Brooklyn in the 1950s
-
For all its fabled color, life in 40s and 50s Flatbush was extraordinarily provincial. In terms of sophistication, it might just has well been central Nebraska or U. P. Michigan. First generation working-class Brooklynites were simply too busy making ends meet to acknowledge that there was a great world outside. Although "The City" — i.e.…
-
Of all human institutions, slavery must be the most loathsome and soul-distorting (although wars, genocides, massacres, pogroms, and wrongful executions are certainly contenders for worst of worst). It's easy to think that slavery is something ancient and foreign. Not something to concern ourselves about — not part our life, nor my life. And yet American…
-
In the back of our fourth-grade "reader" at P. S. 217, there was an appendix containing proverbs and other jots of wisdom. Most of these were commonplaces: "look before you leap"; "a stitch in time saves nine"; "empty barrels make the most noise." Many of these gnomic bits mystified me. For example: For all your…
-
Here's a memory from my youth. Let's say it's the early '50s. I'm a thoughtless, self-absorbed adolescent, nominally studying at Erasmus Hall but in fact not paying much mind to schoolwork. It's a Sunday dinner, so I've probably just come home from playing several hours of schoolyard basketball or softball. We're at the dining room…
-
Approaching 80, I've been studying the Brooklyn Eagle for the date of my birth, March 11, 1939. "War and war's alarms" dominate the news, but nevertheless day-to-day life in Brooklyn was reassuringly perennial. Here's a highlight from the Around the Town column: "One of the features at the Montauk Club's 50th anniversary dinner tonight…
-
This, young 'uns, is a picture of a washboard. It's an object that you might have happened upon in an antique store or a museum. The washboard — this one is made of metal, like the one I remember from my childhood, but they could be made of glass or even wood — sat…
-
On East 9th Street, and probably in other parts of Brooklyn, a manhole cover was called a "sewer." I don't know why. Ignorance, perhaps. As far as I know, manhole covers provided entrance to electrical work and other utilities, not to watercourses. Openings to the sewers that were located along the channel next to the…
-
Let's say I was thirteen, so this event would have occurred on or our about 1952. I had brought my Raleigh 3-speed to the Cortelyou Road bicycle repair shop which was between East 13th and East 14th. The shop was run by a small, fair, heavily-accented German man who was perhaps 50 years old. He…
-
In 1975, Leo Durocher wrote an as-told-to autobiography called Nice Guys Finish Last. I read every word of it, but I got to tell you, it's not a good book. It's a piece of self-justifying pro-Durocher propaganda. It's argumentative, hyperbolic, unreliable. Durocher was an irascible man: he got into fights with sportswriters, players, umpires, owners,…
-
Two nights ago [this would be October of 2009, of course], I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing! HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right.…