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.

 

15. The Agony and the Ecstasy

Fear and Seltzer – the Agony and Ecstasy

CAUTION: Must be used only under adult supervision.   Not recommended for use by anyone with history of heart disease. 

Sounds like the title of a nineteenth century Russian novel.

I don’t know how universal the prevalence of seltzer was, but if you grew up in East Flatbush, the ubiquitous seltzer bottle was a staple on your dinner table.  (I promise I’ll get around to explaining the connection between the two words in the title of this story.)

If you’ve read my previous blogs, you’ll remember my obsession with some of my fears centered about school. Not the mundane fear of tests.  By the fifth grade, tests and I had established a fairly amiable co-existence.  I’m talking about real fears.

How could I pay attention to what Miss O’Neill was saying when I obsessed full-time about the 20-foot window pole falling off it precarious perch and hurtling toward my head.  Pleas to change my seat, even though it would mean giving up my coveted seat next to Marilyn Cohen, to the sixth row where I estimated I had a better chance of survival, went unanswered.

Eraser clapping was not without its dangers.  I dreaded eraser cleaning on inclement weather days because that meant using the eraser vacuum in the basement.  You ever in the school basement?  How do you think the classrooms stay so toasty warm in the winter?  Giant boilers that could explode at any moment, that’s how.

Fear of Stuff You Have No Control Over:
Every once in a while we would have an air raid drill. You know, the type where you had to crawl under your desk, always with your back to the windows.  What the hell was a half inch of oak desk-top going to do to save your sorry little ass in case of an atom bomb being dropped, say on Utica Avenue and considering the strategic importance of East Flatbush, you know that was Target Numero Uno.  And how come, with all your seniority in the school, was your class on the top floor and the little kindergartners were on the second?  I remember hearing that wearing a white shirt might help diffuse some of the radiation.  You had a better chance if you wrapped yourself in tin foil.  The one thing that definitely would save you was that the window shades were all closed.

Here are some things to ponder from the vantage point of forty or fifty years later:  While you were crammed under your desk, where was your teacher? If it had been an unscheduled drill, Miss O’Neill would be on her knees praying to Sweet Baby Jesus for forgiveness for that time she and Billy Driscoll, the custodian – well, that’s another story. Did you ever notice all the crap stuck to the bottom of your desk and try to figure how long it had been there?  Why were you not allowed to talk while you were under the desk? So the enemy pilot wouldn’t know where you were hiding? Were you ever sorry you hadn’t gone to the bathroom five minutes before the drill?  By the time I got into junior high school there were no longer any 'take cover' drills and I missed my big chance with Marilyn Cohen, who by that point, had become a real hottie, if you know what I mean. 

Home was not worry-free either. 
In the total scheme of worries, I worried least about being fried by an atom bomb.  I had bigger things to worry about waiting for me at home.

I told you we’d be getting back to seltzer.

The most lethal weapon in our house was the seltzer bottle.  More so than all the knives in the drawer next to the stove. 

For those of you who are children of those who grew up in the fifties and sixties you think seltzer always came in screw-top plastic bottles.

Right?  Wrong!  You drop a plastic bottle, no big thing.  Oops. Pick it up, put it back in the Sub-Zero Dutch door built-in refrigerator.

(The seltzer you now buy bears no resemblance to that which came in a siphon. The sense of adventure is gone; the new seltzer is like drinking tap water. Why bother?)
When we were kids, drop one of those glass babies on the kitchen linoleum, they’d be sitting shiva for you and your neighbors.  Those that survived, meaning in the apartment houses on either side of yours, would be evacuated until the HazMat team fished out all the glass shards from the walls.  The search would not end until they found that small Good Health Seltzer label.

How old were you before you were allowed to carry the seltzer bottle from the refrigerator to the table?

To prepare for the honor of carrying a seltzer bottle I practiced carrying my cousin's new-borne infant. "OK.  If he could carry Little Warren, maybe we could trust him with the seltzer."  "I dunno, Nat.  An infant is one thing, but a seltzer bottle?" 

I think it was one of my bar mitzvah gifts – permission to carry the seltzer bottle.  “If he can be trusted to carry the Torah in Shul, maybe we can trust him with a seltzer bottle” so I guess they figured they'd give me a shot at carrying the seltzer bottle twelve feet from the refrigerator to the dining room table. 

In retrospect, both incidents made them equally proud and gave my mother bragging rights at her next maj jong game.

“First, make sure his shoe laces are tied.  We don’t want him tripping. Is the floor dry?  Close the blinds.  We don’t want the sun causing him to squint while he’s walking.”

Did you ever know anyone who actually dropped one?  I'm not talking about the urban legends.  You know, where your cousin dated a girl whose brother had a classmate who dropped a bottle.  I'm talking first-hand knowledge.  Rumor had it that Herbie was a victim of a dropped, or thrown seltzer bottle - a crime perpetrated by his mother upon learning he was well on his way toward failing every class in the eleventh grade - again. Herbie’s big scholastic concern was whether he would find a parking spot near the school.

In any case, Herbie manned the last booth in Dave's Sweet Shoppe and Luncheonette, often carrying on an animated conversation with himself ending in disgust when we was unable to convince himself that he was right.  The neighborhood kids would sometimes screw up the courage to ask what happened to his left eye and all he's mutter was 'seltzer.'

Let's take a break for a minute.  I'm not talking about what passes for seltzer in those puny plastic bottles with the screw-off caps and I'm not referring to the imported 'sparkling' water hand-crafted by monks in the Alps. 

This is NOT seltzer

I'm referring to the real stuff in thick glass bottles with metal siphons.  The bottles that look like fire extinguishers, but more powerful.  (C'mon, you gonna tell me you never aimed a seltzer bottle out the window to see how far the stream would go and then have Mrs. Schneider rat on you to your mother because you got her laundry wet.)  The bottles that now sell for upwards of thirty bucks on E-Bay?  The bottles that all the me-gens have been converting to table lamps?

As late as the fifties there were several hundred ‘seltzer men’ in New York City.  (I swear, half were named Sam and all were the age of your grandfather.)   Now there are about two – and they’re all your age.  Seltzer used to be delivered in open trucks.  Welcome to the 21^st century; seltzer is now delivered in closed trucks. The bottles were packed ten to a wooden crate hoisted to the deliveryman’s shoulder. That was the minimum order.  “What, you should want Sam to schlep up to the fourth floor with only two bottles?”  We paid ten cents a bottle; now you pay $25 a case – and you better return the empties.

Ok.  Wanna be a hit at your next social gathering.  What's the derivation of seltzer?  like, where did it come from?  No, to the wiseguy in the back of the room who said it came from his grandmother's icebox. It was actually named after Niederselters, a small town near Frankfort, Germany that began producing carbonated tonics in the 16th century, but it wasn't until 1809 that Joseph Hawkins patented the machinery for carbonating spring water and the hermetically sealed bottles became a staple in our 20th century diet.

Here’s an interesting bit.  Most of the seltzer bottles still in existence were hand-blown by Czech and Austrian craftsmen before World War II. And, in New York City there is only one seltzer ‘factory’ and it’s located in Canarsie. City tap water gets filtered and ‘fizzed up’ with 60 pounds per square inch of carbon dioxide on machines that are close to 100 years old.  (What, you think the water was imported from Maine?)

Wait a second.  Can carbon dioxide really be good for you?  Also, how do they put the top on under that pressure?  (I have a hunch the tops are reinstalled after they’re filled and then the CO2 is injected through the small holes on the top.)  Do any bottles explode during the filling process?  Where in the process are the bottles sterilized?  How come some families got colored bottles and all we got were lousy clear ones?  Where do all those tapered color bottles come from that I see on E-Bay?

Every block had a seltzer man.  Our block had Sol.

This is Sol as a teenager

Sol delivered them in crates of ten Good Health seltzer bottles on his shoulder. 

Ponder this, buckeroos: Piled as high as they were on the truck they never fell off on sharp turns and, equally impressive - no one ever stole the bottles from the open truck.  

At age 10 you're not particularly good at judging age. Your teachers were all about 70 so it only figures that Sol, who looked old enough to be their father, had to be close to 100 and still schlepping those cases up four flights.

On special occasions he would deliver Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup. And, in a nod to healthy living, we also consumed Cott diet soda, also delivered by Sol in his attempt to corner the beverage market. Being first with a product does not guarantee quality. "It's Cott to be good" was about as far from the truth as one could get. But, if you wanted sugar-free soda, it was the only game in town, until Tab. Boy, did we know how to live!!! 

"Good seltzer should hurt."

To the few unaware of the lethal power in a glass of seltzer: Pour a glass of real seltzer, let it sit for 8 hours. That has as much punch to it as a freshly opened bottle of Coke. Let the real seltzer sit for 12 hours, you're coming close to the fizz quotient of a freshly opened bottle of sparkling Perrier.

Here's a brief seltzer vignette.  I admired my father for a lot of reasons.  Interestingly, the older I got, the more reasons were added to the list.  But there was one that I vividly remember from my childhood.  He would sit down for dinner and pour himself a glass of seltzer. I'm not sure what the proper action verb is.  It seems that 'pour' is too gentle a word for what comes out of a seltzer bottle.  In any case, the seltzer made it from the bottle into his glass.  And then he would immediately take a big long gulp, and I mean a really big gulp. No puny sissy sip for my dad!  Based on my limited experience with the beverage, I waited for the belch.  Nothing.  Not even a hiccup.  Sometimes a sigh, but nothing more.  And we would begin to eat as though nothing happened.

I, on the other hand, would pour a small quantity into my glass at the beginning of the meal and then hoping most of the fizz would evaporate, just before dessert was served, I would slowly sip the liquid - not unlike what I later learned to do with fine wine, including the swishing around in the mouth before swallowing.  Regardless of how long I waited, the exercise always ended with at least a hiccup.

But, if you're old enough to read this you know there is always a subtle contest between you and your same-sex parent.  To prove my manliness on several occasions I would attempt to chug a freshly poured glass of seltzer, always with the same results.

With the first gulp you feel as though your eyeballs are going to pop out of their sockets.  In retrospect that would be a blessing because the seltzer is trying its best to escape your body through any orifice it can find. Picture sneezing through your ears, for example. 

Failing the obvious escape routes, it will try some unconventional outlets.  Fearing that it may try for your brain you hold on to the top of your head to prevent your scalp from being ripped from your head because once that first line of defense is breached the brain is sure to follow.  Now, bear in mind that it's critical that you continue to appear ultra cool throughout this.  But it's difficult to do when you realize your toes are separating like they do when you get a cramp in the sole of your foot and for the first time you feel a tickling sensation in your toe nails.

At the same time your throat is going into gag reflex so that even if you wanted to, you couldn't spit it out.  The damage has already been done.  Even your nose gets into the act.  First with a little twitch; then something that resembles the equivalent of a nasal mambo. And somehow, it's your nose that comes to the rescue and even Grandma Jenny, who rarely notices anything, is aware that she better move the pot roast platter.

Ah!  That's good seltzer, Dad.

Now, as cool as you want to be, your father is even cooler.  He knows what's going down.  But he won't let on, other than to ask if you'd like some more.  Hey, don't you think he tried the same thing with his father?

Every block had a seltzer man. 

No more.  According to a Times article about ten years ago there was only one guy who still had the last remaining seltzer route. There's one family-run business on Avenue D and East 92nd Street that still fills seltzer bottles, and oddly enough, the trade refers to his business as a 'filler.' He lives in New Jersey and schleps to Canarsie to continue the business started by his great grandfather.

How will you explain the ecstasy of seltzer to your grandchildren?
I still don’t trust those siphons, but you have to admit, teamed up with Fox’s U-Bet syrup they made a great egg cream!

As a bonus, I've included a recent article from the New York Times:

As Old as the Bottles
By COREY KILGANNON
Name Eli Miller  Age 79
Where He’s From Coney Island
What He Is The city’s longest-working seltzer deliveryman
Telling Detail Keeps a copy of “The Seltzer Man,” a 1993 children’s book about him, on the front seat of his delivery van; it was written and illustrated by a longtime customer, Ken Rush. 
Telling Detail Keeps a copy of “The Seltzer Man,” a 1993 children’s book about him, on the front seat of his delivery van; it was written and illustrated by a longtime customer, Ken Rush. 
“I’m running on fumes — the reason I work is, I just can’t stay home,” said Mr. Miller, who has been delivering seltzer in Brooklyn for more than a half-century.
He can afford to retire, but that would mean his customers, many of whom have been with him for decades, might have to resort to store-bought seltzer.
“I don’t want them to have to drink that dreck you buy in the supermarket,” he said, using the Yiddish term for dirt. “So I guess I’ll retire when Gabriel blows his horn.”
Mr. Miller said that when he began delivering, on March 10, 1960, there were perhaps 500 seltzer men in the city, and a half-dozen seltzer bottlers. Now he can count his delivery competition on one hand, and they all fill up at the last seltzer factory in the city: Gomberg Seltzer Works in Canarsie.
A gritty old machine there pumps its effervescent, bubbly elixir into Mr. Miller’s thick glass bottles, made in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, hand-blown and hand-etched, with pewter siphon tops.
“You drop one of these, it will explode,” he said, holding one up. “Inside here is triple-filtered New York City water with 80 pounds of carbonic pressure.”
Mr. Miller jams wooden shims between the 10 rattling bottles in the beat-up wooden cases, which he delivers for $31 each.
On a recent weekday morning, he pulled his van up to the seltzer works and exchanged his empty bottles for full ones. He said hello to the owner, Kenny Gomberg, and his son, Alex, 25, who last year started his own seltzer route.
“I’m the oldest seltzer man in New York and he’s the youngest,” Mr. Miller said as Alex Gomberg loaded his van next to Mr. Miller’s. “I’m passing the baton to him.”
In quieter moments, Mr. Miller allows that he might consider retiring in a year, and that there is no one to pass the route to. He has about 150 customers, many of them sporadic, which is about half what he once had. He works two or three days a week, delivering to brownstones in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, and to restaurants in Williamsburg.
His seltzer always sold itself — he includes the sound of a spritzing bottle on his answering machine — but these days, new customers seem as enthralled by the deliveryman, as much a throwback as his product.
“I rely on mouth-to-mouth recommendations, but I’ll only take new customers if they’re near my other ones,” said Mr. Miller, who will turn 80 in June.
He used to be able to carry two full cases of seltzer up four flights. Now he asks his customers to bring them up themselves from the lobby.
His lanky frame is still strong, and he can still hoist a crate to his shoulder, but usually he lugs them at waist level. Some days, back pain prevents him from working.
But he declared, “Old seltzer men never die — they just lose their shpritzer.”
Mr. Miller, a lifelong bachelor, has lived in the same apartment in Bensonhurst since 1977.
“My customers are my family,” he said. “They feed me dinner, and I’ve watched their children grow up.”
During a recent delivery to a brownstone in Park Slope, a housekeeper let him in and then left Mr. Miller alone in the place.
“You see?” he said, picking up the empty bottles. “They give me the keys to the kingdom.”
Mr. Miller grew up in Coney Island. His three siblings became professionals.

He worked as a dividend clerk on Wall Street but wanted to make more money. He began a beer delivery route in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which turned into a seltzer route in other neighborhoods.
His father, Meyer Miller, began helping Eli after retiring from his house-painting job. In 1976, his father, then 72, died of a heart attack while carrying a case up to a customer.
“This customer, she used to give him a glass of schnapps, so he liked to deliver to her,” recalled Mr. Miller, who had run up from the truck but was unable to resuscitate his father.
To this day, he keeps copies of his father’s yellowing stationery in the front seat of his van as a keepsake.
“My father died on the route and I’m going to die on the route,” he said, and resumed stacking the old, clattering cases of seltzer into his van.
A gritty old machine there pumps its effervescent, bubbly elixir into Mr. Miller’s thick glass bottles, made in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, hand-blown and hand-etched, with pewter siphon tops.
“You drop one of these, it will explode,” he said, holding one up. “Inside here is triple-filtered New York City water with 80 pounds of carbonic pressure.”
Mr. Miller jams wooden shims between the 10 rattling bottles in the beat-up wooden cases, which he delivers for $31 each.
On a recent weekday morning, he pulled his van up to the seltzer works and exchanged his empty bottles for full ones. He said hello to the owner, Kenny Gomberg, and his son, Alex, 25, who last year started his own seltzer route.
“I’m the oldest seltzer man in New York and he’s the youngest,” Mr. Miller said as Alex Gomberg loaded his van next to Mr. Miller’s. “I’m passing the baton to him.”
In quieter moments, Mr. Miller allows that he might consider retiring in a year, and that there is no one to pass the route to. He has about 150 customers, many of them sporadic, which is about half what he once had. He works two or three days a week, delivering to brownstones in Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, and to restaurants in Williamsburg.
His seltzer always sold itself — he includes the sound of a spritzing bottle on his answering machine — but these days, new customers seem as enthralled by the deliveryman, as much a throwback as his product.
“I rely on mouth-to-mouth recommendations, but I’ll only take new customers if they’re near my other ones,” said Mr. Miller, who will turn 80 in June.
He used to be able to carry two full cases of seltzer up four flights. Now he asks his customers to bring them up themselves from the lobby.
His lanky frame is still strong, and he can still hoist a crate to his shoulder, but usually he lugs them at waist level. Some days, back pain prevents him from working.
But he declared, “Old seltzer men never die — they just lose their shpritzer.”
Mr. Miller, a lifelong bachelor, has lived in the same apartment in Bensonhurst since 1977.
“My customers are my family,” he said. “They feed me dinner, and I’ve watched their children grow up.”
During a recent delivery to a brownstone in Park Slope, a housekeeper let him in and then left Mr. Miller alone in the place.
“You see?” he said, picking up the empty bottles. “They give me the keys to the kingdom.”
Mr. Miller grew up in Coney Island. His three siblings became professionals.
He worked as a dividend clerk on Wall Street but wanted to make more money. He began a beer delivery route in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which turned into a seltzer route in other neighborhoods.
His father, Meyer Miller, began helping Eli after retiring from his house-painting job. In 1976, his father, then 72, died of a heart attack while carrying a case up to a customer.
“This customer, she used to give him a glass of schnapps, so he liked to deliver to her,” recalled Mr. Miller, who had run up from the truck but was unable to resuscitate his father.
To this day, he keeps copies of his father’s yellowing stationery in the front seat of his van as a keepsake.
“My father died on the route and I’m going to die on the route,” he said, and resumed stacking the old, clattering cases of seltzer into his van.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 28, 2013, on page MB4 of the New York edition with the headline: As Old as the Bottles.

At 79, Still Keeping Brooklyn Bubbling

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