Brooklyn in the 1950s
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Basketball, volleyball, punchball, stickball, dodgeball, box ball, box baseball, baseball, softball, stoop ball, touch football, handball, kickball, wall ball. Ping-pong. Hit the penny. Never played tennis or tackle football. Never even heard of soccer. What have I forgotten?
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Autobiographers from Brooklyn divide, on the whole, into two camps. There are the discontented, who yearned from day one to get the hell out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible; and then there are the nostalgics, perpetually romanticizing those great days of spaldeens, stickball, and chocolate egg creams. Martin Levinson's privately-published memoir Brooklyn Boomer,…
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In the late 40s and 50s, Marty Glickman was the radio voice of the New York Knicks. As a basketball announcer, he was simply the best. Most of us from that era, especially Brooklyn guys, can still recall in our mind's ear his melodious, accurate and rapid-fire recreation of the game. "Gallatin to Braun on…
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When I was an unadventurous Flatbush "yoot" back there in the 1950s, there were only two movie theaters that mattered: the Leader and the Kent, both on Coney Island Avenue, and both within an easy walk. The Leader was closer to my East 9 Street home and it was there that I spent many a…
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Stunning, is it not? Just at the west side of our fair city, set against the first manifestations of the Front Range. Six well-tended fields, scores of players and many, many parents and grandparents (among them me, on sunny Saturday mornings). I can't imagine a more idyllic and peaceful scene. Do Luke and Caleb and…
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The word "nostalgia" has a curious history. It was coined in the late 17th century by attaching Greek άλγος (algos – pain) to νόστος (nostos -homecoming). Originally, nostalgia carried a strongly negative signification: "intense homesickness" — "the depressing symptoms… that arise in persons when they are seized with a longing to return to their home…
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Of the many Brooklyn novels that I've read this last while, Big Man, by Jay Neugeboren, comes closest to home. Neugeboren was newborn in 1938, just a year before me, and he attended fabled Erasmus Hall High School, most likely graduating with the class of 1955 (I was '56). It's a mark of my ignorance…
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It should be remembered and recorded that in October of 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt herself visited the home of my parents –my childhood home (539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn). I myself missed the occasion, alas. I was then living in Massachusetts, undergoing the first disorienting days of graduate school. But I…
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Of course everyone knew that Sid Luckman was from Brooklyn and that he had attended Erasmus Hall High School and Columbia University before becoming one of the first superstars of the National Football League. To football fans, he was as renowned a home-town boy as Sandy Koufax was to followers of baseball. But until I…