Newark, New Jersey, is remembered by Peter McVries as the place where his relationship with Priscilla briefly entered adult life. The city is both a destination away from parents and a setting that refuses romantic idealization: its apartments, industrial labor, odors, and everyday indignities become the material test of what the young couple called love.

Arrival and Intended Escape

McVries recalls that he and Priscilla wanted to get away from home, their parents, and the smell of cow manure so that their “Great Romance could bloom in earnest.” They left on June 3 in his car, and after stopping at a motel, continued toward Newark. The journey therefore gives Newark a specific emotional function: it is supposed to be a space of separation, privacy, and self-invention, a place where the couple can live outside the authority and supervision of their families.

Their independence is practical rather than absolute. McVries and Priscilla obtained jobs at a pajama factory in New Jersey and arranged separate apartments in Newark. The separate residences allowed their parents to protest without fully preventing the move, while the summer employment supplied the economic basis for the experiment. Newark thus stands between dependence and freedom: the couple has left home, but their escape still rests on temporary work and a provisional arrangement.

Apartments and Urban Reality

McVries remembers Newark with deliberately abrasive humor. On a given day, he says, the city seemed capable of smelling all the cow manure in New Jersey, turning the rural odor they had fled into something that followed them into the urban environment. The contrast undermines the idea that changing places will automatically change experience. Newark is not presented as a purified alternative to home, but as another setting in which the same unpleasant realities reappear in altered form.

The apartments reinforce that instability. McVries lived with two other men, while three girls shared Priscilla’s apartment. Their separate addresses suggest privacy and adulthood, yet the crowded arrangements also reveal how limited their independence was. Newark offers them distance from their parents without offering genuine isolation, comfort, or permanence. The city becomes a third space in which adolescent aspirations encounter shared housing, paid labor, and the pressures of ordinary life.

The Plymouth Sleepwear Factory

The couple’s working life in Newark begins at the Plymouth Sleepwear factory. McVries contrasts the factory with the glamorous image suggested by movies. Instead of romantic or cinematic labor, he remembers the smell of raw cloth, a cruel foreman, and lunch breaks spent throwing baling hooks at rats beneath fabric bags. These details make the factory a concrete counterweight to the couple’s language of romance. Love does not remove physical disgust, hierarchy, danger, or boredom; it temporarily changes the meaning McVries gives those conditions.

Priscilla worked on the first floor, an area designed as a showcase for tourists taking guided tours of the facility. The space was marked by pastel walls, modern machinery, and air conditioning, sharply differing from the harsher conditions McVries describes elsewhere in the factory. She sewed buttons from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. Her work is anonymous but materially widespread: garments worn across the country are held together by buttons attached by Priscilla. Newark therefore connects private romance to an industrial system whose products travel far beyond the city and whose labor remains largely unseen.

Romance Tested by Place

McVries insists that he did not mind the factory because it was love. That claim gives Newark its central narrative significance. The city does not create the romance, and it does not preserve it through beauty; instead, it supplies the ordinary, unpleasant circumstances against which the feeling is measured. The couple’s belief that even a pajama factory could become meaningful because of love is sincere, but the surrounding details also expose its youthful theatricality.

The remembered Newark episode is told during the Long Walk, when McVries and Ray Garraty are enduring exhaustion, damaged bodies, and the relentless road. Against that present, Newark appears as a former life of sexual discovery, work, shared plans, and chosen distance from parents. Yet the memory is not a simple escape into happiness. It contains embarrassment, cramped living conditions, industrial ugliness, and the recognition that romance had to be narrated into the world rather than found waiting in a beautiful place. Newark consequently survives as both a real city and a test of whether love can withstand the unromantic texture of adult experience.