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22 2 Bayonne Born and Bred Barney Frank’s journey to washington began about 225 miles to the north in Bayonne, new Jersey, a petrochemical industrial working-class city just across the hudson river from manhattan. he was born march 31, 1940 BT (that’s eleven years Before the Turnpike opened). named Barnett after his paternal grandfather, he was called Barney by everyone. in the mid-1960s, he went to court and changed his name legally from Barnett to Barney. “it was complicated having things in both names,” he explained. “Besides, with Barney Frank, i had a fifty-fifty chance of people getting it right. with Barnett Frank, people would inevitably call me Frank Barnett.” he was the second of four children born to Samuel and elsie Frank, the offspring of eastern european immigrants. Their first child, ann, was born two years earlier. doris was born three and a half years later, and david, the youngest , was born in 1950. Bayonne is a small peninsula, shaped somewhat like a boot and located south of Jersey city on the west side of new york harbor. according to tradition, Bayonne (“bay-on” or “on the bays”) got its name from its location on the shores of two bays, newark and new york. To anyone flying between washington and laGuardia airport in new york, other than manhattan, Bayonne is the most conspicuous geographical entity in the whole new york area. Unlike most cities and towns in new Jersey, which give no indication where one ends and another begins, making them indistinguishable from the air, Bayonne stands out because it is surrounded on three sides by water. The advent of oil refineries, first Prentice refining company in 1875, then Standard oil in 1877, stimulated Bayonne as a shipping center and created industry and jobs. The prospect of employment attracted many immigrants, including Barney’s grandparents, who settled in Bayonne soon after arriving from eastern europe. Bayonne Born and Bred 23 in the 1940s and 1950s, Bayonne was a closely knit, very ethnic, heavily roman catholic, and virtually all-white working-class town. The city was about 80 percent roman catholic, with so few Protestants that aaron lazare, a Bayonne native who became a psychiatrist or, in his words, “a Jewish doctor who can’t stand blood,” claimed, “i didn’t meet a Protestant until i went to college at oberlin.” most of Bayonne’s almost eighty thousand residents were middle class. There were very few pockets of real poverty or of wealth. The latter consisted of a small group of doctors and lawyers who had their practices in Bayonne and lived in a four-block area of predominantly one-family houses near the spacious hudson county Park. “People were not terribly rich or you wouldn’t still live in Bayonne,” Barney explained. The Franks lived in a multi-ethnic neighborhood where catholics and Jews, italians, Poles, irish, and other ethnic groups lived together in relative harmony. The irish were considered the aristocrats because they had lived there the longest . an irish family lived on one side of the Franks’ house and a Syrian family on the other. The italian family that lived on the corner included the future mayor of Bayonne, Thomas domenico. despite its reputation as an industrial town with the inevitable noxious byproducts of industry, including unclean air and pollution in the bay, Bayonne, as Barney’s brother, david, remembers it, was “not a smelly, oily place.” it was a pleasant place where the residents were meticulous in caring for their property and could often be seen sweeping their stoops or hosing the sidewalk in front of their houses. elsie Frank called it “an ideal place to raise a family,” and Barney’s sister ann described it as a city “where you could walk anywhere you wanted to go.” Goldie rosenhan, a former resident of Bayonne, remembers, “we had everything you could have wanted as kids growing up—movie theaters, a diner, three five-and-ten-cents stores, the best hot dogs around, and beautiful parks and tennis courts.” The actress Sandra dee, who died in 2005, was Bayonne’s most famous native . Born alexandra Zuck in 1942, she appeared in almost two dozen movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s and had the title role in the original Gidget film. her wholesome, good-girl image was immortalized, and satirized, in the song “look at me, i’m Sandra dee,” from the hit Broadway musical and film Grease. The Frank children...

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