The Two Connecticuts

Flashback:

 It is 1959, and I am standing in my new home laughing, because I am so happy and excited.  I am excited to be in our brand new home, in a new development in West Hartford.  Our new home is a split level, with a dining room, and a family room, and a half bath off the family room.  It seems huge to me, compared to our small ranch house in East Hartford, which had only a living room, a kitchen, three bedrooms and one bathroom.

School in West Hartford is different than it was in East Hartford.  In East Hartford, during math period I assisted the dullest girl in the class, I was sent down to lunch early to help collect lunch money, and I am sometimes asked to stay after school to help the teacher with a special project.  Although I enjoy these special privileges, they are just intended to keep me busy, because I have already mastered the lessons.  In West Hartford, I am working along with the rest of the class, the class designated for bright students.  The work is more challenging and the overall experience is good.  I am embarrassed, however, on the second day at school, when I wear one of my new school dresses for the second day in a row, as I always did in East Hartford.  In West Hartford, all of the girls wear a different outfit each day of the week.  In East Hartford, not everyone had a dress for each day of the week, but fortunately I do, and wearing the same dress two days in a row is a mistake I do not make twice.

One of the nice parts about being in a new neighborhood is making new friends.  There are lots of kids around my age, and because everyone has just moved, everyone is interested in making friends.  In fact, houses are still going up, and as we live there, more kids continue to pour in.  The longer we live there, the more it seems as if everyone I meet is Jewish.  I hear my parents comment that, although the neighborhood is new, the non-Jews have already started to move out.  Although my parents view this as something of an insult, for me it is better than my neighborhood in East Hartford, where I was always the only Jewish girl in my class.

The majority of the influx of Jews is from the North End of Hartford.  I know that area well, it is where my grandmother lives.  I love to visit my Grandmother  there.  She takes me on walks  to Mayron's bakery with its delicious rye bread, and to the local delicatessen.

But although my neighborhood is predominantly Jewish, the town overall is not.  The homes are generally nice, and the school system is good.  Therefore, the town attracts a variety of people whose families have either been comfortable for a while, or who's families are moving up thanks to the G.I. Bill and the economic boom following the second World War.

My family fits into the second category.  My father was able to earn his engineering degree going to school during the day on the G.I. Bill, while he worked in the shop at Hamilton Standard during the day.  Living in East Hartford or West Hartford, my father has Connecticut has a lot of engineers.  Pratt and Whitney, Hamilton Standard, and Combustion Engineering are all in the Hartford area and are all major federal contractors.  Colt is still one of the nation's largest guns manufactures guns, and the blue Onion dome over the major cold still presides over the rooftops of the city, as it has since before the civil war.

Interestingly, although Hartford was known as the Insurance capital of the world, it has also been a major manufacturer of guns and weaponry since the early 18th century.  When Mark Twain moved to Hartford during , he extolled it for its beauty and its culture.  His home was in an area largely populated by wealthy insurance company executives, just down the street from both the Hartford Insurance Company and the Aetna Insurance Company.  When Twain wrote the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Yard, the Yankee he describes in a firearms engineer that uses his knowledge to use explosives to impress the medieval population that his power is greater than Merlin's.

Flashforward:

It is 1969, and the riots in the North End of Hartford following the assassination of Martin Luther King, are settling down.  Even so, much of the area has been destroyed.  Although driving through the North End of Hartford, down Albany Avenue, had been are usual way to get to downtown Hartford, where I have a summer job, my parents now advise me to go down Asylum Avenue.  It doesn't take any longer and seems safer.  The population of North End of Hartford is now almost completely African-American, and there is some percentage of this population, probably a small percentage, that seems to be openly hostile to whites.  Or, perhaps they are just angry at everyone.  In any event, after my Grandmother' suffered several incident's of harassment with stones being thrown at the windows of her apartment, she has relocated to elderly housing in the suburb of Bloomfield.  My father and my brother, took the used golf clubs my father had purchased, to the free golf course in Pope park, in Hartford's North End, and were harassed and chased of the course by a group of angry black teenagers. Just a couple of years earlier, I had attended a

Despite these safety concerns, my parents are very supportive of my decision to volunteer through Hartford's Community Renewal Team, to volunteer to tutor some elementary school student in one of the low income housing projects in Hartford.  The population of the housing project is almost entirely African-American, and its reputation is that because of gang violence, it is not a safe place for anyone.  My Dad drops me off and picks me up from my tutoring sessions.

The girls a tutor are adorable, and their family is delightful.  The girls are about one year apart in age, as I recall they were about 7 and 8.  Their parents have just had a new baby, and he is beautiful.  I remember realizing that I had never seen an African American new born baby before.

The family is very friendly to me, one reason is that