Exploring the New Neighborhood: Step Three

When we moved to the wood framed ranch home on Lancaster Avenue, a place my parents would call home for the next 29 years, the most exciting place was the basement. Dad took us down and I grabbed my scooter, a predecessor to the skateboard, and my sister pulled my baby brother in our little red wagon, and we raced on the cement floors speeding around the metal poles holding up our new sanctuary. That summer we explored all the new construction sites. It was fantastic watching the bulldozers dig immense holes. Then, the cement trucks came and poured those slick smooth basement floors. Next, the masons put up the cinder block walls on all four sides of those holes. Finally, the carpenters with their aprons brimming with nails and their loud whining circular saws would slice boards and nail them together right before our mesmerized eyes. Just before they knocked down an old shack of a house to make way for the new elementary school we were to attend in the fall my cousin Jimmy and I went inside the deserted tenement. I can’t remember everything we found inside, but the one thing that sticks in my memory was a stack of old newspapers from the 1940s. One had a picture of some original Milwaukee Brewers. They were a minor league team in the American Association. Still, the picture that had the greatest impact on my young impressionable mind was a caricature of Uncle Sam holding the hair of a slant-eyed young man with a bruised face and stretched out neck in one hand and the other hand curled into a huge fist. At the time I don’t think I knew what racism was, and I certainly hadn’t heard of a concept such as politically correct, but I knew even then something wasn’t quite right. After all, Jimmy and I were both glad the headlines, Yanks Whip Japs, had proven to be true. He felt he had more to do with this victory since his father had been in the navy fighting in the Pacific while my dad had been in the air corps fighting in Europe. Our young patriotic souls were filled with pride as our explorations came to an end, and it would be years before either of us realized the insensitivity not only the drawing but also the derogatory word held for a whole lot of Americans. Years later, a woman I worked with in California whose family had been in the U.S. for more generations than my own told me how her family moved to a remote part of Idaho to avoid going to an internment camp. Like I said, those were simpler times. Please feel free to share or comment.