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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14. Edna, Anthony and What I Remember of the Sixth Grade

Ah, the sixth grade. Remember what you learned?  I’m not sure we were taught anything that year.  I think Miss O’Neill went on sabbatical that year and didn’t tell the administration. Punching in every day was the extent of her pedagogical activities. Oh yeah, we went to the UN in New York. Nice bus ride. Other than that, zero recollection of any formal learning.  I know I went to school, because I got an attendance certificate.  I was also an AAA crossing guard (yup, with a badge). Oh, and I was elected class president, much to Miss O’Neill’s disappointment who was hoping Susan Schneider would get the job. And, I managed to get through six years in the school without once having to sit on the bench outside the principal's office!

That doesn’t mean I don’t remember anything from that year.

Edna Rabinowitz, or to be more precise: Edna Michelle Rabinowitz.  Why, after all these years is that name still deposited in my memory bank?

And, I remembered assembly day - actually, one assembly day in particular. No discussion of my recollection of elementary school assembly day and the attendant color guard would be complete without a mention of Edna and that fateful day when Anthony DiLarocca carried the American flag onto the stage at PS 235 as he did every week that year. How fickle we eleven-year-olds can be.  One minute Anthony could do no wrong – the first one chosen for any game, friendly, popular. Then… Bingo!

Let me put things in perspective.  In the pecking order of school status the person who garnered the most respect was Mr. Farrell, the custodian. (The first thing you learn in kindergarten is to never refer to him as the janitor. The janitor reported to Mr. Farrell. Mr. Farrell always came to work in a three-piece suit and carried a brief case. If I had known then what an executive was or looked like, Mr Farrell would be one.) Next in the hierarchy was the sixth grader in the color guard who carried the American flag during assembly. Tied for third place were the school principal and the AV kid who set up the film strip projector. Actually, the kid usually beat out the principal for name recognition.

That honor, that year, was bestowed upon Norman Edwin Wasserman, who early on had mastered a skill that would, no doubt, help in his career goals: don’t hire your replacement unless there is a promotable position for you.  Norman had the AV franchise all to himself. A teacher needed AV equipment? Norman was the main, and only, man. He would schlep the phonograph from the principal’s office to the classroom and set up the record for music appreciation. Or he would set up the film strip projector and gingerly thread the spool of film.  Often, it was the wrong spool, or he had forgotten to bring the screen, necessitating another round trip to the principal’s office.  Those who knew Norman suspected that this screw up was intentional; anything to stall a return to Miss O’Neill’s class.

Norman Edwin Wasserman.  Now that was a name that did not easily roll off your tongue.  There were several theories surrounding his naming: a) his parents were fond of names ending in ‘n’, b) the names would satisfy both sets of grandparents, c) his parents wanted to get even for the unplanned pregnancy or d) all of the above.

Back to Anthony. Anthony was selected after careful consideration by the faculty. Actually, the eligibility pool quickly dried up after Anthony. (“What? You want your precious Arnie he should get a hernia carrying that heavy flag?”)

PS 235 was situated in a mixed Catholic and Jewish neighborhood with a large Catholic elementary school just a block away.  If you were Catholic and of elementary school age and your parents could afford it, you went to St. Catherine’s of Genoa on Albany Avenue.  If the family couldn’t afford it, somehow the Church provided.  Case closed. You didn’t want your kid labeled ‘a public,’ as we public school kids were called by those who went to St. Catherine’s.

Unless you got kicked out. Then you went to PS 235 and became ‘a public.’. Once the word got out that it wasn’t so bad – in fact, that it was good - the discipline problem at St. Catherine’s became more acute.

Hence the defacto segregation in PS 235 with the school demographics - except for the St. Catherines alumni -  resembling Rabbi Solomon Cohen Yeshiva, Talmud Study and Day School of Israel and Brownsville (with satellite yeshivas conveniently located in Boro Park and Williamsburg).  You get the picture.

Anthony never went to St. Catherine’s. He was a ‘public lifer,’ a PS 235 student since the first grade. His parents owned a nice house a block away from the school and by the sixth grade most of the class would hang out there after school.

Part of Anthony’s charm, when, or if, we cared to analyze it, had to do with the fact that his was the only last name in our class that ended with a vowel other than 'O'.  (How could I forget Rose Shapiro, but that's another story.). A nice diversion from a steady diet of names ending in stein, er, berg, witz or smith that made up the rest of the class – except for Mary Ellen.

Mary Ellen was the only kid in our class, maybe in the entire school, to have two first names.  How neat is that?  Her ticket into our class was that her mother taught in the school.  As a result, we all started referring to each other by two names.  This lasted about two weeks until we either forgot what our classmates’ middle names were or Miss O’Neill told us to stop making fun of Mary Ellen.  “No way, Miss O’Neill.  Honest. We think she’s cool!”

Okay, so that was our class’ contribution to diversity. Twenty-nine lower middle-class Jewish kids from the neighborhood; one Jewish-wannabe Italian kid, and one ‘other’ from who-knows-where who got driven to school by her mother.

Until that fateful day, what today would be called a ‘wardrobe malfunction.’ In retrospect, ask any kid in that class what was the most important thing he learned that entire year – the takeaway - something that would remain ingrained in the far reaches of his memory for ever. Something that didn’t even get an honorable mention in Miss O’Neill’s sixth grade curriculum: yep, check your fly!

Thank you, Anthony DiLarocca!

So, what does this have to do with Edna Michelle?  She was in our class, but definitely not in the ‘in’ clique. These were the girls who, once they got into high school just to piss off their parents, would actually date guys like Anthony with tattoos and black leather jackets, and who smoked, 

Edna, like a few other girls in the class, was ‘interested’ in Anthony. We guys weren’t jealous of Anthony and his appeal to the opposite sex. At age eleven our concern was who had the newest Spauldeen. Anthony seemed as oblivious to the attention as the rest of us.  Fast forward to junior high school and see how that would change. (It was at that point that Anthony, having joined me in junior high school, and having gone to many of his classmates' bar mitvahs, toyed with the concept of converting, at least until the Bar Mitzvah season ended.) Think glory, girls, gifts, gelt.  Anthony especially liked the sound of that last one and would often pepper his conversations with the word 'gelt.'  "Hey, Neil, I got gelt.  Wanna go for ice cream?"

But, back to Edna.  It was evident that, even to us less-than-worldly sixth graders, that Edna lacked some of the requisite social graces required to navigate life’s daily struggles and interactions.

For starters, it wasn’t that her clothes were dirty or torn. But by nine o’clock she looked as though she had just gone through two hours of remedial recess or had run the last three blocks or had fought off a bunch of kids from St. Catherine’s. Sometimes her hair looked like it had been used by a boy scout troop practicing knot tying.

Edna was less than cool in expressing her affection for Anthony.  In fact, to her credit, her uncoolness gave her a head start in the race for Anthony’s attention. She didn’t care if she made a fool of herself. Discretion was definitely not her strong suit. She heralded this affection by writing his initials all over the inside of her composition book. Unfortunately for Edna, Anthony was more interested in Angela Benevento at St. Catherine’s; a relationship, even at age eleven, made in heaven according to Anthony’s parents - unless he found a nice (i.e. rich) Jewish girl with lots of gelt.

But, of all the kids in the assembly that day, it was Edna Michelle who first noticed Anthony’s, ahem, problem. It was she who had to poke the kid next to her and point.  That’s what set off the chain reaction to the point where even the first graders in the front of the auditorium were pointing.

I was never in the color guard, but I did know that that flag was heavy and required two hands to hold it up and it was the American flag, after all.  You just can’t put it down and you can’t hand it to the kid on either side of you.  They had their own flags, and, by now, their own problems. Maybe the first graders are pointing at them. I don’t know how long it takes to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and that part about Richard Stance – whoever he was, but I can tell you it must have seemed like an hour to the kids on stage.

Eagle-eye Edna got her fifteen minutes of fame as a result of her discovery.  Actually, in her case the fifteen minutes was discounted to about five.

Anthony finally made it off the stage and spent the rest of the day in the principal’s office, no doubt figuring how he was going to make it out of the building at three o’clock.

“No problem Anthony.  We got your back. We sure don’t got your front.”

“Hey Anthony, what’s up?”

Hi, buddy, what’s goin’ down?”

You can not believe how creative – and cruel – intelligent sixth graders can be, unless you once were one.  It was strictly a guy thing.  If the girls said anything they did it behind Anthony’s back. What’s the purpose in doing that when you can deliver a zinger direct to the victim and savor the joy of seeing him react? Unfortunately for his classmates, Anthony took it good-naturedly which took the fun out of the taunting and by Monday recess we had moved on to other important issues and by next Friday, there was Anthony walking down the center aisle of the auditorium with that big American flag. Now, truth be told, not all eyes were focused on the flag.  

Not only had Edna’s claim to fame flamed out but she also garnered the anger of some of her female classmates who felt it necessary to protect Anthony from any further embarrassment.

In any case, shortly after the event, Edna changed her ‘allegiance’ – no pun intended – and her notebook. Now, when she opened her new notebook we could see plastered on the inside were the letters NEW.  Why would anyone write ‘new’ in a notebook?  Then we realized, it wasn’t ‘NEW.’ They were initials! 

Way to go, Norman Edwin Wasserman!   .

We graduated in June. I went on to junior high school; Edna went to the local elementary school for grades 7 and 8.  That was the end of dealing with Edna Michelle Rabinowitz – until the end of my senior year in Erasmus Hall High School.  (No one who went there ever called it Erasmus Hall.  Like saying Samuel J. Tilden High School. At best it was just Erasmus; usually pronounced ‘Rasmuz,’ or ‘Rasmyass.’) 

Anyway, I get my senior year book and I’m thumbing through it, first to make sure my name is in it and then at all those, you know, team and club group pictures.  I stop at the Arista picture to see if my name was mistakenly included and as I thumb down the list, there is Edna Michelle Rabinowitz and she’s the Arista leader. Whatthe…? The school was large – in excess of 4,000 students – but still, in three years how could our paths not have crossed? I know, she was probably in all those honor classes, but still... The picture is small, but there she is in the center of the front row and there she is again in the cheerleader picture. 

So I turn to the page that has her graduation picture and sure enough, there, sandwiched between Denise Rabino and Leon Rabinowitz is Edna’s smiling face framed by long blond hair.  Of course she’s smiling; she’s graduating with honors, she was Arista leader, she was co-captain on the Cheerleader squad, she had volunteered in the principal’s office, she was going on to college, she’s destined to marry some guy with a ‘3^rd’ after his name and move to Greenwich; she had managed to get the knots out of her hair and she looks nothing like I remember her from the sixth grade. Yeah, she probably weighed about the same as she did in the sixth grade – but she was now about a foot taller and had redistributed some of that weight to her advantage, if you know what I mean.

In fact, she looked good.  Damn! Very good! 

Baby swans and Edna Michelle Rabinowitz.

13. "Put It On The Wall, Lou"

Many of the responders to this blog tell me their parents owned the neighborhood cleaners, pharmacy, grocery or candy store. What a quaint concept. No one-hour commute. How totally last century! And the stores were open six days a week. All their lives my grandparents struggled so they wouldn't have to live above the store. I think of that every day on my one-hour commute to work.

The impatient among you readers are still trying to figure out what the title of this blog has to do with these neighborhood stores. Some of you may know; don't give away our little secret.

Most of the stores in our neighborhood were truly neighborhood stores.  The 'owner' of the store may not have been the landlord, but for all intense and purposes, he, or she, was the owner.
But scattered throughout the business district were what we called 'chain stores.'  Most notable, Woolworths.  What, you think old FW lived above the store on Utica Avenue? 

Another was Ebinger's.  If you lived in Brooklyn you know what Ebinger's is, or was.
Ebingers was started by a German immigrant family in 1898. There was a bunch of them in Brooklyn and by the time the chain went belly-up in 1972 there were 67 in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau and Suffolk. The bakery and distribution center was on Bedford near Snyder and if the wind was blowing in a westerly direction, the aroma would not just float over Erasmus; it would sort of caress the school. The goods were delivered to the stores several times a day in red and black electric-powered trucks that would invariably double park blocking the trolleys on Church Avenue.

I still drool just thinking about Ebingers layer cake, but hands down, the blackout cake was to die for. Ebinger's also did some miracle work with crumb cakes and buns. Those in the know would just pick off the crumb topping leaving the rest of the family to deal with a virtually bald bun.  

There was a certain irony in that the majority of Ebingers' Brooklyn customers were Jewish which did not extend to their hiring practices. Anyway, Ebingers died a quiet death, allegedly because it did not follow its customers out of the City in the late sixties and seventies.

If you didn't go to Ebingers, there was Sutters on Flatbush and Caton or you went to a 'Jewish' bakery. You didn't have to be Jewish to own a Jewish bakery. If it was a bakery and you lived in Flatbush, it was a Jewish bakery - pronounced as one word. That's it; don't argue; don't ask why. Just get a small seeded rye and ask them to slice it. And make sure it's fresh. 

Truth in advertising did not apply to local bakeries or fruit stores. "Of course it's fresh! Would I sell your mudda sompem that ain't fresh? 

Aside from all those mixing machines in the back, bakeries had two of the most fascinating pieces of machinery. Sure, the butcher had his saw that could cut through bone like it was butter, (a bad analogy, especially in a kosher butcher shop) and the shoe maker had that neat row of grinders and belts and brushes, but bakeries had bread-slicing machines and cord tying machines. You know, those gismos that would wrap a cord around a box in five seconds including tying the knot. How it do that? Bakeries provided a never-ending supply of cord that wound up in your kitchen junk drawer with the 175 packets of sauce from the Chinese take-out place.  But, even cord had its hierarchy.  The Ebingers' brown and green cord was the most coveted and would be used only for special occasions. Come on.  You gonna tell me your mother didn't save cord?

And while we're on bakery-related rhetorical questions: What ever happened to all those display cabinets for charlotte rouses sitting outside bakeries and candy stores? And why were charlotte rouses sold only in warm weather? 

Here's an interesting tidbit: Charlotte Rouse was a real person - a turn of the century spinster school teacher, who, coupled with what must have been her dislike of children and a weird sense of humor, designed a dessert that would frustrate generations of children. Try to push up the cake through the cardboard cylinder without it popping straight up through the top, grazing your nose and just as quickly plummeting onto the floor.

Here's one more: Did you know that bagel and bialy bakers belonged to different unions? Both items could not be made in the same bakery if it was a union shop. When you bought bagels in a bakery that sold cakes and breads, the bagels were made elsewhere. (Sorry, buddy, to burst your bagel-bialy bubble.)


Each neighborhood store had its loyal following. (Notice, we're getting back to our original topic?) Would you ever think of going into a candy store that was not your 'regular' store?  Eaast Flatbush must have been the candy addict capital because our local candy store, which was officially Hoffman's Soda Shoppe and Luncheonette- had competition on all sides - four within two blocks; including one down the block from Dave Hoffman's shoppe. How did any of them make a living? Probably by staying open from six in the morning until nine at night, six days a week.  My taste buds were trained not to want anything sweet on Tuesdays, when Dave's was closed. 

At home we had freezers large enough to hold two ice cube trays. If we wanted ice cream, we'd go down to Dave's and order a pint of hand-packed ice cream and we'd stand over him to make sure he packed that container inside a metal 'sleeve' so it wouldn't split 

We grew up in the age of specialization without knowing what it was. In what was close to a mile stretch along Church Avenue I knew of only three supermarkets. There was a Shop Rite near Ralph Avenue, a Henny Penny near Schenectady Av and a newer Bohack near Albany Av. Other than that, if you wanted vegetables, you went to a vegetable store; milk was sold in a grocery store, bread in a bakery, fish in a fish store and appetizing (whatever that means) in an appetizing store.

How's this for specialization?  we bought salmon in a fish store; smoked salmon from the appetizing store.

That's where we went for halavah which was sold in bulk. Sol would carve a slab from a giant block.  While we're in drool mode, think chocolate covered jelly candies and all those other goodies - all unpackaged, just sitting there, strategically placed at waist height for a six-year old? If your father didn't own a candy store, the next best thing was grazing rights in an appetizing store.

There was a ritual to buying lox (smoked salmon to those of you who might have just arrived from Iowa). The slicing of lox added new meaning to the word 'thin.' Thin was too thick. If you couldn't see through it, it was too thick. And an eighth of a pound could easily serve a family of six. A pound of lox? You bought a pound maybe for a bar mitzvah. Our local appetizing store must have hired moonlighting surgeons to slice lox.  (Yeah, I know: sturgeon surgeons.)

There was even an art to applying the lox to a bagel. (In my house if you wanted lox it had to be with cream cheese and it had to be on a bagel.  Case closed. I remember the first time I had cream cheese and lox on something that was not a bagel.  It just didn't taste right.)  

I grew up in a 'dot' house. This meant you took a small slice of lox and to make it last you cut it up into even smaller pieces and placed it strategically over the cream cheese so that each bite would have some lox. This process paved the way for the splitting of the atom, which was a piece of cake in comparison. Rich people put an entire slice of lox on their bagel. I used to dream of someday being rich enough to do that. Gentiles sometimes did that when they wanted to 'assimilate,' or wanted a change from the usual corned beef with mayo on white bread diet.

Each store had its unique aroma, but none compared to the smell of the fish store. My mother went to Al's on Church near Schenectady. No one could accuse these local merchants of creativity in naming their establishments. The decision centered solely around whether to use the owner's first or last name. Al's offered the freshest fish at the best prices. It was the best. It was the best because my mother knew. Yeah, I know. Your mother also went to the best fish store, wherever it was. Everyone's mother did. Same for the bakery.

Maybe not so for the grocery. There, your allegiance was based on proximity. And on your family's ability to join the hallowed ranks of those to whom credit was extended. I'm sure there were others, but I knew of only two stores in Brooklyn that extended credit to its customers: Abraham & Straus downtown Brooklyn (no plastic credit card; an imbossed oval metal tag on a key chain) and Lou's Fine Groceries on Church Avenue. I would be sent down to Lou's for a container of milk (or 'a milk') and a stick of butter and maybe a measure of sour cream. Never eggs. It wasn't until I started driving that I was trusted to carry a dozen eggs a block and a half. And after I told Lou or his wife what I wanted, he took the big pencil from behind his ear, licked the point, and would add up the order on the paper bag. Maybe he didn't got such good English, but he sure as hell knew addition - unless it was more than five items. More than five items, out came the adding machine. And I would tell him to 'put it on the wall' and he would write the amount under our name with his big pencil on a sheet of wrapping paper on the wall. 

Every Saturday my mother would go in and Lou would add up all the orders we had bought for the week and she would pay. Never a dispute; no call to Customer Service to talk to a representative who would thank my mother for holding and reminding her how important this call was.

Lou always wore an apron.  It added a sense of importance and helped identify him as the proprietor.  (Who else would be standing behind the counter?) This picture was taken within the first  two days of the month - hence the apron's almost sterile condition.

Let's say American cheese was on sale for 59 cents a pound and you wanted a quarter of a pound. You know it never came to exactly a quarter of a pound. How did the Lou's of the world determine the price? And do it before the scale's needle stopped quivering?

OK. For you non-Brooklynites: a container is what you outlanders erroneously refer to as a carton, or quart of milk; a stick of butter would be a quarter-pound package of butter (one-pound boxes would be opened and the individual 'sticks' would be sold separately) and measures of sour cream (a 'measure' according to my grandmother) defy derivation. The best I can conjure up is that at one time sour cream was sold in bulk to the merchant who then ladled out a supply to the customer. Hey, if you can do better, let me know!

Before we leave Lou, what's the deal with licking the point of the pencil before writing?  There had to be a more effective method of contracting lead poisoning.

That was my exposure to the world of commerce - the mom-and-pop shops on the avenues.  Shops where we were actually known; shops that, if we wanted, actually delivered.

Next session we'll touch on the sub category of merchants - the street guys.

Posted byEngTchrat9/06/2006 10:00:00 PM1 comment: Links to this post

13a. The Iceman Cometh - Street Merchants

Update to this article: Wow, did this generate interest! All the mobile food vendors, even back then! Buy a truck and a grill. Fry some food and bingo, you're in the restaurant business. Sixty years ago we thought it was exotic. "Hey ma, I bought an egg roll offa dat truck an' I still got money for ice cream." Compared to today, it was truly primitive. Let's save that for another discussion. 

We did most of our daily shopping on Church Av - there was no need to go elsewhere. The closest thing to a mall before there was a Kings Plaza was Flatbush Av or Kings Highway near the Brighton subway station or Pitkin Avenue.("So, where else to shop for a Bar Mitzvah or confirmation suit?")

But there was an entire retail world that came to our door. There were the obvious 'seasonal' vendors. 

In our neighborhood, the Good Humor man reigned supreme in warm weather. We're talking about a specially designed pick-up truck with a roofless cab. (In bad weather there was a canvas roof that could be unrolled.)

The poor Bungalow Bar guy came in a distant second. He had to endure some very unflattering elementary-school poetry and even more damaging rumors regarding the cleanliness of the product. The latter ultimately contributed to the company's demise. (What do you think happened to those neat trucks with the house roofs?)

For a while, even Howard Johnson's got into the frey and then there was a bunch of independent operators. (One summer I went on a banana ice cream binge sold only by some independent guy with a truck that got washed once a season which coincided with his own showering. Fortunately, I overcame this lapse in culinary judgment.) 

It wasn't until several years later that Mister Softee came on the scene and the days of the white-uniformed ice cream men who actually rang bells would join the ranks of horse drawn wagons.

Well, not quite.

You could always tell when the Junk Man was in the neighborhood.  Whatever he fed his horse -junk food, I guess - never agreed with him. His horse-drawn wagon with a bunch of cowbells jingling on the back would always make his presence known. 

One of the few times in life when it was better to walk in front of the moving vehicle!

He, and in a somewhat related industry, the rag man.  The rag man must have been related to Pop, the hot knish man.  Same stature, same vintage, same origins.  I spent the better part of my youth trying to figure out what he was saying: "I cash clothes."  Not a clue, but everyone else on the block must have understood because they'd all run into their houses and come out with unwanted clothes - sometimes still being worn by an unsuspecting donor.  After some obligatory haggling he'd stuff them into a giant pack on his back that must have outweighed him and he'd shuffle off.  No one ever questioned what he did with the clothes.  He was ultimately replaced, not with a machine or a truck, but with a giant clothes bin unceremoneously located in a parking lot or at the edge of a gas station.

The vegetable vendor with his hand-lettered prices written with black crayon on a shopping bag also graduated from a horse-drawn wagon to a converted and repainted school bus and raised his prices accordingly. After a while you got used to his unique spelling of some tough words like tomato, onion, potato.  Forget about cucumber; don't even try canteloupe.  Other than my summer day camp rides to Broad Channel Day Camp on a school bus, Vegetable Joe's converted bus was my only school bus experience. 

Vegetable Joe's future emporium.  Probably the closest he came to riding a school bus.

The knife sharpener guy intrigued me. He announced his arrival with a special sounding gong. He also advertised that he would sharpen lawnmower blades. I mean it. He even had a picture of one painted on the side of his truck for my neighbors who had no clue what a lawn was, let alone a lawn mower. Now there was a dreamer! Lawnmowers? Who had a lawn?

No one messed with good old Bob

My mother would save the scissors and dull knives for the day every two weeks when the sharpener guy would show up and it was my job to flag him down. Then, run back to the house and get the scissors and walk carefully and slowly, very slowly, to the grinder. Very slowly. "Stand back folks. Don't go near the kid. He's got knives." It was like the scene from "Dead Man Walking."  

The best - at least for a kid - was the horse-drawn, hand-cranked merry-go-round wagon. The wagon was ultimately replaced with a truck-mounted 'whip' ride, which indirectly provided an unexpected lesson in centrifugal force as it pertains to a not-fully digested meal in a young stomach. Spectators in the know, and even loving parents, learned to stand a respectable distance from the ride.

Caution! Stand back when ride is in motion

The ice man not only cometh but wenteth. By the time I noticed these things, there weren't too many people on our block with ice boxes - in spite of what my grandmother called the refrigerator. So, most of the ice man's business was with the retailers on the Avenue. He, too, joined the mid-twentieth century by forsaking his horse for horsepower but still retaining that awesome ice crushing machine. Drop a giant cake of ice into the hopper and out came crushed ice. Or, cakes of ice were handled with a giant set of tongs and hoisted onto the iceman's burlap towel-covered shoulder for delivery to the customer. 

I can still hear the sound of that machine. If it could do that to ice, what would it do to human bones? It didn't seem to bother the horse, though.  The horse had other things to worry about - like career alternatives and glue.  

                                    

 

Rivaling the competition between the ice cream vendors was that between the Dugans and Krugs packaged bake goods drivers. What ever happened to them? Dugans went stale in October 1966. Krugs? Who knows. Who cared?  There was always Ebingers, and in an emergency there was always Entenmann's from the grocery store!   

                                

And finally, there was the milk delivery: Borden's, Sheffield/Sealtest. In real glass bottles. The Borden's products came from Utica and Kings Highway in what at one time was a stable. And they drove those neat Divco trucks while standing up. Refrigeration consisted of throwing a couple of ice cakes in the back to preserve the milk. Divco engineers followed the same styling concept adopted by Checker taxis. Hit on a decent style and stick with it - forever. Both Divco and Checker are out of business. Duh! 

Hey, wanna know sumpin?  The milkmen weren't crazy about giving up their horse-drawn wagons.  Seems the horses weren't as dumb as we think.  After a while they knew the route. And, if there were several stops on a block, the driver could get out carrying enough bottles for all his stops on the block and go from house to house without having to get back on the wagon.  The horse would just follow along and know where to stop. No truck could do that.  Didn't matter; the horses were replaced.  Done deal! 

Smarter than we thought

By the way,  I was never sent for a quart of milk.  It was,"Go to Lou's and get a milk."  Sending a kid for milk was easy back then. Ever check out the milk display case in a modern supermarket?

What ever happened to those flat-topped Canco containers with the lid in the corner? 

Here's another by-the-way:  Milk, when you were growing up, came only in quart bottles.  The advent of half-gallon containers signaled the beginning of the end for home delivery of milk.

Don't get all excited that I missed the seltzer man.  His role is so crucial that I've devoted a separate chapter to him: "The Agony and the Ecstacy." 

Who did I miss?