My Old Neighborhood Remembered (11 page)

Schoolyard basketball was played continuously, on scorching summer days and on courts cleared of snow, played by day and by night with the light of lampposts, played by dirty ballplayers who could never foul out because nobody kept track of fouls, and crybabies who would cry foul if you grazed their shirts, played between stellar ballplayers and hapless ballplayers, between goody-two-shoes students and academic ne-er do-wells. Democracy in action.

Every neighborhood had its schoolyard basketball stand-outs, some who went on to play for high school and college teams and sometimes returned to play in the schoolyards where it all began for them.

If anybody bothered to calculate, many of us probably spent more time playing schoolyard basketball than any other activity, apart from physically sitting in a classroom.

The world contained in a schoolyard basketball court was compressed, intense, something the boys did that the girls did not. You never saw girls playing schoolyard basketball. The basic form was the three-man game. Every once in a while a full-court game was played. Winners stayed on, losers got off. If you lost, it wasn't a crushing defeat. You might have to wait your turn to play again. If you won, you won court time, like with a pinball machine.

Which neighborhood had the best basketball players was impossible to determine. Good ballplayers came out of every neighborhood and some went on to have well-regarded basketball careers. Where I lived we had the advantage of the small-scale court in the Bronx High School of Science schoolyard to learn our skills before moving up to the Creston Junior High schoolyard. Madison Square Garden was referred to in the sports pages as “the Mecca of college basketball.” The Mecca of schoolyard basketball in our part of the Bronx was the schoolyard at Creston. With the active intramural basketball program at the school, you were caught up in the basketball-mindedness of the place. You played on the Creston schoolyard court whenever you could and when you went on to high school you still played there.

In my time important ballplayers could be seen on the court at Creston, Dolph Schayes, who starred for DeWitt Clinton High School, N.Y.U., and the Syracuse Nationals of the NBA and who would be named to the NBA Hall of Fame, Jack Molinas, who led Columbia to an Ivy League championship and who was a story unto himself, Arnie Stein, who played with Dayton University in the NIT Tournament, Bobby Santini, who played for Iona College, Ed Roman from the C.C.N.Y. double championship team, Dick Kor of N.Y.U., Danny Lyons of Fordham University. When any of these players were on the court, a crowd formed on the sidelines and behind the schoolyard fence, neighborhood people watching neighborhood people who were, unquestionably in our minds, stars.

We moved on from Mrs. S_____ in 5th grade to Mr. Katz in 6th grade, a man who comported himself with personal dignity and who was courteous to us. We were taught, we paid attention, the school year passed without drama. We were headed for junior high school and the great divide, boys to Creston Junior High School, girls to Elizabeth Barrett Browning Junior High School.

They assigned me to the “SPs” for junior high school. For years in the New York City public schools some students were designated for classes called, variously, the “Rs” and the “RAs.” These supposedly more capable students went through an accelerated course of study in junior high school and skipped a grade. When it was our turn to enter junior high, the nomenclature had been changed and the rapid advance classes were to be called “special progress classes,” “SPs.” Why some students were selected rather than others, what the standards were, never was explained to us. Tracking children at twelve or thirteen had to be hit or miss. Whatever the selection process, it could not assess students with skills not easily observed, or students who developed late, or those going through a difficult time for any number of external reasons. Surely an enormous number of students over the years who were not identified for the minor distinction of skipping a grade in junior high school went on to live meritorious lives.

I don't know on what basis I was assigned. Maybe I had good reading skills — from an early start reading titles of foreign movies at the Ascot perhaps? But in junior high the first serious signs of deficiencies on my part in math began to show up and they followed me right through junior high and high school like the rain cloud over the head of Joe Btfsplk in the
Li'l Abner
comic strip.

At Creston, unlike elementary school, we moved period by period to other teachers and other subjects. Some classes seemed to be holdovers from The Depression years, including something called, showers. We thought it might have been a Board of Education-mandated subject from the time when poor children might have taken showers they didn't have at home. We didn't shower during showers; it became an additional gym period.

We were required to take shop — woodworking or sheet metal — and the origin of this subject was likely an intention to teach boys usable vocational skills. In woodworking my group made the traditional Board of Education lamp in the shape of a pump, the pump handle turning the lamp on and off. The shop teacher did not have a future carpenter in me. I labored through shop. He paused along the way in the school year to match our faces to the names in his book. “Who is Corman?” he asked. When I identified myself, he said, “Corman, if you pass shop, my name is Santa Claus.” I passed with the help of a couple of my classmates who practically made the entire damn lamp for me.

Typing was a subject we boys dreaded, except for the apples of their enlightened parents' eyes who came into the class already knowing how to type. The keys of the typewriters in the typing room were blacked out. Looking at that menacing keyboard filled us with a feeling close to despair. How would we ever learn on those horrible machines? The woman who taught typing was a perfect complement to the menacing keyboards. She was stern and unremittingly demanding. Taking that class was what it must have been like being in reform school. And, yes, we all learned to touch-type.

The home room teacher of 7SP1 was a disagreeable man. Let's give
him
a break on the name and call him Mr. S____. He carried on a note-passing relationship with a married woman at the school. He may or may not have been married himself. We knew nothing about him. We were to bring his notes to the other teacher and wait to receive notes back. He distributed the messenger assignments among us. On reading her answers to himself in front of us, he would often smile slyly and send a note in return. My last male teacher was the dignified Mr. Katz. Now I had this Mr. S____ enlisting boys with rampant imaginations as the carriers of his messages to an attractive, bosomy woman.

He dropped one of us out of the “SPs.” Raymond Nielsen had been my classmate throughout elementary school. A quiet boy and an excellent athlete, he was singled out in 5th grade by Mrs. S____ as part of her ongoing denigration of us. She praised Raymond, declaring him to be “the only he-boy in the class.” This gets circumstantial. Mr. S______ was Jewish. Raymond was Protestant. Raymond's father was known to be the superintendent of a building, a super. Was there class bias on Mr. S____'s part? Religious bias? He told us Raymond was no longer in the class, the only one dropped, and Raymond took his place in a conventional 7th grade class, losing the chance to skip a grade.

Academically, the most renowned high school in the Bronx was the Bronx High School of Science. Students were required to take a test for admission to Science and Mr. S____ restricted who could and could not take that test. We decided that he wanted to look good within Board of Education circles with a high percentage of his students getting into the school. He might also have been watching out for us and wanted to shield from disappointment those unlikely to get in or those who would have difficulty at the school if they did get in. This was possibly his motivation, doubtful, but possible. He told me I could not take the test. Was it even within Board of Education regulations for him to prevent me? Since it was prestigious to go there and several of my friends in class were applying and it was one block away from my apartment, I felt badly about it, which was foolish of me. The school stressed science and math where I was weakest and I would have struggled there.

I didn't see much of Raymond after he was transferred out of our class. We had not been close friends and he did not live nearby. A couple of years later when I was in high school I came upon Raymond on the street and we chatted. He had spent his time in the regular Creston classes after being dropped from the “SPs,” took the test for the Bronx High School of Science and was accepted. He was a student at Science. So much for Mr. S____'s judgment. Where Raymond Nielsen eventually went after that, what became of him, I am at a loss. I greatly admired him.

I would like to summon the exact details. I cannot remember. I might have talked when I wasn't supposed to. I might have been late to school. I might have thrown Mr. S____ a disapproving look when he assigned me or one of my classmates the task of delivering one of his precious notes to his lady friend. Whatever earned his wrath, he announced to the class that we were going on a trip to the Museum of Natural History and everybody in the class was going except me. The Creston building was occupied from grades K through 6 by elementary school boys and girls, and 7 through 9 by the male junior high school students. Mr. S____ told me I was to spend the day of the trip in a seat in the back of the room in a 1st grade class. He arranged it with a 1st grade teacher who announced to her little students when I entered the room that I was there as punishment for bad behavior and I took a seat that day to the giggling of the little 1st graders.

I asked Richard Kobliner, the person who had told me about the P.S. 33 reunion, if he knew what became of Mr. S____. Richard said he had heard he became an assistant principal or the principal of a school somewhere. Well, good for you, Mr. S____. You shouldn't have embarrassed a 7th grader with a punishment like that. You never know who the 7th grader will turn out to be. He just may grow up to be a writer and write about you.

Those of us who had seen real basketball played in Madison Square Garden and fantasized about playing the game as it was supposed to be played could act out our fantasies at Creston in the intramural basketball program. Here was our first chance to play full court basketball with referees and foul shots. Our class fielded a competitive team. We had one of the tallest boys in the grade who went on to play basketball for Clinton High School and a few other above average players. I was able to be the playmaker just as I had seen it done in Madison Square Garden.

In junior high school something began, playing organized basketball, bringing the ball up court, setting up my team-mates, shooting running one-handers. I played basketball in the intramural program at Creston, then the intramural program in high school, on club teams in community centers, on camp counselor teams summers when I worked as a counselor. I wasn't outstanding, not like the players I watched from the sidelines at Creston. For the levels I played at, I was good enough.

I have always felt extraordinarily grateful to my friends from my old neighborhood, those boys I grew up with from the time when we were little kids to when we were teenagers, playing on Creston Avenue and in the the Bronx High School of Science schoolyard. The facts of my family background which seemed so enormous to me didn't matter to them. They didn't care who my father was. They accepted me and that was crucial in my life. First, and most importantly, with my neighborhood friends, and then with organized basketball that began in junior high school, I learned I could be one of the players. I could be like other boys.

We could have measured our lives by the Bronx Zoo. When we were little, we were taken to the children's zoo section. We went to the Bronx Zoo by trolley, part of the treat. Trolleys were phased out of the Bronx in the 1940s. Then we were old enough to go with friends rather than with someone from one's family.

The Bronx Zoo was never taken for granted or considered a place meant only for tourists. This was
our
zoo and it was important. On days when the weather was clear and it felt right, my friends and I would say, “This is a zoo day,” and we would go. Over the years we explored every part of the place many times over.

The African Plains with its cage-free environment, the animals separated from the public by a moat, was a highlight and a source of conversation among the children of the neighborhood. You think the lions could jump over the moat if they wanted to? What would happen if a lion got out? What would you do? Our imaginations, stimulated by the Johnny Weissmuller
Tarzan
movies, led us to what-would-happen-if-they-got-out for a variety of the zoo's inhabitants.

The seals, especially at feeding time, were headliners. The duck-billed platypus from Australia was a good novelty and usually attracted lines of visitors — the creature was so odd, a kind of duck and beaver combined.

Before modern zoo environments began to feature simulated natural habitats, the presentation of the inhabitants could be ramshackle, but also could result in appealing exhibits like the penguins close up at ground level in an outdoor enclosure, Charlie Chaplin-ing around.

The first time you went to the zoo with a girl was a big day in your life. The zoo was a logical place to go on a date that wasn't an evening at the movies. It meant you were old enough to be seen walking around with a girl
during the day
.

Our “Say it ain't so, Joe,” moment was when the news broke in the winter of 1951 that basketball players from New York City colleges had been rigging the scores of games for gamblers. A national story and a New York City story, for the young people in the neighborhood it was also a Bronx story. Among the City College fixers were three ballplayers who had played for Bronx high schools. Irwin Dambrot and Ed Roman lived in the Bronx and had played for nearby William Howard Taft High School, and Ed Warner had been a star at the Bronx high school many of us attended, DeWitt Clinton.