PA to NJ - Part 2

These pieces from 1958 aren’t as clear as the other pieces…
Maybe it’s because we would be moving away from Grandmom and Grandpop and that house and neighborhood that was so familiar and held so many memories?
Maybe it was because we were about to begin a whole brand new adventure, someplace unknown and in a brand new house?
It was only a short drive across the bridges, but we were in a different state and that made it seem real far away… Grandpop didn’t drive a car and we would go visit… but it wouldn’t be the same.

We actually moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, in August 1958.
Any summer vacation we ever had was done in August as that’s when Westinghouse shut down for two weeks; that’s where my dad worked and that’s when he took a vacation, those were the rules.

So it was moving day…
All that time I hadn’t be allowed to go in the garage in Clifton Heights, it was because my dad was building a trailer in there for the move.
The first time I saw the trailer, it was already hooked up to my dad’s Chevy.
It had a black shiny metal frame over two wheels and the sides were made of wood that swooped down a little once it got past the wheels. The sides were a lighter brown and the edges were a darker brown.
I know Uncle Franny had come over to help with the move and also Uncle Ed.
There were some other people there too, but I don’t remember much more then that. I sat on the front porch and stayed out of the way. I don’t remember where my brothers or sisters were, or even Grandmom and Grandpop.
I wasn’t sure if I liked this whole moving idea very much.

It took two or three trips even using the trailer, and then it was our turn.
We loaded up in the car, waved our good-byes and headed off to New Jersey.

We pulled up in the driveway, which was new… there were sidewalks now and the piles of dirt were all gone and everything was all leveled out. Two small trees had been planted in front of the house, between the sidewalk and the street and a third tree in a similar position on the other side of the driveway.
There were still a lot boxes, pretty much everywhere and the trailer was parked in the backyard at the end of the driveway.

There were two types of houses in this new neighborhood, one was called an A-frame and the other was called an L-frame. The L-frame I understood, because the house looked like the letter L. I never figured out why the other was called an A-frame, because it didn’t look like the letter A.
Ours was an L-frame. It had a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and three bedrooms with a full basement. The back bedroom was for the boys, the center bedroom was for the girls and the biggest on the front end was for mom and dad.
They all pretty much looked the same, with shutters on the windows facing the street and pinstriped siding in, blue, green or red on top of gray. Ours was red, but because of the gray, from the street, it looked more like pink.

The development of Military Drive had only begun a year earlier and there we were standing in the sand, clay and dust of it all. You couldn’t get more, small town then this!

Of course with it being August and September right around the corner and school starting, the move, the unpacking, the registrations all got kicked into high gear. It might have been just possible, that my dad was glad to get back to work, just to take things down a notch or two.
For us kids, we helped where we could, but were more under foot then help. That was okay… There would be the park to explore, the river to walk along...
There were new neighbors: The Jefferies, the Reeds, the Dandro’s and the O’Leary’s...
[I don’t think any of them are there anymore]

I have to hand it to mom and dad… within a short period of time, the house was set up, discipline had been restored, school was about to start and we were in our new home.