Philip A. Genovese, Jr.

I was born in Newark, New Jersey. When I was five, my family moved to historic Monmouth County on the Jersey Shore.

It was a small town founded in the 1600’s. We had one police car in those days. It was almost always parked at the tiny building that housed our police station and post office. The building was in the middle of a street, an intersection actually, which once served as the town square. Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Quaker churches occupied three of the corners. On the fourth corner was The Allen House, a former tavern and lodge called The Blue Ball, built just before 1700. George Washington was said to have visited The Blue Ball around the time of the Battle of Monmouth. The historical society now calls this The Four Corners.

My family’s house was on a lazy street a couple blocks from The Four Corners. In the summer, my neighborhood basked in stippled sunlight filtered through towering elms, expansive Maples, and stately Sycamores. Weekends in the fall, we’d rake their fallen leaves to the curb and burn the piles. This was before burning leaves and smoking cigarettes and cars with metal dashboards and no seatbelts were hazardous to our health.

My father established his CPA practice in a historic building less than a mile from home and only a handful of houses down from the Four Corners. My two younger brothers and I grew up recognizing a sacred fifth season; one that spanned the colorless Jersey winters and ended with relief in early spring – the Dreaded Tax Season.

Every year, my elementary school would walk the lower grades in single file past my father’s office along the former colonial highway up to The Four Corners. Our teachers would tell us the story of an insignificant Pre-Revolutionary War skirmish between Tory loyalists and patriot Separatists. A local patriot had sparked the incident when, after some drinking time in The Blue Ball Tavern, he took his flintlock into the middle of the dusty intersection and put a musket ball through the bronze Queen’s crown atop the Presbyterian steeple. The Tories were outraged and one of them shot the patriot. Our teachers would lead us in the steps of the wounded patriot up into the vestibule of the church where he had fallen. Then we’d line up again and, one after another, we’d get to rub the dark stains in the wood floor where he had bled to death.

This was the segue for the class tour of the old graveyards. Threatened into silence, we’d wind through hundreds of tombstones worn and tilted from three hundred winters. The inscriptions in the gravestones were weathered and whispered stories of short hard lives. A favorite stop on the tour was the Joneses family plot. I remember there being tiny headstones for each of The Seven Little Joneses who had died over seven consecutive years in the late 1600’s, all on July 7th after their first birthday. 7 - 7 – 7. A chilling if not incomprehensible mystery for second graders in late 1950’s. Today, it’s a forgotten monument to an early American tale in which modern forensic investigators would likely find evidence of infanticide and, by inference, the mental illness, unbearable guilt, and unthinkable misery of Mr. and Mrs. Jones.

But there were no signs of misery in my home. It was kept spotless and well-tended by my mother, who doted on us boys and served a food-group friendly supper every weekday at six. She saw that we left each day for school clean, neat, and timely. I remember her perfumed and most pretty on Saturday nights in the hurried moments kissing us goodbye and instructing the babysitter, while my father waited with one hand on the door handle.

These were years of air raid drills and fall-out shelters, and American Flyers and PF Flyers, and all afternoon games of Combat that began with odds-evens shootouts for the right to be Sgt. Saunders or Kirby or Little John, the big guy with the BAR. Someone’s younger brother had to be the new guy, who always got killed. The big losers were the Krauts that day.

These were also the years that my paternal grandfather, Pop Pop Vito, came for dinner on Sundays. After he hadn’t come for a while, we were told he had “gone away on business”. I never saw my grandfather again and never asked why. It was like any other dirty family secret - you just didn't go there in my house. In sixth grade, after a schoolyard fistfight in defense of my final denial of what had slowly become a shadowy truth, I would learn that my grandfather was Don Vito Genovese, the namesake and Boss of the Genovese Crime Family, a hard and feared man. In 1961 he had gone to federal prison, where eight years later he died, perhaps now reunited with the souls whose blood stained his hands.

About the time Jack Kennedy was assassinated, Dutch Elm Disease claimed all the soldierly elms on our street. Soon after, the county roads department bulldozed the old police station when they widened the intersection at The Four Corners. They left an island in the road and nailed a bronze placard on one of the Sycamores. A few years later, the Sycamores fell, too.

I attended Christian Brothers Academy, a local prep school for boys and went on to Villanova University. By the end of my freshman year at Villanova, I was a full-fledged hippie freak in faithful and equal pursuit of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. I was an earnest but part-time member of the counter culture, flirting with elements of radical student groups and underground movements against the war and the Nixon administration. Despite it all, I graduated in 1974 with a B.A. in English, an excellent degree for those who don’t know what they want to do when they grow up.

So naturally, after college, I became a rock concert promoter, a “young impresario” in the local newspaper. I produced shows featuring many of the major rockers of that era, including Bruce Springsteen. On ten or so occasions, I stood on a darkened stage with Bruce and the E Street Band secreted in the shadows behind me until the spotlight punched a hole in the darkness with me at its center. The audience, on their feet since the house lights had dimmed, shrieking now as I’d grab the microphone and shout, “Ladies and Gentlemen, pleases welcome . . . Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band!” Then, as I ran off the stage, it would erupt behind me, an explosion of bass drums and electric guitars and bright colored lights. In the retelling, I liken the feeling to the scene where the action hero, maybe Stallone in Rambo or Hanks as Gump, is running for his life straight at the camera, narrowly escaping the massive explosion and fireball growing behind him. Great stuff.

But, by the time I was 26, I had tired of working when everyone else was playing. I left the entertainment business to take a job with a giant health care manufacturer as a distribution supervisor. Brilliant decision. It lead to an exciting and fulfilling career in the transportation industry.

I wrote my first novel, The Grandfather Clause, over five years of Sunday afternoons and vacation days stolen from my family. I am currently at work on my second book, The Termination Clause. I had been thinking about writing a book about The Seven Little Joneses.

A few months ago, I took my family to The Four Corners. I had long promised to show them the graves of The Seven Little Joneses. I really wanted to see them again, too. On the way, I told them the whole story, again. I lead them through the graveyard until we found them. We counted the tiny graves. There were ten, not seven. Ten Little Joneses! What the . . .

I live now with my wife and two of our three children on a lazy street in a small town on the Jersey Shore. My oldest son lives in New Mexico. His first child will be born soon. This means that about the time you are reading The Grandfather Clause, I will be a grandfather. Grandfather . . . a difficult concept for some of my generation, especially for those of us still wondering what we’re going to do when we grow up.

I miss the smell of burning leaves in the fall, the taste of honeysuckle in the late spring, good friends gone, and on the occasional quiet Sunday afternoon, all my grandparents. Sometimes, I wonder if All The Joneses rest in peace.