My Old Neighborhood Remembered (6 page)

Alexander's offered the illusion of upscale shopping. It had department store size and variety and some fashionable items, but it was fundamentally a discount operation. With a working class clientele, which was the largest share of the population of the Bronx, this discount store with its modern architecture and promise of quality for value, was the perfect store for the Bronx.

My mother was a graduate of Morris High School in the Bronx and then she became the housekeeper for her several working older brothers. She married my father and through their marriage still had not yet held a formal job. When my father left, my mother, without money, with two children, her life in disarray, walked the few blocks from our apartment to Alexander's and applied for a job. This was 1941 and she was hired as a stock clerk for fourteen dollars a week. She became a salesgirl. A department manager. An assistant buyer working in children's clothing. It was postwar by then and simple blouses, sweaters, and skirts for girls were evolving into something new, children's sportswear, and Alexander's was selling it, and my mother was there for the start of it and she had an eye for it. She shuttled between the Alexander's store on the Grand Concourse and the store on Third Avenue.

J. W. Mays in downtown Brooklyn, another discount department store, was beginning to sell children's sportswear and my mother was hired as the children's sportswear buyer at J. W. Mays. Each day she traveled a long trip to and from Brooklyn on the D train and the A train. But she had become a buyer.

My mother had a long and successful career. She held other jobs after J. W. Mays, and died at 87 working nearly to the end of her life. My mother always credited the buyer who picked her out of the salesgirl line and gave her the promotions that helped launch her out of the working class. Anyone who might have cared is long gone now, but out of respect to my mother, and to that person, her name was Frances Simmons and the store was Alexander's.

The Yankees, logically, were our most popular team, but Giants fans were also sprinkled among us. The Giants' ballpark, the Polo Grounds, was only one subway stop away from Yankee Stadium and routinely we went to both Yankee games and to Giants games. Ebbets Field, in some mysterious place in Brooklyn, always seemed too far away. At the nearby Polo Grounds we could see the Dodgers and some of the outstanding National League players the Yankees didn't play against during the regular season, like Stan Musial and Ralph Kiner.

When a team with a star was coming in for a weekend series you felt the buzz among your friends on the street. Bob Feller pitching the Friday night opener for the Cleveland Indians or the Dodgers against the Giants for a series at the Polo Grounds — was anybody going? Going to a baseball game was not unlike going to the movies in that it wasn't a big deal, you just went. A typical moment: my sister and cousins decide to go to the Polo Grounds to see the Giants play the Cardinals and they gather me up — the little kid in the house — and we all go to the ball game at the Polo Grounds. We had more Yankee fans in that group than Giants fans. The idea was merely to go to a game as entertainment. Both ball parks were right there.

A separate thought within that. I was always being gathered up. I had no father. I
was
watched over. The people around me, my mother, my aunt and uncle would take me along to the movies, and my sister, my cousins, their boyfriends who became their husbands, would take me with them when you might not necessarily take a child, such as when they were going to a baseball game within their own social lives.

I once saw a replica of the vanished Polo Grounds in the Museum of the City of New York and what came back to me was an olfactory memory, the way the damp Polo Grounds corridors smelled of beer.

Youngsters my age were fortunate to be coming into the peak of our baseball awareness at the very moment the game was changed by Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers for the 1947 season. Nobody I knew who was a Yankee fan rooted against the Dodgers or the Giants. They were also New York home teams, their ballplayers familiar to us. Only if they were playing against the Yankees in the World Series did you want them to lose. Jackie Robinson on the Dodgers didn't mean we rooted against him, rather it was — why didn't we get him? He was spectacular. The sight of Robinson running from home to second on a double, or first to third on a single in his choppy, rapid stride, and the way he tormented pitchers with his leads off the bases was something you never forget.

My cousin, Leo, was the serviceman overseas I wrote to during the war. Prior to his entering service he was looking for a white collar job and anti-Semitism being what it was in corporate life, rather than present himself as Leo Cohn, he changed his name to Leo Brody. After the war, Leo Brody found a job unusual for the times and for Bronx boys, Cohn or Brody. He became a motion picture publicist and worked for Eagle-Lion Films, the distributor of the 1950 movie,
The Jackie Robinson Story
, which starred Jackie Robinson playing himself. My cousin came to know Robinson as he shepherded him around for interviews and told me that one night they were walking along the street and somebody shouted angrily at Robinson after a game in which he did not do well at the plate, “What kind of hitting is that?” Jackie Robinson's response makes you wonder about the toll extracted for everything he gave. He died at only 53. He said to my cousin, “What do they want from me?”

In 1948, Satchel Paige, the long-time star of Negro baseball, became the oldest rookie in baseball history when he joined the Cleveland Indians at 42, an age that was disputed by some sportswriters as being too low. We were captivated by Satch and who wouldn't be, he was so colorful with his long, gangly motion on the mound. He made a significant contribution to the Indians, going 6 and 1 with a 2.48 ERA in 1948, helping the team win the American League pennant and ultimately the World Series. In our pitching-in stickball games we imitated Satchel Paige, trying to copy his Hesitation Pitch, a sweet moment in New York street games history, little white kids from the Bronx trying to be like Satchel Paige.

Two seasons after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, their counterpart National League team in New York, the Giants, added two African-American players to their roster, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson. Arrogant and stubborn in their racial prejudice, it took eight years after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers for the Yankees to integrate, one of the last major league ball clubs to sign an African-American ballplayer. Finally, in 1955, Elston Howard was added to the team.

I could not realize when I started out to be a Yankee fan how calcified the Yankees would be about race and class. Yankee Stadium sat at the southwest corner of the Bronx, removed from the rest of the borough. I cannot recall any outreach of the New York Yankees of those years into the community life of the Bronx. Not a single youth activity comes to mind for the area of the Bronx where I lived that bore a New York Yankees sponsorship. They were the imperial Yankees.

Radio broadcasts of baseball games were essential listening. At Orchard Beach you could wander along and hear from blanket to blanket on portable radios Mel Allen's voice calling a game. The very idea of a portable radio was somehow intriguing. It was portable, imagine. My pals would sit on the steps of the side door of the Bronx High School of Science, or another hang-out spot, the steps of the chapel behind the Concourse Center of Israel synagogue and listen to ball games. Except Richie Albert, who owned the one portable radio in our group, would turn it off during a tense at-bat saying he couldn't stand it and we would be apoplectic, but it was his radio.

Aided by ticker tape, radio broadcasts of road games were simulated in the studio. They were not a source of humor even with stilted sound effects to simulate the crack of the bat and roar of the crowd and long delays by the announcers as the tape came through. This was serious, interesting stuff, ball games coming to us from distant cities.

The nicknames: “The Yankee Clipper” and “Joe D.,” “King Kong” Keller, “Old Reliable” Tommy Henrich, “Tiny” Bonham, “Spud” Chandler, “Scooter” Rizzuto. Lawrence Peter Berra was never anything but “Yogi.” I liked the name of one Yankee opponent, the outfielder for the wartime Washington Senators, “Bingo” Binks, just for the sound of it. Because of who he was, I also appreciated Ted Williams' nicknames, “The Thumper,” “Ted the Thump,” “The Kid,” “The Splendid Splinter.” We respected Ted Williams. When I was older, still living in the Bronx, I took a trip through New England with a friend from the neighborhood and we stopped in Boston and went to Fenway Park. The Yankees weren't playing Boston. We went there to see Ted Williams play, an homage from a couple of Yankee fans to see Ted Williams in left field at Fenway at the end of his career. He had been having a running spat with the sports writers and the fans. That day in Fenway Park the Red Sox fans booed him. His playing career interrupted twice for wartime service in two separate wars and still he compiled gaudy statistics, likely the greatest hitter of all time, booed in his own ball park. I don't think he was ever booed in Yankee Stadium.

In 1946, lights were installed at Yankee Stadium and the first night games were played. To market the idea of night games the Yankees scheduled events before night games were played. Yankee players competed against one another in relaying the ball from the outfield to home plate, in running the bases, hitting home runs. A klieg light similar to the ones used to illuminate the ball park was set up at second base and the catchers tried to hit it on a throw from home plate. I went on one of those nights and it was baseball heaven.

Rooting for the Yankees allowed for many highlights and then in a separate category was the 1949 season. To be thirteen and follow your team as Joe DiMaggio misses the first couple of months of the schedule with his famous bone spur and returns to hit .346 the rest of the season, and for your team to go into the final two games of the season playing at home against the Red Sox, who are leading by one game and need only one of those two games to clinch the pennant, and for the Yankees to win both games, win the pennant, and then go on to beat the Dodgers in the World Series — I had an outstanding season in 1949.

My mother handed me a baseball glove one night and told me it was Joe DiMaggio's glove. She was then a buyer and knew various children's clothing manufacturers and said one of the men she did business with was a personal friend of Joe DiMaggio's and gave her the glove when he learned she had a son. The best I can say about it was that it was an old, scuffed baseball glove. The glove did not bear an engraved Joe DiMaggio signature. It had not been autographed in ink by Joe DiMaggio. It was so well used you could barely make out the markings, but it was, according to the engraved signature, a Lyn Lary model. Now Lyn Lary had been a shortstop for the Yankees and a Lyn Lary glove was a fairly popular model, but I asked my mother why Joe DiMaggio would be using a Lyn Lary glove. The person who gave my mother the glove apparently anticipated my question because my mother said she had been informed by this man that the players didn't necessarily use the gloves they endorsed and that Joe DiMaggio liked that particular model. It sounded possible, not likely, but possible. I wasn't assertive enough to ask my mother to go back and get Joe DiMaggio's autograph on it or even Joe DiMaggio's autograph on a piece of paper.

The next day I took the glove and walked up the short street from our building to Creston Avenue where my friends congregated and I announced I had Joe DiMaggio's glove, that my mother knew somebody who was a personal friend of his and it was his old glove. The glove was examined and immediately someone declared it was a Lyn Lary glove, that it said Lyn Lary on it. I explained that the players didn't necessarily use the gloves they endorsed and Joe DiMaggio liked that model. Nobody was buying it. The unanimous verdict was I showed up with any old baseball glove. I kept the glove and I used it for punchball and stickball. Was it Joe DiMaggio's glove? Beats me. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you have a glove that is supposed to be Joe DiMaggio's glove and you don't have proof of it and your friends don't believe it, is it Joe DiMaggio's glove?

We didn't play baseball, not in my neighborhood. My friends were such obsessed baseball fans, we followed our teams so intensely, so much of our street games had baseball in them, in the rules, in the fantasy aspects, they were street game versions
of
baseball, but actually playing baseball wasn't our experience. Boys who lived near parks in the Bronx with sandlot baseball fields, and there were a few such parks, might have had a different experience. Our neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhoods were dense with apartment buildings and retail stores and no baseball fields.

Creston Junior High School ran an intramural program, basketball indoors in the fall, softball in the schoolyard in the spring. Living right near the basketball court at the Bronx High School of Science we grew up with basketball skills and did well in basketball at Creston. We were also able to make the transition from stickball and punchball to softball in the Creston program and were passable softball players. We had no interest in playing baseball. With baseball you needed to be organized to play, nine players, hopefully, and another team to play against, and equipment. In Brooklyn, youngsters had the Parade Grounds League and Kiwanis-sponsored teams. We did not have a similar institutional presence organizing baseball for our neighborhood. And the older guys in the neighborhood from whom we took our cues didn't play baseball, so neither did we.

We were operating out of self protection — if you don't play, you lack the ability to do so, and we didn't play.

One time in an unusual occurrence a group of us went north to the baseball diamonds at Harris Field, located near Bedford Parkway. We were there to play a pickup game with some boys from that general area whom we knew. My pals were woeful on the field. Playing second base because it seemed right for my physique, I was also woeful. We never went back to a baseball diamond again.