Helen

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the Black Tom explosion, which was a German-led act of sabotage on a New Jersey munitions plant. Anyhow, you can read a few summations of what happened here and here. (It is, however, one of those classic shrouded-in-mystery events, so there isn't a lot out there. A book about the saboteurs was recently released, though I haven't read it.) I'm the last person who should be giving any history lessons. No matter--I am not here to talk about the exacts. In fact, one of the most nebulous aspects of the Black Tom explosion is that there seems to be no agreed-upon casualty count. Various sources put it at anywhere from seven to 12, though at the time it happened, this paper claimed 200 people had died. (Why I'm mentioning this will all be clear in a bit.)

So, this is my great-grandmother Helen. By the time I was born, she was a stooped, wizened little thing who relished insulting everyone in my family and insisted on eating only ham and Pepsi at every meal. I suppose you don't outlive three husbands by being easygoing.

Helen grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn. As teenagers, she and her sister passed their summers by swimming in the Erie Basin every day. They were both known as such expert swimmers that a movie director paid Helen's sister (whose name I can't remember) five dollars to do a swan dive off of the bow of a very tall ship--I think it was like a 30-foot jump--for a scene in a movie. (Her mother beat the hell out of her when she got home that night--I guess word spread quickly in Red Hook.)

The Black Tom explosion happened in the early morning of July 30. If my great-grandmother is to be believed (and that's debatable: you don't outlive three husbands by telling the truth, either), later that morning, she and her sister went down to Erie Basin, which was close enough to Black Tom that debris from the explosion was floating everywhere.

The story goes that she and her sister helped the police by swimming out into the water and bringing in the bodies. I'm not even sure if they were entire bodies or just pieces. Then again, I'm not even sure there were any.

I'm not old enough to have heard it firsthand, and so I've been told multifarious versions by my father and my aunt, both of whom are either too senile or too drunk to remember what really happened. The tale of my grandmother the body recovery scout has taken on the patina of myth. When I finally got around to actually researching the Black Tom Explosion for this post, I was terribly disappointed.* Seven freakin' people? All those years, she must've been lying.

Still, I like the story.
*I like my death tolls horrific.