My father’s recollections of his early childhood through high school. As he mentioned, various of us children had asked him to fill out books designed for this purpose, but this lengthy description is much more interesting to me so I’m glad he chose to do it this way. It ends a bit abruptly. He clearly had intended to continue. Its too bad that didn’t happen but I’m happy he wrote as much as he did. — Bart
Barry Kessler recounts his early years to Cody, his dog
Lest anyone thinks that my master has developed a multiple personality syndrome of some sort, let me assure you he has not. We golden retrievers are especially bright beings who are able to understand feelings and to interpret actions in ways mere humans cannot. This is the primary reason I have chosen to record this combination of personal history, social commentary on events of the day, ethical will, and anything else that comes to his mind.
Two of you children started all this by each giving him a book in which to fill out information on personal history and the like. I saw him start each and realized at once that he would never finish either. I also observed that he wanted to write an ethical will, a la his old friend, Harold Bressler, who left one for his family. As you know, he has a lot to say on many subjects, unhindered by lack of information or knowledge in some cases.
I’ll do the best I can to record all this stuff in styles akin to diary entries, the sayings of Chairman Mao, and Joyce’s stream of consciousness. I’ll highlight the ethical will items in a color other than black, and perhaps his “lessons learned from specific events in his life” in a third color. If the content is not colorful, at least the literal words may be. Do not construe any of this to be a part of his will. He does have one of those, not that he has much of physical substance to leave anyone.
I should tell you also that he contemplated at one time recording all this on tape. If he had, you would really have had a mess to deal with. At least if I have any time for second thoughts, there will be a simple way to go back and edit what has been done. But it is still doubtful that all this will follow some plan that everyone will agree makes sense. He has told me that he will go where his thoughts take him, whenever they take him , and there is no promise of coherency, or, for that matter, any sense.
It is March 19, the year of their lord, 1999. He is somewhere on the road between life and death. I mention this because he says he began life about 4:15 PM on July 17, 1933, arriving just in time for dinner. There are those who would say it began about nine months earlier, at conception. As a lawyer, he thinks that, at least for most purposes, it is more practical to consider the beginning of life at birth. He does concede, however, that when you feel babies kicking while still inside their mothers (as he did with each of you children) it is hard to make that argument convincingly.
As for the death part, that’s not always so easy to peg either. With us dogs you can do things that you can’t do with humans. You may think that’s okay, but as an abused dog to begin with, I’m not so sure of it. Anyway, since that doctor in Philadelphia, Brady, told him that his life expectancy without prostate cancer was 18.4 years from spring of 1994, he has had some troubles contemplating the end of his life. That was something he never gave a thought to before that comment. He says the first reaction was “we’re playing in the fourth quarter of the game of life,” but later he decided that he was a baseball player, and as long as the home team still had an at bat left, the game could go on forever. With rising PSA counts and little therapy that promises real help, he is thinking the 16.4 expectancy for people who have had surgery and radiation may be optimistic too. You will have the opportunity to see just how accurate these expectancies turn out to be.
Well, back to July 17, 1933 in Philadelphia, PA where he was born to Gertrude Baron Kessler and Albert Kessler. He was their second son. The first died immediately at birth. He thinks the first was named David and his parents had to go through the trauma of a funeral and bury him in a plot reserved for stillborn children. As you know, he is an only child. You can see where the name came from, his mother’s maiden name. His father agreed to it on condition he be called “Barry” because he liked a popular bandleader of the day named Barry Gray.
He spent the first 10 weeks of his life in a house in Ambler, PA. His father worked as a pharmacist for his uncle (his mother’s brother) Sam Baron. You kids never met him, of course, but his daughter Ruth Baron Simon was Audrey’s godmother. There are two other children, both living in California now, Ellis Baron, married to Honey (yes, that is her given name) and Mildred Baron Herwood (known as “Little Mildred” in the family to distinguish her from Aunt Mildred who was Barry’s mother’s sister.
Aunt Mildred married very late in life to Joseph Chernoff. She worked for many years as a clerk in Sam Baron’s drug store in Ambler. The store was next to the movie theater on the main street and still existed as of about ten years ago under the name Ambler Drug Company. Two asides here: Aunt Mildred was always referred to as the youngest of the Baron Girls because she was the last to be married. In fact, she was the second youngest, as Barry’s mother was the youngest. This was a common practice in old world families.
Albert Kessler, for whom Bart is named, had a falling out with Sam Baron over, what else, money, and somewhere, no one knows for sure, got hold of $600 and some drug company credit in 1933 and opened Kessler’s Cut Rate Drug Store at 215 High Street in Pottstown. It was in the middle of the block and tended not to be noticed as people walked by so they painted it a very bright (and very ugly) yellow color. There were no neon, glowing paints in those days, but this was a close as one could come to attract attention. Nana said in later life that she thought the $600 came from the Mafioso in South Philadelphia where Albert was raised. I’m told Bart has his high school yearbook which, among other things mentions his fighting abilities.
This may be a good time to point out Barry’s background on his father’s side. Hyman Kessler came from Odessa in southern Russia. It is unlikely that the original family name was Kessler, a German name. It was common in those times and places for Jewish families to change their names or to pass their children (probably for a fee) to a local family for name purposes in order to avoid being drafted into the Czar’s army, or worse, being eliminated in a pogrom. That is not to say the children were sold, only that most likely for a fee a non-Jewish family would give the child a Christian surname for the purposes I just mentioned. About 10-12 years ago, at a seminar he was conducting, Barry met a jeweler named Kessler from Philadelphia who also came from Odessa, likely under the same circumstances. He is no relative.
Barry’s grandmother on his father’s side was named Ida . Her maiden name is lost in his mind (along with a lot of other stuff, I believe). She had two siblings, Mary and Sophie. There was very little contact with the Kessler family, except for funerals, when Barry was a child. It is hard to know the real reasons why. Nana would say that they did not approve of her because she had been married (it was annulled) before she met Albert in pharmacy school at Temple. But she also considered the Kessler clan to be a pretty crude, uneducated bunch, with the exception of Albert. Barry’s recollection is very vague (have you noticed that about him too?).
Every Monday before Barry was in school, his father took him along to Philadelphia Wholesale Drug Co. and Krug Drug Company to buy merchandise to restock the store for the week. Before they came home, they would stop at the Kessler tailor shop at 5th and Queen Streets in South Philadelphia to see his grandparents. No matter when they stopped, his grandfather had a quarter he would slip him. His grandmother would always have a plate of sour cream. He found out later that his father was supplementing his grandparents income. They lived behind the tailor shop and never really earned a living.
He recalls no gift(s) of any kind from those grandparents other than that regular quarter from his grandfather. The sour cream is significant because Albert was raised on dairy products in great profusion.
Today humans recognize that the overdose of cholesterol in all that dairy contributes to heart disease, and Albert died before his 48th birthday of serious coronary artery disease. Surgeons said he “had the arteries of a 90 year old man.” More of this subject later.
Hyman died at age 63 of a sudden, massive heart attack. He was ironing with the old fashioned solid iron (heated externally) when he keeled over. ..alive one second, dead the next instant. Barry says that is the way he wants to go. Frankly, I don’t think he wants to go at all, whatever the way. Dr. Brady told him last summer that “you won’t die of cancer, but I’ll tell you what you will die of if you don’t lose 65 pounds.” Even a bulldog could figure that one out from the history . Ida, on the other hand, lived in to her nineties. Because of the bad history between Nana and the paternal grandparents, Barry saw almost nothing of the Kessler clan after 1943 when Hyman died and after 1954 when his father died.
He’ll hold out on biscuits for me if I neglect to mention that Albert had one sister, Dorothy. She was married to a man named Boodis, who died at a young age. They had one son, Leo Boodis, Barry’s red-headed cousin. Dorothy later married a very nice guy named Morris Oberfield, who worked for a radio station in the Philadelphia area. Either that, or he was a shoe salesman on the road, or both. There goes Barry’s great memory again. Morris had a daughter, Sandy, by a previous marriage. From a source he can’t remember, Barry believes Leo passed away a few years ago, but he can’t confirm it. What has become of Aunt Dorothy he doesn’t know either. Hyman and Ida, he believes, are buried in Har Yehuda cemetery, off Route #1 southwest of Philadelphia…the same place Nana’s sister Lillian is buried.
There are no known pictures of any of the Kessler grandparents, aunts, cousins, etc.. Dorothy looked like the female version of Albert as far as her facial features were concerned. Leo looked like his mother, like a Kessler, that is.
Let’s get over to the Baron side of the ancestors. Barry’s grandmother was Esther Baron, who came to this country from Warsaw on a boat by herself when she was 16 years old. Her maiden name was Olishefsky. The spelling here is the best a four year old golden can do. That’s what it sounds like to me when Barry says it. Allegedly, the brass candlesticks that Nana used on some holiday occasions were the only things of value that came with her. However, an antique dealer in the Lancaster area told Barry and Susan that they were made at another time and place. No one knows for sure, and I suppose the traditional version makes for better family history.
Where or when she met Alex Baron no one ever said. He was a cigar maker who died at age 42. One cousin of Nana, Ray Baron, said it was heart disease. Nana implied it was asthma or some related disease. About all that is certain is that he was a person interested in things of art and culture and education, with great intellectual curiosity. He died when Nana was only about nine years old, but she remembered him with great affection. She may have “remembered” more than actually occurred, but her own creativity and intellectual curiosity can easily be traced to her father.
Nana was the youngest of either seven or eight Baron Children, only five of whom survived birth. The survivors were the oldest, Samuel who went to pharmacy school and was in business before Nana was born. Incidentally, he married a girl named Hattie, who was a reported beauty as a young girl. When Barry knew her, she was a very plump, sort of whiny , very short matron. The next oldest survivor was Rose Baron Rudnitsky. When Barry first knew her, she was married to Sam Rudnitsy who was nearly blind, but who bought and sold retail businesses and invested in real estate in West Philadelphia in the area of 65th and Woodland Avenues where they lived. Sam was apparently married once before marrying Rose. He had a daughter Ruth who was married to someone named Taxin in the wholesale food business in Philadelphia. Together Sam and Rose had one son, Alexander, who was born about a year and a half before Barry. Perhaps more about Alexander later. Apparently, Barry has no use whatsoever for “big Al Rudy” or the horse he rode in on. As for me, I can take horses or leave them in general. Barry has weird dreams about horses now and then. Then, he has weird dreams regularly…no foolin’.
After Rose we think came Mildred, or perhaps Lillian. It’s hard to tell exactly considering all that business about Mildred being the youngest when clearly she was not. Lillian and Nana had great jealousy and considerable enmity between them, although Nana not only never openly expressed anger or that enmity to Lillian in front of Barry. She ended up spending a lot of time, money and effort trying to help Lillian through many years of serious mental illness and drastic treatment for it.
When Barry first remembers Lillian she was married to Jacob J. Hoffman, Uncle Jack, and she lived in an apartment on the same floor (the third?) in Roselyn Hall which is just off Ogontz Avenue at Roselyn Street in North Philadelphia. Lillian took Barry to see the historic sights in Philadelphia when he was pre-school age. The Betsy Ross house and Independence Hall, when the Liberty Bell was there, are two places he can still remember visiting with her. Uncle Jack was big on taking him to Horn and Hardart’s Automat on North Broad Street for cherry pie. Apparently all of you missed one of the great institutions, the Automat, which had closed everywhere long before you were born. You had to change your money into nickels at a cashier desk and then each item, be it a sandwich, salad, or the famed cherry pie pieces were on plates behind a separate glass window for each piece which could be opened by putting the required number of nickels into the slot. A piece of that famous pie might have been only 3 nickels, certainly no more than five. An automat was clearly a form of heaven for a child under school age. (And you think we dogs are easily amused)
There is lots to be said about Lillian and a bit more about Jack. It’s out of sequence, but who’s keeping track of that? Lillian was apparently a real beauty in her youth. There are some pictures that bear out that fact. She was surrounded by admirers a great deal of the time. She was taller than Nana, slim, and though she had the Baron nose (which happily skipped the future generations) was really striking for those days and times. Nana was always short and overweight, but was clearly much brighter , wittier, and better adjusted mentally, but then everyone was better adjusted mentally than Lillian. Grandmother Baron always was protective of Lillian. Her expression to cover this situation was: “If you have five fingers, and one of them is sore, you make special efforts to protect the sore finger.” Nana saw it more as favoring the pretty sister, hence the rivalry, jealousy, and problems.
How, with all the suitors, Lillian ended up with Jack remains a family secret or mystery which is in the collective graves of all who have gone before. Jack, in today’s vernacular, would be labeled a “gofer.” professionally. He said he was in real estate. Barry’s parents said he was a messenger boy in a real estate firm. Jewish people in general have difficulty acknowledging family members as dim as Jack. He was not in any way retarded. He was just “slow.” He and Lillian had no children. One would guess from all that happened in later life that the reason for no children was the cause of Lillian’s mental problems. But as to which of them (or maybe both of them) was the source of that problem, no one ever said, and maybe no one ever knew for sure.
When Barry first knew Lillian , she was very heavy, grossly fat, with the most enormously fat upper arms you’ve ever seen. Nana, by comparison, had “small” upper arms. Jack was always bugging her about the weight, but he was also bringing home candy for her in great quantities. Jack died when Barry was about ten or eleven. He can’t remember the exact time of that event either. Lillian was then living alone in the same apartment. Barry’s parents were contributing to her support too, and Mildred, who lived with her mother also spent time and money looking after Lillian. During the years after Jack’s death, Lillian underwent several stretches in mental hospitals, including Byberry in Philadelphia. She had at least one, and maybe multiple, frontal lobotomies. Barry more or less inherited a little of the responsibility for Lillian’s care after Nana could no longer handle it alone. Much to Nana’s credit, despite her long history of ill feeling toward Lillian, when the really dirty work (I mean cleaning up after a dog mess was nothing compared to cleaning up after a Lillian mess) had to be done, Nana was there for Lillian.
Aunt Mildred was another story. She commuted to Ambler from North Philadelphia every day to work in her brother Sam’s drug store. This arrangement went on for years and years. Then, when Barry was in his middle teens, she met Joseph Chernoff, a widower who owned what was described as a “department store” on south Ninth Street in the middle of Philadelphia’s Italian Street Market. Joe Chernoff had three sons, all grown men, when he met Mildred. The family was thrilled, for good reason. Barry tells one story about Joe when he first met him at his Grandmother Baron’s apartment. They were sitting on the couch and Joe was giving a little of his own history. He told of serving in the trenches in World War I, in France. At one point he got a leave to go to Paris. He was a very young man, far from home for the first time in his life, and undoubtedly scared out of his wits by trench warfare. He was so happy to be on the road to Paris and away from the guns that he described travel on the road as “walking on a sea of breasts” all the way to Paris. For a kid in his early teens, meeting an older man for the first time, who spoke with a very heavy accent, and who was marrying his aunt the expression made a lasting impression. (Considering how much he does not remember, this obviously did make a deep impression for all these years.)
Let’s digress here about Joe Chernoff, South Ninth street, the Italian Market, Barry’s various experiences there, and the rest of the history about Aunt Mildred, and the epilogue, so to speak, about contact with Aaron Chernoff in Florida that came through Bernice Bressler in Florida retirement. Joe was a sort of legend on the street. He lived above the store which had broken through at least two buildings at 906 S. Ninth, a few doors north of Carpenter street. He sold clothing of all sorts for men, women, and children, with a “specialty” if you will of children’s christening dresses. He was open seven days a week, and on Sundays, people came from as far away as the Coal Region, Pottsville, Shamokin, and the like, in great numbers. His was the largest selection of these dresses, at least in Pennsylvania. The store was an old fashioned, crowded place, with small aisles, wooden floors, and “stuff” everywhere. Joe had a great reputation in a very tight-knit community that looks today pretty much the way it did 75 years ago. It is still predominantly an Italian neighborhood. There are probably less Jews living there, however
Joe had three sons, the oldest of whom was Ted, then Ed, and the youngest was Aaron, who was still unmarried when Barry first met him. The two older boys were working in the store. Aaron was in school, active in the Army reserves, and hated the store from the get-go. It was fascinating to visit that section of South Philadelphia. There was a chicken store across the street from Chernoff’s Department Store where Barry would watch them slaughter the chickens(on occasion). The sight of blood didn’t appeal to him much then either. As you’ll see in a while, he didn’t much care to watch Mr. Stetler, the butcher whose slaughter house was behind his house at Diamond and Charlotte Streets, about a block and a half from where Barry lived as a little boy…but I’m getting out of sequence here.
During his teen years, Barry would visit at Chernoff’s on a regular basis. His father liked Joe very much, and so did he. Mildred was the aunt he knew best and liked best as a result. Barry was her favorite nephew, likely for the same reasons. When Barry was in law school at the University of Pennsylvania in his first year, 1955-56, he would stay at Chernoff’s one, sometimes two times a week to save the driving time commuting back to Pottstown. It was during the first year, on one of those nights, that he was having dinner with his Aunt Mildred and his Aunt Lillian and one of the “famous statements” of the family was made, which he has never forgotten. He was only about two months into law school, where for the first time in his life he was struggling to be sure he got passing grades (rather than worrying about whether he would get an A or a B), when the two aunts asked: “Barry, why didn’t you go to medical school? Doctors are respected in the community.” Today he claims that his handwriting is so bad because his mother also wanted him to be a doctor and he had to learn to write so that no one could read a prescription. The three truths are that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, he disliked all the science courses he ever had (and he only had chemistry, no biology, no physics), and Nana always subtly pushed for law rather than medicine anyway. He guesses that if she had had the opportunity, she would have wanted a legal education herself. (She hated pharmacy from the start. It was a two year college program at Temple in those days, and it was lucky that the family could afford that much higher education. There was also a pharmacist in the family, Sam Baron, who could provide a job later on to influence the choice.)
Joe Chernoff had surgery for a bad stomach ulcer. About two thirds of his stomach was removed. After recovery, he retired, handed the business over to the boys, and he and Mildred moved to Hollywood, Florida. After Joe died, Mildred continued to live in their small house there. Aunt Rose had also moved to Florida, in the same area as Mildred. Some years later (I’ll describe the details later too) Barry drove Nana to Florida from California where she lived with Mildred for a time. Two things worth noting here, both of a monetary nature: When Barry left Florida after dropping off Nana, Mildred gave him $2,000 with which to buy a car to use when he returned to Pennsylvania. She also, some months later, gave Nana $30,000 to buy an apartment of her own in the same building where Rose lived.
Having done these two very generous things, she then “went off the deep end” mentally and became very bitter toward Nana. She accused her of breaking and entering her house by climbing in the bathroom window from a ladder on the outside. Barry mentions this because the picture all of you can conjure of Nana, first climbing a ladder, and then breaking and crawling in a bathroom window, ought to give you a good laugh (which you no doubt could use about now). To finish this original thought, Mildred then proceeded to cut Barry off completely, as well as Nana, and turned to Al Rudy as her savior, and sole heir. As he did with his own mother, he took her for all she had. Maybe more later on this one.
(Lest you think that because of my superior golden retriever intelligence I can knock off this stuff in a hour or two, it is now the morning of March 30, 1999. I could go much faster, but this human takes more breaks than he is entitled to)
He says it is time now to get to some of the points that your books have requested. Let’s begin with his birth (according to Nana, who , after all, must be the final authority.) Her “confinement” as they called the pregnant time in those days was not easy. Having lost the first child, she spent a great deal of time in bed, off her feet, during those nine months. When Barry was finally born, if you summarize all the points about her son’s birth, it would go like this: “When he emerged into the world, with a full head of hair, all his first teeth, perfectly aligned, he jumped down from the delivery table, said “thank you” to the doctor, asked where the bathroom was located, and when told it was across the street, walked to the traffic signal, waited for the green light, went to the bathroom (remembering to raise and lower the seat, of course,) and came back to Nana to lie quietly at her side.” There are more details, but he might sound a bit more precocious than you would believe, so I will leave it at that.
That day, as I think I have said earlier, was July 17, 1933. He was taken home to Ambler, PA where he spent the first ten weeks of his life being “ a perfect baby.” The house in Ambler is gone from memory. He then moved to Pottstown where his father had opened a drug store. The family lived at 909 North Charlotte St. in the right side of a double house that is still there today. A family named Nynish (spelling?) lived next door. They eventually had two daughters, Deena and Carol, and a son who also had a name. Mr. Nynish worked at Bethlehem Steel, which at the time was the town’s biggest and best known employer. As an aside here, this plant was the company’s largest fabricating plant, and was the spot where fabrication was done for such projects as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Verazanno Narrows Bridge in New York, and many more. It has been gone from Pottstown since the early 1970’s.
There were playmates for him from Lee Avenue and on Charlotte Street just past Prospect, toward town. They included : Billy Sell, Karl Koppel, Joe James, John Hoffman, Ronald Dotterer, and Al O’Neill. This was the edge of town in those days. In fact, Prospect Street was still the Borough Line when they first mover to town. Incidentally, Pottstown didn’t become a “town” till Barry was an adult. Like most communities in PA it was called a Borough, and the highest elected official was the Burgess.
As you can probably guess, I am not his first dog. That was a mix, mostly a chow, named Toya. That poor fellow was hit by a car on Charlotte St. in front of the house by a man named “Coach” Corbett who lived at High and Adams Street. He allegedly was so upset that he backed his car up two blocks. I don’t know what that did for poor Toya, but so the story goes. As part of passing history, Charlotte Street is still PA Route #663, but in those early days it was known locally as the Layfield Cement, since it was the first cement highway in the area. God only knows where Layfield was, if it ever was, or if it was the name of the engineer who designed, or whatever. We’ll leave that for any really serious history buffs to discover.
The next dog was named Toya also. (Those people certainly didn’t have any imagination for dogs’ names, did they?) She was less chow in appearance, but had the same general color cast. After about six years or so she met a similar fate as the original. Charlotte Street was not good to Kessler dogs.
In the book there is a question about the first bedroom he had. At first he couldn’t remember it at all, but then he remembered when he had the measles and was quarantined in the house and had to stay in the bedroom without any lights being on. That “bed” was still a crib with sides up. The room, he thinks, had a bay window opposite the door, but that’s all he can recall. They don’t quarantine for measles any more, but they did then.
As to favorite toys at that very early age, they included marbles, which he still has today, and a swing set out back next to the garage. One day he apparently thought he could fly and leaped off the top of the set and sprained an ankle. Some of us think he did permanent head damage at that time, but we can’t prove it. He learned how to ride a two wheeler in the cinder alley behind the garage that ran into Prospect Street. There were no training wheels, but after his dad helped him a few times, and his mother washed cinders out of his knees a couple of times he was riding it pretty well. It was a Schwinn bicycle, that brand being about as important as Nike would be today in sneakers.
It was an incident involving that bike that taught him that “crime does not pay,” specifically that stealing is not a good thing to do. He got real lucky on that one because he wasn’t the one who did the stealing, but the lesson was not lost on him because it involved that special bicycle of his. Al O’Neill from down the street swiped it from Barry one afternoon and took what would be described as a “joy ride” with it on Ringing Rocks Hill-not the Charlotte Street one, but the back one, Keim Street. It was an oiled road in those days, not really macadam, and there was loose gravel on the surface. Al O’Neill came down that hill at a pretty good clip, the wheels slipped on the gravel, and he ended up in the hospital for nearly a week in pretty bad shape. He carries facial scars of that incident to this day (assuming he is still alive). Barry remembers visiting him in the hospital and seeing how badly he was banged up. That special bike survived in better shape than Al did, scratched and dented some, but still in perfect working order. Barry, for some reason, was not angry about the theft. He was more scared that his father or mother was going to think he just left it some place, and that he would catch you know what over it. As it turned out, Al suffered all the problems, and the two of them remained playmates until their early teens.
His favorite games, when there were other people around, were hide and seek and playing catch. There were lots of times when there was no one else around. In fact, when he was only six, his parents left the doctor’s telephone number by the phone and would go out on a Saturday or Sunday evening and leave him alone without a sitter. Times were very much different in those day. The telephone numbers were only four numbers long (his home phone was 1413, and the store was 1647) and an operator asked “Number, please” when you picked up the phone. Just like Myrtle on the old radio show Fibber McGee and Molly, the operators know the voices of many people, and since the Kesslers had a business in town, Barry’s voice was known too. Besides the telephone simplicity, there weren’t perverts of all stripes roving about and crime at home was virtually unheard of. In addition to all that, the doctors made house calls, and if Barry had ever needed Dr. Stapp, he would have been there in less than ten minutes.
One of his favorite past-times when he was alone in the house was to have “marble races” in the wooden open space between the living room rug and the staircase. During that time he gave names to the marbles, e.g. “Champ” (who obviously won a lot of the races), “Champ’s cousin” who looked a lot like “Champ”, “Prophet” (who knows why on that one) and dozens more. Later on, when they moved to Maple Manor, he would shoot marbles on the hallway rug in a game resembling Bocce, trying to hit one or both of two steel balls about the size of pin ball machine malls. If you see those marble today with some nicks in them, it is because of the contact with the steel balls.
The first present he remembers receiving was a sled “left by Santa Claus” one Christmas Eve when he was only three or four. There was no Christmas tree, and certainly no celebration of Christmas, but the pressure of everyone else in the neighborhood celebrating with gifts for their kids must have played on his parents, and gifts were given at Christmas, and not Hanukah. Barry’s dad was not an “observant Jew” when it came to holidays, but he, like Nana, was very conscious of being Jewish, and never made any effort of any kind to present himself as anything but. Nana was very active in Jewish, and non-Jewish, affairs in Pottstown. Those are worth mentioning at this point.
She was a founder of the Jewish Women’s League in Pottstown. When they first came to Pottstown , the synagogue was mostly orthodox. Men and women sat separately. The women were not equal in almost all respects. To found such a local branch of the League was a pioneering step. Many years later, after she had raised over $250,000 in pledges to furnish the new synagogue on North Keim Street, at an awards banquet, it was the founding of the League role, without any mention of the fund-raising, for which she received a plaque. While greatly deserved, the snub hurt her very much.
At the same time she was working for the Jewish community, Nana was elected to the local board of the YWCA. The national board was so upset at the idea of a Jewish woman being on the board of a Young Christian organization, that they gave the local board an ultimatum: “Get rid of her, or lose your national affiliation.” To the credit of the local people, Nana was retained, and the National Board did throw them out. This is the same woman who many years later, in the 60’s, organized Christmas carolers in downtown Pottstown as part of the Downtown Pottstown Business Association’s holidays promotion. For this she received national publicity. She did it for three or four years.
Another aside here (will this guy ever get his act together?), Nana was a pioneer in several other business respects for the 1930’s. She hated pharmacy school, which was a two year program at Temple, but it was the only college education she could get in her family situation. When they moved to Pottstown, the drug store had a soda fountain as a prominent feature. She ended up making food for lunches and the like, not what she considered getting a college education was about. After six months, in 1933 or early 1934, at the height of the Depression, she threw out the fountain and started selling cosmetics and costume jewelry in that space. For those days, this was a shocking exception for a drug store. When she started with cosmetics, she also started having “perfume parties” at the house on Charlotte Street. This was long before Tupperware parties were heard of. Barry can only barely remember seeing people at the house some evenings, but they were a regular occurrence.
She also did two other projects that started primarily to promote the store but which were activities in which she had great personal interests. She did book reviews for all sorts of organizations all over town. She and Barry’s dad were both avid readers. She donated her time as fund-raising programs for these groups. She also put on several plays in the community. One of them he believes was Watch On The Rhine. For years there was a sound effects record around the house from that performance in which you hear Hitler’s speeches as recorded live at the time. It was a 78 RPM large record. It may still be among his records. (He may be the only one left on the planet who still has a 78 RPM player on which you could hear it.)
Back to the book and the question about remembering the first gift he gave anyone. He went with his Aunt Lillian to Wannamaker’s Department Store in center city Philadelphia and bought his mother a blown glass, miniature candelabra. It was extremely ornate, only about three inches wide and high, and as he remembers it today, really pretty awful looking. It cost about two dollars which was a fair amount at that time and led him to believe it was something special. Nana must have hated it, but because her son gave it to her, she kept it in a prominent, well-displayed place for years.
Barry went to the first grade at the Lincoln School at Eighth and York streets. It was a brand new building that year which served the west side of Charlotte Street from north of Beech to the Borough Line. There was bussing in those days too. Kids from Stowe were bussed to Lincoln every day. They included Sam Green who went on to be an All-East linebacker at Penn State in 1955, after being an All-State fullback and linebacker at Pottstown High. He was the only person bigger than Barry at the Lincoln school. He remembers that because in the fifth grade Sam thought Barry was picking on Dick Firing unjustly and gave him a belt to the mid-section that knocked the wind out of him. It’s the only time that ever happened, but he remembers it to this day with the same dread he had at the time that this was the end of life.
There were teachers there Barry remembers to this day. There is at least one who says she was there, but Barry claims she was not. His first grade teacher, according to him was Miss Barton. Marion Keiser Whitman, who worked at Kesslers for a number of years, says she was his first grade teacher. His second grade teacher was Miss Barkley. In the third grade, he had the principal, Miss Longacre. This was the grade in which he learned it does not pay to cheat in class. He sat behind some very little (literally) girl name Janet Something or Other. In a math test, he looked over her shoulder and saw that she had a different answer for how much 4 times 3 was, and changed his answer from whatever to her incorrect one. Miss Longacre knew immediately what had gone on. From that day on he had been making his own mistakes exclusively. The principal’s job included making copies of materials for other grades, which various students in her class would deliver for her. He remembers particularly being just amazed at reading the sheets about “adverbs” and “adjectives.” They were almost as strange words as “host” and “download” and boot up.” When he got the fourth and fifth grades and actually studied these things, he learned another great truth. All the unknown , new categories that are constantly coming up in life, are, generally speaking, no harder to understand, if not to master, than adjectives and adverbs. Remember, he’s the one who taught me how to use the computer for this project. Of course, I’m a young, not an old dog, and can learn new tricks.
The fifth grade teacher was Miss Land. She looked terribly mean, but in fact was an excellent teacher who instilled in him a strong inclination to learn history. Considering how much he has liked the subject in general, and how conscious he has been of history as a teacher, it is amazing how little he seems to learn from his own. An awful lot of the same mistakes keep occurring in his life, even though he actively is talking about what happened in the past as if he understands it. The great lesson on this point is illustrated by the story of fixturing a store at 260 High Street and opening day discovering there were no mirrors in the ladies coat department. A few years later, while doing the store in the North End Shopping Center, he constantly mentioned that mistake from the past, but managed to get to opening day there also without any mirrors in the ladies coat area. (This guy should be more understanding of the difficulty I have in remembering what “heel” means.)
Barry left the Lincoln School after the fifth grade and went to the Wyndcroft (private) school at the end of Rosedale Drive for the sixth and seventh grades. At that time, it was an “interesting” school in that it consisted of one permanent building (made of bricks and mortar) and, if he remembers correctly, four “out-buildings” which were mostly like chicken coops with one wall more or less windows and a door. Classes were very small, five to seven people mostly. Mrs. Steele was the principal and the math teacher. Miss Mellon taught music and art. You know she didn’t have much influence on his singing voice. Miss Obie came to school every day from Phoenixville by train and public bus from the Reading RR Station on High St. That building was empty for years after the trains were eliminated. Today it is a community bank. The English and other languages teacher was Mrs. Cowperthwaite, the wife of a Hill School math teacher and varsity soccer coach. Her younger son was a classmate of Barry’s at Wyndcroft and a classmate and teammate of his at the Hill on the soccer and baseball teams.
This school was not like the Lincoln School either in class size, facilities (there was only one bathroom in the main building), and certainly not similar in student body. Classmates included Ira Gruber, Diane Whitely, Bill Cowperthwaite, Clymer Brooke, and Virginia Feroe (there is one of Barry’s classic stories involving Ginny Feroe coming during his sophomore year at Princeton) Nancy Ash and Dick Sweeney. Schoolmates included a little blond girl with braces and one wandering eye by the name of Kitten Vaughan. Obviously, much more about her later. She had a classmate, Bonnie Ash, a most comely blond with braids who may have qualified as Barry’s first “secret” love. It certainly was a secret to Bonnie who went on only one date with Barry years later (a hayride) but was the only female who attended his final bachelor party the night before he was married. No, he says she did not appear scantily clad from a cake or from anywhere else that evening (scantily clad, that is).
Barry studied Latin, French, English, math, history, music and art at Wyndcroft. His achievements included winning a poetry recitation contest by reciting Abhou Ben Adam, two consecutive years victory in the field day baseball long distance throw, and a “stunning” upset victory in the three legged race with Ira Gruber. Today Ira is about 6’2”, but in seventh grade they were about the same size and in perfect tune for such an event. He learned a thing or two about sports there also. Boys and girls played most everything together. After all, the school was very small. In touch football there was a tomboy named Anna Mae Gallo against whose face Barry broke his thumb trying to “smear” her out of his way on a touchdown run. (Yes, there was a time he actually ran some place, though no longer in the memory of any living person) He also committed what he remembers as the first of a few “atrocities” in sports of which he has never been proud. In a fit of anger in field hockey (it was not just for girls) he swatted Sam Barkley’s leg with the hockey stick. In and of itself, there could have been worse things, except that Sam had one withered leg (probably from polio) and Barry hit him pretty hard on the good one-not a good thing at all.
This may be the time to insert a series of incidents at both Lincoln and Wyndcroft that come under the broad heading of anti- Semitism and his reaction to it. At Lincoln there were two people who consistently taunted him with such remarks. Remember, this was at the beginning and during most of WWII when Jews in Europe were dying by the millions. One character with whom he fought many a schoolyard scrap was Arthur Quackenboss. Barry was slightly bigger at the time and generally got the best of these go-rounds. In the late 70’s he saw Arthur Quackenboss in Pottstown and he was about 6’3’’, with shoulders out to there, and the same ugly, mean look about him. Discretion dictated letting by-gones remain by-gones. Curiously, the second Lincoln student who taunted Barry with “dirty Jew” and other similar comments was Harrie Burdan, who lived on Diamond street and went home every day by essentially the same route as Barry. He was in the habit of yelling these names at the end of the school day and then running for home. Barry would give chase and usually catch him and give him a few bruises and the like. After about six months of this, Harrie decided it really didn’t pay to go through this exercise daily, or at all for that matter, and they became friends who played war games in the cellars of homes on Maplewood Drive started just before the second world war began but not finished till after 1946. Harrie continued in public school when Barry went to Wyndcroft, but he became a classmate again at the Hill School in Barry’s fourth form year. They have remained friends to this day.
At Wyndcroft there was only one “incident” of this sort, but the difference in the backgrounds of boys from wealthy homes and Barry’s more street wise education at Lincoln gave him a major edge in disposing of the matter. Clymer Brooke, his brother Morrie, Grant Irey, Ira Gruber, and one other boy gave him the “dirty Jew” treatment one afternoon. Never having been in a schoolyard brawl, these fancy boys were scared to death when Barry lined them up against the side of the main building and threatened to beat them all up at the same time. Remember, Barry was nearly his adult size in seventh grade, and these kids were just that, kids. Grant Irey and Ira Gruber, like Harrie Burdan, ultimately became friends and schoolmates at either the Hill (Ira) or Law School (Grant Irey).
Anti-Semitism has been going on for thousands of years and isn’t likely to stop any time in the near future. It comes in many shapes, forms and sizes, and from many directions. No one has a monopoly on it. Barry is a believer in confronting it head-on. I’ve heard him say, “If they’re going to hate me just because I’m Jewish, I’m going to give them a better, more personal reason to do so.” It probably sounds worse than it is, or otherwise how did Harrie Burdan and Ira Gruber become life-long friends. Another of his favorite expressions on this subject is “I’m not going quietly to the showers to be gassed. You’ll have to face me and kill me while I spit in your face.” I might add that he has not been in a physical battle of the sorts described above since that afternoon at the Wyndcroft School.
It is now April 19, 1999 and the other night he was up roaming around the house thinking about this project, among other things. (I’m glad the computer is in the store, or he would have had me up with him to work on it) The subject of “summer vacations” came up. Barry spent the summers of his first five years playing around 909 North Charlotte Street, most of each summer that is. For a week or two each summer, his mother would rent some space at Atlantic City. He thinks his father came down on weekends, but he has only two memories of those summers. One was his visit to the famous elephant of Atlantic City, which is still there, after a major reclamation project a few years back. It was an elephant inside of which you could walk that just stood on a street corner in a part of Atlantic City.
The second great event of the summers at the shore he recalls was being lost on the beach one day. He apparently walked only a block or two away from where Nana was sunning and suddenly found himself all alone. Thanks to some very good parental training, he found a policeman who somehow or other tracked down his mother. He was never particularly upset, as he recalls, but one can only imagine what Nana went through. For that matter, he knows full well what it was like since he once “lost” Laurie at the Philadelphia Zoo because her head did not appear above the side rail of Noah’s Ark after everyone had gone off. She was “gone” only a few minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. He also once “lost” Josh Davidson at Disneyland when he and Kathy had five children seven years old and under with them for a few days.
The summer he turned six, he went up to the Poconos to Camp Canadensis. This was a Jewish summer camp run by a school teacher from Philadelphia named Bill Saltzman. The head counselor was a man named “Uncle” Sam Cohen. Years later at the Hill School, Barry saw “Uncle” Sam who turned up as the Overbrook High School coach, with a tall skinny kid as his best player, a fellow named Wilt” The Stilt” Chamberlain. He went to Camp Canadensis each summer through his twelfth birthday. The first two weeks of the first year he was terribly homesick. His father drove up to the camp one Sunday, agreeing to take him home if he was still unhappy there. Barry decided to wait until after the baseball game that afternoon. Maybe he got a big hit, or maybe he just liked baseball that much, but he decided to stay on.
In those days he was always bigger than most of the boys his age. After four years, he would be a part of one cabin, but take his sports activities, like baseball with the boys in the next cabin up. The one summer he remembers most was the one in which a fellow named Fred Weber was one of his counselors. Fred liked him; gave him the nickname, Kutzie, (who knows why) but it was better than “Wopface” Bert Spector, or Ronnie “Fat Rat” Segal. Being politically correct obviously wasn’t in vogue in the early 1940’s. Being polite and non-slanderous apparently wasn’t either. Fred Weber went on to be a substitute guard on Temple University’s football team in the middle 40’s, and later in life founded his own bathroom fixture company. He sold to a Pottstown outlet where Barry ran into him one more time in adult life.
There are a variety of camp incidents he thinks might be of interest to someone in later life. (You could have fooled me, but then I’m just a golden retriever.) The first thing he “made” in his life was the little wooden box that has the Camp Canadensis, 1941 burned on its top. Obviously, a six year old kid didn’t actually make the box , but he did burn on the letters. The only other thing he ever made in life, at least as of this date (May 1, 1999) was a two step stool at the Hill School. Mr. Palmer (really Paconofsky) didn’t think it met his standards and wouldn’t let him take it home at the end of the third form year. He went up to the school and stole it during the summer. Now, after the former lecture on how he learned not to steal from Al O’Neill’s bike experience, you may wonder about this “theft.” He does not consider it a theft at all since he had to pay for the supplies to make it, and it was his labor that created it. This has nothing directly to do with Camp Canadensis, but to finish this saga of creations, at the same time he built these two little steps, his friend Andy Kaul, built a gun cabinet of some size, which he still has to this day in St.Mary’s, PA. Barry’s steps went into the store at 264 High St. and were consumed in the fire which destroyed that building in the fall of 1949. Even “non-criminal theft” does not go unpunished it seems.
Barry learned to swim at Camp Canadensis, how to trot a horse, how to shoot a 22 rifle, play volleyball, tennis, horseshoes, and why boxing is no sport for a nice Jewish boy, even if Barney Ross and a few other Jewish boxers before 1940 had been professional champions. In the Blue/Gold games near the end of the summer, all the bunks would be divided into two teams and compete for the overall camp championship in all the sports activities. Boxing was included, and Barry had an annual go-round with a boy named Howie Slonaker. There was no love lost between these two, and , fortunately, no teeth either. They were wild swinging matches, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
There was a song fest competition too. The counselors were really pretty creative when one stops to think about it. They would write new lyrics to tunes that people knew, or could learn easily, and some of the songs still stick with him today. The Blue Team marching song was to the tune of the French national anthem. He occasionally sings it today, though no true Frenchman would likely recognize the tune. As you know, one of the things he never really learned was how to sing in any one key all the way through any song, or, for that matter, how to sing on key even for portions of songs.
No Kessler, it seems, remembers any place without thinking of the food first and foremost. At this camp he learned what “bug juice” was about, and he drinks it to this day. The mixture of lemonade and grape juice may or may not be universal, but it certainly was a Canadensis special that he consumed in great quantities. Every now and then, one of his counselors would catch fish or eels in the lake and that bunk’s table would have them prepared specially for them at dinner. His first encounter with eels was to step on them in his bare feet going to the bathroom in the bunk after dark, and then eating them the next day. This camp was no “roughing it” place, but it did give him experience living with nine other boys his age, plus two counselors, for a couple of months away from home. He got some experience in team play on and off the field which was good training.
The summer he was to turn thirteen, be Bar Mitzvahed, and then enter the second form at the Hill School in September, he did go to a camp in northern Canada that really was an outdoor, roughing it kind of place. It was Camp Keewaydin on Lake Timagami, an overnight train ride north of Toronto. It was a canoe trip camp as much unlike Camp Canadensis as it could be. First of all, Canadensis, if I didn’t mention it before, was a Jewish camp. Everyone there was Jewish. Camp Keewaydin people, counselors and campers alike, probably personally knew three Jews collectively, none of whom were their friends. The list of things to take to camp was totally unlike the list for Canadensis. No name tags had to be in any clothing, because there was no such thing as a laundry. A sleeping bag was needed. No Kessler even knew what a sleeping bag was. He got one at an army surplus store. It was a cocoon type, inside of which only the entire body could move, none of the individual parts could move separately. It might have been fine for Arctic troops on maneuvers, but for a thirteen year old it made sleeping a near hazard. For this camp, sneakers were not needed, but heavy work shoes, one pair only, were required.
Barry’s mother heard about Camp Keewaydin from Dr. Nicholson, the Hill School doctor, who went to a lodge on the same lake each summer. He was an older doctor who most likely got a free summer vacation by making himself available as the camp doctor. As the campers were only in camp collectively less than one week out of the two months, this must have been a nice way to get a cheap vacation, if all you wanted to do was read and paddle a canoe once in a while. Barry was booked for one month only at Keewaydin, because he had to be back in Pottstown for his Bar Mitzvah in early August. As a consequence, he went on only three trips out of camp. The first was about five days, and the next two were about ten days each.
During the first two to three in camp at the beginning of the summer, Barry learned, more or less, how to tie an Indian leather strap, called a “Tump line.” This device was a long piece of heavy leather with a wide spot in the middle which was just broad enough to push one’s (human, not canine) forehead against to carry everything heavy, e.g. the canoe or the food box over portages. Barry was a bow man in the canoe as he had had no previous experience in a canoe, nor was he really big enough to carry the canoe on his head (by use of the Tump line) over long portages through the woods. He got to carry the heavy wooden box with the food and supplies for the two boys in his canoe. Paddling a canoe, except for rapids, is fairly easy work it would seem. The portages were something else again. There were usually a couple of them each day, and they were anywhere from about a half mile to three miles.
The Indian guide was a marvel. He could build a fire to cook each meal no matter how hard it might be raining, and there was plenty of rain during the month. And, true to Kessler tradition, Barry remembers the food, especially the corn bread, as being very good. They drank the water from the lakes and streams. Remember, this was a long time ago. Today, Susan gives me, the family beast, spring water, not even tap water. Barry, of course, is not so considerate. At least I don’t have to drink from the toilet bowl. Speaking of toilet facilities, there were none in or out of Camp Keewaydin. Barry learned how to hang onto a tree limb and swing his butt away from his feet to avoid messes when relieving himself. I suppose at age thirteen this was not quite the picture I conjure up today of him doing the same thing.
The box he carried contained the tent he and his canoe partner pitched each night with small trees cut for poles. He does recall that they must have camped each night in a place known to the guides and counselors because they rarely had to cut new poles. Keeping dry and getting the tent up in a windy rain storm was a neat trick. Except for the mosquitoes and black flies which were bad some of the time, the trips and camping out were fun. Running rapids was , in a peculiar way, the most fun. The bow man would generally jump out of the canoe and guide it around areas where otherwise it would be impossible to avoid crashing the canoe on rocks. Once Barry sat on a pointed rock in the water while performing this act. They once ran a rapids past a bear in the water who was fishing for his supper.
I mentioned his long-time friend, Andy Kaul, from the Hill School days earlier. Unknown to each of them, they probably passed each other once or twice on Lake Timagami. Andy went to Camp Wabin which was a few miles down the lake from Camp Keewaydin. They were, to Barry’s knowledge, the only two places anywhere in the region inhabited by humans. He never saw other human beings at any time during that July.
The trip home was something no responsible parent would likely arrange in this day and age, but in 1946, it made sense, and, as you know, went off without a hitch. Barry boarded some sort of vehicle to go from Camp Keewaydin to a train station some distance away. There he boarded a train for Toronto in the early evening, arriving late morning in the city. He remembers walking around Toronto a bit and then getting on another overnight train to Philadelphia, arriving early the next morning to be met by his parents. The thought of sending a near thirteen year old, no matter how mature he might appear, on such a trip today is mind-boggling. There was no supervision from anyone that would be comparable to that given by airlines when a youngster crosses the country now, in considerably less time, even with changes of planes.
He came home for the final few days of preparation for his Bar Mitzvah in August. He had gone several afternoons each week to the home of Mrs. Thomas Weiss, Attorney Alvin Weiss’ mother, who had taught him his Haftorah, and the traditional chanting melodies for both the prayers and the reading itself. Alvin, who later became his good friend, was in High School at the time and seemed “many years” older. They lived on Chestnut Street, about a block east of what was then Pottstown High School at Chestnut and Penn Streets. Mrs. Weiss kept an orthodox Jewish house. What seems amazing today is that, in her day in the Synagogue, women were not called to the altar for torah readings, were not Bat Mitzvahed , and sat separately, usually in the balcony, if there was one. The question then, is how did she learn the chants, etc.. to teach Barry?
Before I go on with the Bar Mitzvah, I have to mention Dr. Nicholson in another context. When Barry entered the Hill School, he was five feet seven inches tall and weighed 128 pounds. For some reason he can’t recall now, he needed an x-ray of his knee. This was done at The Hill and Dr. Nicholson announced to the family that based on the size of cartilage, etc.. in the knee, Barry would probably end up being about six feet or six feet one inches tall. In the ensuing 50 years, he has grown one more inch in height. The additional inches apparently went to his width by mistake.
Back to the bar mitzvah. The ceremony was held at the original synagogue in Pottstown at High and Warren Streets. The building was torn down after the “new” synagogue was built on North Keim Street. Barry and Nana played very significant roles in the building of the new synagogue, but more of that a little later. His bar mitzvah went off pretty well. There was no microphone on the altar and very few could hear if his chants and Haftorah recital were on key. His portion of the Torah was the 40th chapter of Isaiah which begins “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people…” In his library, in the Haftorah volume that he studied from, at that chapter is the original typed speech that he delivered, thanking his parents, etc… He had committed that speech to memory, and he proudly reports that he did deliver it without hesitation or flaws, and in a convincing manner. Of course, he is Nana’s son and you remember the earlier comments on his birth. Need I say more about his bar mitzvah performance?
I wish he would get the style settled that he wants this done in. Now he says “Let’s talk baseball from beginning to end.” Baseball begins with a sandlot at Prospect St. and the alley that ran behind 909 N. Charlotte across Prospect St. and nearly to Diamond St. There are two or three houses now on what used to be that sandlot. When Barry was about 8 or 9 he began playing baseball with the friends he mentioned earlier who lived close by. Occasionally, the “big” boys came down from Evans and Franklin Sts. North of Charlotte. They were Sam Keiser Jr., Roy Dentler, Dick Spare, and a couple others he can’t remember anymore. These “big kids” were only 2/3 older than Barry but at those ages it made a major difference. There were plenty of pick up games on that lot over the years till he moved to Maple Manor, two blocks further north on Charlotte. Sides were chosen by one person considered the best player tossing a bat to another considered the second best. Then hand over hand from where it was caught to the end of the bat and the person last able to hold the bat and swing it around his head made the first choice of the next players on his team. (It was always “his” team. Girls weren’t even a remote consideration as cheerleaders or observers, let alone as players in those days).
Barry developed a pretty good power swing after he moved to Maple Manor. There was a open area behind the building and he would toss a ball in the air and swing to see if he could hit the ball across Maplewood Drive to the back yard of the Turner house. There were three levels of electric wires that ran along Maplewood Drive and depending on how high the ball was hit and how far, Barry determined singles, doubles, triples and home runs. After each hit, he had to go over to Turner’s and retrieve the baseball. This guy could spend an entire afternoon in this way and not finish a game. This was all prior to 1946, before the Kessler family moved into the Turner house at 12 Maplewood Drive.
This is probably a good time to tell the story of how they happened to make that move. Maple Manor was the old Feist mansion on North Charlotte St. Jacob Feist was a Pottstown tire maker prior to the Great Depression when he went broke and lost his mansion and all the surrounding grounds around it. The area he owned was considerable. It went from Charlotte St (known as the Layfield Cement because it was the very first concrete road in the area and went to a place long since lost in history called Layfield) all the way west to Hanover St., what is now three very long blocks, and East back toward town to the backyards of Lee Avenue, and north to what was the Gingrich house, which you will remember as a Gresh house. This entire tract of many, many acres was purchased by a young builder named Paul Keiser who converted the mansion into 5 apartments, including a penthouse on the top floor, all accessed by the original massive staircase in the center. The carriage house in the back was converted into a fairly sizeable single house dwelling on nearly an acre of ground. The side yard of the carriage house was the area from where Barry hit baseballs. There is another house there today. Paul Keiser started to build more houses going up Maplewood Drive. He completed only two or three at most before he was drafted into the Seabees for World War II. He moved into one of the houses just before he left for the war, and a fuel dealer, later Mayor of Pottstown, Johnny Harenstine, moved into the other. There were two or three other basements started, but nothing more was done before Paul Keiser left.
Barry’s Dad and Paul had a verbal understanding that after the war, if Paul ever thought of selling Maple Manor (which he probably would to help finance the rest of the building, including apartment houses), he would give him first choice as the purchaser. At last, we get to the original point of this diversion! The war ended and Paul Keiser did sell Maple Manor, but never offered it to Albert Kessler. He sold it instead to C.Paul “Tosh” Seeders, a local beer distributor and chief potentate of the Pottstown Elks lodge. Seeders, who was responsible for seeing to it that while Jews could pay to eat in the public dining room at the Elks home, there would not be any Jewish members of the Elks while he was alive, announced that he wanted the Kessler apartment for his own use, and they would have to move. In fact, after they moved, he took another apartment and moved someone else into that space. The purchase price for this mansion, and it truly was one, was $63,000. Barry doubts that it could have been purchased for $750,000 by 1970.
A good argument that God does in fact exist is the finish to this story of the move to the Turner house. After some desperate searching for another apartment someplace, the only spot available seemed to be what became the home for the Catholic nuns of the church at Beech and Hanover streets, an ugly grey stone building, two doors south of Beech St. Then Don Turner walked over to the apartment and announced that he was going back to Cheboygan , Michigan from whence he came in 1941 to help build and run the Jacob’s Aircraft factory. This place eventually became Firestone Tire Co. and then Armand Hammer Industries. Don literally built the house on Maplewood Drive from materials that “fell of the trucks” bringing stuff to build the factory. That house, on one full acre of very beautifully landscaped ground, with real pegged oak floors, three bedrooms, two and one half baths, full living room and dining room, screened in porch, central patio, 2 and ½ car garage with doors on both sides, and a pine paneled basement, cost Don $20,000, including the land, etc… He and Barry’s father sat down with a bottle of Courvoisier Cognac and discussed the price, and, when the bottle was finished, they shook hands and agreed that the same $20,000 it cost him would be fine.
Don then left and went to Brookside Country Club, a place that had only two Jewish members, Abe Pollock (wealthy scrap dealer, excellent golfer, and an “intimate” friend of your Grandmother Vaughan) and Leon Prince (the wealthy owner of Bally Case and Cooler Co. and also an excellent golfer). Don Turner was a man who accomplished what he did on his own, and he had very little use for the general membership of the Club, most of whom he considered four-flushers . He told the people at the bar what he had just done, and one of them offered him $28,000 for the house on the spot. Don told them all to “stick their money where the sun never shines because I just made a deal with Al Kessler.” When an attorney present told him that a verbal agreement for the sale of land could not be enforced, Don told him what he could do with his opinion. The house would be the Kesslers’, provided, of course, that Al Kessler could find $20,000 that he didn’t have for the purchase price. The solution was a deal with Gus (Pollock) Ruttenburg from Reading, recently widowed, who thought a mortgage investment of $20,000, with interest only in payments was a good idea. The whole Pollock family knew the Kesslers well. Nana was in a bridge club with Abe’s wife Sayre, was best friend of Ann (Pollock) Brenner, and the Ruttenburgs were people with whom they regularly socialized while Lou Ruttenburg was alive.
The move was made in early 1946, prior to Barry going to Canada to Camp Keewaydin and entry into the Hill School that fall. “Tosh” Seeders had to look across the street every time he drove in and out and see Jews next door, and to make matters even worse, in a house he really had wanted to have for himself. That house was one of the very last built before WWII, of a quality not duplicated since at any price. In its day, it may have been at the very top of the heap. As Hindella Pollock, wife of Bill (Abe’s nephew) who lived in a very large house in Rosedale, once said to Nana, “I may live in the biggest house in town, but you have the best.” By today’s standards, and considering there is now a house on what was the front lawn and another on what was the back yard, one can’t get that excited about it.
Well, now shall we get back to baseball? Probably not worth the effort. Maybe we should comment about the frequent references to anti-Semitism. Why does he seemingly throw those comments in when he is telling about other items? He says that since he is now in a “mixed” marriage, as is each of you children, he doesn’t want anyone to think that he has forgotten his Jewish roots or that he cares less about Judaism because he is not ostensibly observant of holidays and the like. He also says that he is going to comment on his Hill School years and perhaps on Princeton years in chronological order (like he has been doing that up till now…sure) but then he is going to switch to specific subjects and comment on life in general, his personal beliefs as of the year 2000 anyway. There was a considerable space of time between pages 12 and this point, and the better part of 13,000 words. I understand “sit”, “stay”, “come”, “hold”, “eat your supper or breakfast”, “good dog”, “better go now”, and “ride in the car”. I only do those things when it suits me. Why does he need to use so many words when he only does a few things that suit him too?
The Hill School experience began in the Fall of 1946, actually in late August, with a trip to Diamonds, a men’s store on South St. in Philadelphia, before the street went into major decay, and, obviously before it came somewhat “back” in the late ‘70’s. Barry’s Dad was the son of a tailor, who really knew fabric and fine tailoring. But as a South Philadelphia product, his tastes were “fashion” and certainly not Ivy League. Guess what the Hill School was (and still is)? It was against his principles to buy that “dumb” Ivy stuff in the first place, and Barry didn’t like the idea of a “uniform”, namely blue blazer and grey flannel pants. I know this may be hard to believe by children and others, dogs included, who have never seen him in anything else but a blue blazer and grey flannel pants when he is “so-called’ dressed up. But in August, 1946, Ivy League tweeds and blue blazers were almost an anathema to Barry and his Dad, albeit for different reasons. Diamonds did know about good blue blazers. There were a few Jews and Italians (the best dressers in Philadelphia) who would wear such things, but even they could not bring themselves to carry a basic herringbone or tweed sport coat. His father got Barry the Hill School required blazer, but the tweed jacket(s) came later.
It was a requirement at the Hill for new boys to wear a black beanie hat the entire first term whenever they walked outside, unless Hill beat traditional rival, Lawrenceville, in football, in which case to celebrate this major event, new boy hats could be put aside. Failure to wear the hat around the campus would bring demerits, handed out by Sixth formers (Seniors), requiring odd jobs and extra study halls in order to work them off. Too many demerits, and stronger disciplinary action, including the threat of expulsion, would result. The outfits were bad enough for a public school boy who wore polo shirts and sweaters to school, but the new boy hat was an almost unbearable insult. The thought of what his parents might do, however, if demerits piled up, kept that hat on until he reached the top of the steps down to High Street on the way home. Technically speaking, he was still on campus and was subject to demerits while going down that long flight of steps, but boarding students had no reason to be on them, and, thus, his “protest” against the rules was successful without penalty.
There are many, many highlights (and lowlights) through the five year Hill experience. He says he will touch on only the highest and lowest, since any stranger reading this would probably not care all that much about any of it. The first day of classes was an experience never to be forgotten, but not for anything that happened in class. No one had ever pointed out where bathrooms were in the various buildings in which classrooms were located. As a 13 year old, Barry was too embarrassed to ask anyone. That may be hard to believe today, but at 13, in a strange new school for boys only, asking one of those bigger, “punk” older students, who might want to tease a smaller new boy, just wasn’t to be done by the boy who had always been the biggest or second biggest kid in school. By 2 PM, therefore, he was near death from trying to hold back the potential flood. Fortunately, he saw into one of the two doors at the end of the Middle School classroom floor, and realized that it was a bathroom and not another classroom. Saved at last! When he was a Senior he was a guide for parents and new students to be who wanted to see the campus. Several parents expressed a little surprise when he made a point of mentioning where the bathrooms were in each building, but he suspects that many a little Second former was grateful for not having to repeat his ordeal. Of course, boarding students had the option of simply going back to the floor or building where their rooms were, but Barry told them all anyway.
He did well in classes that year. Among other things, he learned to touch type in his English class, a talent which literally got him through lots of problem times later in his schooling, including being able to type the Bar Exams in an air conditioned office in Philadelphia during three searing hot summer days when everyone else was crowded into the old Convention Hall to write out answer by hand. He also made some friendships which have lasted over 50 years. His closest friend today, Andy Kaul joined him at the Hill that fall. Andy roomed with a local friend from Pottstown who boarded, Ira Gruber. They were joined by David Stevens, and all three roomed together for the whole five years. Barry spent so much time with them, that they somehow got a fourth desk into their room where he studied on off periods. He did well enough in second form English to win the prize for the course as best in class.
That first fall, Barry discovered soccer, a sport which in those days no one outside of prep schools knew anything about. He played on the midget soccer team and wasn’t much impressed, nor was he much impressive. He also played midget basketball that winter term and baseball that spring. His basketball career consisted pretty much of sitting on the bench watching the school varsity team while the head coach announced, “Watch what they do, and when you get in, do the same thing.” He did play one midget game against some comparable school team and scored 11 points, 10 in the first half. End of his basketball career much to the disappointment of his father, who was a great basketball player in his day. His father never expressed his disappointment, however, at least not to Barry. Baseball went better in the spring where he was the cleanup batter on the Midget team.
The Third Form was highlighted by his nearly flunking algebra. As he explains it, the problem was with the teacher who was an assistant track coach from Yale, Mr. Burdick, who one day in class railed against Pottstown as some “hick town” and worse. Barry and his friend, Dick Sweeney, took offense at these remarks. Dick flunked out of Hill that year and leading the downward spiral of his grades was algebra. Barry had to be tutored by his old Wyndcroft principal, Mrs. Steele, whose efforts were successful enough that he ended up with a 3 in the course, the equivalent of a C. Barry had always had A’s in math, except at Wyndrcroft in algebra where he got B’s. He did take geometry in the Fifth Form and scored a 1(A) in that math course, and never took a math course again anywhere. In college at Princeton he took Economics 101 to fulfill his required math. (Based on his financial lack of success in life generally, maybe he should have struggled through with more math courses until he got one right)
One other item to mention in third form was his attempt to make the leap from midget to varsity baseball. He did get a fair try at the varsity, and although he was crushed at being sent down to the juniors, he did bat cleanup again on that team and did pretty well. At least he got to play in every game to get experience. He did give up on soccer in both third and fourth form years. He chose to play golf in the fall terms each year. Perhaps a more accurate account would be that he walked across the Far Fields to Brookside Country Club, signed up to play golf, and then went home earlier in the afternoon. In the winter each year he worked in the indoor baseball cage. If the truth were known at the time, the “cage” as it was known was most likely a dirt floor stable left over from many years earlier into which some netting was hung, and which served as a glorified batting cage for winter practice.
In his fourth form year he did make the varsity baseball team and started in most games, earning his first Hill School varsity letter. Apropos of dress codes, the night of the awards dinner in the school dining room, he went wearing his blue blazer and grey slacks, but most improperly, he wore a red sleeveless wool sweater with his shirt and tie. The headmaster’s wife, Marjorie Potts Wendell (yes, the Potts was the Pottstown founding family name) had set a rule of no sweaters in the dining room. Not taking meals there, he didn’t know. In retrospect, the glare from Mrs. Wendell, without being sent from the room when he went up to accept his letter sweater, was a high badge of honor.
Fifth form year, he went out for soccer again, and suddenly found himself one of the starting fullbacks on the team. He performed reasonably well….he says. Also in the fall term, he joined forces with Bill Cowperthwaite, and won the Colgate Debate Cup for successfully arguing in competition that “the world was not getting better.” The cup is still around with the Hill School News article covering the debate. The cup is used today to hold those famous marbles with which he played as a child. In baseball that spring he was batting nearly .400 when he broke his ankle before the last game at Lawrenceville sliding into second base during practice. As the only member of the squad who had lettered for more than one year, and since David Webster was already captain of the senior year soccer and basketball teams. Barry was elected captain of the baseball team for his sixth form year.
The sixth form year was highlighted by his acceptance at Princeton, two weeks after his parents had to send a non-refundable $200 to Amherst where he was also accepted, just in case Princeton said “thanks, but no thanks.” He had an excellent year in baseball, batting cleanup again on a team that averaged 12 runs per game in 12 games, even though being shut out in the last one. At graduation he walked off with 4 major prizes for academic accomplishment, including Cum Laude election, and the most coveted Yale Aurelian Society award for outstanding Leadership, Scholarship and Character in the senior class. Plaques, he says, are easy to come by in later life. All you have to do is volunteer a lot. The Aurelian award is his most coveted prize. Another way to look at all this is that he peaked rather early in life and went down hill after the summer of 1951. Incidentally, if you look at his senior year picture, he is wearing David Webster’s blue blazer because he forgot to wear the appropriate attire on the day senior pictures were taken. Fortunately, since David is about 6’2” tall and his jacket was very long on Barry, the picture is only a head and shoulders shot.
The summer of 1951 was the absolute peak achievement time for him. For the first time, he joined the Pottstown Junior American Legion league team which the year before had gone to the final game of the PA State Championship series. You will find the 1951 Pottstown High School team in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. because they won 51 or 53 consecutive high school games during their years. The American Legion team was that high school team plus only three other players from local schools. Barry was one of them and he started every game, batting just over .400 for the regular season, just under .400 for the playoffs, and, most importantly, the team won the PA State championship. There were no national Legion championships in those days as there are now. He says that team was so strong there is little doubt they would have won it all had there been such a championship. Six of the starting nine players signed professional baseball contracts, and both Dick and David Ricketts played for the St. Louis Cardinals. David was with the Cardinals for over 30 years as a coach as well. One other short time member of the squad, Howie Bedell, quit the team because he thought he should have started too (in Barry’s place). He later played for the Atlanta Braves for a short time and then became a minor league manager in their farm system.