Get a Job

Best present I ever got.

For my eleventh birthday I got a Rollfast two-wheeler. Yeah, it wasn't a Schwinn, but it didn't really matter. 

The bike was more than just a toy. It symbolized a liberation. And, with certain limitations (no riding on Linden Blvd, cross at a light) it expanded my boundaries not to be equaled until seven years later. But that's another story.

Within a year the bike would become a money-maker for me. I wanted my own money, not an allowance, so I went into every store along Church Avenue from Albany Av to beyond Utica Av. ("Hey, you need anyone to deliver orders for you or any other work? Have bike; will deliver!") 

None of the stores I went into looking for a job was a chain store. The 
person I spoke to was the owner, not a manager. I'm referring to the stores where I felt I had a slim chance of finding part-time employment, so that eliminated Ebingers on Church near Utica Avenues and the Woolworth's on Utica Av, John's Bargain Store and the Carvel on E.55th St. but even that was an individually owned franchise. 

Two afternoons of futile searches and I was walking past my neighborhood drug store - actually my neighborhood "pharmacy" and I thought I'd give Dr. xxx a chance to hire a dependable eleven year old with his own transportation. And, what do you know, he just happened to be looking for someone with my experience. Finally, seven decades later, it dawned on me.  Was there a connection between my search and the fact that the good pharmacist was a family friend? Nope.  My parents didn't know I was looking for a job.

Here's something to consider.  In a one mile stretch along Church Avenue, which at best may have been considered a class "B" shopping area, not in the same league with Kings Highway, Pitkin Avenue or Flatbush Avenue or even Utica Avenue Church Avenue had a lot of drug stores.  Maybe not as many as candy stores but darn close so there's little chance you'd be able to figure which one I got my business-start in.

Hold on a moment.  Conjure this. An eleven year old on a bike with a package and enough cash to make change for the order so the customer had no excuse for not paying me, especially if it was a life-threatening prescription I was delivering and the patient died before paying. So, there I was, with maybe ten dollars and a bike worth maybe 50 to 75 dollars left outside while I made the transaction that maybe netted me a few soda bottles for their deposit that I would collect on my way back to the drug store.  Worry?  What was there to worry about? Fast forward a lifetime and let me list all the things!

It was an easy job; no heavy lifting like Tony's job who had to shlep heavy vegetables, until the day I learned a valuable lesson about the world of business: some people in business cheat!

I got paid either a nickel or a dime for each delivery plus the tip from the customer.  Remember, we're talking about the 1950's. To put things in perspective, my neighbor's 15-year old works for an ice cream shop - her first job - she earns $15 an hour!

Remember, I'm the 1950's kid earning, at best a dime for each delivery. So, I deliver Mrs. Klein's prescription and by the time I get back to the store the pharmacist is holding a package for me. I gave you the wrong package.  Bring this one to Mrs. Klein.

OK.  Until the end of the day. Seven deliveries including the two visits to Mrs. Klein, and the owner gives me sixty cents.  "No, there were seven deliveries including the mistake to Mrs. Klein," "No, I don't count that as two deliveries." Of all the ways to fire someone or get him to quit that had to be the cruelest.

That evening, after dinner, my folks asked how my day went. That opened the floodgates. Rarely did I ever hear my parents curse nor did I ever curse in front of them - or at least tried not to.  

That day there was a relaxation on the cursing moratorium. I wondered if my former boss ever asked my parents what happened to Neil that he no longer showed up for work. I wonder if my parents ever again shopped in that store.

I had one or two unmemorable jobs after that until probably my junior year in high school.  Then I went to work for Seymour Rubin and his father who owned the butcher shop on the corner. This was the total opposite of my drug store experience. Not that it was hard; It was nice. I got a salary, I got to ride one of those big delivery bikes and if it rained Seymour who didn't vant I should get vet would drive me to the customer. 

One customer in particular. The father owned a wholesale candy warehouse on the next block and the wife of the owner would shop at Rubin's even though they didn't live in the neighborhood. Regardless of the weather, Seymour would drive me to their home on Snyder Avenue near Kings Highway. I didn't want to talk to Seymour on those trips.  I was too preoccupied rehearsing what I would say when the daughter opened the door. And sure enough there she was and as usual she acted surprised and told me to wait while she went for her money and sure enough my rehearsal was not enough. Next week would be different.

It wasn't. 

What would hurt if she asked me to come in, would you like something to drink or how about some candy. Then I could go into some of my well-rehearsed lines like: what school do you go to? and maybe find out she's in college and engaged.

I left Rubin's when I entered college.  I wonder if Seymour was hoping I would join him in his business.

21. Wait Up!

How else I gonna get your attention?

What does 'wait up' mean? 'Slow down' I can understand, but 'wait up'?

Ya want stories about East Flatbush, like when you were a kid?

Of all the stories in this collection I agonized most over this title.  We both know that a sure-fire case of something not being read is to call it 'instructions'. Come on. You return the leased Toyota three years later and the Owner's Manual is still wrapped in plastic.

Some of my stories may interest you more than others. Hey, even as a teacher I knew there was no way I was going to reach all thirty kids in each class.

Here comes the long-awaited 'instructions.'

Somewhere around story 13 when you've absorbed as much nostalgia as a person can handle there's a 'click here' for 'older' stories. Look, you've come so far, what's another five or six hours? Hey, I slaved over a computer writing them; the least you can do is read them!

But first, let's see what follows.

Pete Hamill, wrote in New York Magazine, 

"Brooklyn was not on those [classroom] maps.  New York was, but to us, New York was some strange, exotic city across the river, where there were people who rooted for the Giants and the Yankees. Brooklyn was not there. Even Battle Creek, Michigan, where we sent a hundred Kellogg's box tops, was on the map.  Brooklyn was not. People who secretly ruled the earth did not recognize us, and we did not really recognize them."

"It'd take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t'roo and t'roo. An' even den, yuh wouldn't know it all."

OK.  Here we go.

I ain’t talkin’ ’bout your parents’ generation. 

If you lived in Brooklyn and went to school in the 1950′s and 60′s I’m talkin' about you. Now, all a sudden, a half century ain’t so long ago, ya know what I mean?

I grew up in East Flatbush - the East Flatbush of the 50's and 60's - a totally different East Flatbush from the 21st century version. Those who write about the current East Flatbush might as well be writing about Cleveland! 

I'm still trying to figure out this fascination with a life and a time more than a half century ago. 

After graduating from Brooklyn College I taught English in the neighborhood (Meyer Levin and Tilden).  I've been out of teaching and East Flatbush and Brooklyn for more than 45 years, but you can't take da Brooklyn outta the boy.

20. Our World - Too Late to the Party

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

“You Can’t Go Home Again” –                   

Thomas Wolfe

It happened, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, "gradually and then suddenly."

If you went to school in the late fifties or early sixties, you missed the real Brooklyn. Our parents were invited to the party; we weren’t.

Brooklyn, the real Brooklyn, the Brooklyn celebrated in film and in novels had already changed by the time we came on the scene.

At best we merely prolonged its death by trying to keep the memories alive. But to have grown up in the post-war years, the Eisenhower era, was to be cheated of the glory days of Brooklyn.

The Dodgers had already abandoned Brooklyn; their home leveled to make way for a high-rise apartment house. Coney Island’s fabled Steeplechase had closed; Lundy’s was suffering through its last days. Ebinger’s would soon shutter its doors, taking with it the best black-out cake ever created by man (or woman); Brooklyn College embarked on a misguided open-enrollment policy guaranteed to fail.

Closer to home, the Rugby Theater – on its way to oblivion – was first converted to a two-screen theater; ‘For Rent’ signs became more prevalent on Utica and Church and Flatbush Avenues and if lucky, the stores were finally rented as dollar stores; and Brooklyn’s Church Avenue trolley – the last line in the last borough to operate trolleys – had its swan song in October, 1956.

By the mid-sixties, New York City public school education, which had served our parent’s generation and us so well, was no longer the key for upwardly mobile kids like us. We were the last.

The families of the kids following us moved upward – or more accurately, outward – to the suburbs, to Long Island or New Jersey. The move sent once-solid East Flatbush into a tail-spin from which it has yet to fully recover.

That was the final straw. Local jobs, especially the small manufacturing jobs, were disappearing and the white middle class flight from the neighborhood was underway, helped along by real estate brokers who warned about our neighborhood's future. 

Once urban flight took hold in the sixties, the last vestiges of our parent’s Brooklyn disappeared. I watched in amazement as six high-stooped attached houses on Rockaway Parkway near Linden Blvd displayed for-sale signs at the same time. I was too naïve to truly understand the ramifications of that sight, but to this day when I think of the one most significant thing that represented this abandonment of Brooklyn, and specifically my East Flatbush, I think of those ‘for sale’ signs on Rockaway Parkway.

By that time the streets and especially the subways had become unsafe. Until then we had been insulated from the Pigtown and East New York gangs; from the drugs; from the poverty.

 
Having already given up teaching, first at Meyer Levin and then at Tilden High School, I too, became part of that flight as my young family moved ‘to the country’ from Avenue H.

But, before long, new waves of immigrants washed over the remnants of our borough and specifically our neighborhood, remaking it in the image of strivers from the Caribbean and China and Russia to become as vibrant and diverse as it had once been.  And young people - at least those who could afford to - began to move to sections of the borough from which we had escaped. 

So much for nostalgia.  The new residents claim they know our East Flatbush, but it’s a different neighborhood they’re describing. 

Garfields on Flatbush and Church – gone
The Tower of Pisa on Utica and Vincent’s on Church – gone, gone; as well as the kosher butchers and delis.

The RKO Kenmore, Loews Kings, the Patio, the Granada, the Rugby theaters – gone, gone, gone, gone and gone.

Even Erasmus and Tilden and Wingate and Jefferson –  all great high schools in their time - gone. (At least ‘gone’ as we remember them.)

From the vantage point of more than a half century later I realize the neighborhood of my memories no longer exists. It, too, is gone.

A drive down Church Avenue reveals only a few vestiges of the Church Avenue of my youth. A recent ride up East 57th St from Beverly Road to Kings Highway bears witness to the change. The typical East Flatbush homes built in the years just before and after World War II– the attached, brick, high stoop design – now include the obligatory wrought iron gates and window bars.

The Brooklyn that brings us to websites such as this one is the past recorded on curled black and white photographs with scalloped edges, faded slides, brittle home movies and clouded memories of innocence, childhood, family and above all – a safe place.

Brooklyn is the precious thing we’ve lost. But, nostalgia maintains its grip on the imagination.

Am I right? I welcome your response.  Read the next story.

19. Grandpa's Chair

There comes a time in one's life when he looks around the commuter train and realizes he is the oldest one on the train.  Changing cars doesn't help; same demographics.

Same thing at family gatherings when you realize you are the patriarch.

How did that happen?  Last year you were sitting at the kids' table drinking grape juice and trying to get it to come out of your nose.  Now you're sitting at the head of the table in the chair that only grandpa sat in.  That comfortable buffer in the form of older relatives is gone and there ain't nothin' separating you from you-know-what.

You're next, buddy.

Once you come to grips with your own mortality it's time to take inventory of your past. You 'inventory takers' are my blog readers.  All of a sudden the place from which many of us escaped decades ago is important.

So, where were you for the past thirty or forty years?

What, you think Brooklyn stood still waiting for its prodigal sons and daughters to return?

Whaddayanuts?

Unfortunately, as I write in one of my blogs further down this site, our memories can't always be trusted.

Brooklyn, our Brooklyn, maybe wasn't so hotsy-totsy to start with, like we now remember it.  It probably never was, but we had nothing to compare it to.

Trust me, our Brooklyn - East Flatbush, East New York, Crown Heights, Brownsville, Pigtown - didn't get no memo 'bout gentrification and certainly no memo about regentrification.  Our neighborhoods would need remedial regentrification and a summer school semester to maybe be a candidate for a Starbucks.  Health warning:  Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen!

A side note:  I'm not talking about the neighborhoods surrounding Madison or Midwood or those areas west of Flatbush Avenue just north and south of Church Avenue - what we used to call Flatbush, but has now been christened with names like Ditmas Park - where some of the old Victorians sell for close to two million dollars.  I'm referring to our neighborhoods. 

And, I'm definitely not talking about the 'new Brooklyn' bordering the East River - especially Williamsburg.  All her life your grandmother struggled to save enough to move out of there.  She'd ferplotz if she knew what some of those apartments are going for now.

Okay.  When you drive down the side streets, the residential streets, at first blush, things look the same as we remember them from the fifties and sixties: kids playing in the street and well cared-for attached and semi-attached private homes - except for the security gates and bars on the windows. Now that's the business to be in: wrought iron fabrication or, more likely, wrought iron fortification.

It's the commercial strips that have changed.  You know, the ones along Church, Utica, Nostrand and Rogers Avenues and the ones in the small strip centers.  They show the most change.  Forget about the premier shopping streets: Pitkin, Flatbush, the Highway.  You want dollar stores? You've come to the right street!

All the stores that were there when we were born and still there when we moved away, all those stores that our parents owned and worked at six days a week so you could go to camp in the summer, trust me, they all closed up the day after we left town.

What? You think the kosher deli around the corner from your house was going to keep the pastrami hot just for us, if we ever returned? And the round knish?  Yeah, I know, you liked the square one. Well, Sol, or Irv or Dave or Murray or whatever his name was threw them all out and followed you to Long Island or New Jersey or Arizona or, more likely, Florida, where he opened a larger, Brooklyn-style deli, with twelve kinds of gourmet, designer knishes and, if you want, you can get mayo on your pastrami sandwich.

The further we get - in distance and time - the more we fall in love with our neighborhood.  I have a friend who headed up the Alumni Association at Brooklyn College.  Her hardest job was getting recent graduates to join.  Fast forward thirty or forty years and the alumni are banging on her door clamoring to join their beloved alma mater.  That's another subject of a story, also further down in this blog.

I find my blogs cater to older people.  (Notice I make the distinction between old and older.  Older people are not as old as old people. This flies in the face of everything you learned in eighth grade English. Go figure.) My East Flatbush Memories blog is more of a community service for chronic delusionals - including its creator. 

Years ago I asked our son if he ever thought about his elementary school days. By the time he was in elementary school we had long since moved out of Brooklyn to Long Island, near the Sound.  "Nope!" I showed him the responses to this blog and from groups on Facebook and the fond memories the readers have of their Brooklyn childhood.  

His response: "But you didn't do anything." I explained the fine art of stoop ball, ("What's a stoop?") hit the penny, punch ball and using a manhole (or someone's brand new jacket) as second base or just sitting on Sammy's stoop to hang out.

So, here I am, trying to avoid sitting in Grandpa's chair and holding on to the memories of those years more than a half century ago, where we did nothing, but somehow had a great time doing it.

18. Best Kosher Deli in Brooklyn - If Not the Entire World

Children's portion

True story:  Here's a reverse of the classic first-time customer in a kosher deli story.  My wife's cousin goes into a new 'kosher style' deli in Houston, Texas and orders a pastrami on rye with a little mustard.  He's told it will take a little longer because it's a special order.  Why? The sandwich automatically comes with lettuce, tomato and mayo.  Anything other than that is a special order.

In all the years you lived in Brooklyn and all the times you ordered a pastrami sandwich, or sat at the same table with someone who ordered a pastrami sandwich, did you ever, ever see or hear anyone ordering a pastrami sandwich with lettuce and tomato and mayo. Come on, even I can't make up anything like that.

Raise your hand if you lived near, or at least ate at, the best kosher deli in Brooklyn. No, first put down the sandwich.  No one will steal it.

Think hot pastrami or corned beef taken out of that stainless steel steam chest and the smell wafting over the glass-front counter as it is carefully and gingerly placed (ha!) on the slicing machine and piled high between two slices of fresh rye bread. Bread you could get  only in the deli.

Oh I see someone in back has her hand up.  You went to a deli where the meat was cut by hand?  It had to be in Brooklyn; it sure isn't in Pine Hills Isle or Boca by the Sea, or Pembroke Pines or Wispering Palms or wherever you now live in sunny Florida.

Hold on.  You know darn well you can't just order a sandwich without looking at the menu.

Since the age of eight you've had the menu memorized - including the daily specials which hadn't changed in at least five years.

It's decision time.  For the indecisive who can't decide between the corned beef and the pastrami there's always the combo triple decker, but for most of us our taste buds were already fired up and ready to go to work long before we even walked through the door.  Looking at the menu was merely an unnecessary ritual while waiting for Irv to take our order, and even that wasn't necessary because all he'd have to ask is if we wanted the usual.

Want to see the counter help go into a fit of uncontrollable hysterics?  Ask if the corned beef is lean.  "Yeah, lady.  It's organically grown, free range tenderly cared for by monks, but I'll trim the fat for you."

Trim the fat off the corned beef and you have a sandwich consisting of two slices of bread and a shmear of mustard.

Okay, so that's the first hurdle.

I liked to order pastrami just to hear how Irv would fracture the word.  Twenty years in the same job and he never mastered the basics of his chosen vocation's vocabulary so that when he yelled the order to the guy behind the counter it always sounded like 'astronomy sagwiz.'  Didn't matter; the counter guy knew.

Here comes round two: 'French fries or knish?' 'knish.' Potato or Kasha?' 'Potato.' 'Square or round?'
'Round.' 'We don't got no more round. It wouldn't kill ya, maybe for once you should try square.'

We're going to take a short detour that those of you have read other of my stories know I am famous for.  (Don't you grammarians go nutso over the construction of that last sentence.)

Irv may have been wrong, after all.  The square ones are fried.  If only your mother knew then what was going into her darling's frail stomach along with the pastrami sandwich and the Cel-Ray soda.

In any case, there was and still is only one major knish purveyor.


Gabila produces more than 15 million knishes a year - most of them the square fried ones - from its Long Island bakery, having long since outgrown its original Williamsburg home - and still sends the majority to Brooklyn where your cousin Arnie consumed one-fifth of them before his by-pass surgery.

Picture this. Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side sells about 1,500 knishes a week - at $3.75 apiece.  If Arnie knew that, he'd be turning over in his grave.  Yeah, the same knish you paid fifteen cents for - mustard included.  You can now buy them, and round ones, in 6-packs from Gabila's website.

Today you can order sweet potato, spinach, mushroom, blueberry, cherry, chocolate cheese, tomato and mozzarella knishes from Gabila's and Yonah Schimmel's Knish Bakery who has been selling knishes since 1910 on Houston Street on the Lower East Side .  Oh yeah, they also have potato knishes.  There ain't nuthin' sacred no more.

The majority of round knishes are produced and baked in the individual deli.  The true knish aficionado prefers the round to the square.  Probably healthier.

OK. I can't wait for you readers to nominate your favorites:  Mrs. Stahl's (which has gone to knish heaven) in Brighton Beach or the guy on Bay 1 who sold knishes out of a shopping bag on the beach   And, of course, how can you not mention the old guy with the 'Mom's' push cart who sold molten hot knishes outside Winthrop and Tilden.  (I have a separate blog chapter dealing with street merchants that talks about the knish man.)

Now, wasn't that detour worth it.  Don't you really want a knish right now?

Ready for round three? 'Cole slaw, please.'  'Onda sangwiz or onda side?'

Round four: 'You want sompena drink?' 'Whaddaya got?' 'Whaddaya wiseguy?' 'Okay, I'll have a Tab.' 'OK, one celery soder. Straw or glaz?'

'Excuse me. Its' Cel-Ray, not celery soda. 'Dat's wad I said. Celery.'

How else to wash down that pastrami on rye (with a hint of real deli mustard you dabbed on from a stainless steel container that every table had) than with a bottle of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda.  (It was originally called 'tonic' until the government intervened.) Before we get into a major dispute, you can substitute cream soda for the Cel-Ray, but it has to be a bottle and none of those new boutique flavors like black cherry.

We’re talking about a world before canned Dr. Brown's and a world before Dr. Brown's diet sodas.  The name was Cel-Ray, not Celery - even though it contains a hint of celery seed in the flavor, along with sugar and, of course, seltzer. Rumor has it that it was created by a Lower East Side doctor treating immigrant children.

Watch out.  Here comes another detour. Brooklynites, in their attempt to conserve letters are often accused of 'dropping the 'r' at the end of a word.  NOT TRUE.  We just place it at the end of words not typically pronounced by the rest of the English-speaking world.  For example: 'Gimme a glassa warda.'  See? same number of r's, just placed more strategically.  Another example: 'Gimme a canna cream soder.'  See wad I'm sayin?

Okay, back to the ordering ritual. 'Please bring some pickles with the sandwich.'  'Sweet or sour?'

In retrospect, there are fewer questions on most AP exams and certainly not as much stress.

There were several prerequisites for being hired as a waiter in a kosher deli.  You had to be named Irv, Max, Sol, Lou, Dave, Nat, Ziggy or Sid.  These, coincidentally, were also the required names to be a deli owner. If, at birth, you were named other than the aforementioned names you were destined for another line of work. The desperate would change their name to get the job.  A second requirement was to have zero peripheral vision so that if a customer who was not exactly lined up with the waiter's nose tried to get the waiter's attention, he would be ignored.  Minimal hearing would also be a plus: 'I heard ya say square knish.  Eat what I brung.  I won't charge ya.'

Age plays a major role in the hiring process - at least reversed age discrimination.  You stand a better chance of being hired if you had already put in fifty years in another job - preferably as a tailor.  Younger than age 60 you were destined to be called  Junior, or worse, 'Kid'.

Growing up in East Flatbush we had a plethora of deli's. Like synogogues, there were always at least two - one you wouldn't step foot in, even if they had the last pastrami on earth. Let's have a moment of silence for Brooklyn's real kosher deli. May it long live in our memories.

Now, before you get your stuffed derma in an uproar, I'm talkin' real kosher deli - no milk products. And, I'm not talking about places like the former Carnegie Deli in the City or the Carnegie wannabe Harold's in New Jersey or Ben's in Forest Hills or their outpost in Westbury.  I'm talking real kosher deli. Are there any outside of Brooklyn?

OK.  Today's quiz.  Name the deli on Church and E 46, Church and E 48, Church and Linden, Ave D off Utica, Utica between Church and Linden, Clarkson and E 51.  Was there any on Church Avenue west of East 46th Street?  There may have been one on Church and Brooklyn Avenue. How about on Remsen or Ralph Avenues?

Yeah, there were a bunch in Sheepshead Bay and Midwood and on the Highway, but we’re dealing ONLY WITH East Flatbush.

We live in north central New Jersey.  I've googled 'kosher deli in Northern New Jersey.'  Ha!

How about opening one in Houston?

One final picture: a real deli sandwich, (not photoshopped, courtesy of Harold's in New Jersey:

For this sandwich the counter man goes out back and lassos a cow and puts two slices of bread around it.

For some reason I can't delete the remainder of this page.  
Use it as a napkin; you're drooling!

17. Remembrance of Things Past

 17. Remembrance of Things Past

A Nod to Marcel Proust

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."

                                                                                                               -  Marcel Proust 1871-1922

Okay, folks. We’re going to take a slight detour down memory lane. The nostalgia-laden among us will appreciate it more than, say, those who come to this site looking solely for things East-Flatbush.  Actually, the events depicted here took place in East Flatbush and in the middle of the last century. Hang in there; you'll appreciate it.

Think back to your high school days.  Some lucky souls just put in their four years, graduate and that's that. But for most of us, our adolescence occupies a prime piece of real estate in our memories.  Give an adult a series of random cues and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence.  That summer you fell in love while working as a counselor at Camp Equinunk or while in summer school so you could graduate in January. 

Whatever the case, your time together was magical, it ended prematurely, but you never forgot.  And maybe a half century later, when the routine of your daily life starts to get to you, you find yourself wondering what kind of a glamorous life he/she is leading now.

But now we can find out. Somehow we stumble across an email address and compose the ideal message to send to someone we haven't seen in fifty years. And, if we're lucky. maybe we get a warm response and we realize the grass we have is just as green, if not greener, than the person's grass we remember from a lifetime ago.

Researchers refer to this phenomenon as the 'reminiscence bump' suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are the most vividly retained.
Here's another piece of news.  As teenagers we are lousy at assessing the behavior of others.  When teenagers in one study were asked to name their closest friends, for the majority, the results were not mutual.  The person who you listed as your best friend probably did not name you as his/her best friend - proof that high school is a time of unrequited longings - and mis-judgings.  A lot has to do with the fact that teenagers often cannot tell when they are being rejected - or accepted.  (Hey, how many times do you get rejected for a date before you get the clue it ain't gonna happen.)

OK.  Armed with this information when I first embarked on this 'blog thing' I researched to see what was out there that would/could jog my memory. I noticed a common thread.
Person A (the Rememberer) sees Person B’s name on a site. Person A has a major attack of nostalgia resembling something along the lines of: “Holy ____. I know that person. He/she sat behind me in ___ and I/we___ . Wow! I remember it like it was yesterday.”

What usually follows is a written litany by the rememberer (you) of events to legitimatize the relationship, to prove you’re not some kind of weirdo - looking for a loan.

Now, you probably know where this is headed, but hold on, buckaroos.

Person B’s (the Rememberee) responses fall into one of two categories depending on the emotional level invested in the original relationship:

Category 1:
Rememberer: “Hey, you lived across the hall from us on Linden Blvd and your mother played maj jong with my mother every Tuesday. You were in high school and you yusta babysit me."

Or, “You lived on East 52nd Street and I lived on Beverly Road and we played punchball on East 53rd Street because it was a wide street.

Rememberees in this category remember every minuscule detail - if they remember it at all. Wanna know the color of your mother’s kitchen wallpaper? Yellow. How many Twinkies you had before you puked your guts all over the kitchen linoleum while watching Milton Berle? Five. Who hit the brand new 'Spauldeen' down the sewer and had to retrieve it or get the ____ beat out of him? You. (As a bonus, the Rememberee will tell you how much the ball cost fifty years ago and where he got it and who supplied the coat hanger so you could retrieve the ball from the sewer and that you still owe him fifteen cents for the ball.)

Category 1’s are easy, because deep down, there ain’t no deep down. You remember or you don’t remember. No big deal. Yeah, it would have been nice if B remembered but if not, tough!

Category 2:
Category 2’s are a whole ‘nother story. Ah. I sense some smiles forming already.
Category 2 remembrances are usually emotionally charged.
Now we’re talking serious, heavy-duty, life-altering, potentially embarrassing stuff that, in retrospect, makes us wonder how we ever climbed out of puberty, sloshed through our teens, and made it into semi-adulthood.

Somewhere in this scenario is the recurring phrase “unrequited love.”

Let’s face it. By sixteen you knew what love was. You knew you had found it. Case closed.
And for the next forty or fifty years every once in a while in the privacy of your own mind, you would conjure up that image of that person who truly shaped your life. And, since your mind can be your best friend, your mind wouldn’t let that person get any older. 

In essence, it's a story you've rehearsed and memorized and played back to yourself a zillion times.  You knew that person as a sixteen-year old and, wonder of wonders, that person is still sixteen! And like all cheerleaders that year, she still wears her blond hair in a ponytail or you can still fit into his team jacket that he let you wear one Friday night when you were shivering outside Vincent's Pizzeria.

Typical Category 2 scenario: “Do you remember me? We went steady during the summer of '60. We both worked on Flatbush Avenue that summer.  You worked in Macy's. You were the first person I ever … and you said I was the first...
Typical response: “No. And don’t write to me any more!”

I marveled that two people who shared the same experience could remember it – or not – so differently and attach such different significance to the event. What a loser. She didn’t even remember him! Whew!

Until…
About a year later I came across a great site where people wrote about their memories growing up in Brooklyn.

There, tucked in among all the unimportant things about far away places like Coney Island, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay and Williamsburgh was a short piece from someone describing growing up in Flatbush. 

Everything she mentioned I knew. The people she talked about and the places where she hung out, I knew. And when she listed her name, I knew her!
Not only did I know her, but she was the first girl I really dated. It was my first year in Erasmus; we dated for about six months. I mean serious, steady dating. 

And, in my mind, she was still fifteen.
So, I wrote to her. I mentioned our mutual friends, the neighborhood, the places we went together. This was sooo cool.

Sure enough.  About two weeks later, I get a long, chatty email from her in which she tells what she’s been doing since high school and updates on the neighborhood, some of our mutual friends from a half-century ago and her kid brother who grew up to own a major league ball club. 

Yeah, yeah. Get to the point where you remember me, too.

And finally, in the last brief paragraph, the information I had been waiting for...
she politely apologizes for not remembering me.
Judy, Judy -  say it ain’t so.

P.S. I’ve sent this blog on to some friends. Each has come back with a similar story. What’s yours?

This story originally appeared in 2009 as one of my first blogs.  Since then i've been in touch with many of my former students who recount vivid memories of being in my class.  (I left teaching in 1968.) Some I have no clue or recollection of; some I do remember but not as they portray themselves. One remembered a specific Social Studies assignment that she couldn't finish and I yelled at her.  I never taught Social Studies. 

Memories.

16. Junior High School

 

I’m surprised to hear your feelings about your junior high school days.

 For some of us it was a rare opportunity to experience one of life’s few do-overs – a new school; new classmates from outside your home neighborhood. It was a time to make new friends – some we would keep for a lifetime; to have a different teacher every forty minutes, some of whom were men.  It was also a chance to figure out what that talk about hormones was all about and to explore our body – and equally importantly – those of others.

 Junior high school! Who didn’t like junior high school?

 Well, for one, me. But I didn’t realize it until much later.

 I was a victim of the ‘2-year SP.’ One of the problems with the 2-year SP was that we had to cram not only three years of curriculum into two, but also all that other stuff – the really important stuff that would carry us through life.  For example, the miracle transformation that took place in summer camp between seventh grade and the next.

 In the seventh grade we would play co-ed Chinese handball in the school yard – as many as eight or nine of us lined up. This was a co-ed sport before the word was invented. Know how to play?  Good! You’re in.  Truth be told, some of the girls must have been ringers. .  All we needed was a wall and a Spauldeen. (If you lived in Brooklyn, you know what a ‘Spauldeen’ is.)

 Come back in a year. The boys seemed to have outgrown that spastic age; you know, where they just couldn’t master the art of walking and eating an ice cream cone without it going up their nose or tripping over themselves while standing still.  And the girls seemed to have moved on to other, more productive endeavors, at least social-wise.

 Wow! Those kids that you would have nothing to do with in the seventh grade – even if you were interested in them, even if you knew what it meant to be ‘interested in’ all of a sudden became ‘persons of interest.’ Case in point:  Ritchie Goldfarb alluded to the fact that he, on occasion, shaved. As a result, Ritchie replaced the class jocks for attention from the opposite sex, at least for a while.

 The transformation wasn’t limited to the boys. There was Marilyn Cohen. Oh yes, Marilyn, who last year I viewed as a pal, someone who would save me a seat at her table in the cafeteria.  We would talk about our families; tell dumb jokes and laugh hysterically.  Yeah, that Marilyn.  That Marilyn went away to Camp Nevamind in Honesdale, PA and as far as I know never returned.  In her place was another girl, with the same name, looked a little like Marilyn but with a different hair style, who seemed to know a lot of the kids but was merely cordial to me. This new Marilyn preferred sitting in the cafeteria with the ‘non-academically inclined’ kids in 9-11 who were a year older than the boys in my 9SP2, specifically with Peter Kelly, who smoked in the school yard and whose father owned the Amoco gas station on Utica Avenue.

If Marilyn’s mother knew she would ferplotz.

In my school, the most read book in the latter half of the seventh grade and the first half of the next was ‘the slam book,’ a composition book with each page folded down the center.  The first page was a questionnaire designed by a committee of girls (usually represented by the ‘in group”) purportedly requesting highly personal information from other members of said group and wanna-be’s.   This information was highly classified. If the keeper ever misplaced the book untold misfortune would be heaped upon her.  Similarly, if a boy ever asked to see what was in the book, he would be met with a response similar to: “You ever, ever look in the book, I’ll rip your freaken eyes out and shove them up your ass.”  “Hey, Marilyn, it’s me.  Remember me from last year?” “I don’t care. Maybe you wanna splain to Petey how you pissed me off.”

Here I am in the process of being threatened with bodily harm and I still have the wherewithall to notice how grammatically incorrect the threat was.  A tribute to Miss Axelrod and ninth grade English grammar: “Never end a sentence with a preposition.”

There was nothing in that book or in any book for that matter, except for maybe the Bible, that warranted further discussion. On my best possible day I didn’t ‘wanna havta ‘splain’ nothin to Peter Kelly. So far, I was able to avoid him and his classmates.  I was happy to continue my winning streak at least until the end of the school year.

To this day I have absolutely no idea what was in the book and to add to the mystery it seems every group had its own criteria for contents.  I did, however, mull over the possible variation of Marilyn’s comment, and while moving the preposition one word to the left would have been grammatically correct, the message would have lost some of its impact.  It’s like saying “It is I” which is the grammatically correct response to “Who is it?”  Old lady Axelrod would be happy, but enough with the grammar stuff.

I had my friends – I referred to them as my ‘school friends.’ We would spend lunch period together or walk to our next class together and on rare occasions we would get together on a Saturday afternoon – always at their homes.  I lived too far away.  At the time it never bothered me.  Fast forward a lot of years and I get the same excuse from friends.  Only now, I don’t accept that as an excuse.

I lived far enough from school to warrant a bus pass.  Time out.  This is before tokens and metrocards and before discount cards where you showed the driver your card and deposited a nickel in the fare box.  In junior high school each month we were issued a new free, unlimited-use card. Wanna go to White Castle for lunch? No problem. A bunch of us would get on the Utica Avenue bus and go up the half mile and order a half dozen hamburgers. What? You never ate a half-dozen White Castle hamburgers?  Now I’m on shakey ground.  Was there a time when the Castle sold only hamburgers and soda? No French fries?.  The alternative was Pinky’s on Rutland Road – not known for its culinary skills, or The Hollywood Diner on Utica Avenue.

I was a decent student in a class of very smart kids.  I wonder if I would have been a very smart kid in a class of decent students. I liked school, I think, when I wasn’t worrying incurring Peter Kelly’s wrath. 

Two years in the school and I remember enough to fill just a few paragraphs:  The highlight? Woodworking shop where I made a combination knife-holder/cutting board.  I don’t know what happened to the knife holder (after three days the knives wound up back in the drawer with all the other utensils), but the cutting board (which even I thought was no great example of woodworking skill) appeared every meal under the unsliced bread, at least until I got married.

Phys Ed and the concept of gym spots and the ropes dangling from the ceiling.  The trip to the gym ceiling provided time to contemplate your worst fears: How often are the connections at the top checked? How much protection would those 3-inch thick mats below the ropes provide if you slipped? How come we never saw the gym teachers demonstrate rope climbing beyond the 5-foot mark? What happens if you accidentally look down from the midway point? What if there’s a fire drill?  All of a sudden dodge ball where by some unfortunate turn of events you wind up the last person standing on your team and Peter Kelly and his friends are on the other team all aiming at your head, or worse. Come to think of it, rope climbing ain’t so bad, except when some kid holding the bottom of the rope decides to swing it.

I try to conjure up what gym class must be like today: See-saws and jungle gyms have been banned from playgrounds where we now live, so dodge ball must be played with wiffle balls and both teams get trophies for sportsmanship and clean sneaker laces. 

In another blog I mention my dreaded 9^th grade English class where I learned grammar.  I’m sure we had spelling tests, wrote compositions and read literature, but it was the grammar that has been permanently implanted.  Years later I was able to exact revenge on the next generation – I taught 9^th grade English. 

Oh, I also had the first two of five years of Spanish, that interestingly helped me better understand English grammar and, later on, put me in good standing with our landscapers.  It didn’t help me in college though, since my major required that I take two years of French.

 What did help, though, was typing. Who would have thought back in the middle of the last century that typing would turn out to be the most helpful junior high school subject! I’m talking about typewriters with no letters on the keys (‘touch typing’); that did not get plugged in; that required carbon paper if you wanted a copy. Ask your grandmother what a typewriter is.

And, in the ninth grade I learned to hate my math teacher, Miss Casey. It wasn’t until much later that I came to this realization.  Until then I had no choice: one teacher for the whole year.  Make do with the hand you’re dealt.  But this realization opened up the floodgates and in retrospect I realized I had also hated Miss O’Neill, my sixth grade teacher, probably for singling me out for getting a 99 on a music appreciation test – when everyone else, and I mean everyone else, got 100. She also liked to return test papers in grade order.  Luckily, much to her dismay I’m sure, I never had to wait long to receive my tests. 

I recently discovered my junior high school graduation picture. It consisted of four groups of people:     1) girls that looked like they should be graduating from junior high school; 2) their male counterparts; 3) boys that three years later would look the same in their high school graduating picture.  And then there was this fourth group of Amazon-like females, at least a foot taller than everyone else in the picture.  Who were they?  They sort of looked familiar.  Were they teachers? students? student teachers? Parents of students? 

No, they were my classmates, all dressed up for the picture! Damn! This particular group of girls looked as though they had raided their mother’s wardrobe.

The ‘group 2’ boys didn’t realize it, but they had it together.  They knew how old they were and dressed, and looked and acted ‘age-appropriately.’  The last could explain why their social life never included any of their female classmates. Less than twelve months since they had proclaimed, “Today I am a man.” Mother Nature had not yet received the message. 

So there I was.  A graduate of the ‘2-year SP’ entering high school not quite 14 years old. Two years of math, science, Spanish, social studies, gym, shop, typing (I still look at the keyboard!) and, of course, English, and all I remember I’ve already told you.

Two years in a class with kids just like me who I have no interest in seeing – except maybe for Marilyn Cohen.