Paterson Boy

Jerry Vis spent the earliest years of his life in Paterson, New Jersey, where he was born in 1939 into a blue-collar family struggling to overcome the lingering effects of the Great Depression. At that time Paterson, known as the “Silk City,” was still a mill town making the fabrics needed by the garment district in New York City. Many of his relatives worked in those inhuman mills.It was a time of horse cart vendors, close knit neighbors, and childhood freedom before the limiting age of helicopter parenting.A story teller by natural inclination, at the age seventy he was presented with a laptop computer by his grown son Benjamin, who asked he write down the stories he’d been telling years. And so, with great reluctance, began a journey that created this work about a life that is both as ordinary and extraordinary as any American life.The first in his father’s family to attend college, he has an MFA degree in fine art, has taught for many years in public school and college, and in the 1980’s established a business as a researcher/restorationist of early American vernacular homes in the Hudson Valley. He is a painter and sculptor with shows in multiple galleries spanning forty-five years. Now widowed after fifty-three years of marriage, he divides his time between his three grown children, one as far away as Argentina and two as close as New York State. He is still painting, doing restoration work and is presently putting the final touches on his third book which reveals that he asked his future wife to marry him on their first date.

“…With crystal clarity worthy of Proust, Paterson Boy evokes a New Jersey childhood during World War II and just after. It captures perfectly, as a child experiences it, what adults take for granted: a seemingly endless train passing through town, a tree cut down, secretive relatives, a strange cellar. Through it all, we feel the process by which a child tries to decode the mysterious world of adults. Like the cellar hiding a mystery, what’s underneath this memoir is the fluidity of remembered events and the sadness of what’s lost as we leave childhood behind.”—Roberto Loiederman, screenwriter, writer for the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and co-author of The Eagle Mutiny