The Crash - 1953
By Charles Degelman
Part One
One spring, my father and I built a soap-box racer. This was no jalopy. This was a bona fide racing machine, constructed according to official specifications for the National Soap Box Derby, held each year in Akron, Ohio. My entry sported regulation wheels and an innovative brake system specially designed by my old man. Although I am sure he enjoyed building this racer with me, my father had another agenda: He had something to prove.
Years earlier, my mother had grown tired of living with workers in the projects of Jamaica Plain, an ancient Boston neighborhood. She wanted a front porch and her own mailbox. As it turned out, an old buddy from my father’s maritime past was bulldozing some acres of the New England woods to build an electronics factory 30 miles to the north and west of Boston. My old man was a self-taught electrical engineer, a gyro gearloose, an inventor. There was a job waiting for him once the factory was built.
So it was that we moved to a rural Massachusetts town before rural Massachusetts was called suburbia. Warrington, Massachusetts, boasted a population 5,000, a pretty place full of cows and apples, farmers and mechanics. The FBI called ahead. They wanted the citizens of Warrington to know that a family of Communists had wormed into their midst.
The gentleman who took the call from the FBI was a lawyer, the patriarch of a long-reigning, aristocratic family in Warrington with connections to the better banks of Boston and to the gold-domed State House of the Commonwealth. He was also chairman of the Warrington Board of Selectmen, the man who presided over the town’s quarterly town meeting.
One Saturday morning he came to pay us a visit; thought he’d drop by to get acquainted, just to get things started on a first-hand basis. After a pleasant chat full of anecdotes regarding the town’s history, this gentleman told us in no uncertain terms that he didn’t give a good goddamn what shape or color we were, nobody from Washington, D.C., or anywhere else for that matter was going to tell him what to think about another human being. Just so long as we abided by the laws of common sense, decency, and the town charter, we were welcome in Warrington, Massachusetts. And, by the way, he’d love to see us at the first Unitarian Church down on King Street, Sundays at 11 ayem. Give us an opportunity to meet some pretty damned fine people in town here, he said.
I was too young to remember much about that first visit, but I can recall that, soon after, we were invited over to a great white farmhouse overlooking a major turn on Bear Hill Road. It was summer and school was out. We ate lunch and watched the McCarthy hearings on the tiny blue screen of the Browns’ television set. The whole family was there.
Time was lopsided for a New England dairy farmer. Wilbur Brown was up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows and get the morning chores over with before he drove an early-morning milk route for Herpy’s Dairy. By early afternoon his work was done until it was time for evening milking. Mary Brown was a farmer’s wife for the 1950s: She helped with the chores, could drive a tractor and clear fouled baling twine out of the hay baler, kept the huge, rambling old farmhouse tidy and functioning, was active at the church and with the PTA, and paid a lot of attention to her husband, her kids, and her kids’ friends. Unless there was hay to get in, or a piece of machinery or a fence to repair, mid-days were easy, anarchistic times for them. Hence the lunchtime gatherings around the television set.
The Browns ate lunch as if feasts were an everyday occurrence. Later I learned they were everyday occurrences: Huge meals, even at lunch, grew like a stop-action marvel of plenty on the great round kitchen table. Mary frequently jumped up from her chair to fetch more dishes full of mashed potatoes and rolls, green peas and squash, all grown in their own garden.
They wanted us to know that they thought it was a damned shame, all this witch-hunting in the name of communism and the Iron Curtain. Weren’t the Russians our allies during the war? Why were we suddenly supposed to think that today they were our enemies?
Regardless of the support and sympathy we received from townsfolk like the Browns, my old man was determined to show the farmers, plumbers, and mechanics of Warrington that he wasn’t just some citified, eggheaded, Socialist thinker. Nossir, he was salt of the earth too. Most of his friends back in Boston were either foreigners, immigrants, or American working-class guys — radio and telegraph operators and union organizers and typesetters and merchant seamen — who had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, when it looked like internationalism and labor unions were going to make things all right for the working man and his family.
My old man worked with his hands, fabricating instruments that would measure minute electronic pulses in a hamster’s cheek pouch, or timers that could trigger a strobe to capture an object in motion at just the right millisecond. At work he rolled up the sleeves of his blue Oxford-cloth shirts and wore a bow tie that would not get caught in the rotating chuck of a lathe, drill press, or milling machine. He was a clever, ingenious guy and he lived by his wits, but he considered himself to be a worker just the same as the farmers and mechanics in Warrington. So, when we put my soapbox racer together, he made damned sure it was well-and-cleverly built.
Beyond its beautiful, red, Official Soap Box Derby regulation-issue wheels, this buggy-to-beat-all sported a sturdy plywood and Douglas-fir frame covered in tempered Masonite. We erected a stubborn post of oak to serve as a front frame member and we contoured hard-to-find, state-of-the-art aluminum tubing into an airplane-style steering wheel. At school, I surreptitiously compared notes with several other kids who were building racers. Nobody had such a machine as mine.
Night after night, the racer took shape under the warm cone of light that separated our work area from the dank recesses of the coal bin and the furnace room. My old man taught me as we worked. I learned how to guide a bucking saber saw along a pattern scribed onto a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. I learned how to mix the fine, dry powder of composite resin glue with water in just the right proportions and how to spread the thick, animal-smelling paste over both surfaces before I screwed the Masonite skin onto its supporting frame members. I learned how to use a brace and bit to drill the clearance holes for the carriage bolts that would clamp the axle to the floorboard.
At the end of a night’s work, before we shut out the light, my old man and I would stand back from the cluttered workbench and admire our progress. I loved to inhale the incense created by our handiwork. Pitch from the plywood and doug fir, vaporized by the friction of drill bits, saw blades, and sandpaper, merged with the fishy odor of the glue pot and the molasses sweetness of my old man’s Pall Malls.
Finally we got down to the final touches, the brakes and the steering gear. Here, we ran into “a few snags,” as my old man described them. We couldn’t get tension in the cable-and-pulley steering system, and my father’s specially designed brake wouldn’t always snap back from its down position.
While we were trying to work the bugs out of these last phases of construction, my old man began to lose interest in my soap-box racer. Something was happening outside the world we had created in the basement, something big and ominous and unreal, something that took place out there, where soldiers marched on the frozen Korean earth, where men in suits and glasses sat at tables covered with papers and spoke into microphones, and where bathing beauties lined up for inspection by car salesmen.
My old man knew two people who were in prison, in Sing Sing of all places. Sing Sing. It really existed. It wasn’t a movie penitentiary; Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney didn’t spit and snarl through these bars. Sing Sing was a real place, and the people my father knew were real people, a man and a woman with two kids my age.
They were supposed to be spies. They had given secrets about the atomic bomb to the Russians, at least that’s what the newspapers said. The kids at school said they were Commies, traitors, and that they were going to “get the chair,” both of them, the husband and the wife. I talked back, the way kids do, armed only with the fragments of information I could salvage from my parents’ conversations.
“They didn’t do anything,” I argued. “It’s the government.”
“They’re traitors.”
“We’re just trying to scare people about Russia, so we can make more guns and bombs.”
Paul Romily, a gangly kid with gigantic red ears spread his arms and made the sound of a dive-bomber, with the accuracy and attention to detail that little boys commit to the sounds of war. “They’re Commie spies. The FBI caught ’em and put ’em in jail.”
“We shouldn’t be shooting off atomic bombs anyway.”
“Give ’em the chair,” somebody said. That advice was underscored with the sound of high voltage coursing through flesh, another little-boy favorite.
I was hopelessly outnumbered and handicapped. It was like arguing the merits of the Yankees in a Brooklyn schoolyard, only there, the resemblance stopped. The whole world hated and feared these people and they were going to die. Besides, I carried an unrealized, instinctual conviction that, if I tipped my hand, if I spoke out too loudly, something terrible might happen to me and my family.
At home, my old man couldn’t stop talking about these people, the Rosenbergs. First he got real crabby and wrote a lot of letters. Then he went to some meetings in Boston after work and didn’t come home all night. Finally he got very sad. He would lie on the couch after work with his hand over his forehead until it was time to go to bed. I knew better than to bother him at a time like this, but I was getting pretty anxious. Race day was approaching, and we still hadn’t worked out the snags in my soap- box racer.
I couldn’t make the connection, but deep down inside, I must have understood that these people in Sing Sing, this husband and wife, this mother and father who were going to get the chair, they probably thought, talked, and acted a lot like my parents.
In fact they could have been my parents, but no one was copping to it. There was no explanation, no comfort offered, no distinctions made between them and us. No one told my sister and me that we would be safe. The evidence at hand bred jeopardy like bacteria in a petri dish: my old man, laid out on the couch in some kind of quiet agony, and my mother, cooking and chatting and straightening up, covering up the shadows, acting as if everything was okay. Me, I couldn’t get my old man down into the basement to work on the car. Race day was scheduled for the first week of May and we still had to fix the brakes and the steering.
End Part 1 — to be continued
Charles Degelman is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a novel set inside the anti-war movement of the 1960s.
