Seventh Street

Tuesday, September 10, 1946 was an unremarkable day by most standards, but it brought with it the gift of life for my virtually hairless premature self. I arrived a month to the day earlier than expected. Close friends and my few employers will tell you that’s the only time I’ve ever been early for anything in my life, but don’t believe them. There had to have been at least one other time…

As a baby, I had the whitest blonde hair this side of Johnny and Edgar Winter, with big blue eyes, a moon face, and a perpetual smile. Until I reached the age of three, my folks and I lived in an erstwhile apartment on the second floor of the house where my father’s older sister and her husband lived. Aunt Matie was a sweet, generous woman whose five-foot-two-inch, 105 pound frame was an oddity in a family of big people. Dad’s other older siblings, Harold, whom we called Uncle Baldy, and Pearl both hovered around the 300 pound mark, and Dad was no lightweight, either. My brother and I would both eventually fall prey to this unfortunate inheritance…

Seventh Street in Niagara Falls, NY was a much different place in the late 1940’s and 1950’s than it is today. My aunt worked as a counter clerk in Delaney and Thorne’s drugstore across the street, on the southwest corner of Seventh and Pine Avenue. Diagonally opposite the drugstore was Kirby’s grocery, where we did our food shopping. Both were neighborhood stores, where the owners knew their customers by name, made deliveries in times of need, and carried accounts for their regular customers. The family dentist’s office was right next door, and the family doctor was right around the corner. Cars and televisions were not yet a reality of life. Home entertainment revolved around the old Philco floor model radio that sat in the living room, and my 78 rpm record player that cranked out endless repetitions of songs by Gene Autry and Burl Ives. Even as a pre-schooler, music was an essential part of my life…

We eventually moved into a second floor flat on the corner of Seventh and Walnut, two short blocks away, that was owned by an Armenian family. My mother’s parents lived three blocks further down Seventh Street, and her brother’s family and her maternal aunt and uncle shared a duplex just around the corner from them. My dad’s father had been killed in a traffic accident when dad was young, and his mother passed away when I was yet an infant, so Aunt Matie and Uncle Lorne, whose only son, Jack was away at college, became surrogate grandparents to me. I loved them dearly…

The men in the family mostly worked worked shift work amid the stench of the chemical plants that made the air almost unbreathable along the Niagara River, just a stone’s throw from the Falls. Grandpa, Uncle Art, and Uncle Marty all worked at the Carborundum plant; my dad and Uncle Lorne both worked for DuPont. My grandfather, from whom I inherited my musical talent, later would sever two fingers on his left hand in an industrial accident. Though they were later reattached, the affected digits were stiff and lifeless, and permanently curled, making standard guitar fingerings an impossibility; he did, however, continue to play Hawaiian guitar until he passed away in 1981 at the age of 87. My dad had twice been burned head-to-toe by liquid Sodium, which singed the hair from his head and left him looking like a white-eyed lobster. Of all his exposed skin, only the area covered by safety goggles remained unburned…

Better living – through chemistry…

Somewhere around the age of four or five, my folks had taken me to see a movie about DuPont’s history. I remember being terrified by a seemingly endless series of chemical plant explosions, but I don’t remember much else. At that young age, I knew exactly what I didn't want to do with my life...

More than most kids, my life as a child revolved around my mother. Dad's shift work schedule negated any kind of normal family life; if he wasn't away at work, he was often sleeping after working the midnight-to-eight shift. My favorite memory from this period is of some autumn nights after he had gotten his first car. He had rented a parking space in a garage a couple of blocks away, but he and I would first drive around Goat Island so that I could see the colored lights shining on the Falls. It was a little thing, but it meant a lot...

In addition to an appreciation of music, the years on Seventh Street also was the origin my lifelong love affair with trains. The tracks leading into the Erie Railroad's Tenth Street yard passed under both Pine and Walnut a short block away, and I spent many hours watching the Erie and C&O freights as they arrived and departed. From my grandparent's yard at the far end of Seventh Street, I could watch the steam engines shifting passenger cars in the terminal, and see the New York Central and Lehigh Valley trains come and go. I recall riding once to Buffalo with my grandmother on the Central's Beeliner, a self-propelled rail diesel car, and I remember well the sparks that flew from the overhead catenary as the Niagara Junction Railway's diminutive electric motors switched cars among the smog-shrouded chemical plants...

Socially, I guess I was a bit of a misfit. My playmates, as I recall, were mostly girls a bit older than myself. One girl in particular took a dislike to me. I never knew why, but in retrospect, that early rejection stayed with me for years. Finally, as I was entering first grade, a new family moved ito the house across the street. Their two daughters, Brenda and Alicia, were my age and a year younger, respectively, and we quickly became friends and playmates. The friendship almost bore disastrous consequences one January day on 1953. We attended Fifth Street school, an ancient stone building a mere two blocks away down busy Walnut Avenue. On the way home, I spotted them walking on the other side of the street and darted between two parked cars, intending to dash across the street to join them. Then I saw the oncoming Cadillac...

I turned back; the driver tried to brake, but the next thing I knew I felt the impact, and found myself hurtling over the front fender en route to an abrupt landing on the hard pavement. I found out later that my mother was watching from the living room window and saw the impact. She handed my newborn brother Billy to Lynn, the teenaged girl who lived downstairs, and ran to the scene of the accident. I remember being rushed to the doctor's office in the back seat of the car that had hit me, but fortunately, all I suffered was a tender derriere and a sprained ankle. It was a long time before I'd cross any steet if there was a car anywhere in view after that lesson...

A couple of old photos come to mind. In the first, I'm about three years old and dressed in a sailor suit; it was the only time in my life when I would be happy to wear a uniform. In the other, taken a year or two later near my grandfather's house, I'm dressed in a black and silver cowboy suit and mounted on a black and white pony. There's a similar photo in a Buddy Holly biography. Well, alright...

A few months after the accident, we said goodbye to Seventh Street, although we'd return many times during the ensuing years to visit Aunt Matie and Uncle Lorne, who continued to live there until my aunt's untimely death of a cerebral hemorrhage. My grandparents and my Uncle Marty's family had both recently relocated to the Tonawandas, and my folks had purchased the newly built house not far away that would be my home at various times for twenty-five years of my life...

In 1997, I returned to the old neighborhood for the first time in many years. The houses where we once lived are outwardly still in good shape, but the neighborhood has definitely declined, especially the blocks south of Walnut Avenue. The block where my grandfather's house once stood is now taken up by the parking lot of the convention center; the downtown section and the rail lines are all gone, as are the steam engines and the electric motors. Even the chemical plants have fallen on leaner times; the air along Buffalo Avenue no longer burns the eyes and smells like rotten eggs. The family-owned businesses were slowly driven out by various corporate chains who, in turn, abandoned the area as its racial and ethnic mixture changed...

Niagara Falls remains a site of natural wonder and man-made clutter. On the American side, high rise hotels, a near-vacant shopping mall and tacky souvenir stands stand only a broad avenue's width from urban decay. Across the Rainbow Bridge, wax museums and greasy restaurants mingle with more tacky souvenir stands, high rise hotels, a gambling casino, and other tourist traps. Yet, there does seem to be a better quality of life on the other side of the Niagara - a gentler pace, a more forgiving attitude. But then again, I'm an unrepentant dreamer. I've been called a lot worse things, and I certainly would be in the years that followed our departure from Seventh Street...