There was a penny candy store on the corner named "Noah's Ark". We chewed about a pound of Bazooka Joe bubble gum that we bought there just to get the comics that came in the wrapper. The comics were a riot. For example: "Mom, Bazooka Joe said I was ugly!" "Bazooka Joe, apologize to your sister." "I'm sorry you're ugly!" I saved them all.

    The Bazooka Joe comics went the way of the Monkey Division radios - meaning I have no idea where they went, but probably the trash can. (*wince*)

    The radio stuff was only one part of my life, but it stayed with me all these years. "Get Smart" did too. I bought a bunch of episodes on DVD and swear I never saw any of them on television. On the other hand there was only one TV, and if my dad wasn't watching "Get Smart", neither was anyone else (unless he wasn't home!)

    In 1966 my brother Chris was born. NASA launched Gemini 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12, and I followed every launch as much as possible. I also got my first bicycle and a transistor radio for Christmas.

Philco Ford model RT-810
I still have the transistor radio, shown above. It's in good shape after 50 years because it still had the vinyl case on it. The vinyl had shrunk and had to be heated with a hair dryer to get it off for the picture.
		Here's the Sears bicycle I got for Christmas in 1966. It's a knock-off of the Sears "SPACELINER." It's actually a nicer looking bike than the SPACELINER and was $10 less. The price shown, $35.44, is equivalent to $282 in 2019.     By Christmas I had just turned 11, and was wise to the point where I thought it was a good idea to ride the brand new bike in the snow that had fallen the night before. It was the day after Christmas. I slipped on the ice while carrying the bike down the front steps, smashing my chin on the handle bars. Man, did that hurt. I had this great idea that I could ride the bike in the tire tracks made by passing cars. That worked for about five feet before I ended up sprawled in the street. I was so mad at the bike I put it down the basement so I wouldn't have to look at it. After all, it was the bike that made me fall, not the other way around. Since all the presents were still around the Christmas tree, my mom asked where the bike was. I told her it was easier to get it out the back door, so it was in the basement.   I ended up riding that bike a million miles over the next four years. My friends and I would sometimes go on a "bike-hike," where we would just pick a direction and start riding, sometimes for 4 to 6 hours for the round trip. I bought a "ten speed" in 1970, and gave the Sears bicycle to a kid named Joe Jones. By that time the headlight, fenders, kickstand, whitewall tires and the "rack" on the rear were long gone. Also, it was now painted black. It remained under Joe's back porch in Glenside, PA for years. Sometime around 1974 Joe noticed it was gone.

    Sometimes Billy's older brother Bobby would come down with Billy. Bobby hung out with a kid across the street named Drew Miller. Drew was my friend, and Billy was my friend, but Billy and Bobby didn't seem to get along so I never hung out with Bobby and Drew because I was with Billy.

    Billy came down in the summer of 1967, and as usual, we had a great time together. West Oak lane was a great place to live back then. Everything you could ever want was within walking distance. The streets were wide, but hardly had any traffic on them. There was no crime. You could leave your doors unlocked. Actually, the only miscreants in the area, as far as I knew, were me and Billy.

    Unfortunately, West Oak Lane rapidly changed in 1968. The Jewish people all moved out and sold their homes to blacks, leaving the minority population of white Catholics behind. Temple Sinai Synagogue, built in 1947, was abandoned. In 1967 a new synagogue had been  built in Upper Dublin Township, about 15 miles from Philadelphia. The entire Jewish population of West Oak Lane then left. On the Temple Sinai website it states the families had an "exodus" to the "outlying areas." That's exactly what it was, an exodus.

    The neighborhood became almost completely African American by 1969, the year I "graduated" from 8th grade. Billy and Bobby lived in the suburbs (Warminster, PA), and their parents stopped bringing them down to our now gang infested and dangerous neighborhood.

    The owners of the drug store and hardware store near our house were murdered while being held up. The other stores were repeatedly robbed till they went out of business. "The Avenue" (Ogontz Avenue,) which had always been thronged with people, became a ghost town. (The liquor store remained open, however.) The Renel movie theater, opened in 1936, shut down in September of 1970 for a year, and then reopened as a porno theater. The Burroughs Corporation building became a mosque. Graffiti was everywhere, most of it illegible.

    A huge loosely formed gang known as the "Clang" materialized and trolled the streets at night. A white person walking alone was their main prey. They were probably responsible for 90% of the violence in the neighborhood.

   The grocery store, the firehouse and "Famous" delicatessen at 76th and Ogontz remained open, except that "Dave and Irv's Famous Jewish Delicatessen" changed hands and anything Jewish about it was purged. At the end of our street, before you turned onto Ogontz Avenue to go to Famous Deli, was our barber shop and the shoe repair guy. Sometime in 1969 I went down to get a haircut and both shops were boarded up. They remained that way for 47 years, as the skeleton of the sign over the barber shop slowly rusted away. In 2016 the sign was removed and the windows were bricked up.
 

75th and Ogontz. Our house was up the block, on the left.

The barber shop was on the left. The shoe repair shop to the right. Now bricked up, you can see where the doors to the shops were located. On either side of the doors were big glass windows.

This Google Street View from 2008 shows the boarded up store fronts before they were bricked up. The remains of the sign over the barber shop is still hanging from the second story above it. It used to say, "NINO'S Barbershop." The store windows and door of the shoemaker can be seen on the right.

Photoshop! What I saw when I went to get a haircut. I don't think that car is from 1969, though.

The remains of Artie's. Photo from 2008 Google street view.

The building remained abandoned for over 40 years.

    And of course, Ree Electronics shut down when the customers became more interested in the cash register than a turntable. That was the end of my radio parts source.

    The "ice cream store" closed. Nino's Pizza closed. The three 5 & 10's closed. The candy store closed. The bakeries closed. "Noah's Ark" closed. Greene's shoe store closed. One by one, every store on Ogontz Avenue was either robbed or shoplifted out of existence. The bars remained open, but under new management. So no more ice cream and no more pizza and no 5 and 10's. It was big disappointment for us kids. I really liked it when my mom took us to Nino's or the ice cream store. (It was actually a rare occasion and it goes without saying that we walked everywhere, my mom usually pushing a stroller.)

    The library at Washington Lane and Limekiln Pike was one of the few places that remained open, along with the liquor store and the bars. A newspaper article in The Evening Bulletin lamented that the only books being withdrawn were ones on Kung-Fu, while thousands of other books were collecting dust. That was the library where I rented the Alfred P. Morgan books on how to make a radio. Now it loaned out books on how to beat people up using Kung-Fu.

    The neighborhood became a dangerous place for white kids, which is one reason I put so many miles on the bicycle. Almost all our friends and classmates moved away. The streets became filled with broken glass bottles and abandoned cars. Trash, orange peels and chicken bones littered the sidewalks. Yes, chicken bones. What was that all about?

     A lot of the lawns became overgrown and the whole area (to me) took on a sinister appearance. My brother Rob and I used to get up early on Saturday and go door to door to make money "cutting grass". We only charged a dollar. Our marketing ploy was to say we would cut the lawn for fifty cents apiece. It sounded a lot less than "a dollar" and sometimes we would each get two quarters, so it must have worked.

    The lawn mower belonged to Billy Meyer's grandparents. It had metal wheels that made a racket on the sidewalks. The handle had broken off, so you had to use it like a push broom while mowing the lawn. Rob and I didn't usually get along very well, but we were a team while cutting grass. When we made two dollars each we were done for the day, and would go our separate ways.

    Some of the new people didn't want to pay to have their lawns cut and we lost our customers. Their lawns turned into weeds.  We gave up after a few weekends of coming home after walking the neighborhood knocking on doors, without cutting any lawns.

    Rob joined the grade school football team, but when the Clang attacked them during a practice, beating up the kids and stabbing the coach, the team was disbanded. The oldest kid on the team was probably 12 years old. The blacks had 50 pounds and five years on the biggest player.

    Rob then joined the Cub Scouts. One day the Clang kicked in the door of the church during a scout meeting and beat up the Scout Master and some of the Cub Scouts. I remember the phone ringing off the hook and my mom being really upset. She sent me down to retrieve my brother. There was a police car in front of the church. I went in through the broken side door and saw scuff marks and blood stains on the floor. Fortunately Rob was unharmed because he and a bunch of the other little kids had hidden in a back room. The Cub Scouts were then disbanded. One by one, all of the things that made life "normal" were ruined.

 

St. Paul's Church, site of an attack by the Clang Gang on a group of mostly white Cub Scouts. The side door was forced open. The fact that a few of the Scouts were black didn't matter, a black Scout was looked down upon by other black teenagers.

    I got a quick lesson in "racism", as they call it now. Back then it was called "prejudice". I was robbed by two adult blacks when I was 10 years old while walking home from Famous Deli. Later I had a stick broken over my head by some blacks who accosted me on Ogontz Avenue. I heard a loud BANG! and saw the ground coming up at me as a piece of broken stick flew by. They had hit me from behind as I walked past them. On another occasion I was sucker punched while I was waiting for the trolley and needed seven stitches in my lip.

    We kids started to get the message. My sister was seven years old when some young black girls grabbed her and poured dirt into her mouth on her way home from first grade. My brother's new "Sting Ray" bike was stolen, and we kept hearing that this kid or that kid had been "jumped". Then "jumped" turned into "stabbed" as the neighborhood became more violent. Thankfully, the few times I was jumped I was never stabbed, though that was only because of quick reflexes. My navy blue nylon jacket had a white line down the front of it from where some old black guy tried to stab me in the chest. I had sensed someone behind me and turned to see a black guy glaring at me with a knife in his hand, raised over his head. The knife came down and I jumped backwards. The tip of the knife made a foot long mark on my jacket, as though it had been made with a pencil. Why did he try to kill me? It was because I took some snow off the hood of his car to make a snowball. At least, I think that's why, because that's what I was doing when he snuck up on me.

    Hardly anything that happened in West Oak Lane made it on the news, but we got to see the war in Vietnam every night. 8th grade was over and I was going to be a freshman in high school. In four years they were going to send me to Vietnam, which was much worse than my neighborhood. Things weren't looking good.

    Then, on Sunday, July 20, 1969 at 3:17 PM EDST, smack in the middle of summer vacation, Apollo 11 landed on the moon!! At 9:56 PM Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface, followed by Edwin Aldrin. Like most families, we were all glued to the television. This was it, after 5000 years of civilization, we were the generation who were fortunate enough to be alive to see this pinnacle of human achievement. The United States of America was able to launch a mission to the moon while simultaneously fighting two wars, the war in Vietnam and the Cold War against the Soviet Union. It was a defining moment in our lives. No one would ever look at the moon the same way again. Men had walked on the moon. Men from the United States.

    I don't think the moon landing mattered much to the gang members hanging out in front of Famous Deli. As a black "poet" wrote, "No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but Whitey's on the moon." His sister was bitten by a rat in the poem. That lifestyle of standing on a corner all day, then  robbing and beating people up at night, just wasn't working out. Paying a bill, fixing a toilet, or changing a light bulb was beyond their capability. Go figure.

7600 block of Rugby Street. When you're 12 years old with a pocket full of money walking in the dark, there really isn't any place to go when trouble comes strutting down the street. A "Safe House" is on the right. Ironic that it now has bars on the door.

    We had collected about half my route when sure enough, a block away we saw the silhouettes of people carrying broom handles and sticks coming towards us. They knew I was out there collecting, they just needed to find me. We slowly walked to a safe house, went up the steps, then dashed behind the bushes and waited. The gang walked by, loudly uttering some guttural language, every other word being "f*ck" or "mother f*cker". We couldn't really understand what they were saying, except we heard one of them say, "... GET that mother f*cker!" as he banged his broomstick on the ground.

    Billy was scared half to death. He was so scared that I thought he was putting on an act. I thought he was laughing that we had outsmarted them, but he was almost crying. The realization that they would have clubbed our heads in with those broomsticks to get the money we collected was a bit too much for him. That was his last visit, and after we went home that night I never saw him again.

    They never caught me, but they did catch Drew Miller. After they turned his pockets inside-out they bashed his face in so badly he needed two surgeries to fix his nose. I didn't know it was possible to stuff the amount of cotton up someone's nostrils as he had. That was the end of his paper route. Mine didn't last much longer.

     Most of our new neighbors on our street were pretty nice to us, perhaps because my dad was a Philadelphia cop, but maybe they were just nice, who knows. My younger brothers played with the black kids on our street, and Rob and I played "bottle caps" with the black kids around the corner. If you walked around the same corner to Famous Deli after dark, you took your life into your hands. It was also strange that you hardly ever saw a black woman in those days.

    While all this was happening we were hearing the best music on the radio, which came from Motown and Stax Records. Were these the same people? Why did these black people move into our neighborhood if they hated white people so much? Why did they hate us in the first place? We didn't even know them, and none of us did anything bad to them as far as I know. The black musicians we heard on the radio were our only exposure to black people prior to 1967. We bought their records at Gimbels department store, almost always a 45 RPM.

    Not to say that Motown and Stax were the only thing we listened to. In 7th grade my favorite album was "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", but what we heard on the radio from groups such as the Delfonics, the Stylistics, the Chi-lites, the Temptations, The Four Tops, the Supremes, etc. etc. made it seem we were living in two different worlds. On the radio it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

     One night, after we had been jumped by the Clang while walking on Ogontz Avenue, I came home and turned on my radio and heard one of my favorite songs, "Psychedelic Shack" by the Temptations. It sounds funny now, but I was sitting there with sneaker prints all over me and a black dirt mark on the side of my face. There was a lump on my head. I was filled with furious hatred, but that song calmed me down.

    I had been with two of my friends, Jimmy Nolen and Jimmy Walsh. We were on our way to Jimmy Nolen's apartment. He lived on Ogontz Avenue, over a drug store. We were almost there when suddenly an arm wrapped around my throat, strangling me as I was lifted off my feet. I was in an absolute terror, the arm around my throat was incredibly strong and I couldn't breathe. I tried with all my might to pull the arm away while kicking my feet in every direction. I couldn't get any leverage with my feet off the ground and I couldn't make a sound because my airway was cut off. I saw my friends walking away from me, not realizing I was not longer with them.

 Then I was thrown on the sidewalk, gasping for air. I didn't know what was happening to me, I couldn't stand back up. I was trying to get my breath and stand up but seemed to keep falling on the ground instead. I started to feel as though I was dreaming.

    In a daze I saw my friends step towards me, then turn around and take off running as a mob of blacks ran right past me after them. Didn't the mob see me? Apparently they did, because they came back. That's when they started kicking the crap out of me.

    I tried to crawl under a parked car but I couldn't get to it. Suddenly I heard tires screech. Two white guys jumped out of a car and the blacks went in all directions. The two guys gave me a ride out of there, dropping me off on Ogontz Avenue near the end of my street. They may have saved my life and I have no idea who they were.

    My friends had escaped, somehow making it to Jimmy Nolen's apartment. Later, after we met in my garage, I told them how I couldn't get up after I hit the sidewalk. They told me I was trying to get up but the guy who threw me on the sidewalk was stomping on me. They said he was a grown man! Jimmy Walsh started laughing and asked, "Doesn't your ass hurt?" I never felt a thing at the time it was happening. Never saw the guy, either.

    I have many fond memories of Jimmy Walsh, but the memory of him laughing while emulating how some adult repeatedly plowed the heel of his foot onto my 12 year old ass isn't one of them.

"Astro Commander" walkie talkie on top of the KT-135 receiver. On the left is the transmitter I built with the parts Joe gave me.

    Jimmy Nolen moved to Harleysville, PA in 1971. Joe's family moved to Glenside, PA in 1972. Somewhere along the line, Jimmy Walsh just vanished. If he came to say goodbye, I wasn't there. I never heard from him again. We moved away in 1974, the last white family on the block.

    The day we moved, some guy we had never seen before started yelling that we had pushed his car out of the way to make room for the moving truck, because his car was next to the truck and wouldn't start.

     We never touched his car. We were putting everything we owned into the moving truck because vermin like him made it impossible for us to live in our own neighborhood. He called the police.

     When the police arrived we proved to them we didn't push his car (no skid marks from the tires!) They talked to the guy for a while, and he went into a house a few doors away. The police asked us if we were moving in or moving out. We said moving out. They left.

    I have to give my dad a lot of credit. He wasn't a cop anymore, but his blackjack, nightstick and service revolver were about 30 feet away from where this guy was standing arguing with us, and he could have taken that guy out with one punch in any case. No exaggeration. Actually, I was waiting for it to happen. To this day, I don't know why my father showed such restraint. It wasn't exactly his style.

     Why that guy wasn't lying unconscious on the sidewalk has been a mystery to me my whole life, but I remember my dad going into the house and hearing my mom saying something loudly to my dad. I was busy loading up the truck with our stuff, so it was only voices. Since they argued a lot it was just more voices. I guess my mom's voice was the voice of reasoning.

    That day in 1974 we moved to the Olney section of Philadelphia. Olney was a great place to live. As a matter of fact, after I met my wife and got married we continued to live in Olney. It was only five miles away from West Oak Lane and had an "Avenue", except that the avenue was named 5th Street. Everything you could ever need could be purchased on 5th Street, just as you could on Ogontz Avenue in 1968.

    One drawback was that the row house we bought in Olney was a lot smaller than our row house in West Oak Lane and there was no room for any of my hobbies. We no longer had a back bathroom, a foyer or a breakfast room and the house seemed to be falling apart. We couldn't even fit all of our furniture in it. I packed up all of my stuff and stored it in my grandparents basement. That was the end of my radio experiments, till ten years later when I retrieved the boxes. By then I was married with four little kids. Those boxes weren't actually opened till we moved to West Point, PA in 1999!

    But that was OK, you could go outside at night and feel perfectly safe. As far as I was concerned in my teenage mind, it made it all worthwhile. You could sit outside on your steps or in a lawn chair at night in the summer, or walk six blocks away to a friend's house in the dark, and not have a thought about your safety.

    Back to my West Oak Lane neighborhood, our $12,500 house on 75th Avenue easily fetches over $200,000 in 2020. I'm happy to report that West Oak Lane has been revived, thanks to the efforts of the "Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation," or OARC.

From the OARC website:

            "After decades of being a vibrant commercial corridor bustling with commerce and charm, the 7100 block of Ogontz Avenue
             began to decline in the early 1970's. By 1981, Ogontz Plaza, the centerpiece of this once mighty block had become a vacant,
             graffiti-scarred eyesore."

    There is no mention of WHY or HOW this happened. Ogontz Plaza became an "empty graffiti-scarred eyesore" for no reason whatsoever, because the actual reason was simply omitted from the article.

    The OARC has an annual budget of 25 million dollars, which I assume are taxpayer dollars. They've been at work since the mid nineties, which means they've sunk 500 million tax dollars into the area. 45 of the boarded up stores are open again, thanks to grant money from OARC. The half-billion dollars spent gives the area a semblance of how it once looked. It actually looks much better than it did in 1974, but not as nice as it did in 1966.

     The revitalization of Ogontz Avenue has spread throughout the neighborhood. Instead of becoming a "badlands" the homes in the area are well kept, and many commercial properties that were open in the 1960s have reopened, though the businesses have changed. There are no pawn shops and only one "we buy gold" sign. The porno theater is a church and the mosque is a dance studio. The abandoned synagogue is now the Masjidulla mosque. The lawns are well maintained, sidewalks are new in many cases and the streets are lined with many late model cars, most of which are nicer than mine (what am I doing wrong?) Driving through the area at night (many times in 2017) I didn't see any gangs or even any groups of people standing on corners. I was pleased to see it is a thriving working class neighborhood.

    The human excrement known as the "Clang Gang" somehow disbanded. Perhaps when they realized  there were no stores left to buy anything and they couldn't get as much as a slice of pizza, they just dispersed due to a lack of victims. Neighborhood destroyed, mission accomplished. Once one of the largest gangs in Philadelphia, they are now nowhere to be found, even on the Internet.

    I imagined buying my old house back, wouldn't that be cool? I could live in my old house again! Then I went on the Philadelphia Police Department website. They have an interactive map of the city. I drew a rectangle on the map from my house to my grade school. It said there were 1000 crimes there in the last six months. It also stated that 1000 was the highest number it could display. Basically, they keep the crime numbers down with a computer program that can't count past 1000!