Old Dock Road

Book excerpt: If you had the good fortune to grow up in a small village of about 3,000 people in 1930 through 1940 - especially a village less than an hour away from a major city like New York, you may well relate to most of these essays. Unfortunately, most small towns have merged with other towns to form small or medium - size cities, in which case you may enjoy reading about a young boy growing up in a town that size - a town where there was little or no crime and the one policeman was a lonely as the Maytag repairman. The town - Closter - was a WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) community and you can imagine the problems John Saladino - an Italian Catholic - had when he opened a barber shop in town, or when Sam Moscowitz (he quickly changed his name to Sam Morse) opened a drug store. Were either of them accepted by the locals? I'm not going to tell you everything in this synopsis. Please read on.