By Mazie Elizabeth Tucker Cleary
November 15, 1978
hen I was growing up I remember parties we had at one another’s homes. For refreshments we would have lemonade and homemade cake. We would play games such as spin the bottle, post office, dance to the music of a Victoria
records or sing and play a player piano. That is if no own could play the piano.
When just a kid some of our games were lay sheepie lay, blind man’s bluff, London Bridges falling down, Go in and out the windows, kick the ricket, prisoner’s base, jacks. The boys would play marbles and the girls would jump rope. Also we would roller skate up and down the sidewalks and sometimes in the streets. We didn’t have Television so we made our own fun. Summer time we had picnics, went canoeing or took rides on the lake in rowboats.
My Mother would stretch lace curtains for people and charge for doing it and my brother, sister and I would have to deliver them for her. She had quite a few curtain stretchers around the house at the time.
Growing up we lived at 841 Cumberland Street, Gloucester City, and had chickens, rabbits, big apple tree in the yard, and a couple of peach trees. Our yard ran all the way back to the street behind us (Somerset Street). It was L shaped; in back of the four houses that were on Cumberland Street at that time.
My grandfather and father had a garden and raised all our vegetables. We got all the eggs we needed from our chickens, and sometimes we would have one of the chickens for Sunday dinner.
In our back yard, we didn’t have a pool like everyone seems to have today. But we had a rope swing hanging from the apple tree, and a hammock, and if the weather was very hot the firemen would open the fire hydrants for the kids to play in from the neighborhood.
Every spring and fall the housewives would houseclean, take up the winter rugs and put down the summer rugs; they would hang the rugs out on clothes line and beat them with a rug beater, usually made of wire with a handle. Then they would roll up the rug or carpet and put it away in the attic until fall and put it down in the winter. The summer rugs were made of a sort of matting.
We didn’t have central heating but a coal range in the big kitchen and another coal stove in the dining room. Most living rooms (we called them parlors then) were closed off in the winter either by a door or heavy drapes.
Kids then liked to watch the coal man deliver coal to the neighbor’s house. We would look out the window and watch it go down a chute into the cellar.
y father worked in Philadelphia and took the train from Gloucester to Camden, where he boarded the ferry boat that would take him to Delaware Street in Philadelphia. In the winter there was a fire in the big potbelly stove in the railroad station in Gloucester City to keep the people warm who where waiting for the train. The ferryboat cost three or five cents. Once in Philadelphia he would walk up the hill to an insurance company on Walnut Street where he worked. A workweek then was five and half days, which include Saturday until 1 p.m.
My mother use to make most of our clothes, and she also would sew for people in the neighborhood.
My grandfather died in 1922 and he never knew what a radio was. My father died in 1932, he knew a radio and loved it, but he never saw a television set. These are things we take for granted today.
I remember the ragman; he would come around in a horse drawn wagon calling out. And people would sell their papers and old rags to him. He would weigh them with a scale he had on the wagon and pay you a few cents.
Also a man would go along the street hollering clothes props, they were wooden and the housewife would come out to buy them. The same would go for the man who sharpen knives. Or as some called him the scissor grinder. He would have a stone wheel on a stand to do the job and work it with a foot pedal. If you had an umbrella that was broken men would come around your neighborhood and repair them right on your front step. There was also a man that would come to your neighborhood selling fish. These men would push carts or drive horse and wagons, and some would drive trucks.
Sounds like we had a lot of men running around the neighborhood hollering but they didn’t come that often.
At the time we did have a lot of poor knocking on our doors in the morning wanting a cup of coffee or a few cents for a drink. We never seemed to be afraid to open our door to anyone who needed help unlike today. I guess they were what you would call hobos.
I remember we would go on excursions trains from Gloucester railroad station to Atlantic City or Wildwood for a $1 a person for the day (that was round trip). They had bathhouses at the shore and you could rent a bathing suit if you didn’t have one. People were covered up pretty well on the beach especially the women. They wore stockings, bathing hats and even rubber slippers.
I attended Gloucester public schools and in 1928 I graduated with a high school diploma from Gloucester High School located where the Mary Ethel Costello grammar school is today on Cumberland Street.
I met my future husband George F. Cleary on a tennis court at the Gloucester City Park on King Street. George and I were married on November 3, 1932. We had three children, Dolores, George and Billy. All of them have since married and now we have 12 grandchildren.
e purchased the Gloucester City News on January 1, 1950. Six months later we open up Cleary’s Office Supplies Store. I did all the bookwork for the businesses along with typing the news articles and waiting on customers. Both businesses were located at 423 Hudson Street. In July 1951 we moved into a storefront rental property at 242 North Broadway, Gloucester City. We operated the Office Supplies Store there and moved our newspaper office to our home on East Brown Street, as there wasn’t enough room for both of them at the rental property.
Around July 1954 we moved the office supplies store along with our newspaper office to a rental property at 110 South Broadway, across from the Gloucester Post Office. We also began an agency for Western Union. All three businesses kept us quite busy as you can imagine.
We eventually had to sell the Office Supplies business because we just couldn’t handle it all. We then moved the newspaper office and the Western Union agency to 106 ½ South Broadway. We stayed there until March 1958 at which time we moved into a second floor office on top of Publishers Printing Plant, 5th and Jersey Avenue. George and I purchased $6,000 worth of stock of Publishers Inc. George was named treasurer of the plant and Publishers printed the Gloucester City News along with several other weekly newspapers.
George along with Hughie McCaughey, another one of the owners of Publishers Inc., formed a partnership and purchased the Camden County Record newspaper on October 18, 1965 for $2,200. Their first issue was the following week.
Post Script
Mazie passed away in 1995. She died from complications caused by Alzheimer’s disease.
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