Robert Knight Oral History Interview

              Hello, my name is Brian Jennings and it's December 18, 2015 and I am going to have a conversation with Robert Knight at the New City Library for Share Listen Learn - Stories of Rockland County.

Bob could you just introduce yourself and tell us when and where you were born if you don't mind.

Bob:  Sure I'm Robert Knight and I was born July 10, 1939 at the Pearl River Hospital.

Brian:  So Bob what are some of your earliest childhood memories or Pearl River?

Bob:  It was a very isolated community.  Most people who lived in Pearl River their parents worked in Pearl River.  They were born locally, raised locally, went to school locally.  It was a very insular and isolated growing up there, since I did all of my growing up in Pearl River.  Everybody walked everywhere or used bicycle.  There was never any mass transit - there were trains but that was just for the hand fill of fathers who worked in New York City and had to commute - they would take the railroad.  Otherwise the railroad was just sort of an interesting attraction that went through the middle of town with the..... at the time I was growing up they had steam engines, they hadn't converted to diesel yet, and the only real attraction of the railroad was that we would as kids go downtown where the tracks were and we would put pennies on tracks and then run away and hide behind the bushes and wait for the train to come along and run over the pennies and then run back to where they had been and hoped we could find them because often they'd get shot several hundred feet away, but if we could find them they sort of collector’s items that we'd use to trade with each other because they had this weird shape to them having been run over by the train.  It was also a little bit risky because they were steam engines, they would shoot cinders into the air up from the smoke stack and so we had to wait a good few minutes for the train to pass before we dared to go look for our pennies because otherwise we'd get showered with hot embers of coal coming back down from the atmosphere where they've been shot out by the chimney and you'd get little burn marks all over if you weren't careful.  That was the kind of things we did for enjoyment.  Swimming in local swimming holes where basically we had two big streams in Pearl River - the Pascack on one side the the Hackensack on the other side and there were several places where they dammed up and that's where everybody would go swimming.  So you basically lived your entire existence there in Pearl River.  There was never any need to leave to go anywhere except - the only exception I could think of was for big shopping expeditions when you would go to the big cities like Westwood or Nyack for things we couldn't find locally in Pearl River, but outside of that you lived 24 hours a day seven days a week in town and never left.
3:54

Brian:  So you said most people worked in town.  Where did your father work?

Bob:  My father was one of the exceptions - he worked first in New York City for a company called Price Waterhouse which he was an accountant, that was his degree.  This firm Price Waterhouse would ship out accountants to companies that needed accountants part time like for tax season and things - they wouldn't have enough business to hire a full time accountant of their own so they'd get hold of this Price Waterhouse and get an accountant sent to them for a month or six months whatever it was, and as happened with most of those accountants after they went to five or ten or fifteen different companies over the years of working there, one of the companies would offer them a full time job and say hey we are thinking of expanding and that's what happened to him.  He spent the first few years for that company being shipped out to other companies and then he got an offer from a company Passaic, NJ call Ocanite which made wire and cable, and they decided that they needed a full time accountant so they hired him part time and converted him to full time and that's where he worked for all of my recollection of him - that was the one place he always worked Ocanite and he took the train from Pearl River to get there.  He was one of the exceptions - by and large the men in Pearl River either worked at Lederle  or at the Dexter Folder Company which were the two big employers.  Lederle much bigger - Lederle had four to five thousand people working there, most of them from Pearl River and Dexter had much less - Dexter had I guess four or five hundred people working there.  Both companies tended to hire employees that were the sons of previous employees.  A father would work there and then when he retired he would turn his job over to his son and both companies operated that way so that most people who worked at Lederle and Dextra - their parents before them had worked there too.  Now both of them are gone.
6:37
 Brian:  You said your father took the train to work.  Did you ever go with your father on the train?

Bob:  Twice that I can recall - once was they had a take your son to work day, and now they expanded that and it's take your child to work day because for some reasons back then girls were not expected to see what their fathers did for a living.  That was a male thing.  So it was take your son to work.  So one day I spent the entire day with him at his office in Passaic.  I found kind of fascinating and one other time I went down with him to work I think it was because something was going on in the evening that he wanted to take me to and was easier to take me during the day and spend the day with him and then go in the evening rather than come back home get me and go back down again.  Those were the only two times that I went with him to work.
7:50

Brian:  And your mother was a homemaker?

Bob:  Yes, she had been a school teacher and then when she me my father and married, I guess she still taught for a couple of years and then when I came along she was strictly a homemaker from then on.
8:05

Brian:  And what your parent's names?

Bob:  My father was Charles Knight and my mother Ruth Carter Knight and they both came from upstate NY.
8:18

Brian:  So how did they get here in Rockland?

Bob:  My father's job brought them down here.  They met actually as students at St. Lawrence University in upstate and my mother's family came from Louis County and my father's family came from Oneida County.  After they married and graduated from St. Lawrence my father got this job with Price Waterhouse which was in Manhattan and so they came down and looked for a place to live.  They decided immediately they did not want to live in New York City even though that's where his job was.  They were not city oriented people.  They were both used to living in the country so they looked in the suburbs and discovered Pearl River which I'm very thankful for - that's where ended up because that's what brought me to Rockland County.
9:20

Brian:  What do you remember about your mother?

Bob:  She was very quiet.  She had had an accident, I'm not even sure when, it was some time before I was born, where they had been horseback riding and she fell off the horse and injured her spine or her hip - I was never quite clear what it was.  Ever since then, and this was before I was born, she had difficulty walking.  In later years she used a wheelchair and a walker to get around.  When I was younger she would walk around with a limp and a cane for support but as the years progressed that got worse so she basically stayed at home and only left the house as I recall on weekends when my father was home with the car and they could drive to like go shopping and things like that.  During the week, Monday through Friday, she basically stayed at home.
10:38

Brian:  Did she like to cook?

Bob:  Yes, yes she was good at cooking - she liked housekeeping, cooking.

Brian:  Is there any particular meal she made that you can remember - that you liked particularly?

Bob:  Yeah, my favorites were casseroles - she made a variety of casseroles - I guess depending upon whatever she found laying around the house that's would be that day's casserole.  So they'd be different everyday, and they were always kind of surprises, but as I recall I think I enjoyed all of them and they all had very different tastes depending on what fruits and vegetables and meat and macaroni and whatever she happened to have laying around the house that day - that's what would go into that day's casserole.  The next day it might be something totally different.
11:43

Brian:  So what do you remember about school in Pearl River.  Where did you go to school?

Bob:  I went to the only school they had which was called The Pearl River School.  I was a K to 12 building, and it was organized by floor.  Kindergarten through second grade I think - kindergarten, first and second grades were all on the ground level.  Third grade through sixth grade was on the second floor, and then you graduated to the high school which at that time was a six year high school - it was seven to twelve.  They didn't have a separate junior high.  That was on the third floor - so that was all the big kids went to the third floor.  The reason they only had two grades on the first floor was because that where all of the large spaces were as well classrooms.  The gymnasium was there, the cafeteria was there and the various specialty classrooms like the art room and the print shop and various vocational classrooms were all on the first level so that's why only  the first and second grades were down there.
13:19

Brian:  Did you have a favorite subject in school?

Bob:  Actually, I liked except I was never good at math which is interested because now I am good at math, but in school I was terrible at math.  I liked English because the reading part of English I liked.  The part I remember totally disliking was being forced to learn how to diagram sentences on the blackboard.  It never made any sense to me why anybody would want to diagram a sentence and I guess as a result of that I just resisted it and never quite got the whole theory of why I had to spend a whole year learning how to diagram sentences.  It made absolutely no sense to me, but the part of it where we had to read books I loved - I just devoured books - I could read an entire book in one or two days.  I would just spend hours at home day and night hidden under my bedcovers with a flashlight even still reading when I was supposed to be asleep.  I just loved reading.
14:39

Brian:  Was there a library in Pearl River when you grew up?

Bob:  Yes oh yes - very much so.  My mother introduced me to the library very early on and I was probably 4 or 5 years old when I first went to the library and I became addicted to the library.  That became my hangout in town - it was on Ridge Street in what had been a two lane bowling alley and when the bowling alley went out of business they converted into a library, just one room, very small but it had an amazing collection of books and that was where I first discovered that, even they had what I thought at that time was a big collection even though it was just one large room was the entire library, they also had the ability to get books so if I wanted a book that they didn't happened to have they had this mysterious way which I later got much more involved in and found out how it worked.  At that time to  me it was a big mystery that I could go and request a certain book and two or three days later I could go back and the book would be there for me waiting with my name on it.  I thought that was amazing - behind the librarian's desk there would be a book with the name Robert Knight on a little piece of paper stuck in it.  I just thought that was incredible.
16:14

Brian:  Do you remember any of the librarians that worked there?

Bob:  I don't remember their names.  They were all very nice.  I always had this strange disconnect with the image of librarians at that time in pop culture they were very strict, very straight laced, very old fashioned matronly women that wore long skirts down to the floor and were always walking around the library with their finger to their lips going SHHHHH! SHHHHH! SHHHHH!   And I didn't find that in the librarians in Pearl River that I got to know.  They were totally unlike that - they were all very friendly and very helpful and they'd give me suggestions if they saw that I like one particular book and when I finished reading it and bringing it back they'd suggest another book and say you might like this one too and usually their suggestions were pretty good.  Once they got to know what my reading habits likes and dislikes were, their suggestions fit right in with what I liked to read, so I sought of got to depend on them for the latest book was something that I would like.  They didn't keep going SHHHHH! which in books, on TV and on radio that's all they ever did.  There I don't ever remember a librarian doing that to me.
17:59

Brian:  Do you remember what authors you liked as a boy?

Bob:  Yes, I started out let's see - I liked books that were in series.  I read the Bobbsey Twins every single one of them, the Tarzan series every single one of them, The Wizard of Oz series every single one of them. Anything that was a serial I just absolutely loved and it delighted my parents because they know once I was interested in a series, that's what they could get me for a Christmas present or birthday present is the next book in that particular series so no only did I get them from the library but then I got my own collection at home that I started building up  because every Christmas and every birthday I could count on getting at least one book.
18:54

Brian:  Do you still have any of those books?

Bob:  Yes, I still have all of them.  I never could give those up - I haven't read them in years but they're still packed away in boxes in my house.
19:10

Brian:  Did you have any teachers that you remembered from school that were important to you?

Bob:  I had several.  The ones I remember the most from school were the ones in high school.  I guess in elementary school - I don't recall having any strong likes or dislikes for the teachers there.  They were nice or OK - I didn't have any problems with any of them but I didn't have any particular attachments to them either.  By the time I got to high school I was developing much stronger likes and dislikes.  I guess based on personalities and attitudes.
20:06 

Brian:  So what do you remember about any of the teachers - one or two of note could you mention what their names were.  What you remember about them - why they were important to you?

Bob:  Yeah, I think the teacher I remember having the most impact on me was a junior high school history teacher, who I later on also had for high school history class.  He was the first teacher that I can recall whoever brought things into class from home.  All of the other teachers had their resources whatever they were in the classroom at all times.  This particular history teacher lived and breathed history and collected history on his own outside of school.  He was teaching something on the Revolutionary War - he would bring in a Revolutionary War rifle or uniform or something from his own collection from home and we'd all get to pass it around and actually touch it and that was the first time I had that experience of actually touching something historical.  These were not reproductions - these were the actual 200 year old things and he'd do the same thing for the Civil War and whatever he happening to be teaching.  He had objects at home that he had collected and would always bring them in and share it with the class.  That just blew my mind that I could actually sit there and touch something that was 100 years old or 200 years old.
22:05

Brian:  Do you remember that teacher's name?

Bob:  I do and it's slipping my mind right now.  I was very upset when he transferred - he got a better job offer at Spring Valley High School and he left us. When I was I guess probably in the 10th or 11th grade, all of a sudden he announced to the class that he was leaving in the middle of the season because Spring Valley had made him a better offer - I guess for more money and he went to Spring Valley and I and most of the kids in the class we all liked him and were very upset that we were losing him.  He was so unique.
22:52

Brian:  So would you say that that's where your love of history came from - from those classes?

Bob:  Yes, absolutely I trace my love of history directly to him.  I don't know if that hadn't happened with him bringing in those objects - I have no clue whether I would be as fascinated the rest of my life with things as I was by that experience.  To me that just turned on a whole light bulb of experiences that I'd have never really thought of.
23:34