My Old Neighborhood Remembered (4 page)

Our literacy came to us courtesy of Dick and Jane and teachers who knew how to teach to the Dick and Jane books.

Odd to say it, the war was also an aid to our reading skills since we children followed the war in the newspapers.

Depending on the headlines, all of the large number of daily newspapers in New York City in the 1940s ended up in our apartment at some time or another,
The Bronx Home News, The Daily News, The Daily Mirror, The New York Post, The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, PM, The Journal American, The World-Telegram, The Sun
, which became
The World-Telegram & Sun
.

Comic books were also an aid to literacy. We had the high-brow comic books,
True Comics
with comic book depictions of real people and events: “He Bombed Tokyo, James Doolittle.” “Houdini, the Man Who Mystified the World.”
Classic Comics
, entire issues given over to one classic title,
The Count of Monte Cristo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. I was not thrilled about Archie, Betty and Veronica but they appeared in comics and I still read them. We were at war and we had Captain Marvel, Sub-Mariner, and Wonder Woman to take on the enemy. The publishers of Superman sidestepped the dilemma created by his character — why doesn't Superman just end the war? — by having Superman a generally passive presence during the war.

We also read pulp fiction magazines and here I ignored the mainstays, detective pulp fiction and fantasy pulp fiction in favor of a sub-genre, sports pulp fiction.

Eventually, we made our way to the library to read real books. The brilliance of library systems, of guiding children along developmentally, was fully realized in our local branches. Story hour was a gorgeous custom, tykes crouched on the floor as a librarian read stories, the librarian lighting candles to mark the occasion of story hour with ceremony.

They should have kept the custom forever — to get your first library card you needed to stand before a librarian and read an oath aloud proclaiming you would abide by the rules of the library and take care of the books you borrowed.

When I was older I went by myself or with friends, the nearest library about a fifteen minute walk from our apartment. The walk gave the activity seriousness of purpose. You walked back with your arms full. I can only remember one title of a book I borrowed out of the many from my childhood library and it is obvious why I would remember that one. I had a dog and the title I remember is,
Lad: A Dog
, by Albert Payson Terhune.

We had the streets to ourselves for a while. We roller skated on the smooth, black asphalt with metal skates we clamped to our shoes and tightened with a skate key, and few of us could stop short; you slid on to a parked car. The asphalt was a perfect, dark surface to draw on with chalk, to draw pictures or play hangman, a word game where you tried to figure out a word your opponent chose and your wrong guesses were penalized and depicted by a chalk-drawn gallows which would hang you.

In the streets we had room to run and dart away in ringo-levio, “one, two, three.” Skelly was played with bottle caps flicked with your fingers along the asphalt. In Johnny-on-the-pony you would take a running start in the street and pile on a chain made by your friends' bodies. Jump rope was skipped on the sidewalks and in the streets, “A, my name is Alice, and my husband's name is Adam, we come from Albania, and we sell apples.”

For off-the-point, a pink Spaldeen (made by Spalding, but never called a Spalding) was fired at the molding of a building so it ricocheted into the street, caught on a fly and you were out, bouncing once for a single, twice for a double, three times for a triple, up against the wall of the building across the street for a home run or caught off that wall for an out. Touch football with a real football or with newspapers rolled up and tied was played with blocking, and association football without blocking.

We were all over the streets with marbles when the marbles season arrived, suddenly, as if by decree. One day before, no marbles, the next day, marbles everywhere, our immies and purees and kabolas. The idea was to end the season with a big bag of marbles which we could admire for their beauty.

We would sit on the curb and at our feet we placed a box with cut-out holes and we would challenge all comers to roll their marbles into one of the holes from a fixed point in the street and we kept their marbles if they missed and paid off with a number of marbles if they shot it in the hole, depending on their distance from the box. In the high stakes version we would place a single marble between our legs and call out, “Hit the marble and get fifty” and from across the street the challengers would roll their marbles and try to hit yours. Freddy Krongold rolled a marble straight for the mark from across the street, hit my marble and wiped me out. I had marbles days of victory. In my marbles career that was a major defeat.

Punchball was usually a substitute for stickball when we didn't have a stickball stick or enough players. And we had stickball itself, the largest in scale of the street games, played with a bat that was once a broomstick or mopstick, cut to size from the hole in a manhole cover. Our version was where you self-hit the ball and ran the bases, a game that made us into borderline delinquents — windows could get broken — and the police broke up games, confiscating our bats which we tried to hide on running boards curbside when cars still had running boards.

A neighborhood baptism was to shout at the police, “You guys should be out chasing robbers,” which you shouted just as you started running away, or an outfielder yelled, “Chickie the cops!” and the batter hid the stick and we pretended to be playing punchball with the outfielders a block away from home plate, a lame pretense since nobody could possibly punch a ball that far.

The superintendents of buildings were the enemies of stickball. The more aggressive of these supers nabbed our Spaldeens and punctured them with a pen knife.

In a good game with full sides of players stickball cut across age differences in our neighborhood, we kids played, older guys joined in, grown men. It was a beautiful street game. Even a lesser player could whack a ball and it would fly. Adults sometimes stood on the sidewalk or sat in folding chairs and watched us. Stickball could take up an entire city block, and why not?

Gas rationing was eliminated with the end of the war and the volume of cars moving through the streets increased dramatically. In our immediate neighborhood the main playing area was Creston Avenue along a two-block stretch. Other neighborhoods in the Bronx may have continued with a full range of games in the streets, not the case in our neighborhood. The heavily trafficked Grand Concourse was one short block away. Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue, also major streets, were nearby, so Creston Avenue drew collateral traffic. With the cars coming through in volume, we couldn't freely play games in the street any longer. We organized an occasional stickball game, but it had become too difficult to sustain.

Potsie, also called hopscotch, came out of the street onto the sidewalks, and that is where jump rope was now played exclusively, and with the lines in the sidewalk cement we played box ball, hit-the-penny, and curves. Curves involved digging your fingers into the Spaldeen and pitching it into a box in front of your opponent who tried to slap it into the box in front of you. If it bounced once it was a single, and so on.

We were busy on the sidewalks, we were not in the streets, although we were in our nearest schoolyard. Like farmers using terraced landscaping, we exploited all the possibilities of the adjacent schoolyard of the Bronx High School of Science on Creston Avenue. The space was small by schoolyard standards and was never used by the school or the Science students. It did have a basketball court and since it was right there, we all played a considerable amount of basketball, and occasionally punchball in the basketball area, and handball against a wall of the school building, and box ball against a wall of the yard, and in a narrow area behind the basketball court we managed pitching-in stickball, hitting out into the street. Displaced from the street, we used everything there.

In an early example of clubhouse politics, when the basketball pole in the Science schoolyard collapsed, one of the older fellows who was active in Democratic Party circles and who hired us to distribute campaign literature at election times, intervened and within days we had a new pole and backboard in the yard.

We scrambled over all the possible playing areas of the Science schoolyard and we played on the sidewalks, but the golden age of our street games, of children large and small in the street with chalk and marbles and jump ropes and Spaldeens and stickball bats had ended, overrun by Buicks and DeSotos like hippopotamuses in our midst.

A major distinction between candy stores turned on two important elements, food and bookmakers. Some candy stores served food, mainly sandwiches. This distinguished them from those that did not. Some candy stores featured a resident bookmaker. This distinguished them from those that did not.

A luncheonette, as opposed to a candy store, concentrated on food and soda fountain items, but not candy store items. Candy store items were what made a candy store a candy store: Spaldeens, wax lips, Sen-Sen, Bromo-Seltzer, playing cards, Yo-yos, bubble gum, loose cigarettes, packaged cigarettes, chalk, jacks, baseball cards, compasses, button candy, wax bottles, marbles, packaged candy like Suchard chocolate, “say soo-shard,” and Bonomo's Turkish Taffy, book covers, white paste in a jar, marshmallow twists, halvah, erasers, bottled sodas, marble-covered notebooks, pretzels, jawbreakers, pencils, candy in a tin cup with a tin spoon, licorice, pens, pen points, chocolate babies, loose-leaf hole reinforcements, jelly candy, batteries, rulers, cigars, paddle balls, gumdrops, razor blades, candy cigarettes, protractors, Dixie Cups, Popsicles, Fudgsicles, Mello-Rolls, coconut squares, harmonicas, comic books, coloring books, crayons, egg creams, malteds, lime rickeys, cherry Cokes, flavored sodas, ice cream sodas, frappes, sundaes, loose ice cream — a quart, a pint, a half pint, a gill — magazines, pulp fiction, newspapers.

Some candy stores had a wide enough storefront for an open window and signs with pictures of drinks and the prices, and a customer could stand on the sidewalk outside and sip drinks there.

The food counter in the five-and-ten also displayed pictures of drinks and food. The five-and-ten food counter was neither luncheonette nor candy store, but should be noted for the food art placed overhead on display, notably the Mona Lisa of the genre, the color picture of the hot turkey sandwich with a puddle of gravy sitting in the mashed potatoes.

Along with food, a major difference between candy stores were the bookmakers. They set up in either food or non-food candy stores, bookmakers being adaptable chaps. An indication of a candy store with a bookmaker was a sign on the sidewalk outside the store advertising “Cars to the Track.” If a bookmaker didn't hang out in such a place, and he probably did, then the horseplayers there could tell a person where to find one. Or a bookmaker might just be set up in his booth or on his stool at a conventional candy store working his book.

In a ritual for the horseplayers who wanted to see the early line for the next day's races, and for people looking to get a jump on the news, they would mill around the candy stores in the evening waiting for the first editions of
The News
and
The Mirror
to arrive.

Candy stores were as reliable as anything in our lives. They were open for long hours. Get up early in the morning, the newspapers were there. Need something at night from a candy store and there it was. In hot weather, for children it was our lifeline given the enormous amount of sodas and ice cream we required to get through life. Since candy stores bought their stock from the same suppliers, you weren't disappointed wherever you went, to your candy store or one that happened to be near where you were standing at that moment. You had something in mind, you bought it, you got exactly what you had in mind. Chocolate licorice was chocolate licorice. Some candy stores might have been lighter on the ice cream in an ice cream soda, more generous with their malteds, stingier with milk in an egg cream than others, but you weren't going to get a bad egg cream anywhere. Could there be a bad anything from a candy store fountain?

Sometimes we tried to be inventive, asking for different combinations of drinks, a chocolate Coke, a Coca-Cola ice cream soda, a vanilla egg cream. You were always looking for value, so Mission bottled sodas, containing a larger portion than bottles of Coke or Pepsi were appreciated, Mission orange a leading seller.

Naturally, people think their favorite candy store was the best. They were all the best. And mine was the best. This was Fisher's candy store in the street below our apartment. Fisher's was in the category of serving food with no bookmaker. Mr. Fisher featured an ice milk specialty, a “frozen malted.” People came there for it specifically, which made Fisher's a rarity among neighborhood candy stores, a destination candy store.

In recalling candy stores of the past, some people cite the time before everyone had a telephone and customers would receive calls in a candy store and someone from the store would summon them. This is not a recollection of my days in the Bronx. We had phones in the apartments. A common memory is of the grumpy candy store owner harassing children who lingered over a comic book in the store without buying and the owner would chase them out of the store, not a recollection of mine either.

Because we lived in the building where the candy store was located, because they saw someone or other from our family on a regular basis, because I was a little boy who lived upstairs, for one, all, or none of these reasons, Mr. Fisher was lovely to me. I was given complete access to read comic books for as long as I wanted. When I was really little I would scrunch in a corner near the entrance of the store and when I was older I would sit in the rear and read away. A generous gift, to be able to read comic books to your heart's content from the entire array of comic books in a candy store. It made me feel like a rich kid.