Thursday, April 5, 2018
My condolences to Tom Seifert Senior, Paul, Patricia, Rosemary, and the extended Seifert family. I grew up with Tommy (Only the nuns called him Thomas…which was usually not a good thing!). When my family moved to New Milford, Tommy and Paul were the first to greet us. The madness began almost immediately! We played soldier, cowboys and Indians; “camped out” in the Seifert’s back yard; built forts in their sandbox with Japanese-beetle “soldiers” running around (flying wings plucked). We swam and picnicked at Crestwood Lake, and raced our sleds down East Woodland Road…at the last-minute shooting into driveways so as not to be “runover” if we reached the Boulevard.
We climbed trees as if it were our vocation. We had an unofficial “Apes Club” in which one could proceed through the various levels “apeness” by climbing higher and higher. We talked about conquering trees as if they were peaks in the Himalayas. This was very serious stuff for ten-year-old boys! Tommy was the best, mostly because he had no fear, and was willing to bounce on a branch to propel himself up to grab a higher branch! The rest of us usually balked at jumping to a branch. Even if you made it, how were you to get back down if you couldn’t apply normal hand-to-branch standards? I still remember running back to tell Tommy’s dad that he couldn’t get back down from a tree he had conquered. When everyone arrived to help, somehow Tommy was already down.
Trees were special. We hurried home from Ascension School on windy days to climb into the canopy of the Girl Scout Woods in Bergenfield so as to be blown about, shrieking with joy. Our moms would have been horrified if they knew.
There are so many other memories, like the Christmas Tommy and I both received Superman spring-loaded exercise equipment and decided to screw the apparatus into the telephone pole in front of his house and stretch it out to become strong all-at-once and be done with it…ultimately destroying our presents.
Tommy also made a major contribution to the predicament his brother, Paul, and I got into when we became stranded on an island in the Hackensack backwaters one afternoon, as the tide was coming in. Paul and I had walked out on a stationary log close to an island. Paul crossed, I crashed through the flimsy board, that acted as a plank connecting the log to the island. With the tide rising rapidly how would two non-swimmers make it back to the log? Tommy ultimately pushed the log free from the bank it was embedded in so we could mount it and return. Unfortunately, the log floated away and sealed our fate. The New Milford Volunteer Fire Department was summoned to rescue us. That one made the Bergen Evening Record.
Probably the best (but at the time worst) memory is when the three of us, Tommy, Paul, and I decided we were going to run away to Africa. We planned to spend a week or so in his old Bronx neighborhood to visit friends, and then make our way to Amsterdam Houses in lower west Manhattan where I had lived, before easily stowing-away on one of the ocean liners anchored nearby. Surely once we got to Europe there’d be no difficulty making our way to Africa! We had a quarter between us and spent it on a small loaf of Silvercup bread, which we finished eating just as we first viewed the George Washington Bridge looming before us. Reality set in as we decided to head home for our tribunal…a month’s restriction to our individual backyards the sentence.
Lots of memories, Tommy. I couldn’t forget you without forgetting myself.
Jimmy Mason
