Jersey Goes West: A Memoir

By Paul Hosch

"This book is like a pot smoke-filled time machine; funny, serious, far-out, turned on, and groovy, all at the same time." If you're dying to know what it was like to survive the sixties, this book is the place to find out. And if you somehow skipped the flower power revolution, we will take you down the white rabbit hole for a long last

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Awakened Press
• Release date: Dec 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989182725

Paul Hosch

Paul Hosch grew up on the Jersey Shore many years before it became famous on MTV. Mr. Hosch majored in journalism and wrote a regular column for his college newspaper, but got kicked out shortly before graduation. He drove out to San Francisco in 1969 to catch the last dregs of the Hippie Revolution and in his new e-memoir, JERSEY GOES WEST, he describes Grateful Dead concerts at the Fillmore, his disappointment with Woodstock, getting busted in Haight Ashbury, and how he saw a man get killed at the Stone's ill-fated Altamont concert. After abandoning the drug scene for yoga in 1970, he toured the U.S. with an Indian swami, then spent a year studying with a guru in India. In 1975, Mr. Hosch graduated from Philadelphia College of Arts. On his second trip to India, he went underground during Indira Gandhi's martial law and climbed the Himalayas in search of a mysterious yogi as detailed in his first e-book memoir, UNDERCOVER IN INDIA. In 1976, Mr. Hosch moved to Hawaii and worked as an artist in the International Marketplace. He spent five years teaching copywriting and design at the University of Hawaii and another six years teaching at the Honolulu Academy of Art. His painting was featured in the Academy Award winning film, "The Descendants," starring George Clooney. He moved to Southern Florida in 2009.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

As we entered the ceremonial hall, a somber man in a severe black suit stood stiffly in front of the coffin. He politely asked my mother, sister, and I if we would like to see my father’s remains now. We all looked at each other, laughed nervously, and in unison said, NO, thank you. It was an unusually awkward moment because we could tell the undertaker was desperate to show off his embalming skills and he seemed so downcast when we refused to take a last look at my father’s lifeless body. Seeing the dead was not our family’s style, however. We were determined to remember him as he was in life.

I was scheduled to be the main speaker that day after having spent the better part of the morning thinking of nice things to say about him. When my turn came, I told the congregation how he was my childhood hero and described a favorite photo of him as a young man in an Army uniform, sitting on a white horse in front of the pyramids. I actually enjoyed telling those stories about my father while family and friends sat in the audience nodding their approval.

After my speech, a man from the country club got up and expressed his unmitigated grief over the loss of his dear friend. Almost immediately, he became distraught and began to weep uncontrollably. He had to be escorted off the stage by the funeral director because he was unable to continue. Afterward, I asked my mother who the guy was because I had never seen or heard of him before. She said he worked at the golf course. She was surprised he was crying so much because he barely knew my father. We both burst out laughing at the strangeness of that, but reined it in before anyone noticed.

When the service was over, several people complimented my speech although my mother, ever the cynic, accused me of not meaning the nice things I said about him. I insisted I did, but I’m not sure I was being totally honest. After all, funerals are hardly the place to start pointing out someone’s faults. One only says the kindest, most flattering things about the recently departed.

Back at the house, his golf group delivered three huge trays full of bagels, lox, and cream cheese, with cut fruits, Danish pastries, and other goodies. My mother spent the rest of the day wrapping bagels in tin foil and wedging them into the refrigerator while relatives and friends sat around the living room gossiping. She was so busy arranging bagels, she had no time to grieve…

When my mother passed away twenty-seven years later, there was no funeral at all because she had outlived her entire generation. In fact, I was the only one there to make the arrangements. It was at the height of the COVID pandemic and everyone else was either too far away, sequestered, or dead.

I was my mother’s caretaker for the last thirteen years of her life until she passed away at the age of 103. I hoped spending those years together would heal some of my old wounds, and in a way, it did. My mother and I learned to tolerate each other by avoiding the worn-out resentments of the past. Instead, we focused on problem solving in the present. By that one thing alone, we began to relate to each other as real people. That’s all it took. Once we learned to stay in the here and now, we got along fine.

When I was a kid, I saw my mother as a towering, all-powerful monolith. By the end of her life, however, she was but a frail old lady in a wheelchair who depended on me for everything from toilet paper to hearing aid batteries, to setting up doctor’s appointments, to help with difficult words from the latest crossword puzzle. Seeing her as a helpless old woman, I found it hard to believe she was the same powerful matriarch who lorded over me when I was a kid.

My relationship with my parents was tenuous at best. After they were gone, I was left with a giant cosmic question mark. Who were those people anyway, and how did I wind up with them? They never seemed to understand me as a person, and, for the most part, I didn’t understand them either. It was as if we had been flown in from two different galaxies and plunked down in the same household for some unfathomable reason. We had a fairly cordial relationship on the surface, but underneath, there was an unspoken cultural and generational abyss which could never be bridged.

Then there was my Grandma Rose. The last time I saw her was in 1975 when she was eighty-two years old. As I was about to leave her apartment for what turned out to be the last time, she asked me to escort her up to the boardwalk where she worked as a cashier in a fish restaurant. She said she wanted to lean on my arm because it was difficult to step up on the curb after crossing the street.

My grandmother wasn’t working because she needed money, that’s for sure. In fact, she was a wealthy woman who owned the lion’s share of the restaurant she worked in. She only cashiered to remain active for a few hours a day. In her community, she was known as a compassionate godmother-like figure who often gave interest-free loans to family and friends.

I was surprised when one of my nieces described her as scary, overbearing, and imperious. The younger woman’s off-the-cuff remark was a shock to me because I couldn’t even imagine my grandmother in that light. To me, and others of my generation, our grandma was the very personification of benevolence, generosity, and wisdom. Apparently, not everyone thought of her that way.

The bottom line is that each of us views family from our own unique perspective. Where one person sees a saint, another sees a horned demon. I once thought everyone saw me the same way I saw myself. And if they didn’t now, they would eventually come around. I have been proven wrong too many times to count. There is no absolute when it comes to opinion. Does that imply we can never know the true nature of things? Yes, I think it does. There are too many fine gradations in life for one person to be right all the time and everyone else to be wrong.

My memory of growing up was only one view of that fragmented reality known as a family. After all, there were four separate realities in my nuclear family alone: mine, my sister’s, my mother’s, and my father’s. Perhaps each of us only saw twenty-five percent of how things really were. Then, if you factor in the passage of time, everything shifts again. When I was five years old, I had one impression of my parents, but by the time I was fifty, my perception had radically changed.

WOLVES IN THE LIVING ROOM

Image2

I was awakened by a loud noise. Creeping out of bed, I quietly tiptoed from my bedroom into the hall near the living room and peeked through a crack in the louvered doors to see what all the racket was about.

At first, it seemed to be nothing more than another noisy adult cocktail party, but when I looked more carefully, I saw my parents and their friends had torn back their human faces which now hung limply behind them like hooded sweatshirts. I was amazed to see they had all become grotesque cartoon wolves with long snouts, sharp pointy teeth, bulging eyes, and protruding pink tongues. Terrified, I watched as they sipped martinis and made casual cocktail conversation. They looked weird to me, but they seemed happy because they had abandoned their usual pretentiousness and were being their true wolfish selves for a change.

Suddenly one of them spotted me behind the door, caught me by the arm, and dragged me into the center of the room. I thought I was going to be attacked, but instead he tore my face back, and much to my surprise, I too, was a wolf underneath. One of them gave me a hand mirror so I could see myself. They all laughed uproariously as I sat on the couch and looked at myself, very much in shock. The wolves didn’t harm me, they just continued partying as if I wasn’t there.

I had the same dream over and over again over the next couple years, and never did the wolves hurt or punish me in any way. They were just goofy cartoon animals having a good time. Even so, I always woke up in a cold sweat, scared out of my wits. It was an alienation dream, reinforcing the idea that adults were strange creatures I could never understand, and even worse was the fear I might become one of them someday…

PART ONE: JERSEY

Image3

ONE

1951: THE CASTAWAY

Image4

"Summer camp: the second worst camp for Jews." —Sarah Silverman

Paralyzed with fear, I grasped the hand of a man I didn’t know. The two of us stood side by side in front of a primitive log cabin surrounded by an impenetrable forest of pine trees. I watched as my parents drove away down a long dirt road, a huge cloud of dust in their wake. I called out to them in despair, but it was too late; they were already out of sight and I didn’t know if I would ever see them again. No one had warned me about being abandoned in this deserted, tree-infested wilderness. Was I going to be punished, scalped, eaten, or tortured? At four years old, I was far too young to understand any of it.

Thus began my first day at Camp Pinehurst, a Jewish sleepover camp, located less than a half mile from the notorious State Reformatory for Boys in Winston Park, New Jersey.

According to my mother, I was on record as the youngest child ever to attend the camp. She seemed so proud when she told me, as if it was one of the great achievements of her life. When I quizzed other parents over the years, they said it would have been unthinkable to send a four-year-old to a sleepover camp for the whole summer. But for my mother, it was business as usual. She was the same mother who boasted she toilet trained me in less than an hour. It’s scary to think how that went down.

But on the positive side, getting sent away helped me become an unusually independent and resourceful young boy. I was set out on my own from an early age like a Dickens character and had no fear of interacting with new people. It was the old ones I worried about.

1954: TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

We were only allowed two candy bars a week from the camp snack bar, which was never enough to satisfy us. We kids were always craving candy. While on a group hike, I espied a little grocery store about a quarter mile from the camp. Seeing how close it was, I decided to sneak over there and buy some extra goodies. I knew instinctively I could be back before they realized I was gone, so I recruited an assistant to go with me and took prepaid orders from the other boys in my bunk. My wingman and I snuck out through a hole in a fence, hiked to the store, brought back as much candy as we could carry in our backpacks, and sold it at a small profit to my bunkmates. My smuggling operation was a huge success. After a few clandestine trips, I had accumulated more than twenty dollars (mostly in candy) as my profit, which isn’t bad considering I was barely seven years old.

Eventually, the suspicious store owner noticed our camp T-shirts, and called Uncle Martin, who owned and operated the camp. Uncle Martin zoomed over in his wood-paneled station wagon and caught us in the act. That was my first bust, but it would hardly be my last.

Although I quite literally got caught with my hand in the cookie jar, I was never punished for my crimes. When I told my parents about my enterprise on visiting day, they found it amusing. I learned that Jewish parents never punish their children for turning over a nice profit.

1956: THE CHARLES ATLAS CLUB

One hot summer afternoon, they took a few of us over to the nurse’s office, stripped us down to our skivvies, and weighed us like sides of beef. The nurse declared that I was officially underweight, and registered me for a special program called the Charles Atlas Club. Very few people remember Charles Atlas anymore, but he was a famous bodybuilder who advertised his workout regimen on the back cover of ten cent comic books. Charlie used to be a 97-pound weakling. The girls laughed at him, and bullies kicked sand in his face at the beach until he started working out and became a world-class body builder. After that, no one dared laugh at him again, even when he posed for beefcake photos in a leopard skin speedo. As part of the program, I was taken to the nurse’s office every night just before taps and given an extra thick vanilla milkshake designed to fatten me up.

Well, I didn’t gain much weight that summer, but I got terribly congested from slugging down a gullet full of sludge every night right before bedtime. It’s hard to imagine a camp in this day and age loading down young children with fifteen grams of saturated fat in the name of good health. Now, it would probably be more like quinoa and kale smoothies with organic, plant-based protein for the poor undernourished campers.

1959: THE CLIMAX

When I was twelve, I graduated to the prestigious Cedar Cabin, the newest and most modern of all the bunks in camp. Right next to Cedar Cabin was the administrative office where the counselors on night duty drank beer and sat guard duty while we slept.

One night, two cousins on the verge of puberty, decided they were going to try pleasuring themselves for the first time. This was something I had never seen before, although I was pretty sure I knew what it meant. The two boys laid towels on their bunks and started at it. We all gathered around, like doctors in an operating theater, curious to observe what would happen next. After a couple minutes, it turned into a life and death competition to see which cousin would finish first. We all cheered for one cousin or the other, as if it was the Dodgers against the Yankees in the World Series.

As their tense faces turned beet red, we yelled louder and louder, which aroused the curiosity of the counselors who were schmoozing next door. They came over with their industrial-sized flashlights and quietly peered in the windows, but by then, we were in such a frenzy, nobody noticed them.

When the counselors finally barged in the front door, everyone quickly leapt into their beds to avoid capture. Unfortunately, I had the bunk closest to the entrance and was the only one who didn’t make it back in time.

As my punishment, I was taken by the collar of my pajama shirt out to the middle of the baseball field with my blanket and told to sit there until they came back to get me. Then they walked away and left me there alone. I wasn’t scared because it was warm out and a lovely panorama of glittering stars flickered beyond the tall row of pine trees separating the camp from the looming reformatory tower in the distance.

After about five minutes, the sky lit up with brilliant-colored lights in wavy pastel patterns, pink, violet, blue, yellow, and green. It started slowly at first, and gained intensity until the whole sky went totally berserk. I sat there in amazement. I didn’t realize it until years later, but I was witnessing a rare Jersey occurrence of the Aurora Borealis and it might have been the finest thing I’d ever seen in my twelve years on Earth. It was even more dramatic being that I was out in the middle of the big field by myself while everyone else was snoring away inside the bunk.

A moment later, some delinquents apparently escaped from the nearby State Reformatory for Boys and deafening warning sirens blared from the nearby tower.

So here I was, in a vast empty field, watching the Northern Lights conquer the sky while listening to ear-splitting sirens from the other side of the trees. Even though I was just a kid, I took this as an omen I would see and hear things in my life that most people would never believe.

As a postscript, one of the cousins overdid his initial attempt at self-gratification and his sore member swelled to an enormous girth. He could barely move the next day and was bent over in pain. The counselors escorted him to the nurse’s office for some embarrassing medical treatment, but fortunately for him, the injury was temporary. Within a week, he was able to walk upright again like a normal human being.

TWO

1928: MY MOTHER IN HER OWN WORDS

Definition of a Freudian slip: you say one thing when you mean your mother.

About fifteen years ago, I got the urge to do some ancestral research. I submitted my DNA (99.5% Ashkenazi Jew) and created a family tree on Ancestry. I also asked my only surviving parent, my mother, to write down some details of her early life. I knew that once she was gone, her life story would be lost in the ethers forever. In an effort to comply, she wrote a fifty-page memoir on a yellow legal pad when she was ninety years old, addressed to me.

Oddly, she never told me she had written it, even though I lived with and took care of her for the last thirteen years of her life. Several months before she passed away, I found the memoir sitting in the bottom of a cardboard box in her bedroom closet. When I thanked her for her effort, she claimed it was nothing much, but I think her real intention was for me to discover it after she was gone. That was her style. She also left little instructional notes all over the house to be found after her death. I’m still finding them:

This purse was made by your Aunt Lil. Make sure someone uses it.

Those Spode dishes belonged to your grandmother. They can be sold at this address.

The following is a small excerpt from her handwritten memoir, used with her permission and blessing:

When my parents got married in 1916, my dad had very little education. To support the family, he became a cutter of lady’s shirtwaists which meant cutting fabric for women’s blouses based on patterns provided by the factory boss. It was a common profession for the uneducated at the time, and was not very lucrative. My father’s brother Mack, on the other hand, had no particular skill either, but he made a much better living working in traveling fairs and carnivals up and down the East Coast.

My mother, impressed by my uncle’s success, wanted my father to join him in the carnival business, but my father didn’t think it was right to leave the family for months on end. My mother had other ideas. Being an ambitious woman, she went to my principal to ask whether we could skip school for a few months and go with them. The principal said traveling around the country would be far more educational than sitting in a classroom. Upon hearing that news, we hit the road.

In those days, Jews were not allowed in many hotels around the country. In fact, my Uncle Mack had to sleep in the car half the time because most hotels refused him a room. He finally got fed up and went to court to change his name from Mack Kirschenbaum, a very Jewish name, to Mack Harris, a generic American moniker. Following his lead, we also changed our name to Harris. After that, we had no problem getting hotel reservations, even in the deepest south.

My dad quickly became an expert at running wheels of chance and other midway games and soon, our financial situation improved exponentially. But after traveling with the carnival for a couple of years, my parents decided to settle down. My father got a gambling license on the boardwalk at Long Beach, N.Y. by bribing local officials.

Right from the first day, his business was mobbed with customers. My folks worked every night until 1 a.m. but were always too exhausted to count their money in the evening. Instead, they threw the proceeds into an old suitcase and hid it under the bed until morning. After breakfast, my younger sister and I helped count the previous day’s profits. We put the change into wrappers, then took coffee cans around to each of their stands to pick up coins which had fallen on the floor the night before. By the end of the summer, my sister and I each had a full can of quarters which my parents let us use for spending money during the school year.

After I graduated high school, my family moved to Asbury Park, NJ, but I had no idea what to do with myself once we got there. When one of the boys who worked for my father asked about my future plans, I told him I had none. He said he was a student at Rutgers University and told me about the New Jersey College for Women which was just down the road from there. He suggested I fill out an application. Going to college had never crossed my mind until then because women rarely went past high school in those days. But, I asked my folks about it, and because I was an excellent student, they let me apply. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, in August of