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I was born and raised in New Jersey. Here in Milwaukeee some people think that's funny. Back in Jersey, lots of people don't even know where Milwaukee is.Famous N.J. Persons: Tony Soprano |
Dolores A New Jersey Story
On September 8, 1934, when the luxury liner Morro Castle caught fire off Sea Girt, New Jersey, Dolores’s parents, Ruth pregnant with Dolores for five months, Frank an unemployed welder, both numb with fatigue, leaned into each other to keep from toppling on a tiny dance floor next to a merry-go-round in Keansburg. On the sixth day of a marathon dance, only one other couple remained on the floor, shuffling artlessly, all pretense at movement to the music abandoned. A sparse audience, mostly children, occupied benches around the floor, the girls chattering, and the boys jostling one another. None gave more than a glance at the sagging adults on the floor. Rain fell noisily on the boardwalk outside, a damp wind came through the arcade entryway, scattering sand and a tattered rotogravure across the wood floor. Ruth neither saw nor heard the rain. A Milky Way candy wrapper stuck to the sole of her shoe. She tried to kick it away but couldn’t lift her foot. Gazing over her shoulder, Frank thought how clean the rain would feel if they could just walk out, end the torture. He fought for strength, his forearms beneath Ruth's shoulders supporting her weight. The voice of a man speaking into a microphone at a card table beside the dance floor penetrated his consciousness. The man talked excitedly over the recorded music about the burning luxury liner, the Morro Castle, now drifting toward Asbury Park, about frantic people jumping from the flames, swimming for shore. Frank looked out across the boardwalk at the wind-whipped water of Raritan Bay. Keansburg was over eighty sea-miles in a big loop around Sandy Hook from the stricken ship but Frank saw drowning people in the bay. His eyes darting from side to side he pulled Ruth closer and asked, "Should I save somebody?""Save us," she pleaded. On the seventh day they would be the last couple standing, they would win twenty-five dollars. "And that's just what he did, your father, he saved us." Ruth would tell the story many times as Dolores grew. The ordeal at Keansburg became a movie musical starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell. “We won fifty dollars. It was wonderful!" Frank worked when he could and they scraped by. In 1936 Ruth’s hand was broken by a closing door in her father’s Chevrolet which they had borrowed for an outing to Asbury Park. Doctor’s bills mounted and, desperate for work, Frank left Ruth and Dolores behind, headed west riding railroad freight cars until he reached San Francisco. There he joined unemployed men camped at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, hoping for a job, eager to risk their lives for $5 a day. In October 1936, using a false local address, Frank was hired. In January, he fell from the bridge deck, the safety net failed and he dropped 220 feet into the strait. His body was never recovered. When Dolores was twenty, she met Norman, a young man as ordinary as Dolores herself. Ruth disliked Norman and when Dolores said that Norman was a great dancer, a dancer like her father, Ruth laughed. "Your father was no dancer, he was a stumbler on the dance floor, your father was a bridge builder! Where have you been?" she raged. But Dolores married her dancing Norman, who ten years later became manager of his father's hardware store in Perth Amboy. In Dolores’s life there would be no high drama, no burning ships, not even much in the way of dancing. But she and her children never went hungry and Norman never left them to save them. |
Neglecting air resistance, since y = 220 = sqrt((a(t^2))/2) then t, the duration of
his fall, = 3.7 seconds. |