Not Quite a Vagabond: A Travelography

By Janet Go

This is a tell-all travelography written by a woman who suffered a speech impediment and was abused as a child. At 92, she reveals secrets she didn't tell her parents, three husbands, or friends, all of whom she's outlived. She has skirted typhoons, bullets, pirates, and arrest for smuggling as she sailed on freighters and luxury liners around the seven seas. She describes her interviews, while a reporter on Guam, with movie stars, government officials, entrepreneurs, and any strays who landed on the island.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669852902

Janet Go

The author’s first article appeared in the Washington, D.C. Star at age eleven. After graduating from the University of Colorado, she moved to Honolulu, then to Guam. In 1969, she wrote the first tourist guidebook to Guam and Micronesia and was a staff writer for daily newspapers. Upon retirement from U.S. Civil Service in 1991 as a technical writer/editor for Navy publications, she returned to Colorado. When not skiing moguls, she wrote travel articles for magazines and newspapers and published four books. She has sailed the seven seas on freighters and luxury liners. She lives on Maui.

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Copyright © 2022 by Janet Go.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 11/11/2022

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CONTENTS

Preface

1.     Smile and Try

2.     Below the Mason-Dixon Line

3.     Day of Infamy

4.     The Home Front

5.     The Pipes Were Calling

6.     Coming of Age

7.     Rocky Mountain High

8.     Sea Level

9.     Bikes and Thumbs

10.   Bye Bye, Birdies

11.   My Old Flame

12.   Aloha

13.   Oceania

14.   My Thrilla in Manila

15.   Hafa Adai

16.   Mention My Name

17.   I’m O.K.

18.   The Last Straw

19.   Pamela Was No Lady

20.   Flying Down to Rio

21.   The Big Easy

22.   Dancing Sands

23.   Full Circle

24.   Colorful Colorado

25.   High and Dry

26.   Just Us Girls

27.   Around the Horn

28.   Paradise Enow

29.   Celebrating 80

30.   Fear of 90

Photo Gallery

Acknowledgments

Preface

Travelography: an autobiography and travelog.

Musician Ani DiFranco once said, If you’re born a lion, don’t try to act tame. I was born on July 23, Leo’s cusp. My life certainly has not been tame.

I put up my sails and let the winds blow me across the sea of life, awash with joy, grief, and adventure. I’ve been married and divorced three times, and had more boyfriends than I can count with a straight face.

As a Jill of all trades, I’ve tried ice and roller skating, playing the piano, dancing, singing, painting, bowling, billiards, archery, bicycling, novel writing, photography, and skiing. I mastered none, but I had fun.

There’s nothing I can do about growing old, so I might as well enjoy it. I’m tickled that I’ve lived this long.

I follow the advice on a sign in Little Annie’s Eating House, Aspen: If you’re walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.

Writing this has jogged my memory, bringing to light things I’d rather forget. I’ve hewed to the line and let the chips fall where they may as I reveal secrets I’ve never told my mother, husbands, cousins, or peers. It’s time to tell the truth.

1

Smile and Try

On September 8, 1934, thick smoke hid the sun. I wiped tears from my eyes, which burned from the fumes caused by smoldering coal, wood, and steel.

My parents and I, along with hundreds of people from across the river in Philadelphia, had rushed to the New Jersey shore when they heard the news that S.S. Morro Castle had run aground at Asbury Park.

Sitting on my father’s shoulders, I watched men, women, and children jumping overboard into the fiery water. They waded to shore, bumping into mail bags and crates of cargo floating in the water.

Emergency crews and onlookers pulled the survivors to safety. Rescue ships and lifeboats, launched from nearby beach towns, gave first aid to passengers and carried away the bodies of those who drowned.

Hours later when the ship burned to the waterline, it exploded, sending pieces of the flaming vessel through the air and rattling windows for miles.

A fire had started in a storage locker of the S.S. Morro Castle, named for the stone fortress and lighthouse in Havana, Cuba. The ship had been on her regular run of passengers, cargo, and mail between Havana and New York City when she ran aground.

Of the 543 passengers on board the vessel, 408 were rescued, and 137 passengers and crew members perished. Only 6 of the ship’s 12 lifeboats were launched from the burning vessel.

Some think the fire was set to hide the murder of the captain; others say the captain set the fire to hide someone else’s murder. In 1935 the ship was towed away and sold for scrap. The cause of the fire remains a mystery.

Watching the Morro Castle disaster at age four didn’t keep me from catching the ocean travel bug. To tell the truth, I’ve never looked for a cure.

The Early Years

My great-grandparents were among the Irish, Scots, Germans, and Italians who sailed across the big pond from Europe in the 1840s to escape famine, poverty, and political turmoil at home. They forged new lives in America working in textile and clothing industries, building trades, railroads, and port services.

My mother’s ancestors sailed from Germany to New Orleans, where some worked in sugar cane fields and others migrated to Philadelphia.

My mother, Ethel Margaret Fullmer, was born in Philly on September 21, 1911. She was the oldest of the five children of John Henry Fullmer and Henrietta Carolina Bach Fullmer.

Mother’s father, John, worked at Curtis Publishing Company, publishers of Etude music magazine. Before she was married, my mother worked for Theodore Presser Music Company. They passed the music bug on to me; I began taking piano lessons when I was nine, and in my teens, I wrote articles for Etude.

I believe Ellis Island was the landing place for my father’s ancestors, the Hilfertys from Letterkenney in northwest Ireland.

My grandfather, Hugh L. Hilferty, Sr., had three wives. The first two woman died young, and Georgiana, Hugh’s third wife, raised his seven boys, all of whom towered over their father.

Daniel Joseph Hilferty, my father, was born on May 1, 1910, in Philly. The oldest of the boys, he stood six feet tall, with brown eyes, and black wavy hair.

My parents were married in 1929, when my father was working at Philco in Camden, New Jersey. The newlyweds moved into an apartment in Camden.

Born on July 23, 1930. I was named for Janet Turley, the sister of my father’s Aunt, Jean Gillon. I took after my German mother with my 5’3" frame, light brown hair, and blue eyes. All my life, I envied my father’s wavy black hair.

In 1931, the stock market crashed, heralding in the Great Depression. When millions of Americans lost their jobs, they lined up at soup kitchens, begged in the streets, or sold apples from pushcarts.

When Philco abolished my father’s job, my father’s Scotch-Irish Uncle, Patrick Gillon, and his wife, Jean, invited us to move in with them. They owned a three-story row house in South Philly. Their three teenaged sons had to share a bedroom after my parents and I moved in.

The Gillon’s narrow, two-story row house was crammed with overstuffed furniture decorated with crocheted doilies, end tables, ottomans, lamps, candy dishes, and fake flower arrangements. The round dining room table was set with a lace cloth and two candlesticks. The kitchen was small but efficient, and important decisions were made around the small table in the middle of the room.

Uncle Pat was a barber in the city, and he trimmed the family’s hair in the basement of their house. Aunt Jean worked the evening shift at a hoagie shop. When she came home at 11 p.m., she brought leftover hoagies which Uncle Pat, his sons, and my father shared, along with beers, until the wee hours.

After escaping an assassination attempt in Miami in February 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated in March as the 32nd U. S President. For the first time in American history, President Roosevelt waged war on poverty.

Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps to pay young men $30 a month each to plant trees, build bridges, paint murals in post offices, and develop national parks and forests throughout the United States.

My mother’s brother, John, worked for the CCC in Washington State. The CCC built roads and facilities at Rocky Mountain Park in Colorado, and expanded to the Territory of Hawaii, where they helped build facilities in Haleakala National Park on Maui.

During those years, my parents and I listened to the President’s fireside radio chats made while sitting in front of the fireplace in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. Fala, his Scotty, was at his elbow.

His Master’s Voice

In 1935, my father was hired by Radio Corporation of America in Camden, New Jersey, and we moved into a second-floor apartment in Camden.

I’ll always remember crossing the Delaware River Bridge, which was lit up at night like the Las Vegas’ strip.

Above the bridge’s superstructure flashed gigantic signs of a Whitman’s Samplers’ delivery boy running with a box of assorted chocolates under his arm; RCA Victor’s dog wagging his tail while listening to his master’s voice; a can of Campbell’s Soup being ladled into a bowl; and a bucket of Sherman-Williams paint pouring out to cover the multi-colored globe.

Jokingly called New Jersey’s armpit, Camden was noted for urban decay, political corruption, and murder.

But people forget that for decades, Camden was the nucleus of technology and was referred to as the Silicon Valley of America.

From 1901 through 1929, Camden was headquarters of Victor Talking Machine Co. Later called RCA Victor, it was the world’s largest manufacturer of phonographs and phonograph records for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. It had the first commercial recording studios in the country, and developed radio communications systems for the military.

Until 1967, Camden was home of New York Shipbuilding Corp., which during World War II was the largest and most productive shipyard in the world. Among the Naval ships built there were the cruiser USS Indianapolis and the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk. In 1962, the first commercial nuclear-powered ship was launched in Camden.

We lived in a second-floor apartment in Camden. I remember watching the iceman, who drove a horse-drawn wagon, carrying a huge block of ice with tongs up the back steps of the building to our kitchen door. He placed the ice in the bottom of our icebox, resting on the buckled linoleum floor. The milkman and bread delivery man also came by horse-drawn wagons.

In those days there was no central heating. Mother used to boil water to fill a tub in front of the gas stove to bathe me. And we dressed in the kitchen near the warm stove.

We ate whatever mother could afford in the market. I remember eating sandwiches of sugar and butter on white bread, which no doubt caused my mouthful of cavities that had to be filled in later years.

My Sister

I’ll never forget November 22, 1935. My mother called to me from the bedroom. Janet, stand in front of the couch and make sure Carol Ann doesn’t roll off onto the floor.

I leaned against the edge of the living room sofa watching my four-month-old sister, Carol Ann, lying on the upholstered couch. Wrapped in a blanket, she was coughing and tears were running down her tiny, pale cheeks.

Mother, wearing a coat and dangling a pocketbook over her shoulder, returned to the living room. She picked up Carol Ann, cradled her in her arms, and grabbed my hand. Come.

In the hallway, mother locked our door and knocked on her neighbor’s door. When the woman opened her door, mother asked her if I could stay there while she took Carol Ann to the hospital.

Of course, Ethel. If there’s anything else I can do....Come in, Janet.

Early that evening, my mother and father came home. Mother’s arms were empty. Carol Ann had passed away in the hospital after a brief bout of pneumonia. She was buried in Drexell Hill Cemetery, Pennsylvania, in the Hilferty family plot,

At five years old, I was too young to realize I would never get to skate, bicycle, swim, or play hopscotch with my little sister.

Readin’ and ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic

Stutterbox! My classmates tittered and pointed at me.

I didn’t know I stuttered until I entered kindergarten at the Roman Catholic St. Peter School in Camden.

Our teacher wore a long-sleeved, ankle-length black wool habit, black stockings, and black leather shoes. An elbow-length black wool cape was draped over her pleated bodice. On her head was a black bonnet fastened beneath her chin with a bow.

I cringed when I heard the clink of the heavy crucifix hanging from the nun’s long rosary beads as she walked towards me. She asked me a question. I don’t remember what it was, but I probably murmured something unintelligible.

Speak up. She frowned.

When I hesitated, she picked up a sharp, metal-edged wooden ruler and whacked the knuckles of my left hand. I winced and she hit my knuckles again.

At noon, I ran home screaming. The knuckles of my left hand were bleeding. I told my mother what happened and said I was never going back there again. I didn’t!

Religion wasn’t a big issue in our house, although my father was raised in an Irish Catholic family. My mother’s German relatives were Episcopalians, but to please her in-laws, my mother insisted I have a Catholic upbringing.

My father used to say that if he were President of the United States, he’d go to church because it would be good for his public image.

To get ahead in the Federal Government, especially the Navy, my father said you had to be a Mason. For example, President George Washington was a Mason, and the Declaration of Independence was signed by nine Freemasons, including John Hancock. Masons believed in the brotherhood and universal spirituality.

In 1936, we moved from Camden to a house on Clayton Avenue in Merchantville, home of Jersey Joe Walcott, heavyweight champion boxer, actor, and sheriff of Camden County.

At six years old, I entered the first grade at Merchantville Elementary School. My classmates began echoing those in kindergarten: Stutterbox.

On the first day, my home room teacher, Mrs. Cubberly, asked each of us to stand up and introduce ourselves. When it was my turn, I stood up. My n-name is Ja-Ja- Janet H-Hill-f-fer-t-ty. The kids around me giggled.

Mrs. Cubberly walked over to me and clasped my hands in hers. Smile and try.

I nodded. My name is J-Ja-Janet Hil-fer-ty.

Red-faced, I sat down and hung my head in my hands, my elbows on the desk. Throughout the year, my classmates teased me mercilessly.

I adored Mrs. Cubberly. She was the best teacher I can remember until I went to college.

Our house in Merchantville was a two-story wooden structure with lots of windows and a large yard. The house sat on a corner, the edge of Matchtown, where Negroes lived in poverty in wooden shacks with dirt roads, no sidewalks, and no street lights.

I made friends with a Negro classmate from Matchtown. One day after school she invited me to her home, where her mother gave us milk and cookies.

When I came home, mother asked why I was late. I said I went to my friend’s house. She yelled that I was never to go into Matchtown again. It’s too dangerous for you to go there, she said. Mother didn’t seem to mind when my friend and I roller skated and jumped rope on the concrete sidewalks around our house.

First Surgery

One day around my fifth birthday, I awoke with a fever and sore throat. Myfather drove mother and I to our doctor’s office on his way to work.

All I remember about the operation, done in his office, was lying under bright lights and the doctor bending over me.

Open wide. When the doctor looked in my mouth, he said my tonsils looked like a cat had clawed them. They had to come out. Might as well remove the adenoids while we’re at it.

He murmured through the white mask covering his mouth, Janet, can you hear me?

I nodded.

Breathe deeply. When you wake up, you can eat all the ice cream you want.

I took a deep breath and woke up an hour later.

The doctor drove mother and I home. When he carried me upstairs to my bedroom, I vomited all over his jacket. He laid me on the bed and left. I enjoyed ice cream for a few days until my swollen throat was healed.

Hooky

One day while I was in the first grade, my girlfriend and I walked to my house to eat our packed lunches. My mother was at a neighbor’s house playing bridge. We sat in the back yard shaded by peach and apple trees and decided not to return school that afternoon.

I wrote a note to my teacher, saying I was sick and had to stay home in the afternoon. I signed my mother’s name.

When I gave the note to the teacher the next morning, she recognized my sprawling handwriting and called my mother. After school at home, mother bawled me out. I didn’t play hooky again until Senior Day in high school, 12 years later.

I was plagued with hay fever each spring when I lived in New Jersey and Maryland. Every time the goldenrod, ragweed, and Queen Anne’s lace blossomed, my eyes and nose became itchy and runny. Sneezing was my signature. Later as I moved around the world, new-mown grass and hay, and pollen from roses and other flowers affected me. The only place I don’t have allergies is in the middle of the ocean.

As products of the Great Depression, we were the original reuse and recycle generation. We returned milk, soda, and beer bottles to stores which sterilized and refilled them. We used brown paper bags as covers for school books and gift wrapping. When the soles of my shoes wore out, I’d cut pieces of cardboard to insert into the shoe to cover the holes. Mothers washed clothes by hand and hung them to dry on backyard lines.

Mother wouldn’t let me leave the dinner table until I had eaten everything. Eat up, Janet. Think of those poor starving Armenians.

Send this to them, I said. I later learned that after the Ottomans committed genocide, the few Armenian people left were starving.

When my mother and father argued, I would hide behind a chair in a corner of the livingroom. I’d pretend the chair was a ship and the rug the sea. Sometimes I’d stare at pictures in the newspaper, and when I saw a photo of a wounded dog or horse, I’d cry for them and for myself.

One afternoon when I was six, I threw a few clothes in a shopping bag and sneaked out of the house. After walking a few blocks, I asked, What will I eat? Where will I sleep? When the sun began to dip, I got scared and hurried home. I tiptoed back to my room upstairs. My parents didn’t even miss me.

2

Below the Mason-Dixon Line

In 1937, my father was offered a promotion to work for Bendix Corporation at Glen Burnie, a suburb of Baltimore south of the Mason-Dixon Line, which divided the North from the South on the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland.

In 1783, Astronomer Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, a British surveyor, settled a dispute between the Calvert family of Maryland and the Penn family of Pennsylvania by placing mammoth stones on boundary lines between Maryland and Pennsylvania and Maryland and Delaware. Years later, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey replaced the rocks with official markers, known as the Mason-Dixon Line.

We lived in a small white bungalow in Glen Burnie, and I was in the second grade in elementary school. After a year with Bendix, my father applied for the job of radio engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory, Anacostia, Washington, D.C. He was hired, and we moved south to Hyattsville, Maryland.

The first American stagecoach route passed through Hyattsville, founded in 1695, and two years later, the road became a postal delivery route. The Washington and Baltimore Turnpike, connecting Hyattsville and D.C., was built in 1812 and soon became part of Route 1 that stretched from Maine to Florida.

By 1893, an electric streetcar connected Hyattsville to D.C. Soon the tracks were bordered by service stations, garages, auto dealership, and homes. The area’s first newspaper, phone system, and utilities were in Hyattsville, located in Prince George’s County, named for Denmark’s Prince George.

I attended grades three to seven in Hyattsville Elementary School. Each morning in our home room, we kids stood to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag and sing the Star Spangled Banner, Maryland My Maryland, and Prince George’s County.

Maryland My Maryland, to the tune of O, Tannenbaum, was adopted as the state song in 1939. Since 1974, lawmakers have tried to replace it, saying the words were a Civil War call to arms for the Confederacy against the North. The only words I remember were something about not cowarding in the dust.

I remember the Prince George’s County song that went something like Prince George’s County, heart of old Maryland, pride of the free state, united we stand. Once home of Algonquin and Iroquois Indians, Maryland is proud of its rolling hills and valleys bordered on the east by the Patuxent River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean.

In music class, we sang Negro spirituals, the religious folksongs inspired by African music. We were too young to realize that these syncopated melodies were associated with African slaves in the American South. As we raised our voices in Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, and Ol’Man River, we sympathized with the workers picking cotton and stevedores loading barges on the Mississippi River.

In class, I had to sit up front and cock my head to read words on the blackboard. Finally, one teacher suggested that I needed an eye examination. When mother took me to an opthomologist, I couldn’t read many lines on the eye chart. I had a stigmatism.

After I got my first pair of glasses, I could read the words on the blackboard, see birds on the grass, and colors were brighter than before. I’ve worn eyeglasses ever since. Thereafter, the term Four Eyes was added to Stutterbox.

Washingtonians spoke with Southern drawls. The tempo of life was languorous, trolley cars leisurely clanged around the streets, and auto traffic was light. There were few high-rise buildings in D.C., until the New Deal expanded and hoards of hustling and bustling northerners arrived.

Segregation was taken for granted below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Before World War II, Federal Government workers, college professors, and schoolteachers considered themselves better than the dark-skinned laborers who worked with their hands.

Blacks were treated as second-class citizens, made to sit in the back of streetcars and buses, and they were banned from white-only restaurants. Private beaches in Maryland and Delaware did not allow Blacks or Jews onto the grounds.

The few Black families who attended the Catholic church in Hyattsville were forced to sit in pews on the right side of the church. Hyattsville elementary and high schools had no Black students.

It wasn’t until 1953 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that restaurants in the District of Columbia could not refuse to serve Blacks.

My parents’ families and friends lived in Philly, so we drove there to celebrate birthdays, weddings, births, deaths, and holidays. It was about a four-hour drive from Hyattsville, depending on the traffic.

We usually stayed with Kathryn Heiser, mother’s high school girlfriend. Kathryn, her husband, and son lived with her parents in a large house in a Philly suburb. Sometimes Kathryn or her mother would take me on the train to New York City, where I was awed by the skyscrapers, uniformed doormen, fast cars, and twinkling neon signs.

Christmas was special in Philly and New York. In both cities, the streets came alive with roasting chestnuts and jingling sleigh bells.

Saks’ Fifth Avenue windows glittered with tinsel, toy trains, and sugary frost on the glass. Crowds gathered at the store’s main entrance, where carolers were dressed for a Dickens’ Christmas in long mufflers, top hats, and bonnets.

Wanamaker’s department store windows displayed sparkling trees, snowmen, reindeer, wooden soldiers, and 80,000 dancing lights. One window featured the 10,000-pipe organ, carried to New York in 13 freight train cars from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

Of course, our New York visits included seeing the Rockettes in Radio City Music Hall, which opened in 1932. I’ll never forget their Parade of Wooden Soldiers.

In Philly and New York, we ate at Horn & Hardart’s Automats. It was magical to drop a coin in a slot on the wall, open the glass door, and take out a cinnamon bun, cruller, cherry pie, a slice of New York cheesecake, dish of baked beans, rice pudding, a hoagy, scrappel, or chicken pot pie.

Salvation Army trios stood on street corners singing carols, ringing bells, and snapping castanets. The singers and musicians were not always in tune, but they were earnest and performing for a good cause. The Salvation Army saved many people during the Great Depression.

My father used to sing, irreverently, Drop a penny on the drum, save another drunken bum.... To this day, I can’t pass a Salvation Army kettle without dropping in a few dollars.

The Jersey Shore

I first dipped my toes into the Atlantic Ocean at my grandfather’s home in Atlantic City, built on Absecon Island by the Lenni-Lenape Indians on the New Jersey shore. One of America’s first railroads, the Camden and Atlantic Railroad was built in the 1830s between Philly and Atlantic City.

My parents and I celebrated holidays and weekends at the shore with my grandfather, Hugh Hilferty; his third wife, Aunt George; and sons Jack, Bill, Leo, and Tom. Son Joe was sailing around the world with the Merchant Marines, and Hugh, Jr. was in the Army.

My grandfather was an inspector for the Army Ordinance Department and also owned a gas station in Atlantic City.

I was the first girl born to the Hilferty family in two generations, so my uncles and grandfather spoiled me. I proudly displayed my ‘diamond rings’, the gold paper rings from Cuban cigars, that my uncles gave to me.

The Hilferty house, within walking distance of the beach and the Boardwalk, had a large kitchen, dining room, a parlor, three bedrooms, and one bathroom. The house would burst its seams when my parents and I came to visit. I slept either on a blanket on the dining room table, on two chairs placed together in the living room, or in bed with Uncle Tom, who was two years older than I.

Because the front door of the house faced the trolley tracks, we used the back door on the Atlantic Ocean side. The small, fenced-in yard contained a shower to rinse off sand. This was also where my grandfather would cut his sons’ hair as well as mine. He would put a bowl on top of my head and cut around it to make a short bob.

Uncle Tom and I used to walk barefoot across hot, gritty sidewalks and streets to play in the sand on the beach and cavort in the ocean waves. Sometimes we rode bicycles on the Boardwalk between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., when pedestrians and the rolling chairs took over.

The world-famous Boardwalk, considered the oldest and longest boardwalk in the country, was laid in 1870 along the beach to keep the sand out of hotel lobbies. During the next 20 years, the Boardwalk was extended to 40 feet wide and 4 miles long.

The Boardwalk was bordered by the beach and ocean on one side and, on the other, by hotels, stores, cafes, carousels, Bingo parlors, auction houses, soda fountains, theaters, and penny-ante hustlers. Kiosks sold racy postcards, landscapes painted on shells, coral jewelry, Kewpie dolls, Swiss woodcarvings, and Salt Water Taffy.

Amusement and games took place on piers extending up to half a mile out to sea, where the force of waves shook the piers in stormy weather and hurricanes. Landmarks were the concrete John Young Pier and the huge neon 57 sign atop Heinz’s Pier.

The first Miss America was crowned in 1921 during the pageant on Steel Pier, which also featured the Flying Zachinis blasting out of a cannon three times a day and a woman on horseback diving from a 40-foot tower into the ocean.

During my visits, I would help Uncle Tom deliver lunches to my grandfather and uncles working in the gas station. We became a familiar site pulling a red wagon piled high with the sandwiches Aunt George had packed.

In 1952, Uncle Tom was ordained as a Catholic priest, and he enlisted in the Navy in 1957. He served 20 years as Marine Crops chaplain in Camp Pendleton, California, and was chaplain aboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. He served two tours in Vietnam as the Marine Corps chaplain, and retired a Navy captain in 1977. When he died of a heart attack in 2008, at 80, he was Monseigneur, pastor emeritus of Queen of Peace Parish, Ardsley, PA.

On Friday evenings after dinner, my grandfather went to the horse track. Before he left the house, Aunt George dug into his coat pocket to take part of his salary to run the household. She left him a few dollars to play the ponies.

If his sons weren’t home when my grandfather returned from the track, he would drive around town looking for them. He usually found the boys in a nightclub. On the way home, he’d threaten to kick the boys out of the house if they came home late again.

Once home, my grandfather removed his belt, turned the boys one at a time over his knee, and beat them across their backside. The boys, who were all six feet tall, humored their father because they knew that they could pick him up with one hand if they wanted to. By morning, all was forgiven.

Most evenings after we helped Aunt George clear the dining room table and wash and dry the dishes, whoever was home gathered around the dining room table to play poker, using wooden match sticks instead of money, or Monopoly.

In the early 1930s, Lizzie Magie conceived what she called the Landlord’s Game, the forerunner to Monopoly. An artist, writer, feminist, and inventor, Lizzie received a patent for the game, which had a square board with nine rectangular spaces on each side, set between corners Go to Jail and Public Park.

Later, Charles Darrow reinvented Lizzie’s game and renamed it Monopoly, using the street names of Atlantic City. He sold the game for a fortune to Parker Brothers in 1935.

My grandfather died in April 1940. A Solemn Requiem Mass was celebrated for him at the Church of St. Francis de Sales, and he was interned at Holy Cross Cemetery in Atlantic City.

It’s probably just as well that I have not returned to Atlantic City since my grandfather’s funeral. I’d rather remember my childhood days on the beach and Boardwalk than wander through today’s casinos with spinning wheels, rolling dice, and clinking slot machines lining the Boardwalk.

A Snowy Drive

Calling 3Z971. Come in please.

I’ll never forget the winter afternoon when my parents and I were returning from a visit to Philly. As we crossed the Maryland State line, the wind was blowing the snow in horizontal sheets across the road.

Snowflakes began to cover the windshield of my father’s Ford. I don’t recall the model, but I know the car had two doors, a front and back seat, and running boards. No rumble seat.

When my father could barely see the car in front of us, he stopped beneath a railroad overpass to batten down the canvas-and-isinglass side curtains. Inside, we were warm and cozy, but the windshield was so fogged up that mother constantly wiped moisture off