Train Tracks

TRAIN TRACKS

Family Stories for the Holidays

Michael Savage

Dedication

For Janet Roll Weiner, who has watched over me as a guardian angel

Epigraph

All memories are traces of tears.

C
HINESE
P
ROVERB

Contents

Introduction

I Really Was
Poor!

A
t my
recent birthday party, my son got up to give a little speech about his dad, and
he mentioned something intriguing. Here's what he said: “When my dad told me
that he was so poor when he was young that he actually wore a dead man's pants,
I thought he was just exaggerating as I often think he does. But tonight before
the party, he showed me childhood pictures that were just sent to him from
relatives for this book. I was astounded to see he actually was wearing pants,
hand-me-downs, five times too large, cut off at the knee. I couldn't believe his
family was actually that poor.”

Well, that's the end of that quote. In reviewing
the photographs in this book, you will see that exact picture: me standing
beneath my aunt, straddled by my sister and my cousin, wearing dead man's pants.
Every word that you read in this book is as true as that photograph.

I
n going
through photographs for this book, I found pictures of many of the men that I
write about: the gambler, the leather man, the uncle who was a Democratic Party
operative. What strikes me is that they were all very ordinary-looking men. You
would never pick them out of a crowd and think they were anything special. And
that's just the point of this book, which is that in the ordinary there is the
extraordinary. Now, whether it is that men were more dynamic in those days, or
that I saw the dynamism in their lives, is for anyone to guess. I don't know.
Are men still like that? There is a movie called
The Naked
City
where it is said, “There are eight million stories in the naked
city. This has been one of them.” I was fascinated by that as a young boy,
because it showed me that every individual person walking the streets had a
story, if only you could find that story. And all of my life I've found this to
be true, that of course every human in their destiny, in their journey through
life, is actually weaving a story. It's just that most of us don't even realize
we are unique or weaving a story. Or is it that the times have made so many of
us homogenous? Have we become just one massive group of individuals in a sort of
socialist hive? Well, whatever the case may be,
Train
Tracks
contains the stories of ordinary men and women, each of whom
was extraordinary.

ONE

Train Tracks

I
attended
grade school in Bronx, New York, in the late 1940s, early 1950s. What I remember
most was my mom coming to school on a Wednesday before the Thanksgiving weekend
and picking us up early in the day, before the other kids were let out, and
taking me and my sister down to Manhattan to Penn Station to board a train to
visit my cousins, my aunt, and my uncle in Easton, Pennsylvania. My father, of
course, couldn't come with us; he had to stay and work. He worked seven days a
week in his store. Thanksgiving vacations with my relatives in Pennsylvania were
perhaps the most American part of my early childhood.

How exciting it was to be getting out of school
early on a Wednesday and seeing all the other jealous faces of the kids left
behind! Mom would take us downtown by bus and by subway, and it was thrilling to
get into Penn Station: the big hissing trains—the size of the train, the engine
in particular—overwhelming me as a little boy. It looked like a hippopotamus, a
living, breathing monster. And then boarding the train: the black men with white
gloves in white clothing who worked as porters. Astounding, isn't it? And then
the train would begin, a long ride to me; it was only two hours or so, but to me
it was a very, very long ride. An hour or so seemed like it took all day. The
train chugged underneath the Hudson River into New Jersey and, believe it or
not, the train stopped on the other side of the river. It stopped to switch
engines. You see, only electric engines were permitted in New York, but in those
days New Jersey still permitted coal-fired steam engines, if you can believe it.
And so the railroad companies switched to coal-fired, steam-driven locomotives
over in New Jersey, and then the entire ride from that point on was bathed in a
dense black smoke that ran behind the train, between the cars, outside the
windows, all the way to Pennsylvania.

Ah, but sitting in that Pullman car, being served
those delicious ham sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread by white-gloved
attendants . . . Can you believe it? Even a poor kid could
experience a sense of dignity in those days. And then when we arrived in
Pennsylvania at the station, when the big monstrous train hissed to a stop and
roared, emitting steam and smoke, the entire platform was engulfed in black
smoke and white steam, and I didn't know if my relatives were there because you
couldn't see anybody in that fog. It was such a dense fog. I was afraid that the
train had gone to the wrong place, to an unknown place, and that none of our
relatives would be there. And my mother would hold me by the hand and pull me
through the fog. And then of course! As the fog lifted, out of the fog came the
big uncle and the smiling aunt and my smiling cousins. Oh my god, was that
happiness.

We would jump in their car and the first thing we
would do was go to a certain restaurant on top of a hill, overlooking the town
of Pittston, where it was alleged their hamburger was actually horse meat. We
didn't learn this until years later, but I must tell you, as a poor kid I didn't
know the difference between horse meat and cow meat. It tasted a little stringy,
to be honest, but maybe that's what makes me the man I am today. In any case,
one memory after another comes back from those Thanksgiving holidays in
Pennsylvania with my cousins. Memories like and unlike those that you, the
reader, no doubt have of your own. Shall I share a few of them with you?

How about learning how to drive a stick shift in
the little Nash Metropolitan that my cousin owned (a tiny little car that looked
like a clown car) and the mysteriousness of shifting? I didn't understand where
the gears were or what they did. And I was amazed and thought that my cousin was
an astronaut as he shifted from first to second to third, pushing his foot down
against the floor. I had no idea what the shift levers were doing. But we'd
drive all around the town. You see, he was about sixteen and allowed to drive at
that time.

Or how about he and I putting on all of the
football gear, the shoulder pads, the knee pads, the helmet, and playing
football in the muddy field across from his house? This was a big football town
in those days; in fact, a game between Easton, Pennsylvania, and I think it was
Pittstown, New Jersey, was the big high school game. And we'd all go and cheer;
it must've been on a Sunday. But before that game, oh, my cousin and I were the
stars. We were the stars among ourselves. I remember running all day, running as
though there was no time, slipping and falling in the mud until we looked like
the mud itself. Coming back to the house, being shooed in through the back door
because we were so dirty, being told to leave our clothing on the back porch—and
it was so cold.

Speaking of the cold, I remember their dog. They
had a beautiful, collie-like dog whose fur always smelled of the cold air. You
know how dogs smell on a cold day, how they retain the cold as they come in? I
loved to touch that dog. We weren't allowed to have a dog in those days because
of the apartment that we had. So to me, it was miraculous to see a family living
in an actual house of two stories with an attic and a basement and a dog.

It was in that little house on Spring Garden Street
that I smelled my first pizza. You say, What the heck is the big deal about
that?
Well,
let me tell you something. I was
upstairs in the attic getting ready for bed and I heard all the people buzzing
downstairs in the kitchen about something. We came down and peeked around the
corner and they were all looking at something in a box, a flat box. It was
called a pizza. I didn't know what it was, but you know what it smelled like?
Vomit. That's what mozzarella cheese first smelled like to me. Who knows if this
perception was accurate or if, in fact, mozzarella cheese was just terrible in
those days. In either case, it was something I could not eat. They sure liked
it, though, that “first pizza.”

I remember my uncle Abe, a sweet, tall man, my
mother's brother. They had left New York City so he could take a job during the
Depression, working as a hand in a brassiere factory in Pennsylvania. You may
laugh at this, but that's what people had to do in those days to survive. He was
a sweet-hearted, lovable, big fellow like a Max Baer–type, always friendly,
always a smile for everyone. And as it turned out, Abe was quite the local
political figure. I had no idea at the time, but as the years progressed, he got
himself deeply involved in local Democratic Party politics.

Abe was an amazing man in many ways, a powerful
personality who functioned in a variety of ways and on multiple levels, as all
of us do. He was an infuriated ward leader, is what he turned out to be. He
certainly symbolized the old-fashioned ward boss, but beneath that gruff
exterior was my sweet uncle. He was amazingly devoted to his family and friends.
It was said that he never said no to anyone asking him for a favor. You see, he
had been steeled in adversity, not in diversity. He was born in Montreal,
Canada, in 1911 and raised in New York City in great hardship. As I said, he
settled in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he started as a factory hand and moved up
to being factory foreman, and nevertheless still struggled. As time went on he
went into the political sphere and his life greatly improved. This is a part of
the obituary that was written in the local newspaper:

Abe Cohen, dead at 71:
Abe Cohen, a familiar figure in his houndstooth hat, who politicians say
delivered votes as regularly as the post office does mail, died Saturday.
Mr. Cohen, age 71, was pronounced dead on arrival at Easton Hospital. He
died of natural causes. He celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with his
wife on June 23rd. He made a name for himself in the local political scene.
For more than 30 years he was a Democratic Committeeman in Easton's 8th
Ward, Western District, where he lived. He also headed campaigns for various
state senators several times, and also for the mayor. He was a member of the
local Zoning Board and was involved in several zoning controversies in the
past few years. Quote: “He was so outspoken. He told you the truth,” said
one of the managers of the city parking garage who waged successful
campaigns for mayor in '71 and '75. “Abie always told you where you stood.”
The ex-mayor said Mr. Cohen liked to call himself “the old-time politician.”
His associates said he was a good one. On Election Day he was not interested
in money. He was interested in bringing out the votes, said people who had
worked with him.

Anyway, it's interesting to see that he was an
old-time politician and, by what I can read in this obituary, deeply involved in
tussles—for example, he seemed at one time to have backed the only Republican in
a Democratic factory town, and for that he was thrown off a local zoning board
for over two years. In fact, he was removed from his zoning board seat in 1977
and reappointed to the board only two years later. And then he got even with the
man who got him thrown off the zoning board. I had no idea he was this
political, but I can see there must be some political blood running through the
family somewhere. He was the only one I knew who actually did any politics. It
says elsewhere in this obituary, “If a constituent wanted something in Abe's
ward, he went to Abe. Abe would go to no end to help these people. Time has
changed, bringing a new breed of politician that wasn't so quick to hand out
patronage jobs. It became just as easy to harvest votes through the media. The
Abe Cohens lost clout but there was a time when many politicians wouldn't
whisper such a thing . . . He retired at the end of his
career as a special investigator for the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue
Bureau of Cigarette and Beverage Taxes. He was named to the post by the
administration of the Democrat Governor after he led the Governor's successful
campaign in that town. From 1931 to 1952 he was a mere cutter in an underwear
factory. From '52 to '71 he was in another factory job, a pocketbook
factory.”

I had no idea that I had such a political uncle.
But I can say to you, this whole book,
Train Tracks
,
is about the train tracks that run from my childhood right through my
quasi-political career of today. Although I am not involved in politics in any
direct manner—I never have and never will run for office—I am certainly anything
but apolitical.

Nevertheless, other memories include his wife, my
aunt, and her famous meringue pie, something I have never seen in New York City.
I didn't eat it because I don't like sugary things, but it was certainly
beautiful to look at it and truly a part of an American dream that I had never
seen in a small tenement apartment in New York. The idea of baking a pie or
baking a cake was not something that we got in my beautiful home, where my
mother cooked but didn't bake. Other memories to follow in
Train Tracks
.

Living in a crowded apartment as we did, it was a
real treat to run around the two-story house in Pennsylvania. I loved the attic,
I loved sleeping in the attic—there was something mysterious and secretive about
it. I especially loved their basement. It was not one of those “finished”
basements. It was an open basement that was always cold and damp, as basements
are. But they had built shelves in the basement. And on these shelves were
canned goods. It looked to me like a grocery store itself: the long rows of
Campbell's soups, the long rows of spaghetti, long rows of canned sauces and
other packaged foods. To us it was a cornucopia. Most interesting to me as a kid
was a well-oiled Japanese rifle that my cousin's uncle from the other side of
his family had brought home as a souvenir from World War II. Apparently he had
served in Japan and brought home a Japanese rifle, which I played with, opening
and closing the bolt and pulling the trigger as often as I could. I loved the
sound of the bolt. I loved the sound as I pulled the trigger. I loved the smell
of the grease that was in the gun to preserve it. I loved the feel of the wood
stock. I loved the blue of the barrel. I guess I've always loved guns.

Ever since those times, I've been infatuated by
trains. Although I don't ride the rails any longer, I remember up until the late
1970s and early '80s out here in California I would as often as possible, which
was probably only three or four times a year, escape from all of my
responsibilities and worries and board an Amtrak train over in the East Bay and
ride it up to Lake Tahoe, getting off at Truckee, California. It was just as
magical in those days as it was back in my childhood days—in this case, in some
ways more dramatic because I understood the beauty of the rails. I remember
especially the motion of the train, standing between the cars, which you were
allowed to do at that time, inhaling the air, watching the countryside zip by.
Perhaps most beautiful was when we entered the mountains of the High Sierra, the
deep granite mountains, where the railroad tunnels were blasted out a century
before. Those were simply amazing, coming out of the tunnel into the snowcapped
mountains of the High Sierra Nevada, ending up at Truckee, California, an old
mountain railroad town that, to this day, retains its rustic charm.