G A M B O A     

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Early in  1936 my Father, Mother and Brother came to Gamboa to live.  My family lived in one of the French Quarters before crossing the bridge. There were three houses in that area.  Rose Jones Burns was one of the other occupants living there with her husband.  My Mother would tell stories of how she and Rosie would send a trustee from the prison across the bridge for groceries and they could hear him tramping back home after doing the shopping.

Later in the year my Mother found out she was going to have another child, so my parents decided to move back to the family home in Panama to be closer to the hospital.  After I was born in 1937, we waited for 3 years to get quarters.  When we finally moved to Gamboa again the only housing available was either in the Ridge 4 family houses or the Dust Bowl 12 family houses. Gamboa was now a growing town. After my Father ran into Monty Lowry, walking to the Commissary, from the Ridge for the second time that day  (construction had soiled her laundry on the line and she had to get more laundry soap) they decided on the 12 Family house. 

We lived at 274 G & J until I was 12.  My Father had gotten permission to take two connecting apartments to live in.  I remember having a swing down under the house by the entrance.  The cars were also parked under the houses.  Since we had two apartments and one car, we used the other space to place chairs and a picnic table.  During that time we made friends with many people who came and went.  Sheila Gilbert, Laura Dew, Violet Scott, and Carolyn Pollack were some of the people I remember living there.

                                          My brother and I use to take a shortcut across the ball field to go to school.  In those days, I didn't even know it had a name. When I was 12 years old, we moved to an Up and Downer on Rum Road 168A.  Do you know how many steps there were on the side of the hill?  Fifty five!   I even remember our phone number.  Six was the prefix for Gamboa.  Our number was 6-230.  Our Post Office Box was 71, which was on the top row.  Very frustrating!  For many years I could not look to see if we had any mail!

                                                                   
  I remember the wonderful times we had at the Civic Center.  Dancing lessons, cotillions and Christmas parties were some of the things held there.  During the war the Woman's Club had style shows and parties for the Servicemen who were stationed in Gamboa, and lived in the Quonset hut by the bridge.  We had square dances.  Red Townsend was the caller.  One dance I remember was the Virginia Reel.  I recall Bobby Conners singing a Red Skelton song (The Fox Came Out on The Silver Night).   Another "sound" memory for me was the record, "Three O'clock In the Morning", that signaled the last dance of the evening. How smooth the concrete floors were. A "scent" memory is  of the Gardenias blooming in the bushes in the front.  When I was about 10 years old, Martha Swalm and I were riding our bikes around the Civic Center.  My bike went off the sidewalk and fell on my ankle.  My pant leg (rolled up) got caught in the chain and nothing we could do would dislodge it.  Martha decided to go home and get scissors.  It was getting twilight and  Martha didn't return, so I dragged my bike home.  It was a Roadmaster and heavier than the bikes today. It took awhile to get home.  It was a hop...drag bike...hop...drag bike...hop... drag bike walk home!  When my Mother saw my condition, I was not punished for getting home late. 

The Clubhouse was fun.  Going with Nina Brown to get an Ice-cream Sunday occasionally was great.  And only for a quarter.  I remember Mr. Small working there.  We would sit on the bottom shelf in the magazine area and read the comic books. They also had the glass case containing candies and gum.  If they sold anything else from the case, I don't remember.  (Obviously not important to children.)   It was a wonderful building.  Many of us went to Kindergarten in the room on the ground floor by the staircase.  Mrs. Ruth Banton was our teacher when I was in Kindergarten.  I loved to play the "triangle".  Coach Grieser would come in and we would line up to go to the pool for lessons.  Remember using the kick board?  Or jumping from the side of the pool into his arms and then being thrown back wondering if you would sink or swim?  Next door to the Kindergarten  was the Library run by Mrs. Betty Malone.  And across from the staircase and near the front door was the Barber Shop.  Upstairs was the Manager's office. The Beauty Shop was next to it, as were the bathrooms.  And if you walked around the staircase, on the second floor, there was a room that I remember was used during the war for the women to go and roll bandages and learn First Aid. They had two eating areas.  The one behind the Magazine room,  was a place with a bar and tables.  Then the main dining room right in the middle of the building.  It was by the window leading to the passage of the Movie Theater where you could find the Pinball machines. 

Attached to the Clubhouse on the second floor was the Movie Theater.  It was on stilts.  Years later they closed up the bottom area and made it the new Clubhouse.  Many dance recitals were held at the Movie Theater.  My Mother taught dancing and many of us have pictures of us on that stage.  They even had footlights.  How can we forget Saturday at the movies?  A Serial and full length show for the kids.  First sitting in front and then graduating to the back.  I remember Mrs. Suggs as the ticket lady.  Once Laura Dew and I smuggled  a water pistol into the show and every so often we would shoot water up into the oscillating fans that were high on the side walls .  Nobody could figure out where the water was coming from.                                                                                                             

Connected to the Clubhouse was the swimming pool and the dressing rooms.  Trying to get into the pool without stepping into the chlorine water was quite a feat.  "Pete", the Pool Man, had a band which played at some of our parties at the pool and the Civic Center.  Imagine live music for teenagers!  We had the Red, White and Blue troupe.  I remember the two piece bathing suits the girls wore.  Many parties were held at the pool. Remember the grandstand for the guest, just in front of the Dispensary?  Was that the Bleakleys that were the clowns at our Pool Extravaganzas?  The pool was wonderful. There was the baby pool, the main pool and the 12 foot diving pool.  In the main pool, I remember learning to swim from corner to corner.  And there were underwater ledges you could stand on at one side.  In the baby pool, as teenagers, we'd sit down, stretch out our legs and relax.  One day Dora Panavak brought a baby Alligator and put it on a board in the baby pool.  We thought it would stay on the board...what shrieking when it slithered into the pool and started swimming.  Dora thought it was quite funny.  The deep pool with the high boards, was something we worked up to.  Recall diving to the bottom of that 12 foot deep pool or at least to the ledge while your ears popped?  Most of us learned to dive off the first board and maybe the second board.  But the third platform was something else.  The next platform was just to make the last platform higher.  I jumped off the top at the urging of Joan Anderson once, screaming all the way down, what a wonderful sense of relief when the water closed up around me. Patrick Morrison was a protégée of Coach Grieser.   I remember Patrick in his diapers swimming in the pool.  He truly learned to swim before he could walk.

Then there was the Gym and Bowling Alley.   There was a passage through the drop ceiling that would bring you into a back closet in the Bowling Alley.  Access was right above the Bowling Alley door.  To climb it you had to put your foot on the Fire extinguisher and open the door to the crawl space.   I sent the extinguisher crashing to the floor, spraying water and was so scared I ran home to hide.   Later Kenny Morris told me he picked it up and put it back on the hook.  Coach Gergoni had succeeded Coach Grieser and was VERY stern.  Kenny told the Coach that some kids had been having a water fight, which accounted for the water in that area...whew!!  Of course, my brother had been telling me the police were looking for me.  As for the Gym itself, it was a place for much of our social life too. We paraded there on Halloween in our costumes and  played volleyball, basketball, badminton and a game where we would stand against the wire wall and someone would throw a ball at our feet.  When Dave Sundquist had the ball it was sheer terror for us.  Don't remember the object of the game...maybe to see how dumb we were? There was also a wall for handball.  I remember Fritz Cheney playing there often.  In the backroom, during the summer we always had some sort of arts and craft classes.  There was a ping pong table in the room too. 

With all these activities we also had our school. 

Besides studying there was baseball, kickball and the "monkey bars".  We had plays under the school.  After the war was over and the second part of the school was added we skated under the new part.  The concrete was smoother there.  The custodian was "Rodney".  One of my teachers was Vera Jones.  The writing teacher that traveled from school to school for penmanship was Mrs. Moomaw.  Remember, "circle, circle, circle" or "push-pull, push-pull, push-pull"? I don't remember a teacher coming from out of town to teach music, but I do remember we went to a bigger room (in the part they added to the school) where someone played on a victrola, "Peter and the Wolf".  Remember the round circular pitch pipe that looked like an Oreo cookie?  Miss Starr was principal through our 5th grade.  Miss Lemoine became Principal and 6th grade teacher after Miss Starr left.   Our class was large enough to take up the whole classroom.  Miss Lemoine took us on a field trip.  We toured one of the newspapers, the Coca Cola Bottling Plant, a candy factory, an alligator factory and a farm.  With all the junk food and then the smells most of us felt slightly nauseated by the end of the day.

We also had scouting. First we had Mrs. Ryder as leader for the Brownies and later on Mrs. Motz was our Girl Scout leader.  In our teens we were Mariners under Mrs. Olga Holmes, along with Elaine Saunders as her assistant,  The Girl Scout house, was called "the little house".  When we were Mariners we had a slumber party at "the little house".  The boys had Cub Scouts, Boys Scouts and then Sea Scouts under Mr. Biava and then Mr. Artie Holmes.  We use to go out with the Sea Scouts on the Southern Cross.  They also had the small speed boat, the Thunderbird.
 

                                            All this and I haven't talked about the outdoors.  Playing, "One, Two, Three, Ring 'O Leveo" or climbing trees and catching locusts at twilight.  How many of us were told to come home when the streetlights came on.  Then there was our climbing up and down hillsides.  The red clay would cling to the bottom of our saddle oxford shoes or penny loafers and make us a bit taller, while the saw grass would give us paper cuts as we grabbed it to assist our way up a hill.  Or all the free fruit we ate when hunger overcame us and we were out playing.  There were mangoes during the season, which was almost always preceded by someone falling out of a tree.  Or the coconuts when a parent had someone come take them down off a tall palm tree.  We rode our bicycles on the sidewalks and walked them as someone approached us; we knew the unspoken rules.   We aqua planed in the Canal when a parent would take us.  Children and dogs ran free.  We had a "neighborhood watch" back then, "parents" who looked out for us.  I don't think we ever complained to our parents that "we had nothing to do".  I always thought the paths we made by the bamboo trees going up the hill to  Jadwin Avenue, or by the Mango tree near the steps  would be there forever, but they are gone.  The "cliff" going toward the Ridge was bare rock and quite a feat to climb in my days.  Now it is a grassy hill.  The town is smaller than I remember and I wonder what took us so long to walk around it.  Could it have been that we had to stop to chat with this person and that one? 

We had our own Doctor and Dentist.  A Fire Department, Police Station and Gas Station.  We had a fine Commissary with top grade merchandise.  In our teen years we had a good relationship with the police.  I can remember a group of us visiting the Station one Halloween and locking ourselves in a cell.  That was after Policeman Fred Saunders followed us, down the Ridge Road, by the Bridge, with his Search Light on so we teenagers wouldn't get hurt.

There were two churches,  Our Lady of Good Council Catholic Church was built in 1937.   The Gamboa Movie Theater and Civic Center was the place of worship for Protestants until the Union Church was built in 1952.  On Christmas Eve, many of us went to Midnight Mass at the Catholic Church.\ 

I can't stop this narrative without mentioning the Golf Club.  It was built by the Men of the Dredging Division.  It was a wonderful place.  A grown-up place.  Men played golf and there were many dances and dinners for our parents.  There was a Chinese cook there that was wonderful.   I remember my Dad bringing home dinner (Pepper steak) that was delicious.  I celebrated my 16th birthday at the Golf Club.  Many young men learned to play golf there.   It was a beautiful spot and today is an expensive Resort.

This town was Mr. John Claybourne's dream.  He was boss to our Fathers.   Elsie Claybourne, his wife, was Henry Grieser's sister and that's how we got Coach Grieser to Gamboa.   Superintendent Claybourne made his dream our Utopia.
 

This is the Gamboa of my memories.   The bridge that was frightening.  Wondering how my Dad always could foretell what color the light would be when we approached Gamboa. The hope that we would get across the bridge before the light changed, the thrill the first time you drove over it and the terror when you shared the bridge with the train. Then there was our Lighthouse.  We stood on the hill behind it watching history in the making when the ships from WW II came through.  The siren that blew at 12:00 noon.  The plaque at the RR station that would give you a shock if you touched it. The RR station. Being able to tell what time it was by the trains that ran by three times a day, watching the Cheerleaders jump out of the train to give a cheer on their way to play against Cristobal.  The times we felt earthquakes and knew it was so, because it wasn't time for the train.  The Dustbowl, The Ridge, Snob Hill, Rum Road.  This is a place where we stood on the corners and chatted after a night of entertainment, trying to make the memories last.  This was our Gamboa.

Doris Ehrman Monaco

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