It was sometime in the early 1960’s. My father, as he often did, drove me to the Pinebrook Auction. For those unfamiliar with the Pinebrook Auction, it was a large concrete structure where live auctions took place as well as where merchants sold their wares to the public. In addition, to the auction itself, there was a wonderful ice cream store called O’Dowd’s that made enormous sundaes as well as Kiddie Land which even had a small roller coaster. It was a kid’ dream and people came from all around to enjoy this unique slice of Americana.
I always made a beeline for comic books and to this day, I can remember the smell of wood shavings on the floor and the unmistakable aroma of the kosher pickles in large white plastic barrels. The smells, the juxtaposition of everything haphazardly arranged, the smells of different foods, all made for a cornucopia of smells and sights that was pure Delancey Street in the suburbs..
On one such trip to the ‘Auction’ sometime in the early 1960’s, I was at my usual place devouring all of the Spiderman comics, when I noticed a little girl a few feet away, reading the Archie comics with the same relish that I held for ‘Spidey’ my first super-hero. I couldn’t of been more than seven or eight years old at the time and this little girl couldn’t be much older than five or six, but having no sisters it is my first conscious recollection of the opposite sex, other than my mom. I glanced at her, and she glanced back. I did not know it at the time, but I had just laid eyes on the person I would spend my life with.
Flash forward a decade later. It is 1973 and I needed a part-time job while going to college. I had worked at my uncle’s supermarket since I was about fourteen and I wanted a change. My Dad told me that Rockaway Sales was looking for people, so I went down, applied and was hired. Right about the same time, a 17-year-old girl, living in the next town over, also was looking for part-time work. She was a junior in high school and was saving to go away to college. Her Dad told her that Rockaway Sales was hiring, so she applied and was also hired.
Shortly after starting work there, I was walking down the toy aisle and there was this girl bending down straightening out the boxes of toys. She was wearing a brown smock. She had long brown hair, parted down the middle and she stopped me in my tracks. The energy in that aisle changed unmistakably and the feeling was palpable.
The job only lasted about six months for both of us. The two ‘managers’ were lecherous old men who if they tried to do today, what they pulled back then, would probably still in prison. Today, we call it sexual harassment but back then women were forced to play along. This young girl working her first job and totally innocent to the ways of the world was ill-equipped to handle these two guys and when she wouldn’t play along, they fired her.
On her last day of work, I asked her out on a date. The restaurant was in Fairfield. It was one of those chain restaurants, long since gone. It was called Charley Brown’s or Charley’s Uncle, something like that; its only significance was that was where I had my first date with my wife. I soon realized, however, that a nineteen year-old dating a seventeen year old is much different than two people dating in their 20’s. Minus the job, we had very little to talk about and much of dinner was eaten in silence. The next night sitting in the Verona Inn, I asked my good friend if he thought I should ask her out again and pursue things. Sitting there with his beer and cigarette, his words of wisdom cut through the smokey bar with the authority and certainty that only a drunk friend in a dive bar at 1:30 in the morning would give. The advice was quick and to the point. Dump her.
And so, I did. About a year later, my friends and I were walking through Willowbrook Mall when she and her friends were doing the same thing. As was the case that first day in Rockaway Sales, I was thunderstruck. She was now eighteen and had transitioned from a girl to a woman. I asked her out and thank God, she said yes and as they say, the rest is history.
We married in 1981 on the same day that the Pinebrook Auction burned to the ground.
