Jimmy's birth

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Jimmy was born in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paterson on Dec. 28, 1948.

He a strapping 8-pound first child of Basil and Marie Garland, who had married early in 1948 and resided in their in-laws’ house on the corner of Newby Avenue and West 34th Street in what was then called “West Paterson.”

The location was more than a little ironic since it served as hub of Jimmy’s early life.  Frank Quackenbush would be buried a few blocks away. Jimmy’s band would play regularly at a club a block away. Many of the Jimmy’s closest childhood friends came from the enclave of hilly streets.

And even though the family moved around a lot, they often came back to Newby Street for the first decade after Jimmy’s birth, and even after that, relocated to nearby apartments.

Jimmy was named after a hero uncle, who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions over Austria during World War II. Jimmy’s name sake was declared missing in action during one such flight but managed to work his way back to allied lines – only to die a fluke crash during a training mission in Texas a short time later.

Jimmy and Basil were remarkably alike except in one respect.

Jimmy, frailer in frame, never took to sports or the military the way Basil did.

Basil, born in Paterson, was a tough kid, a Golden Gloves boxer in the early 1940s, and once voted as “a manly man” by his classmates at St. George’s School and later St. Bonaventure High School.

But like Basil, Jimmy had the gift of gab, able to talk himself in and out of trouble – sometimes actually talking himself into trouble for the challenge of talking his way out again – such as when he convinced the draft board psychiatrist to label him 4F to as to avoid going to Vietnam in the late 1960s.

Basil like his brothers James and Robert was more than a little patriotic. Yet instead of joining the air corps like James, or the army like Robert, Basil joined the U.S. Marines and served in the Pacific Theater and other places.

At the time of his marriage to Marie, Basil worked as a clerk for Pan American World Airways. Marie, at the time, worked for the Book of the Month Club in New York City.

Basil was something of a jack of all trades and relied heavily on his gift of gab to support his family, often as a salesman.  He recognized some of this in Jimmy and occasionally incorporated his eldest son into one of his schemes such as one where he had Jimmy design a board for a lecture – supposedly something scientific. As Basic mixed some concoction in test tubes and beakers while speaking, Jimmy used a pointer to point to parts of a diagram. Ultimately, it was a joke since at the end what Basil mixed as a drink which he promptly consumed.

When Basil took over operations of wholesale liquidator in the former Sears building on Bloomfield Avenue and Valley Road in Montclair, he hired Jimmy to work there, along with our mutual friend, Garrick.

Jimmy, however, was never as practical as Basil, something Basil recognized.

When Jimmy lost his job as a van driver for Outwater Plastics in Garfield in 1977 and was evicted from apartment he rented from Garrick’s aunt, Basil would not allow Jimmy to live in their apartment in West Paterson unless Jimmy found another job.  Jimmy promptly moved out and moved into the attack room of Garrick’s Passaic apartment.

Jimmy wasn’t lazy. He simply sought to live what he believed was an artist’s life and wanted somehow to make his way in the world as an artist.

This was not something the always practical Basil understood.

Yet as practical as Basil was, life was not easily, and as often as he moved out of his in-laws’ house in West Paterson, he often found his way back there.

While Jimmy started life in West Paterson, his siblings were born elsewhere with each move – Bob (named after Basil’s other brother) soon followed, and then came the girls, born in places like Paterson, Lodi, even Clifton.

Somehow, they always wound up back in West Paterson, struggling to make ends meet.

When I first met Jimmy, Basil and the family were living in a big gray house on Paterson Avenue under the shadow of the Route 46 overpass. When they moved out, they went to a two-family house elsewhere in West Paterson some place up the hill from Browertown Road. At some point in 1972, they moved to Pompton Lakes where Jimmy for a time after his breakup with Ginger resided in their basement.  The year 1974 was particularly tough when Basil lost both family cars to a sheriff’s sale. By the 1980s, the family had moved to Montclair just up the road from where the married Bob lived in Verona.  Basil, who died on New Year’s Eve 1988 lived long enough to see one son and two daughters married. He never stopped being a charmer. Even as he was dying of cancer in Mountainside Hospital, he managed to get me to bring his nurses donuts and sent his final word of thanks to me through Jimmy.

Marie lived early 2010 after having established a career or her own for most of the 1990s, and later, organized trips for Verona’s senior citizens. By this time, Jimmy had managed to charm his way into becoming the director of public library, from which he would soon retire, and finally buy a trailer where he could live out the rest of his days as recluse and artist.

But his impact between birth and death is a tale worth telling, symbolic of our generation, because of how knowing him and being around him, reshaped our lives and allowed us to pursue our dreams as well. Since I was there for much of it, I spent a good part of my life documenting this odyssey, with Jimmy serving as the noble Odysseus.

This blog is about that journey.

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