FOUR

    In many ways, our family was typical of the 1950’s. We were of the TV age, watching Uncle Miltie, Your Show of Shows, Ed Sullivan, Lucy, The Honeymooners, Ernie Kovacs, Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Million Dollar Movie, and other programs together as a family; and I watched the Three Stooges and westerns after school with my friends. We quoted all the Stooges’ lines and poked each other in the eyes; we played ‘cowboy’ with our cap guns. When The Untouchables became popular, we role-played that, using pretend machine guns and all the lines from the show. We loved it when it snowed and the schools were closed, built snow forts and had sometimes fierce snow-ball fights. We played all the street games, punch ball, ring-a-lev-i-o, handball, stoopball and even some ancient things like leapfrog taught to us by older kids.

    Another show that we kids watched religiously was The Twilight Zone, but even more influential to me was its cousin Alcoa Presents, or One Step Beyond. Unlike any other sci-fi shows of its day, its stories were supposedly true. Perhaps the scariest episode to me was "Message From Clara" in which a school teacher begins to uncontrollably write a language that she doesn't know or understand. I longed to understand what 'automatic writing' was all about, and would find out a few decades later. Teddy and I watched the show with the lights out to get the maximum effect. We loved scaring each other the way kids might around a campfire. Teddy and I were the same age, but he was a head taller than I and let me know it. He was good at sports to my awful, and knew how to fight. I got picked on a lot by all of them, and they loved to call me “Lenny the fag”. Often all I could do was run home or get beat up, and these were my friends. When Teddy and I were alone together however, we were close, and he’d apologize for joining the others in 'ganging up' on me. And it was when I’d take my revenge by scaring him. I had a knack of being able to lie straight-faced and be believable and tortured my poor friend with stories of boogie-men on the stairs, and mummies under his bed.

    One area in which I differed from the crowd was my interest in popular music. Beginning at age six, for which birthday I received from my grandmother a three speed record player, I traded in my old yellow kiddie records and 78 player for rock and roll. I’d listen to Alan Freed every night in bed and then constantly hound my parents for money to buy 45’s, which were 98 cents each plus tax back then at Jaynel’s. But when a local appliance outlet began discounting them to 75 cents, my dad was glad to help me add to my collection, by giving me a really generous allowance for then, the only one in my peer group that had one at all. I bought toys, board games, lots of candy, but mainly 45’s.

Teddy’s parents gave him very little, causing a lot of jealousy for him, but we had him over constantly and were his “home away from home”, which was just next door, our windows facing in a courtyard. When his parents, who apparently did not read Dr. Spock, were screaming at him we heard it clearly and could see him sitting dejectedly at the family desk. For all the backstabbing and name calling, Teddy and I remained truly best friends all through school days. Our attempt at rekindling the friendship as adults ended very sadly, however.

The thing we all did have in common was interest in the opposite sex, especially when puberty hit. The first sign of that was in sixth grade (yes, things moved slowly in those days) when one of the girls in our class began to 'fill out'. Her brassiere was the talk of our grade, poor thing. By seventh grade, Junior High, puberty was everywhere, even for us boys, and interest became obsession. It was a contest between us to see who matured first. I remember the day my friend Pete announced that he had “one hair in one armpit and three crazy hairs in the other”. We hid nothing from each other, even playing strip poker together; well, we asked them but the girls wouldn’t play.

There were two girls at school that we especially had our eyes on, Josie and Tina. They actually held hands with boys, older boys who were obviously held back. They wore tight-fitting revealing clothing, causing us to assume that they were sexually active, and we’d follow them home from school at a safe distance just to gawk. We’d call them names not necessarily out of meanness but jealousy, and never got up the nerve to actually speak to either of them. When one of our close childhood girl-chums from the three buildings suddenly got married and moved away, we were in shock. We’d heard about the movie “Blue Denim”, and weren’t allowed to see it, but in real life? It was beyond belief, and we were jealous that she’d won that 'contest'. When one of the kids at school suggested that our parents still had sex, that it was something done not only for procreating, we didn’t believe it. I went home that day, eyed my 'square' parents (only in their 30’s then), and said no way!

On the main shopping artery for our neighborhood, 13^th Avenue, there was a second-hand bookstore named “Unk’s” where we’d find old comic books and Mad Magazines. But one day I purchased a book about the facts of life. Teddy and I retreated to the relative sanctity of my room and started reading it. I must tell you about Teddy’s laugh. To call him a hardy or infectious laugh-er is an understatement. When he started laughing, he laughed loud and hard, and nothing could contain him. His face would turn red, and everyone in his vicinity would start to laugh. I was gasping for air when my dad entered the room and took the book away. To our delight however, recognizing that we were now old enough to know this stuff, my dad undertook the task of reading the book to us, believing that Teddy’s dad would probably not teach him these bird and bee facts. There was one line of the book that Teddy especially found funny and quoted it for years afterwards, cracking up each time; we had no end of fun merely quoting that sentence. I’ve edited that sentence out of this book to keep the adult language to a minimum. I thought about publishing a non-censored version of my life to sell in secular bookstores, but I can’t imagine there’d be very much demand for it.

For all our obsession, Teddy and I remained virgins throughout high school, along with, I suspect, most of our schoolmates. We had a lot of laughs, however, once even at a somber moment in the school play Diary of a Young Girl. Admittedly, I was trying to get Teddy to laugh. His mother called me 'The Instigator' for getting him in trouble. This time the people sitting near us were not laughing with us, and we were quickly ejected from the auditorium. Teddy could not only laugh the loudest, but belch as well, even complete sentences. He could burp any sentence! Who could have a better friend than Teddy? 

His dad and uncle had owned a penny arcade in Coney Island back in the 30’s, and as a result there actually was one toy in his household, an old penny game that involved guiding a ball from the top of a wood, glass enclosed box along steel 'girders' to eventually deposit it into receptacles marked with various point values. It didn’t actually belong to Teddy, and after his father passed away it was donated to a charity, I believe. But we had hours of fun with that thing, as well as with looking through all the rare pennies his dad had saved. He would keep every Indian Head penny that came through the arcade, as well as any Lincoln cent with a mint mark. Teddy’s dads’ Whitman coin folder was complete, and a thrill to behold on the rare occasions that he retrieved it from its hidden spot in a closet. Oh that 1909-SVDB cent; He had actually found one!

I remember the day I met Teddy. We had just moved into the apartment, when Teddy’s mom spotted me and said “have I got a boy for you”, and ushered me next door. We 'clicked' instantly, and started doing everything together. Teddy, his cousin Jan and I were in the same first grade class along with another boy who would become my life-long friend, Bill. Ted & I walked the six blocks to and from school every day together. At lunch time there was Lenny’s Luncheonette across the street from the school. The person that ran it was Moish, short for Moisheh and Hebrew for Moses. We were great customers of that establishment; I’d buy trading cards by the case there, the ones that came with a card size piece of bubble gum. I collected baseball cards, Davy Crockett cards and Rock & Roll cards. Outside on the sidewalk we’d 'flip' for the cards we needed to complete our sets.

We called Lenny’s a 'candy store' even though it had so much more. There were newspapers and cigars, 25 cent hamburgers and sandwiches, nickel Cokes, and some toys. Candy bars were a nickel then as well, but I remember the day the price went up to six cents, for Coke’s as well. I protested loudly until my mom explained that they really did need that extra penny to cover higher expenses. There was also a great old Seeburg jukebox there, five cents a song, six for a quarter. When they took the old records off the box, they’d sell them for 35 cents each. In 1956 I bought “Stranded In The Jungle” out of that box, although the grooves were pretty well worn. Down the block from Lenny’s was an actual old candy store run by a little old couple. Everything was a penny, 2 for a penny, or two cents for high end things like those long strips of paper with the colored candy dots on them. You could get a nice little bag of things like licorice hats and gumdrops for five cents in there! On another corner was a restaurant where I’d sometimes get a cream cheese, tomato and jelly sandwich on white toast; ummm I can taste it still. Another lunch choice was an Italian bakery that made pizza without cheese in large trays. A square piece was 10 cents, but if you weren’t very hungry they’d cut you a diagonal half for a nickel. You might imagine that it wasn’t very good without any toppings at all, but the combination of the delicious dough, herbs and perfect Italian sauce was heavenly. The smell would make us salivate, and often only a giant 20 or 30 cents portion would satisfy.

After school Lenny’s was a hangout for teenagers, and me, gathered around the jukebox ‘sipping Cokes’. My mother had taken a job on one of the corners across from school working for a small investment firm. By third grade I was already sporting a great 'd.a' type haircut with an impressive pompadour or 'conk'. The teens were impressed by my knowledge of rock & roll music. By the age of 10 I’d been to two of Alan Freed’s extravaganza live shows and had met him in person at a live radio broadcast from Coney Island. I saw many of the day’s hit artists, Frankie Lymon, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Buddy Knox, The Cellos, The Velours, The Rosebuds from New Utrecht High School, my future alma mater, and many more at those shows. I loved to watch the teen couples at the candy store, dreaming of the day when I’d be 15 or so and have a girlfriend of my own.

Mostly mom typed and prepared a prospectus for potential investors. Later on she worked from home, and our living room became an office filled with equipment and piles of papers that needed to be assembled into booklets for convincing people of this wonderful opportunity, whatever it was. The largest machine was an automatic typewriter; the information was fed into it on what looked like piano rolls, the keys would jump up and down eerily as if ghost-operated on this ancestor to the computer and copy machine. I bet it’s in a museum now. With the extra money they made, my folks were able to spoil me in style.

One of my favorite memories of Lenny’s was the controversy over a product they sold called crackerballs. These were the 'bang snaps' that are sold today, tiny paper-wrapped gunpowder things that you throw on the ground and cause a small explosion. The ones back then differed only in being more spherical and wrapped in shiny colored paper. They weren’t much louder than the caps we already used in our ubiquitous toy guns, but Lenny’s was selling a ton of them and they came to the attention of the school principal who convened a special assembly of the entire school. He addressed the large crowd using his megaphone, a cone shaped device that amplified one’s voice slightly, made famous by Rudy Vallee recordings a few decades earlier when the use of electricity was not so wide-spread. Maybe the schools were short of funds even then, or public address systems were an impossible luxury, but from my vantage point, as he spoke moving the gizmo from left to right to cover the large room I could make out perhaps every third or fourth word, but one of them was crackerballs. The next day there were no more at Lenny’s.

When Lenny, Moishe’s dad died my family and I visited his apartment while their family was 'sitting shiva', a week-long ritual in which close relatives of the deceased sit on uncomfortable wooden stools and wear clothing they have torn, the 'sackcloth and ashes' of the Bible. We paid our respects by bringing a small gift and sitting with them awhile. Years later when my mother died, my father informed me that I would have to not only mourn for a week, but an entire year. By that time, though, I had almost completely rejected Judaism and G-d.

'Candy stores', really luncheonettes, were all over New York City, and Teddy and I loved to investigate them. One on 13^th Avenue was a major hangout for teenagers, and I remember buying a Teddy Bears (Phil Spector’s group) 45 there (“Oh Why”) from their 35 cents/3 for a dollar box. Another one on a corner near Montauk Junior High was not so popular. We were checking out their wire revolving comic book rack one day, noticing that there were mixed titles in each slot. It was difficult to see what was behind and I admit that some bending took place. “Stop bending the books!” the proprietor screamed, jumping out from behind a counter where he’d been watching us carefully. How can we see what’s behind, we yelled back, at which he grabbed us by the scruff of our necks and threw us out. Oh, we’d return there and pretend to be looking at that rack just to tease that old guy, then run out. In my decades as a retailer I can say that I’ve been paid back by many annoying customers, and my blood has boiled plenty.

I also remember a wonderful ice cream parlor on 18^th Avenue that used those aluminum dishes that kept the ice cream cold and were just fun to eat out of. They had my favorite jukebox of the era there, the Rock-ola, that took the 45 out of its slot and played it right side up so the label and all were visible (unlike the Seeburg’s that played the records sideways). I played “Deserie” by The Charts on that exotic orange Everlast label; no mistaking it for a boring RCA or Capitol release. And it’s still one of the greatest records of all time.

In addition to collecting 45 r.p.m. records and trading cards, I also accumulated candy bars, especially the ones I loved to eat. I’d hang my 45’s on the wall and play 'record store, but also 'candy store'. I’d 'invent' candy machines out of cardboard boxes and egg cartons, trying to duplicate the mechanical apparatus of the actual machines that dropped the bar. Eventually my father became concerned about the number of Clark Bars, Hershey Bars, Sky Bars and Chuckles in my room, as well as any money I was extorting from my friends who were trying my vending machines, and made me give them away at my next birthday party. Each kid at the party got about a dozen candy bars, plus a couple of Flintstones vitamins that I refused to take once I’d tasted them.