I was a grade-schooler in the late 1940s in Carteret, New Jersey. The great World War II was just beginning when I was born in New York City, the greatest city in the world. The people there will remind you about it also. I was two and half years old at a funeral wake, when I heard, “The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor! We were at war!” My early childhood was spent worrying about this war and my mother bringing me to buy meat with ration stamps. I think my first movie was Bambi. My mother and I moved in a big moving truck from New York City to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, so that my father could build war ships there, as we lived in an upstairs apartment. The great FDR died, Adolf Hitler died, the atomic bomb exploded on two Japanese cities, and WWII ended, all within a couple of months, when I six years old in 1945. My parents bought a house in Carteret, New Jersey, that was next to my father’s work as a welder at the factory of GATX, where he worked for over twenty years. We were the new middle class Irish immigrant family of the late 1940’s, as home owners, although we did not own a car. However, our daily routine was gathering around the radio in the living room to listen to shows and sports events on the radio. We always listened to the John Gambling morning show on WOR and the evening news with Walter Winchell on our small kitchen radio on top of the refrigerator. I even had a small radio for my own bedroom to listen to “The Shadow Knows” and all those other mystery shows. I could only imagine what those people were like on the radio. However, my mother had a few miscarriages. I remember my Aunt Kate, her sister from the Bronx, coming to take care of me. My mother and father did not want me to grow up as an only child. Thus, I got two foster brothers, John and Jerry Mingin, for the rest of my life. I started school when I was 5 as a kindergartener at Washington Grade School on Roosevelt Ave. When all the other kids were crying, I loved school and climbing the Monkey Bars. We went to Sacred Heart Church every Sunday, which was a Slovak parish, with the Mass in Latin and the sermon in Slovak. I did not understand either, but I loved it anyway. However, we went to St. Joseph’s school and church, that was farther away, when my brother Johnny was caught by a truant officer skipping school. Then Jerry, my younger brother, got Polio. Thus, my older brother Johnny and I were quarantined to the house for a month. My father felt sorry for us, so that he bought us one of those new-fangled Black and White TVs for our living room to replace the radio, when I was nine years old in 1948. Johnny and I were the shoe-shine boys on weekend evenings outside the many saloons on Roosevelt Avenue. I also had a Friday afternoon newspaper delivery service of the weekly Carteret Press that cost 8 cents. Everybody gave me a dime, and said “keep the change.” I remember watching TV in the store windows before we got one of our own at home. In those post-WWII days, everyone was happy because the war was over. We rode out bikes to St. Joseph’s grammar school that was about a mile from our house. We played on the street in front of our house on Railroad Avenue with the Sam Chodosh Oil and Coal Company at the bottom of our dead-end sloped street. Across from our house was a railroad track with railroad trains in the morning and evening. What do you remember about growing up as a grade school kid?