WALT TRIZNA: GROWING UP IN NEWARK

                          GROWING UP IN NEWARK

My youth and early childhood were spent in Newark, New Jersey.  Since then, I have traveled the country, lived in either coast or in the Midwest, yet never left Newark totally behind.  There is always a hint of Newark in my attitude, my approach to life.

 Life changes, but the experiences that mold us come early instilling values we carry within us.  It is with these values that we set out on this great adventure called life.  My values were born on the gritty streets of Newark, New Jersey during the fifties and sixties.  Life has molded me since then, but in my memories, there is still that young boy wandering down Newark’s city streets wondering what the future will bring.

This is a remembrance of my life as a young boy growing into manhood and of my hometown from 1947, the year of my birth, until I was nearly twenty-one. The story is of a family of six living in a two-bedroom cold water flat and just getting by. 

I grew up in the ‘Down Neck” section of Newark, although I have no idea how the area got its name, but it may have something to do with the shape of the Passaic River as it passes by my area of Newark.  As in any city, there are associated with sections of the town names whose meaning or significance has been long lost.  My mother was born in a section of Newark that was called ‘The Island” although there was no water nearby.

Newark never seemed like such a bad place to me. When you have experienced nothing else, you have no means of comparison. I have returned to the area of Newark I once called home and walked the gritty streets of my old neighborhood with its brick storefronts and multiple family dwellings and the feelings of despair, surrounding me, were blocked out.  The feeling of home dispelled, from my eyes, the visage of a poor and troubled city.  No matter how destitute Newark becomes, it is the place where my young hopes were many and my dreams unlimited.  Shortly after we were married, I took my wife Joni on a walk through the ‘Down Neck’ area of my youth, showing her the house where I once lived, where the tree used to stand under which I read as a child on hot lazy summer afternoons.  And all she could see was filth and decay.  She could not imagine the little boy sitting on a stump, under a tree lost in the world of Treasure Island or Moby Dick, books that brought promise and adventure to a young ‘Down Neck’ boy, but his ghost was there for me.

I still think of that small boy there sitting beneath a tree.  Because, for better or for worse, what and who I am today was, in part, formed by what I learned beneath that tree, in that house and that Newark neighborhood.  Where we begin life is beyond our control.  What we do with that start is up to us, using the lessons our surroundings provide to improve the life we have been given.

I hope to explore three levels with this writing.  First, remember what Newark was physically like and the memories that go hand in hand with growing up in a city that has had a constant black eye, a city whose reputation is known and not envied.  I will recall the streets, the people and the events that make memories of what they are.  The second is the emotions, hopes and dreams that were fostered by my youth, by the conditions under which I lived.  The third and most important reason for this text is what I see in the world that surrounds me today.  I am a quiet person, an observer of the world around me.  It is these observations of today with the memories of yesterday that will fill these pages.  I hope they kindle some memories you may carry, memories neglected but not forgotten.