great Depression. He worked in Manhattan for years, but eventually got an opportunity for a new career in radio-communications in Louisville, KY. He tried to avoid induction into the military as World War II geared up, but eventually found that no one who could hold a rifle and shoot straight was going to miss the opportunity to serve his Uncle Sam. Like so many of his generation, the Second World War finished the maturing process, and put a fine polish on the person he had become. Here then are his adventures, in New York City, during World War II, and amongst the Border States, during the 20th Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781490778488

Louis Richard Baumgaertner

About the Author: Lou Baumgaertner was born and bred in New York City, and was a New York Yankee to his dying day. Part of that, of course, could be attributed to his being a die-hard fan of the best baseball team in the world, the New York Yankees. He was a War Baby, born in the Bronx during the First World War. He spent his childhood in the Bronx and Corona during the Roaring Twenties, and began to mature in Corona and Manhattan during the Great Depression. Like so many of his generation, the Second World War finished the maturing process, and put a fine polish on the person he had become. His memories provide a rich historical background to life in the 20th century, and especially of New York City in the early twentieth century. Here then are his adventures, in the Big Apple, and amongst the Border States. About the Editor: Gene Baumgaertner has published 8 other books with Trafford, two history books and six novels, including two fictionalized, semi-biographical works about the Baby Boomer Generation.

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Copyright 2017 William Eugene Baumgaertner.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017902922

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CONTENTS

List of Photos

Foreword

Chapter 1 Beginnings in the Bronx and Corona, New York City 1916 to 1921

What Was the World Like in 1916?

Chapter 2 Grammar School 1921 to 1929

What Was the World Like in 1921?

What Was the World Like in 1929?

Chapter 3 Xavier High School 1929 to 1933

What Was the World Like in 1933?

Chapter 4 Life After High School 1933 to 1938

What Was the World Like in 1938?

Chapter 5 Adventures with the Mastic Beach Gang Remainder of 1938 to Early 1939

What Was the World Like in 1939?

Chapter 6 First the Calm, Then the Storm, January 1939 to May 1942

What Was the World Like in 1941?

Chapter 7 Living the Life in the Bluegrass State Middle 1942 to the Summer of 1943

What Was the World Like in 1942?

Chapter 8 You’re in the Army, Now Spring of 1943 to Early 1944

What Was the World Like in 1943?

Chapter 9 The Ferry Man March to October 1944

Locale Backgrounds

Chapter 10 The Fireball Express November 1944 to May 1945

What Was the World Like in 1944?

Chapter 11 The Southern Belle June 1945 to March 1946

What Was the World Like in 1945?

Chapter 12 Beginning a New Life after the War April to Autumn, 1946

What Was the World Like in 1946?

Chapter 13 Piecing Together a Home in a Post-War Economy Late 1946 to Late 1947

What Was the World Like in 1947?

Chapter 14 Transitioning Through Life To the End of the Baby Boom Late 1947 to 1964

What Was the World Like in 1950?

Chapter 15 What Came Before: Louis John Aloysius Baumgaertner 1891 to 1966

What Was the World Like in 1966?

Chapter 16 What Came Before: Susan Hauss Baumgaertner 1895 to 1986

What Was the World Like in 1986?

Epilogue Coming to a Conclusion

What Was the World Like in 1997?

Appendix A Grandparents Baumgaertner

What Was the World Like in 1904?

Appendix B Grandparents Hauss

What was the World Like in 1935?

To my best friend and wife,

Gloria A. Baumgaertner,

and to the fruits of our love,

Gene, Bonnie, Jack, Jill, Roy, Tammy, Robyn, and David

OTHER BOOKS by the EDITOR

Published by Trafford

Novels by Gene Baumgaertner

Troubled Times

Book I of the Adventures of William Howard and Hugh Fitzalan

in Century England

Royal Interlude

Book II of the Adventures of William Howard and Hugh Fitzalan

in Fifteenth-Century England

The Guardian Directive

and the First Battle for Earth, 4350 BC

An Innocent Man

The Life and Times of an American Baby Boomer

Part 1: From the Beginnings through the 1960s

Staying Alive

The Life and Times of an American Baby Boomer

Part 2: The Serendipitous

Sun Warm You

The Ancient Chronicles of the Red Dawn Tribe

History Books by Wm. E. Baumgaertner

A Timeline of Fifteenth-Century England

1398–1509

Squires, Knights, Barons, Kings

War and Politics in Fifteenth-Century England

LIST OF PHOTOS

Chapter 1

1917: Lou Baumgaertner in Crotona Park

1921 circa: Backyard of 189 Kingsland Avenue; Puffy and Lou

1919 circa: Lou and Aunt Peach Erny bathing in Flushing Bay

1920 circa: Portrait of Lou Baumgaertner at approximately four years of age

Chapter 2

1921 circa: Lou and Aunt Berna in the backyard of the Hauss’s Edson Street home

1926 April 4: Gene and Lou Baumgaertner and Joe Erny in the Edson Street backyard

1928: Cousin Marie Spartara and Lou and Gene Baumgaertner in Obernburg, New York, in the Stream by the Schwartz and Weiss Farms

1929: Independence Day in the Corona backyard; Gene and Lou Baumgaertner and Joe Enry; and Gene Baumgaertner saluting

1929 June 25: Lou Baumgaertner on graduation day from the eighth grade of Our Lady of Sorrows

Chapter 3

1931: Lou Baumgaertner in and out of uniform

1932: Obernburg, New York; Gene and Lou by the lake

1933: Graduation from Xavier High School; Lou Baumgaertner and his parents

1932: The family at Mastic Beach, Long Island, Lou, Margie and son, Gene with towel on head, Mother (Susan), and pet dog Peggy

1933 circa: Lou Baumgaertner, Sr., U.S. Postal Service Carrier

1933: The family during the summer at Valley Stream

Chapter 4

1933 September: Lou’s first job out of high school, errand boy for a print shop

1935 April 21: Lou and George in Toronto, with the Williams’s 1935 Studebaker

1937: Lou Baumgaertner buys a 1935 Ford Tudor (two-door), his first set of wheels

1938 April: The trip to Washington DC

Chapter 6

1939 circa: Betty People

1940: Two-Door Buick Torpedo-Body Convertible, Lou Baumgaertner’s dream car, the Betty Lou Buick, sitting across 111-30 Forty-Third Avenue, Corona, New York City

1941 Spring: Dottie and Army MacGillivray, Betty People, and Lou Baumgaertner

Chapter 7

1942 June 07: Sad day of goodbyes before the departure for Louisville, Kentucky

1942 June 08: Waving goodbye

1942 July: The Norwood House; Bowman Field Administration Building, Louisville, Kentucky

1942 late summer: At Bowman Field

1942 November: Lou Baumgaertner’s new flame, Doris Richards

Chapter 8

1943 August: Home before induction, Gene Baumgaertner and Joe Erny on leave

1943 October: In and around Camp Luna, Las Vegas, New Mexico; Orris, Selby, Osinske, and Baumgaertner

1943 November and December: Ready for bivouacking in Wisconsin and ready for training at the ARTU in Nashville

1944 February: Albert Cario, Lloyd Woolsey, Lou Baumgaertner, Albert Thames, and Bob Holzfuss at Homestead AAB, Florida

1944 February: Homestead AAB, Migrant workers bungalow converted to a barracks; B-17 Bomber flying past the barracks

Chapter 9

1944 May: Lou Baumgaertner delivering a B-25 to Karachi, India; Lou in Karachi

1944 May: Street scenes in Karachi, India

1944: Bombers stored at Morrison Field, West Palm Beach

1944 May: Visiting Natal, Brazil: Trolley, Theater

1944 October: Delivering a B-25 to Rio; Navigator Lt. JC Washburne, Copilot Lt. EW Jackson, and FRO Lou Baumgaertner

1944 October: On Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro; Buck Jackson, beach girl Regina, and Lou Baumgaertner

1944 October: Visiting Rio de Janeiro; Luxor Hotel; Lou on the Seawall

Chapter 10

1945 January: Boat down to Georgetown, British Guiana

1945 January: Georgetown, British Guiana; Church Street; Town Hall

1945 February: Natal, Brazil; the Flight Crew; Lou Baumgaertner with a bar girl

1945 February: Natal, Brazil; local scene; dressed for the carnival

1945 March: Ascension Island; Wide-awake airfield; aircraft maintenance

1945 April: Accra, Gold Coast; spend off time in the barracks or at the beach?

1945 April: Accra, Gold Coast (Ghana); time at the beach

1945 April: Gold Coast (Ghana); street scene in Accra

Chapter 11

1945 August, circa: Gloria Delores (Delylah) Kennedy Abel

1945 August: Santa Maria, Azores; Santa Maria Harbor, Florida; Engr. SSgt. RE Price and Fl. Off. HE Junior Hartwig celebrating the near end of war

1945 November: Lou and Gloria’s visit with her mother, Delylah Abel, in Miami Beach

1945 November: Gloria Abel and Lou Baumgaertner on Miami Beach

1946 March 17: The wedding day of Lou Baumgaertner and Gloria Abel

Chapter 12

1946 Waiting for the new St. Matthews house to be built

Chapter 13

1947 January to March: The Gloucester Road House finally completed

1947 March: Arrival of Baby Gene, with Mom (Gloria) and Nana (Susan)

1947 Summer: Lou Baumgaertner working in his front lawn

Chapter 14

1947: Visiting the family in Corona, New York; Lou, Sr. (Dad), Gloria, Baby Gene, Uncle Gene, Susan (Mom), and Lou

1950/1951: Gloria with Bonnie and Gene and with Jack and Jill

Mid to late 1950s: The Lou Baumgaertner family at the dining room table

Chapter 15

1915 September 14: The Baumgaertner family

1915 September 14: The Baumgaertner-Hauss wedding party

Chapter 16

1947 circa: Grandpa John Hauss and his seven daughters

1948 April circa: Susan and Louis Baumgaertner, Sr., visiting in Louisville, Kentucky

1972 August – Gloria and Susan Baumgaertner meeting on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida

Epilogue

1968: Three campaigners: Jerry Holcomb, Larry Hogan, Sr., and Lou

1970: Gloria lunching with U.S. Senator from Maryland, Mac Mathias

1973: Lou and Gloria Baumgaertner ready to attend the Presidential Inaugural Ball

1984: Gloria Baumgaertner working for, and meeting Pres. Ronald W. Reagan

1988: Gloria with fellow Bush delegates Roberta Deegan and Larry Hogan, Jr.

Lou and Gloria in 1968, and the Baumgaertners’ gravesite circa 2000

FOREWORD

Foreword by Lou Baumgaertner

Herein are my memories, filtered through seven decades of living, of the events of my life that seem worth passing along. Not all of them are here; some appear in other writings about various family members. It will take reading them all to get a full picture. Even this account is incomplete; it will be added to as time and memory permit.

[Editor’s Note: I have done my best to go through all the autobiographical accounts written by Louis Richard Baumgaertner and the biographical ones of various family members and still later writings and to insert them chronologically into their proper places. So to my knowledge, the following document is as full and complete an account as exists.]

* * * * *

Foreword by Gene Baumgaertner

Lou Baumgaertner was born and bred in New York City, and although he also lived among the Border States and even in the South, he was a New York Yankee to his dying day in every fiber of his body. Part of that, of course, could be attributed to his being a die-hard fan of the best baseball team in the world, the New York Yankees. However, it also meant so much more, as those of us who have lived in a number of other regions of the country know. New Yorkers tend to be different from those who live in other regions and frequently are easily recognized by others as either being different, or more precisely as being from New York. Sometimes that recognition is not accompanied by a warm feeling of acceptance, and occasionally it is met with thinly veiled hostility. We are not always blameless in this latter.

But we New Yorkers know we are different. We have our own accent (although those who live in New York City would use the plural, as there are multiple accents; and to a true New Yorker, it’s all the others who have accents… We speak perfectly normally). Because we live in a big city, we talk fast, we seem brusque, and we sometimes appear to lack patience with others. We don’t mean to be rude, but the demands of surviving in a big city (almost any big city) require a no-nonsense attitude to life to avoid being run over by those around us. But once you get to know us, we’re pretty nice people—kind, considerate, generous, loyal to a fault—even if ambitious, busy, and sometimes aggressive, and to many, seemingly not overly friendly.

We New Yorkers are proud of ourselves and of our city, and we have a right to be. It may not be the capital of the country, but many New Yorkers often think of it as such. Certainly, it is among the iconic symbols of being an American. And there are many other icons of America within its borders.

What is the most iconic symbol of the USA abroad if not the Statue of Liberty? And certainly New York City is among the few big cities in the USA that, taken collectively, represent the business and cultural capitals of the country. (Now, a true New Yorker might ask, what other few big cities could he be talking about? There is only one New York City! And New York City is the business and cultural capital of the country! This ubiquitous sentiment is why New Yorkers are so often accused of not playing well with the other kids on the block.)

And we New Yorkers are definitely Yankees. No one should argue with that point. We live well above the Mason-Dixon Line. We fought for the North during the Civil War. And although there are others who can rightly and proudly also proclaim themselves as being Yankees, these other Northerners don’t also happen to have the best baseball team in the world residing in their city. Now do they?

And so, by way of example, let’s take a look at one particular New York Yankee. Lou Baumgaertner was a war baby, born in the Bronx during the First World War. He spent his childhood in the Bronx and Corona during the Roaring Twenties and began to mature in Corona and Manhattan during the Great Depression. He spent summers and long weekends out on Long Island, mainly in Mastic Beach. He worked in Manhattan for years but eventually got an opportunity for a new career in radio communications in Louisville, Kentucky. He tried to avoid induction into the military as World War II geared up, but eventually found that no one who could hold a rifle and shoot straight was going to miss the opportunity to serve his Uncle Sam.

Like so many of his generation, the Second World War finished the maturing process and put a fine polish on the person he had become. Here then are his adventures in New York City, during World War II, and among the Border States, during the twentieth century.

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings in the Bronx and Corona, New York City

1916 to 1921

I was born on November 3, 1916, on a beautiful, warm, sunny day, according to my mother. I was baptized at Saint Joseph’s Church in the Bronx on November 12, 1916. They named me Louis after my father and called me Junior, a sissified name that was to haunt me until I was sixteen. Mother told me that when I was a baby during the First World War, she had to pay ninety cents for an orange for me. This is the equivalent of paying about ten dollars for an orange today. [Editor’s Note: This $10 equivalent is in 1989 dollars. In 2016 dollars, that same orange would have been equivalent to $19.56.]

My parents lived at 4294 Park Avenue in the Bronx when first married, and Daddy worked at the Tremont Avenue Post Office. The Bronx was then mostly rural—considered out in the boonies—and the New York Central main line tracks ran down the middle of Park Avenue in an open cut. Sometime in the late teens, we moved to a basement apartment near Crotona Park in the Bronx, just a few blocks away. Some of the first pictures of me as a baby (which we still have—see Album A) may have been taken in this park.

I seem to remember Park Avenue and the railroad running through it; I have a memory of driving a little sit-in toy steam engine along the sidewalk when we lived on that street. Album A also contains a host of my baby and toddler pictures taken in the Bronx when we lived there.

My paternal grandparents lived in a third-floor walk-up tenement on East Eleventh Street on the East Side of Manhattan. As I remember it from my visits there as a young child, it consisted of a large front room, two bedrooms, and a large kitchen with a kitchen sink, a washtub, and a black iron coal stove for cooking, baking—my grandmother made delicious apple and cheese coffee cakes—and heating the bath on Saturday night. Kerosene lamps and city gas were used for lighting. Even though I was quite young when we visited my grandparents, I remember that when the gas light started to dwindle, they had to put a quarter in the slot in the metal box mounted on the wall near the ceiling in the front room to restore the pressure—that’s how they paid for the gas.

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1917: Lou Baumgaertner in Crotona Park

In one corner of the kitchen was an enclosed bathroom containing only a flush toilet (no tub, no sink) with a window glazed with glass that you couldn’t see through. The front room faced on the street, and the kitchen faced a bare-dirt backyard which abutted the backyards of the adjacent tenements. There was a candy store in the ground floor front of an adjoining tenement, and I still recall my mother buying me chocolate-covered cherries and malted milks there (probably with money my grandmother had given her surreptitiously for that purpose).

In Album A there is a picture of Aunt Anna and me when a toddler in front of one of the adjacent tenement stores. (This one seems to be empty.)

Sometime in the early 1920s, my Aunt Peach (her real name was Matilda) and Uncle Joe Erny bought a two-family frame row house at 189 Kingsland Avenue (formerly Main Street and later Forty-Third Avenue), Corona. Sometime later, my parents and I moved into the upstairs cold water flat (no central heating) in their house. There was a small kitchen with a black iron coal stove for heating and baking, a small gas range, a sink, a washtub, and closets. There was also a medium-sized dining room with a round oak table, china closet and bureau, and a leaded stained-glass tiffany hanging fixture which featured fruits—apples, pears, grapes, etc. This was rounded off with two bedrooms, one of which was separated from the front room (parlor or living room) only by portieres (heavy drapes), plus a small hall bedroom, just large enough for a twin bed (and actually used for storage).

The bathroom had a tub and commode. The flat was heated by a stove in the kitchen and by a gas heater installed in front of a false fireplace in the front room. The front room was furnished with mission style sofa and chair, very plain wood with leather cushions, plus a library table with an iron gas lamp with a tiffany shade. The iron gas lamp, long since electrified, is still in use (in 1989) in my bedroom—but the leaded stained-glass shade was broken by my brother when he was a little kid.

The bedroom had a set consisting of a vanity and a bureau made of bird’s-eye maple, one piece in each bedroom. When we first moved in, there was no electricity, only city gas for cooking and limited illumination and kerosene lamps for light. There also were no sewers; there was a cesspool underground in the backyard.

When we first moved in, there were no sidewalks, and the road was unpaved, with a single streetcar track down the middle. There was a boot scraper on the front steps of the house, and it was put to frequent use removing mud from shoes during rainy spells. The streetcar was a four-wheeled Birney type called by some a dinky trolley. It terminated at the east end of our long street, where the motorman switched the trolley pole to the other end of the car, and began the return trip to Elmhurst and connections to Ridgewood and Brooklyn.

As a little boy, I used to put colored stones on the track to get colored powder after the trolley passed. The motorman used to shake his fist at me as the trolley rocked over the stones. We also used to flatten pennies on the track.

Sometime during the 1920s, sidewalks, sewers, and electricity were put in; the streetcar tracks were removed, and the road was paved. The Democrat Borough President Maurice Connelly was sent to jail for getting rich on sewer graft, resulting in the election of a Republican, George U. Harvey, an anomaly in an overwhelmingly Democrat county (also called, in New York City, a borough).

Queens County was almost rural in those days. Flushing Bay was much larger because it hadn’t yet been filled in to build La Guardia Field. The Flushing River carried tug and barge traffic and had lots of tributaries feeding it from the many fresh water springs in the area. Near the bay in the unpopulated area north of Jackson Avenue, around 114th Street, was Crazy Hill, so-called because atop it was a crazy house, a sanitarium for the insane.

As kids, we used to go sleigh riding down this hill. To the west of this point was an area that had contained beach-front houses and an amusement park to rival Coney Island, called North Beach. The whole area from Flushing Bay to Forest Hills between the towns of Corona and Flushing was marshland whose creeks and ponds contained killies, little inedible fishes for which we boys went fishing. It was also a good area for punks, cattails which we could dry on the roofs of our porches to use later as tinder sticks to light our fireworks around the Fourth of July.

The southern part of this area was the Corona dumps, described below, and later, the World’s Fair Grounds, and still later, Flushing Meadow Park. The northern part was filled in for La Guardia Field in the late 1930s and much later, for the Mets Stadium and parking areas.

When I was a little boy, only two roads crossed this marshland: Jackson Avenue with its trolley line and Corona Avenue with its trolley line. It was also crossed by a trolley trestle from Kingsland Avenue to Flushing and by the Long Island Railroad trestle. In this area, there used to be an abandoned teakettle steam engine’s boiler and cab. I used to play in them as a little kid. Later, Roosevelt Avenue was extended to Flushing when the L (or el, the elevated mass transit system, itself an extension of the NYC subway system) was extended from Alburtis Avenue, Corona, to the other side of the Flushing River, where the L went underground to become a subway.

Aunt Peach and Uncle Joe had a dog which, because I couldn’t say puppy, became named Puffy. He was part Spitz and part mean. He bit me four times, once breaking the skin, because, they said I was teasing him. If I was, I wasn’t aware that I was. He was a good watchdog, though, and a good ratter—any rats that wandered into the neighborhood from the Corona Dumps on the other side of the railroad tracks would be pounced upon, given a quick shake, and tossed aside with a broken neck.

One time, he disappeared for several days at the same time that a female poodle from the neighborhood did. They were discovered on the Long Island Railroad tracks that were a block away. The female had been killed by a train. Puffy had been hit too, but he survived and recovered. He died several years later when some mean person (we suspected our next-door neighbors who had complained about his barking) broke his neck with a baseball bat one night, and we had to have him put to sleep.

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1921 circa: Backyard of 189 Kingsland Avenue; Puffy and Lou

The Corona Dumps were a vast dumping ground for the New York City garbage, located where the World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1964 were later held (and where Flushing Meadow Park is now located). They weren’t dumping trash near us while we lived there, but when the wind was wrong, we would be subjected to the stink of burning garbage. And I guess the fires would sometimes drive the rats into the adjacent residential neighborhoods. The piles of trash were at times mountainous and were worked by little narrow gauge steam engines hauling little dump cars.

By the late 1920s or early 1930s, dumping garbage was discontinued, and the area was leveled off. Then the Italian families living nearby established large gardens (actually on city-owned property) in the rich garden soil. I remember when I used to get up early to go to high school, I would see and hear the farmers working their land and tending to their goats.

I recall the names of a few of the neighbors from those early days, almost all of them German. There were the Kraemers who ran the saloon on the corner. (I don’t know how they survived in those days of Prohibition, selling near beer, a 3.2 percent alcohol drink). The Meierdierks ran the grocery store a few doors away from us and across the street. They were both very plump.

Mrs. Meierdierks had the biggest butt that I had ever seen. Mr. Meierdierks’s wasn’t much smaller. When they were both behind the counter, they couldn’t pass one another because each one by himself/herself filled up the aisle. They were always very nice to me, sometimes giving me free candy from their vast selection of penny candy, which occupied a large glass-covered counter on one side of their store.

It was from running errands to their store for my mother that I remember the prices of those days: six cents for a loaf of bread or a quart of milk, ladled loose from a farm-type milk can; sixty cents for a pound of boiled ham; twenty cents for a pound of butter cut from the wooden tub; etc. The Holstens ran the grocery store in the next block. The Mindes ran the butcher shop in the same store.

Other neighbors were the Zahns, the Boettgers, the Wagners, the Bougheys, and the Nasses. (Carl and Vinnie were older boys who taught me how to play ball—always keep your eye on the ball—and even tried to teach me how to ski.) There were also the Kesslers, the Larsons, the Burkes, the Reinigs, and the Kliebers. After a while, the Italians began coming into the neighborhood: the Scandurras, the Contrattis, the Vachinos, the D’Alberts, the Stravellies, etc.

The Boughey property contained a small factory in the back, facing Railroad Avenue. It made ornamental ceiling and wall decorations out of a plasterlike substance. (We always had plenty of chalk from factory-rejected products for drawing our bases, for making potsy games (hopscotch) on the sidewalk, for graffiti, etc.) There was an abandoned tank car without an undercarriage near the factory that I used to play on. Occasionally, there would be a discarded Model T Ford in the lot nearby. One time, I dropped a match into the gas tank of such a Model T. Luckily, there was only a memory of gasoline in the tank. Even so, the resulting explosion blew the hat off my head and left black soot freckles all over my face.

When I was a little boy, my mother used to take me bathing in Flushing Bay. There are photographs of my Aunt Berna (three and a half years my senior and then a natural blond) and Aunt Peach in the water there. Later, when the bay became polluted and unsafe for swimming, Mother used to take me on the L to Woodside where we boarded the Long Island Railroad to Rockaway Beach to go bathing. We’d take a lunch—I can remember succulent plums and peaches, hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches, etc., that tasted so good in the salt air—and spend the day.

I recall being a little frightened because the LIRR train spent so much time over the water on trestles as it proceeded across Jamaica Bay to the beach, and I used to have bad dreams about those experiences. In later years, Uncles Tom and Hen used to take Mother and me to Rockaway in their Willys Overlands or Nash touring cars.

Still later, when Uncle Joe Enry got his first Chevrolet, we would pile into it for a family outing at the beach. There are pictures in Album A of the Baumgaertners, Enrys, Aunt Berna and Uncle John Hauss, the Reillys, etc., all together at Rockaway. Since those early days of my childhood, I have always loved the salt smell of the sea.

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1919 circa: Lou and Aunt Peach Erny bathing in Flushing Bay

My maternal grandparents’ Edson Street house is the one I remember from my childhood. It had three bedrooms, an unfinished attic where Grandpa worked at tailoring (and where, I believe, my Uncle John, eight years my senior, slept on occasion in later years), a living room, a dining room, a large kitchen, and a full basement but only one bathroom. The property was deep, maybe as much as 150 feet deep; and for a while, they had a chicken coop way back in the lot. I also remember that the hot air central heating system had a bad case of carbon monoxide, and it’s a wonder no one ever got sick or suffocated because of it.

I still remember the names of some of their neighbors because I used to play with their children: Mullane, Kepko, Greco, Booth, and Troiani, to mention a few with children my age. I also remember that it was, while playing in this neighborhood, that I cut my hand on a piece of broken glass while digging in a sand pile and sprayed blood all over my grandparents’ white front door; and when I fell off a pile of cement blocks and landed on the back of my head, I still have a lump there; and when one of the Booth girls ran her buck tooth through my eyelid when we ran into each other while playing, my mother had to apply the peroxide on it; and when a piece of steel or stone flew up and cut my arm when Uncle John was chopping wood in the backyard; and when I ran around the corner of Grandpa’s house with my mouth open and caught a fly in it. (Yuck!) I also recall Grandma’s flower garden, especially the marigolds, and feeding the chickens in the backyard. (And there is a photo in the album that records this.)

We used to have big family gatherings at 9 Edson Street. I remember get-togethers at Christmas and New Year’s, the Fourth of July, and other holidays with a house full of relatives. In those days before radio and television, the family members used to entertain one another, playing musical instruments (principally the piano), putting on skits, singing songs together, and generally having a grand time, sometimes slightly lubricated by Grandpa’s homemade wine. Grandpa did have a Victrola (an early version of a record player, which is an early version of what evolved into a cassette tape player and then a CD player and then an iPod, etc.), and used to play classical music on it. I remember hearing Strauss waltzes coming from it.

When I was very small, I was the first grandchild, and the family made over me quite a bit. They would put me on the dining room table at my grandparent Hauss’s house with a small American flag on a staff in my hand. Surrounded by admiring grandparents, parents, and aunts, and uncles, I would march around on the tabletop, saying, Hul-lay, hul-lay. (I couldn’t say hurray properly yet.) This was apparently right after the end of World War I. The dining room had a picture of Our Lord and the Apostles at the Last Supper—this picture now graces the dining room of my Aunt Berna in Freeport, New York.

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1920 circa: Portrait of Lou Baumgaertner at approximately four years of age

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Editor’s Notes: What was the world like in 1916 when Lou Baumgaertner was born?

In the world. World population was approximately 1.82 billion. World War I was well underway, and the Germans attacked the French fortress at Verdun. Italy declared war on Germany. The Easter Rebellion in Ireland was put down by British troops. The Olympic Games were halted until the end of the war. In early August, the United States bought the Danish Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million and renamed them the U.S. Virgin Islands. Francisco (Pancho) Villa attacked New Mexico, killing seventeen. Gen. John J. Pershing’s raid into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa failed. American chewing gum was introduced into French markets. In late November, the United States established a military government in the Dominican Republic. In December, the Siberian monk, Grigory Rasputin, confessor to the Czarina, was murdered in Petrograd (Leningrad). Gandhi supported the British in World War I in the hopes of hastening the independence