Palisades Park (16 page)

*   *   *

While Beatrice Kyle was performing at Palisades, the indefatigable Bert Nevins came up with another inspired bit of press agentry: he had Bee write (or at least sign her name to) a letter addressed to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who administered the country’s fuel and petroleum reserves for defense purposes. After describing her unusual livelihood, she explained her quandary to the secretary and sought his advice:

Over the summer season I use more than 300 gallons of gasoline, and if you feel that such use is wasteful I will be glad to change my act.

No response from Ickes was ever noted, though somehow the letter found its way into the hands of newspapers across the country.

It was, as Irving Rosenthal would have said, “a sweet gag.” But in only three months’ time, such a proposition would be no laughing matter.

7

E
DDIE WAS LISTENING
, that Sunday afternoon, to a football game on WOR—the New York Giants playing the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds. It was 2:25
P.M.
, midway through the first quarter, and the Dodgers’ kickoff was caught at the three-yard line by running back Ward Cuff of the Giants. Assisted by some nice defense from teammate Tuffy Leemans, Cuff ran it up to the twenty-seven-yard line before he was taken down hard by Frank “Bruiser” Kinard of Brooklyn—at which point the game was interrupted by the crackle of an announcer cutting in with:

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Flash! Washington. The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Stay tuned to WOR for further developments which will be broadcast as received.”

Like many startled Americans that day, Eddie’s first thought was: “Where the hell is Pearl Harbor?”

Taking the news in stride, WOR promptly returned to football, but Eddie immediately lost all interest in the game and switched over to CBS, where the news program
The World Today
was due to start at 2:30
P.M.
It began with a bulletin from newsman John Charles Daly:

“The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i, from the air, President Roosevelt just announced. The attack was also made on all naval and military activity on the principal island of O‘ahu…”

Eddie knew where Hawai
‘
i was, and he knew at once that the future he had been dreading had finally arrived.

On this unseasonably spring-like day in December, the kids were out roller-skating when normally they might have been lacing up their ice skates at Fettes Pond. Eddie quietly called Adele into the living room. Pulled by the shifting tide of news reports from CBS to NBC Red to Mutual to NBC Blue, they tried to piece together what was happening six thousand miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The news flashes were alarming but vague—until one reported grimly that it was believed hundreds of men had been killed at Hickam Air Field, adjacent to Pearl Harbor.

Adele’s eyes filled with tears as she wordlessly gripped Eddie’s hand.

At 4:05
P.M.
, NBC Blue announced that FDR would meet with his cabinet and congressional leaders that evening. This was followed by a live broadcast from the Pacific:
“Hello NBC, hello NBC, this is KGU Honolulu. I am speaking from the roof of the Advertiser Publishing Company building. We have witnessed this morning from a distance … a severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese … One of the bombs dropped within fifty feet of KGU tower. It is no joke, it is a real war.”

Adele said softly, “My God. Not again.”

Each of them had been children during the First World War, and now it looked as though they were going to live to see the Second.

Eddie nodded soberly. “Yeah. My cousin Freddy came back from the first one with only one arm—and he was one of the lucky ones.”

It would be another week before Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, returning from the scene in Hawai‘i, would reveal that casualties numbered not in the hundreds but the thousands, and that six warships had been lost in the attack: the battleship
Arizona,
three destroyers, and two smaller ships, crippled and sunk in their berths like men shot in their sleep.

Pearl Harbor shattered the American complacency that foreign wars would remain just that—fought on foreign soil, the United States existing in a permanent state of grace guaranteed by the vast bulwarks of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Not within living memory—a hundred and twenty-five years—had the United States been attacked by a foreign power on its own territory. Eddie and Adele’s reaction was, like that of most Americans, one of shock, rage, defiance—and an unaccustomed sense of vulnerability.

The Stopka children, however, were blessed with the invincibility of youth, and when they came in for Sunday supper, they greeted news of the attack enthusiastically: “Oh boy!” Jack whooped. “War!” “We’ll show those Japs who’s boss,” Toni declared. They then went on to debate who would do more damage to the Axis war machine: the Human Torch, Captain Marvel, or Superman. And say, wasn’t it almost time to listen to
The Shadow
?

The next day, after President Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war on Japan, Congress followed up with legislation expanding the draft call, requiring all men from eighteen to sixty-five years old to register. The Selective Service would also reexamine the status of the seventeen million men aged twenty-one to thirty-five who were already registered—like Eddie.

But this almost seemed unnecessary, at first. On December 9, the Army, Navy, and Marine recruiting centers in Newark were overflowing with men so eager to enlist that the offices had to remain open around the clock.

Eddie was not immune: his first, patriotic impulse was to join the stampede on the recruiting offices. Already friends from the lumberyard, all bachelors, had signed up for the fight. Eddie wanted to smash the Japs as much as they did—but if he did, who would provide for his family?

“Eddie, for God’s sake,
don’t enlist,
” Adele begged him. “I know how you feel, but we need you here, at home. How will I feed the kids?”

“I could send you all my service pay,” Eddie offered.

“Which is what? Forty, fifty dollars a month? How far will that go?”

“I read in the papers, they’re already talking about providing some kind of allowances for servicemen’s wives,” Eddie said.

“And what about our stand at Palisades? I can’t run it by myself.”

“You can hire somebody to help out.”

“You can’t trust an employee like you can family.” Adele said pointedly, “How many carnivals have you worked where concession agents have been holding out on the owner from the day’s take?”

Eddie frowned. “A lot,” he had to admit.

“That’s why the Mazzocchis and the Cunys are grooming their kids to take over their concessions.”

She made a persuasive case, as did events later that day—when air-raid sirens blared raucously into life, all the way from Cape May to Boston.

The various municipalities in Bergen County hadn’t agreed yet on a common air-raid signal; in Cliffside Park and Fort Lee, it was a siren wailing for two straight minutes. But in Edgewater it was four screeching blasts of a steam whistle, repeated four times—scaring the hell out of Adele when she first heard it, sending her laundry whites flying out of the basket and into the air like surrender flags. When she heard the rumble of planes overhead she raced to the windows—aware that this was the last thing she should be doing—and her heart pounded as she saw a squadron of planes bearing ominously down the Hudson River toward New York Harbor. But after a few moments she realized they were ours—Army Air Corps planes scrambling to meet enemy planes, thought to be coming in off the Atlantic.

Eddie rushed home from work in time to hear on the radio that there had been no enemy planes—it was just a case of jangled nerves. Adele hugged him as if there were real bombs falling all around them. “Thank God you’re here, Eddie,” she said in a shaky voice, then began sobbing. He held her, kissed her head, stroked her hair, and promised her everything would be all right, as empty a lie as he had ever told in his life.

Toni and Jack experienced the air raid at school and found it a good deal more exciting than did their parents. “Boy, that was fun!” Toni declared when she got home, and Eddie didn’t contradict her: he’d rather they thought this all a lark than be frightened, as some of their classmates were, by the raid. And he had to admit, for the moment he was glad he was here at home, where he could comfort his children—and wife—if need be.

A meeting of the local Civil Defense Council drew fourteen hundred people to Cliffside Park High School, where officials noted that New Jersey’s many defense plants—with more factories retooling for defense every day—represented prime targets for German bombers. “It is a certainty,” one speaker said soberly, “that the New York metropolitan area will suffer at least a token bombing attack before the war is over.” This inspired scores of volunteers for civil defense and Red Cross first-aid classes. Adele signed up for the latter.

But as it turned out it wasn’t Nazi bombers that New Jerseyans had to fear—it was Nazi U-boats.

On the night of January 25, 1942, a German submarine torpedoed the Norwegian oil tanker
Varanger,
thirty-five miles off the coast of Sea Isle City, New Jersey. The concussion could be heard as far north as Atlantic City. Its forty crewmen survived the attack, but in March the American freighter
Lemuel Burrows
was sunk off Atlantic City, claiming twenty lives. A surviving officer said that the lights blazing along the Jersey shore “were like Coney Island. It was lit up like daylight along the beach” … perfectly silhouetting the
Burrows,
making it an easy target for the U-boat.

Prowling the waters from Newfoundland to the Florida Keys, Nazi submarines were soon sinking freighters with impunity. The government ordered street and boardwalk lights extinguished all along the Jersey coast and banned illuminated nighttime advertising. (Night baseball was also three strikes and out for the duration.) Now, in the evenings, families like the Stopkas sat within the violet nimbus of a blackout lamp, the only other light being the green gaze of the radio’s tuning eye. Opaque blackout drapes were drawn across their windows, allowing no seepage of light to escape. Even Manhattan had lost some of its luster, its skyline dimmed with swaths of black where lights once burned all night long.

Across the Eastern Seaboard families gathered, each in their own private darkness—yet still laughing at Bob Hope and Jack Benny, still keeping rhythm with Glenn Miller and Paul Whiteman, and listening attentively to news of the war,
their
war, the one they were living and fighting even now, here in their own blacked-out living rooms.

*   *   *

With remarkable speed, America’s economy shifted to a wartime footing. All civilian auto production was halted as car manufacturers—including the Ford Motor Assembly Plant in Edgewater—converted to the construction of tanks, tank destroyers, Jeeps, half-tracks, amphibious vehicles, aircraft engines, and munitions. Eddie, eager to contribute to the war effort, quit the lumberyard and applied for a job on the assembly line at Ford. Unemployment in America became, almost overnight, a thing of the past as the Federal government pumped billions of dollars into defense.

But money couldn’t make ordnance out of thin air, and after the Japanese invaded the Dutch West Indies, rubber was instantly in short supply. Automobile tires became the first item to be rationed to the public, and to minimize wear, car owners were allotted four gallons of gas per week; the covers of the Gas Ration Books encouraged them to
DRIVE UNDER 35
.

Soon joining the list of rationed items would be bicycles, kerosene, sugar, coffee (one cup a day), butter, meats and canned fish, and shoes.

Conservation was the watchword of the day. Housewives like Adele were urged to save their beef drippings and bacon fat in a wide-mouthed can and take it to the local butcher in exchange for ration points. “Okay,” Adele asked one morning as she dutifully began draining pork grease from the skillet, “can someone tell me what earthly use the U.S. Army has for
bacon
fat? Do they grease the battlefield and hope the Nazis slip on it?”

“They told us at school, Mama!” Jack piped up enthusiastically. “You make something called glycerin out of the fat—”

“And they turn the glycerin into
bombs
!” Toni finished with a flourish. “BOOM!”

“I’ve got to go blow up a few Nazis today myself,” Eddie said, kissing his family goodbye to go to work—where for eight hours a day he inspected engine cowlings on tanks which, the minute they rolled off the line, were on their way to Moscow to resupply the besieged Red Army.

Toni and Jack did their bit for the war too, collecting all kinds of scrap—rubber, rags, tin cans, bedsprings, even foil wrappers from chewing gum and Hershey’s Kisses—for salvage drives. Jack, in the ultimate show of patriotism, even turned in his old comic books for the paper drive. Like children all across the country, they prided themselves on being a part of the war effort. Even schoolyard play took on a different tone, as girls skipped rope to new lyrics to a song from Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:

Whistle while you work,

Hitler is a jerk.

Mussolini is a weenie,

And Tojo is a jerk!

Eddie, who closely followed the war news, found these mild epithets inadequate for an enemy capable of committing the kinds of atrocities that seemed to follow in their wake: In Hong Kong, on Christmas Day, Japanese troops invaded a hospital, shot the doctor in charge, and bayoneted fifty-six wounded soldiers. A month later, in Malaya, the Japanese ordered the mass execution of one hundred and sixty-one captured and wounded Australian, British, and Indian soldiers. Their bodies were heaped in the street and burned. And in February, after the British colony of Singapore surrendered to the Japanese, the occupying army began the systematic execution of thousands of ethnic Chinese believed “hostile” to the Japanese.