Is Zat So!
Camden Courier-Post - February 8, 1938
YOU can always rely on Camden to bring back the normal balance. The more I see of this city the more it is impressed on me that realism can be found anywhere in the place. Camden is a good antidote for pessimism and cynicism, if you only want to find the cure and are fortunate enough to locate it.
This thought seeped into my ken the other day after I had read one of those kind of magazine articles, that always give me a pain in the neck. It was one of those “expert” articles telling youth how to find its proper sphere in the business world.
The dame who was dishing out the piffle-paffle on that score had the decency to admit that one of her students wanted to “know how he would get a job” rather than listen to all the ballyhoo about how to fill in your own conspicuous niche.
Accompanying the article was the usual honey from personnel managers about openings that their corporation possessed for the paragons who could answer all the requirements. The fact that these personnel managers declared there was always room for such material made me laugh. For, argued the Mackay, if all these positions are crying and begging for men, how come there are 10 million unemployed in this country, according to unemployment census.
Of course the whole business was a lot of guff and meant nothing in the face of the facts. Certainly these positions couldn’t go begging without being filled from the raw material that might be found in the army of 10 million idle workers. That type of hooey is even too tough for an incurable optimist like myself to swallow.
Laughabilities Rise at Detective “Mag”
My laughter increased as I read one of those “true detective” publications. What made me laugh was that every article, factually correct, ended with the admonition that crime does not pay. That suited me all right, too. Until I cast a surreptitious eye over the advertisements in this magazine; only to discover that it was packed from cover to cover with all the gyp and sucker advertisements that one can shake up.
The fact that this magazine was pushing out its message that crime does not pay and then purveying to the lads that trim the suckers whenever the trimming was good was too much for my blood. I began to want to exercise profanity, which is something that intimate friends know is a thing that Mackay rarely uses.
So we went for the domestic hearth in both sorrow and anger, only to bump into Mark Marritz. Mark will never be president of the United States but if Haddon Township remains a G.O.P. citadel it is a fair assumption that Mark will always be solicitor for the township unless he rebels and becomes a Democrat.
Now Mark Marritz is an excellent antidote for skepticism, pessimism and cynicism regarding America and her institutions. Mark was born in Kiev, Russia where he remained until he was 10 years old, when the family migrated to Wilmington.
“You can’t tell me anything about Russia today,” Marritz ventured to the writer. “Because I know how it was before the World War. I was born in Kiev and we were compelled to keep a picture of the Czar in the house, in fact every household in Russia had to display the Czar’s picture.”
“Jewish boys in Kiev, where they had massacres and pogroms against the Jewish people, were not allowed to go to school. They were prohibited from getting an education.”
Had His Fight to Get Ahead
“The only way we Jewish boys—my father was a merchant in Kiev—could get an education was through the rabbi. He couldn’t have a regular school either, he was compelled to teach each boy as a separate pupil.
“I got a good working knowledge of mathematics from the rabbi and also some of the Russian and Jewish culture. Imagine how I felt, too, when my father came to America and we settled in Wilmington. For I had to go into the first class in the lowest grade at school, because I could not speak English.”
“I had to learn the alphabet just like youngsters who were going to a school for the first time. As soon as I mastered English, though, I went ahead more rapidly, for the rabbi’s teaching had given me education along the lines that were necessary to me.”
Marritz is a walking advertisement for the destiny and glories of the melting pot. Energetic, good-looking, personable and with a talent for conversation and a penchant for the law. Mark assuaged some of the indignation that was wrought when we read the hooey that had been printed in those magazines.
Next we get a further advance back to normalcy when we bumped into Pat Iarossi. Pat is a barber but that doesn’t deter him from basking in the sunshine at Miami and thanking his lucky stars that his family moved from San Marco in Italy to Camden years ago.
Pat is another excellent example of the melting-pot. His barber-shop is now located at 600 North Third Street, site having been Pat’s for the past 14 years. Before that he had a shop on Front Street, where he barbered the native sons and daughters for 20 years.
Make no mistake, Pat has carried the tradition of the America that benefited him so much into his own activities. The years of service of his four employees amount to 52.
The oldest employee has been stropping the razors there for 18 years while the baby of the outfit, who is not so old either, has been employed by Pat for 10 years. Two others enjoy terms of 14 and 12 years.
Pat’s greatest memories cluster about Ann Pennington, Camden’s gift to the Follies and the stage, and the Dooleys, a theatrical family which also is a proud Camden possession.
“I used to cut Ann Pennington’s hair when she was a child,” Pat recalled. “And the Dooleys always made my shop their headquarters. Billy Dooley worked for me. The kids, six of them, trained in a patch we called the ‘cow lot.’ Rae and May were the two girls, while Johnny was the big shot of the boys.”
“They used to turn cartwheels right out in the lot there and come into my shop to do a little vocal rehearsing. Ann Pennington was always dancing, you couldn’t keep her feet still. I remember one day Ann, Johnny Dooley and a girl named Moore went over to Lubin’s in Philadelphia, trying to break into the movies.
“Lubin wouldn’t handle them and they all came crying into my shop.” Whereupon Pat produced a post card dated in 1911 showing Johnny Dooley starring in the old Bijou Theatre in Philadelphia.
So Pat has no envy of the thespians or of anybody else. Why should he—Miami is some place to spend the Winter.