We took a trip to Atlantic City with my cousin. blah blah blah….
On the back of the pictures Mary wrote: “Geza and I at the shore June 11, 1967. I got a sunburn but he just gets brown. We had the kids with us. Geza saw to it that I had a good time anyway.”
Mary’s voice, her white teeth, wonderful smile and great sense of humor attracted me to her, traits she still has, and I still find endearing.
The First Trip to Cleveland
During the summer, plans were made to visit Mary’s older sister, Elsie, her husband Don and three sons in Cleveland and I was invited to go along. I had not met them before. They picked me up after work at the bank at midnight in Mary’s mom’s car and the six of us set off on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Mary’s mom was driving with Mary and I sitting next to her in the front and the lids in the back, asleep. In those days the traffic was much sparser, consisting mostly of tractor trailers. Mary’s mom didn’t like trucks, so she would pass the, at all costs but then would immediately slow down to a speed slower than the truck’s she passed. She did this to a truck three times before the driver got upset enough to lay on the air horn. I looked at Mary with pleading eyes and she got the message and asked to drive. She, of course, refused. So, I devised a plan to give both of us a little relief and with my left foot I operated the gas and brake pedal, while she just needed to steer. This is how we drove all the way to Cleveland.
As we were driving into Chardon, the closest settlement to their house, I noticed what looked to me like ashtrays attached to almost every tree along the main road. There were sidewalks on both side of the road with houses. I had two thoughts in my head: One was a commentary on how clean this little village must be that they provide their populus with ashtrays and secondly, how much must these people smoke? When I voiced my observations to Elsie, she almost fell of the chair, she was laughing so hard. As it turns out, they weren’t ashtrays but containers to catch the sap from the maple trees! What a country!
We Get Married in 1968
While my career was being shaped my relationship with Mary and the kids was developing as well. I bought a 1960 Rambler American (faded British racing green, baby!) with which I traversed the New Jersey Turnpike more often than I can count, traveling between Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey. While I worked second shift I drove to Trenton after work, saw Mary for an hour or so, then slept in the car and saw her again in the morning. The car’s front seats reclined all the way to make a somewhat comfortable bed. Once I caught a bad cold which was bad enough that Mary wouldn’t let me sleep in the car, so I got the couch. Her mother was furious the next morning and told me she didn’t want me sweating on her couch.
I was going home on the New Jersey Turnpike one afternoon, when I noticed an unusual car coming up fast behind me. When it got closer, I saw the big trident in the middle of the grill. It was a Maserati! Then I saw that it was Wilt Chamberlain behind the wheel all hunched over. He didn’t look comfortable at all, but he was driving the Maserati and playing for the Seventy Sixers basketball team.
Then one night when Mary and I went driving we parked to talk and necked a little. It was then that she got tired of waiting for me and she asked ME to marry HER. I happily accepted. We had our wedding on June 1, 1968, in Willingboro, New Jersey in a Methodist Church. There were very few people invited and after we were pronounced “man and wife”, I cried many tears of happiness. John Ferguson was my best man. He had a full-sized Chevy convertible in which he chauffeured us around. There were very few people at the wedding and the reception, none of us had any money. Owen Duffy and Jerry Branco came down from New York.
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We rented a small, three-bedroom house in Levittown, Pennsylvania. A short time later we moved into another rented house, slightly bigger and in 1969 into a four-bedroom, two-bath house on Quincy Drive. An interesting, albeit useless fact is that we had TV cable from the first day of our married life. The coax entered the house from the pole into an A and B splitter. The A side had all the Philadelphia stations, while the B side had most of the New York City stations. This is the reason we got to watch the first-ever live performance telecast from the Metropolitan Opera of Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme. Renata Scotto sang Mimi and Luciano Pavarotti was Rodolfo. It was a memorable performance by both. The whole family watched (there was only one TV downstairs, so we all watched the same program) and a few members even enjoyed it. Mary bought me the entire opera on vinyl, which came with a booklet containing the entire score in both Italian and English. Catherine actually listened to the whole opera, following each line. Ask her now and she’d probably deny it, especially if you asked her in front of husband Don.
Mary had a short errand to run one day, so assignments were given to the children to make sure they were busy during her absence. The boys’ task was to rake leaves. When I arrived home from work and drove up the driveway, I saw the boys with some matches in their hand. I could tell they were trying to light the dry leaves they raked under the carport. As soon as they saw me, they tried to hide the matches, so they knew they were doing something wrong. I parked the car in the driveway and while walking over to them I decided that a severe punishment was necessary to make sure they don’t even think about doing something this stupid and dangerous. I calmly told them what I thought they were doing wrong and why. Then I told them that they were going to get the hardest punishment of their lives. I made Roger get my father’s old riding crop and they each got whacked on their behinds a couple of times. I gave them each a hug and all was fine.
The first time my parents came for a visit we lived in a three-bedroom rancher. The rooms were very small and of course the American ceiling height is 8 feet, as opposed twelve in their apartment in Budapest. I never thought about it, but they must have felt very claustrophobic. The other thing was that, to my knowledge, they never slept in one bed. Yes, just like Lucy and Desi. Due to space limitations, they shared a bed while they stayed with us. Of course, they never said a word.
We spent a lot of time playing cards. They taught Mary and me how to play bridge and were typically paired males against females. Most of the time the males won but there were a few times when the females were victorious. Every time that happened, we proved over and over again that they were bad winners and that we were very poor losers. Sometimes the night ended prematurely when the females won too many times, but all was well the next day, and we’d start all over again.
When we didn’t play bridge, it was solitaire with two decks of cards. It was very addicting and there were many weeknights when it was after midnight and my father was still saying “One more. Then we’ll go to bed.” There were trips that we took by car. We visited the Martonfalvays in Jackson Heights in Queens; we took them back to Brooktondale and Ithaca. We visited a Hungarian couple who lived in-between Brooktondale and Ithaca. He was a horticulturist and worked for Cornell University. His passion was playing bridge, so my parents played with them. He had a habit of taking a long time in making tactical decisions, all the while saying, “Life is difficult!” (Nehéz az élet). At my mother’s request we always had to visit the pigs on Cornell property and ogle the latest batch of piglets with their huge mother. Whenever in Ithaca we always had ice cream at the Purity ice cream store to sample their vast assortment of flavors. My mother could never pronounce the name Purity and we always enjoyed her trying and laughed a lot at her expense. It wasn’t until my Hungary trip that I discovered that the Hungarian ice cream flavors tasted sooooo much better. The fruit flavors tasted exactly like the fruit they contained.
We took them to Sarasota, Florida several times. The first trip was in Mary’s mother’s car, which had no air conditioning. My parents and the five of us were in the car and it was brutally hot, worse as we got closer to Florida. I remember stopping in Georgia somewhere on Route 301 (Interstate 95 did not exist in all of Georgia) to fill up. The thermometer at the gas station read 103 in the shade. Luckily, we had a small cooler with us with some cool water in it. Mary dipped a washcloth into the water and put it around our necks to keep us cooler.
Once we got to Florida, I was fine and lived to be out in the sunshine. I could, and did, lay on the sand at the beach for hours.
There was a large faction of Hungarians in Sarasota. My uncle, Frank Padar, was the president of the Hungarian club. One Hungarian couple owned a hotel and perchance my parents were there for the official opening of their pool. One of the pictures taken of the pool showing my parents lounging at poolside became the picture on the official postcard offered to all hotel guests for years to come.
It was the first year Disney World opened, and my parents were in Sarasota. A Hungarian teacher’s class had planned a trip to there and due to a late cancellation, there were a couple of openings. My parents were asked if they wanted to go. Neither really knew anything about Disneyworld but my mother accepted right away. When my father learned that they were to travel on a school bus in which no smoking was allowed, he declined. That night when my mother arrived back home and raved about all the sights and sounds, she had experienced my father was really disappointed. My mother talked about those experiences to many people and for years thereafter.
1969 – Off to Cherry Hill
The twenty years I spent in Cherry Hill were the best years of my working career. I had more fun, worked with, and for, more nice people than anywhere else, resulting in decades-long friendships. A group of twenty-plus friends and acquaintances still attend the yearly reunions.
The datacenters were named Information System Center / New York (ISC/NY) and ISC/WC for West Coast. They were thriving, so much so that a third was to be opened, this one in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It was called ISC/SJ for South Jersey. Next thing I know I was given a promotion to Shift Leader with a 15% salary increase and was transferred to Cherry Hill. Owen Duffy said he thought I would happier with a shorter commute. He was absolutely correct!
My new workplace was located right across the Cherry Hill Mall, the first mall in the country. They were separated by an always-busy multi-lane Route
38. There was a pedestrian bridge built to enable us to walk to the mall on nicer days. The RCA facility was built on, I’m guessing, at least fifty landscaped acres, with mostly grassy areas and hundreds of huge trees. Employees of other RCA facilities in the area referred to it as “The Country Club”. The Cherry Hill Inn was right next door and served as an overnight resting place for many visiting the RCA facilities. The Cherry Hill Inn was a famous landmark and I had spent many enjoyable hours playing tennis on their courts with Bob Schreiber, Bob Carelli, Al Hazell and Ginny Davis.
The park-like RCA Corporate Staff facility consisted of multiple buildings, all connected to each other and were designated as 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206 and, ours, 207. Building 207 was built specifically for the datacenter and when I first arrived at the facility, it was not quite complete, so much so that I had climbed up a ladder leaned against the awning for the front entrance (which was not in place yet) and walked on top of the awning, through an open window, into the building.
An early picture of the RCA Cherry Hill facility. In the foreground is Building 207, directly behind is 205; to the left is 203. At the top of the lower parking lot is a little white structure. It was intended to be a bus stop, I think. This is where I parked my motorcycle during the days, I commuted on it. Directly behind that is 204, where I finished my days in Cherry Hill. Behind 204 was building 202 and to the right of that was 201. On the other side of the row of trees at the top of the picture is the Cherry Hill Inn.
An early aerial picture of the Cherry Hill Mall in the background. One Cherry Hill Mall, a tall office building my mother-in-law worked in, has not been built yet. The buildings in the foreground comprised the Cherry Hill Inn. The RCA 201 Building is all that’s visible of the RCA complex.
For the first two weeks until the building was finished a few of us worked in the RCA facility in Camden, New Jersey. This was the birthplace of RCA and Nipper whose huge statue graced one of the red brick buildings. All the buildings here were very old. The curtains smelled very musty. Each room had a window air conditioner, and I couldn’t wait for our center to be finished. I worked with Andy Gattuso (a man I respected very much), and Cathy Johnson. It is here that I met Norm Katz and Bill Ewer, who ran the Camden computer center. Bill Ewer transferred over to Cherry Hill a couple of years later and became my supervisor.
I was one of three shift supervisors, sharing the thirty-plus operators. RCA was consolidating computer centers into large computer centers to save the corporation much money by eliminating duplicate equipment, people, effort, etc. It was nice being on this end, for we didn’t feel the pain of all the people who’ve been laid off because of this effort.
Our computer room was nicely filling up with computers and other equipment and the work was starting to trickle in. It didn’t, however, arrive at the anticipated pace for which all those operators were hired, so one of our initial tasks was to select the operators to let go. This was a difficult task for me because during the few weeks we were together, favorites have been established, some of whom had to go. We got through it, though and, as always, life went on.
We all had to wear jacket and ties during working hours and the computer room was a showcase. The white walls and the almost antiseptic air-conditioned environment reminded one of an operating room. There were guards at the two entrances and no unauthorized access was permitted. As a new facility it was shown off to groups of visitors from other RCA locations and I am sure, we were the envy of many, further living up to the name of “country club”. There was a wall of glass in the main lobby on the second floor through which the computer room could be seen.
I was working on the third shift when a couple of the operators, Bill Hughes and Tom Fatale bought motorcycles. Bill’s was a Honda 350 and Tom bought a Honda 450. I remember thinking how BIG these machines were! One night they both drove them to work and once we got all our work done and it was light out, they offered to take people on rides in the parking lot. Another operator, Lemuel Newmus, sat behind Tom and they took off. Lem got scared and he was yelling like a banshee to put an end to the ride. This, of course, spurred Tom on to go even faster. The access road in the parking lot was rather close to a development and the ruckus awakened some of the people and before long we had to put an end to the fun. Luckily, no reprimands were needed. As Bill was coming in for a “landing” heading for the main entrance to the building, he misjudged his speed and panicked and hit one of the metal posts supporting the awning over the entrance. That dent stayed there for decades. He was shaken up, so I offered to follow him home.
By this time, I had lusted after Porsches for years, thanks mostly to my friend John Ferguson and that ride in his Speedster. Mary would nightly peruse the local paper’s used car section to see if there was one for sale. There either wasn’t or it was out of our price range. One night she called me excitedly and told me that a small car dealership not too far from home had one for sale. I couldn’t wait to come home from work and Mary, and I drove to the dealer. We left the kids at home to fend for themselves. It was after 1 AM when we searched for the car in the lot. It wasn’t there but a couple of policemen were, and they wanted to know what we were doing there. They politely told us to come back after the sun came up, so we did. Turns out the owner drove it home that night and later, when his son found out that we were interested in buying it, he was very disappointed. So, we bought the car, a 1969 Porsche 911T. Compared to American cars it was expensive at $5700. We postponed buying a house for this car! This took place at a time when the term “foreign car” was always said with as healthy dose of disdain; always scoffed at and looked down upon. The standard comment to the price was “How can you pay so much money for such a little car?” to which my comment was always “This is not bologna. I didn’t buy it by the pound!”
The access roads at work around the parking lots were oftentimes the favorite route to take people for test rides. I took my current boss at the time, Jim Lawless, for a ride. I always made sure the passenger wore the seat belt. After exiting Route 38 there was a short straight of a few hundred feet. Building 201 where the big money-makers resided occupied that beautifully furnished building. As you headed straight for it, you had a choice of going left toward 207 or to the right. The car was going at a pretty good clip by this time, so a turn in either direction was exciting. I usually turned left (there were speedbumps to the right) and went straight for a few more hundred feet, still accelerating. There was a wonderful 90-degree right-hander at the end and taking this at 40 or more really got the passenger excited. After this was the back-straight and by now we’re whizzing by Buildings 204, then 207, still gaining speed. In sight was the road going straight, with Chapel Avenue just out sight and the water tower to the right. But before that, shortly after 207 was a not-quite 90-degree right turn, which most of my passengers didn’t even look at, thinking that we were going straight. I took that right-hander with Jim sitting next to me. Actually, he wasn’t quite sitting, he was trying to stand up by this time. When we turned to the right he was yelling at the top of his lungs from the surprise and the excitement. He was the most fun of anybody I’ve taken for a test-ride in the Porsche.
Some time later I took my new boss, Bill Ewer, for a ride. He was quite impressed but didn’t say much about the ride. Afterwards he asked if he could drive it. The car had a five-speed transmission at a time when that was rare, so I felt obliged to tell him at least that fact about the car. He thanked me and we both got in and buckled our belts. Next thing I know he slammed it into first gear, popped the clutch and in a cloud of tire smoke, he shifted into second weaving around parked cars in the parking lot. Then before I had time to tell to park it, he did and said it was nice a little car. It was only later that I found out he used to drive stock cars. It was pay-back time and now I knew how Jim Lawless felt sitting next to me.
I loved that car. It was my daily commute in all kinds of weather, including snowy days. Rear engine, rear-wheel-drive is a good combination for traversing slippery roads and I never had any problems. That part of New Jersey never sees much snow, so people don’t bother with snow tires. They also don’t know how to drive in these conditions, which can be a deadly combination. Haddonfield Road was always very icy on a section that was slightly up-hill. People would try to make it but would get stuck halfway up, preventing the next person from trying it. I loved motoring past these people in the car, just to see the expression on their faces. Route 295, a major six-lane highway was another trouble-spot for some people. When it snowed the snowplow only removed the snow from the right lane-and-a-half, leaving the left lane for me. I never slowed down.
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By the way, I took the aerial pictures when a man named Ken, who worked for the NBC Elections, took me up in a single-engine plane, after I bugged him for months. I had to call Mary to ask her to bring my camera bag so I could take these. I am glad I did.