Marked for Life A Memoir

Miss Grape Juice Face I was born at the end of the Second World War, at the beginning of what would be called the Baby Boom. My father spent the war as a lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General's Office in Washington, D.C. He came home to practice law in the little New Jersey town where he had been born and raised. Millville is a factory town, midway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City--not a rural town, neither urban nor suburban, just a small town among other small towns. It's not even a particularly charming town, though it may once have been. The Maurice River flows through the South Jersey salt marshes on its way to the Delaware, but it slows down to little more than a creek as it passes through Millville. The mill company that gave the town its name dammed the river and, at the turn of the century, excavated part of it to create Union Lake. Two miles wide, it was once touted as the biggest artificial lake in the world, a tourist attraction with an amusement park on its shores. But by the time I was born the park had long been abandoned. The carousel and bandstand were gone, and the scrubby forest had grown back. Local people put up summer shacks and boat docks on land they rented from the mill company. The bottom of the lake was filled with rotting leaves that turned the water a dark rusty color, staining our skin and ruining our bathing suits. Millville was a white Protestant town, so unabashedly conservative that the local newspaper was the Millville Daily Republican. The town's few Jews were mostly merchants with small shops along High Street. Morris and Bea Friedman had the shoe shop; Maxie Zeitz had the delicatessen. Lou and Faye Miller owned one drugstore; Bailey and Ada Abrahms, the other. The Ackerman family sold furniture. The Kleinmans sold toys. The Levensons sold groceries. There were a couple of Jewish doctors and a couple of lawyers, like Daddy. But no Jews worked in the factories. In the 1950s, Millville's business district was a single street, High Street, just a few blocks of stores and banks, the post office and the Leroy Movie Theater, where we lined up on Saturdays for the twenty-five-cent Kiddy Matinee. All the stores closed at noon on Wednesdays so that the shopkeepers could make the trip into Philadelphia or New York City to restock their shelves. My father's law office was on the second floor at the corner of High and Sassafras Streets, in a building that had once housed Davidow's Department Store, the crowning achievement of my grandfather's retail career. We lived only a block away, around two corners. My sisters and I could run back and forth between our house and Daddy's office even before we were old enough to cross the street by ourselves. During Millville's boom years, at the turn of the century, some of the wealthiest people in town built homes on Second Street, where we lived. Half a century later, the street was just a row of middle-class homes, but remnants of the old architecture remained. Leaded-glass windows looked out onto front porches with lathe-worked posts and railings. Kitchens opened onto backyards neatly divided from the neighbors' by low fences. Our house was half a double, a two-family structure built like Siamese twins. The two houses shared a common interior wall, and a low railing divided the porch in half. We had one side of the porch; the Brandriffs had the other. Chain-link fences, covered in the summer with honeysuckle vines, separated our little yard from two larger ones. On one side, Old Mister Brandriff grew roses. On the other, Old Man Friedman raised chickens and grew sunflowers. Out our backyard gate, I take the shortcut across the empty lot. Hopping over mud puddles, I run through the narrow alley, holding my nose as I pass the big garbage bins behind the fish and vegetable market--and I'm on High Street where everybody knows I'm Daddy's daughter, one of the Davidow girls, the one with the purpDavidow, Joie is the author of 'Marked for Life A Memoir', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400047413 and ISBN 1400047412.