by Maureen Wlodarczyk
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My mother Arlene was a “Jersey Girl” decades before anyone thought of calling us Garden State girls by the moniker that now evokes images of big hair and dark suntans. Arlene wasn’t that kind of “Jersey Girl.” She was a Jersey City girl, born and raised. Born just weeks after the stock market crash of 1929, a child of the Depression and an adolescent of World War II, my mother remembers a very happy, if modest, childhood in the city she loved, surrounded by caring family, friends and neighbors in the Greenville section. I enjoy hearing her talk about those “old days” and I am usually the one to prompt her to tell me those stories.
