By Doris
One of my earliest memories is being behind a couch when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I think we were playing hide and seek. I was five years old, having been born on March 5, 1936. There was a great air of excitement but I was never frightened, probably because I didn’t really understand what was happening. Everyday life continued for us. I played with my friend Dale Rowley, who was the little boy who lived in the magical house on the corner. There was a fish pond and a grape arbor and it was a fun place to play.
Every Christmas Eve my father dressed up as Santa Claus and delivered presents to us. Because we were so excited we never realized my father was missing, or suspected he was Santa. Our Christmas tree was beautiful and I loved the tinsel strands that were hung one by one. Underneath the tree was a village, complete with little mirror ponds and tiny animals.
I had an older sister Marian, born in 1930, and a younger sister Carol born in 1941. My mother was Ethel Galm Karg and my father was Herbert William Karg, starting the all-German tradition carried on when I married Grandpa, Don Lidke!
Foods in particular stand out when I look back at those early years: making tiny apple turnovers (a very popular dessert at the time) from apple pie remnants with my mother, pineapple upside down cake (who would bake a cake upside down?), Sunday night waffles that were my father’s specialty, and the ever popular tomato soup and crackers for lunch. Getting new shoes was an adventure because you got to put your feet in a fluoroscope machine and could look down and see all of your toes and learn if the shoes were big enough. Turns out too many x-rays were not good for you, so they were discontinued. Fortunately I still have all of my toes, so far! My love of the beach began when I was little as every summer we went to Belmar, at the Jersey shore where it was fun to run in and out of the waves. There was a great merry go round at Asbury Park. There are many good memories of those years for which I am grateful.
In 1942 we lost my mother. She went into the hospital to have a hysterectomy due to some problems. It was a fairly commonplace operation at the time, but you were hospitalized for a couple of weeks. She was about to come home when bleeding started and despite transfusions, the doctors couldn’t save her. It was very hard to understand at six. My grandma, Louise Karg who had been a widow for many years, came immediately to live with us. She was a wonderful lady, who at age 70 came to take care of three girls, ages one, six and twelve. My father was remarkable, carrying on with his job at the bank in Newark NJ. where he worked for 45 years. I worked at the same bank for seven years in personnel, now known as Human Resources, before Grandpa and I were married in 1960.
Life changed again in 1943 when my dad married my stepmother, Joyce Miller, and my brother Herbie was born in 1944. In 1945 we moved to South Orange, where Grandma had $10,000 that she gave my dad to buy our house. That was a huge amount of money in those days and we got a three story house with four bedrooms. So now begins my life in South Orange.