by Eric Moss
Special to NJJN

March 12, 2009

I was recently sitting in my living room in Kfar Saba, Israel, reading a book about Sicily and Italian immigration to the United States. My thoughts went to my childhood in West Orange, where Italian immigrants were a central part of my growing up.

At that time West Orange had two major social groups: the Jews, who for the most part lived “up on the Mountain,” and the Italians, who tended to live “down in the Valley.” I’d often go down to the Valley to get my hair cut at Rocco’s barbershop, or to eat spaghetti or pizza at Salerno’s or Ann’s Clam Bar, or to lick an ice cream cone on a summer’s night at Spaletto’s drugstore on Valley Road with my father, who had treated my sister and me to a special ride in his yellow convertible with the top down.

We were friendly though somewhat distant with our classmates from the Valley. What they did after school was a mystery, for we rarely visited each others’ homes. The girls wore gold crosses around their necks, and the boys went out for the rougher sports like football and baseball. We Jews preferred the noncontact ones, like long-distance running and tennis when the latter came into fashion.

Reading the book halfway around the world nearly 50 years later, those days came back in a nostalgic wave. I went to the Internet and found an expression from the distant past that now rang familiar: the “Swamp Lines.”

I recalled it had something to do with buses in the Valley. It was a term I always wondered about because I had never seen any swamps down there. Curiosity prodded me on, and I surfed further.

I came upon an early 20th-century engraving of a strange, open-sided railroad car coming down a mountain. The caption explained that the Jules Verne vehicle was a “Coaster,” and it was frequented by people who were called “Orangemen.” Suddenly, I remembered singing at Saturday morning football games, “On the slopes of Orange Mountains….”

The accompanying article — which originally appeared in Harper’s magazine on April 10, 1894 — explains that the Orangemen, living as they did on the side of a mountain, had a natural inclination to “coast.” They liked to slide downhill on all kinds of contraptions, from sleds to old cartons, or simply roll downhill. Hey, I thought, that’s me! I remembered lying on my father’s back as he lay on a winter sled at the top of a snow-covered slope at Cameron Field in South Orange. He’d push off and down we’d go, speeding all the way to the bottom. I loved it and so did Dad.

The old article went on to describe a corporation that had built a trolley car that ran up the side of “the Orange Mount,” beginning in the Valley at the Swamp Line on Harrison Avenue, running up a certain Forest Hill Road, continuing up Winding Way and then through a gully and up a cliff-side to a plateau looking out over Manhattan. The point of this engineering feat was to bring people up to that wilderness area, where a land developer hoped to attract buyers.

People could ride leisurely to the top, look around, and eat and drink at a new restaurant and bar. Pleasantly inebriated, they would then, with their legs hanging casually over the open sides of the railroad car, coast back down to the Swamp Line. It was especially nice on a summer’s evening when there was a breeze and the sun was going down.

Reading all this, other memories returned. I recalled going behind our backyard at Burnett Terrace, which ran up and down a slope. There was a forest in which several black cement walls rose in a clearing next to an old stream. I used to play on these mysterious walls, having no idea where they had come from. I’d lie on their outcrops with a bird watcher’s book Mom and Dad had gotten me for a birthday, searching for rare parrots, cockatoos, and peacocks but seeing only common robins, blue jays, and sparrows.

Some years ago I tried my hand at a short story about my early ornithological activity and found myself writing about the Stonehenge-like walls. Striving for poetry, I wrote about the eerie atmosphere in that sylvan glade and speculated that those massive, mysterious walls had supported a tree-locked train station. I had no idea from where I got that vision, but I liked it. I now understand that it probably came to me from hearing some adult’s offhand remark about the old “Coaster” line going up the mountain.

The vision stayed with me over the decades. On a nostalgic visit to West Orange a year or so ago, I drove to the old place. I walked around the woods behind the family house and found the walls. In my memory so tall and grand, they were barely higher than my balding head.

A secret garden

More details from the old article stirred my sleeping memory. The turn-of-the-century writer described a mansion that sat at the edge of the cliff top. I remember that edifice. When I was a student in Roosevelt Junior High School and we lived on the mountain top, which by then was covered with proud houses, I passed it every day. I would climb up through a gully filled with wild vegetation and get to the back wall of the mansion. Imagining myself a commando, I would carefully raise my head, look to see that no one was around, leap over the wall, and race through a vast private garden before anyone could catch me.

My exit route led me to the parking lot of a golf club, whose green links and sand traps spread over the top of the hill. I had heard from Mom and Dad that this club was “anti-Semitic” and “restricted.” So, it was with a mixture of bravado and fear that I strode out the parking lot to the safety of Rock Spring Road, nearly every day.

I am now in my home in Israel, to which I immigrated nearly 40 years ago. I occasionally encounter — more and more as I get older — ghost memories of other times and places. I used to think that local history was a bore. No more! Perhaps there is someone out there to whom these memories speak.

Eric Moss (hemoss@bezeqint.net), grew up in West Orange and immigrated to Israel at the age of 25. He is a clinical psychologist who lives in Kfar Saba, Israel.

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