My Old Neighborhood Remembered (13 page)

In protest through the union, the teachers voted to cease participating in extracurricular activities, shutting down high school clubs and sports teams. When I reached school one morning, a crowd was gathered outside, people talking excitedly. Instigated by the teachers, a students' march was planned down the Grand Concourse and we were to meet up with students from Theordore Roosevelt High School and then go on to City Hall. I was in. A march? Playing hooky en masse? Sure, bring back our teams!

At City Hall we became part of a crowd of thousands of shouting students.
The New York Times
reported 10,000 students demonstrated citywide and 3,000 converged on City Hall. The demonstration consisted of students milling about and yelling at the City Hall building and at the police. This was a protest with a limited attention span. I left with the crowd jamming the subway trains leaving the vicinity.

The next day we were back in school amid a troubling rumor. The principal was going to keep a list of everyone who was out of school for the protest and we would be penalized when and if we ever tried to apply for college.

A police department official said the students' demonstration was the work of “subversives.” No penalty was exacted against us and no immediate gains were made by the teachers.

The teachers' boycott of extracurricular activities carried through the school year that followed. Under a new mayor, Vincent R. Impellitteri, the teachers were granted an increase, bringing their annual maximum pay to $6,500. We engaged in our one uncommon outburst and settled back into the familiar. Other student demonstrations did not occur. We were in the 1950s and in the Cold War, with public officials looking for Communists in everybody's soup.

While we were in elementary school they had us ducking under our desks on command in classroom drills in case the Russians dropped an A-Bomb on us. Now we were supposed to beware of stealth Commies. Our teachers were required to comply with the Feinberg Act which prohibited New York school teachers from being members of the Communist Party. Even
The New York Times
was not above using the rhetoric of the anti-Communist New York tabloids. A
New York Times
headline was:

“Red Teachers” from
The New York Times
? The witch hunt mood of the day played out in our classrooms at Clinton in that nothing was ever said about the mood of the day. Our teachers were probably fearful of bringing attention to themselves by discussing the nation's preoccupation with Communism and in place of a teaching opportunity we had silence.

My 6th grade teacher had tried to lead a classroom discussion as to whether teachers should be fired if they were members of the Communist Party. I offered that I didn't think anybody should be fired for belonging to anything. After the class a couple of my classmates teased me and the way they did, 6th grade-level teasing, was to call me a Communist.

I became fascinated with the hearings that pitted Senator Joseph McCarthy against Owen Lattimore, an expert on Asia who taught at Johns Hopkins University. I rushed home from school to watch it on television. Lattimore was accused of being a Communist agent by McCarthy. The confrontation was outstanding theater, the feisty Lattimore with brisk, staccato phrasing rebutting the sneering McCarthy: “I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party.” “I hope the Senator will, in fact, lay his machine gun down. He is too reckless, careless, and irresponsible to have a license to use it.”

For a high school student, the impact of watching McCarthy in action on television against Lattimore was powerful. Who could be concerned about Communists and Communism after watching Joe McCarthy?

My family was typical of the families I knew in the neighborhood, the only political thing anyone did was vote — for Democrats. We heard of enclaves of Socialists in the east Bronx. The writer, Vivian Gornick, who lived in the east Bronx, has referred in print to her “slightly irreverent left-wing household.” Not our household. My mother had cousins with a chicken farm in Tom's River, New Jersey, whom she said were Communists, a notion that seemed to me as far away as a chicken farm in Tom's River, New Jersey.

The patterns that showed up earlier in junior high school became definitive for me in high school, high grades in English and history, low grades in math and science. Combine the numbers and my high school average was 83 at the end.

I was in a history class with some of the better history students. The bell would ring to end the period and they would get up to attend the next class, trigonometry for most of them. I did not join them. I was taking intermediate algebra . . . for . . . the . . . very . . . slow . . . Spread out over two terms instead of one, it was known in school as “Idiot's Algebra.”

For my chemistry Regents exam I was sitting in the stairwell outside the classroom still cramming with my Barron's prep book seconds before the exam was to begin.

The principal of the school, Walter Degnan, a strict disciplinarian, enjoyed a grudging admiration among the students — for his foot speed. If he happened to spot anyone leaving the building to cut classes, Mr. Degnan, in his street shoes, would chase after him and usually run him down, a smart tactic in an all-boys school, establishing he was not a man to cross.

A cultural amenity at Clinton were the plays staged by Actors Equity in the school auditorium. Not community theater performed by amateurs, the actors were professionals, members of Actors Equity. The admission price was little more than the cost of a movie ticket and attracted adult Bronx residents and, inasmuch as the performances were staged in our school, Clinton students. I volunteered to be an usher which enabled me to see the plays without paying, productions like
Arsenic and Old Lace, Blithe Spirit, Pygmalion
.

The high school years for people of my age coincided with the Korean War, a gray war at a gray time, a war without bunting. Unlike World War II when our neighborhoods breathed with the events overseas, the public was not galvanized except for those unfortunate to serve and for their families.

From the summer of 1950 to the summer of 1953, the United States tallied more than 35,000 dead, a serious number for what was sometimes called in the media a “police action” and a “conflict,” rather than a war. As an elementary school child I had followed the war maps in
The Bronx Home News
during World War II. As a high school student I was now buying
The New York Times
at the candy store downstairs and reading the war coverage on my bus ride to Clinton in the mornings.
The Bronx Home News
was no longer published. Its optimistic slant on war news gone. We received instead in
Life
magazine, David Douglas Duncan's photographs of the faces of American servicemen, portraying how much of a slog was this war.

In 1951, General Douglas MacArthur reinterpreted the chain of command in his own behalf. President Harry S. Truman reasserted civilian control of the military, dismissing McArthur in the middle of the war. MacArthur took a victory lap for his career in a speech before Congress, his “Old soldiers never die” speech. My family voted for Truman as they had for Roosevelt and my allegiance was not with MacArthur. The word, “stalemate,” was being used to describe the war, which inched along through the rest of our high school years.

We were proud of our school the way most high school students are proud of their high schools. Our pride did not manifest itself in attending games by our school teams. Most of the people I knew in school did not attend football games. As for the basketball team, when they played a home game sometimes I stayed in school and watched. Less frequently I would attend an away game. With a choice between watching a game played by other people and playing ball ourselves after school, many of us preferred to play ball. My neighborhood friends were mainly distributed between Clinton, Science and several Catholic high schools. They did not customarily attend their school games either. We were still playing schoolyard basketball in the Science and Creston schoolyards as we were growing older, trying to hold on to our relationships with each other.

In the summer before my senior year at Clinton, I was a junior counselor at a sleepaway camp. I returned there as a regular counselor the following summer and worked as a counselor in other camps the next two summers when I was in college. I was fifteen that first summer and went from sitting on the sidelines when others danced at parties, which had been my specialty, to attempted dancing with the girl counselors.

Previous to the summer I had been invited to a party by people I played basketball with on a community center team and I didn't know how to dance well enough to dance. I feigned a foot injury and attended the party limping.

At camp I was so nervous about dancing, I invented my own style of the slow fox trot — very fast. One of my counselor friends called me, “Speedy.”

Back in the city I went on a few dates with girls I met through the counselors at camp. Socially, I was about as smooth an operator as I was in math.

A school tradition was for seniors to wear a hat designating them as seniors. Inexplicably, chosen for the senior class hat was a French foreign legion model with a flap hanging from the back. We must have looked absurd to the world at large wearing these hats to school, but we bought them because they announced to everyone at Clinton that we were seniors.

We were coming to the end of high school. Several of my classes had been outstanding and the same could be said by anyone who attended public high schools in the city then with that unusual generation of teachers. I received from a teacher whose name was Dr. Bernhard, a 96 in English, the highest grade I had ever been given. I was very pleased, but that was all. I was unable to see that it might have had some significance.

Clinton had its prized students in the school population, its honor students, its Arista. The main advisor to these boys was “Doc” Guernsey, who had been a pal to the elite students for decades and was beloved by them. My final grade in English did not significantly change my overall academic record. I averaged out to be an average student, so I did not know “Doc” Guernsey, nor did he know me. His colleagues who were friendly with the prized students did not know me either and I did not know them. I passed through high school completely anonymous academically.

The Paradise Pizzeria was our Stork Club. When we started dating this was the place you took a girl you wanted to be seen with because other guys and other girls might be there to see her with you.

Located at 184th Street and Morris Avenue, it was the place people went to after a movie or for a stand-alone meal on an evening out. A legitimate neighborhood restaurant, not a slice joint, The Paradise had size, quite a few tables, and a jukebox. Now and again a neighborhood weisenheimer would drop money in the jukebox on his way out of the place, running away laughing with his friends, leaving behind something like five repeats of an irritating recording like Eddie Fisher's rendition of
Oh! My Pa-Pa
.

Given the number of places there were to buy pizza in the Bronx — which expanded exponentially in the 1950s — and given that the Bronx had its own “Little Italy in the Bronx” area with the Arthur Avenue section of the east Bronx, I would not go near saying The Paradise served the best pizza in the Bronx. I will say it was delicious.

A thought about the Arthur Avenue area. For my sister, cousins, and their boyfriends, Arthur Avenue was an eating destination — sometimes they brought me along — the Arthur Avenue area featuring the first steak house many Bronx residents ever went to, Dominick's, eventually superseded by another Dominick's. The original Dominick's was pridefully regarded by Bronxites as good as any steak restaurant downtown. I wouldn't have been able to weigh in on that, never having eaten in a steakhouse downtown.

To the rear of the Concourse Center of Israel synagogue was a small chapel on Creston Avenue, wood-shingled with a few outside stairs, the small house used for daily prayer service. Those stairs became a neighborhood hangout for the boys and girls from the immediate vicinity. We took turns sitting on the steps, at times only the boys while the girls leaned against cars or gathered nearby, at times, the reverse. And at times we mixed, with the spillover extending to the sidewalk. Testing out our emerging mental capacities, we would play charades together and sometimes order pizza from the Paradise.

The pizza at the Paradise Pizzeria was the first pizza I knew and I carry the Paradise pizza memory with me. The pizza had a distinct tomato sauce taste. The cheese, which was not excessive, and the tomato sauce were in balance, not like those pies, soggy with cheese, the taste of tomato sauce indiscernible, that now pass for “New York pizza.” To this day when I eat pizza I look for that element of tomato sauce. Six decades later I'm still comparing pizza with the pizza at The Paradise Pizzeria.

A few years ago, I was on the platform of the 86th Street and Lexington Avenue subway station and I noticed four people, obviously tourists, looking at a map. I asked if I could help. One of them said, “We're trying to get to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.” “Okay,” I responded. “Go downstairs and take the Number Four to the Bronx and get off at Fordham Road. When you get off, transfer to a bus going east toward the Bronx Zoo. Ask somebody. Make sure you're going toward the zoo. Tell the driver you want Arthur Avenue and can he call out the stop. When you get off the bus, walk in exactly the direction you're facing, which will be south. A few blocks and you'll find the area you're looking for. If the driver forgets and you reach the zoo, you've gone a couple of blocks too far.” “Thanks,” one of them said, very offhandedly, and they blithely went along their way. I had to smile. They probably thought — ask any New Yorker for directions and he'll tell you how to go. In a ten-block radius there was probably nobody other than me, including the subway clerk, who could have given them those exact, correct directions.