Memories of a Camden Christmas; Priceless

By Anne Murphy

Black Friday is the quintessential shopping day. But instead of  going to a mall, my older brother and I time travel back to our childhood as we make our annual trek to East Camden, the place of our youth.

Last year, we agreed to tour South Camden first. I was nervous about detours - the gray landscape and the neighborhood's reputation for drug-dealing is so different from what I remember as a child.


First, we traversed Mt. Ephraim Avenue.

"St. Joe's 'Polish' High School is no more," my brother informed me. "It's Dayton Manor nursing home now, but I remember the Skateland skating rink and a bowling alley across the street - a kid's paradise"

All I saw was a scraggly vacant lot, a boarded-up building and two cemeteries. 

On to Broadway, known for its movie theaters and great shopping. This once impressive mile-long promenade of fine jewelry and fashionable clothing has shrunk to two blocks of on-the-cheap shopping. The Roxy, Princess, Lyric and Midway Theatres are gone.  McCrory's 5 & 10 is the only remnant of Broadway's heyday.

"Kids got their school clothes over there at Lester's, now gone. Next stop, the invisible Lit Bros. at the corner of Broadway and Federal Streets," my driver clowned. "Everyone shopped at this Times Square of Camden."   
                                                                                                               
 A turn onto Cooper Street made me nostalgic. We crossed Federal Street Bridge into East Camden.

"It doesn't look so bad," I said, pushing a lilt into my voice. A spiffy, yellow awning over a food market signaled us for a turn onto Grand Street. I smiled at our old duplex on the corner.

Pristine white doors and even whiter aluminum-framed windows made me proud. Many of the row houses are graced with white wrought-iron vertical strips.

"Pretty," I said.

"Security," Pat said.

Some owners are trying. A white picket fence down the street is another rose in the thorns of one of our nation's poorest cities.

In the '50s, this was a working-class neighborhood.  Patrick and I attended nearby St. Joe's Elementary School. These memories carried me back to a Christmas morning long ago.  
                                

Awakened by the scent of Mom's freshly baked bread, 12-year-old Patrick, in his shoebox-sized moccasins, padded into the living room after me. I reached up to our red stockings on the cardboard fireplace with its pasted-on hooks. A Snow White watch and an orange protruded from the red fleece. Sticky candies inside had stuck to the fabric.

Pat unwrapped his old toy rifle which Dad had painted green for Christmas. He knew it had been merely painted, but it looked swell.

He had overheard Mom and Dad agonizing two nights earlier that the Sears & Roebuck catalog order hadn't arrived. Pat had gone with them on the previous Saturday as they trudged along Cooper Street in Camden, from one small loan company to another, but the Household Finance loan had come through too late to pay the Sears bill.

So Dad made a tool chest for his son with leftover lumber. Pat opened the lid again and again so he could run his hands over the finely sanded wood, and he inhaled the aroma of raw wood. He clicked and unclicked the two front locks and examined the hinges on the back.

Under the tree, my walker doll from the previous Christmas looked like the catalog doll I had seen on the catalog's pages. Her strawberry hair was done up in long ringlets, and she had on the most beautiful black velvet dress I had ever seen.

Mom had used the long black velvet demonstration scarf from her house-party cosmetics business. Pat had watched her pedal away on the sewing machine until late in the evening, turning the velvet this way and that to stitch the fabric for a dress to make "Sally" new all over again.

With the little energy they had left, Mom played a few Christmas songs on her spinet piano while Dad chimed in on his black wooden flute.

            Silver bells, silver bells - it's Christmas time in the city.

I relive that beautiful Christmas when this time of year arrives. On Black Friday, when the entire country jams the stores, my brother and I drive to see the street, the apartment building and our roots.

We visit an era long before the neighborhood changed so drastically. Pat and I go to Grand Street to remember that Christmas 50 years ago.