The West Brighton Doomsday Machine

and other amazing stories of Staten Island Preparedness

On first appearances, nothing was unusual about my father’s ‘66 Pontiac LeMans. He loved the car. It was stylish, fast, and had a massive hood and equally massive trunk (the latter he was secretly drawn to). Having survived the empty shelves of the Great Depression, as well as being machine-gunned on a frozen hillside in Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge, my Father knew the importance of being prepared. Left to starve in the cold, bleeding and terrified, his thoughts as he lay wounded centered around his mother’s cooking. Ergo, Dad believed that few things were more important than staying warm and having enough food.

While growing up on Staten Island in the 1950s and 60s, I was often puzzled by the Sears and Roebuck-covered luggage racks my father would have fitted to our cars when we went on long trips. Mind you, the cars in the 50s and 60s had huge trunks that would effortlessly swallow, among other things, one or two chunky snow tires, all kinds of emergency tire tools, jacks and flares, spare headlamps and tail lights, cans of motor oil and even jugs of gasoline, in addition to the enormous amount of space provided for luggage, ice chests, and folding beach chairs.

It was only after I had the opportunity to look into the trunk of our ‘66 LeMans that I realized why there was never room for luggage:

Our car had become the West Brighton Doomsday Machine. Not that things were laid out in any particular order, it was more nearly the volume of supplies my father believed would be necessary to keep us alive. I’m almost positive that under the layers of foodstuffs was a spare tire, but I could not be certain, since tucked into one of the giant wheel wells was an equally large wheel of aged Cheddar in black wax… purchased from Cheese of All Nations on Chambers Street in the city. Everything in the trunk was there to survive a thermonuclear attack on Staten Island, and in particular, West Brighton, one block south of Forest Avenue, being ground zero.

In addition to a dozen boxes of those rice crackers that tasted, I imagine, like corrugated cardboard, my father had cases of canned goods, specifically chick peas, as well as at least thirty tins of sardines in olive oil, and kippers in red sauce. Tucked around these items were bags of nuts, dried pasta, gallons of A&P Apple Juice, gallons of bottled water, and a dozen packages of dried calamyra figs from Barzini’s nut importer on Manhattan’s Lower West Side.