Brooklyn in the 1950s
-
From my birth in 1939 until I left for college in 1956, I lived at 539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush (now gentrified to "Kensington") section of Brooklyn. 539 was a three-story, three-family wood-frame Victorian, which my parents had acquired in 1937 for $4500 — a depression-era fire-sale price financed by my generous "maiden…
-
In 1957 (I was 18 and in my second year in college), the reverend doctor Billy Graham led the largest revival meeting in history — an average attendance, in the old-old Madison Square Garden, of eighteen thousand people a night for three months. What was his message? It was half jingo, half Christian fundamentalism. "Let…
-
Beginning at the northwest corner and preceding south — in the first brick house, a family of notably obese immigrant Syrian women who spoke no English; there were no children that I know of and no interactions with other neighbors. The house itself was not unusual but it was fronted by a wrought iron fence…
-
Sardines, a tin at a time. Herring, canned, either in wine sauce or in tomato sauce. Whitefish. Lima beans, which came into the house dried but which were soaked to plump up, then boiled and mashed (but not for me, if I could possibly avoid them). Potatoes in any form, but usually mashed and buttered. No chicken or lamb…
-
“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious — perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with…
-
Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the…
-
Insomnia once again — a nightly affliction, a family trait. Perhaps we lack a gene that lets others sleep from dusk to dawn. Have I noted here that I want my tombstone inscribed with the motto, just beneath my name and dates, "No More Insomnia, Forever." During the wakeful nights, I've taken to listening to…
-
What was it like in the 1940s when I was your age? Very different. Milk was delivered daily in bottles: a milk-wagon, drawn by a tired, plodding old horse, appeared on East 9th Street three times a week before we sat down to breakfast. There were also daily visits from a horse-drawn vegetable truck. An…
-
If it happened in Brooklyn, it must have happened in metaphorical or mythological rather than real Brooklyn, because it's not the Brooklyn of my memory. It Happened in Brooklyn is a 1947 musical, I guess you'd have to call it, featuring still skinny Frank Sinatra and womanly Kathryn Grayson, and also Jimmie Durante, who steals the…