Early Years in South Phila. and Atlantic City
Mother was a classic pianist and was primed for the concert stage. It ended when she married my father. The story as I recall it is as follows: My mother studied piano at a young age and evidently had a large talent for the instrument. She was able to read music rapidly, had dexterity and was able to play the masters with grace and emotion. She was hampered by the fact that she was a female and regardless of her talent, there was not much room for her at the top. She played organ in the church for weddings, funerals and Sunday mass. She also played piano in the pit for the silent movies. Her first break came when she auditioned for the Clarence Furman Symphony and won a place with the orchestra. From what I learned much later in life, she became enamoured with the concert master of the orchestra and a romance developed. Then, much to my mothers chagrin, the violin player dumped her for another woman. By this time, several of my mother’s sisters were already married and she, being the oldest, was in grave danger of being left unwed. One afternoon a young man met my Grandfather with a request that he be permitted to court to the lovely piano playing Agnes Tursi. I never really found out how he first met her but I think that they met at some mutual family function. Charlie Del Marco was well into his late 20's, had his own business selling meats and groceries, came from a large Italian family all well entrenched in the grocery business, was single and wanted Agnes. That was all that my Grandfather needed to hear and he told my mother to say yes. They were like oil and water; no matter how hard you mixed them, they would separate on standing. My Father had a limited education. He was a simple man with simple tastes; honest, forthright, durable and true. He didn’t know anything about music other than he liked to hear it and most of all; he liked to hear Agnes play it. His life centered on the business and he started each day at dawn, went to the store, worked the customers, took the money and went home. He went to mass every Sunday, said his prayers in Latin, loved the music at a solemn high mass and thought that a great way to spend Sunday afternoon was to go to the cemetery and put flowers on the graves of his relatives. For fun he would play poker and lose, go to the racetrack, bet on the horses and lose. This he did regularly on saturday nights with the boys and wednesday afternoons when the horses ran.
My Mother was of a different ilk. She was strong willed, opinionated and given to a fierce temper (she displayed it to me frequently)..Her two passions were the piano and duplicate bridge. My mother was very talented and played both well. She felt that she was a cut above the rest of the crowd and had a reputation for being a bit snooty. My father bought her a baby Grand piano for a wedding present and it was a center piece of our living room for as long as I can remember. During warm days, the windows would be open and my Mother would play and the neighbors would congregate around the front steps for hours. Frequently Mother would have a group of musicians with her and they would play arias from the Operas. There were many nights with sopranos, tenors and a full string quartet. My father would sit and listen and smile; he loved her. She was very feisty and had a short fuse. I was riding in the car with her one day on Broad Street in Philadelphia. It was a hot summer day and the traffic was thick. She was going a bit slow and a man in the car behind us began honking his horn. At a traffic light he yelled something to her and that did it. She mumbled something like ‘I’ll fix him’. She then rolled up the window and turned off the engine. There was a policeman at the light and he came over to see what the matter was and at the same time the man in the other car got out and came toward us. My mother rolled down the window and said to the officer ‘That man said he was going to hit me and I got so nervous that I stalled the car’. The policeman took hold of the man, told my mother not to be afraid and to try to start the car. The car started, we drove away and my mother said, ‘I fixed him, the son of a bitch.’ That was vintage for my mother.
My Father opened a business on Allegheny Avenue. It was a store typical of the times, selling meat, produce and groceries. I was 10 or 11 years old at the time and I was in and out of the store after school and on weekends. As I recall, the store was open seven days a week and I would deliver grocery orders to some of the customers who would call in. The store was long and narrow in configuration with the meat counter in the back and the groceries and produce in the front. My Mother would be at the cash register near the front door. My Mother always handled the money. My Father loved to play the horses and it was his habit to make a few bets with the local bookie. My Father rarely won and my Mother was upset because he would allow the bookie to come into the store. One day the bookie came quietly into the store, walked to the back where my Father was and proceeded to do horse business as usual. The two of them walked casually up to the front and my Mother turned to my Father and, as best I can remember, said “Charlie I told you not to let him come into the store anymore”. The bookie looked at my Father and said “Charlie, who’s the boss around here”. That was the last thing he remembered because my Mother reached behind the counter, picked up a can of peaches and whacked him over the head with it. He crumpled to the floor and the gash on his forehead required several stitches to close. He could not call the police because it would have revealed his profession. He never returned to the store again!
When we were living in South Philadelphia it was customary for the family to gather together in the springtime and go to Atlantic City. The women would scout around for a suitable home to accommodate two or three families and rent it for the entire summer season. The home was always somewhere on Georgia Avenue just a block from the beach.We would leave Philadelphia and go to Atlantic City at the close of school in June and stay until after Labor Day in September. I spent summers in Atlantic City from the time I was seven or eight years old until well into my teens. They were great years of frolicking with my twin cousins, Vincent and Louis. We were young and full of vinegar and our days would start at sunrise with my Mother and my Aunt Lena making breakfast for us. We would gather up the beach chairs, blankets, beach umbrellas and all the things needed to spend the day. We would go down to the beach early to stake out our turf depending upon the tide.
Mom & Dad circa '30
From RT, AUNT BETTY, MOTHER, Aunt Lena, ????
Atlantic City Beach circa '28
Atlantic City Beach circa '28
Dad & Mom circa '30
My Father Mom & Dad on Honeymoon My Mother
Atlantic City Beach is known for its white soft sand and the surf is usually quite gentle. We would lay out the blankets, put up the umbrellas and the beach chairs and wait for the women to arrive. Usually we were on our own for several hours because the women would arrive near lunch time with huge baskets of sandwiches, potato salad and lemonade. In the morning before the women came we would run up and down the beach, frolic in the water and generally try to do everything that we knew we would be forbidden to do when our parents arrived. There was a ritual after lunch that I remember well: we had to sit for at least 45 minute in order to digest lunch so that we would not get a fatal cramp while swimming in the ocean. This got to be a problem for us as we got older but there was no changing the routine. My Aunt Lena would draw an X in the sand for each of us and say sweetly “each one of you put your little behind on the X and don’t move until I tell you to”. Soon there would be a chorus of grumbling and grousing and “can we go now, we waited long enough, we want to go in the water”.
Charlie with Cousins Vince & Lou
During certain months of the summer season the sandbars would move in close to shore and bring with them a multitude of small sweet tasting clams. People called them cherry stone clams and we would dig them up by the bucketful and eat them on the spot. One day the sandbar was out a little farther from the shore and I was standing in water up to my waist. I would wiggle my big toe into the sand until I felt a clam and then would reach down and scoop it up. I didn’t have a bucket with me so I put them into my bathing suit. After a time my bathing suit was bulging with clams. What happened as I started to walk out of the water was a scenario worthy of the Keystone Kops. One of the clams opened up a bit and decided to close again, only this time, it closed on my little foreskin. My mother didn’t believe in circumcision and therefore the clam clamped shut on the end of my foreskin. I ran screaming out of the water pulling clams out of my bathing suit and throwing them left and right. I drew quite a crowd and I believe it was my Aunt Lena who picked me up and brought me to the lifeguard stand. They pulled down my bathing suit and there was a little clam dangling on my little dickey.. Everyone thought it was funny; I did not. I don’t remember what they did to remove the clam. I think they broke it open and sent me on my way. I never went digging for clams again.
when we were quite young one of our pastimes was body surfing in the waves. The surf in Atlantic City is not very strong so we were not in any danger. Another favorite pastime was crawling in the sand under the boardwalk.The object was to find a large enough crack between the boards of the boardwalk so we could peek up and hopefully see under women’s dresses as they walk by. Thinking back on it there was not much we could see but I the hope of seeing something taboo was enough for us. We spent many hours in the sand under the boardwalk but I can’t recall seeing much of any great feminine value. Apropos that topic, there were in many Penny arcade’s on the boardwalk. They had games you could play for a penny but the ones we were interested in were the machines that you looked into, turned a crank and started a picture show. It was a spool of photographs that rotated and produced motion the faster you turned the crank. Most of them where short reels of Laurel and Hardy or Buster Keaton or some other comedy show. But there were several with a fan dancer or strip tease artist. Those machines ate up a lot of our pennies because the girls would slowly begin to take their clothes off and then just at the last minute the machine would go blank and you never really saw what you hoped to see. I tried many times to turn the crank slow enough but I never saw the 'bare essentials'.
After all day on the beach, the next ritual was to wash the sand off, get dressed, have dinner and head out to the Boardwalk. The women were dressed in their best and they gloried in the nightly promenade. I’ll bet we walked the length of that boardwalk thousands of times but we never tired of it. It had to do with the times. There was no television and it was too hot to stay in the house and listen to the radio. Walking on the boardwalk, to see and be seen, was the thing to do. If you got tired there were many seats along the way and of course there was the Atlantic City rolling chair, propelled by an amiable black man, who would usually sing to you while pushing you along the boards. High above Hamids Million Dollar Pier was a large display of changing flashing lights. It started out with an image of the world. A paint bucket would pour paint over the top and slowly the colors would change until the entire world was a rainbow of colors. There was another display that I think was on the Steel Pier. It had a horse race every few minutes. Eight horses would enter the gate, each one a different color and then they would start to run. There would be a crowd of several hundred people looking up at the display trying to pick the winner. It was fun for everyone and the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, circa 1940, was a wonderful place. There is nothing to compare with the boardwalk in July at two in the morning with the soft breeze blowing in from the ocean. Stretching from Ventnor, past Steel Pier and on toward Captain Starns restaurant were thousands of stores, shops and hotels. Little stands selling fruit juice, ice cream, salt water taffy pizza, Philly cheese steaks and the most mouth watering of all, Itialian veal and pepper sandwiches. You could not go home without eating one..............Ummmm, I can almost taste it now.
On days that were not suitable for the beach my cousins and I would roam the boards on our own. We found that we could crawl along the catwalks of both the steel pier and the million-dollar pier, find an open window over the water, crawl through the window and spend the rest of the day in the pier. Steel pier was our favorite because it had a fun house, a movie theater with live performing vaudeville and at the end of the pier, the water show. The most famous feature was the diving horse and rider. The end of the pier was a square with the center open to the sea. The bleachers were at the bottom end of the square and the performers were at the opposite end. There were several shows a day and they were great. Talented divers performed from various levels and some from extreme heights. They dived into the Atlantic Ocean, swim to a ramp and come up amid great applause from the audience. There were juggling acts and trampoline acts but the most famous was the “diving horse”. A large horse ridden by a well endowed girl would trot out onto the end of the stage. There was a ramp out over the ocean and she would coax the horse up to the edge. The audience woud roar as the horse and rider jumped off and plunged some 25 to 30 feet into the Atlantic Ocean. They made a big splash, went under for a few moments, then horse and rider would surface, swim over to the ramp and come back onto the pier. I don’t know how many times I saw that act but I’m sure it numbers well into the hundreds.
During the summer the Hippodrome Theater ran first run movies from Hollywood Frequently the star of the film would do a walk on during the vaudeville show. I remember the year that Howard Hughes produced the film ‘The Outlaw’ starring Jane Russell. It caused a sensation and was banned by the Catholic Church, therefore the theaters were packed for each showing. The film ran for two weeks and I saw it at least twice a day. (Remember, I would sneak into the pier. I would scurry along the side of the pier holding on for dear life. There was always an open window out over the ocean to climb through.) I thought the movie was great and I can still see the scene in the hayloft when Jane Russell leans over Billy the Kid, the camera moving slowly from her face down over what were then the most famous knockers in the world, and she whispers “don’t worry, I’ll keep you warm”. If you were a teenager at that time and you didn’t get a stiffy in your pants there was something wrong with you. Funny, I don’t remember much else about the movie. I knew where the stage door was and as soon as the vaudeville act was over I ran to the stage door entrance hoping to see Jane Russell. Sure enough, one day there she was and I was close enough to be able to touch her. There was a crowd that day and she signed autographs and spoke pleasantly to her fans and then she looked over at me and she said “ And what can I give you?” I looked up at her and said “How about a kiss, Miss Russell?” She looked down at me and said “Sure” and took my head in her hands and gave me a great big smooch on the forehead. Everyone laughed and I loved it. The lip imprint stayed there for the rest of the day.
The pier was a great place to go when the weather was marginal or when other members of the family came from Philadelphia. The women would pack picnic baskets and we would go early and stay late. There were two movie theaters on the pier and each night a name band would play in the ballroom. The adults would dance and we would run around the floor and pretend to be Fred Astaire. Several of us knew how to climb into the pier so we were a fixture in the afternoons and evenings. I remember seeing Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Frankie Lane, and most of all, Vaughn Monroe because of his theme song “Racing to the Moon”. He had a very deep baritone voice and the first two lines of the song where his signature. The band would open the set with his song and we would line up along the edge of the bandstand, hold our noses to produce a deep nasal sound and mimic “Racing to the Moon, Way up in the Midnight Blue, and Then all too Soon, It Fades from View”. The band was booked for a week and the first time we did it he got a little angry but when we showed up night after night he went right along with us and laughed as we imitated him.