Dr. Metablog

Ball Games I Played During the 1940s and 1950s.

Basketball, volleyball, punchball, stickball, dodgeball, box ball, box baseball, baseball, softball, stoop ball, touch football, handball, kickball, wall ball. Ping-pong. Hit the penny. Never played tennis or tackle football. Never even heard of soccer.

What have I forgotten?

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Martin H. Levinson

Autobiographers from Brooklyn divide, on the whole, into two camps. There are the discontented, who yearned from day one to get the hell out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible; and then there are the nostalgics, perpetually romanticizing those great days of spaldeens, stickball, and chocolate egg creams. Martin Levinson's privately-published memoir Brooklyn Boomer, Growing up in the Fifties (2011) is most decidedly of the latter group. But what a thin and disappointing piece of work it is!!  Gosh, were we all quite so shallow! Levinson's book displays no sense of life's complexities and contradiction and ambiguities. Perhaps it's because he didn't or wouldn't read -- no exciting trips to the Brooklyn Public Library in this sterile memoir. Nor even to the movie palaces.  

The best word for Brooklyn Boomer is, I'm sorry to say, superficial. Also padded.

Also unoriginal. 

Plus the account of public school "assemblies" is shamelessly cribbed from a 2006 entry on this very blog.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist -- Marty Glickman

 In the late 40s and 50s, Marty Glickman was the radio voice of the New York Knicks. As a basketball announcer, he was simply the best. Most of us from that era, especially Brooklyn guys, can still recall in our mind's ear his melodious, accurate and rapid-fire recreation of the game. "Gallatin to Braun on the left wing. Swish."

Until a couple of days ago, I did not know that Marty Glickman had written (in an "as-told-to" kind of way) an autobiography called The Fastest Kid on the Block (1996), and that, believe it or not, one copy of this book is among the holdings of the Michener Library of the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley, Colorado -- and is now in my very own hands. A warm thank you to UNC and to Interlibrary Loan.

Glickman was not only an announcer; he was also a student at fabled P S 217, my own not-so-"alma" mater, which he attended from first through sixth grade. He was born in 1917 so that would be in the 1920s. He was, get this, the fastest kid on the block in my very own neighborhood. 

He was not just a voice but an athlete, best known as a two-way football player at Syracuse University. He was also a top of the class sprinter who once ran a hundred yards in 9.5 seconds (the great Jesse Owens held the world record at 9.3). In 1936, Glickman was scheduled to run the second leg of the 4 x 100 at the Berlin Olympics.  He was scratched at the last minute for reasons that are still murky, but Glickman's opinion, and mine, is that Adolf Hitler didn't want a Jew to win a medal, so he had Goebbels whisper to Avery Brundage, who was the head of U. S. Olympic committee, that Glickman not be allowed to run. (Brundage was a notorious racist, misogynist, and Jew-hater, known as "slavery Avery." (There's an unverified report that Brundage spoke at the February, 1939, Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden; it would nor have been out of character for him to have done so.)

Glickman is philosophical about not being allowed to run in the Olympics. It would have been good to show his grandchildren his gold medal, he says. I myself am indignant for him.  

Once, when I was still a Brooklyn yoot, a rumor swept the P S 217 schoolyard that "Marty Glickman is going to be here this afternoon."  He appeared, but all that I can remember is that he spoke to a knot of kids. I remember nothing more.

Basketball in My LIfe

My father, who was born in 1904, was a basketball enthusiast when the game was in its infancy. He played guard on Eastern District High School's team and later played as a freshman at CCNY under legendary coach Nat Holman. But Dad came from an impoverished family and left college after one year because, he told me once, "I couldn't see how I could stay in school when my family needed so much." So while his formal education went by the wayside, he was able to make up the difference by a lifetime of reading. And although he was not a complaining sort, it was clear to me and I think to my brothers that he felt a bit grieved that his formal athletic career had been cut so short. He kept at it, though, on his own. Well into his forties, he was absent from family dinner one night a week. "Wednesdays," my mother explained, long before I could understand what the words meant, "your father goes to the gym." And Saturday mornings, in warm weather, were reserved for tennis. Dad very much wanted his three sons to carry on his athletic tradition, but I think, in retrospect, that in the long run we all disappointed him. Both my brothers were fine athletes although not big or fast enough for professional careers; I was, alack and alas, a disappointment. Dad, who had also been a semi-pro catcher in baseball, taught Gene and Jon how to throw an "inshoot" and an "outshoot," but he could not bring himself to coach me because it was obvious that with my 55 mile an hour fastball and scattershot arm, I wasn't going anywhere, pitching-wise, and although he showed me a couple of basketball moves he was, I recognize, a bit embarrassed by my want of athletic skill. (In my defense I must report that although I was more academic than athletic, I was voted "class athlete" by my P. S. 217 (8-5) eighth grade class -- a group which must have been, now that I think of it, quite a collection of klutzes). My older brother was a good enough basketball player to play for his college team for a year, and my younger brother was an outstanding sandlot all-star in baseball who once struck out Joe Torre, who, it will be remembered, finished his major league career with a .300 lifetime average. (The second time he pitched to Torre, my brother says, the future MVP hit a ball that "is still circling the earth.") I myself had the briefest career on the diamond. The pinnacle of my experience was that, once, playing second base, I turned a double play -- took the toss from the shortstop, stepped on the bag, gracefully wheeled, and pegged the ball perfectly to the first baseman. It happened once and once only, but it was glorious -- definitely a Hall of Fame moment. The peak of my basketball career occurred in the slippery court (which doubled as a dance floor) in the basement of the Flatbush Jewish Center on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. I was, I estimate, thirteen years old. Wearing number 3, in black and gold, I was steaming down the left side of the court on a fast break and was forced away from the basket, so instead of a layup I managed a sweeping running left-handed hook which caught nothing but net. There was modest applause. None of my teammates guessed that I had intended to bank the ball off the backboard and that it had slipped out of my hand and swished, entirely by accident. I only reveal this deep secret now, very now.  Another high point in my career: I once won a local foul shooting contest. I hit 23 of 25. One small caveat, though. The contest was conducted in the P.S. 217 schoolyard, where the baskets were, how shall I say this correctly, unsteady and soft. As a result, they were like sewers -- everything flushed. I doubt that I would have made 23 on a standard rigid rim. Nevertheless, I did win the medal and the other competitors all used the same ball and basket as I -- so, therefore, a modest triumph. And then playing basketball faded into the background, because I didn't get my growth until very late and for a while I was playing at 4' 11" or 5' 1" against hairy guys who had already reached their full mature height. But I continued to pursue my undistinguished career -- including the most competitive activity of my life -- three on three half court in the EHHS gym, one basket wins, and "winners out." And then a little intramural in Ithaca; an occasional pickup game in Cambridge. Oh, and twenty years later on, I played a bit with my own offspring, all three of whom were more athletic than I. My last pathetic hurrah (almost a decade ago, now) was being obliterated at h-o-r-s-e by my granddaughter Ella. 

Nevertheless, I retained my interest in the sport. No longer a participant, I became a serious spectator. I know enough about roundball to appreciate both player and play. For thirty years or so, I had a good seat at the home games of the CU Buffaloes -- it was high quality college basketball (although the Buffs rarely enjoyed a winning season). One source of interest and fun for me was to evaluate the talent and try to predict which of our guys (or the visitors') had the skill and size to move up to the next level. Over the years, I followed the early days of many a later NBA regular -- and even a couple of stars. I remember in particular Jay Humphries, who played four excellent seasons for CU and then averaged in double figures during an extended NBA career. Also local lad Chauncey Billups, "Mr Big Shot" himself. Andre Roberson, a terrific defender and rebounder who never lived up to his potential because he just couldn't master the corner three; Matt Bullard, a fine outside shooter; Scott Wedman; Alec Burks; Derrick White (still playing for Boston and getting better each year); and Spencer Dinwiddie, whom I didn't judge to be an NBA player but who has become a steady professional. The high point of my CU spectatorial career occurred in 2006 when the Texas Longhorns brought to our stadium a gangly teen-ager named Kevin Durant. One didn't have to be a sophisticated evaluator of talent to recognize that KD had a spectacular career ahead of him; it was grandly obvious. It took him only two years to lead the NBA in scoring. I stopped attending CU games when the athletic department, an independent entity with only a loose connection to the University, demanded that I make a donation of $400 for the privilege of purchasing season tickets. I resented the presumption, and I felt that there were many causes more worthy of my limited philanthropy than CU basketball. Although I stay away from our local Events Center, I'm still an occasional arena visitor. In fact, just last season, LERM and I bought incredibly expensive tickets to watch the Cavaliers take on the Pelicans at the Smoothie King Arena in New Orleans. The venue was up-to-date but way too brightly lit, and crowded, and noisy. Moreover, I dislike the theory that attendees must be continually entertained and placated with garish novelties. I don't go to basketball games for the half-time acrobats or the animal acts or the costumed dancers or the "kiss-cam" or the ear-popping "music" nor to be commanded when to cheer or when to chant "DE-FENSE." I go to watch and admire the players. Despite the distractions it was a good game, even though Zion Williamson was out with an ankle injury. These pros, even the unheralded ones, are fabulous athletes and they are especially impressive in person. 

So for most of my life it's been the electronic medium that has kept me abreast of the game. It all started with radio; I suspect that very few readers of this entry will be able to recall the fast-paced narration of Marty Glickman on WHN, but he was, let me tell you, a hoops artist who could bring the Knicks alive with voice alone. Then came television, sometime around the early 1950s. The thirteen inch black-and-white Dumont that my father acquired displayed an image that seemed miraculous at the time but paleolithically primitive compared to the 60" HDTV that entrances me nowadays. It's all present -- right there before my astonished eyes. Incredible no-look passes and sensational blocks and three-pointers from downtown -- and also horrid tattoos -- in brilliant color. In my TV-basketball saturated brain is stored the entire history of the NBA from then until now. In the 50s, Max Zaslofsky, Harry Gallatin, Sweetwater Clifton, Carl Braun, the McGuire brothers Dick and Al, and Ernie Vandeweghe, who played only home games because he was a full-time medical student. A team that was good but always managed to lose to the Celtics -- who had Cousy and Sharman and later Bill Russell, the Jones boys (Sam and KC), Havlicek and Heinsohn. I was in those years a most loyal and enthusiastic fan of our own New York Knickerbockers -- the championship teams composed of Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, and Walt Frazier, names and faces as present in my memory as the more celebrated Dodger boys of summer. Then came the Magic-Bird era, LA "showtime," Michael Jordan, Duncan-Ginobili-Parker-Popovich, and now LeBron James, who, although, he is certainly the most effective player in history, is less exciting to watch than his innovative contemporary, Steph Curry. During this last while, I've become a devoted GSW fan; when they were at their best, a few years ago, they played an extraordinarily beautiful game. There were nights when they'd score 30 baskets on 25 lovely assists. It's been a great ride that's now coming to an end, but there's another generation of players on the horizon and perhaps I'll be around long enough to enjoy them. After all, I've been there for the entire history of the NBA. What developments I have seen! What was once a local, coterie sport has gone international, with many of the best players coming from overseas or south of the border. Where once all the players, save a few, were White and middle-class, now 75% to 80% are Black and inner-city, bringing with them a heck of a lot of skill and flash and dazzle. Lumbering awkward centers, with their slow roundhouse hook shots, have been superseded by astonishingly mobile 7-footers who can protect the rim but also drift outside to nail a three. Salaries, in the old days, were little more than nominal and now there are marginal players making millions off the bench. The athletes have become celebrities -- and their shoes have become almost as famous as they are, and more lucrative. Franchises, which once went for a song, are now worth billions.

When I'm watching a game on a Sunday afternoon, I think about my father. I wish he could sit with me and discuss the progress of the sport. I'd like to show him what has happened since he left us in 1985. He'd like it that the players are bigger, faster, stronger, in better shape, and that the shooting is more accurate and the defenses more subtle and sophisticated. He'd love the pick-and-roll and the pick-and-pop. He'd appreciate the alley-oops and the accurate full court passes. I also know what he wouldn't like -- the overhasty three, the lenient interpretation of walking and palming, and the occasional showboating, Most of all, he'd hate it that the NBA is now in cahoots with the gambling establishment. He would see it, as I do, as a major miscalculation -- as a scandal waiting to happen. 

Every once in a while, even at this advanced age, I dream that I'm in the midst of a game, and I rise up and with an effortless flick of the right wrist launch a perfect 40-foot three that hardly even grazes the net. A childish fantasy, perhaps, but still very  satisfying.  

Neighborhood Movie Theaters

When I was an unadventurous Flatbush "yoot" back there in the 1950s, there were only two movie theaters that mattered: the Leader and the Kent, both on Coney Island Avenue, and both within an easy walk. The Leader was closer to my East 9 Street home and it was there that I spent many a rainy weekend afternoon ostensibly watching a double feature while sprinting in the aisles, hurling popcorn at the kids who were down in front, and dodging the "matron." The Kent was more of an expedition but still less than a quarter of a mile away. I once saw a show there with my father (Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)], memorable because it was the only time I ever went to the movies with him -- he was no frivolous moviegoer. In my childish innocence, I assumed that both the Leader and the Kent had been in place since time immemorial and that moviegoing began and ended with these two theaters. They were like mountains and rivers, permanent features of the landscape (or, rather, cityscape). I was very wrong. All is flux and movie theaters come and go. According to that most valuable resource, Cinema Treasures, over 27,000 cinemas in the United States have been closed or demolished, with many more endangered -- killed in the 1930s by the Depression and then in my time by the TV and DVDs and discs and streaming and covid. And also by self-inflicted wounds -- the studios and independents have failed to produce a regular supply of films for grownups and instead fill the shopping mall screens with CGI effects and infantile fantasies and "franchises." Nevertheless, the Kent is still in business, as a small-screen "art" theater, but the Leader long ago devolved into a bowling alley -- the Leader Lanes. Later it became a pharmacy. I don't know what has become of it lately; probably something dreadful.

There's much more to the story than the Leader and the Kent. In my youth, there was also the Culver Theater, the outside appearance of which I knew very well but never the interior. The Culver was located at the corner of 18th Avenue and McDonald, just a block away from the McDonald Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where I shelved books for 75 cents an hour all through my Erasmus Hall years.  

The Culver was adjacent to and almost under the Culver Local, the "El" or elevated subway, that ran along McDonald (formerly Gravesend) Avenue. ("Elevated subway", by the way, is one of the most fabulous unappreciated oxymora of our time). The Culver was a big spacious theatre that sat 1445 people. I imagine that most of the paying customers had a tough time catching the dialog when a train rumbled by. I wish I could identify what film was playing when this picture was snapped, but alas the image is blurred. The styles of the automobiles suggest a date in the late 1930s. The Culver has long disappeared and nowadays the most prosperous commercial venture on its former block is the Tashkent Supermarket. 

Then there was the Beverly, located at the intersection of Church Avenue and East 2 Street, just a few blocks from Erasmus Hall High School at Church and Flatbush.

On the day of this photo, the Beverly was showing Away All Boats, a 1956 war drama featuring Jeff Chandler, but as we all know, Jeff was in fact Erasmus alumnus Ira Grossel. The movie in which he starred was playing just down the way from his old high school -- a marvelous serendipitous coincidence. The Beverly's second feature, Raw Edge, was a western with Rory Calhoun and Yvonne DeCarlo. Did I plunk down my quarter to watch a war movie and a western? It was certainly the kind of programming that would have attracted my seventeen-year-old self. I have no recollection of either feature but I am able to bring to mind an image of young lovely Yvonne DeCarlo. The Beverly operated from 1920 to 1981 and has since, sadly, been transformed into a T-Mobile showroom. 

There was also the Rialto

at the corner of Cortelyou Road and Flatbush Avenue. It was directly on my route as I walked to Erasmus Hall High School with Steve Lewin five times a week between 1952 to 1956. It was also a block or two from the Sears, Roebuck store, where in the summer of 1956, I handed out parking tickets to drivers entering the Sears lot. Their cars looked a lot like the ones in this picture. Last I heard, the Rialto had transmogrified into the Cortelyou Road Church of God -- a sorry fate. 

In addition to the theaters that I attended or might have attended in the days of my youth, there were another bunch that had already shut up shop. The most prominent was the Newkirk Theater on East 16th Street -- and therefore only five or six blocks from P S 217. It stood just across from Newkirk Plaza, the shopping center that also housed an express stop on the BMT line. The Newkirk started life as the TNF, named after the initials of its trio of builders. It might have been, originally, a legitimate theater.

In 1928 it reopened as a cinema with a performance My Best Girl with Mary Pickford (who lived for a while with Doug F. at 1320 Ditmas). It closed in 1940 and has since been demolished. It must have been quite an ornament to the neighborhood, but I rode my bicycle on that street many times and never detected the least sign that there had once been a handsome theater there. I wonder also what became of the grand Robert Morton organ that accompanied the silent films. Later the Newkirk acquired a proper movie marquee as can be seen in this fragment of an image.

 The Newkirk was gone for good in 1940.

Then there was the Dorchester, a the corner of Dorchester and Coney Island Avenue. Here's how its building appeared a few years ago:

 

I must admit that this slice of the old neighborhood has resisted gentrification.

 

I can't find an image of the Cortelyou Photoplay Theater at the intersection of Cortelyou and Marlborough, which seated 400 and closed in 1928, but here's how the Ditmas Theater at 115 Ditmas (near East 2 Street) looked in 2013. Apparently the building was derelict or near-derelict for a long while. Now, I'm told, it's been transformed into "luxury apartments."

 

I predict that in a couple of generations, the movie theater will be totally extinct although a few will survive as museums. Future ages, if there are future ages, will gasp at the way we entertained ourselves in the thrilling days of yesteryear. 

 

But I gotta tell you, it was hell of a ride while it lasted.

Where My Grandchildren Play Soccer

Stunning, is it not? Just at the west side of our fair city, set against the first manifestations of the Front Range. Six well-tended fields, scores of players and many, many parents and grandparents (among them me, on sunny Saturday mornings). I can't imagine a more idyllic and peaceful scene. 

Do Luke and Caleb and Asher appreciate the glory of their situation? Why should they, after all? It's what they've always known; they take it for granted that soccer should be played in such lovely and prosperous surroundings. Later on, they'll come to know more about the circumstances of less fortunate people.  

It's hard for me not to compare Foothills Community Park with the P S 217 schoolyard of my own childhood. Ours was a representative "playground," no better or worse than would be found in any other middle-class or working class neighborhood. No grass, just solid concrete from one chain-link fence to the other. It was where we ran races, played "two-hand touch," flipped baseball cards, played punchball, stickball, basketball, softball, boxball, box baseball, handball, and any other game that could be improvised with a pink spaldeen. There were, as I remember, four basketball backboards and rims, arranged as two full courts. But one of the backboards was missing, the pole having disappeared many years ago and never replaced. Another of the poles had been set in the ground at an angle of perhaps 80 degrees and never corrected. It was useless. And then the two other baskets, on the Newkirk Avenue side, were set in ground that was not level, so that the basket was 9' 6" or so if you shot from the left side and 10" 6" on the right. Maybe this was a benefit; it helped us master trigonometry.

The P S 217 schoolyard was crowded. Various sports overlapped and shared the fields. If you were playing basketball, you had to watch out for line drives off the bat of one of the softball players. This taught us to be alert.

I did not feel at all deprived or "underprivileged" -- it was life as I knew it -- but I'm mighty glad that my grandchildren enjoy the luxury of grass and space and peace. In the words of the great Sophie Tucker, "I've been rich and I've been poor, and, believe me, rich is better."

Nostalgia

The word "nostalgia" has a curious history. It was coined in the late 17th century by attaching Greek άλγος (algos - pain) to νόστος (nostos -homecoming). Originally, nostalgia carried a strongly negative signification: "intense homesickness" -- "the depressing symptoms...  that arise in persons when they are seized with a longing to return to their home and friends." Then, for reasons that are not on the record, sometime during the first part of the last century, the meaning of nostalgia shifted and became much more positive. It's now a good word: "a wistful yearning for the past." A useful word.

Nostalgia is a familiar phenomena that all can recognize: the savoring of a pleasant memory from earlier in our lives. It seems that nostalgia contains within it a bias toward or even a falsification of the past. It's implicit in nostalgia that things were better "back then." For example: I am a member of a Facebook group called My Flatbush House from Years Ago. Its contributors routinely idealize their childhoods. Reading their posts, you'd think that the Flatbush of our youth was if not the the classical Golden Age at least the Garden of Eden. "I loved my Brooklyn childhood." "I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything." "I grew up in the 40s and 50s! We were so lucky to have known those days." "Much simpler times, more real and human-sized." "There was no fear, everybody felt safe; we played out in the streets, unsupervised, until it was suppertime." "We walked to and from school in every weather." "Going out meant playing games in the street." "I feel so blessed to have lived such a wonderful free life." "The fragrance of roses was everywhere in July (why don't roses have perfume anymore?)"

"Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"  "Those were the days, my friend,/ We thought they'd never end." "Rocky Top you'll always be/ Home sweet home to me."

Of course I also remember the good times, but I can't embrace such unalloyed, uncritical celebrations. Yes, I can savor some pleasant moments in my seventy-years-ago life. But I also recall that the 1950s was the era of "juvenile delinquents" and gang wars, back alley abortions, ethnic strife, "broken homes," heroin, segregation, overcrowded chaotic schools, imminent nuclear holocaust and "take cover" drills, McCarthyism, polio, the Korean War, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley.  

It's fascinating that the English language does not have a word for an antonym of nostalgia. One of my sources suggests "cynicism." But I'm not a cynic;  I'm an intermittent and realistic anti-nostalgist.   

And why, when I lie insomniac (as is my too-frequent custom), do I not savor the odor of those ever-perfumed Coney Island Avenue hybrid tea roses but instead am tormented by nightmares of fear, humiliation, awkwardness, embarrassment and loneliness. My childhood was pretty good one, thanks to my attentive parents. So why do I obsess about the bad times? Have I gone full curmudgeon? Or am I simply more honest than my cohort of Flatbush contemporaries?

In The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Shakespeare explores nostalgia and its opposite. Two old guys, Shallow and Silence, reminisce. 

SHALLOW: I was once of Clement's Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet.

SILENCE: You were called 'lusty Shallow" then, cousin...

SHALLOW: On that very same day did I fight with on Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Jesu, jesu, the mad days that I have spent. And to see how many of my old acquaintance are now dead.

SILENCE:  We shall all follow, cousin...

SHALLOW:  Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?

SILENCE: Dead, sir.

SHALLOW: Jesu, jesu, dead. He drew a good bow; and dead. He shot a fine shot...  And is Jane Nightwork alive?...  Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she's old, and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement's Inn.

SILENCE:  That's fifty-five years since.

And then comes the correction, the anti-nostalgist.  

FALSTAFF:  Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying. This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street;  and every third word a lie.... He was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey,... And now is this vice's dagger become a squire and talks as familiarly of John o' Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I'll be sworn he never saw him but once in the tilt-yard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal's men.

And on and on, at great amusing length.

Shallow and Silence indulge their nostalgia;  Falstaff sees thing differently, but whether he is a realist, a cynic or a curmudgeon is open to interpretation.

A Heart-of-Flatbush Novel: Big Man (1966), by Jay Neugeboren

Of the many Brooklyn novels that I've read this last while, Big Man, by Jay Neugeboren, comes closest to home. Neugeboren was newborn in 1938, just a year before me, and he attended fabled Erasmus Hall High School, most likely graduating with the class of 1955 (I was '56). It's a mark of my ignorance of modern American letters that I had no idea that my near-classmate was the author of 24 books, most of them novels. Big Man was Neugeboren's first novel. 

Close to home? Here are couple of sentences that will shiver the nostalgia timbers of wistful ex-Erasmians. 

I walk down Church Avenue, past the Kenmore Theater. Across the street the old church, used to cut classes and sit in the graveyard....  In front of Garfields's Cafeteria all the guys hanging out with their broads and their puffed hair.... Guys with Erasmus jackets on. I keep walking. Past the firehouse and the Holy Cross schoolyard.

Wow, it's a guided tour of the old neighborhood as it was in the 1950s. Who from Erasmus hasn't sprawled on the steps of the Dutch Reformed Church?

The novel revolves around the 1951 basketball scandals, which were world-shaking news at the time. A number of New York City college players (CCNY, St. Johns, Fordham, LIU) fell into the clutches of shady gamblers and were paid to shave points.  A few were indicted and convicted. I wrote a few melancholy and disillusioned paragraphs about the scandals some years ago -- here.

In Big Man, Neugeboren tells the story through the eyes and mouth of a character named Mack Davis, who had been an upcoming star but is now, because he missed a couple of baskets, stuck in a dead-end job at an automated carwash. It's an ambitious conceit and a promising plot. Big Man, I regret to say, is not a very artistic piece of work, but what the heck! Neugeboren was only 25 or 26 when he wrote it and had had only a few years to recover from uninspiring Erasmus Hall English classes. 

I confess that I was uncomfortable that Neugeboren wrote the novel in a black voice. I don't object in theory, because there's no earthly reason why a white novelist can't impersonate a black person, any more than male novelist can't speak as a female (or vice versa), or a young writer speak in the voice of an old. So wny was I troubled? I think it was because the voice that the novelist invented didn't seem genuine. It seemed "literary" -- as though the Davis character had been heisted out of a  blaxploitation film. Occasional inadvertent lapses in the dialect were particularly painful to my ever-sensitive ears.

Big Man reminds me how central basketball was to my adolescent life. I think if I had spent as much time and effort on my schoolwork as I did practicing my foul shots I might have been somebody. But I think I learned as much about life from basketball and its scandals as I did from any other 1950s phenomenon (such as the antics of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy). I'm grateful to Jay Neugeboren for preserving an important piece of my history and especially for bringing the old neighborhood right to the forefront.

When Eleanor Roosevelt Visited 539 East 9 Street

It should be remembered and recorded that in October of 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt herself visited the home of my parents --my childhood home (539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn).

I myself missed the occasion, alas. I was then living in Massachusetts, undergoing the first disorienting days of graduate school. But I know the story. 

During the 1960 presidential campaign (John F. Kennedy versus "Tricky Dick" Nixon), JFK's Catholicism emerged as a divisive issue. It's hard to believe what a fuss was made about his religion, especially nowadays, when no one bothers themselves that Joseph Biden is not only a Roman Catholic, but a serious one at that (JFK's personal commitment to his religion was, let's say, nominal).

Among Jewish voters, some of whom had grown up in Brownsville or Williamsburg or the Lower East side where Jewish-Irish conflict was a fact of life, there was a great deal of resistance to voting for JFK. And other Jewish voters, harking back to the old country, remembered Catholics as their antagonists and were hard put to vote for a candidate of that persuasion.

It fell to the task of Mrs. Roosevelt to persuade these reluctant voters that they could and should cast a ballot for Kennedy. At the time, there was no one in America who had more credibility with Jewish populations than she. It was well known that Mrs. Roosevelt had lobbied her hesitant husband for more lenient policies toward "displaced" Jews

I don't know how it came about that our living room was chosen as a site for Mrs. Roosevelt to meet with voters. I suspect that it was through my mother's extensive contacts with members of the League of Women Voters, an organization of which she was a stalwart volunteer. I know that my mother assembled 50 or so voters, almost all Jewish women, and seated or stood them in our very crowded second floor living room. Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, and as my father said to me later, she "dragged her ass" up two flights of stairs, spoke for 20 minutes, presumably in that upper-class nasal twang for which she was famous, answered a couple of respectful questions, and then limped back down to her car. And went on to the next venue. And the next. (She was 76 at the time, and not in great health.) Apparently she followed this same arduous routine for months.

That's how elections are won.

Eleanor Roosevelt died two years later, in 1962. 

 

I'm proud that our home hosted Mrs. Roosevelt. It's too bad that 539 East 9 was demolished in 1988. It deserved a better fate, especially since there was a day when it was graced by one of the previous century's finest human beings.

 

For more on 539, click here.

Sid Luckman's Cortelyou Road Childhood Home

Of course everyone knew that Sid Luckman was from Brooklyn and that he had attended Erasmus Hall High School and Columbia University before becoming one of the first superstars of the National Football League. To football fans, he was as renowned a home-town boy as Sandy Koufax was to followers of baseball. But until I read R.D. Rosen's new biography of Sid, called Tough Luck, I didn't know that football's first T-formation quarterback was a neighborhood guy, and that his modest childhood home was just four blocks off the route that Stephen Lewin and I took every morning for four years to EHHS. And that his house was just around the corner from the Sears department store where I spent the summer of 1957 pulling down $1.25 large an hour.  

The above is a modern picture, drawn from googlemaps. I suspect that the house is not much changed from the way it appeared in the 1930s but that the bars on the windows and front door are later additions. According to Zillow, the House of Sid is 1664 sq. ft. and is now priced at c. $750,000. I'd bet $2500 was the number in the 1930s, when the Luckman family was in residence.

Shouldn't there be a bronze plaque on the property?

It's a measure of the chanciness of the old neighborhood that Sid's father was convicted and imprisoned for a gangland murder and that he died in Sing Sing.

McDonald Avenue Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, 1953-1956

For all its fabled color, life in 40s and 50s Flatbush was extraordinarily provincial. In terms of sophistication, it might just has well been central Nebraska or U. P. Michigan. First generation working-class Brooklynites were simply too busy making ends meet to acknowledge that there was a great world outside. Although "The City" -- i.e. flush upscale Manhattan -- was just a 30 minute subway ride away, trust me, no tourists ever made it to our isolated grimy neighborhood.

In the middle 50s, when I was a pupil at Flatbush's semi-famous Erasmus Hall High School, I worked after school shelving books in the McDonald Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I worked two or three days a week from 3 pm to 6 pm and earned seventy-five cents large an hour. A frugal young fellow (cheap as dirt, some say), I saved every penny, and I was proud to be able to pay my first year's Cornell tuition ($900). It was a good job for me; I handled a lot of books and because I was an omnivorous reader and an autodidact by nature, I borrowed and chewed over many a volume that I wouldn't otherwise have encountered. Plus I was able to sneak peeks at the contents of the 612.6 shelves.

It was at the McDonald library, which was barely more than a storefront, that I experienced the first glimmer of an idea that there might be a world elsewhere. 

The library staff was organized hierarchically. At the very bottom were the part-time shelvers like myself. Masters of the Dewey Decimal System, we had no greater qualification than the ability to remember the order of the letters in the alphabet. A long step up were the clerks, who checked books out and in, issued library cards, and collected fines. Clerks, like shelvers, were native to the neighborhood. But then there was the "professional staff" -- five people with degrees in "library science" who answered inquiries at the reference desk, advised borrowers, and purchased books. The "pros" were not from the neighborhood; they lived across the river In Manhattan and took the elevated Culver Line to the stop at Ditmas, and they intrigued me.

Miss Owen -- Alice Owen -- head librarian, imbued with gloom, was an extremely small, thin, clipped, austere woman with an unBrooklynish Maine or northern New England accent. Archetype of the proper maiden lady -- sexless in my view, but then, as I learned later, who can ever tell?  Miss Owen was, how shall I say this respectfully, detail-oriented. There was Miss Warren, from South Dakota, a fan of Senator McCarthy, who explained to me that the world's brown and black people had benefited enormously from colonialism. Exotic Mr. O'Shea, obviously gay (but of course I didn't recognized it at the time) from North Carolina, a young man with more hip sway than Miss America and who actually -- hard to believe -- referred to our borrowers of color as "jungle bunnies." I was stunned and horrified. Miss Kyvelos, whose parents were Greek fishermen and who was as round and warm as Miss Owen wasn't.

And then, another kettle of fish entirely, Bob Reisner, a 30ish bearded Greenwich Village writer (not an entirely successful one, or he wouldn't have been working at the library) who hung with jazz musicians and who was writing a biography of Charlie Parker. He was a type entirely new to me -- skeptical, disrespectful, "anti-establishment." Borderline hipster. In strong contrast to the McDonald convention, his demeanor and language were lecherous, and he was more frank about his desires than anyone I knew, though whether his lusts and triumphs were real or imaginary I don't know. He was compiling a book called "Show me the Good Parts" -- a catalog of the sex scenes in contemporary novels. Pornographically speaking, he was way in advance of his time. 

On the whole, the McDonald library was quite an eye-opener for provincial me. I stayed on through the summer of 1956, then headed for Ithaca, where more surprises awaited.

February 10. Thinking over what I've written, I can now correct my initial memory. Miss Owen wasn't the head of the library. That position was held by Miss Boies. Miss Owen was a figure of authority because she was in charge of the part-time shelvers like myself. Miss Boies was also a librarian who came to us directly from central casting by way of Ohio. At some point, she retired and was replaced by much younger Mrs. Gerstner, who contracted cancer and died only a few months after her arrival. I clearly remember her valedictory words to me, "Get the most out of life."

And also, I wonder why Mrs. Gerstner and Bob Reisner took the time to talk to me. I had nothing to offer them. Is it possible that they saw me as a youth of promise. If so, they were over-optimistic.

Slavery in Brooklyn, Oh No!

Of all human institutions, slavery must be the most loathsome and soul-distorting (although wars, genocides, massacres, pogroms, and wrongful executions are certainly contenders for worst of worst). 

It's easy to think that slavery is something ancient and foreign. Not something to concern ourselves about -- not part our life, nor my life. And yet American slavery was only eighty years into the past -- the blink of an eye -- when I was growing up in the 1940s in Flatbush. At P.S 217 or at Erasmus Hall, neither our textbooks nor our teachers made much of its recency. Slavery was not our past; not here, not in Flatbush. It was a crime of the distant South -- of Mississippi and Alabama, long ago. In the land of cotton, not the land of Coney Island and Jackie Robinson. Slavery was distant chronologically and geographically.  

What an unpleasant revelation, then, to encounter the story of Flatbush slavery in Thomas J. Campanella's painstaking and eloquent history, Brooklyn, The Once and Future City (Princeton, 2019).

The facts: "slavery was an essential element of New York life in the 17th and 18th centuries." "Only Charleston, South Carolina surpassed New York (i.e. Manhattan) in the number of enslaved residents." Campanella reports that there was "no place in New York that had more slaves per capita than Kings county, where one in three residents was in bonded servitude." One in three? In my neighborhood?  How could we not have known this?  How have we remained oblivious?

Slavery, I now learn, was especially established in "Dutch towns like New Utrecht, where 75 percent of white households owned slaves." And also "in Midwout [our Midwood] where African-Americans constituted 41 percent of the population in 1790."  

In 1790, the population of the town of Flatbush -- my Flatbush -- included 378 enslaved people, 12 free black people, and 551 white people – 75% of whom were slaveholders.The farmers of Brooklyn "formed a Southern planter class in miniature." 

And it was the farmlands of Brooklyn -- Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, and New Utrecht -- that supplied Manhattan with grain and fruits and vegetables raised with slave labor. No slaves, no Brooklyn; no Brooklyn, no Big Apple.

In 1799, the New York state legislature passed the Gradual Manumission Act: all children born of slave women after July 4 were to be free though they must remain indentured to their masters until the age of twenty-five for women and 28 for men. Though it seems a weak and toothless compromise, the new laws led to the rapid decline of slavery. In 1827, one hundred and ninety-three years ago, slavery was declared illegal in New York. (Vermont, to its credit, had abolished slavery two generations before, in 1777).

Here's a Brooklyn bill of sale for "one certain neger girl called Anna" to Jan Lefferts for thirty-eight pounds. Her owner, Gilleyam Cornel, was illiterate. He signed with "his mark."

From what I've learned in the past about the history of Brooklyn, and with these revelations, it's undeniable that the haunts of my childhood (East 9 Street, P. S. 217, St. Rose of Lima, Newkirk Station), were not very long ago farmed with slave labor. It's horrible and disillusioning, but it must be acknowledged.

Wisdom II: Proverbs, Anvils, Hammers.

In the back of our fourth-grade "reader" at P. S. 217, there was an appendix containing proverbs and other jots of wisdom. Most of these were commonplaces: "look before you leap"; "a stitch in time saves nine"; "empty barrels make the most noise."  Many of these gnomic bits mystified me. For example:

For all your days prepare,

And meet them ever alike.

When you are the anvil, bear.

When you are the hammer, strike.

I had no idea what an anvil was (now I own a beauty!!) but I understood that it was something to beat with a hammer. For what purpose? I had no clue?  But I was a moderately progressive youth and I couldn't grasp why we anvils were being urged to "bear." It seemed like a reactionary idea then and still seems so now. Way too passive, I thought. Why shouldn't the anvils join together and form a united front against the hammers, or whatever capitalist oligarch controlled the hammers? Why did my grandparents come to America if not to free themselves from the perpetual anvilhood of sorry Ukraine?

Moreover, I completely missed the mark on "strike," which I interpreted to mean "go on strike." An easy mistake, because the only other meaning I knew of strike was the "three strikes and you're out" of basebalI. Even naif me knew that baseball had nothing to do with anvils and hammers or fourth-grade readers. 

The poem was therefore incoherent. Endure and suffer when you're an anvil, but get on the picket line when you're a hammer.

Why couldn't anvil and hammer unite and resist their oppressors together? 

I should also confess that anvil and hammer fused and mingled in my youthful brain with a Phillies shortstop of the period named Granville Hamner.

A Few Words About My Father

Here's a memory from my youth. Let's say it's the early '50s. I'm a thoughtless, self-absorbed adolescent, nominally studying at Erasmus Hall but in fact not paying much mind to schoolwork. It's a Sunday dinner, so I've probably just come home from playing several hours of schoolyard basketball or softball. We're at the dining room table. Roast beef, possibly. There's a desultory conversation, but then my father, Emanuel, savoring the loaded table, observes, right out of left field I thought then, "I don't think we could eat better food." He paused. "Perhaps fancier, but not better."

I didn't know what has prompted his observation but it made enough impact on me that I retained it in memory for now these seventy years. I doubt that any of the five of us dissented and I suspect that we continued to stuff ourselves with meat and roasted potatoes and (inasmuch as it was the 50s), some sort of soggy canned vegetable. But now, almost seven decades later, I think that I have a better understanding of Dad's spontaneous celebration of the roast. I also think that I know why that particular moment has stayed in my mind when so much else has long since evaporated. After all, Dad was not given to gratuitous compliments, certainly not to the food on the table. My father was neither a gourmet nor a food critic (I've written about his eating habits elsewhere). I now know that he wasn't commenting on the preparation or the presentation of the food. He was savoring its inherent quality -- its grade A choiceness -- wait, not just its quality so much as its abundance. But even more specifically, when I think back, he was enjoying the knowledge that he was able to provide such a bountiful dinner for his family.  

To understand Dad's spontaneous overflow of emotion, it's necessary to recall the facts of his own childhood. From what I've gleaned, the family in which he grew up must have been among the poorest in America, the very bottom of the economic ladder. His father worked in a factory -- which was just a large room behind a storefront -- as a roller of cigars. It's well documented that in the first part of the 20th century, cigar-rollers were one of the most exploited and most underpaid of American workers. Grandpa's wage when Dad was growing up, he told me, was $9 per week. The family, the six of them (the parents Isaiah and Eta, the children Max, Sol, Mollie, and Manny) lived in a sixth floor cold water walk-up flat -- that is, in an apartment in a tenement up six flights of stairs (no elevators), water but no hot water. I don't know how many rooms in this apartment but it didn't matter much, because, Dad said, they all spent their time in the kitchen, which was the only room they could afford to heat. 

Dad's mother, my grandmother Eta (she's Yetta in her naturalization papers) didn't speak much English and I can only remember one conversation with her -- just a short while before she died in 1962 at age 89. It was a struggle for her to speak my language but she managed to say two memorable sentences about her early years in America. She said, with pride, "we was poor but we was clean," and (very relevant here) "we always had what to eat."  That sentence of hers --"we always had what to eat"-- was said with almost exactly the same valence as my father's "I don't think we could eat better food." For grandma, putting food on the table for six individuals was achievement enough. It was a triumph. Grandma didn't speak of her diet in the old country, but from her height (4'10") and that of her husband Isaiah's (5'1"), I can guess that food was an issue and that dearth was common. I also suspect that the sixth floor walk-up might have been luxurious compared to the standard of living in StaryConstantin in Ukraine.

But to my father. He had no difficulty acknowledging the poverty of his early years. I think, looking back, that he had some pleasure in knowing that he had overcome the hardships of his youth. If he didn't have a jacket in the coldest of winters, well, he had a sweater, and that was enough. I only remember one complaint, and it wasn't about his family. During World War I, students in P. S. 122 were lined up on the side of the room and were instructed to offer their donations for the purchase of War Bonds. When they surrendered their dimes or quarters, they were allowed to sit down.  But Dad was required to remain standing because he didn't have even a nickel to donate. "Wasn't that a cruel thing to do to a child," he said to me.

But poverty did not distort my father's personality. He was the precise opposite of the stereotype of the upwardly mobile overachiever, grasping for more and more.  He was actually rather contemptuous of such people. He said to me once, "Anyone can make money if he makes it the whole business of his life to do so." And I also remember an instance when I overheard a conversation among his friends about how much their stocks had gained. After they left, my father said, 
"When the stock market is going up, everyone's a genius." He himself never had an extra dollar to invest in stocks. But enough is as good as a feast.

He was the person least interested in material goods that I have met in my entire lifetime. He had no possessions and craved none. He was a real estate lawyer in a world where clients squabbled over inches, but his opinion was "Nobody owns anything. Maybe you can say you have a lifetime lease, but that's all."

Here's another piece of wisdom that offered, and one from which I've profited. I think I can quote this verbatim. "Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend. And never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend. People like to help each other."

Cookie Lavagetto's Teeth

Approaching 80, I've been studying the Brooklyn Eagle for the date of my birth, March 11, 1939. "War and war's alarms" dominate the news, but nevertheless day-to-day life in Brooklyn was reassuringly perennial. Here's a highlight from the Around the Town column:

 

"One of the features at the Montauk Club's 50th anniversary dinner tonight will be the lyrics written by Dr. J. L. McAteer. The genial dentist wrote all the lyrics for the show and they are expected to be quite something."

 

I have to confess that although I spent the first 17 years of my life in Brooklyn, I had never heard of the Montauk Club. But it exists! It was formed in 1890 and it's still there -- housed in a fancy Venetian Gothic building in Park Slope.

But it's not the Montauk Club that's the subject of this paragraph -- it's the "genial dentist" and lyricist J. T. McAteer who has quite something in store for us. "Around the Town" continues:  "Dr James McAteer is the dentist for the Brooklyn  Baseball Club and examines the teeth of each and every player on the club.  Seems that Business Manager Larry McPhail is fussy about it and insists on x-rays at least once each year. As far as McAteer is concerned, infielder Cookie Lavagetto has a perfect set of teeth, while good ones are owned by pitcher Van Mungo and infielder Johnny Hudson."

So now we know. Cookie Lavagetto had perfect teeth! What a revelation. Information that has been hidden for 80 years. Everyone knows that Lavagetto broke up Bill Bevan's 1947 World Series no-hitter with a double off the Ebbets Field scoreboard. But who knew a damn thing about his choppers?  This is neglected news of historic proportions. 

And it makes a guy wonder about the other players on the team (aside from those with semi-perfect teeth -- the legendary Van Lingle Mungo and unknown-to-me Johnny Hudson). Were other Dodger teeth cavity-filled, crooked, misshapen, stained with tobacco juice, busted, false, even missing. No wonder the '39 Dodgers were so bad. Twenty-five players and only three to write home about, teeth-wise.

So here they are, the fabulous teeth of Cookie Lavagetto, bright and shiny, glistening at us over the years (I'm sorry but I couldn't find a picture of Cookie's molars).

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How My Mother Did Laundry (Written For My Grandchildren)

 

This, young 'uns, is a picture of a washboard. It's an object that you might have happened upon in an antique store or a museum. The washboard -- this one is made of metal, like the one I remember from my childhood, but they could be made of glass or even wood -- sat in the "laundry sink," which was filled with hot soapy water. You scrubbed your clothes on the washboard. It might be hard for you to believe, but when I was a youngster there was no such thing as a washing machine. It came later -- in our house, sometime in the early 50s, just a little after the refrigerator replaced the icebox. The washboard pictured above was cutting-edge technology in the 40s.

 

What was a "laundry sink"?  At 539 East 9 Street, and I think in most regular-people homes, the kitchen sink had two parts -- a shallow basin for everyday use, and a second basin, deeper and wider, for dirty clothes. In some houses, the laundry sink was made of soapstone or concrete, but ours was porcelain.

 

Every Thursday was "wash day," which meant that my mother spent the entire day, dawn to dusk, doing the laundry, sometimes with the aid of a hired woman, but more often with the help of her mother, my grandmother, who lived just around the corner but spent wash day with us. It was a two-person job. Clothes were soaked, scrubbed on the washboard, rinsed, squeezed, then hung on the outside line to dry. Then, after a few hours, taken down and ironed. Sheets and pillowcases, if I remember correctly, were washed every week; blankets periodically.

 

It was a difficult task, but I don't think anyone ever recognized how arduous it was. It was just the way things were. Women, as everyone knew, "did laundry." I am positive that I never thought to lift a finger to help, though I wonder, if my sister had survived, whether she would have been recruited to do so. Certainly, I never saw my father participate, not in the slightest. If my mother ever complained, she never did so in my hearing. "Wash day" customs were immutable, or seemed to be so. Gender relations in the world of my youth are embarrassing to recall.

 

Then, sometime around 1950, came the wringer-washer.

 

 

Now no more hand squeezing. Clothes were washed in the tub, then fed through the mechanical wringer, which consisted of two rubber cylinders which were turned with a crank. The pressure squeezed out the water, eliminating the need for hand wringing. It was a great step forward. We owned a wringer-washer, portable, that had to be wheeled into place and connected to the kitchen faucets. It was a scary machine because a child had to worry that his mother's fingers would be accidentally wrung.   

 

Sometime later (I can't remember exactly when) came the washing machine with a spin cycle. I remember that when I worked at the Sears Roebuck warehouse starting in 1957, that Sears sold and delivered many of them, so they must have appeared hard on the heels of the brief flowering of the wringer washer. 

 

In retrospect, I don't think there's an innovation that contributed more to the revolution in housework and therefore to the revolution in women's work and status than the washing machine.  

 

This morning I did my laundry. Two minutes to put the dirty clothes in the washing machine and another 30 seconds to transfer the clean clothes into the dryer. That's it.

 

Let us therefore pause to appreciate the luxury and convenience of contemporary laundering. And let us pause also to appreciate our hard-working mothers and grandmothers.

Street Talk

On East 9th Street, and probably in other parts of Brooklyn, a manhole cover was called a "sewer." I don't know why. Ignorance, perhaps. As far as I know, manhole covers provided entrance to electrical work and other utilities, not to watercourses. Openings to the sewers that were located along the channel next to the curb were also called sewers. A sewer was also a unit of distance. "He can hit a spaldeen three sewers." It was not a scientifically accurate form of measurement.  

A "gutter" is in most parts of the country a channel for water. On East 9th Street, the word "gutter" referred to the street's entire asphalted area, not just the area near the curb. "Hey, kids, keep out of the gutter. You'll get hurt."

"Stoop" referred to the stairs leading up to the porch. In "stoop ball," you throw your spaldeen at the stoop and catch it on the rebound.  Five points for a grounder, ten points for a fly ball, twenty points for a "pointer."

I don't think there was a specific name for what is here called the "park front area"-- the space between the sidewalk and the curb.  Nor a word for "curb cut." which was considered, linguistically, as a section of a driveway.

East 9th Street had a wonderful tree canopy. In retrospect, I can identify and recall a very large sycamore and a series of Norway maples, but the only trees that had names were a trio of huge old elms which were called "Mickey's trees." I have no idea why they were so called nor do I know who was this Mickey of famous memory. The elms were cut down in the late 40s (Dutch elm disease) --  a tremendous loss to East 9th Street. 

An Unpleasant Cortelyou Road Memory

Let's say I was thirteen, so this event would have occurred on or our about 1952. I had brought my Raleigh 3-speed to the Cortelyou Road bicycle repair shop which was between East 13th and East 14th. The shop was run by a small, fair, heavily-accented German man who was perhaps 50 years old. He was assisted by his father, an older and smaller, wizened, bald man who must have been in his 80s. Mr. Hart and Mr. Hart.The older Mr. Hart, whom in my adolescent wisdom I thought of as a gnome, was working on my bike -- replacing an inner tube or adjusting the gears (which were fragile and frequently busted). A group of three middle-aged women gathered on the sidewalk in front of the shop, chatting. Mr. Hart the elder, the gnome, didn't like it. He looked up from his work and muttered to me, "A real hen-party."  A few minutes later, he said, as if he owned the sidewalk, "they're still there. Hen party." 

I had never heard the expression "hen party" but I knew it was a slur. A piece of anti-woman bigotry. I mean, what was the problem with three women talking on a public street? 

But what disturbed me was that Mr. Hart took it for granted that I was on his side -- that we were linked by our maleness, our roosterness, against hens. I knew (in language that did not at that point exist), that I was being "co-opted."  But although I was uneasy, I was able to offer only silent resistance. I failed. Later I learned to challenge such mini-bigotries but at this point in life I was much too young, too unsure. 

Of all the events that occurred in 1952, this trivial encounter is one that clings and needs to be exorcised. 

But it is such experiences that shape us. As David Copperfield says, "Trifles make the sum of life."

Durocher 1947

In 1975, Leo Durocher wrote an as-told-to autobiography called Nice Guys Finish Last. I read every word of it, but I got to tell you, it's not a good book. It's a piece of self-justifying pro-Durocher propaganda. It's argumentative, hyperbolic, unreliable. Durocher was an irascible man: he got into fights with sportswriters, players, umpires, owners, coaches, wives -- everyone he encountered. In every single case, he was absolutely blameless and they were absolutely wrong. The gambling that got him suspended for a year? -- why, it never happened.

Durocher doesn't give it the emphasis it deserves, but he had, by accident, a place in the story. Durocher was manager of the Dodgers when Branch Rickey hired Jackie Robinson. It was a watershed moment, a supremely important step in the civil rights movement, and the beginning of a major transformation of not just baseball, or sports, but of the nation and the world.

Durocher played his part, and he's proud of it, but I can't help feeling that he missed his moment. His vision was so narrow, so constricted, so unaware. I suppose he should be commended for doing the right thing, but as far as I can tell, he did it for trivial reasons and did not have a glimmer of understanding of either oppression and injustice on the one hand, or equality and freedom on the other.

When some Dodgers proposed to petition Rickey not to sign Robinson, Durocher called a team meeting. Here's what he says that he said to them:

"I hear some of you fellows don't want to play with Robinson and that you have  a petition drawn up that you are going to sign. Well boys, you know what you can do with that petition. You can wipe your ass with it. Mr. Rickey is on his way down here and all you have to do is tell him about it. I'm sure he'll be happy to make other arrangements for you. I hear Dixie Walker is going to send Mr. Rickey a letter asking to be traded. Just hand him the letter, Dixie, and your'e gone. Gone. If this fellow is good enough to play on this ball club -- and from what I've seen and heard, he is -- he is going to play on this ball club and he is going to play for me. I'm the manager of this ball club and I'm interested in one thing. Winning. I'll play an elephant if he can do the job, and to make room for him I'll send my own brother home. So make up your mind to it. This fellow is a real great ballplayer. He's going to win pennants for us. He's going to put money in your pockets and money in mine. And here's something else to think about when you put your head back on the pillow. From everything I hear, he's only the first. Only the first, boys. There's many more coming right behind him and they have the talent and they're gonna come to play. These fellows are hungry. They're good athletes and there's nowhere else they can make this kind of money. They're going to come, boys, and they're going to come scratching and diving. Unless you fellows look out and wake up, they're going to run you right out of the ball park. So I don't want to see your petition and I don't want to hear anything more about it. The meeting is over. Go back to bed."  

To me, his speech, though apparently effective, is trivial -- an opportunity wasted. He opposed the petition for three reasons: one, it defied authority (his and Rickey's); two, Robinson is going to help us win and therefore make us money, and three, there are "others" on the way, who also want to make money, so get out of the way.

The idea that Jack Roosevelt Robinson and others of his hue should be allowed to participate out of simple fairness and equity did not occur to him. Slavery, racism, segregation, justice, equal opportunity -- not part of his thinking. Durocher's awareness of his place in history -- zero. What a disappointment!

Written in 2009 and Republished Today, as Relevant Now as Then: As Time Goes By

Two nights ago [this would be October of 2009, of course], I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing! HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right. Instead, it was the discovery that the Phillies'  lanky, awkward-but-effective scraggly-bearded right fielder Jayson Werth sports a noteworthy baseball pedigree. His grandfather was Ducky Schofield, a good-field no-hit infielder from the 1950s -- from the days, that is, of my golden youth. Holy jumping jiminy! I saw this young feller's grandpappy play! 

Youch!  More evidence, as if more were needed, of my long-in-the-toothedness.

Why should I be surprised?  I went to my first baseball game in 1946 (at Ebbets Field -- Cardinals 3, Dodgers 1).  Before there was TV. I've been attending to the game for 63 years. Close to three generations.  [Nine more years have passed since I first wrote this;  so 72 years now.]  

I've grown accustomed to father-son combos. Bobby and Barry; the Griffeys (who once played together in the same outfield); Felipe and Moises; huge Cecil Fielder and his even more enormous son, Prince; the Hundleys, the Stottlemyres, and many, many others. Sometimes while I'm watching a game I lose track of time. Eric Young, Jr. looks and runs so exactly like his father that it's easy to fall into flashback mode. I remember a game in which Pedro Borbon came in to relieve. Holy moly, I said to myself -- he's a right-handed pitcher. Why the heck is he throwing with his left hand?  Then after a few seconds of complete bafflement it came to me: Pedro Borbon, Jr. I had simply lost twenty-five years -- a phenomenon to which your "mature" brain is occasionally and increasingly prone.

Jayson Werth isn't even the sole grandson. Aaron Boone's father was the catcher (and manager) Bob Boone and his grandfather was the Cleveland infielder Ray Boone, whom I also saw play, but only on the TV. And then there's the Bell family: grandsons David and Mike, father Buddy, and grandfather Gus, a big hitter with Cincinnati during the Ducky Schofield years.  

So here's the question. Will I hang around long enough to watch the great-grandsons play? Is Jayson Werth fertile?  Does he have any kids?  Are there any budding Boones or baby Bells waiting in the wings?

Where I Lived (I)

From my birth in 1939 until I left for college in 1956, I lived at 539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush (now gentrified to "Kensington") section of Brooklyn. 539 was a three-story, three-family wood-frame Victorian, which my parents had acquired in 1937 for $4500 -- a depression-era fire-sale price financed by my generous "maiden aunt" Mollie. The house was larger and more splendid, I believe, than my father's modest income would otherwise have justified. At first we lived on the first floor and rented floors two and three. Much later, substantially more prosperous, we rented the first floor apartment and lived on the second and third floors in nine spacious rooms, only a couple of which mattered to me.

Most mysterious was my parents'  bedroom, which was entirely off limits to me and to my brothers Eugene and Jonathan. A forbidden zone. Absolutely taboo. I remember that one time I played some sort of racing or hiding game with one of my brothers and ventured into the room and -- horror of horrors  -- rumpled my parents' neat bedspread (the bed was always carefully made). It was as if I had robbed a bank or bitten Miss Bildersee, our formidable PS 217 principal. I was severely rebuked and made to swear that I would never commit such an outrageous transgression again. An overreaction by my parents, I knew even then.  

Nevertheless, I used to sneak into the room when the parents were absent. In one corner hung a picture of my deceased infant sister Susan. Placed on the floor under the picture, was a child-size chair of wood and rush which was venerated even more than the connubial bed. A shrine. I'm sure that the taboo against entering the room was linked to the shrine. Yet to me, the parents' bedroom was not so much holy as it was weird and strange.  

After my mother died in 1978 my father moved downstairs, abandoning shrine, bed and bedroom. When I visited as an adult, my wife and I would sometimes sleep in what had formerly been the parents' bed. That was mighty creepy and inhibiting.    

Equally important to me but much more pleasant was my father's small but intensely cultivated backyard garden. He grew roses -- hybrid teas, mostly but also a floriferous "Blaze" climber. An apple tree, not very prolific, a Bartlett pear, and a peach tree that was damaged by the hurricane of 1946 and finished off by borers. There was also a patch of perennial sweet peas, a weigela with picotee  leaves, and a fragrant mock orange. But the garden was dominated by Dad's  perfectly tended roses. 

In 1948 I was allotted a square foot of space in which I planted a single pumpkin seed. The plant transgressed its assigned borders --  which amused me no end -- and the single pumpkin that it produced was prizeworthy huge. In subsequent years, I was allowed room to plant and study the habits of old-fashioned annuals: snapdragons, marigolds, zinnias. I saved their seeds over the winter. I now grow those same plants in their modern, much-improved versions. But I don't dare to try roses; that will always be Dad's domain.    

I think my life would have been very different without the garden. 

On the whole, 539 was very good to us. After my father died, it was torn down and replaced with an undistinguished apartment house rented by families of Hasids. My very secular father would have been appalled.

Here's a picture of 539 as it appeared in 1940.  The kid's toy in front of the house probably belonged to my older brother.

Billy Graham and Me, 1957

In 1957 (I was 18 and in my second year in college), the reverend doctor Billy Graham led the largest revival meeting in history -- an average attendance, in the old-old Madison Square Garden, of eighteen thousand people a night for three months. What was his message?  It was half jingo, half Christian fundamentalism. "Let us tell the world that Americans believe in God, that we are morally and spiritually strong as well as militarily and economically. Let us tell the world that we are united and ready to march under the banner of Almighty God" -- not a sentiment that would have been dear to my heart. No Almighty God in my upbringing or anywhere in my brain. 

Graham was a fervent anti-Communist, but of a sort that left me baffled: "My own theory about Communism," he proclaimed, "is that it is master-minded by Satan. I think there is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism in which they seem to outwit us at every turn, unless they have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given to them."  Let me try two non-Satanic explanations for apparent Communist success: 1) "They" didn't outwit us;  in fact, they were dumber than us, overplayed their hand, and collapsed. 2) European and American imperialism had left a mess in the "underdeveloped countries" that was ripe for exploitation.  

How was a secular partially-educated young fellow supposed to understand such a paranoid, irrational  analysis of world politics?

With mockery, I'm afraid. Sometime in the middle of the summer of 1957, along with a bunch of wise-ass PS 217 cronies, I took a break from my Sears, Roebuck warehouse job and took the subway to 49th Street to take a gander and a listen to the Crusade for Christ (it was free). What do I remember?  A chorus (probably led by George Beverly Shea but I can't swear to it), bright lights, a cheering, milling crowd. I remember that Billy spoke, but I have no recollection of what he said, though the bronze gong of a voice resounded through the hall. Did he tell us of the five ways that Americans could most effectively combat Communism? By "old-fashioned Americanism" -- whatever that was, by "conservative and evangelical Christianity," by prayer, by "spiritual revival," and by "personal Christian experience." All five of which sound pretty much the same to me. And remote from my experience or desires.

Needless to say, I wasn't his most sympathetic or susceptible auditor.  

I wonder if he touched on another of his favorite topics that night: that "a woman commits sin when she deliberately dresses in such a way as to entice a man"; "that a wife "should keep herself attractive and give her husband a big kiss when he comes home from the office instead of yelling at him from the kitchen."

Except for the spectacle, it's all vague in my mind. I do remember, though, that when leaving that Garden I accidentally and momentarily found myself on the line of people who had made a "decision for Christ" and were heading to the podium. That was scary. I beat a quick retreat.  

I wonder how many other members of the audience were rubberneckers like me. 

I'm reminded now of the great old gospel song by the Carter Family, "Something Got a Hold of Me."  It's a parable that tells the story of a man who goes to a revival meeting to scoff. "I says I'll go down, take a look at the crowd/  It's just the weak-minded I feel."  But then there's a revelation: "They sing and shout and they all clasp their hands/ And they all got down on their knees./ When the fire fell from heaven it fell upon me,/ And then I fell to the floor." Because

Something's got a hold of me.

Yes, something's got a hold of me.

I have a spirit I'll never forget

That something's got a hold of me.

Well, nothing got a hold of me. No fire from heaven, no road to Damascus revelation. If anything, I was confirmed in my scoffery and atheism.

What did I learn? Not much. At the most, only that if the people who inhabit this country, my fellow Americans, are incomprehensible to me, then it is equally likely that I am incomprehensible to them.

And frankly, the mysteries that I encountered in Madison Square Garden in 1957 are, sixty years later, still mysterious to this day. Perhaps even more so.

East 9 Street Between Ditmas and 18th, 1939 -1955

Beginning at the northwest corner and preceding south -- in the first brick house, a family of notably obese immigrant Syrian women who spoke no English; there were no children that I know of and no interactions with other neighbors. The house itself was not unusual but it was fronted by a wrought iron fence and a row of ancient stubbed catalpas which we called "umbrella trees." Next was the house belonging to Dr. Jerry Yurkovsky, our M.D. In retrospect, he was a kind man but a badly-trained, out-of-touch physician. He was also an immigrant -- from Poland, I believe. My father, who rarely spoke badly of anyone, thought that he was a decent sort but that Mrs. Yurkovsky was "a real pill." I remember only her iridescent dyed red hair. Then came the Lampsons, Hubert and Dorothy. He was never seen in daylight but was rumored to own a "yacht"; she was the neighborhood grouch, known to slice in half any errant pink "spaldeens" that that might be punched (kids played "punchball" in the street) over her tall privet hedge and into her front yard. While I never questioned this neighborhood orthodoxy, I never saw a sliced spaldeen either. Then came the large Victorian house belonging until about 1950 to the Heidtmanns and then to another family whose name I can't remember but who had an impaired daughter who screamed and screamed at maximum volume at all hours day and night. Next came our immediate neighbors on the south, Mr. and Mrs. Pynn, who lived in a small old wood-shingled structure.The Pynns (did they have given names?) were extremely old, in their 90s I would guess. He was a retired Cornish seaman, believe it or not; she cultivated colorful gladioli in her small backyard garden. Their upstairs tenants were the Rhodins, Thor and Pearl. He was a tall gaunt ancient austere Norwegian whose only known activity was writing letters to local newspapers; she was almost as tall but Jewish and "went to business." They had three children but they were out of the house and too old for me to know them: Thor, jr, Yammie (Hjalmar), and Margeret. Thor was a physicist at Cornell rumored to have worked on the "bomb." I have written about the Rhodins elsewhere. Then came our house, a three-story 1912 Victorian of which our family of five occupied the top two floors. The first floor tenants were the Burnets (formerly Bernsteins), Albert and Bessie. He was musician who had retreated to accountancy. There were two sons, the older, Leonard, was troubled, and I now realize, probably gay; he played the sax; the younger son, Henry, had a cleft palate, later corrected by surgery, I believe, and banged on his drums incessantly. To our north were the Carps, who owned a brickyard or building supply business somewhere not in the neighborhood. They were a gloomy Dickensian family. Both of the daughters were nuns who came visiting once a year in their long black robes; the son, hang-dog Eddie, had the demeanor of a jaded funeral attendant. The Carps first act on moving into the house was to erect a tall forbidding chain link fence around the perimeter of their property which annoyed my father no end. Proceeding south, the next house was occupied by the Spollens, an immigrant Irish family who seemed to produce a new child every year. My memory is hazy about the south end of the street, under grand old elms until they fell victim to the Dutch blight, except that in one of the houses dwelt two tired bony sisters, perhaps twins, who every Sunday, trudged down 9th Street and past 18th Avenue to one of our neighborhood's numerous under-attended Protestant churches. They had a splendid garden of hollyhocks. Also at that end of the street lived, Mr. Mennino, who shared his personal variety of cucumbers with my father. At the very end of the block lived the dog-faced man..  

On the other side of the street was an Italian family named Cocito, pronounced American'ly, ko-see-to. When Junior Cocito (perhaps he had a name, but everyone called him Junior) grew up and married, he bought the house next door to his father's. Then next, coming closer to us, were the Cunninghams. Mr. Cunningham was a large imposing firefighter; there was at least one daughter and two sons, Jimmy and Billy. Billy was our only celebrity; he became rich and famous as the "Kangaroo Kid"; he also played first base on my younger brother's baseball team. After the Cunninghams was another house of semi-mystery, occupied by an unfriendly family whose last name was Harris. I believe my mother told me that Mr. Harris was a school principal. There was a shapely daughter a year or so older than I whom I admired from a distance. She (Betty) married at 16 or 17 ("shotgun," I was told), and disappeared -- as did the family. Then came the Burkes, directly across the street from us. There were two sons, Charley, a genuine dolt and high school dropout who became an armed guard for Wells Fargo, and lanky John, who was studying for the priesthood. There was also an uncle or cousin who lived with them and who spent every weekend waxing and noisily buffing his big new DeSoto. Then came the house occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Petranto along with their ancient father who spent all day every day watching the traffic from the oversize glider on the porch. There was an older daughter, Madeleine, whom I didn't know, and a son, Frankie, a bachelor, a contemporary of my older brother Eugene, who later found work in the U.S. post office and who, when I investigated a few years ago, still -- eighty years later -- lived in his childhood home. Upstairs from the Petrantos dwelt the Meinekes, Charlie and Tessie. He was a butcher; she was "at home." There was a rather sad ungainly but harmless daughter just my age, Charlotte, who dropped out of school early. I hope she a good life but I wonder. Next northward was another mystery house, probably a rental; for a year it was occupied by the Tebbets family. There was an attractive mid-twenties daughter whom my older brother and his peers admired no end, and a son, Lee, whom twenty years later I encountered in Vermont where he gave me an envelope of blue corn seeds (which I never planted). And then came the Constantino household. The father was a shoemaker, I believe. There were three children, Frankie, a terrific athlete; Regina, a beauty, and Carly, who dyed his hair henna and moved to Greenwich Village. There were two or three more houses at that end of the street, but I'm vague about them. Sorry, don't remember; too far away. The name Ortner comes to mind. Mystery houses.

Even though I lived on the street for my entire childhood and until I left for college, I never entered a single house, nor did any of the neighbors ever enter ours. It wasn't that kind of neighborhood. Or perhaps we weren't that sort of people.

More Family News: What My Father Ate

Sardines, a tin at a time. Herring, canned, either in wine sauce or in tomato sauce. Whitefish. Lima beans, which came into the house dried but which were soaked to plump up, then boiled and mashed (but not for me, if I could possibly avoid them). Potatoes in any form, but usually mashed and buttered. No chicken or lamb chops, but lots of tongue. (When I left home, I vowed never to eat tongue again, and, trust me, I've kept the faith.) Chopped chicken liver mixed with hard-boiled eggs and onions. Steak, when we could afford it. Roast pork with applesauce. Delicatessen meats -- salami, baloney, corned beef, frankfurters. Baked beans, courtesy of Heinz. Apples, seeds and all, right down to the stem. Chocolate in any form, but especially white chocolate. Halvah, a particular favorite. Dates and figs, dried. Black radishes and onions, soaked in gribbinis. Tschav, borsht with huge helpings of sour cream. Corn on the cob. Slimy canned Harvard beets. No alcohol, nary a drop. On hot days, not beer, but instead iced tea or iced coffee. Cheese, either Velveeta or Swiss. Good bread -- pumpernickel or rye. Crumb cake direct from Ebinger's Bakery. Bacon and two eggs, sunnyside up or soft-boiled. Cream o' Wheat cereal. Swee-Touch-Nee tea. On Sunday morning, bagels and rolls, warm from the bakery, eaten while reading the the Times (25 cents) and the Eagle (10 cents). Ice cream, the more exotic the flavor the better.

Notes on "Mucilage."

“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious -- perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with all that mucilage.")

In my life, mucilage made its mark long before glue arrived on the scene. In Brooklyn (and perhaps elsewhere) 1940s schoolchildren were issued small curvy bottles of the yellow stuff, each fitted with a red-rubber tip which was slit so that a drop or two of mucilage could be emitted when the bottle was pressed to the surface of your construction-paper or doily project. Actually, the slit regularly became caked and occluded and the hardened mucilage had to be scraped off with your fingernails. It was a lot like nose-picking.  

LePage’s Mucilage, I believe it was called. We said Page as "page" but surely LePage's Mucilage if pronounced Frenchly (le pahje) would be far more euphonious. Some claim that if you were building a model airplane, you would use mucilage on your fuselage, but I believe such an assertion to be the kind of persiflage at which I take umbrage. 

And yes, the word is a descendant and cousin of Latin mucus, meaning mucus.

Unbeknownst to 1940s me, mucilage has a life outside the bottle. It is a glycoprotein and exopolysaccharide found in most plants where it helps to store water and thicken membranes. I have now learned that the sticky stuff on the leaf tips of the insect-catching sundews that live at the edge of our pond is a form of mucilage. 

I would be curious to know from what plants William Nelson LePage distilled the vast vats of mucilage that were diluted and parceled out to schoolchildren, who then spent the hour after "Arts and Crafts" removing nasty mucilage scale from their fingers. But I do now know why schools loved the stuff  -- because vegetable mucilage is, if not exactly edible, not poisonous either. No hoofs were harmed during its production.

Once having established the mucilage monopoly, Mr. LePage must have brought home zillions. And if his descendants were as sticky-fingered as I suspect they must have been, they will be enjoying the profits on their yachts or in their Manhattan penthouses to this day while we 1940s pupils are left with only memory-traces of mucilage's peculiar feel and odor.  

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

hack

 

"Hurrah for the Pumpkin Pie"

Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the school auditorium and warbled our dear little hearts out every Thursday at 10:00 am.

I remember very well the stirring but perplexing Thanksgiving hymn that began 

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Looking backward, I admit that I understood the first line of the stanza but was pretty much boggled by what came next. "Chasten" and "hasten" make a wonderful internal rhyme, but who does He hasten and how exactly does He chasten?  A syntactical mystery for sure. Were we expected to believe that the Great Signifier in the Sky "chastens and hastens" His own will?  Why in the world should he be asked to do so?

Nor did I grasp the meaning of third line, because I didn't recognize that "the wicked oppressing" meant "the oppressing wicked" or more precisely "the wicked who are oppressing someone." But who were they "oppressing"? Apparently, the "distressing", that is, the people who are distressed. And who, to be more specific, were the innocent distressed who were being oppressed. Us?  Our teachers? Let me now confess that I sang then and remember at this moment the line as "now cease us from distressing", thinking that we, the pupils, must have been the "wicked" and that it was our now enlightened task to cease from oppressing the distressed. I read the line as a provocation to guilt, even though I knew that I myself, third-grader, had never oppressed anyone.

Nor was I the only confused 10-year-old, because BB, my PS 217 classmate and consultant on our assemblies, remembered the line as "The wicked oppressing now seize us from distressing" -- a sentence which is way beyond my parsing skills.

Of the last line of the quatrain, I grasped "Sing praises to his name" but "He forgets not His own" opened another can of confused worms. I construed "His own" to be shorthand for "his own name." But what kind of Lord forgets his own name?  As BB, equally misled, says, 'it's god, just three letters; how hard is that?"

The hymn goes on for another four puzzling stanzas, though to tell truth, I don't remember whether they were required of us PS 217 choristers. I for one am retrospectively pleased that we omitted the stanza that included the lines "We praise thee, O God, our Redeemer, Creator,/ In grateful devotion our tribute we bring" which surely seemed even then a trifle too theological. 

Despite the fact that I was mostly clueless, I rather enjoyed belting out the hymn's anapests. It's a joyous, rollicking piece of music. Whether it was appropriate for a public school in the heart of immigrant Brooklyn is another question. But hey, it was the 50s, before we all became so multicultural.

Nevertheless, out of spirit of curiosity, and because it's now so easy even for us lazybones to investigate such questions, I turned once again to wikipedia and typed in "We gather together." Warning: surprise in store.

It's a Christian hymn (of course) written in 1597 by one Adrianus Valerius to celebrate the victory in the Battle of Turnhout, a turning point in the Dutch Protestant war of liberation against Spanish Catholic domination. It first appeared in print in a 1626 collection of Dutch folk and patriotic songs but didn't find its way to the New World until 1903 and became popular only in 1935 when it was included in the "national hymnal of the Methodist-Episcopal Church." During World War II, which was entering its last phase when I was a kindergartner in PS 217, the hymn became popular because "'the wicked oppressing' was understood to refer to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan." Which is, I suppose, how an anti-Catholic Protestant hymn came to be included in our curriculum. After all, it was out of such strange and unpredictable meldings and divagations that Brooklyn/American culture was formed.   

"We gather together" was not our only Thanksgiving song. We also sang the entirely unobjectionable 

          Over the river, and through the wood,

          To Grandmother's house we go;

          The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh

          Through the white and drifted snow - oh.

I found this song lovely but otherworldly, because my own particular grandmother lived not over the river but in a tiny third-floor walk-up on distinctly unpastoral Coney Island Avenue, where there was an occasional tired horse, pulling a vegetable wagon, but there were few sleighs.

But as it turns out, "Over the river" too has a history.  

   

That's a portrait of its author, Lydia Maria Child. She looks rather forbidding, as though she might have taught sixth grade at PS 217, but on further investigation she turns out to have been a radical and revolutionary woman to whose accomplishments I wish we had been introduced. Born in 1802, she started her writing career with the novel Hobomok which depicts and approves of the marriage of an Indian man and a white woman. It caused a small scandal. In 1833, she published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans which proposed the immediate emancipation of slaves, arguing that slavery was as harmful to slave-owners as to the enslaved. It was the first anti-slavery book printed in America. Ms. Child was also an early advocate of women's rights and spoke favorably of sexual passion. Of course she was ostracized from polite society. In 1844, she published the small innocuous poem for which she is remembered, which concludes "Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?/Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!" -- a sentiment to which there can be no possible objection or dissent.

"The Lost Chord"

Insomnia once again -- a nightly affliction, a family trait. Perhaps we lack a gene that lets others sleep from dusk to dawn. Have I noted here that I want my tombstone inscribed with the motto, just beneath my name and dates, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

During the wakeful nights, I've taken to listening to old-time radio. My favorite: WHRO out of Norfolk, Virginia. Last night, I heard some tenor from the 1920s (perhaps John McCormack) in a scratchy recording (tuba for bass) wail or warble "The Lost Chord"-- quite the 3 am treat it was. A flood of memories arose, because "The Lost Chord" was one of the songs that we learned during the PS 217 assembly back there in Flatbush in the 1950s. I recalled with some amusement that our determined "music specialist," Miss Georgia Keiselbach, a big lumbering woman with a trained contralto voice, tried gamely to inculcate an anguished mid-Victorian quasi religious parlor song into the minds of a roomful of fidgety 10-year-olds. Quite an experience. I was entranced by Sir Arthur Sullivan's melody, but I have to admit that the lyric was incomprehensible to me then and is still quite a challenge to this day.

So I investigated. Onto the internet, which, fortunately, works very well at 4 am.

The words to "The Lost Chord" are by Adelaide Anne Procter, after Tennyson apparently the most popular poet of her day, although I must confess that I had never heard of her even though I'm supposed to know something about nineteenth-century English literature.  

Here's Ms. Procter's fervid poem: 

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music 
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heav'n
I shall hear that grand Amen.

I'll paraphrase (even though I know that paraphrase is not a nice thing to do to a poem): in a reverie at the organ the poet experiences something grand that is aesthetic, transcendent, ineffable, and fleeting. The "lost chord divine" -- note the Miltonic deployment of adjectives -- stands for the hope or wish or belief that there is such a place as heaven and that it's a place where weariness, fever, pain, sorrow, perplexity, strife, and discord are superseded by the "infinite calm" and "perfect peace" of the "grand Amen."  A not unusual or extraordinary nineteenth-century sentiment where the hunt for the disappearing god was frequently mediated by art -- in this particular case by the art of music. 

As long as I'm reducing the poem to its paraphraseable meaning, I might also add that Procter, like many poets before and after her, has conflated religious and sexual longing. I derive this meaning, inaccessible to the roomful of quavering sopranos of which I was one, and very likely unsuspected by Miss Keiselbach herself, from the vocabulary of passion in which the poem is couched: "crimson," "touch," "lay" "love," "trembled."  And from the sentence, "It came from the soul of the organ,/  And entered into mine," where it might be argued, slightly frivolously, that any line of poetry that contains "came" "organ" and "entered" has got to be about a symbolic sexual encounter. Especially when the ambiguous word "mine" can denote either "my soul" or "my organ." So in this extravagant reading, in which it is once again clearly demonstrated that you can take the boy out of Brooklyn but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy, "The Lost Chord" is not only about the search for "perfect peace" but also for the perfect orgasm which will provide infinite calm to the poetess when she "dies" -- a word which is itself a Victorian euphemism for sexual climax. The lost chord is the big O (and I don't mean Oscar R.)

Just for fun of it let me also adduce a couple of sentences from the wikipedia article on Adelaide Anne Procter: "Modern critics argue that Procter's work is significant for what it reveals about how Victorian women otherwise repressed feelings." "One critic suggests that Procter may have been a lesbian and in love with Matilda Hays; other critics have called Procter's relationship with Hays 'emotionally intense.'" "Procter became engaged in 1858. The identity of Procter's fiancé remains unknown, and the proposed marriage never took place." "In 1851, Procter converted to Roman Catholicism." "Procter never married. She became unhealthy, possibly due to her charity work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 38." I'll let my loyal readers connect the dots.  

"The Lost Chord" is a fine song and deserves to be revived. On YouTube, you can listen to a remarkably accomplished version by Enrico Caruso. Which you can access to at any time, even in the midst of a long insomniac night.

A Letter to my Grandchildren

What was it like in the 1940s when I was your age?  Very different. Milk was delivered daily in bottles: a milk-wagon, drawn by a tired, plodding old horse, appeared on East 9th Street three times a week before we sat down to breakfast. There were also daily visits from a horse-drawn vegetable truck. An itinerant knife-sharpener came once every couple of months. And also a very old man with a large sack thrown over his back, singing out in the loudest voice I've ever heard, 'I cash clothes." There were squarish automobiles (Packards, DeSotos, Studebakers), but far fewer than today -- so few that kids would play punchball and stickball right in the middle of the street, just stepping to the side to let that occasional car whizz by. Kids also skated in the street, using clunky metal skates that attached to the shoe by turning a "skate key." There was no television, but everyone listened to the radio. "Portable" radios were as big as bread boxes. Some people had refrigerators (much smaller than modern ones), but most had "iceboxes." Every week, an ice delivery man would haul a block of ice (about a foot-and-a-half square if I remember correctly) with large tongs and set it in the icebox. Coal was delivered in barrels: men with heavy gloves would roll the barrels from the truck to the ground-level coal chute. All telephones were attached to the wall with wires. Long distance phone calls were expensive and only for emergencies. People did not communicate by e-mail or by texting, but by means of postcards and letters. A "letter" was a piece of paper on which whole paragraphs were written; it was inserted into an "envelope" and put in a "mail box" for delivery. Hard to believe, I know. There were no word processors. I learned to write using a "straight pen." There were no dvd's or cd's or streaming. Instead, we had "records," vinyl discs 12-inches in diameter which were placed on a rotating "turntable" on which rested a hand with a stylus, at first steel and then later diamond. It was primitive, I know, but it worked rather well. There were no credit cards. Some people had checking accounts, but 99% of commercial transactions were completed with "money." When I started at P. S. 217, in 1944, I wore "knickers" (pants that went to just below the knee and were held in place with elastic) and long socks. You can sometimes see knickers in old illustrated books or in clothes museums. Men always wore hats: fedoras or derbies or panamas or bowlers or pork-pies, usually made of felt. Women wore hats too, some with veils, most of them godawful ugly. Young folks "courted." In those days, before people became intimate, they would go through a period in which they would "date" and talk and get to know each other. This period could last for weeks or even months. Astonishing, I know, but trust me, it happened that way in the old days. "The past is another country; they do things differently there."      

World War II Memories

I was six years old when the war ended in 1945, so my memories are few and arise in no particular order. I remember hearing news reports on the radio that were datelined "Moscow"-- but I conflated Moscow with Bosco, a brand of chocolate syrup popular in the 1940s. I remember that the floor of our kitchen was disfigured with an infinite number of black marks -- rubber was in short supply and the substituted soles left nasty blotches. My mother said, "We'll wait until the war is over to replace the linoleum." Many commodities were in short supply: instead of butter there was a white oleomargerine into which a packet of orange food color was mashed to simulate a credible yellow. There were ration books and ration stamps for gasoline and sugar and coffee and greens. My mother was furious that Mr. Lerner, who owned the fruit and vegetable shop on 18th Avenue, sold black-market lettuces from the back of his store. A bus driver was rude to a passenger; my mother said: "all the decent young men are overseas." We saved our nickels and brought money to school to buy war bonds. Following government advice, my father dug up his carefully tended lawn and planted a "victory garden" of vegetables. There were frequent blackouts: my father's friend Jack Patent sported a white hard hat because he was a warden. My Uncle Dan, a major in the Army Air Corps, came home from the Burma border for a thirty-day furlough and showed me his captured German Luger. We received air mail letters from him and from other soldiers with details blacked out by military censors. I complained to my mother: "Mrs. Callery (my first grade teacher) isn't nice to me." My mother said, "You have to forgive her; she's lost four of her boys in the war." Lost?  Four of her boys? I did not understand. On a sunny spring day in 1945, we heard on the radio that President Roosevelt was dead; my mother sat on the stoop and cried. And in August of that same year, when our family was visiting someone on a lake somewhere, all of a sudden the adults who had motor boats were zooming back and forth and shouting and laughing. I asked what was happening and my father said, "the war is over." 

Uncle Jack's tank was demolished by German cannon fire and he was the crew's only survivor. He lived with shrapnel in his brain until the age of ninety-one. Cousin Saul's older brother was killed in New Guinea, but Sarah, his mother, "knew" that he was alive and waited for the knock on the door or the telephone call until the end of her days. Meanwhile, the poor fellow's bones lay bleaching at Buna or some other long-forgotten field of battle. Before the war, my mother told me, we used to receive mail from the old country -- from the many members of the Chafetz and Tomaszewski and Middlebank and Hessel families who had stayed behind. "But after the war, nothing."

Can we, even now, bear to imagine what became of all those Malkas and Rifkas and Levs and Mendels?   

It Happened in Brooklyn, so they Say

If it happened in Brooklyn, it must have happened in metaphorical or mythological rather than real Brooklyn, because it's not the Brooklyn of my memory. It Happened in Brooklyn is a 1947 musical, I guess you'd have to call it, featuring still skinny Frank Sinatra and womanly Kathryn Grayson, and also Jimmie Durante, who steals the show. And also the ever-luminous Gloria Grahame in a very small role as an Army nurse in England. Brooklyn is evoked as a fairy tale land where everyone is nice to everyone and jobs and money fall from the trees -- kind of an urban big rock candy mountain. Not the case -- though nowadays Brooklyn, which used to be mocked, is every Twenty-Something's land of putative milk and theoretical honey. In truth there's nothing much that is recognizably Brooklynian -- even in geography -- to my jaded old eyes except a rather beautiful sequence of Frank Sinatra singing and "dancing" on Brooklyn Bridge. Most of the action supposedly takes place in the basement of New Utrecht High School, but in actual fact it's a Hollywood sound stage.

Sinatra, a returned soldier, thinks he's in love with Kathryn Grayson but she prefers Peter Lawford, playing the shy grandson of an English Dook. The film is worth seeing if only because Sinatra and Grayson sing, believe it or not, "La ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni -- as far as I know Sinatra's only foray into grand opera.

If I had been the screenwriter, I would have had Gloria Grahame jump on a luxury liner and return to Brooklyn for the climactic concluding scene, rather than remaining, as she does, merely a sweet overseas memory of Frankie's. 

It Happened in Brooklyn