41 Bridge Street: a memory

The names are not too original, but they accurately provide a description of the streets. Bridge Street, a short dead end with a narrow one lane bridge. Plant Street has the plant, what use to be the offices and change room for the miners. The Sterling Parkway however pushes the creativity of the best of marketing firm. The roughly paved road is not any longer than a tenth of a mile in length and wraps through what use to be the back side of the mine’s parking lot. Two of the three building on the Parkway are low income rental units with what looks like a Toys-R-Us explosion in the back yard—a scattering of tricycles, blocks, doll houses, baseball bats, basketballs…. Across the hardly traveled road is a weedy field with stately large oaks, a place that was once a well kept park in front of the old Sterling Hill Zinc Mine. It was on Bridge Street that my grandfather and grandmother Perez raised three boys, Manuel, Joseph (Pep) and Ralph (Babe). The house was a modest, square box with three bedrooms and a kitchen that surrounded a small living and dining room. The bathroom was an outhouse. For migrant workers from Mexico the street was home and became known as Mexico. For me, it was a small house on a crowded street of similar houses, with tiny front yards and nothing but the space for a driveway between each building. The neighborhood spoke Spanish and the place in northern New Jersey seemed as foreign and as far away as Mexico itself when I was a little kid..


As a kid I had a sense for my heritage, even if I never did learn to speak my father’s native tongue. In those days, the goal of parents who had babies born after The War was to provide a better life for your children through education. For my parents, especially my dad, better meant English, so he never taught us and I never heard him speak it unless he was talking to his mother or father. Despite never learning the language I was proud of the fact that my grandparents came from Mexico and equally thankful. Years later when I visited the border town of Tijuana, I was never so happy to get my ass back into the US and appreciative the fact that my grandfather was willing to leave his home in order to make a better life for his family.

My parents took my brother, sister and me to New Jersey to spend a couple of weeks each summer with our grandparents. As a very little kid I learned I had two grandparents. I did not know why, not realizing each one of my parent’s had a set of parents. I remember thinking of them as Big Grandma and Little Grandma, a designation derived from their heights. Big Grandma was a disciplinarian, but little Grandma could not be understood due to her broken English. Both grandmothers were scary enough to encourage me to attempt to build an airplane to fly home. I never got past assembling my building materials: a metal table for wings, an enamel wash pan for the fuselage, a wire clothes line and a few clothes pins somehow would make the engine.

There were times I had to comfort my little sister who was eighteen months younger, that soon we would be going home—counting the days on the calendar that hung in our grandparent’s bedroom.

There were strange things in the house. Even though the house had indoor plumbing when I was a kid, there was a chamber pot under the bed. Fear and apprehension faded as I grew older I learned to behave and became more familiar with the broken language spoken on Bridge Street, a more realistic approach to adapting to summers in New Jersey than building an airplane.

I learned a lot of things on Bridge Street. On the front porch I debated the very real possibilities that Santa Claus did exist. My older brother argued for his existence with a neighborhood boy who had concrete proof that the fat man was bogus. His proof: he stayed up all night and saw his parents distribute toys under the tree. I am sure my brother Mike, who was six years older, knew damn well that eight reindeer could not fly pulling a sleigh so a character named Saint Nick could climb down chimney after chimney with a sack full of toys. Yet for the sake of his two little sisters, one teetering on finding the truth and the other still clutching to the myth like Linus to his blanket, he defended his position. My older brother!

Mike didn’t always look after his two little sisters. When the boys came to pitch pennies on the back yard concrete slab, he would victoriously capture our pennies along with the older boys. Once we lost our pennies Robin and I could not play and we had to scram. That was until it became known that my little sister was gifted with an unusual amount of strength and could beat up boys twice as old as she was. Giving Robin her respect was done out of admiration and fear. No self-respecting boy wanted to tangle with and lose to a little girl. The older boys might have tolerated us hanging around them, but that didn’t mean that had to play with us.

Down the road from the house were sand hills, as big as any found in the Sahara Desert. I don’t know why there was so much sand and what role it played in the mine, but I do know that Bridge Street was once called Dump Street. The mining waste was once dumped along the sides of the street and later company housing was built on it to house the labor force from Mexico.

Going to the sand pits was a treat. When we had permission, we went to play King of the Hill, or just spent the morning trudging up the mounds of sand to “glaciate” back down.

If we were not in the sand hills, we were playing in the creek under the bridge. The boys caught and tormented snapping turtles the size of basketballs and more cantankerous than any truck driver without his dinner. A more mundane afternoon was spent fishing for nothing, roller skating down the street (metal wheels against asphalt left our legs tingling at the end of the day) and waiting for the ice cream truck. When we heard in the distance the musical bells, we would beg grandma for a nickel so that we could buy a Fudgesicle. If we had been more enterprising we had saved our allowances for this occasion. However, what we hadn’t lost in pitching pennies was spent on a raft rental when we took the once a year trip to Sandy Hook on the Atlantic Ocean.

It was in New Jersey that I fell in love with I Love Lucy. Ricky Ricardo was like my dad and Lucy was like my mom – a marriage of mixed cultures. We did not have a TV back home, so watching Soupy Sales, American Bandstand and Bonanza at my grandparent’s house was a treat. I saw my first color TV in New Jersey. The peacock was awesome!

I went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. In the back seat of my uncle’s car I listened to Santa Claus reports from the radar stations in the frozen north. I saw chickens lay eggs behind the next door neighbor’s house and learned to stay away from a plant called itch weed. We collected comets—melted iron ore—from the driveway and gathered fool’s gold from the stream. And in the evening, grandma served hot fresh tortillas and tamales—back then few gringos knew about these things. We slathered the home made tortillas with real butter (Mom used nothing but oleo) and laughed as we ate holes in the flat bread. My uncle taught us Spanish during those meals.

These memories floated around me as delicately as a milkweed drifts in the wind on an autumn afternoon. I walked down Bridge Street and the present melted into the past. I heard a distant laughter of kids playing down the street, neighbors mowing their lawns, men working on their cars. The sounds of the community, Spanish and English mixed in the air. The whistle of the mine, signaling the end of the work day shrilled from high above the town. I was here now and I was there forty years ago.

My aunt and uncle were not expecting me, so they were both surprised to see me walking down Bridge Street just like my grandfather had done at the end of the day, coming home from the mine.