KellysCafe

The Old Neighborhood - East Camden

2012-01-10T02:54:00.000-08:00

The Old Neighborhood –

Originaly published in SandPaper Column Kelly’s People Circa 1980s

I didn’t know the guy from Adam when I looked across Gregory’s bar to see who bought me a beer. The bartender said it was from “Mike from the old neighborhood.”

Everyone has an old neighborhood the twelve square blocks you spend your formative years, from the earliest time you can remember until you get out of school.

For me the old neighborhood is East Camden, the area bordered by the sleazy motels on the Admiral Wilson Boulevard and Route 130 to the south, the railroad tracks and Cramer Hill to the north and suburban Pennsauken to the east. It is a nice section of Camden, with shade tree lined streets and older, singer family homes set back among the streets of townhouses. I lived on Garden Avenue.

Today people put Camden in the same category ads Beirut, Berlin and Belfast, but when I lived there it was a community were people lived, worked and enjoyed a middle-class existence that was not unlike “Leave it to Beaver” or “Donna Reed.”

We even had a Donna Reed in the neighborhood, a girl next door. We went to St. Joe’s grammar school together and I delivered her newspaper after school. But I didn’t remember Mike, and looking at him from across the bar I couldn’t see past his beard and didn’t believe that he knew me from the old neighborhood. I thought it must be a case of mistaken identity.

I know it’s hard for people to believe that you could live in a house in Camden that had a white picket fence, four southern mansion style porch pillars that were so big you could put your arms around them and your fingers wouldn’t touch. And a yard with big evergreens, two red-leafed Japanese maples, and a giant wheeping willow in the back that you could swing on the branches like Tarzan.

There was also a side yard with a birdbath and a hill you could slide down in the winter, and a basketball court above the garage door with a spotlight so you could shoot hoops after dark.

Everyone in the neighborhood shot baskets there, except I don’t remember Mike. So I took a sip of beer and walked around the bar to say hello to Mike, who thinks he knows me from the old neighborhood.

I went around the bar, shook his hand and looked into his eyes, searching for some sign of recognition, but I still think it’s a case of mistaken identity. I didn’t recognize him when I introduced myself.

“I know who you are Bill,” he said, “we stood at the same bus stop together for two years. Camden Catholic High School, class of ’67.”

Mike introduced me to his wife, who he says he met at a high school reunion.

“I was a couple years ahead of you, and we didn’t hang out or anything,” he reassures me, “but I still recognize you. And my wife is from there too.”

We both look at her as she smiles and says, “I miss Panzarottis the most,” and that clinches it. Panzarotti, deep fried inverted pizza pockets. There was only one place in the known world you could get them and that was on Marlton Pike in East Camden.

I tell them that the last time I went to Philly I stopped in East Camden on my way back to the Shore and picked up a few Panzarottis and a couple for my mother and brother. I remember my mother walking me there for the first time and eating my first Panzarotti on the way home.

They used to be 35 cents apiece and take five to ten minutes to make, and like a cheesesteak at Pats or Genos in South Philly, don’t have to sit down to eat it.

The place was different from when I was a kid, as there are no tables or chairs at all, and the ordering window had bars, bullet proof glass and you had to slide your money in.

From the small corner store, just across from the old bakery, they expanded to selling them out of vans and franchising them to other pizzerias all over South Jersey.

Then it became sort of a quick quiz, like the soldiers pulled on each other during the Battle of the Bulge to see who was really American and who were the Germans in American uniforms. I mention Bugfoot Charlie and Mike says, “Bugfoot Charlie. I haven’t heard that name in 20 years. He made the biggest Bryers ice cream cone you could buy for a dime. Sold them out of that Mom and Pop place on the corner where you’d stand in line for an hour to get one.”

Okay, I’m convinced. We grew up in the same neighborhood 20 years ago, went to the same school and were passing bus stop acquaintances who now live at the shore, the new neighborhood.

When Mike says he is now selling real estate in Ocean City, I mention that almost everybody from the old neighborhood is at the Shore. Joe Knoren, my former next door neighbor and basketball partner is now in Wildwood, his father’s in Ocean City. Jim Barklow, Bugfoot Charlie’s nephew, who lived behind me in Camden is now in Wildwood.

Quicky the former Camden cop lives on the other side of the alley from me in Ocean City, Bill Brown is on Morrlyn Terrace, and the Creans have a house on 4th street. The Defligers are a few blocks up town and Alan Cabal’s grandmother lives on West Avenue. Carol, who also stood on the same bus stop, is also working real estate and as a restaurant hostess.

Jim Toogood, who used to live across Garden Avenue, did the famous Bay Shores watercolor, while former Camden mayor Angelo Erricatti, when he got out of prison for ABSCAM, moved in with his daughter in Longport.

Lou and Nick Ventura, who owned the neighborhood pizza and cheesesteak joint on Marlton Pike, bought the Green House in Margate and the Ruby in Northfield and made them nice taverns.

While we took the bus to Camden Catholic high school in Cherry Hill, Woodrow Wilson was the local high school and they were playing Ocean City high school for the state football championship.

“Do you remember how we used to sneak into the Woodrow Wilson football games on Saturday afternoons?,” Mike asked. “Under the fence by McGraw school, where I went to kindergarden,” I respond, and I think of the chain link fence with the barbed wire on top. Mike smiles and added, “Yea, and we’d wait until the national anthem and slip under and run while the cops were standing at attention.”

On Sundays we’d play tackle football against the guys from Cramer Hill. “Who plays tackle football anymore?”

Since they met at their high school reunion, Mike and his wife smile when I tell them my class should be having a 20 year reunion. At least there were rumors. Donna Reed organized one after 10 years, but I missed that one.

“You ought to go,” they encourage me.

But when I check with my old mates – Janis, Mark Jordan, Gerry Montgomery,… nobody has heard anything.

If not maybe we’ll all just get together and have a game of tackle football or something, have a pizza at Ventura’s and go get a Panzoratti.

Here’s looking up your old address.

Outside St. Francis Cabrini Church , Ocean City

2011-11-12T13:22:00.001-08:00

Aunt Molly & Maryjane

2011-10-31T20:56:00.001-07:00

Aunt Molly & Maryjane at Browns Mills

Brian & Cindy's Wedding Party

2011-10-31T20:53:00.000-07:00

Brian and Cindy's Wedding Party at the Library IV in Williamstown

Lynn Delcorio, Joe Hayburn, Irishman, Nancy and Leo Kelly

Leo Kelly in DC

2011-10-31T20:50:00.001-07:00

The Harters at 819 Wesley

2011-10-31T20:48:00.001-07:00

Bob Spiller playing hoops in Camden

2011-10-31T20:46:00.001-07:00

RCA Indian Head TV Test Pattern

2011-09-27T12:04:00.001-07:00

Nipper - Master's Voice

2011-09-26T22:04:00.001-07:00

RCA Camden

2011-09-26T22:03:00.001-07:00

Molly and Aunt Ethel on the 819 Porch

2011-07-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

Molly and Trooper, Aunt Ethel and Katie the Cat on the Porch at 819 Wesley, OCNJ

Kelly's Lagoon off Mirror Lake, Browns Mills NJ

2011-07-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

BACK TO THE LAKE

Browns Mills. Before the Jersey Shore it was always Browns Mills for the summer, and usually a late Friday afternoon when my family and friends would pile into my father’s car, leave our home in Camden and head for the small community nestled next to Mirror Lake in the middle of the Pine Barrens.

I knew every landmark on the 40 mile route from the city to the country, having traveled it so many times, and couldn’t wait for that roller coaster pitch in my stomach that would come when we got to the “hills,” actually just bumps in the road, not far from the Pine Barrens Commission headquarters that signified the entrance to the town that held some special magic for me.

Not far from Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base, Browns Mills is now famous as the home of Deborah Heart and Lung Hospital, but those institutions don’t reflect onMirror Lake, which you can’t see until you leave the main part of town and turn the corner past the bus station.

There was the Pig N’ Whistle Inn, a colonial era tavern and stagecoach stop, on one side of the road and a house on a hill that was Kay’s Gift Shop. Down a bit further there was a pizza restaurant next to the damn that flowed into a stream that, by canoe, would eventually carry you to the Delaware River.

The inn burned down years ago, and there’s a McDonald’s there today. The bus stop is gone too, and the gift shop is now a bank. But the lake is still there, and the places that meant something to me growing up haven’t changed all that much.

The road still winds around the lake that was once lined with private docks belonging to families with homes nearby. Most, like ours, were vacation homes, country retreats for those who wanted to escape the city in the summer. Our white stucco house, which my father and my uncle built with their own hands, brick by brick, is the last of a few small cottages at the end of a dirt road. It has a fireplace and a picture window facing the Little Lake, the small lagoon off the big lake, Mirror Lake, at the other end of the street.

In the winter, when there aren’t many leaves on the trees, you can see the house across the little lake where my Aunt Jane and Uncle Jack lived in the summer and holiday weekends. You could walk across the 100 yards if the lake was frozen, as it was much of the winter. My father was the biggest so if the ice would support him, it was good for everybody. A fire in the barbeque pit was good for hot dogs and marshmallows.
In the summer you visited them by row boat or canoe, or walk around to the bridge my uncle Babe built along the path through the woods they used to get to the dock on the big lake. You might pass aunt Jane on the trail, heading for the dock with a towl and a bar of Ivy soap, the kind that floats.

Uncle Jack always had something going on. He was either oil painting ships, putting up the hammock, tether ball pole, or badminton net, but always took a break to take us in his little Porsche to the bus stop market for ice cream and a ride around the lake. I don’t know how six cousins fit into that little car.

Then he’d drop us off at the dock where we’d dive or cannonball into the lake, driving Aunt Jane out of the water, and race to the neighbor’s floating pontoon platform out in the deep part. As we’d pull ourselves onto the bobbing float I’d swallow the brownish cedar water, and then lie in the sun until dry.

There were drownings all the time, and you thought about it when you heard an ambulance screaming around Lake Shore Drive, but they were usually city slickers out of their element. We had been baptized in this lake when we were born and felt invincible. But we did practice the buddy system, wouldn’t go swimming alone, and if you wanted to swim across the lake you had to follow a row boat.

Power boats weren’t allowed on the lake, so it was often filled with rowboats, canoes and sailboats in a soft breeze, gently floating nowhere.

We would take a canoe to explore the swampy source of the lake. Catching frogs and turtles with your bare hands is a patiently crafted skill, and dusk is the best time to catch fish. Rolled up pieces of wet bread make good bait for catfish, and you only feel squeamish the first time you learn to grab the flopping fish from behind the gills to remove the hook.. No matter what the size of the catch, the fish are thrown back to be caught another day.

Sometimes, on really dull days, we’d cast off a plastic model ship into the little lake, a toy that took hours to build and only a few minutes to sink with a BB gun.
Then there was the time a state Fish, Game & Wildlife agent came out of the woods behind our house and gave a ticket to my father for fishing without a license. Dad had his day in court, explained how he was teaching my brother to cast a line, and besides, the agent had to trespass on our property in order to catch him. Not guilty.

Breakfast with Uncle Jack meant blueberry pancakes, wild berries you had to go pick yourself.

After dinner we’d meet at Uncle Jack’s to play flashlight tag in the dark while the older folks played cards on the porch.

If you stayed overnight at Uncle Jack’s house, which was usually crowded, and didn’t get a bed, you had to sleep on the bathroom floor, which would earn you name painted in oil on the bathroom wall.

There were seven brothers and sisters in my father’s family, so there were always a lot of cousins running around, and their names are all on that wall.

We would sleep either in the bunk beds in the side room, or in the attic, where the stars would shine in the window through the pines, and we’d fall asleep to the sounds of crickets and frogs croaking into the night.

In the morning, a woodpecker would wake us up and we’d go outside to pick blueberries that Uncle Jack would put into the pancakes.

Then we’d have to wait for an hour before we could go down the path through the woods to the big lake for a dip in the lake, because one of the rules was you couldn’t go swimming on a full stomach.

We didn’t put our shoes on until Sunday, when we went to church – St. Ann’s in the Pines.

It went that way every day, all summer, from Memorial Day until Labor Day, for years, until we became teenagers, discovered girls and rock & roll, and started going down the shore where the action was.

And now I find myself sitting across the table from Uncle Jack, drinking his iced tea that tastes just like the big lake, saying how every time he runs into a cousin they say, “Browns Mills. Let’s go back there because they were the best days of my life.”

And Uncle Jack said, “We still go up there for weekends in the summer, but nobody comes to visit us anymore.. You’re welcome. It’s still the same. You can get everybody back there if you want to, but that was a special place at another time, and it’ll never happen again. That, I think, is what Thomas Wolfe meant when he said, ‘You can’t go home again’”

[Originally published in the column Kelly’s People – The SandPaper, Friday, Dec. 16, 1988]

Uncle Jack and Uncle Leo

2011-07-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

Molly and Bill, Sr. at D'annucci's

2011-04-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

Molly and Bill, Sr. at D'annucci's.

Mary Theresa Kelly Born - October 16, 1917 - RIP - March 18, 2011

Visit Guest Book

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/courierpostonline/obituary.aspx?n=mary-theresa-kelly&pid=149658471

KELLY, Mary Theresa age 93, of Browns Mills died Friday, March 18 at Lourdes Medical Center in Willingboro. Born in Camden, she was a longtime resident of Ocean City, NJ before moving to Browns Mills 8 years ago. Mary was a secretary for both RCA and the Camden Schools in Camden and she also ran a rooming house in Ocean City for 38 years. She was a parishioner at St. Ann's Church in Browns Mills and St. Francis Cabrini in Ocean City. Mary was an avid Bridge player and she prayed the Rosary often. Mary was predeceased by her husband, William E. Kelly, Sr. (a Camden Policeman) and a son, Leo James Kelly. She is survived by a son, William E. Kelly, Jr. of Browns Mills and several nieces and nephews. A memorial Mass for Mary will be held on Monday, March 28 at 10 AM at St. Ann's Church, 22 Trenton Road in Browns Mills (www.stannschurch.org), and also on Tuesday, April 19 at 7:00 AM at St. Francis Cabrini Church, 114 Atlantic Avenue in Ocean City, NJ. Burial will be in Calvary Cemetery in Cherry Hill. Arrangements are under the direction of the Tilghman Funeral Home in New Egypt (www.tilghmanfh.com).

Published in Courier-Post on March 26, 2011

Mary Theresa “Molly” Kelly

She thought that she was the luckiest person in the world to live on the lake in Browns Mills in a house that her husband had built.

She was very religious, prayed the rosary three times a day for many things and many people, died while praying and was buried with her rosaries in the same grave as her husband at Calvary Cemetery in Cherry Hill.

She was predeceased by good friend Father Walsh, who followed the Kelly family from St. Joseph’s parish in East Camden to St. Augustine’s in Ocean City, and Monsignor O’Conner, an Ocean City neighbor and good friend, as well as her cousin Father Stephen Haynes, “Father Skip,” who was a converted Catholic and was ordained a priest after working at the Philadelphia Bulletin for many years.

Mrs. Kelly strongly believed in the innocence of her friend James Dwyer, and attended his rosary session at St. Augustine’s in Ocean City every Wednesday at noon, until he was wrongfully convicted and sent to prison. She sent Jim a prayer, that he returned to her while she was in the hospital, and when her son Bill began to recite it to her, she picked up the ending of the prayer and finished it on her deathbed.

Trust Him

Trust Him when dark doubts assail you.
Trust Him when your strength is small.
Trust Him when to trust Him is the hardest thing of all.
Trust Him when through doubts and sunshine
All thy cares upon Him cast
Till the storm of life is over
And your safely home at last.

Aunt Jane and Mom (Molly) at the Lake

2010-11-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

Mary Jane and Mary Alice & Me?

2010-11-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

Mary Jane and Mary Alice (Omrod from Haddonfield) and Me? Billy as a baby in the hamock at Browns Mills

Mrs. Kelly & Mom (Molly)

2010-11-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Kelly and Molly at Browns Mills in the 1930s (or early 1940s)

Mrs. Kelly at Browns Mills

2010-11-04T10:15:00.001-07:00

The Big Lake Drained

2010-11-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

Boating on the Big Lake

2010-11-04T10:14:00.001-07:00

Mom sailing in the big lake

2010-11-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

Dad at the Dam in Browns MIlls

2010-11-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

Dad at the Dam in Browns Mills in the 1930s.

Mom & Dad at D'Annuccis

2010-11-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

Leo, Mom & Trooper at the dock

2010-11-04T10:10:00.002-07:00

Uncle Jack's Art

2010-11-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Side Porch at Uncle Jack's

2010-11-04T10:09:00.001-07:00

Uncle Jack's Cabin in Browns Mills

2010-11-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

Uncle Jack's House from the side

2010-11-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

Uncle Jack's House from the rear

2010-11-04T10:07:00.001-07:00

At the Kelly Family Reunion in Avalon

2010-11-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

Leo and Gary, Aunt Tudy and Mom (Molly Kelly) with friend at one of the Kelly Family Reunions in Avalon.

At the Log Cabin

2010-11-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

At the Log Cabin on the Farm in Virginia, with Gary. There are bullet holes and arrow heads in the wood.

The Old Farm in Virginia

2010-11-04T10:04:00.001-07:00

Hi Ho Silver Away!

2010-11-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

BK with Horse at Farm

2010-11-04T10:03:00.001-07:00

BK at Farm

2010-11-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

BK on Tractor at Farm

2010-11-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

Riding in the Pond

2010-11-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

Billy at the Farm in Virginia

2010-11-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

St. Joe

2010-05-17T23:51:00.000-07:00

B-17 Sidegunner

2010-04-22T16:17:00.000-07:00

Bill Kelly, Sr. 1943 England

2010-04-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

Wounded in Action 1943

2010-04-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

362 Garden Avenue

2010-02-16T00:18:00.000-08:00

Uncle Babe, Aunt Ethel, Uncle Jack, Aunt Jane
Jerry and Mary Jane on the porch of 362 Garden Avenue
Christmas 1949

Ed Hill RIP 12 07 41 Pearl Harbor

2009-12-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

Barney Tracy & Bill Kelly on Unruh's Roof

2009-12-03T18:10:00.000-08:00

Howard Unruh RIP

2009-10-21T00:45:00.000-07:00

Bill Kelly, Sr., Camden city detective, on roof, holds Thompson submachine gun on Unruh as he came out with his hands up and surrendered to police.

This UPI report is wrong about police riddling the building with bullets and using tear gas. The police didn't fire a shot and no tear gas was used. Nor was there a list of victims.

From what I have learned, Unruh obtained some prophalatics - rubbers for sex, from the pharmacy, and apparently the pharmasist mentioned this to the barber. When Unruh went to get a haircut, the barber made fun of him for buying rubbers when he didn't have a girlfriend, and asked him what he was going to do with the rubbers. That sparked Unruh to go home, grab his guns, kill the pharmasist and return to the barber shop to kill the barber, shooting other people he ran into along the way. - BK

Mass killing suspect Unruh dies at 88

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2009/10/20/Mass-killing-suspect-Unruh-dies-at-88/UPI-30521256039478/

TRENTON, N.J., Oct. 20 (UPI) -- Howard Unruh, suspected of killing 13 people in a 1949 New Jersey spree, has died, authorities said.

Unruh, 88, was never tried for the Sept. 6, 1949, slayings in Camden, N.J. Instead, he was found criminally insane and institutionalized.

Officials said he died Monday at Providence Nursing Home in Trenton, N.J., after a long illness, CNN reported. Unruh is considered by some as the first the first single-episode mass murderer in the United States, CNN said.

A World War II veteran, Unruh was known as an eccentric character who wore combat boots with a business suit, walking the streets carrying a Bible and quoting religious scripture. During the killing spree, police said he calmly shot business owners whose names he had on a list, such as a barber, a shoemaker and a pharmacist, along with other people who crossed his path, including children.

After the killings, police surrounded his apartment building and after riddling it with bullets, lobbed in tear gas canisters, capturing Unruh when he came out, CNN said.

© 2009 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

St. Joe's East Camden 2nd Grade 1959

2009-10-19T17:30:00.000-07:00

Billy & Jackie at Kelly's Kitchen

2009-10-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

Billy Kelly and Jackie Kelly at the Kitchen table at Kelly's Cafe

Kelly Family Reunion

2009-10-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

Kelly Family Reunion at Uncle Ben's house in Avalon, NJ

The Team at Kelly's Cafe

2009-10-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Team at Kelly's Cafe

Can you help identify any of these guys?
If so, let me know

Billkelly3@gmail.com

Eddie & the Cruisers visit Walt Whitman's Home

2009-09-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman Home
328 Mickle Street

Camden, New Jersey

When they made the movie Eddie & the Cruisers, about a fledging rock & roll band that plays Tony Marts nightclub in Somers Point while on the verge of making it Big Time, they changed P.F. Kluge's novel, replacing the inspiring poet Walt Whitman with Ramboux, and replacing this chapter with a scene to a bizarre junk yard in Vineland.

But this is one of the most important chapters in the book, as it is where the name for Eddie's most important album comes from.

But that's Hollywood.

We still have P.F. Kluge's original words though, and I think it would be neat if somebody developed a short, one act play of this, and filmed it on site.

From the novel "Eddie & the Cruisers" by P.F. Kluge
(Viking Press, 1980, p. 186)

....An hour later,...we found ourselves near Camden, just across the bridge from Philadelphia. Camden's not such a good town for leaves. Or trees. Flat, fucked over, mostly black, Camden is to Philadelphia what Newark is to New York: a place you drive through.

"Time we turned around," Eddie said.

Nobody argued, but there are a lot of old-fashioned traffic circles in that part of Jersey, exits feeding off them like spokes off a wheel. I screwed up the turn, and somehow we found ourselves in downtown Camden, where even the dirty bookstores closed at sundown.

"What a place," Eddie mused. "Who the hell ever lived here, anybody ever heard of?"

"I know one!" Joannn popped up. "A famous person, too."

"Who?" Eddie asked.

"Guess."

Eddie didn't respond. Maybe he was blue. Then again, maybe he was stumped.

"Give up?" she asked.

Eddie shrugged. "Sure."

"Jersey Joe Walcott," she said. "I read it somewhere."

"There's another famous man came out of Camden," I said.

"Who's that?" Joann asked.

"You guess." But there weren't any takers. "We'll drop in at his house."

I was in luck that day. My memories of a class trip I'd taken ten years before didn't betray me. And Walt Whitman's home hadn't been urban-renewed, although everything around it had. It stood there, an island of wood and stone in a sea of empty lots, smashed brcik, shattered glass.

"Oh yea," Eddie said as we pulled up in front. "Walt Whitman. Guy who built the bridge."

"Come on Eddie," Joann chided. "the guy they named the bridge after!"

"No shit!" Eddie said.

"Like Pulaski and Goethals," she said.

"Yea. And Triboro."

"Let's go in," I said.

"They let you in?" Eddie asked.

"Sure."

"What for?"

"Just to look around. See where he worked, lived, died. So you get inspired, maybe."

"Okay," Eddie agreed. "I could use a little of that."

I won't make too much of Eddie's visit to the place where the senile, half-paralyzed poet spent his last two decades. I'll leave that to Mannheim and his kind. Yet he won't be wrong if he argues that something of Walt Whitman stayed with Eddie for the rest of his life.

Like all such shrines, the Whitman house was presided over by one of those dear officious volunteer ladies who are the last-ditch custodians of culture in America. She was surprised to see us, so close to closing time, and a little alarmed. We didn't look like your average literary pilgrims. But once we paid admission and convinced her we weren't casing the place, she escorted us from room to room, happy to show us everything: the front parlor, with the poet's rocking chair and fireplace, the back room, with the bed from which he completed the ninth, or "deathbed," edition of Leaves of Grass.

Joann loved the place. She was everywhere, poking into corners, peering at pictures, peppering the hostess with questions. What was it? A nesting instinct? An antiquarian streak? A tiny respite from the impasse her affair with Eddie must have reached? I don't know, but she stayed indoors forever. Eddie, meanwhile, strayed outside, and I followed, into the backyard. I remember there were some fruit trees and a vegetable garden that was about shut down for the season, and a rickety wooden bench you weren't suppose to sit on. We squatted on the grass and rested our backs against the seat.

"We can go anytim," I said, afraid that he was bored.

"We've seen all there is to see. It's just an old house."

"Leave her stay a while yet," Eddie said. "She like it here. I like it too."

"I was hoping you would."

"Maybe someday, they'll make a museum out of the back room at Vince's. Hey, would that be something? This here bed is where Frank Ridgeway worked on 'Far-Away Women,' and Eddie Wilson sat right over here on a case of empty Schaefer bottles."

"That would be strange."

"So's this. Think about it. If Whitman came back today, he'd find the house the same as ever. He could climb right back into the bed he died in. Or step out into the yard. Same pear trees. Same bench. Some old vegetable patch. Nothin' ain't changed. But the minute he stepped out onto the streets of Camden...hole shit!"

I laughed at that. Eddie had this way of saying "holee shit!" that always broke me up. He had a big grin on his face and he headed back to the car.

I went inside and found Joann. We started browsing through pictures of turn-of-the century Camden and stayed till closing time. When we found Eddie, he was waiting for us outside, sitting on the hood of his car. He was staring across the street, so wrapped up in what he saw over there, he didn't notice our approach.

I can tell you what he was looking at. I can't tell you what it meant to him, though I can guess. The Whitman house, I've said, was surrounded by empty lots strewn with junked cars, ripped mattresses, cans and bottles.Here and there, on the horizon, there were a few other surviving houses: a flash of laundry, a scrap of garden, an unbroken window. Out of these houses, at dusk, kids came to play. That's what Eddie was watching: black kids throwing rocks at birds, foraging over bins of garbage, scraping together a baseball game on a lot where a slide into home plate would mean death from a dozen kinds of tetanus. They played though, till it was too dark to see grounders or line drives, only the fly balls against the sky. Then, when it was too dark even for that, they walked home, kicking, jiving, poking past the poet's house, trailing clouds of "mothah-fuckahs."

Eddie pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered them around. I didn't smoke much back then, but I took one anyway, sensing that Eddie didn't want to leave. Joann lit up too.

"It doesn't connect, does it?" Eddie said, blowing a cloud of blue smoke into the autom air. "From there" - he pointed to the Whitman hosue, then to the war zone where the kids had played - "to there."

"No."

"It came apart somewhere," he said. "They don't know nothing about each other, him and them. He's just a name on the bridge to Philly."

"He's been dead a long time," I said.

"I know that, but..." he gestured at the ruins "...what about this?"

He pointed down the street at the black kids. You could still hear them announcing what they would do to each other's ass, come morning.

"...and them?"

"I got this for you," I said. It was the only answer I could give. A paperback edition of Leaves of Grass.

He seemed genuinely surprised. And moved. He thumbed through it, though it was too dark to read.

"I like the title, anyway," he said.

"It's from the both of us," I said, a total lie. Joann had been in the backyard, examining the poet's pear tree, when I purchased the book.

"Thanks, the two," Eddie said. He grabbed each of us by the arm and walked around to the side of the car, and for once the ride home was the way it used to be, relaxed and full of wonder, windows open to the night......

September 6, 1949 Cramer Hill Camden

2009-09-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

It Was 60 Years Ago Today Unruh

2009-09-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

It was 60 years ago today that Howard Unruh grabbed his guns and went on a killing spree in the Cramer Hill section of East Camden, NJ, the first post-WWII spree killer in USA.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20090906__You_never_get_over_it_.html?viewAll=y&c=y

Posted on Sun, Sep. 6, 2009

Sixty years ago today, a Camden gunman killed 13

By Barbara Boyer
Inquirer Staff Writer

Charles Cohen slipped into a closet after hearing his mother yell, "Hide, Charles! Hide!"

Sixty years later, he remembered vividly what he had heard next: gunfire.

Howard Unruh, a deranged World War II veteran, was spraying bullets around the Cohens' apartment in the Cramer Hill section of Camden. He was on an infamous 20-minute rampage that killed 13 people and wounded three others.

In the media, it became known as the walk of death.

As 12-year-old Charles huddled in a closet, Unruh killed the boy's father, Maurice, 40, then his mother, 39-year-old Rose. Unruh then killed the boy's grandmother Minnie Cohen, 67, as she desperately tried to call police.

Last week, Cohen said a prayer and lit a candle in a synagogue to observe Yahrzeit, the Hebrew anniversary of the deaths, which occurred Sept. 6, 1949.

"You get through it, but you never get over it," Cohen said. "I think about my parents every day."

He was disappointed to hear from a reporter that Unruh, although in poor health, was still alive. Cohen was waiting for the call that the man who killed his parents had died.

He never got that call.

On Friday, Cohen died at 72, three days after giving his final interview about that terrible day 60 years ago.

Many witnesses gone

Unruh has outlived a lot of people who could offer memories of the shootings and their aftermath. The judge is gone. The medical examiner, the psychiatrist, and nearly all the investigators are gone, too.

One of those still around Camden is Ron Dale, a retired ironworker and Navy veteran who was 8 and waiting to get his hair cut on that September morning.

The line for the barber in the 3200 block of River Road was long as youngsters got ready for the first day of school. The shoemaker in the next shop had comics, so Dale waited there.

That was when Unruh arrived, gun in hand, and shot the shoemaker, John Pilarchik, 27, a World War II veteran from Pennsauken.

"I heard this bam! He turned around and looked at me," Dale said last week. "He left and went to the barber's."

J. Clark Hoover, 45, was cutting the hair of 6-year-old Orris M. Smith as the boy sat on a hobbyhorse. The two were shot dead in front of the boy's mother.

Dale ran home, pale with fear, his mother later told him. She closed and locked the windows, pulled the blinds, and locked the door, which the family rarely had done before the slayings but regularly did afterward.

Pandemonium ensued. Police flooded the neighborhood. As they searched for the gunman, they used loudspeakers to warn residents to stay inside. Mothers grabbed their babies and ran. Others slid beneath their beds.

Dale was among those who scattered for safety. At Engel's, the nearby saloon, the owner later told Dale that he had grabbed his gun and waited for Unruh as customers took cover behind the jukebox and bar.

But Unruh targeted mostly neighbors and business owners on the other side of River Road, or killed those who got in his way or just caught his eye.

The chronology of the shootings is unclear. At some point, Unruh spotted movement in the first-floor window of a rowhouse next to the shoemaker's. He fired and killed 2-year-old Tommy Hamilton, who was playing with the curtain next to his playpen.

Unruh lived in a second-story apartment at River Road and 32d Street, above the pharmacy where Maurice Cohen worked. Unruh wanted the Cohens dead because of a squabble about Unruh's leaving a gate open.

He also killed a mother, her son, and a grandmother stopped in traffic; a tailor's wife of one month; a TV repairman stopped in traffic; and an insurance agent who failed to get out of his way as he stood at the door of the pharmacy.

Dale thinks Unruh also was looking for neighborhood teens.

"The older kids in the neighborhood used to harass him. They thought he was gay and used to make fun of him," Dale said, describing Unruh as a loner.

James Klein, Unruh's public defender for 33 years, was 7 at the time.

"I remember playing outside and my mother saying, 'Come inside. There's a madman on the loose.' "

In a recent interview, one historian said the event foreshadowed the decline of Camden, an industrial city that had experienced little more than petty crimes. It pierced a trusting community where neighbors took care of one another, he said.

"It's something you never really forget. . . . You take extra precautions to protect your family and your property," said Paul Schopp, a former director of the Camden County Historical Society. "He didn't just rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their essence."

Schopp, who took an interest in the case as a historian, said his father had been on the No. 9 bus from Philadelphia, heading home to Palmyra, when it passed through Camden during the rampage. Police stopped traffic on River Road.

"He was very much aware that something horrific had happened," Schopp said. "By the time his bus had reached the carnage, they were putting sheets over the bodies."

If he'd had more ammunition, Unruh told police, he would have kept shooting. In the end, he surrendered when police descended on his apartment and opened fire on the building.

Years later, as Unruh's attorney, Klein would become one of the few people to visit him regularly in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, where doctors diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and he remained in a ward for the criminally insane.

Klein said Unruh had never been right after he returned from World War II combat, having served in Italy and France, keeping a diary of the Germans he killed. After the war ended and he returned from the service, Unruh tried college but could not make it, Klein said.

Unruh collected weapons and created a shooting range in the basement of his building. He often walked the neighborhood in Army boots, carrying a Bible. Police later learned that Unruh had kept a list of those he wanted dead.

Over the years, Unruh never was found competent to stand trial; the legal system has treated him as someone found guilty by reason of insanity. He unsuccessfully sought parole and transfers to less restrictive facilities, with the relatives of his victims fighting each possible move.

Cohen was among those who attended court proceedings and kept track of Unruh. In the 1980s, he became a strong advocate for victims' rights and hoped for changes in the criminal-justice system to prevent such slayings, his family said. It seemed, however, that the number of mass murders increased; each time, Cohen relived his own horror, they said.

He and his wife of 52 years, Marian, had three grown daughters and seven grandchildren, some of whom never were told of the tragedy. Two years ago, he and his wife left Cherry Hill and moved out of the area. His wife said services for her husband would be private.

There are no more hearings - or, as Marian Cohen called them, "dog and pony shows" - where Unruh is taken to court. Every year, a judge signs a new order to keep him confined.

On River Road, most of the buildings still stand, occupied by new businesses. Engel's Saloon is now the Rumbarenque Night Club, closed this year after a 25-year-old man was fatally shot outside.

Martin's barbershop stands where the shoemaker was killed, and weeds grow in a lot where the old barbershop was torn down.

The apartments where the Cohens and Unruh lived are vacant. A newer stucco facade hides the bullet holes that had, for decades, scarred the building.

The pharmacy is a shoe store, where Maritza Guzman, the owner of Gomez Shoes, learned of the rampage a week after she moved her business there two years ago.

Guzman said she was sorry for the tragedy, "but life has to continue."

Still in custody

Today, Unruh is the oldest person incarcerated in the state. When not hospitalized for medical reasons, he is confined at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.

Klein questions whether the mass murderer will survive to see his 89th birthday in January.

"He's really declined a lot," said Klein.

Greetings from Kelly's Cafe

2009-08-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Kelly's Cafe

Babe and Jerry Kelly

2009-08-05T00:14:00.000-07:00

Babe and Jerry Kelly at the bar

South Jersey Dart Champions

2009-08-05T00:13:00.000-07:00

South Jersey Dart Champions 1965 - Kelly's Cafe

Dart Team Trophies 1965

2009-08-05T00:12:00.000-07:00

Dart Team Trophies 1965 - Won in Every Category

Babe Kelly behind the bar

2009-08-05T00:11:00.000-07:00

Babe Kelly at work behind the bar

Brothers Bill & Babe 1965

2009-08-05T00:10:00.000-07:00

Brothers Bill, Sr. and Babe Kelly
Second floor living room above the back kitchen at Kelly's Cafe (Circa 1965)

Renovate Camden Prison

2009-08-05T00:00:00.001-07:00

Renovate Camden Prison

The State has removed all the prisoners from the Camden prison, and the Delaware River Port Authority has offered millions of dollars to tear the building complex down, but why can't it be redeveloped into another use.

An architect friend of mine - Jack Snyder, once said that prisons, hospitals and schools are all pretty much designed the same, and a building like that prison, less than 20 years old, complete with plumbing, electric and other utilities still use able, should be adapted for another use rather than totally destroyed just because it was a bad decision two decades ago.

It could easily be converted to a hospital, medical center, college dormitory for Rutgers and Cooper Hospital students.

They want to tear down the old Sears building because it stands in the way of Campbell's progress, and they want to tear down the prison, but they don't even have something ready to replace it with.

They should re-adapt the prison to college dorms, get some people living in that neighborhood again, and tear the building down when they are ready to build something else there.

Last Inmates Out of Camden's Riverfront Prison

2009-06-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 20, 2009

http://www.courierpostonline.com/article/20090620/NEWS01/906200352

Courier Post

Last inmates leave Riverfront Prison.

By Bridget Smith

About 20 inmates were transferred from the controversial North Camden facility Thursday morning to other prisons around the state, said Danielle Hunter, a New Jersey Department of Corrections spokeswoman.

"It's great news," said Rod Sadler, chairman of Save Our Waterfront, an organization that comprises several nonprofit groups. "It's a good thing for the city and our neighborhood, and hopefully it'll be a green signal for future development."

Community activists and local officials are hoping the prison's location will attract commercial and residential development to the 80 acres of waterfront framing one of the city's most violent neighborhoods.

The prison, built in 1985, once housed more than 1,000 inmates. But that number has declined steadily since the beginning of the year.

Officials announced Riverfront's closure in early January.

Now, all that remains are "a few items" that are in the process of being distributed to the state's 13 other prisons, Hunter said.

The property will be turned over to the state Treasury Department to decide what becomes of the 16.7-acre property.

Reach Bridget Smith at (856) 486-2473 or brksmith@camden.gannett.com

In Search of Walt Whitman May 31, 1809 - 2009

2009-06-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

In Search of Walt Whitman by William Kelly

“To me, it is the seaside that gives the stamp to New Jersey.”

- Walt Whitman in “From Specimen Days.”

Leaning up in his chair in the second floor room of his Mickle Street row house in Camden, Walt Whitman dipped his feather quill pen into a bottle of ink and wrote:

“There is a dream, a picture that for years at intervals (sometimes quite long ones, but surely again, it time) has come noiselessly up before me, and I really believe, fiction as it is, has enter’d largely into my practical life – certainly into my writings, and shaped and color’d them.”

Whitman’s recurring dream, he wrote, “is nothing more or less than a stretch of interminable white-brown sand, hard and smooth and broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweeps, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low brass drums. This scene, this picture, I say, has risen before me at times for years. Sometimes I wake at night and can hear and see it plainly.”

Hard, smooth sand, rolling ocean, drums and foam. He was here by the water’s edge, but exactly where has been lost in the sands of time.

America’s poet laureate, Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New York, but lived in Camden, New Jersey for the last decades of his life. He traveled to the Jersey Shore on occasion, but there are few references in his writings or biographies that give a clue as to exactly where at the shore he visited.

His New England contemporaries – Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both made pilgrimages to Camden to visit Whitman, and his literary friends chipped in and bought him a horse and buggy as a gift. Whitman is said to have worn out the poor horse, taking frequent jaunts to the Stafford house in Laurel Springs, and from there to the shore.

In the late autumn of 1876 Whitman’s brother Jeff (Thomas Jefferson Whitman) visited Camden with his two daughters and took Whitman for a carriage ride to the shore. According to John Kaplan’s account, “He was pleased by a five-mile drive in a carriage on the hard-packed sand, but his keenest delight came from a two-hour stroll all by himself on the deserted beach. This brought back to him many of his childhood and youthful memories of Long Island.”

“As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, as I wened the shores I know, as I walked where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, where they rustle up hoarse and sibiland, where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her casta-ways….Last of ebb, and the daylight wanning….On and on, and do your part, ye burying ebbing tide!” – W.W.

Paumanok is the Indian name for the area of Long Island where Whitman was born; however, John Kaplan’s account of the five-mile ride on the hard-packed beach narrows the possibilities to a number of Jersey Shore barrier island, possibly Long Beach Island, Absecon Island, or Seven-Mile Beach (Wildwood).

My interest in Whitman and his whereabouts stemmed from the 1997 deaths of Beat Generation writers William Burroughs and Alan Ginsburg.

According to Bob Dylan, “Ginsburg was America’s greatest poet since Walt Whitman,” an opinion shared by many others, including singer/songwriter Patty Smith, who grew up in Camden Country and visited Walt Whitman’s grave after giving a show at the Walt Whitman Poetry Center in Camden last fall.

In Keeping with the spirit of Ginsburg, Burroughs, Dylan and Smith, we decided to embark on the mission of discovering Whitman’s local connections, if there were any.

On a spontaneous whim, with Dave (Swift) as the driver and Rich the navigator and photographer, we headed out to Whitman’s grave in Camden.

For me it was a return to my childhood roots, the old neighborhood, as it was for Rich, who was from the Camden suburbs, and directed our drive down the back roads of our youth.

While on the road, as I paged through Kaplin’s biography of Whitman, Rich related that as a kid he once stumbled across a stream in the woods where there was a bench and a small plaque that noted the place where Whitman frequently went to mediated – Timber Creek.

From Kaplin’s book I read: “Leaning heavily on his cane, he went for a bobble around the block with his little yellow-and-white dog Tip,….acting on impulse or sudden invitation, he (would) spend hours alone in the woods and by the pond at Timber Creek.”

“A grassy farm lane that narrowed to a foot path led from the Stafford house to a stream, a secluded pond and high woods. Calamus and cattails grew at the water’s edge beneath banks of brush and tree roots. Like Adam, in this wild garden that he called Timber Creek, Whitman, gaining back strength and spirit, looked at nature as if for the first time.”

“The fervent heat, but so much more endurable n this purse are – the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the grassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; and occasional wasp, hornet honey bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go) – the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard hawk up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs (Once he came quite close over my head; I saw plainly his hook’d bill and hard restless eyes)….” – W.W.

According to Kaplan, “He wrote seated on stumps and logs or in an old chair the boys hauled out to the creek for him. Once awhile he met them there when they came to dive and splash in the pond…Timber Creek was the imagined landscape of his poetry.”

Whitman also took his clothes off and skinny dipped with the boys. As Whitman himself explained his back-to-nature experiences, “There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.”

“For several summers he performed a solitary ritual in his garden,” wrote Kaplin. “He stripped himself naked, dug his feat into the black mud and rolled in it, rinsed away the mud, rasped his body with a stiff brush until his skin turned scarlet and rinsed again in the spring. After his mud and water bath he bathed in the sun and air, making slow promenades in the turf and declaiming and singing, ‘vocalism’ as the top of his voice.”

“I make the echoes ring, I tell you,” he sang.

“Somehow I seeme’d to identify with each and everything around me, in its condition. Nature was naked and I was also,” wrote Whitman of his Timber Creek sorjurns.

Even after decades Rich ad no trouble finding Timber Creek. Next to the railroad, through the woods, down a gully and there’s the stream and pond, very much like it was in Whitman’s day. The bench and plaque are gone, and there’s the back of a split level home on the bluff. Whitman’s echoes are now drowned out by unseen progress, but the little nature conservatory that inspired Whitman is still inspiring, despite the rubber tire and tin cans in the creek.

“Ducks and drakes are a rapid skimmering over the pond surface of my life, thoughts, experiences, that way – the real area altogether untouched, but the flat pebble making a few dips as it flies and flits along – enough a least to give living touches and contact points….” W.W.

Kaplan said that Whitman made Timber Creek the theme for a book, “Idle Days & Nights of a Half-Parallytic,” and concluded “the notes he made there are his Walden,” but he later changed the name of the book to “Specimen Days.”

That book, according to his biographer, “is a profoundly intimate book, written in a lean, unassuming prose that is in direct contrast with his earlier manner…Whitman suggests how…the bustle of the cities and the suffering in the war had their own enclosing significance and were also paths to the stillness and health of Timber Creek.”

From the creek to Whitman’s summer residence at the Stafford farm house couldn’t be far and within a few blocks we discovered a sign that read: Walt Whitman’s Summer Home.

The Stafford House, at 315 Maple Street, is dated 1785 and was Whitman’s periodic residence from 1876 until 1881. Whitman described it as “a pleasant house, part of it quite old, with maples and lilac bushes growing in the yard.” The maples and lilac are still there, and the home has been restored somewhat and maintained by a group of neighbors, but it was closed when we arrived there.

Through the windows we could see the interior living room, and see that there had been an attempt to restore the place to what it was in Whitman’s day.

“I too pass from the night; I stay awhile away O night, but I return to you again and love you; Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you? I am not afraid….I have been will brought forward by you; I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long; I know not how I come of you, and I know not where I go with you…but I know I came well and shall go well…I will duly pass the day O my mother and dully return to you…” - W.W.

From Timber Creek to the Stafford House, we backtracked down the Pike to Whitman’s Mickel Street home, but first, as it is on the way, a stop by his grave.

As I had been there many times, the first as a child with my father, I knew the way to Harleigh Cemetery, adjacent to Our Lady of Lords hospital.

At the gate of the cemetery there are two signs, one directing visitors to the grave of Hiku poet Nicholas A. Virgilio, who is more revered in Japan than in his own hometown, and the other sign to Whitman’s grave.

While Virgilio’s grave includes a podium, for visitors to stand and read poetry to the lake, Whitman’s grave is down a well-worn, tree-lined path to a little grotto.

The design of Whitman’s crypt, chosen by Whitman, is based on a drawing by English poet William Blake.

The tomb was constructed out of Whitman’s royalties and built to his specifications and under his watchful eyes before he departed. The crypt also includes the bodies of other members of his family.

Two large trees with flat barks are carved with the initials of people who have come here from all around the world to visit the grave of the old bard.

“If you whoe’er you are my book perusing,
In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing,
All, all toward the mystic ocean tending,
Currents for starting a continent new,
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid,
Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves,
Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous’d and ominous too,
Out of the depths of the storm’s abysmic waves, who knew whence?
Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter’d swiftly
Or from the sea of time, collecting vesting all, I bring, A
Windrow drift of weeds and shells…There waifs from the deep,
Cast high and dry,
Wash’d on America’s shores?” – W.W.

The granite marker, with a beautifully engraved shadow of Whitman bears the inscription: “Walt Whitman – May 31, 1819 March 26, 1892. Author of Leaves of Grass, the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. His poetry was a celebration of life, and his philosophy was a preparation for death.”

“I depart as air, I shake my white locks as the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow – from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for me under your boot sole.” – W.W.

And there we came closest to finding Whitman, hard by the side of his grave.

From there we went into downtown Camden, to Mickle Street. I remembered Whitman’s house to be surrounded by hundreds of other row houses.

Today, only a few neighbors remain, and the two story, wood clapboard tow home is boxed in by a few other red brick row houses, one of which is the home of the Walt Whitman Society.

Whitman’s house is closed. An empty wine bottle is wrapped tightly in a brown paper back on the step, until recently the last refuge of a passing derelict, whose vision from the steps is the Camden County prison. To the left is the river and the skyscrapers of Philadelphia.

In front of the house, standing untouched by the decay and progress around it, there’s a large granite block, a well used carriage step, once used by Whitman to mount his chariot for trips to Timber Creek and the Jersey Shore, on which is carved the initials “W.W.”

A few blocks away, the Walt Whitman Poetry Center is also closed and deserted. The reflecting pool is empty, but there at the end, is Pan, dancing in the park, and at the end of the pool is a duck, scampering away from the jaws of a snapper turtle, all brilliant, bronze sculptures that go unrecognized in the Camden, New Jersey, my hometown.

“Elements merge in the night… ships make tacks in dreams… the sailor sails … the exile returns home… the Fugitive returns unharmed, the immigrant is back beyond months and years; the poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his childhood, with well known neighbors and faces. They warmly welcome him …. He is barefoot again … he forgets he is well off.” – W.W.

It was from his Camden home that Whitman looked back on the cities where he lied and wrote, “New York, Brooklyn, New Orleans and Washington – They are all cities of romance. They are the cities of things begun – Camden is the city of things finished.”

“Pensive and faltering
The words the Dead I write,
For living are the Dead….
…duly return to you….” - W. W.

The SANDPAPER, the Newsmagazine of the Jersey Shore
Ocean City, N.J. Friday, June 5, 1998.

When I sat down to retype this story to post on line, I didn't realize that it was May 31, 2009, one hundred and ninety years to the day of Whitman's birth on May 31, 1809.

In fact, I was quite startled at the fact, as I should have known it and thought about it and visited his grave, as I'm sure others did.

But when I checked if anybody else noticed this fact, I found a few other blogs who also wrote about Whitman today.

They had a birthday party at Walt's house:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Walt+Whitman+190+years&hl=en&start=10&sa=N

http://bellemeadebooks.blogspot.com/2009/05/walt-whitman-at-190-difficult-oracle.html

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_xzNt5IyYxF8/Sh9v1IZP77I/AAAAAAAAA-k/rUmwVIL8EhU/s1600-h/guyWalt.jpg

This May 31 is the 190th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth. He remains the singular American poetic invention even as the world he inhabited fades further from view. When Leaves of Grass was originally published in 1855, the United States was largely an agrarian country building toward civil war whose image of itself was still mostly Calvinist in its outlook, and a land where "the future" was filled with unprecedented change. He lived from the age of buckboard to railroad; Robert Fulton invented the steamboat the year Whitman was born, and he died the year Ellis Island accepted its first immigrants. Thomas Edison had invented the incandescent light bulb 13 years before. Imagine that.

Guy Davenport, in his book of essays The Geography of the Imagination, calls Whitman a symbol of American idealism "as bright and in many ways more articulate than Jefferson or Jackson." Yet his reputation these days seems more dim and more remote than ever. In some ways, Davenport suggests, this is because Whitman's poetic stride, the multitudes his poems contain, makes him a difficult figure to measure in full. Even the poets in the generation immediately following Whitman found his multifaceted catalogues too inclusive:

"Whitman, Yeats complained, was bad for the American spirit because it seemed to him that we indulged all too naturally in what Whitman urged us to wallow. (Max) Beerbohm caricatured this view of Whitman ('... inciting the American eagle to soar'), and the young Ezra Pound in his Pre-Raphaelite suit thought Whitman much too much, while intelligently suspecting that there was something there that that the critics weren't seeing...."

Here's what Rundangerously had to say:

http://rundangerously.blogspot.com/2009/05/happy-birthday-walt-whitman-190-years.html

A Golfer's Tribute:

http://www.meetup.com/San-Diego-Social-Golf/fr/boards/thread/6997425/

Lawrence requested and I tried to deliver. Loosely following the style of Walt Whitman, born May 31, 1819, recited 190 years later at the Ballesteros Open, at Doubletree:

I stand on gnarled roots and twigs, fallen leaves forecasting my fate should I linger too long.

I feel the oppression of the leafy bough, skies blotted by its branches, life and death embodied in a single heavenly arch

I breathe the heavy mist, cool and filling in my breast, tempting me to linger, to stay upon the trunk of its host

Searching, seeking forward sun and lush fields, pennants promising victory upon the shores of distant land

I struggle torn between the calming glen and the glory of the plain, to succumb to the shade or to lay up on the sunny hill

One last deep breath of cool air, one glance above through the looming bough, one fierce swipe with my sickle as I send one final thought through the leaves toward heaven:

Why, Lord, did I not take a mulligan?

Leo Kelly 1935 CCHS Camden

2009-05-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

Uncle Leo Kelly outside Camden Catholic HS in Camden, 1935 The Class Clown

Killed on the USS South Dakota Battle of Coral Sea.

Burried at Sea

The USS South Dakota was built at New York Ship Yard, Camden, N.J.

Many of the iron workers who built her frequented Kelly's Cafe on State Street in North Camden.

When Uncle Leo James Kelly enlisted in the Navy he was assigned to the South Dakota, and participated in the battle on October 26, 1942 in which 32 Japanese planes were shot down, a record for a single ship that holds today.

On the night of 14-15 November the South Dakota engaged in night action against a fleet of Japanese ships during the Third Battle of Savo Island (Guadalcanal) and sustained heavy damage from 42 shell hits while sinking three Japanese cruisers and heavily damaging several others.

It was during this engagement when Leo J. Kelly was killed.

USS South Dakota BB 57

http://www.ussdakota.com/uss-south-dakota-stories-buried-at-sea.html

The following men lost their lives while serving aboard the
USS South Dakota between 1942 and 1945.

NAME FIRST INITIAL SERIAL NUMBER DATE OF DEATH RANK/DIV.

Biblewski Joseph F. 650-34-92 6-May-45
Acierto Antonio 497-85-97 19-Jun-45 GM
Adams Milledge R. 552-01-78 15-Nov-42 Radar
Allensworth Arthur R. 648-52-90 22-Oct-43
Baer Philip E. 377-15-54 6-May-45
Baker James M. 287-68-23 5-Feb-45
Baker Oren P. 627-09-06 19-Jun-44
Ball Charley E. 554-10-94 19-Jun-44
Barnett Herman D. 560-48-06 19-Jun-44
Bouvier Mathieu T. 606-67-80 21-Jan-45
Bruggman Alfred B. 377-91-85 19-Jun-44
Burke John E. 006-20-20 15-Nov-42
Canfield Leon W 008-59-22 15-Nov-42
Carmitchel John B. 603-01-22 15-Nov-42
Carnelley Walter J 650-21-96 7-May-45
Cavaliere Joseph 811-08-04 5-Nov-44
Cavender Garnett L 626-06-54 19-Jun-44
Chaney John D. 668-35-98 19-Jun-44
Chatelain Hubert Paul 274-21-85 26-Oct-42
Clark Albert R. 003-50-31 16-Jan-45
Colangelo Leonard V 610-42-16 19-Jun-44
Collura Jospeh P 707-94-56 18-Jan-44
Conner Olen D. 337-80-16 15-Nov-42
Corrieri Giovanni A. 646-38-14 15-Nov-42
Currer David 012-36-20 15-Nov-42
Daisernia Benedict J 600-12-63 6-May-45
Dillard Jack J 223-65-83 19-Jun-44
Doyle Reginald F. 244-06-79 19-Jun-44
Ebel John A. 140-06-79 15-Nov-42
Engholm Russell K 376-14-53 15-Nov-42
Erwin Lawrence H 552-71-17 15-Nov-42
Fox Arthur R. 647-04-89 15-Nov-42
Fullenlove John J 026-57-00 19-Jun-44
Goforth Richard L 639-58-24 19-Jun-44
Greenhaw Will B. 670-73-60 15-Nov-42
Gustafson Edward 663-56-84 6/19/1944
Hartman Albert 654-95-83 15-Nov-42
Henderson Alfred 274-46-76 15-Nov-42
Henderson Melvin 381-54-77 15-Nov-42
Henneberry George 202-63-74 19-Jun-44
Hesser Willard A. 644-87-49 15-Nov-42
Heuszel Lewis G 625-42-89 15-Nov-42
Holmes James A. 610-45-12 15-Nov-42
Horan Jr.Arthur J 647-94-54 6-May-45
Horton Frank E. 207-32-42 15-Nov-42
Horton Myron B. 553-51-75 19-Jun-44
Iven George N 351-07-51 15-Nov-42
Jensen Martin S. 638-17-59 14-Nov-42
Johnson Alfred 606-30-91 15-Nov-42
Johnson Frank J 852-43-18 6-May-45
Jones Therion A. 656-03-54 7-May-45
Keane John J 224-68-55 15-Nov-42
Kelly Leo J 650-21-86 15-Nov-42
Knop Arron 410-61-53 15-Nov-42
Krepps Jr. Raymond 012-36-35 15-Nov-42
Kunkel Alvin F. 338-50-18 6-May-45
Lahey Leonard E. 321-75-27 15-Nov-42
Linder Wallace R. 274-42-57 19-Jun-44
Lutts Earnest R. 670-73-96 19-Jun-44
Marsden Nelson A. 666-14-43 15-Nov-42
McCalister William 410-69-60 15-Nov-42
McIntosh James 646-54-47 15-Nov-42
Miller William 658-14-45 19-Jun-42
Morey Kenneth J. 329-04-02 15-Nov-42
Morris Carroll E. 342-62-73 19-Jun-44
Murphy John 608-83-64 19-Jun-44
Nagy John A. 850-96-97 5-Jun-44
Nardiello Alexander 811-89-27 19-Jun-44
Nichols Jr. Charles 012-04-88 15-Nov-42
Nimmo Raymond H 647-64-16 19-Jun-44
Patterson Jr. James 321-75-27 15-Nov-42
Pavlic Milton F. 007-14-17 15-Nov-42
Paynter Jr. Lewis 609-32-41 6-May-45
Pearson Arthur T. 202-01-10 15-Nov-42
Pfyl Werner F. 376-12-66 15-Nov-42
Price Frank L. 800-49-18 5-Apr-44
Pritchett Merton 410-68-92 15-Nov-42
Puzerski Albert 862-12-21 19-Jun-44
Quartermont Lloyd 610-46-03 15-Nov-42
Runnels John V 626-12-39 7-May-45
Skelton Herbert G 316-81-83 19-Jun-44
Smith Jr. Hasting 644-25-39 19-Jun-44
Surber George E. 871-66-85 6-May-45
Vance Victor D. 628-24-78 15-Nov-42
Wilke Jr. Theodore 628-24-03 15-Nov-42
Youngchild Robert 890-14-12 19-Jun-44
Zupko George J 002-26-59 15-Nov-42

Uncle Jack and Uncle Leo

2009-05-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

Uncle Jack and Uncle Leo - Probably taken at Browns Mills.

Both Navy men.

Uncle Jack had an American flag tatto on his arm that he could make wave.

Mom said that they were at Browns Mills when they got the news that
Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Leo enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor and died on the USS South Dakota at Battle of Coral Sea and is burried at sea.

My younger brother Leo was named after him and looked remarkably like him.

God bless tham all.

Memorial Day 2009 Browns Mills, N.J.

Uncle Leo Kelly and Kelly Park in North Camden

2009-05-19T17:09:00.000-07:00

Uncle Jack & Uncle Leo Kelly and Kelly Park in North Camden

Uncle Jack Born worked at Public Service bus company in Camden and was married to my father's sister Jane Born, head of nurses at West Jersey Hospital for a quarter of a century.

There was always a tie in between the Kelly family and Public Service, besides Uncle Jack, because John Kelly, Jr., the eldest son of my grandfather, died in an accident while repairing a Public Service bus. He was down in a pit working on it when it caught fire or something fell on him. In any case, the company said that there would always be a job open for any Kelly anytime, but I don't know of anyone who took advantage of that offer. But Uncle Jack was a manager there for many years, and retired to his home in Pennsauken and Browns Mills.

Uncle Leo as he is known in the family, was one of the Kelly boys - along with my father Bill, Jerry and Babe.

Besides Aunt Jane, there was also Aunt Julie, who was also a nurse.

Leo was known for his sense of humor, and was the class clown, but was also a good football player and took live seriously enough to join the Navy and die in battle, manning an anti-aircraft gun that was hit directly during one of the last sea battles between battleships. And it was a night battle, so they could hardly see each other.

Leo's name is listed among those American sailors who were killed in combat and buried at sea.

It was the hero's death of Leo Kelly that inspired the call for the little North Camden park be named Kelly Park in honor of Leo Kelly and his brothers who also served during World War II.

The articles in the newspapers at the time indicated that it was a foregone conclusion that Kelly Park would become a reality, but it never happened.

I asked my 92 year old mother about Kelly Park and she said, "Oh, yea, they talked about it but never did anything about it."

Memorial Day 2009

Bill Kelly, Sr. on the Sidelines

2009-05-19T17:07:00.000-07:00

Bill Kelly, Sr., offensive guard for the Camden Berwick Bears semi-pro football team,
on the sidelines.

Uncle Leo Kelly Playing Football

2009-05-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

Uncle Leo Kelly in either Berwick Bear or Camden Catholic HS football uniform, probably outside State Street home.

Ventura's Marlton Pike

2009-05-17T21:14:00.000-07:00

Ventura's Marlton Pike

Before there was a Ventura's Off Shore in Northfield, Ventura's Green House on the beach in Margate or Moma Ventura's in the burbs, there was this little pizza joint on the Marlton Pike, near East Camden but technically a few blocks in Pennsauken. It hugged Route 130 and is still there, though I haven't patronized it since the late 60s when Nick and Lou Ventura were in the kitchen.

It had to be a weekly thing and pizza and cheesesteaks were the only items on the menu, as far as I was concerned, and both were terrific.

The last time I was there was the day before or after graduation in May, 1969, and I was with my mother and Michael Bruno, a boysterious, Italian buddy from St. Jose grammar school days, though we drifted apart in high school and didn't see each other as much, except for that last day at Ventura's.

And I remember Lou and Nick talking Italian to each other in the kitchen, and coming out to say hello and to congradulate us for graduating.

After another summer at the Shore I went away to college (Dayton, Ohio)and they sold the house in East Camden and I never made it back to Lou and Nick's Pizza Joint, but they followed us down the Shore.

Like many of dad's friends and fellow cops, we spent time at the PAL House - Police Athletic League ramshackled old wood clapboard three or four story hotel like place on the Sea Isle City boardwalk, before it was whiped out by the storm of '6?.

Then we started going to Ocean City, where Bill Brown, another Camden cop, had a rooming house and a little diner on 9th Street. We also stayed a few times at Quickie's - another Camden cop, and a few weeks in an apartment around 16th street. I worked at the 22nd Street Restaurant as a bus boy, once cleaning up after Princess Grace Kelly and her family ate there.

The diner was owned by Mr. Pestratus, a Greek who owned a diner in South Camden, and a good friend of my father.

So there was a small contingent of Camden people infiltrating Ocean City, and I later learened that my old neighbor Jimmy Barklow (Bugfoot Charlie's nephew) and Joe Knoran, my first best buddy, both moved to Wildwood, as did my dad's good friend Bill Large.

Lou and Nick Ventura went to Margate, where they bought the old Green House, a real house on the beach in the shadow of Lucy the Elephant.

I remember going in there back in the 1960s, and there was a band in the corner called the Flintstones, and they really were a bunch of Old Coots, playing Hillbilly music. But they were having a good time.

Venturas cleaned up the place, and put a nice restaurant upstairs and a tavern bar downstairs, where the pizza and cheesesteaks taste just like they did back in the old Hood. They really do.

Lou put in a deck upstairs, and the place is really popular, especially in the summer, when you can sit out and eat and drink in the sun and catch the girls on Thong Beach.

Lou's son also got into the business, and Lou bought the old Rugby Inn in Northfield, also an old classic institution, and remodedled it into a really fine bar and restaurant. And he did it without ever closing for a day.

The Rugby had always been a popular sports bar, and had nice owners (Lou Mathis' stepsons, Joe and Steve Sundra) and best bartenders (Harry "Bumps"/Joe Miller) and a strong following from the Atlantic City Country Club, which is just down the street.

With a nice fireplace and big bar, Ventura's Offshore Cafe also has good food and Bumps is still there.

When I was bringing my mother home from the hospital after visiting my dad after he had a stroke, we stopped at Ventura's Off Shore for something to eat. Lou was there, and just like he did at the Marlton Pike joint forty years ago, he came out to say hello, and was especially pleased to see my mom, recalling for a moment the old Hood.

"Look at Lou now," my mother said. "When we first met him he couldn't hardly speak English, and here he is with three restaurants and all these people working for him, so successful," and then she looked at me and said, "and you're still a worthless bum."

But she said it in such a way that it was almost funny, and Lou laughed and said that I was actually worth hundreds of thousands more than him, because he owned the banks that much, which took some of the sting out her bum barb.

And although I put my time in at Mack & Manco's Pizza, and I've seen how successful Scott and Duncan have been with Yesterday's in Columbia, South Carolina, and Brian has been with the Library, I'm glad I'm not in that business, as all those guys really work hard to be successful.

But it is, as my mother noted, a testiment to Lou and Nick Ventura for living the American dream in style.

Tarantini Panzarottini

2009-04-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

The History of the Original Tarantini Panzarotti

I remember my mother walking me to Marlton Pike, about ten blocks away from Garden Avenue, to go to the barber shop, doctor's office, a family portrait photo shop and to get panzorattis.

I can still remember eating my first panzoratti on the walk home.

An inverted pizza, sealed and deep fried, the fresh panzoratti is really delicious.

We used to go to the Marlton Pike shop and sit at the tables and eat, but after being gone a decade or so, when I went back I was disapointed to see the drastic change in the nature of the neighborhood. You could no longer sit down and eat at the shop, and had to order your food through a bullet proof, glass window with a banker's tray. There was a definate disfunction between the neighbors, but the panzorattis were still good.

At that time they had vans of panzorattis going around to the various schools and sporting events in the area, and now, panzorattis are patented and sold through a franchise, and can be had at many pizza joints throughout South Jersey.

And when ever and where ever I have one, a panzoratti brings back the memories of the old hood.

According to the official history:

The Original Tarantini Panzarotti first came to America with Pauline Tarantini, an Italian immigrant mother with 10 children. As a seven-year old child, Mrs. Tarantini learned how to make these unique delicious treats from her mother in Brindisi, Italy.

During a family financial crisis in 1960, Mrs. Tarantini began frying her Panzarattis by hand from her Camden, New Jersey home. Her husband, Leopold, peddled them at gas stations and other local establishments for 25 cents apiece. Origionally the Tarantini's gave out free Panzarottis to the neighborhood kids. By evening the kids would be back for more along with their intrigued parents.

By 1963, the Panzarotti was becoming so popular by word-of-mouth that the Tarantini's purchased a store front a few doors from their Camden home and obtained a nationally registered trademark. Soon afterwards they designed special cusomized equipment to mass produce the Panzarotti while still retaining the lightest "home-made" quality.

Now, over 40 years after Mrs. Tarantini took out her frying pan, her sons and grandsons carry on the family tradition through their company Tarantini Panzarotti Pizza, Inc.

The Tarantini family, with the help of Angel Distributiors of Marlton, New Jersey, are proud to bring the South Jersey tradition of Panzarotti to you.

State Street View of Ben Franklyn Bridge

2009-04-07T17:12:00.000-07:00

The North Camden Kellys

2009-04-07T17:11:00.000-07:00

Descendants of Daniel KELLY

Generation No. 1

1. DANIEL1 KELLY was born 1798 in Ireland. He married MOLLY O'GAGHAN. She was born in Ireland.

Child of DANIEL KELLY and MOLLY O'GAGHAN is:
2. i. PATRICK EMMET2 KELLY, b. 1818, Ireland; d. 1890.

Generation No. 2

2. PATRICK EMMET2 KELLY (DANIEL1) was born 1818 in Ireland, and died 1890. He married BRIDGET O'RYAN KANE 1839, daughter of THOMAS KANE and SARAH MOYNIHAN. She was born 1820 in Ireland, and died 1879.

More About PATRICK EMMET KELLY:
Occupation: Shipbuilder

Notes for BRIDGET O'RYAN KANE:
Adopted by the O'Ryan family - reason unknown.

Child of PATRICK KELLY and BRIDGET KANE is:
3. i. JOHN PATRICK3 KELLY, b. January 1854, County Donegal, Ireland; d. May 25, 1902, Philadelphia, PA.

Generation No. 3

3. JOHN PATRICK3 KELLY (PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born January 1854 in County Donegal, Ireland, and died May 25, 1902 in Philadelphia, PA. He married JANE CARNEY June 03, 1873 in Ireland, daughter of MATTHEW CARNEY and MARY COSTELLO. She was born April 17, 1855 in County Cork, Ireland, and died July 22, 1929 in Philadelphia, PA.

Notes for JOHN PATRICK KELLY:
John had a horse farm in Ireland.
Died of Tuberculosis.
The 1900 Census lists John as being born Jan 1854. He came to the U.S. about 1876.
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.

More About JOHN PATRICK KELLY:
Burial: May 28, 1902, Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect. 8, Range 4, Lot 36, S/8 (Owner ID 290567, Jane Kelly)
Occupation: Policeman

Notes for JANE CARNEY:
Died from Cancer. Liked travel.
The 1900 Census shows Jane to be born September 1847. Came to the U.S. about 1876.
On 1900 Census Jane said she had 15 children; 9 living at the time.
In 1900 and 1910 lived at 616 Race Street, Philadelphia, PA.

More About JANE CARNEY:
Burial: July 26, 1929, Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect. 8, Range 4, Lot 36, S/6 (Owner ID 290567, Jane Kelly)
Occupation: Housewife

Children of JOHN KELLY and JANE CARNEY are:
4. i. MARY FRANCES4 KELLY, b. Abt. 1875, Philadelphia, PA; d. May 18, 1969, Philadelphia, PA.
5. ii. JOHN KELLY, b. Abt. August 1876, Philadelphia, PA; d. Aft. April 1930, New Jersey.
iii. SARAH KELLY, b. Abt. April 1879, Philadelphia, PA.

Notes for SARAH KELLY:
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.

6. iv. HELEN (NELL) KELLY, b. Abt. December 1881, Philadelphia, PA; d. December 17, 1948.
7. v. ELIZABETH ANN KELLY, b. Bet. 1883 - 1886, Philadelphia, PA; d. July 16, 1961, St. Louis, MO.
8. vi. MARGARET "MAG" KELLY, b. April 08, 1885, Philadelphia, PA; d. April 24, 1979, Pennsylvania.
9. vii. JOSEPHINE (GERTRUDE) F. KELLY, b. September 01, 1887, Philadelphia, PA; d. April 03, 1979, Philadelphia, PA.
10. viii. FLORENCE MARIE KELLY, b. Abt. October 17, 1893, Philadelphia, PA; d. May 15, 1977, Philadelphia, PA.
ix. WILLIAM (CHARLES) KELLY, b. Abt. May 1897, Philadelphia, PA.

Notes for WILLIAM (CHARLES) KELLY:
In 1900 and 1910 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.

Generation No. 4

4. MARY FRANCES4 KELLY (JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born Abt. 1875 in Philadelphia, PA, and died May 18, 1969 in Philadelphia, PA. She married CHARLES A. CONNOR Abt. 1895 in Pennsylvania. He was born Abt. August 1869 in PA, and died Bef. November 1956.

Notes for MARY FRANCES KELLY:
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1910 lived at 238 N. Randolph Street, Philadelphia, PA.
In November 1956 lived at 7521 Gilbert St., Philadelphia 19, PA.

Notes for CHARLES A. CONNOR:
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1910 lived at 238 N. Randolph Street, Philadelphia, PA.

Children of MARY KELLY and CHARLES CONNOR are:
i. JOHN F.5 CONNOR, b. November 1899, Philadelphia, PA; d. October 28, 1962; m. UNKNOWN.

Notes for JOHN F. CONNOR:
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1910 lived at 238 N. Randolph Street, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1956 lived at 359 E. Gorgas Lane, Philadelphia 19, PA.

More About JOHN F. CONNOR:
Occupation: lawyer

ii. CHARLES PHILIP CONNOR, b. February 22, 1902, Philadelphia, PA; m. UNKNOWN.

Notes for CHARLES PHILIP CONNOR:
In 1910 lived at 238 N. Randolph Street, Philadelphia, PA.
On 11-24-1936 Charles lived at 4158 N. Darien Street, Philadelphia, PA, and worked at the Commonwealth Title Co. of Philadelphia, 1220 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1956 lived at 2116 Mesquite Street, Las Vegas, NV.

More About CHARLES PHILIP CONNOR:
Occupation: Casino card dealer

5. JOHN4 KELLY (JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born Abt. August 1876 in Philadelphia, PA, and died Aft. April 1930 in New Jersey. He married MARY ELLEN TWOHIG Abt. 1906. She was born Abt. 1886 in County Derry (Londonderry), Ireland, and died 1942.

Notes for JOHN KELLY:
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.

More About JOHN KELLY:
Burial: Calvary Cemetery, Cherry Hill, NJ (Section AA, Range W, Lot 5, Grave #1)
Occupation: Philadelphia Policeman

Notes for MARY ELLEN TWOHIG:
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.

More About MARY ELLEN TWOHIG:
Burial: Calvary Cemetery, Cherry Hill, NJ (Section AA, Range W, Lot 5, Grave #3)

Children of JOHN KELLY and MARY TWOHIG are:
i. JOHN "JACK"5 KELLY, JR., b. Abt. 1907, Philadelphia, PA; d. 1935.

Notes for JOHN "JACK" KELLY, JR.:
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.
Not married.
Died from accident at bus company - he was working in the pit and it caught on fire.

More About JOHN "JACK" KELLY, JR.:
Burial: 1935, Calvary Cemetery, Cherry Hill, NJ (Section AA, Range W, Lot 5, Grave #2)

11. ii. CORNELIUS "BABE" KELLY, b. June 02, 1908, Philadelphia, PA; d. October 25, 1972, Camden, NJ.
iii. JANE KELLY, b. September 26, 1913, Camden, NJ; d. February 13, 1993, NJ; m. JACK BORN, Bet. 1930 - November 1956; d. Aft. November 1956.

Notes for JANE KELLY:
No children.
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.
In November 1956 lived at 1531 Gross Avenue, Pennsauken, NJ.

More About JANE KELLY:
Burial: Unknown, Pennsauken, NJ
Occupation: Directress of Nurses at West Jersey (now Camden) Hospital (plus 3 satellite hospitals in suburbs of Camden)

Notes for JACK BORN:
In November 1956 lived at 1531 Gross Ave., Pennsauken, NJ. d. 199?

12. iv. WILLIAM E. KELLY, SR., b. December 08, 1914, Camden, NJ; d. December 09, 1988, Philadelphia, PA.
13. v. JEREMIAH "JERRY" JOSEPH KELLY, b. September 10, 1916, New Jersey.
vi. LEO JAMES KELLY, b. Abt. 1919, New Jersey; d. November 15, 1942, Serving aboard USS South Dakota.

Notes for LEO JAMES KELLY:
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.
Not married.
Killed while on the USS South Dakota during WWII - it was torpedoed. He received a Purple Heart.

14. vii. JULIA KELLY, b. 1922, Camden, NJ. d. 2008.

6. HELEN (NELL)4 KELLY (JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born Abt. December 1881 in Philadelphia, PA, and died December 17, 1948. She married RALPH HOUCK Aft. June 1900. He died Aft. July 26, 1945.

Notes for HELEN (NELL) KELLY:
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
Lived in Buffalo, NY.

Child of HELEN KELLY and RALPH HOUCK is:
i. RALPH5 HOUCK, JR..

Notes for RALPH HOUCK, JR.:
Killed as a child by a drunk driver while Ralph, Sr. was pulling him in a wagon.

7. ELIZABETH ANN4 KELLY (JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born Bet. 1883 - 1886 in Philadelphia, PA, and died July 16, 1961 in St. Louis, MO. She married HUGH F. CLINE Aft. June 1900. He was born Abt. 1877 in Pennsylvania, and died Bef. November 1956.

Notes for ELIZABETH ANN KELLY:
In 1900 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1920 lived at 1435 South Marstan St., Philadelphia, PA.
In November 1956 lived at 1300 Greentree Rd., Glendale, MO.

More About ELIZABETH ANN KELLY:
Burial: July 20, 1961, Resurrection Cemetery, St. Louis, MO (Sec. 16, Lot 333)
Occupation: Sales clerk in retail shoes

Notes for HUGH F. CLINE:
In 1920 lived at 1435 South Marstan St., Philadelphia, PA.

More About HUGH F. CLINE:
Burial: Holy Cross Cemetery, Philadelphia, PA
Occupation: Clerk in ship yard

Children of ELIZABETH KELLY and HUGH CLINE are:
i. ELIZABETH5 CLINE, b. Abt. 1905, Philadelphia, PA; d. July 1910, Philadelphia, PA.

More About ELIZABETH CLINE:
Burial: July 23, 1910, Holy Cross Cemetery, Philadelphia, PA (Sec. 32, Range 7, Lot 20, 2/8)
Cause of Death: Pneumonia

15. ii. GERTRUDE ELIZABETH CLINE, b. June 05, 1906, Philadelphia, PA; d. March 19, 2000, Chillicothe, MO.
16. iii. HUGH "BUD" F. CLINE, JR., b. Bet. 1908 - 1909, Philadelphia, PA; d. 1942.
17. iv. DOROTHY "DOT" R. CLINE, b. August 30, 1911, PA; d. March 20, 2000, NJ.
v. WILLIAM CLINE, b. February 1912, Philadelphia, PA; d. May 1912, Philadelphia, PA.

More About WILLIAM CLINE:
Burial: May 30, 1912, Holy Cross Cemetery, Philadelphia, PA (Sec. 32, Range 7, Lot 20, 2/6)

8. MARGARET "MAG"4 KELLY (JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born April 08, 1885 in Philadelphia, PA, and died April 24, 1979 in Pennsylvania. She married JOHN J. "JACK" SCANLON Aft. June 1900. He was born Abt. 1882, and died May 1942 in Philadelphia, PA.

Notes for MARGARET "MAG" KELLY:
In 1900 and 1910 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In November 1956 lived at 2834 S. Smedley St., Philadelphia 45, PA.

More About MARGARET "MAG" KELLY:
Burial: April 27, 1979, Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect. 8, Range 4, Lot 36, CR/8 (Owner ID 290567, Jane Kelly)

More About JOHN J. "JACK" SCANLON:
Burial: May 16, 1942, Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect. 8, Range 4, Lot 36, CR/10 (Owner ID 290567, Jane Kelly)

Children of MARGARET KELLY and JOHN SCANLON are:
i. JOHN J. "BUDDY"5 SCANLON, b. June 18, 1915; d. April 15, 1995, Pennsylvania; m. UNKNOWN, Bef. November 1956.

Notes for JOHN J. "BUDDY" SCANLON:
In November 1956 lived at 2834 S. Smedley St., Philadelphia 45, PA.

More About JOHN J. "BUDDY" SCANLON:
Burial: April 19, 1995, Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect. 8, Range 4, Lot 36, CR/6 (Owner ID 290567, Jane Kelly)

18. ii. MARIE SCANLON, d. Unknown.
iii. JANE SCANLON, m. JOHN SCHAFFER, Bef. November 1956.

Notes for JANE SCANLON:
In November 1956 lived at 3 Drexel Ave., Stratford, NJ.

Notes for JOHN SCHAFFER:
In November 1956 lived at 3 Drexel Ave., Stratford, NJ.

9. JOSEPHINE (GERTRUDE) F.4 KELLY (JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born September 01, 1887 in Philadelphia, PA, and died April 03, 1979 in Philadelphia, PA. She married FRANCIS HENRY CLARKE November 30, 1911 in St. Augustine's Church, Philadelphia, PA. He was born August 11, 1888 in Beverly, NJ, and died September 24, 1981 in Germantown Hospital, Philadelphia, PA.

Notes for JOSEPHINE (GERTRUDE) F. KELLY:
Residence at birth 703 North 8th Street, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1900 and 1910 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1920 lived at 5448 Spring Street, Philadelphia, PA.
Piano player. Giggler (always laughing).

More About JOSEPHINE (GERTRUDE) F. KELLY:
Baptism: September 13, 1887, St. Augustine's, Philadelphia, PA. Thomas O'Neill & Mary Slaven - sponsors.
Burial: April 1979, SS. Peter & Paul Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect 9, Row 12, Lot 28
Cause of Death: Cardiopulmonary arrest due to old age

Notes for FRANCIS HENRY CLARKE:
Loved to play darts and watch baseball.
In 1900 lived at 1857 Etting Street, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1910 lived at 1728 Mareton (sp) Street, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1920 lived at 5448 Spring Street, Philadelphia, PA.

More About FRANCIS HENRY CLARKE:
Baptism: October 30, 1895, St. Elizabeth's, Philadelphia, PA. Florence Miller - sponsor.
Burial: 1981, SS. Peter & Paul Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect 9, Row 12, Lot 28
Cause of Death: Respiratory failure due to pneumonia
Occupation: Milkman for Scott-Powell Dairies; Clerk; Paymaster for Publicker Industries, Inc.

Marriage Notes for JOSEPHINE KELLY and FRANCIS CLARKE:
Rev. D. D. Regan, 4th & Vine Streets, 2:00 PM. The movie The Sixth Sense uses St. Augustine Church for the interior shots of the church in the movie.

Frank and Gertrude met in the summer of 1910 at a band concert in Rayburn Plaza (now the site of the Municipal Services Building).

Children of JOSEPHINE KELLY and FRANCIS CLARKE are:
19. i. HARRY JOSEPH5 CLARKE, b. September 16, 1912, Philadelphia, PA (1:30 AM, 11-3/4 lbs).
ii. FRANCIS CLARKE, b. August 31, 1914, 3842 Aspen Street, West Philadelphia, PA (1:30 PM, 8 lbs); d. November 10, 1914, 5448 Spring Street, West Philadelphia, PA.

More About FRANCIS CLARKE:
Baptism: September 20, 1914, St. Agatha Church, Philadelphia, PA; 38th & Spring Garden Streets; Aunt Nell & Uncle Ralph - sponsors.
Burial: November 11, 1914, Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, Sect. 32, Range 7, Lot 20, 4/8 (Owner ID 311989, Hugh F. Cline)
Cause of Death: Malnutrition

20. iii. GERTRUDE (TRUDY) DELORES CLARKE, b. August 20, 1918, Presbyterian Hospital, PA (9:10 AM, 8 lbs).
21. iv. HELEN LORRAINE CLARKE, b. December 23, 1921, Mirsiacordia Hospital, Philadelphia, PA (4:30 PM; 8 lbs.).

10. FLORENCE MARIE4 KELLY (JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born Abt. October 17, 1893 in Philadelphia, PA, and died May 15, 1977 in Philadelphia, PA. She married (1) ? WEDEKEMPER Aft. June 1900 in Philadelphia, PA. He was born in Pennsylvania, and died Bet. 1916 - 1920 in Philadelphia, PA. She married (2) JOHN ALBERT "JACK" WALLIS Aft. 1916. He was born September 25, 1895 in Boston, MA, and died March 02, 1958.

Notes for FLORENCE MARIE KELLY:
In 1900 and 1910 lived at 616 Race, Philadelphia, PA.
In 1920 lived at 109 N. Millick Street, Philadelphia, PA.
In November 1956 lived at 29 S. 69th St., Upper Darby, PA.

More About FLORENCE MARIE KELLY:
Burial: May 20, 1977, Beverly National Cemetery, Burlington County, NJ (Plot L, Grave 3707)

Notes for JOHN ALBERT "JACK" WALLIS:
In 1920 lived at 109 N. Millick Street, Philadelphia, PA.
Pvt 45th Co 12th BN 153rd Depot Brig.
In November 1956 lived at 29 S. 69th St., Upper Darby, PA.

More About JOHN ALBERT "JACK" WALLIS:
Burial: March 06, 1958, Beverly National Cemetery, Burlington County, NJ (Plot L, Grave 3706)
Occupation: 1930 - Clerk for City Electric Supply Co.

Children of FLORENCE KELLY and ? WEDEKEMPER are:
22. i. CHARLES E.5 WALLIS, b. December 29, 1914, Philadelphia, PA.
23. ii. WILLIAM RODMAN WALLIS, b. Abt. 1916, Philadelphia, PA; d. Unknown.

Children of FLORENCE KELLY and JOHN WALLIS are:
iii. JOHN ALBERT "JACK"5 WALLIS, JR., b. May 31, 1921, Philadelphia, PA; d. October 29, 1990, Long Beach, CA; m. GINGER; d. Unknown, Long Beach, CA.

Notes for JOHN ALBERT "JACK" WALLIS, JR.:
In 1920 lived at 109 N. Millick Street, Philadelphia, PA.

24. iv. FRANK MERRITT WALLIS, b. December 29, 1925, Philadelphia, PA.

Generation No. 5

11. CORNELIUS "BABE"5 KELLY (JOHN4, JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born June 02, 1908 in Philadelphia, PA, and died October 25, 1972 in Camden, NJ. He married ETHEL FOULK Bef. November 1956. She was from New Egypt, N.J. d. 198?

Notes for CORNELIUS "BABE" KELLY:
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.
In November 1956 lived at 69 State Street, Camden, NJ.
Babe owned Kelly's Cafe, 69 State Street, Camden, NJ. He was shot and killed when the bar was robbed. They never found his killer.

More About CORNELIUS "BABE" KELLY:
Burial: October 1972, Calvary Cemetery, Cherry Hill, NJ (Section J, Range 19, Lot 4, Grave #10)

More About ETHEL FOULK:
Occupation: Nurse

Children of CORNELIUS KELLY and ETHEL FOULK are:
25. i. JERRY6 KELLY.
26. ii. MARY JANE KELLY.

12. WILLIAM E.5 KELLY, SR. (JOHN4, JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born December 08, 1914 in Camden, NJ, and died December 09, 1988 in Philadelphia, PA. He married MARY TERESA "MOLLY" HARTER. She was born October 16, 1917 in Camden, NJ.

Notes for WILLIAM E. KELLY, SR.:
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.
In November 1956 lived at 362 Garden Avenue, Camden, NJ.

More About WILLIAM E. KELLY, SR.:
Burial: December 13, 1988, Calvary Cemetery, Cherry Hill, NJ (Section D, Range GG, Lot 2, Grave #1)
Occupation: Camden Policeman

Notes for MARY TERESA "MOLLY" HARTER:
In November 1956 lived at 362 Garden Ave., Camden, NJ.

Children of WILLIAM KELLY and MARY HARTER are:
i. WILLIAM E.6 KELLY, JR., b. July 28, 1951, Cooper Hospital, Camden, NJ.

Notes for WILLIAM E. KELLY, JR.:
Writes for The Sandpaper Magazine, 109-34th Street, Ocean City, NJ 08226-2053, 609-398-7964.

ii. LEO JAMES KELLY, b. September 26, 1956, Cooper Hospital, Camden, NJ.

Notes for LEO JAMES KELLY:
Leo was named after his uncle, Leo James Kelly, who died in WWII.

13. JEREMIAH "JERRY" JOSEPH5 KELLY (JOHN4, JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born September 10, 1916 in New Jersey. He married THERESA MCCREADY. She was born April 23, 1921 in Camden, NJ.

Notes for JEREMIAH "JERRY" JOSEPH KELLY:
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.
In November 1956 lived at 1721 N. 47th Street, Pennsauken, NJ.

Notes for THERESA MCCREADY:
In November 1956 lived at 1721 N. 47th St., Pennsauken, NJ.

Children of JEREMIAH KELLY and THERESA MCCREADY are:
27. i. PATRICIA6 KELLY, b. July 03, 1948.
28. ii. JOHN "JACKIE" KELLY, b. March 07, 1951.
iii. ROBERT KELLY, b. December 14, 1956.

14. JULIA5 KELLY (JOHN4, JOHN PATRICK3, PATRICK EMMET2, DANIEL1) was born 1922 in Camden, NJ. She married BEN D'ANNUCCI 1954 in Camden, NJ. He was born 1926.

Notes for JULIA KELLY:
In 1930 lived at 55 State Street, Camden, NJ.
In November 1956 lived at 1584 Parkside Avenue, Trenton, NJ.

Notes for BEN D'ANNUCCI:
In November 1956 lived at 1584 Parkside Ave., Trenton, NJ.

Children of JULIA KELLY and BEN D'ANNUCCI are:
29. i. LISA D'ANNUCCI, b. November 19, 1957.
ii. MICHAEL6 D'ANNUCCI, b. August 27, 1960.
30. iii. JANIS D'ANNUCCI, b. September 27, 1961.

For the rest of this history, please request it from me:
billkelly3@gmail.com

Kelly's Cafe The Gangs All Here

2009-04-07T17:10:00.000-07:00

Kelly's Cafe - The Gang's All Here

Photos: Many thanks to my cousin Jerry Kelly for the photos of Kelly's Cafe, where he grew up.

Doors to the Backroom

2009-04-07T17:09:00.000-07:00

Going to the Backroom

2009-04-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

Band in the Backroom

2009-04-07T17:07:00.000-07:00

Shades Are Up

2009-04-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

Keeping Tabs

2009-04-07T17:05:00.000-07:00

The Crew at the End of the Bar

2009-04-07T17:04:00.001-07:00

Photos Above Shuffleboard

2009-04-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

At the bar by the Door

2009-04-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

Draft Beer at the Shuffleboad

2009-04-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

Dart League Champions

2009-04-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Kelly's Cafe Air Conditioned

2009-04-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

State Street North Camden N.J.

2009-04-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

Eating Hotdogs on the AC Boardwalk

2009-04-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

Leo, Bill, Molly and Jerry Kelly - Eating hotdogs on the Atlantic City Boardwalk 1941.

Camden Berwyck Bears Football Team

2009-04-07T16:52:00.001-07:00

Camden Berwyck Bears Football Team

2009-04-07T16:52:00.000-07:00

Camden Brewers Baseball Team

2009-04-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

Old Pix of Kelly's Cafe

2009-03-18T18:54:00.000-07:00

I recently uncovered some old photos of Kelly's Cafe, on State Street in North Camden, and will post them as soon as I can get them scanned.

Phil Cohen's Camden

2009-03-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

Hey,

I stumbled across Phil Cohen's Camden web sites while looking for an old Camden County politician, and found that he's been documenting the city's history on line for awhile now, and even has a page dedicated to Kelly's Cafe!

And my father! And Uncle Leo!

Many thanks Phil, You're the best!

http://www.dvrbs.com/Camden-HeartSoul.htm

http://www.dvrbs.com/Camden-HeartSoul.htm

http://www.dvrbs.com/DEFAULT.HTM#CAMDEN,%20NJ

http://www.dvrbs.com/DEFAULT.HTM#CAMDEN,%20NJ

Kelly's Cafe:

http://www.dvrbs.com/camden-bars/CamdenNJ-Bars-KellysCafe.htm

69 State Street was a bar as early as 1910, when Conrad Ahrens was the proprietor. William Pfeiffer was the proprietor by 1918 through the early 1940s. Frederick Weldon ran the place after World War II. From the mid 1950s through the early 1970s, 69 State Street was the home of Kelly's Cafe. The Kelly family had lived next door at 65 State Street for many years before acquiring the bar. One son, Leo Kelly, was killed in action while serving with the United States Navy during World War II, while another son, William, became a Camden police officer after returning home. Cornelius J. Kelly applied for the liquor license renewal in 1967.

Kelly's Cafe was closed by 1977, and the building no longer stands.

And Cohen's Interesting People:

http://www.dvrbs.com/people/DVRBS-Camden-Biographical.htm

My Dad:

http://www.dvrbs.com/people/CamdenPeople-WilliamEKelly.htm

With the Thompson submachine gun, ready for action in the capture of Howard Unruh, the first major spree killer in USA after WWII.

WILLIAM E. KELLY was born in 1915 to John and Mary Kelly of Camden NJ. The Kelly family had moved to New Jersey from Pennsylvania in the early 1910s. By 1930 John Kelly Sr. had been a Philadelphia policeman for many years, and in 1930 he worked as a truck driver. The family had by this time owned a home at 55 State Street in Camden NJ. The two oldest brothers, John Jr. and Cornelius were working as clerks in the transportation industry. Still at home besides Leo were brothers Leo and Jeremiah, and sisters Catherine and Julia Kelly. John Kelly Sr. passed away in 1931. Brother Leo later went to work for Campbell's Soup.

On November 16, 1940 William Kelly joined the Camden Police Department, along with Joseph Caputi Jr., Joseph Carroll, Roland Comerford, Joseph Hooven, Julius Kaunacki, Frank Nelson, and Harry Tracy.

William Kelly enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor. He left Camden for basic training on January 27, 1942. His brothers Jeremiah and Leo also enlisted. Leo Kelly was killed in action while serving with the United States Navy aboard the battleship USS South Dakota on November 15, 1942 .

Returning to Camden and police work after his wartime service, William Kelly married and started a family. The 1947 Camden City Directory shows him and his wife, Mary T. Kelly, at 362 Garden Avenue in East Camden. A son, William E. Kelly Jr., was born in 1951. The Kelly family remained at the garden Avenue address into the 1970s.

On September 5, 1949 Detective Kelly took part in the arrest of Howard Unruh, who had gone on a shooting spree in Cramer Hill that had resulted in the death of 13 people.

William Kelly was still with the Camden Police Department in 1962. After retiring from the Camden Police department, William Kelly worked as an investigator with the Camden County Prosecutor's office.

I even get a plug:

His son, William E. Kelly Jr., is a journalist an author of regional history books, as well as a history of golf. He has been involved in researching the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for since the mid-1970s.

And Uncle Leo:

http://www.dvrbs.com/ccwd-WW2/CamdenWW2-LeoJamesKelly.htm

Entered the Service from: New Jersey
Died: November 15, 1942
Missing in Action or Buried at Sea
Tablets of the Missing at Manila American Cemetery
Manila, Philippines
Awards: Purple Heart

SEAMAN SECOND CLASS LEO JAMES KELLY was born in 1919 to John and Mary Kelly of Camden NJ. The Kelly family had moved to New Jersey from Pennsylvania in the early 1910s. By 1930 John Kelly Sr. had been a Philadelphia policeman for many years, and in 1930 he worked as a truck driver. The family had by this time owned a home at 55 State Street in Camden NJ. The two oldest brothers, John Jr. and Cornelius were working as clerks in the transportation industry. Still at home besides Leo were brothers William and Jeremiah, and sisters Jane Catherine and Julia Kelly. John Kelly Sr. passed away in 1931. Brother William later became a Camden police officer.

Leo Kelly graduated from Camden Catholic High School in 1938. An accomplished musician, he played saxophone and bass horn on radio programs in Philadelphia. He played semi-pro football, and worked as a timekeeper at the Campbell Soup plant, a short walk from his home. On March 6, 1941, he was held up by a bandit, but saved his salary by hiding it under the time cards in his rear pocket. He enlisted in the United States Navy in February of 1942, and was stationed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard before going overseas as a crewmember of the newly commissioned battleship USS South Dakota BB57.

Kelly's Cafe - Camden N.J.

2008-12-07T20:03:00.000-08:00

Kelly's Cafe - Camden, N.J.

When I was a kid in the 1950s and 60s, Kelly's Cafe, at the end of State Street in North Camden, New Jersey, was the one place where I always enjoyed going. At the end of State Street in North Camden, just under the Ben Franklyn Bridge to Philadelphia, Kelly's Cafe was the center of the universe, at least for awhile. Our family and friends would come together for birthdays, holidays, weddings and funerals. My father's brothers, my uncles owned it, and Uncle Babe and Aunt Ethel lived upstairs with their kids, Jerry and Maryjane, my favorite cousins.

As a kid, not yet a teenager, you're a fly on the wall whose dragged around with grownups temporarially dedicated to you for a few hours at a time, some enthusiastic and some reluctant, but always accomidating.

My father was a Camden policeman and my mother worked as a secretary at RCA and later at the North Camden grammar school, Pyne Point.

So Kelly's Cafe was right there, under the Ben Franklyn Bridge, sandwiched among Ballantino's junk yard and a row of brick houses, one of which was where my father lived with his brothers and sisters, Jane, Jerry, Leo, Julie and Babe, each of whom would make their mark in the community.

Uncle Babe ran Kelly's Cafe, a family affair that also included Aunt Ethel behind the bar on occassion and cooking the roasts that would be carved for hungry steelworkers from shipyard, the primary clientele.

While Aunt Ethel worked the bar, there was a large green shamrock sign that read: Ladies Not Served At Bar, and there was a big backroom, at least it was big for a kid who was sometimes left there to play the out of tune piano, pool table and huge collection of bottlecaps that were over valued by me at the time, as were my cousin Jerry's comic collection that took up shelves that lined an entire wall.

The window from Jerry's totally cool room overlooked Ballintino's junk yard and the Ben Franklyn Bridge, which always has a flow of cars, trucks and trains going along, bringing the skyline to life, as if you were in a giant Christmas train set.

The backroom of Kelly's Cafe was up a flight of stairs from the bar, and included the aforementioned standup piano, wood table with formica tops and round back wooden cabaret chairs. There was also a hole in the floor, a door that you could pull up and walk down the stairs to the cellar where kegs of beer and bottles of booze were stored.

Towards the back of the dining room was a door that led to the kitchen, a door that led outback, and stairs that went to the second floor where Uncle Babe, Aunt Ethel and cousins Jerry and Maryjane lived.

The bar had two front doors, one on each corner. When you entered the door to the right the horse shoe bar was on your left, with an American darts board against the far war in front of the other door, and a shuffle board that ran down the far west wall. Then there was the men's room behind that, which I remember as one huge, wrap around urinal where a dozen guys could fit at once, and probably did when the shipyard got out.

There were photographs along the wall above the shuffle board, pictures of the boats that were built at New York Shipbuilding Company over the course of decades - including the Kitty Hawk carrier and first and only nuclear powered merchant vessel.