Persistence of Memory
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ow did I see through
the fence? When the trolley stopped, I could see nothing through the high,
closely spaced vertical gray boards that lined the street—that separated the
world inside from that outside.
Dad explained
“persistence of memory,” and described how movies work. Movies, he said, are a
projection of individual still pictures, flashed on the screen one after
another, each scene following the next so quickly that the mind retains the
prior scene and creates a “moving picture” out of the succession of scenes. So
too, each crack in the fence, each slim vertical space between adjacent boards,
gives a narrow glimpse of the scene beyond. One glimpse follows the next as you
move in the trolley along the length of the fence, and the brain remembers the
previous view and attaches the next one to it. These individual images are
stitched together in the mind to create a continuous tapestry of the scene on
the other side.
So each time we rode
the Number 32 trolley down this fenced-in portion of Liberty Heights Avenue I
watched the movie of life on the other side. There were trees and lawns. A
tennis court. A huge house, three stories tall, surrounded by a porch. I asked
Dad once if it was an apartment building. He laughed. “No,” he said. “One
family lives in the house. They’re rich.”
He didn’t say it with
any resentment. It was just a fact, like we were poor and some people are rich.
“How do you get rich?”
I asked on one of our trips downtown.
“Well,” he smiled,
“you can inherit wealth from your father.”
I must have had a
blank look. I was old enough to know that there was no wealth in our family. So
he quickly followed that with, “Or you can go to college and get a good
education. Then a good job. Then you
can get rich.”
But nobody in our
family had ever gone to college. So that’s how we left it. I was only twelve
years old. I had time to get rich.
My first real business
opportunity was not until a few years after. I went into the snowball business
with my friend Sheldon.
We called them
“snowballs,” but today, sixty years later, you probably know them as “shaved
ice,” or even “Hawaiian ice.” I can’t imagine why it’s called “Hawaiian.” The
only thing we knew about Hawaii in the 1940s was that it was the home of the
Hawaiian yo-yo champions who stood on the corners outside of schools in the
spring and demonstrated tricks with the yo-yos that they sold to us. The yo-yos
were encrusted with diamonds, which were as real as the Hawaiian origins of the
yo-yo champs.
In
order to go into the snowball business, you needed a lot of stuff. The
snowballs were made by scraping ice from the surface of a big rectangular ice
block, using a hand scraper. So first of all, you needed a block of ice and a
scraper. Then you needed syrups, which you could buy in quart bottles in
flavors such as lemon, strawberry, cherry and lime. Lime tasted awful, but it
was bright green and apparently an attractive color. Add some chocolate syrup
and you had enough of a selection to appeal to your clients. Our deluxe
offering was the chocolate snowball with two squirts of marshmallow as a
topping. But it cost 10¢, a prohibitive cost for much of our clientele.
A
block of ice, some syrups,
and you’re in
the
snowball business!
Blocks of ice were easy to come
by in those days. While nearly everyone had an electric refrigerator at home,
some people still had iceboxes. An icebox looked like a refrigerator, except in
the top compartment you placed a large block of ice. If the icebox was well
insulated, and if we minded our parents and didn’t “go into the icebox” every
fifteen minutes for a snack, the ice lasted for a full day. The next morning,
the iceman came along the street in his wagon, and carried a fresh block of ice
into your kitchen and placed it in your icebox.
This is an icebox. The
compartment
in the upper left corner
is where you
placed a block or two of
ice.
For the most part, blocks of ice
were available for commercial uses. Lots of food stores displayed their
perishables, such as fish and meat and cheese, on top of trays of chipped or
crushed ice in glass-fronted cases. So there were two ways to get a block of
ice for making snowballs. If you had a real icebox in your house, you could
talk your mother into ordering an extra block. Most of us did not have iceboxes
at that point in time. We had electric refrigerators. So, to get a block of
ice, we had to go to the icehouse.
We were lucky. There was an
icehouse in our neighborhood, just a half-mile or so up Garrison Boulevard,
next to the train crossing. Sheldon had a wagon, which we pulled along behind
us to the icehouse. There, we could buy a fifty-pound block of ice for about a
quarter. We managed to load it onto the wagon, and we covered it with an old
bath towel, to reduce the rate of melting. If it was a hot enough day to sell
snowballs, it was also hot enough for a lot of melting to occur before we got
the ice back to our snowball stand.
The Health Department played no
role in insuring the safety of our customers. The block of ice sat on the rusty
bed of the wagon. The towel had stains on it of questionable origins. We did
not wash our hands. We did not know it at the time, but we were doing our part
toward building up immunity to germs among the kids in our neighborhood.
Our place of business was in the
alley behind Sheldon’s house on Cold Spring Lane. An old card table held the
syrups and the paper “boats” that the snowball was served in. A paper cup held
the wooden spoons that we provided. When a customer approached, one of us
started shaving the ice block. The shaver was designed in such a way that the
newly shaved ice filled up a rectangular section of the shaver, and when that
was full, the ice was transferred directly into the rectangular paper boat.
This was passed on to the “pourer” who sprinkled the shaved ice with the chosen
syrup. After a brief argument with the customer (“More syrup.” “That’s all you
get for a nickel!”) the goods were handed over in exchange for the advertised
cost: “Snowballs, 5¢. Chocolate syrup, 2¢ extra. Chocolate and marshmallow,
10¢.”
On a hot day we sold most of the
ice block that had not melted away. On Thursday evenings, we had our “game
business.” A bunch of churches in our neighborhood had banded together to
create a softball league, Each church had a team, and they played against one
another on Thursday evenings throughout the summer. On the playground at PS 69
there was room for three games. That meant six teams, about sixty players and a
lot of people cheering for them: and a big market for our tasty frozen
offerings. So, right after an early dinner we rushed to the icehouse, bought a
fresh block, and hurried to the ball fields.
Since we were not at our stand,
we had to transport all of our supplies to the field. We loaded a big cardboard
box with syrups, paper trays and spoons. The box sat atop the ice block, and
one of us held the box in place while the other pulled the loaded wagon across
the bumpy ground. We found a place to the side of the infield and began
advertising.
“Snowballs, just a nickel,”
Sheldon would call. He was not as shy as I was, so he had the “caller’s” job.
Soon a crowd would gather. We would scrape and pour, scrape and pour, until the
crowd dwindled and their attention returned to the game. At that point we would
load the wagon and move quickly across the school grounds to the next game.
After we had made our sales at the third game, we went back to the first one
where we could catch latecomers.
When the games were over and the
last of the possible customers had left the field, we loaded up for the trip
back to Sheldon’s garage, where we kept our supplies. Our pockets were heavy
with change. We emptied the evening’s “take” onto the ground and divided it up.
If one of us had purchased syrups or paper trays that day, half his expenses
were paid from the profits of the other. That night, before I got into bed, I
added the day’s proceeds to a big jar on my bureau. I could see the jar fill
from one day to the next, and I felt very satisfied that I could earn money in
this way.
There are no photographs of me
and Sheldon operating our snowball business. No permanent record of us
scraping, dragging ice blocks, stuffing our pockets with pennies and nickels and
dimes. But I remember the things we did, and I can put the memories together
and make my own movie. It’s a little like watching something taking place on
the other side of a fence, glimpsing the events through the narrow cracks
between boards.
Persistence of memory.
In memorium: Sheldon Mechanick
November 5, 1936— November 9, 2005.
