Atlantic City

There is a saying that life is a journey and any journey begins with the first step. Life is a journey that begins at birth and ends in death and the space between is the tale I’ll tell in this chronicle.
The chronicle that unfolds follows my life from my birth in 1932 until the present. To give some perspective, I was born during the depression to Earle and Gwendolyn Robinson, in this resort city, that was a summer destination for the east coast wealthy.
My mother was born in Lynchburg, Va and was going to Glassboro Teachers College and my father was born in West Grove, Pa and going to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. They met while he was working in AC as a bellhop one summer.
My grandfather, Papa, had come here as a baker from Philadelphia
years before. He ran away from home in Hampton , VA after finding his older brother had been lynched.
I n Philadelphia, he got a job as a helper in a German baker shop. Eventually over the next 10 years, the baker taught him the trade along with some elementary German.






Papa was a story teller and told me stories almost from birth, using props and dialect to hold me spellbound. He and my mother essentially raised me since my father was in college and later in medical school.
We were an extended family Papa , Momma, Uncle Clarence, Aunt Mina, their kids Junior, Billy and Evelyn and Aunt Mad who taught school in DC and came to stay every summer. We all were crammed in a little house on Ohio Ave, but none the worse for our plight.






Atlantic City, then as now, is like an elaborate stage show. The finery is gaudy and brassy and in the wings behind the curtains are the dirty crumbling props. The boardwalk, beach and the elaborate hotels were the stage and the Black neighborhoods hidden behind a racial curtain. They even had a designated colored beach called “chicken bone beach”. I’ll relate to that later.
I really don’t remember having any interaction with whites as a child since my world centered around a segregated society, and I took it for granted that stores, schools, movies, night clubs were black and the norm and didn’t realize there was a different world I was not part of .

Stanley Homes Village






We moved from dwelling to dwelling rooming at times or cramped together with my aunt and uncle’s family until 1937, when my mother was able to qualify for an apartment in the Stanley Homes Village projects. These units were brand new and my aunt and uncle also secured a unit for their family. “The Village” was one of the first public housing experiments in the country and the tenants were overjoyed to have such a nice dwelling. The lay out included court yards and grassy play areas with designated trash houses, making it a place that everyone took pride in living there.







My Papa rose every morning at 3AM for work. In cold weather he would put layers of newspaper inside his coat and shoes to blunt the icy winds blowing off the ocean and trudge to work as a master baker at one of the Grande Dame hotels on the boardwalk.
First, the breakfast sweets and then the breads for the day and after a mid morning nap, start the dessert pastries, pies and cakes for dinner. This was a daily routine.
He came home around 4pm and my job was to run to the corner store and get him an evening paper, 2 cigars for a nickle and what was left from the dime he gave me I would get some penny candy.
When I was about 5 years old, my cousins who were like 13, 11 and 9 decided to go see Papa at the hotel where he worked. The hotel was a magnificent structure, a kind of replica of the Empire State Building, “ The Claridge”.
Naturally we had to go to the service entry in the back. A man said “what you children want”? We asked if we could see our Papa. He said “whose that!”, we said Mister Papa. Finally my oldest cousin realized that maybe they didn’t call him Papa so he said William Herbert
He said “Oh! Bill, he’s back there”, pointing to a dark corridor. We wound our way through the bowel of the hotel amid hissing steam pipes and strings of dim light bulbs to a dungeon like room with a cot. There stretched out on the cot in his baker apron lay Papa napping.
We all yelled “Papa” and he was startled awake and said “what are you children doing here” clearly embarrassed “ “ We wanted to see where you worked” Sternly he sent us home. Later I realized he didn’t want his grandkids to see him in a servile position. And we never again went to the “Grande” hotel.



This is a poem I wrote about my papa in 1984


He had a chiseled face
Roman or Indian
Choose
He was both!

He had the bearing of a
Caesar or Chief
Choose
He was both!

He had a way with rich and poor
He was neither,
yet
He was both!

I miss him in a way I cannot describe
He was my friend and
my Papa
He was always both!




There are so many stories about AC as it later became known

Uncle Clarence and Blue

.Here is one. My Uncle Clarence was a milkman, who worked for
Kligermanns dairy driving a milk wagon. The wagon was pulled by a horse named “Blue”, who knew the route and every delivery stop. He would start at 3AM and finished about 8Am. When the weather was mild Jr, Bill and me ( Burley) would help him deliver his route. We had all the orangeade, chocolate milk and sweet buns we wanted. Uncle Clarence would nap and Blue would plod the route and we would run back and forth delivering orders and picking up empties. When the route was done he would wake up and say “Barn Blue” and Blue would trot, literally gallop, back to the barn. This was a around 1937 or 8. Sometime later the dairy got rid of the milk wagons and got milk trucks and Uncle Clarence couldn’t sleep his route with us doing the work anymore. The modern age was coming for us all. How sad.


What we did as kids!






In any part of this country and in every country in the world, if you leave children to their own devices, they will be creative sometimes dangerously so in finding an outlet for their energy and curiosity.
We kids in AC were no exception. We had an ocean, a beach, the back bay and the meadows that encompassed us and gave us a unique playground.
No one actually taught us to swim we just went in the water and bobbed up and down letting the waves toss us to and fro. The life guards would blow their whistles to wave us in or warn us of rip tides. Once a current swept me out almost to the end of Heinz Pier and up against the pilings and they came and got me. My arms and legs were covered with cuts from the barnacles on the pilings. Boy was I scared.
There was a board walkway laid on the sand partially down to the water. On any hot day, the sand where you had to walk where the boards ended, was like burning coals. Since we didn’t wear shoes or sandals, you either has to run fast or carry a towel to stand on until you could get to the water. If you ventured off “Chicken bone beach” the beach patrol would try to catch you, but to catch us was like trying to catch water in your fingers.
On the backside of AC were the meadows, a sprawling field of marsh grass and sand. Here we stalked each other like Indians with spears and bows and arrows and set traps and cooked stuff in fire pits we built in the sand. The city had a pile of cinders stored on a flat portion of the meadows that was used for the roads in winter.
It was 50-60 feet high and had a winding road up it’s slope for trucks to dump more cinders. This was our “mountain” and we would jump down to the soft pile of ash at the base or fight for king of the mountain. Give a kids a place and they will create a play ground.


When World War 2 started in Germany, before Pearl Harbor, the war news was shown at the movies on Saturdays which we stayed at all day and we were fascinated by paratroopers. We all decided that it would be neat to jump out of a plane and float down dangling from a parachute.
One day we found the top of a discarded beach umbrella and with
innate ingenuity we straightened the bent struts tying strings from them to the center pole to make it into a parachute, we thought!
There was about five of us and we need a place to jump from. What we found was a 2nd floor fire escape in back of an apartment building. Every one of us wanted to be first, so to be fair we flipped coins until the odd man could be chosen. The lucky jumper was “Bunky”. Grinning he climbed up to the landing and perched on the railing. And we shouted in unison “Jump”, “Jump” As soon as he left the rail the umbrella turned inside out and he fell like a stone on top of a bunch of trash cans, breaking a leg and an arm.
When our parents found out what had happened all us would have preferred to have been the one who jumped and hopefully to have died. A few years later a couple of us went on to jump from a real plane in a real war. ( not me, I was too young ).
Street games are a part of growing up and their origin is probably lost in history. But there was a game we played called “Scummy” that I have never seen anywhere except in AC. In later years, I would show my kids the game but I guess with their current interest it never caught on.

All one needed to play was a piece of chalk (swiped from school) and side walk or paved parking lot. Also you needed some disc to shoot like you do marbles which we made out of little round tins that samples of hair oil or Vicks salve came in about the size of checkers .Someone always had a piece of chalk and we all carried our shooter tin in our pocket with our marble sack We would draw out the play board and go at it. It was like a cross between marbles, croquet and shuffle board. We could play it all day anywhere and any time as long as there was light even the street lights. Great memories!