My Old Neighborhood Remembered Read online

  In 5th grade, our class drew an emotional bully as the teacher. She continually berated us for being stupid and sloppy in our habits and nowhere near the excellence of her daughter, close to our age, attending another school, whom she constantly held up to us. I hope things worked out for that girl. I did something really dumb one day and this teacher came down on me. When she wasn’t looking I pocketed a ball she had taken away from one of my friends in the class and left on her desk. I seized it surreptitiously and gave it back to him. This is pure elementary school theatrics — the teacher told us she was going out of the room and the ball was to be returned to her desk in her absence, and if not, someone was going to get in serious trouble. I didn’t like this teacher and I was tired of her bullying and I wasn’t going to give in to her, not realizing in my 5th grade naivete that she knew I had snatched the ball.

  She came back in, saw the ball was not there, walked directly to me and said I was the one and my mother was going to have to come to school. My mother come to school? My mother was working. My mother couldn’t come to school.

  It was agreed at home that for my conduct problem, my sister, who was a high school student, would come to school instead of my mother. And she did and it was embarrassing, the boys whistling at her as she came in, the fact that I couldn’t even get a parent to show up. Well, that was in my mind. I was officially labeled a bad boy in the eyes of this teacher, on the road to suspension if I didn’t mend my bad boy ways.

  The teacher, let’s call her Mrs. S____. We’ll give her a break on the name. Mrs. S____ liked to repeat a story about a World War II soldier who had been in her class. He was told in battle, “heads down,” and he put his head down because he learned in her class how to listen, and others didn’t, and a bomb exploded and they were all killed, but he wasn’t because, yes, he learned in her class how to listen.

  I once attended the opening of a recreation center in St. James Park and addressed a group of P.S. 33 students who were brought there for the opening ceremony and I told them that I had attended their school long, long ago, and that I remembered having a really mean teacher. “Who? Who?” a couple of them called out. I declined to answer, but afterward a woman came up to me and said she was a teacher at P.S. 33 and had attended the school herself. “Was the teacher Mrs. S____?” “Yes,” I answered. “I knew it!” she said. “She was so mean.”

  The mean ones, the strict ones, the nice ones were, by and large, career professionals. Many of our teachers came to teaching during The Depression. With the scarcity of jobs then, teaching was considered secure with decent pay. The approved occupation for intelligent women from the lower to middle class was to be a teacher. For intelligent men of their social class, for Jews and other minorities, corporate jobs were not available to them. Some of these men also gravitated to teaching. When we came through as school children in the 1940s and 1950s, they were there in place for us, these professionals — intelligent, conscientious people who might not have been teachers at a later time. Eventually, they phased out, they retired, people who became teachers because prejudice and economic conditions prevented them from being anything else. They were a unique generation of teachers. We children, not economically privileged, were privileged to be taught by them in in those schools.

  Even with Mrs. S______, when she passed us on to 6th grade, we were ready for 6th grade.

  In 1997, I heard from Richard Kobliner, a former classmate and friend from the neighborhood, who had become a teacher himself in the New York City public schools system and was active in education circles. He somehow assembled a rough list of names and addresses of the P.S. 33 6th grade graduating class of June 1947, and a lunch was planned in a midtown Manhattan restaurant for the fiftieth anniversary of our graduation. He later explained some might have been confused and thought the reunion was just for our particular class, not the entire grade. Even at that, about thirty or so people came. A few brought their spouses. We were all in our early sixties. We were having difficulty trying to identify anyone, then when you looked at a name tag what clicked in was a face of a 6th grader.

  We talked among ourselves and brought each other up to date as people always do at a reunion. Then we went around the room and we spoke to the group at large about something specific we remembered from the time when we were in school together. We probably hadn’t thought about it in decades. I certainly hadn’t. A theme emerged. We were children of the home front during World War II.

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  THE HOME FRONT

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  On December 7, 1941, I had just turned six years old and sat on the living room floor drawing primitive pictures of the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the best of my understanding. On September 2, 1945, when the Japanese formally surrendered, I was a couple of months shy of ten years old. In going from six to ten my range of comprehension evolved through these war years, as had that of my classmates, to a somewhat older child’s sense of what it meant for the nation to be at war.

  The war was embedded in our day to day life, the home front war all around us, the daily war news in the newspapers and on the radio, the weekly war reports in the news-reels, the shortages, the rationing, the posters, “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” the people in uniform, the air raid wardens with their helmets and arm bands, the bunting in store windows, the parades along the Grand Concourse, the patriotism, the propaganda, the cartoon images of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini.

  In front of the Loew’s Paradise for a war bond drive, Liberty Bell Bridge was constructed and people who bought a bond could ascend the bridge and stand at a facsimile of the Liberty Bell and ring the bell for freedom. A captured Japanese two-man submarine was on display near Liberty Bell Bridge and people could look inside and observe how small the submarine was, which translated to how sneaky the enemy was. We were a nation at war, the Bronx was at war, our neighborhood, our block, our building, our families were at war.

  With the war zones so distant, paradoxically the artificial depiction of the war in the movies made the war seem real. Bombs fell in the movies, guns were fired, blood was spilled, people died. These movies were usually simplistic, but then we were children. They worked on our children’s minds in showing us that this war which so absorbed the grownups was being fought against a terrible enemy. We devoured the movies, Wake Island, Guadalcanal Diary, Hitler’s Children, Flying Tigers, Bataan, Winged Victory, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The North Star, The Purple Heart, Sahara, The Fighting Seabees, Pride of the Marines, and at the end of the war, as if to match in kind our getting older, we had the more nuanced, The Story of G.I. Joe.

  As we grew older, our sense of the war changed from a vague feeling of menace to the sense of a real enemy who would kill you. We went from playing with toy soldiers and toy planes and toy battleships to making detailed drawings in our notebooks and in the margins of school papers and on loose sheets, drawings of planes and tanks and guns shooting. We were swimming in war fantasies.

  At the 50th anniversary of our 6th grade graduation, one of our classmates said, “You looked around and suddenly all the men of a certain age were gone.” In windows, banners with a blue star in a white field signified someone in uniform, and here and there a gold star for someone who had died. The Gold Star Mothers, respected, took their place in the Memorial Day parades.

  Whether anything we children did genuinely mattered for what was called, “the war effort,” I cannot be certain. Having all those earnest children involved with the war possibly contributed to the grownups’ morale. It helped our morale. We bought Minutemen stamps and assiduously pasted them into books toward earning a War Bond. We joined in on the scrap paper drives. We saved Dixie Cup covers with action pictures of our fighting heroes. We were conscientious during the air raid drill blackouts making sure all the shades were pulled down tight, no air raid warden was going to shout, “Lights out!” at us. We wrote to our family members in service. The standard symbol of the home front was a framed picture of someone in service. In our family it was my cousin
in his Army Air Force uniform and I wrote to him. It was my duty. We followed the football teams at West Point and Annapolis because they were Army and Navy. We understood shortages. Bubble gum was a scarce item and if we managed to buy a piece in a candy store we kept it for repeated use, storing it in a glass of water overnight like false teeth. We studied silhouettes of enemy aircraft, the Stuka, the Zero, the Messerschmitt, the Focke-Wulf, and would have been able to spot the invaders in the skies, no doubt about it, and call in the sighting to the police.

  On V-E Day, May 8, 1945, with victory in Europe declared, we went crazy, throwing newspapers and toilet paper rolls off rooftops, the streets covered in a blizzard of paper, and we ran through it and kicked it around, a scene repeated on the day of victory over Japan, V-J Day, August 15, 1945. As paper fell on all sides in jubilation on V-J Day, I was on nearby Creston Avenue and happened to see a gold star mother who lived there looking out her window. She emptied a small bag of carefully cut strips of paper, dropping the strips into the street. She watched the paper as the last of it fell to the ground and then she closed her window on the war.

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  MY AUNT AND UNCLE

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  My aunt and uncle would entertain other married deaf-mute couples who frequently came to the apartment to play cards. Their sign language was literal, not the style of signing you see on television and public events when someone is translating for the deaf. That modern style employs a considerable amount of shorthand, a gesture to substitute for a spelled out word. My aunt and uncle and their friends used some shorthand for certain common words, but everything else was indicated letter for letter, specific language, close to written language, as they spelled out the words with their fingers extremely rapidly. When the friends were together they were loud, they made sounds they couldn’t hear, and they used broad facial gestures and every part of their bodies to express themselves, spelling out words emphatically. They communicated. They were geniuses at it.

  An early memory is sitting with either my aunt or my uncle and playing a little sign language game. “I.” You point to yourself. “Love.” You hug yourself. “You.” You point to the other person. “With.” You place your fists together. “All.” You roll your hands over each other. “My.” You place your hand on your chest. “Heart.” You place your hand on your heart.

  My aunt and uncle’s three children, Leo, Selma, Renee — and my mother, my sister, and I — all spoke sign language. I suspected my aunt felt embarrassed to be seen signing on the street. Her exchanges with me were unusually abrupt when we would meet in public. I picked up her embarrassment. I tended not to have prolonged conversations on the street with my aunt and uncle. My aunt had a limited command of guttural spoken language. My uncle could not produce language sounds. He was behind a wall of silence. In his concentrated, silent world, he had great patience for playing with children, as he did with me, as he had done with his own children. At his funeral my cousin, Leo, said, “He walked with the angels.” My aunt, patient with me as well, was my after school card-playing, Chinese checkers chum.

  Eventually, my cousins and my sister married and moved out, leaving the household consisting of my mother and me, and my aunt and uncle. My middle cousin, Selma, and her husband, Norman, who lived in the Bronx, were leaving to live in the suburbs. My aunt announced that she and my uncle were moving out to occupy Selma and Norman’s apartment west of Jerome Avenue in the 170th Street area. I was surprised, but my mother was devastated. Over the years, she had contributed money to the household in increasing amounts, but it was my aunt and uncle’s apartment. From the beginning we were, technically, boarders. The message my mother heard was that my aunt and uncle had been obliged to take us in when we were in need, but now with this other apartment available and my mother financially solvent, they could be free of us. My aunt and uncle may just have had the feeling they wanted their own apartment. My mother didn’t regard it that way. “I thought we were a family,” she said to me, disconsolate.

  My aunt and uncle moved. I would still see them and they were present at family events. When I was going into the Army I went to tell them about it. The draft was in effect. I was approaching the time when I would be drafted and a couple of options were available to me, to serve in the Army for two years, and then I would have to be in the Reserves for three years, or take advantage of the newly created Reserve Forces Act, allowing me to enlist with an Army Reserve or National Guard unit, serve on active duty for six months and then attend weekly meetings for another six years. The comparisons seemed so complicated, the difference between the three years I would have to serve in the Reserves even if I had been on active duty for two years — versus the time I would have to serve if I went the Reserves route, that in trying to explain it to them, I took out a pen and drew a chart on a piece of paper. I was trying to show the differences and why I was choosing to enter through the Reserves. My aunt’s face fell. Writing on a piece of paper was what speaking people, other people, did to make deaf-mutes understand. “You don’t have to write it out,” she signed to me. “We are not stupid.” I had done what I had never done before with them. I wrote something out instead of signing. I felt terrible. I overcompensated with an animated conversation in sign language about anything I could think of.

  I hope they forgave me. When my first child was born — they were still alive then — I brought him to the Bronx so they could see him. The Old Neighborhood, set largely in the Bronx, is dedicated to my sons and to them — my uncle, who played with me with his infinite patience, my aunt, there for me when I came home from school while my mother was working — the people who taught me to sign. “I . . . love . . . you . . . with . . . all . . . my . . . heart.”

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  A TWILIGHT ZONE TYPE OF OCCURRENCE

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  A party was given in Los Angeles in 1981 in connection with the publication of The Old Neighborhood in a private room in a restaurant. Someone in charge of decorating the room for the party went into a photo archive looking for images that might have been relevant to the book and had them enlarged poster-size and placed on the walls. To get the full sense of this, one has to conceive of the odds against. An image chosen was from the May 31, 1946 edition of The New York Daily News, a view of that year’s Memorial Day parade along the Grand Concourse. This was the first Memorial Day parade following the end of the war and it was a big parade with large crowds.

  Out of all the various pictures in a photo archive, this was an image considered relevant to the novel and was chosen for display. The odds also strongly come into play against this particular composition for the picture, considering the march route was several miles long. The building that is in the very forefront of the image, the most prominently displayed building in the photograph, is my building, 175 Field Place, and if you looked closely through the halftone dots, you could see people looking out the window and since I watched all the parades from the window and would have been watching this parade, one of the people seen looking out the window had to be me.

  Thirty-five years after the picture was taken I was looking at the picture which had been chosen to decorate a room for a party celebrating a novel I had written about my old neighborhood, the picture chosen out of any number of possibilities to represent that time and that place, and the picture included a trace of me as a little boy looking out the window.

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  THE TALKING DOG

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  I do not know if The Talking Dog was from the Bronx or only visiting. A crowd of children had gathered around the corner from my apartment near a man with a German shepherd and when I arrived the children were practically jumping up and down with excitement. This is going to sound like a child’s imagination at work. Not so. It happened.

  As I watched, the man said to the dog, “What do you want?” And the dog growled unmistakably, “Wanna hom-burger.” “What?” the man said. “Hom-burger,” the dog answered. To be accurate, the German shepherd spoke with a slight foreig
n accent.

  He repeated the routine with the dog a couple of times and by then I was practically jumping up and down with excitement, too, and we were laughing and grabbing on to each other, barely able to control ourselves, never having seen or heard anything like it. The man then calmly walked away, discouraging us from following him and that would have been the entire story of The Talking Dog, except it’s not.

  About a week later I was listening to the radio, an amateur hour show, Major Bowes or Ted Mack, something like that, and introduced was “The Talking Dog.” The same man’s voice was heard, “What do you want?” And the dog growled unmistakably, “Wanna hom-burger,” with a slight foreign accent. “What?” the man said. “Hom-burger.” And the audience applauded and that was the act. The Talking Dog, who was in my own neighborhood, and who appeared on the radio, was the first celebrity I ever saw.

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  OTHER DOGS

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