TOM'S PAGE

Some people say I was abducted by aliens as a child and this kid was left in my place, ca 1956.

The "Cellar Rats" in Jersey City, ca 1967

The Cellar Rats hardcore in their lair, ca 1968

"They made me do it"

Forced to dance, against my will, ca 1994

Fitting in with the expectations and limitations of my social situation, I expected to study industrial arts in high school and learn a trade when I graduated.  Somehow, I became interested in the Navy Nuclear Power Program, and enlisted right after completion of school.  I had committed to 6 years service - two years more than a regular Navy enlistment - to compensate for all the extra school that I would attend,  but I saw this as a means to a better education.  Little did I know how true this would be.

Nuclear Power School showed me that I could achieve anything, provided I was willing to work for it.  Amazingly, I could understand concepts of calculus, chemistry, nuclear physics, electrical engineering - in fact, I wound up with a 3.2 average!  This school was not to be taken lightly;  8 hours of classes, 5 days a week, with normal study hours of 3-4 hours per night, and additional hours assigned if you were slipping below certain grades.  Lack of study or effort was not accepted - you were disobeying direct orders!  What motivation!

I was assigned to Pearl Harbor on the nuclear submarine Queenfish after completion of one and a half years of school.

Some Stories:

Here is a poem my father taught me, which he had learned in school in Ireland:

TWENTY FROGGIES

Twenty froggies went to school,

down beside a weedy pool

"We must be on time", said they,

"First we study, then we play."

Master Bullfrog, grave and stern,

called each pupil on his turn.

Not a dunce amongst the lot,

not a lesson they forgot.

Twenty froggies grew up fast,

bullfrogs they became at last.

Now they sit on other logs

teaching other little frogs.

Cloonamna. That was on the name of the school that my father had attended. I remember him telling me (one of the few things he told me about home) that there were two rooms, and they had a common fireplace in the wall between them. The boys were on one side, the girls on the other. Every so often the kids would be allowed to go to the fire to warm themselves, and the boys would look thru to see if the girls, as my father put it, "would be picking up their dresses to warm their behinds". If they were, the boys would take a stick and give them a poke, with the result being all sorts of disruption. My father remembered being sent outside to gather switches (not the electrical kind) for the following punishments.

Back in 1998, during my last visit, I went to the building, which was on the road to Kilmovee, and looked inside one of the windows. It was being used for some business where the owner assembled car parts or something, and there was the fireplace separating the two rooms, just as my father had described!

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The Coincidence

My father's sponsor here was his aunt Maria Waldron Buckley. We sort of lost touch with the Buckleys over the years - my father didn't care for them, as my mother put it, they were "lace curtain Irish" and well, you know what that made us! Maria (pronounced Mariah) would come over to check out their house when they first married, and would look at things and say, "it's dacent" which drove my mother up the wall. The issue I think that drove a wedge between the Nestors and the Buckleys was that when my dad came over in the mid 20's, all he could get was a laborer's work. At one point he had the chance to become trained in welding, and all he had to do was accept a lower pay for a couple of months - this was a real opportunity. But Maria wouldn't hear of it, because she wanted his rent money; she said if he did that, she would have him sent back. As a result (according to him) he wound up without a trade and worked as a laborer his whole life. Now, of course, I'm sure he could have found other opportunities, but he chose to not let this go. Anyway, that set the stage for a cooling off between the families over the years. I heard about a funeral and attended many years ago, and there seemed to be some interest in the family's genealogy, but didn't get a lot of response. Then this happened....

My wife Andrea started a new job on December 1st of this past year, working at the Hackettstown Elementary School system as a Spanish teacher. On the evening of December 2nd, My car died due to a bad alternator. I managed to get it to the shop, and I was glad that I wasn’t working the rest of the week, and wouldn’t need the van.

However, the next morning, it was 17 degrees, and was going to be that way for a while. Problem was, we hadn’t drained the pipes at the lake house in the Poconos, and if we didn’t do that soon, they would freeze and burst. So we agreed that I’d come with her, drop her off in Hackettstown and continue on to the lake (about 40 minutes further). Andrea was running late, so she had to make up some time on the road. I sat with my eyes closed and hands clenched while she zoomed down route 80, swerving around and passing trucks at a high rate of speed. When we got off the exit onto Route 46 to go to Hackettstown, she didn’t slow down a bit, with only 15 minutes left before she was late on the third day of her new job. To make matters worse, she had an appointment with the principal at 8:30, and it would be pretty obvious if she was late.

As we came down the last hill and headed into Hackettstown, she noticed the flashing lights in the rearview mirror. She asked “do you think he’s pulling me over?” and I said that she should pull over in any event – if he wanted to pass her, he would. He didn’t.

The young cop (they’re all looking young now) came over and told her that she was doing “61 in a 40 zone” and politely asked for her papers. While she searched for her pocketbook I rummaged through the 15 copies of the insurance certificate and registration to find the current ones (thank God they were there). I gave them to her and she told the cop that she forgot her wallet and didn’t have her license. He got her social security number and in about 30 seconds had a read out of her entire life (welcome to the 21st century). At first I thought that he was calculating how much the town of Hackettstown’s coffers were going to be increased by this stop, because he became very quiet for a moment; then he leaned into her window, looked at me and asked “Are you Tom Nestor of Mount Tabor?” I admitted to that sad fact, and he said he wanted to speak to me.

As he walked around the front of the car, my mind went through every possible reason he wanted to "talk to me": tickets that blew off my windshield that I wasn’t aware of, things that I thought I had gotten away with in my youth, and so on. I opened the window and he asked me if I was related to the Buckley family. Now, I wasn’t aware that that was a misdemeanor or anything, so I admitted I was. Then he asked me to name some of them. I was starting to wonder if this had something to do with Homeland Security (maybe the Buckleys were picked up for some sort of plot), a new drunk test, or if it was going to be a segue into my Miranda Rights, but I decided to respond; “Raymond, Jamesey, Davey”. The cop broke into a grin and stuck his hand in the window, saying, “Hi cousin!”

Works out he was a descendent of my great aunt Maria (Waldron) Buckley, who was my father’s sponsor for his immigration to America in 1927. Think about it: what was the chance that two members (who had never met before) of the family that had started out on the other side of the Atlantic and came to Jersey City 100 and 80 years ago, would meet on the streets of Hackettstown, where neither of them lived? Not only that, but one of them would recognize the other only by name and place of residence, from papers sent to his parents and aunts and uncles years before? Well, we spent about 15 minutes “catching up” on family matters on the side of the road, while Andrea bit her nails, watching the clock. In the end Jim and I agreed to get together to compare notes (he’s also interested in genealogy, thank God!) in January. I asked if he was going to throw Andrea in jail, but he just laughed. .

We got to Andrea’s school about 15 minutes late, and she found that the principal couldn’t make the appointment and left an apologetic note for her. I got to the lake and found that none of the pipes had frozen, and then was told by the mechanic that he would only charge me half price for the alternator because he had replaced it about a year before. I guess I should have played the lottery that day!

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The Bicycle Wheel

I met my uncle Mike for the first time in 1976, after my father died. He brought me back to the 3 room house that the 5 brothers, the parents and the grandmother lived in (it was deserted since his 2 bachelor brothers passes away several years before.)

He handed me the first letter my father sent from America and told me to keep it. Then he brought me to a broken down shed and pointed to a bicycle wheel hanging on the wall and asked me to take it down. I did, and then he smiled at me and said, "the last thing your father did before he left was change that tire, and hang that wheel on the wall. It's never been touched for 50 years, until you came." That was sort of a tough moment for me, but it really made me feel part of that circle. My father never spoke of his life in Ireland - he was 23 when he left - and up to then, I had only met one relative on his side, Mike's daughter Bernadette, who came over to the US a couple of years before. Now I'm close to Bernie as I am to my own siblings.

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...my father came from a townland called Sinolane in the mid 20's, to Jersey City in NJ.  He thought he'd just pick up the gold in the streets and send for his brothers, but he walked into the Depression and I believe he felt that he let the family down.  He stopped communicating with them, and they assumed he got rich and forgot about them.  He eventually had some correspondence in the '60's, but nothing  of substance. 

When he was dying of cancer in 1975 he asked that I bring his ashes back and bury them in the family plot.  I had to move heaven and earth with the Irish Consulate to let me bring "cremains" into the country, and they insisted that I had to show all the paperwork to customs IMMEDIATELY upon arrival, or something terrible would befall me. When I got off the plane, the customs "official" was dozing in a chair, obviously hung over, and refused to even open his eyes, just kept saying "go on..." and finally, "get the hell out of here, leave me alone".

When I went to Uncle Mike and told him what I wanted to do (this was upon our first meeting ever) he got very upset and didn't think we could do that.  Finally, he agreed to it, but said it would have to be done in the dead of night, when there was no moon.  Fortunately, that occurred during my stay, and we threw shovels and the ashes into the "boot" of cousin John's car and lit off in the night.   Uncle Mike insisted that we cut the engine at the top of the hill and drift down, so there was no noise to alert the neighbors.  I wasn't sure why Cousin John didn't like that idea until we reached the bottom of the hill and I saw what was waiting about 50 feet beyond the gates. Urlaur lake!  By the way, all during the drive Uncle Mike told us stories of how the local people would see the ghosts of the monks moving around the Abbey at night, swinging lanterns and climbing the stairs - this put me in a great frame of mind for this exercise.

We quietly got the shovels and ashes out, and went to the gravesite. With a low wattage light we started digging, and after about a foot (it seemed) my shovel shot into the ground.. "that would be uncle John" Mike said (I'd dug right into the coffin!).  We kneeled on the ground, Mike grabbed the can, looked around and pushed it into the hole, then furtively pushed the dirt (plus some other soil) into the hole, quickly saying "maythedeadrestinpeaceamen".  We scattered some marble chips (from another grave!) where we had dug, so it didn't seem so fresh, then homeward we went.  When I was last there, I weeded the area and found that the handfuls of marble chips were right where we left them 20 years before!

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His first letter home was written on March 10, 1927 (Thursday) from 591 Grand Street, Jersey City. It was addressed: "Dear Father, Mother, Brothers & Grema", and goes on: " Just a few lines to let ye know I landed here safe on Tuesday last (March 8, 1927). Maria & Briggy met me when I came off the steamer. I cannot say, but I have a good time. I am just like if I was at home. ...... Herself is as stout as Kathrine Larkin." Briggy was his mother's cousin, Bridgit Scally, who came to America with Maria. Katherine Larkin was a neighbor in Sinolane

He went on to say, "We went through a lot since we left Queenstown....we were not sorry to get away from them. I did not see Tom Callaghan when he was coming off the Boat. I thought I would get his address but I missed. We had a good time together...... I sent a card from Boston I am sure ye have it by now....tell Grema not to worry, I am all right."  He worked at American Type Founders Company - either 300 Communipaw Ave. or Wire Form co., Roy I Pettit Mgr, 265 Grant Avenue

He belonged to the TWU of America, Rail Road Division, Local 2001 NYC, located at 210 W. 50thStreet. He bought his house at 76 Seaview on 8/26/65.

.....to be continued