Bon Voyage: We Begin Our Journey by Visiting Very Dear Friends
At 7 pm on August 25, we landed at the Newark, NJ, airport and were met by our long-time friend, Nick Masucci.
I met Nick’s wife Diane in the summer of 1973 when I worked at the Detroit Free Press. Diane and I were hired as the first female “copy boys”. We preferred the title “copy aides”, but that did not take with most of the tough old newspaper men there. Our job was to change the ink and paper on the news wire machines (Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Dow Jones) while the machines were running so no dispatch was missed. We also delivered photos, stories, messages from one department to another and ran errands around town — to Windsor, Canada, to pick up daily Canadian stock reports, to newsstands to buy copies of the rival afternoon newspaper. My father threw a fit when he learned I was sent into the streets of Detroit about 9:30 one night to buy a bottle of whiskey for a reporter who kept a supply in his bottom drawer and drank it from his coffee cup. One time, Diane and I were dispatched to deliver a cage containing two live chickens to Mother Waddles Soup Kitchen; the chickens had been a departure gift for an editor being reassigned to a Gannett newspaper somewhere in the south (a 50-pound sack of grits went with the chickens). Mother Waddles had agreed to take the chicken and grits and use them to feed the homeless.
Although I returned to Syracuse University at the end of the summer, Diane and I remained friends and our families, despite the distance between New Jersey and California, have visited often and become close. Nick helped Laura get her first job after college; their son, Ben, lived in Redlands for a while and was a frequent guest for dinner.
We arrived at the Masucci Bed & Breakfast, as we called it, and Diane, Nick, Gary and I went to dinner at an Italian restaurant in downtown Montclair, which had a very lively street scene — sidewalk cafes, street musicians, a variety of shops.
After (finally) a restful night’s sleep, we awoke on Diane’s birthday (and our departure day) to coffee and fresh bagels — real bagels, not like the ones we are forced to settle for in San Bernardino. Large, thick, round, fresh-baked bagels. Cream cheese. Lox. It was a wonderful breakfast.
Diane and Nick’s daughter, Deborah, came by to see us with her 17-month-old daughter Jayden, who was a delight to watch bang on the xylophone and push a shopping cart around. We relaxed on the patio and had a wonderful visit. At noon we loaded the car and Diane and Nick drove us off to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal at Red Hook.
Manhattan traffic was surprisingly light, and we arrived after slightly more than an hour. We googled “restaurants near me” and found Brooklyn Crab for lunch, only half-a-mile from the terminal. We shared a lunch of oysters, fried clams, clam rolls and mussels, and, of course, a pitcher of beer to celebrate Diane’s birthday and our adventure.
Once we had eaten our fill, it was to the port, several photos taken and good-bye.
The Masucci B & B was is four-star rated. Dinner, breakfast, lunch and catching up with old friends were the perfect send-off. Certainly anyone who is willing to spend her birthday chauffeuring us from New Jersey to Brooklyn deserves four gold stars and a top rating.
