When I was 10, I had a 12-year-old sister, Denise, and two brothers. Lenny was 14 and Danny was 5. We boys slept in the same room in a small, single-story house in a modest, riverside neighborhood known as Pleasureland.
The neighborhood’s name derived from a nearby park with two swimming pools and many picnic tables. On weekends, people from all over North Jersey and even New York City went there and to the adjacent, similar Muller’s Park, where I got my first job, at 15, as a garbageman...