My Remarkable Journey (3 page)

“Hey, kid, c’mere.”

I must have gotten a million warnings about staying away from strangers. There was no sin worse than going over to a stranger
in a car who offered candy. I moved a step closer, figuring I could run for it.

A guy got out and opened the trunk. If I saw candy, I was outta there. But curiosity got the best of me and I peered in. There
was no candy. There were comic books. The whole trunk was filled with comic books. And I loved comic books!

“I told my kid if he misbehaved one more time he was going to lose his comics to the first kid I see,” the guy said. “You’re
the first kid.”

I took the treasure up to our apartment.

“Daddy, look,” I said when he got home.

“How’d you get them?”

“A man pulled up in a car.”

“You went to the car?”

“Yeah.”

“What did I tell you about strangers?”

“But—”

Whack!

There was another time when I didn’t go to Hebrew school. I came in for dinner as if everything was normal and joined the
family at the table.

“How was Hebrew school?” my father asked calmly as he ate his soup.

“Fine.”

Whack!

I fell right off the chair.

“Eddie!” my mother gasped. “What are you doing?” Someone had seen me on the street at the time of Hebrew school and tipped
my father off at the bar and grill.

“Don’t lie!”

They say that discipline is a father’s way of showing love. There were times later in my life where a few more of those whacks
might have come in handy. My mother’s love did not come with smacks. Her biggest weakness was that she felt sorry for my loss
and spoiled me. If I had blown a hole in a bank and taken thousands of dollars, she would have asked the police, “Did somebody
make a mistake in his checkbook? Maybe my son had a good reason.”

She apologized, gave excuses, and got me out of every mess I got myself into. Which enabled me to get into the next mess because
I knew that somehow she’d get me out of that one, too. Over the years, so many people came forward to try to fill the hole
left behind by my father. I don’t know if they could sense what I’d lost. It’s a good question. But in the beginning, the
emptiness was not filled by a man. It was filled by the radio.

My days started and ended with the radio—a dark brown Emerson shaped like an arch, with speakers on both sides. Sometimes
my mother, my brother, and I would sit around and stare at the radio as the sound came out. It sounds crazy. What did we do
when the radio was on? We looked at it.

I’d mimic the shows in my deepest baritone.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…
The Shadow wasn’t invisible. He had the power to cloud men’s minds so that they couldn’t see him. He’d learned it in India.
There was Captain Midnight, brought to you by Ovaltine. All of us in the Captain Midnight club had our special decoder.
And now boys, here’s your message for tomorrow. Thirty-six.
You’d work the decoder. T.
Fifteen.
E.…
Terror tomorrow on Caaaaaaaptain Midnight!

We didn’t have television then. But radio was more exciting than watching television because your mind could picture anything.
Listening to a gavel pound at a convention was much more dramatic than watching it. I remember talking about this many years
later with Rod Serling, who was famous for writing
The Twilight Zone
.

“We used to think the scripts on radio were better than on television,” he said. “They weren’t. Radio just allowed you to
imagine better. Let’s say I’m doing a radio script. I write, ‘There’s a dark foreboding castle at the top of the hill.’ Your
mind can see that castle any way you want. If I write the same thing in a television script, I’ve got some guy coming over
to me, saying, ‘Mr. Serling, how would you like that castle? You want steeple tops?’”

I became a radio freak. I knew exactly what was on and when. One of my favorite shows early on was
Uncle Don
. He did a great kids’ show. He would read the comics on Sunday in a wonderful voice. I had my Uncle Don piggy bank. It was
green and yellow and had his picture on it. “Don’t forget, kids, to save your money.” I loved Uncle Don. He had this theme
song:

Rippity-ripscar-hi-lo-zee

Homonio-figgidee-hi-lo-dee

Rodee-kazolts with an alakazon

Sing this song with your Uncle Don

Good night, little boys and girls!

One night, I must have been ten years old, Uncle Don signed off with his trademark, “Good night, little boys and girls!” and
then we heard, “That should hold the little bastards until tomorrow.”

I took my Uncle Don piggy bank and threw it out the window. My mother went crazy. “What are you doing? There’s money in there!”
She ran down three flights of steps to pick up the coins. I’ve never been much for psychobabble. But I’d be hard-pressed to
argue with any psychologist who linked that moment to my financial problems later in life. “Even at an early age, Larry was
throwing his money right out the window.” When I look back, I don’t see the moment as being about money. To me, it was really
about passion.

We never heard from Uncle Don again. But my love for the radio only grew as I got older. I would go to the shows and watch
the sound-effects men rub cellophane together to simulate the crackling of fire.

Best of all, there were Red Barber and Arthur Godfrey. Red made baseball come alive. He taught me the game. He described baseball
in a way that went straight into your soul. There was nothing like the tension of a great Brooklyn Dodgers game. I can still
remember Red Barber on opening day. “Spring training is over,” he said. “They now play in hate.”

Red was so great with pauses. He could really set you up and make you lean in toward that radio. In the war years, announcers
couldn’t travel with the team. They used to announce the accounts that came in by telegraph. We’d hear the tick, tick, tick,
and think that we knew what they meant.
That’s a double!
Sometimes, the ticker would break. I remember Ronald Reagan telling me that when the ticker broke while he was announcing
games he’d have the batter foul off eleven straight pitches until the telegraph came back up. Baseball is a sport made for
radio. But there’s nothing like going to the park. I’ll never forget entering Ebbets Field for the first time, being struck
by how green the grass was, how brown the dirt, how white the lines. I’d sit in the bleachers of Ebbets Field, roll up the
scorecard, and broadcast the game as if I were Red.

Arthur Godfrey was something else. He was the first rule breaker, and he encouraged me to take risks. One day I was home from
school with a fever. My mother was working and my brother was at school. Godfrey was on, and he went into a Peter Pan peanut
butter commercial.

He said, “I talk about Peter Pan peanut butter every day. When I tell you how good it is, you can believe me or you can not
believe me. But I’m not going to give you the same old message today. What I’m going to do today is I’m going to eat some.
I know this breaks the rules, because it’s not going to sound right. But I’m going to take this dollop of Peter Pan peanut
butter and I’m going to put it in grunddmadrudmdrmgdrrumumnurdurdumdmdm.”

I got out of bed, got dressed, went to the store, and bought some Peter Pan peanut butter. I was eating it on the way home.

By the time I was in junior high school, I already knew. You could see it in the school yearbook. They asked me what I wanted
to be, and I told them: a radio announcer.

B
ROTHER

There’s no denying that our situation would have been different if my father had lived. We wouldn’t have gone on Relief. There
would have been more stability and discipline in our home. And we wouldn’t have moved when we did.

So much of Larry’s childhood was formed by where we moved—Bensonhurst. It’s one of those things. If you make one little change
in life, it changes everything that follows.

D
AUGHTER

I wasn’t there. But when I try to imagine my father at nine, I see the child of Jewish immigrants who’s absolutely loved.
I see the classic and overprotective mother. I see him very close to his father. I see the family struggling financially,
but with a very strong sense of home. Then in one moment his father is taken, and I think he was crushed in his soul.

He may have been angry at his father for leaving. But ultimately that falls upon the God whom his mother was taking him to
worship at temple. Something in him turned that day. I don’t know that he’s ever cried about his father’s death. It’s one
of my softnesses and pains for him, because if he hasn’t cried, then that anger and grief is still stored. It got translated
into a go-go-go personality that never stops to reflect. In a way, he turned that grief into good. He turned it into a great
career, and he became famous. But that doesn’t make that pain go away.

P
AUL NEWMAN
once told me that whenever he arrived in a city halfway around the world after a long flight, he would turn on the hotel
television to see me. I was his connection to America, he said, his connection home.

A lot of people have made comments like that over the years. The map that is the backdrop of my CNN set is one of the most
recognized television images in the world. I’ve been in front of that backdrop night after night for almost a quarter of a
century. Maybe, as Woody Allen once joked, 80 percent of success is simply showing up. But that sense of home that people
talk about, there’s much more to it than just sitting behind a microphone night after night. My guess is, it comes from Brooklyn.

I couldn’t imagine a better place to grow up than Brooklyn in the ’40s. Back then, Brooklyn had all the benefits of a small
town. The butcher and the owner of the candy store down the street were like your extended family. There was permanence. After
all these years, a photo of my friend Sid and his all-star basketball team still hangs in a glass case in the Jewish Community
House of Bensonhurst. And yet the Brooklyn we grew up in was bigger than Philadelphia. You could get on the subway and go
to see one of three major league baseball teams. Brooklyn was home to millions of immigrants. So it was a place where permanence
intermingled with change. It’s said that if you’re walking down any street in America today, one out of six people you bump
into will have some association with Brooklyn.

I not only realized what a great place it was after I left, I knew it was a great place at the time. Anybody who spent his
formative years in Bensonhurst will tell you that those years were the best years of his life. Nobody moved, nobody divorced,
and your friends were your friends forever. Fifty years later, you could be walking down the street, meet somebody you knew
casually from high school, and you’d be best pals in five minutes. Maybe you can say this about a lot of places. I’ve never
grown up anywhere else and have no way to compare. Except that Mario Cuomo once told me, “Everybody heard about Bensonhurst.
I don’t know what it is, I grew up in Queens. I had a lot of friends, and a great childhood, but there’s something about where
you
grew up. We heard about it in Queens.”

Simply walking to the corner of 86th Street and Bay Parkway gave you friends with nicknames.

There was Inky Kaplan, who told a teacher he’d drink the bottle of ink on his desk before he’d apologize for something he’d
done in class. He had blue teeth for six months… and grew up to become a dentist.

There was Hoo-ha Horowitz. You’d mention somebody to him and he’d say, “Who?” as if he didn’t hear you. And you’d say, “Hah?”
That’s how he became Hoo-ha.

Joe Bellen was Joe Bush. I don’t know why he was Joe Bush. But he was Joe Bush, and he’ll always be Joe Bush.

I was Zeke the Creek the Mouthpiece because I was always talking and it rhymed.

My best friend, Herb Cohen, was Herbie the Negotiator. Herbie was a troublemaker who specialized in getting us out of trouble
after getting us in neck deep. Our chemistry was perfect. I love stimuli. Herbie was a stimulus.

I met him at Junior High School 128 when we both were given signs that said Stop and were assigned to be traffic monitors
in front of the school. “How about you keep your side moving,” Herbie suggested, “while I keep my side moving.” We waved the
cars right into each other and created a traffic jam that stretched for blocks.

The principal demanded to see us… and our mothers. It was one of many times my mother was forced to make the trek to that
office. But at least that time she became friends with Herbie’s mother.

There are a million Herbie stories. But the one that tells them all is the Moppo story. It happened while we were in ninth
grade. In the New York City system, ninth grade was the final year of junior high school. The following year, we’d be going
to Lafayette High.

In the middle of the year, we noticed that a kid we called Moppo wasn’t showing up for school. His real name was Gil Mermelstein.
But we called him Moppo because he had wild curly hair. A few more days passed, still no Moppo. So we went by Moppo’s house
to find out what happened. There was me, who wanted to be a broadcaster. There was Herbie the Negotiator, who wanted to be
a lawyer. And Brazzi Abbate, who wanted to be a doctor.

All the shades at Moppo’s house were drawn. Sitting on the stoop in front of their building was Moppo’s cousin, who lived
in New Jersey. He was Moppo’s only living relative in the Northeast.

There’d been a tragedy, the cousin told us. Moppo had contracted tuberculosis. As soon as they found out, Moppo’s parents
took him to Tucson, Arizona, with the hope that the climate would help him recover.

The cousin had come from Jersey to tell the school that Moppo had moved, and to wait for the phone company to disconnect the
line.