Truth, As Strange As Fiction: Life In Riverside

The Great Falls of Paterson, NJ aka The Passaic Falls

 Riverside is a larger neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey. Its boarded on three sides by the Passaic River, hence its name. My husband Angelo grew up in Riverside on Fifth Avenue. Everyone in the neighborhood was familiar with the mob’s management style learned from fearful whispers. From the 60s through the 70s the mob was in control of this Italian neighborhood. Like other ‘families’ in other places, in Riverside the mob owned most everything. They owned many types of businesses. Among them oil and textile, dozens of factories that had seen better days, the local lumberyard, a couple of bars and a few restaurants. Even the local laundromat and a whole lot of real estate – many run down houses which crammed the city streets. It was far from an upscale area.

Random crime was not done in Riverside without the perpetrator facing retaliation to set an example. And the only killings, shootings and stabbings, handled the ‘family.’

Between the police presence and the mob it was safe to walk the streets. Joseph D. Pistone aka FBi undercover agent ‘Donnie Brasco,’ said that growing up in Paterson he learned how local mobsters acted as he saw them hanging around, gambling, doing ”the basic things that wise guys do.”

The street rules were, don’t meet their eyes if you could help it, or if you did, look away as quick as you can. And if spoken to, be polite. You could see them at their local hangout in the back booth and a nearby table in the pizzeria on River Street talking, smoking and reading newspapers or the daily racing forms.

During the race riots that followed the death of a great uniter Martin Luther King (1968) whose words and deeds would be later hijacked for political gain, the Riverside area stayed untouched for this very reason.

This is what the house Angelo grew
us it looks like today.

While Riverside escaped the turmoil, my part of town near Madison Avenue and Market Street wasn’t so luck. The riots brought nightly looting and fires to the businesses. We kept our doors locked and shades down through the curfewed nights. Each morning we’d wake and feeling jittery head out for school once the seven AM road barricades lifted.

National Guard lined the streets and manned the barriers while their military tanks (this was my first time I’d ever seen a tank) and jeeps parked nearby. My dad drove me to St. Joseph’s High School through these narrow cobblestone back roads. We meandered along those street to avoid any lingering problem passed an unkempt park.

This whole area was hundreds of years old. I asked my dad how he knew about these street. They were new to me. He smiled. In his college days, he said he attended William Paterson college then located on twenty-third Ave and worked for a beer distributor. He would deliver beer weekly to the St. Joe’s rectory for the priest’s Friday night deliver on these very roads.

Any murders in Riverside were not gangland killings, those between mob families over turf. But of anyone who betrayed or inform on the mob. Their bodies left in the open over night as an example to others. A few major cases were of a guy knifed on Fifth Avenue and left at the bus stop for the morning commute. Another was a man shoot threw the windshield and his car backed into a parking space in the A&P lot, The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company-an extinct grocery stores chain. The third happened at 1:30 AM on October of 1966. A neighbor of Gabriel ‘Johnny the Walk’ DeFranco, (known for a limp when he walked), looked out and saw three men assail DeFranco on his apartment porch at the corner of Madison and 5th Avenues. DeFranco answered his doorbell to his killers. They beat DeFranco before slashing his throat. His killing would be later connected to an earlier murder of a young married woman shot twice in the head in February of that year. Her body dumped in a Garden State Parkway gully not far from her home. Her car was found in Newark doused with gas and on fire. Both murders were later connected to a wife-swapping club, amateur porno shoots, and counterfeiting.

Angelo was paperboy in the early 60s in the neighborhood and DeFranco was his best tipping customer. Angelo rode his bike to do his paper route after school. One time a couple of mob guys stopped him. They ask him to take a bag and ride down a block and throw it into the open window of a black sedan. Angelo murmured, “I got to get home,” and rode off. He knew not to do anything of that source.

Angelo and I married in 1970 and for a time we lived with my in-laws. Shortly we moved next door with our baby to the first-floor apartment of the corner house. Both my parents had died sixteen months apart and the rest of my family imploded in the squabbling aftermath. For me, my father was the glue. When he died my mother slipped away from the rest of the cracking paste which crumbled after her.

The mob boss drove himself around in a Cadillac. He would stop by for the rent money from my mother-in-law first of every month and have coffee with her. My husband’s family paid sixty-five dollars a month for as long as they lived there while most renters paid one hundred-fifty dollars and had to go to the lumber yard to pay it. If my father-in-law had a few drinks he would say the landlord was sweet on her. She got us the apartment next door.

THIS is the house we rented in the early 1970s.
This is what it looks like today.

I only met the mob boss twice and remembered all the rules of engagement barely looking at him while greeting him with smiling. I couldn’t have described him if someone paid me.

Both meetings were in my mother-in-law’s unattractive aqua colored kitchen. All the rooms were the same color. That included the walls, woodwork and ceilings of this early nineteen hundreds house remodeled for the 1960s.

Near the end of the four years we lived in Riverside Angelo begun interning as a nuclear medical tech . He was now lived near that Pennsylvania hospital. So it was up to me to walk around to the lumber yard where renters paid there rent on the first of the month. Lumber of all sizes laid around in neat stacks lining the driveway you had to walk down. I don’t think lumber in the yard or at else from those stacks ever moved. I would write the check out at home to be able to get in and out of the office fast. You didn’t know who would be in the office. Usually a few men hung around a water cooler off to the side of the front counter giving you the eye. But it you were luck it would just be the one nice guy there was working the office. He wasn’t much older than me and he was always respectful. Only once did one of the wise guys try to chat me up as I nervously looked away. But Mr. Nice Guy told him, “She’s married and a young mother,” to him and a smile for me.

Soon a new reason to leave arose. By this time muggings and worse began devastating the area. The neighborhood schools continued the downhill spiral they’d been on for years. My daughter was now a four year old and this was on our minds heading into the future. On weekday mornings I would feed my daughter, get ready for work and then get her dressed for another day with her grandmother. This one day, she couldn’t find her pink bow headband. It was a favorite for the moment, so I joined in her search. Earlier, she was playing on the couch in front of the TV. Thinking that was the best place to start, I moved a cushion and put my hand around it feeling to the beloved headband but pulled out a warm died baby rat. I knew mice from rats. I dropped it and drew my daughter away from the couch, leashed the puppy we took in after someone had dumped it in our backyard and ran to my in-laws. This was more than I could take! The lumber yard sent a couple of men right over in answer to my frantic phone call where I was told, “Yeah, we are have that problem in the area right now.” They gave me the all clear the next day, but that was it for us. While we packed to move we found huge lifeless relatives of the baby rat in the yard. We saw our future elsewhere now. The old Riverside mob was beginning to lose its grip and the younger guys, now heavily into the drug trade and the crimes that it brought with it. No more ‘safety’ from the horrors of life.

~JD Holiday/JD Amenta

© 2019.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The Winterberg Family

Connection> Brian Winterberg 1950-2024/ Married / Doris Ann Day 1949-2017/Dau. of/Ira Reese Day 1921-1970

How Bud Amenta And Jan Met

 

Janice in the red coat.

How Angelo (Buddy) and Jan Met.

My friend, Judy was dating a friend of Bud’s, Dennis  and they needed a date for Bud so they could doubled date. Judy and I were on the cheerleading team at St. Joseph’s High School in Paterson, NJ, so Judy wanted either me or their friend, Jackie to meet him. Judy, Dennis and Bud were sophomores. I was a freshman in 1966. 

For some reason Jackie couldn’t make it to that afternoon and Judy took me to the old mill beside the nunnery to see Bud. The boys were working out with the with weights and Bud had his shirt off. The old mill, a aged-ridden brick building called the gym, was used for gym classes and after school activates like the cheerleading squad practices. Our squad had a schedule practice and we were going there to practice through we knew we would be waiting for the boys to finish their scheduled weight lifting.

Judy pointed Bud out to me as we entered. One look and I thought, 'I could never get a guy like that.' Bud was so good looking. I agreed to go on a blind date to meet him anyway.

1966

It was that Friday night, Halloween. Bud's father drove the boys to Judy’s house on Madison Avenue, three blocks from my own house, to pick Judy and I up. The date would be at Bud’s house where the boys had decorated the basement for our Halloween party date.

There must have been some talk among the boys where Bud said something like, 'Hope she doesn’t look like a frog,” because when I got into the car, Dennis said, ”clanged your magic twanger, froggy!” A clear reference to the Andy Devine’s children show from the 1950’s where a frog puppet would appear to have a conversation with Andy Devine. It was a fun night, though I felt awkward this being my first date.  

One day not long after that, on the back stairwell of St Joe's, Judy and Jan were 

Bud and Jan, Eastside Prom, 1969

going down the stairs to the exit door heading for the old mill and Dennis and Bud were going up having just come back from it. I was wearing a red duffle coat, that Bud still remembers. Dennis and Judy were commenting back and forth, and Bud and I remember it was something amusing though what was said we don’t know. Bud said that that moment is the moment he knew he loved me, though he didn’t realized that was the feeling at the time.

Ira Reese Day And Ruth Catherine Dunn: How my father and my mother met.

 

Ira Reese Day and Ruth Catherine Day

On the photo: To Ruth
with Love, Ira

The story I was told by my mother that she worked in a lab for Curtis-Wright Inc. and my father worked there too as an accountant, though she worked there first. This was in the 1940s. 

My father was a member of the Holy Name Society* in Paterson New Jersey along with his friend Martin Baron (who later, because my uncle). And at a parade in Paterson that my father was with the society and my mother and her sister Frances were spectators in the crowd. They met after the parade and they began dating.

                                  

They then got my father’s friend, Marty Baron and my mother’s sister,

Frances (Nicknamed, Babe, because she was the youngest child in the family until their brother, Ed was born,) Dunn Baron together.

Ira, Babe and Marty taken at Pennington Park, Totowa, NJ

Ruth took the photo.

* The Confraternity of the Most Holy Names of God and Jesus (Holy Name Society) promotes reverence for the Sacred Names of God and Jesus Christ, obedience and loyalty to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, and the personal sanctification and holiness of its members. Members are called to contribute to the evangelization mission of the Church and to make perpetual acts of reverence and love for our Lord and Savior. The apostolate of the society is to assist in parish ministries by performing the Corporal Works of Mercy: to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless, tend the sick, visit those in prison, and bury the dead; as well as the Spiritual Works of Mercy: to convert sinners, instruct the ignorant, counsel the wayward, comfort the sorrowing, bear adversity patiently, forgive offenses, and pray for the living and the dead. 

https://www.nahns.org/

Ruth Catherine DAY 1916-1971: A Family Story

My mother is second from the left. 
Left Sadie Dunn Nichol,
Ruth Dunn Day, Babe (Frances Dunn Barron
– James Brennan (with hat on), tennis champion

In the mid-1960s, my mother, Ruth, saved a toddler’s life when our family was a Lake Rick-A-Bear Lake, in Kinnelon New Jersey. She was heading for the snack bar on the beach and coming along the path of trees that ran beside the lake just past the picnic tables she saw it in the water apparently having fallen off the bank. No one else was around or watching the baby. She waded into the water and grabbed the child. I came along shortly after and one of the beachgoers rushed up to me and said, “your mother saved that baby over there from drowning.” I didn’t say a thing while looking to the side. I couldn’t see the baby with the crowd of people huddled around, many of them talking loudly.I kept walking back to your picnic table more off the path and in a secluded area of the woods. My dad was grilling burgers and chicken wings the rest of the family sitting either at the table or in Adirondack chairs smiling. For once no one was saying a word. I said to my mother, “someone said you saved a baby?” Mom just continued to smile, she blue eyes shining and gave me a shrugged. That was her. I discovered something else about my mother when I was in high school. I took French my first year from Mrs. Chackmanoff. She was a Jewish  and fron France teaching in a Catholic school. The first day she called my name and asked me to stand. She told the class that she was honored to be teaching me because it was my mother who taught her English. When I told my mother this after school she just said, with her smile, “ Yeah, she didn’t speak English. They lived upstairs from us when you were a baby. We babysat for each other. Her husband was a Russian Prince.”

Ruth-my mother at 21.

 We lived on Madison Avenue in Paterson and we had lived on this block once before eight doors up from where we were living in a block of terraced rowhomes. Mrs. Chackmanoff’s family had the apartment above ours. At the end of freshman year, Mrs. Chackmanoff called me up to her desk and told me she was passing me even though I failed French because she used to change my drapers and for all my mother did for her when her family first came to this country. She told me she had been in a concentration camp in World War II when the Germans held France. When the Russian arrived her future husband was among them and they liberated the camp saving thousands. She later married him and came to America. At first, our two families could only wave and smile at each other. One day my mother went to the small grocery store on Market Street and found Mrs. Chackmanoff standing in the last aisle crying and looking at the change in her hand. My mother saw she was trying to buy bread and jelly. She pointed out the coins for the two items and from then the English lessons began. Mom didn’t tell me any of that. She was like that. She didn’t talk about others as I remember it. I told my mother what Mrs. Chackmanoff said about finding her in the grocery stores and she did her usual shrug with a smile. I felt such admiration for her. My mother never spoke badly about anyone. And she didn’t talk badly about her own mother. There were signs I suppose along the way. Though what did we, her children, have to compare it with? We know only our own bubble, our small safe and comfortable albeit lower middle-class sphere created by our two parents. My friends home life seen just like mine with else kids as far as I could tell. We had fun times at our house. Great holiday with wonderful meals. Getting ready for Christmas’ would be weeks of examining Sears and Spiegel’s catalogs to write our lists for Santa and then drives to toy stores to view what we wanted. Our father would come back later and buy the gifts though at times saving money with a cheaper version. There were board or card games on Saturday night after my mom’s weekly great fried chicken dinner. Some Sundays, long car rides, four kids stuffed in the back seat elbow to elbow after the kids went to church and then for dinner, sandwiches and a bakery layer cake, the special treat of the week. This was followed by watching Bonanza and the Ed Sullivan Show. Thursdays were chili dogs, known in Paterson as Hot-Dogs-All-The-Way, and fries from any number of hotdog restaurants around the city. In the summer, day trips to the lake to swim and a week at the Jersey shore. After school some days I would come home to find my sister, Doris having tea with our mother, the prized tea set all laid out on the dining room table. They would be talking and laughing. I spent some afternoons watching the Million Dollar Movie of the day with our mother. She would go back and forth to the kitchen cooking supper. Then my mother worked around the house more times than not she would be happily humming her favorite tunes. This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 56c1b-john-sadie-dunnsite-1.jpg I suppose some signs something was wrong was that sometimes lunch would be on the table when we ran in from school and sometimes mom would still be in bed. Then we would make our own lunch from lunch meat and cheese in the refrigerator or peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes we would find her crying in the bedroom. Her parents. She did not like conflict. If any of her five children were fighting and telling them to stop didn’t work she would fling one of her penny loafers at them usually missing. One time the shoe hit her china cabinet breaking the glass door and her prized china inside. I remember it. That was me and my brother, Ike. She sat and cried as we ran from the house only to return when we knew the heat would be out. All the glass was cleaned up and nothing was said about it, ever! I first learned about my mother’s early life from my sister, Doris, who spent time with her godmother, one of my mother’s close sisters, and years after the same accounts from a couple of her sisters in the few conversations I had with them. The story goes that my mother was her mother’s ‘whipping boy.’ Her mother beat only her even though she had six other children. No one seems to know why. And those we talked to said they knew not to intervene. Years later my parents would help two other members of my mother’s family elope with ‘unacceptable’ men drawing the ire of the ‘old battle-ax’ that my father called his mother-in-law. I think this was an act of rebellion, long overdue, by my mom inspired my dad’s self-assertive nature. Other things my aunts told me about my mother was that she was always kind, quiet, pleasant, smart, religious and always nervous. She like roller skating. She went to Saint John’s Grammar school in Paterson and then business school and became a comptometer operator, the comptometer being the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculators made in the United States back in 1887. She was so good at it she was in demand at banks.

260px-Comptometer_model_ST
_Super_Totalizer A comptometer

During World War II my mother set up offices for Curtis-Wrights Industries who made plane for the military and where my father worked for all his life though the two did not date until meeting at a Holy Name parade one year. My father was a member of The Holy Name Society and my mother a parade goer. What I know about my parents’ wedding was that it was a judge of the piece ceremony. My mother wore a business suit. One of her closest sisters, Aunt (Frances) Babe and Uncle Marty, my father’s best friend, stood in for them. It was during the war and no other family members were present and there were no pictures taken. 

    My mother’s mother was forced on us each summer for two weeks. My father couldn’t stand her and so my parents tried any way they could to get out of it. Many telephone fights with her siblings went on before and after each visit. One year we all had the German measles and that included my father. Measles is a very contagious disease caused by a virus spread through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes. 

It fell on the week the ‘battle-ax’ was due for our summer visit from her. We lounge around in the living room where the TV was with our pillows and blankets, our father sat in the armchair. My mother came in from the kitchen and said in a worried tone, “We should tell them so someone else can take our turn. Old people can die from it.”

“Let her come,” my father said. “Maybe she’ll die and put an end to our misery.”

My mother threw up her hands, made a clicking sound and left the room. I was horrified he would say that until I learn of the abuse my mother had to deal with from her.

MOM (Ruth Day) and me.

When I met my future husband, Buddy on a blind date when we were fifteen and sixteen, he came over after school before he would go to his part-time job at the supermarket. One time was while my grandmother was there and she wanted to sit on the porch. She was frail now and walked with a cane. Buddy help her to the porch carrying a chair and walking behind her in case she fell. When he left, my grandmother said to me, “He’s a nice boy. Too bad he’s Italian.” One of her daughters married an Italian and this had been a bone of contention. Later I told my father what she had said and he laughed. He never liked any of the boys I or my sisters brought home but this changed everything for me and Buddy! Buddy became like a son to my father.

I once heard my father and mother talking in a way I never heard them do before. My father used to take trips to Washington D.C. as the accountant on a team of negotiators for Curtis-Wrights Industries working on government contracts. My parents stood at the pantry door. Dad was saying, “Why Ruth? Why?” The pain in his voice. My mother had drank all the beer and to try and hid it, filled the bottles with water. I didn’t know for a long time what that conversation was about until my sister Doris told me all she knew of our mother’s alcoholism.

Ruth Day (left) and her sister, Alice –
(see the washing machine behind them)

My mother was abused, persecuted as a child with a sick mother.

I wonder if she felt the beatings were her own fault. Was it the guilt her mother heaped on her. Maybe mom did feel being mistreated was her own fault; she was bad so that was why she deserved the mistreatment. Did all this lead to feelings that she had no room to talk or criticize others? Did she think she didn’t deserve to feel good about herself and so never talked about the good she’d done?

When she was twenty-three, she had a mental break-down. Her father who liked to drink gave my mother beer to get through it. So that was how she learned to cope with life.

I believe my father tried to take care of her in the best way he knew with the information and lack of support available to them. 

In the nineteen fifties and sixties alcoholics with treated badly to say it mildly. There was little support for those with the disease and their families. It would be a year or so after my mother’s death before alcoholism was declared a disease and the understanding we now give it.

Mom and Dad, Ira
and Ruth Day, 1967

My mother was persecuted by people which included her own family and my father’s mother. She received anonymous phone calls a few times a week as long as I can remember. All we knew about these calls were that they shouted names at her and she would be upset after one. In those days there was no way to find out who the caller was. I suspected it was a hostile friend of my father’s mother who did it at that grandmother’s direction. She was another piece of work.

My father died sixteen months before my mother of heart disease. I was nineteen at the time. We were all lost without him. None more than my mother. She stopped eating and just drink beer. These months were even more horrible than the year and a half leading up to my father’s death. With her being out of it all the time people disappeared from her life quickly. Some showed up for the money she was willing to give away just to have them talk to her.

One sister wouldn’t take her phone calls. This was the same sister that when her husband was cheating on her, my mother would drag us all over to be with and comfort her.  Later, when my mother was dying in the hospital she came. She screamed at me, “Why didn’t you tell us?”

I said, “Where were you when she needed you!”

Another sister wanted her to still watch their mother for the two weeks that year, and without my father to intervene, that sister said to her, “He had to die to get away from you.”

I was standing next to her in the kitchen on Lake Avenue the house my father bought for us before he became ill. My mother began sobbing and I took the phone telling her sister to never call us again.

Places she shopped at for years and took her credit wouldn’t now and some told her not to come there again. She doctor offered no help. No one did. She was not in an acceptable condition and did not have an acceptable disease.

To this day some have nothing kind to say about her. Even many years after her death there were still people making derogatory remarks with disdain like, ‘She came to my house with a six-pack and wanted to drink it!’

My mother was dying. So what was their excuse for abandoning her?

I still miss her. Ruth Catherine Day. ~Jan

 

Ira Reese Day 1921-1970

Ira, 21 Years Old

Ira told his children that he was one quart english, so going back, George (abt 1818) and Sarah Day (abt 1820) were both full english.

Ira told JD, his 3rd daughter, that he was laid of from his job at Curtis Wrights in 1951 the year JD was born. They lived in a cold water flat in Lodi, NJ. During that time, at 6 months old, JD had her first asthma attack and was in and out of the hospital until she was 2 and a half years old. Aunt Babe (Frances Dunn) and some of the others would help out with bringing food. After about a year, Ira got his job back.

He said that when he went back to Curtis Wrights Industries he deviced a

Ira, Babe and Marty

filing system that only he knew. He rearranged letters of the alphabet in his head making his own system and he did all the filing. His secretaries typed and answered the phone only. He would use files and replaced them right back in the filing cabinets. No one else knew how to find anything in his office. This worked and he was the boss there for many years.

 One day LD, Ira's oldest daughter, was talking on the phone to EG and TG (best friends of Ira (Ike) Day ( b. Dec,11,1953). EG  and LD were talking about their family trees and how the Day line was stopped about the 1820's with George and Sarah Day in Paterson, NJ and trying to link them to a Captain Samuel Day, a revolutionary was hero when EG's mother said, that we had a somewhat famous person in our family. That our father, Ira Reese Day was somewhat famous locally in Paterson because everyone knew that there was a man who would help people with their taxes and the IRS. EG mother also said didn't we remember how packed the funeral home was when he died. Many people wanted to pay their respects.

At a Dunn family reunion in 1991, which D and I, Jan, along with D's wife, C, their daughter, C M and my daughter, J W all went. There I was told by 3 cousins, things about our father. J N told me how my father helped him make a few decisions that helped him and how thankful he was for that help. B B told me how my father helped him in the same way and M B said my father helped his mother, my Aunt Babe (Frances), after his father died. He said she couldn't have made it without my father's helped. They all said they and others admired him and they had great memories of him.

Ira and his daughters, DD and LD
late 1950s at the Jersey shore.

The Coyle Family

 Connection >Hannah Coyle /m./John McGee /dau./ SarahMcGee /m./ Patrick Connell 
/dau/ Mary Agnes /m./ Ira M. Day

The Coyle Family

Parents of Hannah Coyle MCGEE 1848-1919

Patrick COYLE abt.1830 and Hannah Tenny abt.1830

The McGee Family

 Connection >Sarah McGee /m./ PATRICK CONNELL   /dau/ Mary Agnes /m./ Ira M. Day /son/ Ira Reese Day 1921

The Maher Family

 Connection >William B. Maher /m./ Dorothy Merriamn /son/ William Maher /m./ L. Day 

/dau of / Ira Reese Day 1921 and Ruth C. Dunn

From the Paint Box: some of Jan's ARTWORK

 

                                                                                

Art by J.D     a

Self.
All of My Artwork is copyrighted.

MORE of my Art can be seen at: https://gravatar.com/authorjdholiday

and https://jdswritersblog.wordpress.com/tag/from-the-paint-box/

y

 

American History: Webster’s Dictionary

 Noah Webster was not only a signer to the Constitution and a plain old wordsmith, he went far beyond and wrote the American dictionary. From what I have read it was clear to Webster it needed to be done to provide a basis for a common language for Americans to make English easier to read and write. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758, it was Webster’s two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language that truly earned him his place in linguistic history and the reputation as the leading linguist of American English.  Webster mastered twenty-six languages including Old English, Greek, and Hebrew. He finished the dictionary while working in Paris at the University of Cambridge. The book was over seventy thousand words, thousands of which were all new words.

It took 28 years for Webster to write it. By this time he was 70 years old.  The colonies contained a multitude of languages. He wanted his work to make American English pronunciations and spelling to be solely the American way; dropping the British form. Webster added words unique to the colonies, many taken from the continent’s Native Americans. He added new words that were not in other dictionaries making the language unique. Some of them include Constitution, Federal and patriot.

Both Benjamin Franklin and Webster thought to make life easier in the new colonies. They knew how hard it was to spell words in English, sounds didn’t match letters for one thing and that the problem was an inconvenient English alphabet. He wanted to do this so “all persons of every rank, would speak with some degree of precision and uniformity, putting everyone on the same footing.” – Noah Webster.

Franklin did work to improve the American English language in his own way. In 1736 at age 30, he wrote a somewhat saucy reference work published titled, The Drinkers Dictionary, a list of 228 common terms for being drunk. In the end it would be Webster who was willing the complete the work on a dictionary.

Franklin would work on many other endeavors as we all have learned while Webster lovingly persevered to improve communication for the new country that would bare fruit. He would also organize the Pennsylvania militia, raised the funds to build a city hospital and plan to pave and light city streets, create the Franklin stove, and bifocals, he negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War… and well, you know, I could go on and on about Franklin. But I won’t.

Franklin alphabet remakers

Webster did correspond with the likes of Franklin, and many others, even Washington on the topic of language. Webster, like many of the men who signed the Constitution, was extremely busy. He created his own version of an American Bible. He also worked for copyright laws, on a strong federal government, universal education, and the abolition of slavery along with the likes of Franklin and Hamilton and he helped found the Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1791.

Part of Webster success was due to his willing to change something when he believed it needed improvement. So in 1828, living in an apartment in Paris  Webster’s Dictionary was published in North America. He had to mortgage his house to do it. Needless to say it became very influential. Webster’s legacy has continued to impact us in ways most of us would not even consider.

I’ve heard people say Webster was commissioned to write his dictionary by Benjamin Franklin. And though he was recruited 1793 by Alexander Hamilton to become an editor for a Federalist Party newspaper, I could not find history to back up that claim of a recruitment about the dictionary. When reading about Webster’s life you would have to think Noah Webster made that trip by himself.

You can read more at these links:

languagemuseum.org/noah-webster-an-american-dictionary-for-an-american-english/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster’s_Dictionary

https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/americas-first-dictionary

Franklin’s The Drinkers Dictionary:

http://www.drinkingcup.net/1737-benjamin-franklin-publishes-228-terms-for-being-drunk/