tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-315586822024-03-21T14:57:23.879-04:00East Flatbush (Brooklyn) MemoriesReflections of East Flatbush, Brooklyn at the midpoint of the last century...
Tilden, Erasmus, Meyer Levin, Winthrop. Church, Kings Hway, Lenox, Linden, Ralph, Remsen, Snyder, Schenectady, Troy, Utica. 135,181,208,232,233,235,244,246... Rugby, Vincent's,Tower of Pisa...
If these strike a familar cord, read on...
Not all the blogs are highlighted to the left. Run your curser over the list to highlight them all. Some may interest you more than others. Hang in there.
Your comments...EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-36866687498748078042016-02-15T18:00:00.001-05:002016-02-15T19:31:03.862-05:00The Absolute Best Kosher Deli in Brooklyn - If Not the Entire World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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True story: Here's a reverse of the classic first-time customer in a kosher deli story. My wife's cousin goes into a new 'kosher style' deli in Houston, Texas and orders a pastrami on rye with a little mustard. He's told it will take a little longer because it's a special order. Why? The sandwich automatically comes with lettuce, tomato and mayo. Anything other than that is a special order.<br />
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Come on, even I can't make up anything like that. How can anything I write below beat that?<br />
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Raise your hand if you lived near, or at least ate at, the best kosher deli in Brooklyn.<br />
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Think hot pastrami or corned beef taken out of that stainless steel steam chest and the smell wafting over the glass-front counter as it is carefully and gingerly placed (ha!) on the slicing machine and piled high between two slices of fresh rye bread.<br />
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Oh I see someone in back has her hand up. You went to a deli where the meat was cut by hand. you win!<br />
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Hold on. You know darned well you can't just order a sandwich and don't bother looking at the menu. Since the age of eight you've had the menu memorized - including the daily specials which haven't changed in at least five years.<br />
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It's decision time. For the indecisive who can't decide between the corned beef and the pastrami there's always the combo triple decker, but for most of us our taste buds were already fired up and ready to go to work long before we even walked through the door. Looking at the menu was merely an unnecessary ritual while waiting for Irv to take our order, and even that wasn't necessary because all he'd have to ask is if we wanted the usual.<br />
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Want to see the counter help go into a fit of uncontrollable hysterics? Ask if the corned beef is lean. "Yeah, lady. It's organically grown, free range tenderly cared for by monks, but I'll trim the fat for you."<br />
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Trim the fat off the corned beef and you have a sandwich consisting of two slices of bread and a shmear of mustard.<br />
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Okay, so that's the first hurdle.<br />
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I liked to order pastrami just to hear how Irv would fracture the word. Twenty years in the same job and he never mastered the basics of his chosen vocation's vocabulary so that when he yelled the order to the guy behind the counter it always sounded like 'astronomy sagwiz.' Didn't matter; the counter guy knew.<br />
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Here comes round two: 'French fries or knish?' 'knish.' Potato or Kasha?' 'Potato.' 'Square or round?'<br />
'Round.' 'We don't got no more round. It wouldn't kill ya, maybe for once you should try square.'<br />
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We're going to take a short detour that those of you have read other of my stories know I am famous for. (Don't you grammarians go nutso over the construction of that last sentence.)<br />
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Irv may have been wrong, after all. The square ones are fried. If only your mother knew then what was going into her darling's frail stomach along with the pastrami sandwich and the Cel-Ray soda.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbgiThmRxsCAvWtJ7-oUgo4MsE2itaIAO_KYQ27gS7yMiNcDudTs-SU-YpSIbRkG_5rLP0UcsPYdjtCrWSsr3FcuUm6f0gUBVOlMdxUn6myHOYj9zOwhj9RenMwDN8kSJqYaWX/s1600/knish-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbgiThmRxsCAvWtJ7-oUgo4MsE2itaIAO_KYQ27gS7yMiNcDudTs-SU-YpSIbRkG_5rLP0UcsPYdjtCrWSsr3FcuUm6f0gUBVOlMdxUn6myHOYj9zOwhj9RenMwDN8kSJqYaWX/s200/knish-3.jpg" width="200" /></a>In any case, there was and still is only one major knish purveyor. Gabilla produces more than 15 million knishes a year - most of them the square fried ones - from its Long Island bakery, having long since outgrown its original Williamsburg home - and still sends the majority to Brooklyn where your cousin Arnie consumed one-fifth of them before his by-pass surgery.<br />
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Picture this. Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side sells about 1,500 knishes a week - at $3.75 apiece. If<br />
Arnie knew that, he'd be turning over in his grave. Yeah, the same knish you paid fifteen cents for - mustard included. You can now buy them, and round ones in 6-packs from Gabila's website.<br />
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Today you can order sweet potato, spinach, mushroom, blueberry, cherry, chocolate cheese, tomato and mozzarella knishes from Gabila's and Yonah Schimmel's Knish Bakery who has been selling knishes since 1910 on Houston Street on the Lower East Side . Oh yeah, they also have potato knishes. There ain't nuthin' sacred no more.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOMFVxHkegJXBEJ2ghOefkyh7tE2WopFuWF8inQzjKOVOofN4VArh2bEYudKU_C-ilTccvxc4luymvlQbdM-_shlZkSYRSqlgG0jEtDEcnPzgOlKtB6P7XeCc5Sk7ktR3SSZOl/s1600/knish4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOMFVxHkegJXBEJ2ghOefkyh7tE2WopFuWF8inQzjKOVOofN4VArh2bEYudKU_C-ilTccvxc4luymvlQbdM-_shlZkSYRSqlgG0jEtDEcnPzgOlKtB6P7XeCc5Sk7ktR3SSZOl/s200/knish4.jpg" width="200" /></a>The majority of round knishes are produced and baked in the individual deli. The true knish aficionado prefers the round to the square. Probably healthier.<br />
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OK. I can't wait for you readers to nominate your favorites: Mrs. Stahl's (which has gone to knish heaven) in Brighton Beach or the guy on Bay 1 who sold knishes out of a shopping bag on the beach And, of course, how can you not mention the old guy with the 'Mom's' push cart who sold molten hot knishes outside Winthrop and Tilden. (I have a separate blog chapter dealing with street merchants that talks about the knish man.)<br />
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Now, wasn't that detour worth it. Don't you really want a knish right now?<br />
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Ready for round three? 'Cole slaw please.' 'Onda sangwiz or onda side?'<br />
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Round four: 'You want sompena drink?' 'Whaddaya got?' 'Whaddaya wiseguy?' 'Okay, I'll have a Tab.' 'OK, one celery soder. Straw or glaz?'<br />
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'Excuse me. Its' Cel-Ray, not celery soda.<br />
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How else to wash down that pastrami on rye (with a hint of real deli mustard you dabbed on from a stainless steel container that every table had) than with a bottle of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda. (It was originally called 'tonic' until the government intervened.) Before we get into a major dispute, you can substitute cream soda for the Cel-Ray, but it has to be a bottle and none of those new boutique flavors like black cherry.<br />
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First, we're talking about a world before canned Dr. Brown's and a world before Dr. Brown's diet sodas. The name was Cel-Ray, not Celery - even though it contained a hint of celery seed in the flavor, along with sugar and, of course, seltzer. Rumor has it that it was created by a Lower East Side doctor treating immigrant children.<br />
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Watch out. Here comes another detour. Brooklynites, in their attempt to conserve letters are often accused of 'dropping the 'r' at the end of a word. NOT TRUE. We just place it at the end of words not typically pronounced by the rest of the English-speaking world. For example: 'Gimme a glassa warda.' See? same number of r's, just placed more strategically. Another example: 'Gimme a canna cream soder.' See wad I'm sayin?<br />
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Okay, back to the ordering ritual. 'Please bring some pickles with the sandwich.' 'Sweet or sour?'<br />
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In retrospect, there are fewer questions on most AP exams and certainly not as much stress.<br />
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Thee were several prerequisites for being hired as a waiter in a kosher deli. You had to be named Irv, Max, Sol, Lou, Dave, Nat, Ziggy or Sid. These, coincidentally, were also the required names to be a deli owner. If, at birth, you were named other than the aforementioned names you were destined for another line of work. The desperate would change their name to get the job. A second requirement was to have zero peripheral vision so that if a customer who was not exactly lined up with the waiter's nose tried to get the waiter's attention, he would be ignored. Minimal hearing would also be a plus: 'I heard ya say square knish. Eat what I brung. I won't charge ya.'<br />
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Age plays a major role in the hiring process - at least reversed age discrimination. You stand a better chance of being hired if you had already put in fifty years in another job - preferably as a tailor. Younger than age 60 you were destined to be called Junior, or worse, 'Kid'.<br />
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Growing up in East Flatbush we had a plethora of deli's. Like synogogues, there were always at least two - one you wouldn't step foot in, even if they had the last pastrami on earth. Let's have a moment of silence for Brooklyn's real kosher deli. May it long live in our memories.<br />
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Now, before you get your stuffed derma in an uproar, I'm talkin' real kosher deli - no milk products. And, I'm not talking about places like Carnegie Deli in the City or the Carnegie wannabe Harold's in New Jersey or Ben's in Forest Hills or their outpost in Westbury. I'm talking real kosher deli. Are there any outside of Brooklyn? <br />
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OK. Today's quiz. Name the deli on Church and E 46, Church and E 48, Church and Linden, Ave D off Utica, Utica between Church and Linden, Clarkson and E 51. Was there any on Church Avenue west of East 46th Street? How about on Remsen or Ralph Avenues?<br />
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We live in north central New Jersey. I've googled 'kosher deli in Northern New Jersey.' Ha!<br />
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How about opening one in Houston?<br />
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And a final shot of a 'real' sandwich from Harold's in New Jersey.<br />
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<br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-25481026529927703822016-02-11T18:10:00.000-05:002016-02-15T19:47:40.105-05:00Grandpa's Chair<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There comes a time in one's life when he looks around the commuter train and realizes he is the oldest one on the train. Changing cars doesn't help; same demographics.<br />
Same thing at family gatherings when you realize <u>you</u> are the patriarch.<br />
How did that happen? Last year you were sitting at the kids' table drinking grape juice and trying to get it to come out of your nose. Now you're sitting at the head of the table in the chair that only grandpa sat in. That comfortable buffer in the form of older relatives is gone and there ain't nothin' separating you from you-know-what.<br />
You're next, buddy.<br />
Once you come to grips with your own mortality it's time to take inventory of your past. You 'inventory takers' are my blog readers. All of a sudden the place from which many of us escaped decades ago is important. <br />
So, where were you for the past thirty or forty years?<br />
What, you think Brooklyn stood still waiting for its prodigal sons and daughters to return?<br />
Whaddayanuts?<br />
Unfortunately, as I write in one of my earlier blogs, our memories can't always be trusted.<br />
Brooklyn, our Brooklyn, maybe wasn't so hotsy-totsy to start with, like we now remember it. It probably never was, but we had nothing to compare it to.<br />
Trust me, our Brooklyn - East Flatbush, East New York, Crown Heights, Brownsville, Pigtown - didn't get no memo 'bout gentrification and certainly no memo about regentrification. Our neighborhoods would need remedial regentrificcation and a summer school semester to maybe be a candidate for a Starbucks. Health warning: Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen!<br />
A side note: I'm not talking about the neighborhoods surrounding Madison or Midwood or those areas west of Flatbush Avenue just north and south of Church Avenue where some of the old Victorians sell for close to two million dollars. I'm referring to our neighborhoods.<br />
Okay. When you drive down the side streets, the residential streets, at first blush, things look the same as we remember them from the fifties and sixties: kids playing in the street and well cared-for attached and semi-attached private homes - except for the security gates and bars on the windows. Now that's the business to be in: wrought iron fabrication or, more likely, wrought iron fortification.<br />
It's the commercial strips that have changed. You know, the ones along Church, Utica, Nostrand and Rogers Avenues and the ones in the small strip centers. They show the most change. Forget about the premier shopping streets: Pitkin, Flatbush, the Highway. You want dollar stores? You've come to the right street!<br />
All the stores that were there when we were born and still there when we moved away, all those stores that our parents owned and worked at six days a week so you could go to camp in the summer, trust me, they all closed up the day after we left town.<br />
What? You think the kosher deli around the corner from your house was going to keep the pastrami hot just for us, if we ever returned? And the round knish? Yeah, I know, you liked the square one. Well, Sol, or Irv or Dave or Murray or whatever his name was threw them all out and followed you to Long Island or New Jersey or Arizona or, more likely, Florida, where he opened a larger, Brooklyn-style deli, with twelve kinds of gourmet, designer knishes and, if you want, you can get mayo on your pastrami sandwich.<br />
The further we get - in distance and time - the more we fall in love with our neighborhood. I have a friend who headed up the Alumni Association at Brooklyn College. Her hardest job was getting recent graduates to join. Fast forward thirty or forty years and the alumni are banging on her door clamoring to join their beloved alma mater.<br />
I find my blogs cater to older people. (Notice I make the distinction between old and older. Older people are not as old as old people. This flies in the face of everything you learned in eighth grade English. Go figure.) My East Flatbush Memories blog is more of a community service for chronic delusionals - including its creator.<br />
Years ago I asked our son if he ever thought about his elementary school days. By the time he was in elementary school we had long since moved out of Brooklyn to Long Island, near the Sound. "Nope!" I showed him the responses to this blog and from groups on Facebook and the fond memories the readers have of their Brooklyn childhood. His response: "But you didn't do anything." I explained the fine art of stoop ball, ("What's a stoop?) hit the penny, punch ball and using a manhole as second base or just sitting on Sammy's stoop to hang out.<br />
So, here I am, trying to avoid sitting in Grandpa's chair and holding on to the memories of those years more than a half century ago, where we did nothing, but somehow had a great time doing it.EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-50634815735773184802015-06-09T20:36:00.000-04:002015-06-20T11:14:29.377-04:00Too Late to the Party<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> <em>First, a bit of housekeeping. Are you reading this in its original EastFlatbushMemories.blogspot.com</em> ?</o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">If you went to high school in the late fifties or early sixties, you may have missed the real <st1:place st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place>. Our parents were invited to the party; we weren’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Brooklyn , the real Brooklyn, the <st1:place st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place> celebrated in film and in novels had already changed by the time we came on the scene. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">At best we merely prolonged its death by trying to keep the memories alive. But to have grown up in the post-war years, the Eisenhower era, was to be cheated of the real glory days of <st1:place st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Dodgers had already abandoned <st1:place st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place>; their home leveled to make way for a high-rise apartment house. <st1:place st="on">Coney Island</st1:place>’s fabled Steeplechase had closed; Lundy’s was suffering through its last days. Ebinger’s would soon shutter its doors, taking with it the best black-out cake ever created by man (or woman); Brooklyn College embarked on a misguided open-enrollment policy guaranteed to fail. The subways, just beginning to be unsafe at night, required the presence of a uniformed cop on every train.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Closer to home, the Rugby Theater – on its way to oblivion - was first converted to a two-screen theater; ‘For Rent’ signs became more prevalent on Utica and Church and Flatbush Avenues and if lucky, the stores were finally rented as dollar stores; and Brooklyn’s Church Avenue trolley - the last line in the last borough to operate trolleys - had its swan song in October, 1956. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">By the mid-sixties, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:city> public school education, which had served our parent’s generation and us so well, was no longer the key for upwardly mobile kids like us. We were the last. The families of the kids following us moved upward – or more accurately, outward – to the suburbs, to Long Island or <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New Jersey</st1:place></st1:state>. The move sent once-solid <st1:place st="on">East Flatbush</st1:place> into a tail-spin from which it has yet to recover.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">That was the final straw. Once urban flight took hold in the sixties, the last vestiges of our parent’s <st1:place st="on">Brooklyn </st1:place>disappeared. I watched in amazement as six high-stooped attached houses on <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Rockaway Parkway</st1:address></st1:street> near <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Linden Blvd</st1:address></st1:street> displayed for-sale signs at the same time. I was too naïve to truly understand the ramifications of that sight, but to this day when I think of the one most significant thing that represented this abandonment of Brooklyn, and specifically my East Flatbush, I think of those ‘for sale’ signs on Rockaway Parkway. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">By that time the streets and especially the subways had become unsafe. Until then we had been insulated from the Pigtown and East New York gangs; from the drugs; from the poverty. Having already given up teaching, first at Meyer Levin and then at Tilden High School, I too, became part of that flight as my young family moved ‘to the country’ from Avenue H. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Current residents can claim they know our East Flatbush, but it’s a different neighborhood they're describing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Brooklyn, and specifically our neighborhood, had lost many of its 'institutions' by 1970:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Garfields</st1:city></st1:place> on Flatbush and Church – gone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The <st1:placetype st="on">Tower</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">Pisa</st1:placename> on <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Utica</st1:city></st1:place> and Vincent’s on Church – gone, gone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The RKO Kenmore, Loews Kings, the Carroll theaters – gone, gone, gone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Even Tilden – gone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But Brooklyn's most important loss in this period was a loss of confidence. In the 1950's alone, the borough lost more than 135,000 residents. They were buying the hype about the suburbs, they were buying cars, they were moving out to the 'sticks'. Filling the housing vacuum in our neighborhood were, for the most part, first generation Americans from the Caribbean islands seeking the same good life, a better tomorrow, that our grandparents were looking for when they moved here.</span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> A drive down <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Church Avenue</st1:address></st1:street> reveals only a few vestiges of the <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Church Avenue</st1:address></st1:street> of my youth. A ride up <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">East 57th St</st1:address></st1:street> from <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Beverly Road</st1:address></st1:street> to <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Kings Highway</st1:address></st1:street> bears witness to the change. The typical East Flatbush homes built in the years just before and after World War II– the attached, brick, high stoop design - now include the obligatory wrought iron gates and window bars. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Brooklyn that brings us to websites such as this one is the past, recorded on curled black and white photographs with scalloped edges, faded slides, brittle home movies and clouded memories of innocence, childhood, family and above all – a safe place and to think back on how life had once been in Brooklyn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">From the vantage point of a half century later I realize the neighborhood of my memories no longer exists. It, too, is gone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><st1:place st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place> is the precious thing we’ve lost. And for a lot of us, that's how Brooklyn ended.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I welcome your response.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">N.Berger <st1:personname st="on" style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="mailto:engtchr@hotmail.com">nberger1@outlook.com</a></st1:personname></span><br />
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<st1:personname st="on" style="font-family: verdana;"></st1:personname><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-17269711924978755182015-06-06T17:42:00.000-04:002015-06-20T21:35:10.052-04:00Remembrance of Things Past - with a nod to Marcel Proust<h4>
<em>"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."</em></h4>
- Marcel Proust 1871-1922<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Okay, folks. We’re going to take a slight detour down memory lane. The nostalgia-laden among us will appreciate it more than, say, the purists, who come to this site looking only for things East-Flatbush. Actually, the events depicted in this blog took place in East Flatbush and in the middle of the last century. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Think back to your high school days. Some lucky souls just put in their four years, graduate and that's that. But for most of us our adolescence occupies a prime piece of real estate in our memories. Give an adult a series of random cues and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence. The summer you fell in love while working as a counselor at Camp Equinunk or while in summer school so you could graduate early and your new soul mate could retake Geometry. Whatever the case, your time together was magical, it ended prematurely... but you never forgot. And maybe a half century later, when the routine of your daily life starts to get to you, you find yourself wondering what kind of a glamorous life he/she is leading now. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">But now we can find out. Somehow we stumble across an email address and compose the ideal email to send to someone we haven't seen in fifty years. And, if we're lucky. maybe we get a chatty response and all of a sudden the grass we have is as green, if not greener, than the person's grass we remember from a lifetime ago.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Researchers refer to this phenomenon as the 'reminiscence bump' suggesting that memories from the ages of 15 to 25 are most vividly retained.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Here's another piece of news. Teenagers are lousy at assessing the behavior of others. When teenagers in one study were asked to name their closest friends, for the majority the results were not mutual. The person you listed as your best friend probably did not name you as his/her best friend - proof that high school is a time of unrequited longings. A lot has to do with the fact that teenagers cannot tell when they are being rejected - or accepted.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">OK. Armed with these studies w</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">hen I first embarked on this 'blog business' I researched to see what 'non-scientific' information was out there that would/could jog my memory. I noticed a common thread. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Person A (the Rememberer) sees Person B’s name on a site. Person A has a major attack of nostalgia resembling something along the lines of: “Holy ____. I know that person. He/she sat behind me in ___ and I/we___ . Wow! I remember it like it was yesterday.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What usually follows is a written litany by the rememberer (you) of events to legitimatize the relationship, to prove you’re not some kind of weirdo.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now, you probably know where this is headed, but hold on, buckaroos.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Person B’s (the Rememberee) responses fall into one of two categories depending on the emotional level invested in the original relationship:</span><br />
<h4>
<br />Category 1: </h4>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Rememberer: “Hey, you lived across the hall from us on Linden Blvd and your mother played maj jong with my mother every Tuesday. You were in high school and you usta babysit me."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Or, “You lived on East 52nd Street and I lived on Beverly Road and we played punchball on East 53rd Street because it was a wide street.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Rememberees in this category remember every minuscule detail. Wanna know the color of your mother’s kitchen wallpaper? Yellow. How many Twinkies you had before you puked your guts all over the living room carpet while watching Milton Berle? Five. Who hit the brand new 'Spauldeen' down the sewer and had to retrieve it or get the ____ beat out of him? You. (As a bonus, the Rememberee will tell you how much the ball cost fifty years ago and where he got it and who supplied the coat hanger so you could retrieve the ball from the sewer and that you still owe him fifteen cents for the ball.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Category 1’s are easy, because deep down, there ain’t no deep down. You remember or you don’t remember. No big deal. Yeah, it would have been nice if B remembered but if not, tough!</span><br />
<h4>
<br />Category 2:</h4>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Category 2’s are a whole ‘nother story. Ah. I sense some smiles forming already.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Category 2 remembrances are usually emotionally charged. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now we’re talking serious, heavy-duty, life-altering, potentially embarrassing stuff that, in retrospect, makes us wonder how we ever climbed out of puberty, sloshed through our teens, and made it into semi-adulthood. Somewhere in this scenario is the recurring phrase “unrequited love.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Let’s face it. By sixteen you knew what love was. You knew you had found it. Case closed. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for the next forty or fifty years every once in a while in the privacy of your own mind, you would conjure up that image of that person who truly shaped your life. And, since your mind can be your best friend, your mind wouldn’t let that person get any older. In essence, it's a story you've rehearsed and memorized and played back to yourself a zillion times. You knew that person as a sixteen year old and, wonder of wonders, that person is still sixteen! And she still wears her blond hair in a pony tail or you can still fit into his team jacket that he let you wear one Friday night when you were shivering outside Vincent's Pizzeria.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Typical Category 2 scenario: “Do you remember me? We went steady during the summer of '60. We both worked on Flatbush Avenue that summer. I gave you my ID bracelet. You were the first person I ever … and you said I was the first...</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Typical response: “No. And don’t write to me any more.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I marveled that two people who shared the same experience could remember it – or not – so differently and attach such different significance to the event. What a loser. She didn’t even remember him! Whew!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Until…</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">About a year ago I came across a great site where people wrote about their memories growing up in Brooklyn. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There, tucked in among all the unimportant things about far away places like Coney Island, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay and Williamsburgh was a short piece from someone describing </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">growing up in Flatbush. Everything she mentioned I knew. The people she talked about and the places where she hung out, I knew. And when she listed her name, I knew her!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Not only did I know her, but she was the first girl I dated. It was my sophomore year in Erasmus Hall; we dated for about six months. I mean serious, steady dating. I finally understood why my friends said dating was cool. Holy! I can still remember her. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And, in my mind, she was still fifteen.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">So, I wrote to her. I mentioned our mutual friends, the neighborhood, the places we went together. This was sooo cool.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Sure enough. About two weeks later, I get a long, chatty email from her in which she tells what she’s been doing since high school and updates on the neighborhood, some of our mutual friends from a half-century ago and her brother who grew up to own a major league ball club. Yeah, yeah. Get to the point where you remember me, too.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And finally, in the last brief paragraph the information I had been waiting for...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">she politely apologizes for not remembering me. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Judy, Judy - say it ain’t so.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">P.S. I’ve sent this blog on to some friends. Each has come back with a similar story. What’s yours?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-81884578604364803122014-02-19T22:09:00.000-05:002015-06-18T15:07:46.438-04:00Seltzer...The Agony and the Ecstasy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3IZYwz77t4jlwHVpsI1zlVft412zedpUT_IKADMSoTyD82xpwf1RfWiABwzk6tdou9aGHeEHYgtmrZwQNF_7Exk_SFZXXXTXq6JznmF37Zfvz_QZA9or9h5aF_18tNXEgiccJ/s1600/seltzer+bottle.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3IZYwz77t4jlwHVpsI1zlVft412zedpUT_IKADMSoTyD82xpwf1RfWiABwzk6tdou9aGHeEHYgtmrZwQNF_7Exk_SFZXXXTXq6JznmF37Zfvz_QZA9or9h5aF_18tNXEgiccJ/s200/seltzer+bottle.png" width="117" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Good seltzer should hurt."</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The most lethal weapon in our house was the seltzer bottle. More so than all the knives in the drawer next to the stove. I lived in fear of a dropped bottle causing an explosion that would level the entire block. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But, 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.<br />
<br />
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 he 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.'<br />
<br />
Did they really explode? If one bottle could level a block, I estimated a case of ten packed the same wallop as an atom bomb. For all we knew, the Enola Gay could have dropped a case of seltzer bottles over Hiroshima. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">(This ain't no history class, but the Enola Gay was the name of the B-52 bomber that dropped the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima. During the Second World War pilots painted the name of their planes on the fuselage.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Had it been a crate of seltzer bottles it would have been called the "Brooklyn Project" not the "Manhattan Project."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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?" </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I got my first opportunity somewhere around the time I got into junior high school. By this time my parents had no problem with me crossing Utica Avenue, Linden Boulevard and Church Avenue or carrying a dozen eggs and a bottle of milk by myself, so I guess they figured they'd give me a shot at carrying the seltzer bottle from the refrigerator to the dining room table. The second time I saw my parents show how proud they were of me was at my Bar Mitzvah- although in retrospect, I think the seltzer incident won first place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">(Bear in mind, 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?) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Every block had a seltzer man. Our block had Sol.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Sol delivered them in crates of ten Good Health seltzer bottles on his shoulder which he removed from his open-top truck. 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 three flights.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">On special occasions he would deliver Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup. 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, even before Tab. Boy, did we know how to live!!! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. Now, I'm not sure what the proper action verb is. It seems that the word '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 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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 into the atmosphere, 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">With the first gulp your brain is already on emergency alert frantically sorting all the messages to determine the best method for minimizing the devastation that is about to unfold. First, 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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">At this point, it ain't too choosey. As sailors stuck in a storm say: "Any port in a storm." 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 in your life you actually feel your toe nails tingling. 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 it is through this orifice that the remnants of the gulp shoot out with such force that even Grandma Jenny, who rarely notices anything, looks up startled, frantically moving the pot roast from the path.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Ah! That's good seltzer, Dad.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Every block had a seltzer man. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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 schlepps to Canarsie to continue the business started by his great grandfather.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How will you explain the ecstasy of seltzer to your grandchildren?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">As a bonus, I've included a recent article from the New York Times:</span><br />
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As Old as the Bottles</span></h1>
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By </span><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/corey_kilgannon/index.html" rel="author" target="_blank" title="More Articles by COREY KILGANNON"><span style="color: #1e91fc; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">COREY KILGANNON</span></a></h6>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<strong>Name </strong>Eli Miller <strong>Age </strong>79</span></h6>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>Where He’s From</strong> Coney Island</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>What He Is</strong> The city’s longest-working seltzer deliveryman</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>Telling Detail</strong> 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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">At 79, Still Keeping Brooklyn Bubbling</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“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.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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: </span><a href="http://www.seltzerworks.com/" target="_blank" title="Film about the company"><span style="color: #1e91fc; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Gomberg Seltzer Works</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> in Canarsie. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“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.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mr. Miller jams wooden shims between the 10 rattling bottles in the beat-up wooden cases, which he delivers for $31 each. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“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.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But he declared, “Old seltzer men never die — they just lose their shpritzer.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mr. Miller, a lifelong bachelor, has lived in the same apartment in Bensonhurst since 1977. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“My customers are my family,” he said. “They feed me dinner, and I’ve watched their children grow up.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">During a recent delivery to a brownstone in Park Slope, a housekeeper let him in and then left Mr. Miller alone in the place. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“You see?” he said, picking up the empty bottles. “They give me the keys to the kingdom.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">To this day, he keeps copies of his father’s yellowing stationery in the front seat of his van as a keepsake. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">“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. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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.</span><br />
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<div class="ecxshareTools ecxshareToolsThemeClassic ecxshareToolsThemeClassicHorizontal ecxarticleShareToolsBottom" data-description="Eli Miller has been delivering seltzer in Brooklyn for more than 50 years, and can’t imagine retiring, or the thought of his customers drinking the store-bought kind." data-shares="facebook|,twitter|,google|,save,email,showall|Share" data-title="As Old as the Bottles" data-url="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/nyregion/the-seltzer-man-is-still-bubbly-after-all-these-years.html">
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EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-80170034586475217382014-02-07T20:22:00.000-05:002015-06-18T15:04:20.184-04:00Delaney Cards<em>If, as you scroll down this page everything is in one long, very long, paragraph, then you are not reading this in the original format. Someone has stolen my blog for their own use. So, to see it in its original, pristine condition, please go to <span style="background-color: yellow; color: #0c343d;">EastFlatbushMemories.blogspot.com</span></em><span style="color: #20124d;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What do you mean you don't know what a Delaney card is?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.delaneybooks.com/images/delaney_card_r2_c1.gif" name="delaney_card_r2_c1" style="height: 287px; width: 267px;" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">If you attended a New York City public high school in the fifties or sixties, you know what a Delaney card is.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In any case here's a refresher course:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Welcome back, class. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">First, let's take care of some housekeeping chores. My name is Mr. Berger and I am your homeroom teacher. When the late bell rings you WILL be in your assigned seat so I can take attendance. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I'm going to hand each of you a Delaney card. For those of you new to high school or new to New York or can't remember anything prior to last June, these cards serve a bunch of purposes. Each of your teachers will ask you to fill one out and each teacher may use it for different purposes but its primary use is as a seating chart and a way of my keeping attendance. I'll get to know most of your names within a week. Some, like the young man facing the back of the room, I'll learn a lot sooner. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Yes, they're called 'Delaney cards.' No, not da laney card. What do you mean 'Why?' They're Delaney cards because they were created by Edward Delaney, a Harvard graduate who taught history at DeWitt Clinton High School."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's easier to explain what a Charlotte rouse is than a Delaney card. "Hey, yo, teacher! I dropped my Charlotte Rouse on da laney card."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Wanna make it a complete trifecta? "Hey yo, teacher! I dropped my Charlotte Rouse inna my egg cream and it spilt on da laney card." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It don't get no more Brooklyn high school than that!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Yes. Print your name and all the information called for on the black side and print your name on the red side." Yes, in ink. OK, then you can use pencil. No, you can't borrow a pencil. Yes I know it's small. What do you mean you made a mistake? It just asks for your name and address. Yes, I know it asks for personal stuff, but I need to know your name if you're going to be in this class. Yes, even if you're in the Witness Protection Program. No, you can't use your pen name."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And so continues the unique rights of Fall in New York City high schools. And the first forty minutes of the semester.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Each Delaney card was put into a slot in a Delaney book corresponding to the row and seat of the student. Six or eight rows across; six rows deep. This works if the room is set up in the traditional configuration of classrooms with desks bolted to the floor. One year I had an official (homeroom) class that met in a lab or woodworking shop. Don't ask.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">At the beginning of the class each day I would take attendance either by calling the names - a good technique for the first week until I got to know the students - or by scanning the room for empty seats, looking in the Delaney book for the corresponding card, turning it over to the red side and drawing a line through the corresponding calendar date.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I also learned to leave extra time at the beginning of the first few classes so the students could remember their seat assignments or negotiate changes. Unlike some teachers, I didn't care where the students sat -except for those with valid reasons for choosing a particular seat. (Having to sit next to the cute blond did not qualify as a valid medical reason even if the sun cast a shadow on the desk you originally chose.) But after the first day or so, that was it. You chose your seat, live with it - unless I moved you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Delegate: the first rule of good classroom management - and sanity. And there's no better task to delegate than class attendance. There's never a shortage of students willing to take on the role of attendance monitor. Picture the thrill of standing in front of your class of peers and marking some fellow student absent. A minute ago, you were just one of them; now, that maroon Delaney book in your hand signaled awesome power. Its status is the equivalent of the junior high school color guard or elementary school chalkboard eraser monitor. (What a great way to get even with some guy who said he'd call and didn't. Just flip the card over, put a line through the date and wait for the damage to settle in.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The front of the card was personalized by each teacher. I would put in various codes and if I wanted to garner extreme fear in a student who had just committed some capital offense, I would make a big deal of putting a mark on his or her card. It usually took about two weeks before I forgot what all the codes, dashes, and symbols meant.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Every once in a while an attendance monitor would ask me what some of the marks meant. Invariably the monitor would be mysteriously replaced by someone less inquisitive or at least smart enough not to ask. Test scores and grades were entered in a separate book.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Impersonal? Maybe, but, hey, I had thirty-plus kids in each of five classes I met daily. By the end of the day I considered myself lucky if I remembered where I had parked my car. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">No one had to teach me the importance of handing each student only one Delaney card - and collecting one card individually from each kid. None of this passing a supply of cards back ("Hey, teach, I didn't get no card." when you know you gave each row six cards.) This method also reduces the number of sophomoric obscenities that have been around for a hundred years. What it doesn't do is eliminate all the phoney phone numbers. The war never ends.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">As the semester wears on, the alibis and excuses become more numerous - but less inventive. Often, I would offer a 'by' for a truly imaginative, original story. I would be amazed at the creativity from a kid explaining his absence, who, when asked to write a compositon would come up with a blank stare and a paper to match.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Roberta. Why were you not in English yesterday? What do you mean you were home taking care of your sick sister? A week ago you told me you were an only child and asked if I could adopt you. Also, I saw you in my homeroom class yesterday morning, and then I saw you fourth period outside sitting on my car smoking. That's why your Delaney card has a line through yesterday's date, and that's why the Cutting Office was notified."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And so it goes. Every day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Well, not <em>every</em> day. There were weekends and school holidays!</span><br />
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EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1163305076994729712013-11-11T22:25:00.000-05:002015-06-20T21:30:30.396-04:00Exploitation<strong>Exploitation</strong><br />
Okay, kids. Settle down. Hey, everybody! Quiet. While Carol is taking the attendance and Billy is adjusting the window shades and Norman is erasing the board I want to talk to you about the assignment I wrote at the top of this blog. I gave specific instructions that you were to scroll to the bottom of the page - that the blog on the bottom should be read first. Some of you in your zeal to please me are reading from top to bottom. <br />
<br />
Wrong!<br />
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Let's spend a few moments today talking about the exploitation of children - specifically, the voluntary exploitation of school children by those entrusted with their education.<br />
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In the twelve years I spent as a student in the Brooklyn public schools and the five as a teacher in the same system, not once did I hear a parent complain that the in-class assignment his or her child was doing - for free - was demeaning, dangerous or degrading. In all those years I did not know of any case - real or imaged - of any illness or injury - physical or mental - associated with any in-class 'job.' <br />
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And there was never a shortage of volunteers, even for the most menial of 'jobs.'<br />
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The reason: every job had its perks.<br />
<br />
What future career opportunity was washing the blackboard or cleaning the erasers going to provide for Norman when he 'got out'? OK, walking up and down the aisles with the waste basket might lead to a lucrative civil servant position, but the others?<br />
<br />
It starts in grade school, probably around the fourth or fifth grade. <br />
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Anything is better than sitting a whole day in Miss O'Neill's class - even cleaning the erasers would be a welcome respite. <br />
<br />
Take it from someone who knows. I was senior eraser monitor in the fifth grade - a promotion no doubt based on recommendations from my fourth grade teacher who saw it as a great way of getting rid of the kid who kept asking questions and from the school custodian who recognized talent when he saw it.<br />
<br />
Whatever. <br />
<br />
There were two ways to clean erasers: The purists would take them outside and clap them against the wall. <br />
<br />
It was a cushy job in September. Go outside near the auditorium, clap them erasers silly against the wall for maybe an hour until Miss O'Neill sent a search party out looking for me.<br />
<br />
Three rules for outside eraser clapping:<br />
1. Stand upwind of the clapping or resign yourself to a coughing fit like you wouldn't believe. You're gonna feel like your eyeballs are falling out. <br />
2. This is no time to show your literary creativity by clapping the eraser in the form of certain words you've recently learned from that sixth grader who lived on the other side of the hospital who spelled everything phonetically (This invariably would lead to some second grader's mother coming up to school and registering a complaint. It didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out who the miscreant was.)<br />
3. pick a wall that can't be seen from your classroom.<br />
<br />
The avant garde eraser cleaners embraced modern science and used 'the vacuum.'<br />
<br />
Regardless of your philosophical leanings, when it got colder it meant using the eraser vacuum in the basement which shared space with three of the largest pieces of machinery I had ever seen. The Indian Head nuclear reactor was based on the same design, but because of space limitations it could not match in size or output what was residing in the school basement and in cold weather those babies worked overtime making those weird sounds, like what you'd imagine a boiler would sound like just before it explodes. I seemed to be the only one concerned about all those needles on the gauges pointing in the red zone. They'd find parts of you scattered in a three-block radius down to Albany Avenue. <br />
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But, the most miraculous thing is that when they found your hand it would still be clutching a clean chalkboard eraser. For years afterward, old neighborhood people would still be talking how 'dat kid what got hisself blown up could clean an eraser' and they'd shake their heads muttering that kids nowadays don't know the meaning of clean erasers.<br />
<br />
The two groups never saw eye-to-eye on the best method. The chance to be outside usually ended the discussion in favor of the purists. However, being downwind of the eraser and engulfed in a cloud of chalk dust did convert some purists. I imagine the discussion and the job died a natural death with the advent of whiteboards and dry markers.<br />
<br />
In any case, eraser cleaning was probably close to the bottom of the in-class job hierarchy - until the first nice Spring day.<br />
<br />
Years later I wondered how much critical learning I missed because of all the time spent outside the classroom. No doubt it was the sole reason I did not get into Harvard. At least the waste basket monitor did his job in the classroom.<br />
<br />
Six years in the school - seven, if you count kindergarten - and that's all I remember about it! (Well, come to think of it, I also remember the bench outside the principal's office, but that's another story.)<br />
<br />
At the polar extreme was being in the color guard for assembly. Because of the wider visability, this job trumped class president. Remember, we're talking grades 4-6 It's like the difference between being a governor and a US Senator. (Do kids still go to assembly? Do schools still have auditoriums? Do kids still own white shirts or blouses?)<br />
<br />
Even that job had its hierarchy. Carrying the American flag trumped all other flags. If you had that assignment, you had it made; you were destined for great things. When you walked the halls, kids would stand aside and let you pass.<br />
<br />
Unless, you trip on the stairs leading to the stage, or sneeze, or... once you make it to center stage holding the flag with both hands and there you are in front of the entire school, and I mean everyone, and right in the middle of the Pledge of Allegiance, right at that point where everyone is saying that stuff for Richard Stanz you realize that your fly is open. The snickering starts with the boys in your own class and then quickly engulfs the girls sitting in Row F.<br />
<br />
It's the little kids who are the least cool. They have to point. It's the pointing that really gets to you.<br />
<br />
And, all of a sudden, clapping erasers against the side of the building in twenty degree weather does not sound like such a bad job - when you finally return to school.<br />
<br />
(My wife was an elementary school teacher - in the same school I attended as a student. She keeps in touch with a class she had more than forty years ago and two of them remember being in the color guard - that it was the single best thing that happened to them in elementary school.)<br />
<br />
I was never in the color guard. No, really! It wasn't me. I swear!<br />
<br />
I was a crossing guard. Yup, with the white belt and the AAA badge. Even then, I was into the 'power thing.' Hey, there are limited options open to an eleven-year old to impress the chicks. (Do they still have student crossing guards? Like today I would really tell some fifteen year old sixth grader that he had to wait for me to say it's ok to cross the street.)<br />
<br />
I was also an AV monitor - before it became a dorky thing. We would set up film strip projectors. (Explain that to your kids!).<br />
<br />
There were other neat jobs in the classroom. Being the window shade monitor took somewhat of an anal retentive personality. Who else would be so exacting in their lives to line up all the shades? <br />
<br />
Howard Newman was. I swear that if the shades were off by more than a quarter inch it was a lot. Those shades were the envy of every teacher in the school. They would stand across Lenox Road and stare up at Howard's work. It was a cool job and often required team cooperation with... the window monitor. <br />
<br />
Now, that job was way cool - other than the aforementioned color guard and maybe being class president! <br />
<br />
Settle down, Buckeroos. I know, I know. Board of Education (now Department of Education) policy forbade anyone other than a teacher from opening or closing windows. Let's get real. Hey, I'm talking about my school where the average age of teachers hovered around 60. The new 'girl' was at least 50. Which one of them could look up to the top of the pole without falling over, if she could even see to the top. Why risk the embarassment? That's why you had Warren!<br />
<br />
All class activity would stop while the window monitor carefully removed the twenty-foot pole from its brass mooring and carefully place the hook in the brass loop on the window. Well maybe not always so carefully. We would wait in anticipation for the gentle sound of the brass hook - some twenty feet in the air as it ever-so-gently penetrated the window glass. Sometimes we would be disappointed; but more often than not Warren would not disappoint. <br />
<br />
And the response was always the same: Warren's same and unimaginative curse, Miss O' Neill's questioning his intelligence, the cheering from his fellow classmates and later on, the occasional transfer of cash from one unhappy student-bettor to a happier one. You would think Warren would have given up the pole - or handed it down or whatever. He made it through the entire fifth grade with that job and the next year when Miss Reilly asked who wanted the job he got it based on prior work experience - with the same results.<br />
<br />
Come on! You all have seen those little holes or cracks in the center panes of those big glass windows. How do you think they got there?<br />
<br />
Knowing Warren's shortcomings in the spatial relationship area, I obsessed over that pole not being firmly engaged on its hook and it coming crashing down on some hapless student - mainly me. I figured I could be in seat one in row one and still get whacked. Maybe it was better to sit in row six- near the windows. That way you wouldn't get the full force of the pole - and especially the hook. I thought I was alone in my fear until I noticed other kids - in fact the whole class would be mentally figuring the trajectory of that flying pole. Even Miss O"Neill, who would get out of her high chair in the corner (Remember those?) put her rubber-tipped pointer down and walk toward the back and give a reassuring tug on the pole to verify that it was safe.<br />
<br />
(Did you know that those wood poles have been replaced by aluminum and those old teachers have been replaced by young, even pretty, teachers?)<br />
<br />
One step up from basket monitor was the wardrobe monitor whose job it was to close the wardrobe after all coats had been hung up. (This is for the folks who went to a '200 series' elementary school where all the sliding wardrobe doors were connected, so if you closed one door, all of them would slide closed at the same time.) <br />
<br />
One of my tasks as a Director of Human Resources is to deal with job enrichment - how can management and employees make the job more interesting, thus keeping the employee more involved and, hopefully, more productive.<br />
<br />
Hell, this ain't nothing new. Way back in the fifth grade Harold had learned to make the wardrobe monitor's job more interesting and enjoyable - much to the consternation of the girls he would periodically lock in the wardrobe. Midway through the year Harold learned a vital lesson about job security - a stigma that he no doubt carried with him throughout his work life. He was fired! But the job provided a future career opportunity - Harold became a conductor for the New York City Transit Authority<br />
<br />
Oh, my! There's the bell. I can't believe the day is over already, class. Let's continue this tomorrow. Harold, let Marcia out of the closet. What do you mean she doesn't want to come out? Who's in there with her? Harold, open the doors NOW!EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1157598176976100742012-09-06T22:00:00.000-04:002016-02-13T10:20:35.639-05:00"Put It On The Wall, Lou"<strong><em><span style="font-size: 130%;">"Put it on the wall, Lou"</span></em></strong><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here's some serious stuff. In researching this series I came across an interesting phenomenon. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The overwhelming majority of respondees to these 'Brooklyn' blogs had parents who worked in the neighborhood and most were in retail. "My father owned the bakery on..." "My father worked in the men's shop on Utica Avenue." "My father owned the jewelry store on..." So many of the respondents had families that worked in the same neighborhood in which they lived. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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. Any of you who grew up in East Flatbush had a parent who worked in Manhattan? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I was in junior high school when I decided I wanted my own money, not an allowance, so I went into every store along Church Avenue from Albany Av to Kings Highway. ("Hey, you need anyone to deliver orders for you? Have bike; will deliver!") </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Not one of the stores I went into looking for a job was a chain store. The person I spoke to was not a manager, but the owner. Aside from the Woolworth's on Utica Av, the closest to a chain store, was the Carvel on E55th St, but even that was an individually owned franchise.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Speaking of Woolworth's, walking into that store was a throw-back to an earlier life. Wood floors and wood counters. THE place to go to for school supplies. A fun place to stroll through before going to the Rugby. This one was unique - no soda fountain. Just very old sales 'girls'. Even my grandmother, who was far from being a spring chicken herself, would comment about how old the 'help' was with their smocks no doubt designed by the same people who designed the Howard Johnson restaurant uniforms. These factors all contributed to the chain's demise. The name above the store may have been replaced, but there is such a distinctive look that long after, you just know it was a former '5 and dime.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
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imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ok. So I forgot about Ebinger's, 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 including the ones on Church Avenue, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau and Suffolk. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The closest was on Church near Utica (click on the picture here, courtesy of Brooklynpix.com) but their 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. I still drool, just thinking about Ebinger's layer cake, but hands down, the blackout cake was to die for. Several web sites proclaim to have the original receipe. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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. The stuff was delivered to the stores several times a day in red and black electric-powered trucks that would invariably double park blocking the trolleys. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
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" style="cursor: move; height: 154px; width: 258px;" unselectable="on" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There was a certain irony in that the large percentage of the chain's Brooklyn customers were Jewish which did not extend to their hiring practices. Ebinger's died a quiet death, allegedly because it did not follow its customers out of the City in the late sixties and seventies, to be reborn as Entenmann's packaged cakes and a Bay Ridge bakery using the signature Ebinger's logo and colors.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">How much heartache can one kid endure? Dem Bums moving west and Ebinger's disappearing.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I got my very first job delivering prescriptions after school for a drugstore on Church Av. That won't help you pinpoint the store. There was a drug store on every other block.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I was paid by the number of orders I delivered plus the tips from the customers. It wasn't until years later that I realized how good a deal I had. I'd get the same tip for carrying a bottle of pills as the guy delivering three bags of heavy groceries. Rarely did I have to collect any money from the customer; everything was charged. Not with plastic; but with a pencil and a box full of index cards.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">After a while, I'd get to know the regulars and they'd invite me in. ("So, you want I should make you sompem to eat? You look so skinny.") Sometimes they'd tip me by giving me soda bottles to cash in at the candy store for the deposit. That's interesting: Fifty years later the quart bottles have mushroomed to 2-litre bottles, but still command a 5-cent deposit. How did the world of bottle deposits escape inflation?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In high school I went to work delivering for Rubin's Kosher Butcher. And the tips really began rolling in and still the packages weren't as heavy as groceries. Added bonus: I got to ride one of those delivery bikes with the big basket in front. Now, THAT impressed the girls! On rainy days Seymour Rubin would drive me. (He didn't want I should get vet and seeck. It was easier to drive me than to deal with my mother, his customer.) That job lasted through high school. I got two dollars a day for about two hours of work. My first real salary: 2 fives, which my father framed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If you didn't go to Ebinger's, 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 Brooklyn, 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? Of all the retailers, 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 tieing the knot. How it do that? And why did your mother save all the cord in the kitchen junk drawer? Especially the green and brown cord from Ebinger's. That was special occasion string.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Each store had its loyal following. Would you ever think of going into a candy store that was not your 'regular' store? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I lived in an upscale neighborhood. We didn't have a candy store; we had Dave's. Just plain Dave's No further explanation required. It was on a corner, there was a newspaper stand out front. What did you think it was? And when Coca Cola replaced the old Breyer's Ice Cream sign, Dave's became Dave's Luncheonette and Soda Shoppe accompanied by a price increase. East Flatbush must have been the candy addict capital because Dave had competition on all sides - four within two blocks; one on the same block. How did any of them make any money? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At home our refrigerator had a freezer compartment large enough to hold two ice cube trays. That's it. You want side-by-side? One of the trays would have to be put in the sink. We'd go 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 with as much ice cream as it could possibly hold.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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. If the names were already in use, then just initials would do. 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.<br />
<br />
Maybe not so for the grocery. Even after a Bohack's opened two blocks away. my mother still patronized Lou's. Not only was allegiance based on proximity but on certain other perks: free delivery and your family's ability to join the hallowed ranks of those to whom credit was extended. I would be sent 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 shaving that my mother would trust me to carry a dozen eggs a block and a half. To this day I still have an aversion to carrying eggs... and seltzer bottles.) After I told Lou or his wife what I wanted, he'd reach under the counter, take one shopping bag just large enough to hold my order, remove the big pencil from behind his ear, lick the point and add up the order on the paper bag. Maybe he didn't got such good English, but he sure as hell knew addition. I would tell him to 'put it on the wall' and every Saturday my mother would go in and Lou would add up all the orders we had bought for the week and my mother would pay. No plastic; just a sheet of wrapping paper on the wall and Lou's big pencil. (What's with the licking of the pencil point???)<br />
<br />Here's something to ponder: Let's say American cheese was on sale for 89 cents a pound and you wanted a quarter of a pound. It never came to exactly a quarter of a pound. as good as he was, Lou wasn't that good, so the cheese on the scale would be a little under or over what you had asked for. How did the Lou's of the world determine the price? And do it before the scale's needle stopped quivering? Did you ever know anyone to question the grocer's math?<br />
<br />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 is a quarter-pound stick of butter (one-pound boxes would be opened and the individual sticks would be sold separately) and pints 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! Also, 'a milk' was always one quart. If you remember being sent to buy a half-gallon container, you are too young to appreciate this blog. It wasn't until much later that milk started being sold in larger-than-quart containers. By the way, the half-gallon containers helped signal the death knell for home delivery of milk.<br />
<br />
Going to the appetizing store to buy lox (smoked salmon to those of you who might have just landed from Iowa) was close to a religious experience. The slicing of lox added new meaning to the word 'thin.' An eighth of a pound could serve a family of six. A pound of lox? You bought a pound maybe for a bar mitzvah. Forget your definition of thin. Thinly sliced lox meant you could see through it. Rumor had it that our favorite appetizing store on 48th and Church, hired moonlighting surgeons to slice lox<br />
<br />
There was even an art to applying the lox to a bagel. I grew up in a 'dot' house. This meant you took a small slice 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.<br />
<br />The only way to buy halavah was from an appetizing store. The clerk would cut off a piece from a giant hunk and weight it. The pre-packaged stuff is good, but does not come close to buying it from that giant hunk. While we're in drool mode, think about those chocolate covered jelly candies and all those other goodies strategically placed at waist height for a six-year old?<br />
<br />
Next session we'll touch on a sub category of merchants - the street guys. Later blogs will delve into the exotic culinary world. How old were you when you learned that exotic cheeses did not include Velveeta or any cheese you spray on a cracker?</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-56961806400265902702012-08-18T14:20:00.001-04:002013-12-08T15:36:10.839-05:00FWIL - RIP<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-small;">(originally posted 2007 - then edited 2009 and again in 2013- worth re-reading update with some background info.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Special occasions in our family were celebrated with food. You graduated from kindergarten? Let's eat out. You got accepted to your fifth choice college? Let's eat out before you move to Idaho and we'll never hear from you again. Promotion? How about if we celebrate with a fancy meal before you get to be such a big-shot you won't want to eat with your family that loves you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Special occasions did not always mean happy occasions. "Hey, we never liked him anyway. Let's celebrate by eating out to take your mind off the jerk.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">And, if you were looking for a truly special place to dine, there was no place more special than F.W.I.L - Lundy Bros. And you could be assured your special occasion would be shared with up to three thousand of your fellow Brooklynites - more on really special days like Mother's Day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Come on. You know a trip to Lundy's was a special occasion. Not the every-Sunday type of occasion that warranted a trip to Fong Fong. We're talking about the original Lundy's - not the puny remake that emerged in the nineties that could seat only seven or eight hundred people. I'm talking about the original - and according to some - the largest restaurant in the United States, if not the world, with seating for close to three thousand! How's that for intimate dining?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Hold on a minute. Before you get all upset and claim that Lundy's is/was in Sheepshead Bay and not East Flatbush, let me explain.<br /><br />There were some areas in the borough that were 'non-neighborhood': Flatbush Av, Downtown, the Highway, the Junction. There were some institutions that belonged to the borough and not to a particular neighborhood or high school: the downtown theaters, Brooklyn College, the main public library on Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Park, the zoo, the beaches, Ebbets Field, and ... Lundy's, for example.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">First, stop trying to figure out the names of the Lundy Brothers. Here's the scoop: One guy. Frederick William Irving Lundy opened the restaurant in 1934 as an adjunct to his family's thriving fish business. One person's name. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">The original restaurant was a seafood shack perched on a dock in Sheepshead Bay which was condemned by the City in the 1930's as part of a neighborhood renewal project. The new two-story Lundy's was built on the site of the old Bayside Hotel at the corner of Emmons and Ocean Avenues</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span> <br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">You just didn't walk in to Lundy's, wait to be seated, wait to be served. No. Lundy's was not for the feint of heart. You did not want to take your great aunt from Boise there. First, there was no maitre d' and no reservation. The restaurant was a city block long and had two kitchens and multiple dining areas.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Yeah, and your parents had a favorite waiter who remembered your family from three months ago. Yeah, right!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">One of the vivid memories I have of eating at Lundy's was the act of securing a table. Assuming you made it inside the restaurant after waiting outside, finding a table was left up to the customer. My father would elbow his way through the large dining room, lead his family upstairs to the long narrow room facing the Bay, find a family nearing the end of their meal and then hover territorially nearby. Typically, the law of the jungle would prevail; rarely was there any dispute.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Also, there were the rituals: You were given a lobster bib and the after-meal cleanup involving a finger bowl with lemon-scented water. In retrospect, it was not unlike a religious event. (I wonder if the waiters ever bet each other to see how many of their customers would try to drink the contents.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Lundy initially insisted on hiring only blacks for his wait staff. From the captains to the busboys, the 200 or so front line employees in their starched uniforms were African-Americans.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Close your eyes (after reading the rest of this paragraph) and think about the Lundy's Shore dinner: for starters, a basket of steaming hot miniature biscuits accompanying a shrimp, clam or crab cocktail; steamed clams, half a lobster, half a chicken, potatoes, vegetables, coffee and dessert. Not just any dessert, but if you had been there before you knew what to order: hot blueberry pie with Breyers vanilla ice cream.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">OK. I'm back. Just wanted to see what was in the refrigerator.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Lundy's outlasted the Depression and World War II. It thrived through the '50's and '60's. Little changed in the way the restaurant did business, but its surroundings were changing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Little by little, the middle-class neighborhood residents, who had made up the bulk of its customer base were relocating to the suburbs and by the 1970's the restaurant was no longer profitable.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">And in 1979, just months after Irving Lundy's death, the restaurant - to the great dismay of its loyal customers - closed its doors.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Until sixteen years later, when smaller Lundy's opened under new ownership with seating for only 800 diners.</span><br />
<br />
<shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" preferrelative="t" spt="75" stroked="f"><stroke joinstyle="miter"><formulas><f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"><f eqn="sum @0 1 0"><f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"><f eqn="prod @2 1 2"><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"><f eqn="sum @0 0 1"><f eqn="prod @6 1 2"><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"><f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"><path connecttype="rect" extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t"><shape alt="" id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Hey,
How much bad news can a person
take?</span></shape></path></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></formulas></stroke></shapetype><br />
<shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" preferrelative="t" spt="75" stroked="f"><stroke joinstyle="miter"><formulas><f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"><f eqn="sum @0 1 0"><f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"><f eqn="prod @2 1 2"><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"><f eqn="sum @0 0 1"><f eqn="prod @6 1 2"><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"><f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"><path connecttype="rect" extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t"><shape alt="" type="#_x0000_t75"><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">First, The Dodgers, Trolley cars, Ebingers, parking meters, Tilden going
belly up. Now, Lundy's is history - for the second time. <br /><br />And now, even the puny off-shoot is shuttered.<br /><br />Here's a further update. The property owners are thinking of turning the place into a food store! </span></shape></path></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></formulas></stroke></shapetype><br />
<shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" preferrelative="t" spt="75" stroked="f"><stroke joinstyle="miter"><formulas><f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"><f eqn="sum @0 1 0"><f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"><f eqn="prod @2 1 2"><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"><f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"><f eqn="sum @0 0 1"><f eqn="prod @6 1 2"><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"><f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"><f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"><path connecttype="rect" extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t"><shape alt="" type="#_x0000_t75"><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Ain't nothin' sacred no
more.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></shape></path></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></f></formulas></stroke></shapetype>EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-76705173762898928312006-12-25T21:03:00.005-05:002013-11-29T12:16:00.281-05:00Parking Meters and Egg Creams<strong><span style="font-size: 130%;"></span></strong><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Waddaya mean you don't see no connection?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">You're right. They don't have anything to do with each other.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">I usually don't read obits, but this one intrigued me:</span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">The last New York City mechanical parking meter - an emblem of street life since 1951 was withdrawn from service recently. </span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Before you rejoice and decide to move back to the City from Boca or wherever it's always beautiful weather, read on. The meters have slowly been replaced by more than 62,000 battery-powered digital meters that the City finds more accurate and vandal-resistant.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">In a somber but unpretentious ceremony somewhere in Coney Island, the last mechanical meter was replaced by a digital version ready to take quarters.</span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Quarters? What happened to dimes? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">I remember dime meters on Flatbush Avenue and then along Church and Utica Avenues. And not the type that required the driver to twist a handle after inserting the coin. Just put the coin in the slot, listen for the gears winding or more likely inserting the coin and waiting for nothing to happen before pounding it on its side to jiggle the coin enough to engage the gears. The latter took some finesse.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Parking meters came to New York somewhat late in the dance. They were first introduced in Oklahoma City in 1935. How's that for embarrassment? Scooped by Oklahoma City! I'm sure that really alleviated the parking crisis in downtown OC.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Anyway, it took sixteen years before New York realized that it was letting a lot of dimes - and quarters - to say nothing of slugs and foreign coins, to slip through their fingers. The meters were first installed on West 125 St, and it sure didn't take long for the fungus to spread to the 'outer boroughs.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Those original meters required weekly winding by some guy walking along the curb with a crank,</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"> winding each meter. (Another occupation replaced by modern science and after all that special training you went through to get that job! ) But, the job that really impressed me was the guy who emptied the coins from the meter into a 2-wheeled canister with a long vacuum-cleaner type hose. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Now, that was a job! Just think of the possibilities. Think of all the promotional opportunities that must have been turned down once you got that job. "No, sir. Thanks for the offer, but I really don't want to be borough president. I think I'll just stay down here in the Department of Traffic doing the same boring job out there on the streets I've been doing for 23 years, collecting all those dirty coins for the City I love and making sure they all get into this canister I drag around every day."</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"></span><br />
<div align="center" style="font-family: arial;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC7NUoDjSRh9mODG1-todM5Ja0RKW7jcKtf2U0U7o2iyTzHDxomaPlRhpHwEz3jHgwkQd1LEqsBLAFSzGm8FGm-xJ_5Slj5OTTSncX-BGge8NNzpxXVBpTBO9zhHVMJPyUqIMJ/s1600-h/pic1_lg.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" height="221" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5012675536731640002" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC7NUoDjSRh9mODG1-todM5Ja0RKW7jcKtf2U0U7o2iyTzHDxomaPlRhpHwEz3jHgwkQd1LEqsBLAFSzGm8FGm-xJ_5Slj5OTTSncX-BGge8NNzpxXVBpTBO9zhHVMJPyUqIMJ/s320/pic1_lg.jpg" style="height: 119px; width: 92px;" width="174" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 100%;">A side note for all you ex-pats out there. It no longer costs a quarter for an hour of parking. For that lone quarter you get 10 to 12 minutes of parking. That could be why the City has installed meters that can accept coins or credit cards and/or parking cards. How thoughtful. There is no longer a need to carry a roll of quarters. There <strike>are</strike> were about 600 meters that accept credit cards.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 100%;">There must be a lot of folks feeding these machines. In a recent year, the City took in more than $96 million from those meters.</span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;">Here's a further update. Those digital meters have been replaced by muni-meters. First the meters were removed, leaving only the hollow poles until the City got around to removing them. I'm sure that the overly honest drivers just dropped quarters down the hollow tubes. At the other end of the moral spectrum are the citizens who just yanked the poles out of the sidewalk and sold them for scrap metal. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;">In any case, now once you've found a parking spot you then have to locate the nearest muni-meter (There's usually two or three per block conveniently disguised as all the other street stuff you find along a curb.) Determine how much time you need to buy and how you will pay for it (cash or credit). Then run down the block, pay for your parking, run back to the car, put the receipt on your dash - all while looking for the parking enforcement agent.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Figure on about three dollars an hour A lot of years ago I was in some town on Long Island. Pulled up to a meter, put in a penny and got twelve minutes of parking. Since there was already 40 minutes on the meter I felt I had beaten the system. By the way, many of the digital meters have a sensor that puts the timer back to zero when the vehicle leaves the spot. Saves you the time and grief of looking for a spot with time on the meter so you can save a dime. (Don't tell me you didn't do that years ago!)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I'm getting too old to handle all this change.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 100%;">Well, I was so distraught over another loss from my youth (Ebbets Field, trolley cars, Ebingers, Tilden High School, and now parking meters) that I decided to drown my sorrow, literally, in an egg cream. </span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">Anyway, I could not find a decent egg cream, let alone many who knew what an egg cream is. Anyone out there know where the name came from? Why 'egg'? Check this: a current neighbor who grew up in Bay Ridge seems to remember an egg cream made with CREAM SODA!!! (That's why your mother told you never date anyone from any number street that didn't have 'East' in front of it.)<br /><br />Decided to see if I could recreate an egg cream on my own.</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"></span><br />
<div align="center" style="font-family: arial;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd9VdN0rj3bJnS2UQHq8tPx3zB9rX9f6ZINbRGUCw4RrgrcBh6q4dA3UIDBMamlHqjY5jXHtrbaQp519Qv-vlvQDODF2vkssbNesLdlmXecGWiGQxEEP9-LIyjy69AIk2x-ONV/s1600-h/02_ubet_truck_top_center.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5012663016901972146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd9VdN0rj3bJnS2UQHq8tPx3zB9rX9f6ZINbRGUCw4RrgrcBh6q4dA3UIDBMamlHqjY5jXHtrbaQp519Qv-vlvQDODF2vkssbNesLdlmXecGWiGQxEEP9-LIyjy69AIk2x-ONV/s320/02_ubet_truck_top_center.jpg" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><br />
<div align="left" style="font-family: arial;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;">F<span style="font-family: arial;">ox's U-bet Syrup - a Brooklyn institution long before Ebbets Field was conceived. </span></span></div>
<div align="left" style="font-family: arial;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The only syrup allowed in an official 'egg cream.' </span><br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-family: arial;">
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Just as Brooklyn bagels taste better than bagels from any other city, so too, with egg creams. </span><br />
</div>
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 100%;">As a public service, the following is the recipe for an 'official Brooklyn egg cream' from Fox's website:</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><br />
<ul style="font-family: arial;">
<li><div align="left">
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><em>Take a tall, chilled, straight-sided 8 oz. glass</em></span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="left">
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><em>Spoon 1 inch of U-bet chocolate syrup into glass</em></span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="left">
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><em>Add 1inch whole milk</em></span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="left">
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><em>Tilt the glass and spray seltzer (from a pressurized cylinder only) off a spoon, to make a big chocolate head</em></span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="left">
<span style="font-size: 100%;">S<em>tir, drink, enjoy</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%;">It didn't taste the same!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">By-the-way: No more glass jars; only plastic squeeze bottles. For those of you who insist on scooping your syrup out of a hard-side container, Fox's U-bet is available in 55-gallon drums. (No kidding!)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 85%;"></span><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-63667357380346587622006-12-20T21:36:00.002-05:002013-01-23T16:05:34.420-05:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDzm3eFATsO3Pf9KDXrYGgmPSYCKk-Q_C2qew399dQzlwSIG1xFgts8_wpTQg3eju61roTjWLZAb6M2rKhCcr4LOGktuNQDBGe8QY1SO0PrOx4dTiQtstBSeaVDah8hkgO6nOa/s1600-h/tilden+side.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5010809729923813474" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDzm3eFATsO3Pf9KDXrYGgmPSYCKk-Q_C2qew399dQzlwSIG1xFgts8_wpTQg3eju61roTjWLZAb6M2rKhCcr4LOGktuNQDBGe8QY1SO0PrOx4dTiQtstBSeaVDah8hkgO6nOa/s320/tilden+side.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></a><br />
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<span style="color: #000066;">This is a response to the previous installment announcing the demise of Tilden High School. The story, in part, appears courtesy of Sam Roberts, class of '64 and The New York Times.</span> </div>
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<strong>WHEN TILDEN WAS THE WORLD</strong><br />
By SAM ROBERTS<br />
Published: December 17, 2006<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">THE REV. AL SHARPTON and I don’t have much in common — but we do share a defining backdrop for our wonder years in Brooklyn. At different times, we both attended Samuel J. Tilden High School.<br /><br />And both of us were chagrined by the announcement Monday by the New York City Department of Education that Tilden — deemed unsafe and unsalvageable academically — would be closed and replaced by a cluster of smaller and presumably more manageable institutions.<br /><br />Tilden alumni are hardly slouches. In addition to Mr. Sharpton, they include the Mets manager Willie Randolph, the labor leader Victor Gotbaum, the former White House counsel Leonard Garment, the writer Murray Polner, the jurist Milton Mollen and the weightlifter Dan Lurie.<br /><br />Sid Gordon batted for Tilden before joining the baseball Giants. Ronnie Blye broke scoring records at the school before playing for the football Giants. The folk humorist Sam Levenson, though not an alumnus, taught Spanish there in the 1940s.<br /><br />Jake Ehrenreich, whose memory play, “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn,” opened Off Broadway in October, not only graduated from Tilden but also makes his entrance on stage wearing a Tilden sweatshirt, emblazoned with a giant T.<br /><br />Tilden, which opened in 1930, was built to accommodate about 3,800 students. But within a decade, enrollment swelled by 50 percent. I grew up about a mile away, on Kings Highway, one block from the hulking New Lots el, which more or less defined the border between East Flatbush and Brownsville. Almost overnight, Brownsville, heavily blue collar and lower-middle class, would be recast from Jewish to black. We lived in what we considered solidly middle-class East Flatbush, which I deluded myself into thinking was an integrated neighborhood because an Italian family lived on our corner.<br /><br />Also, I like underdogs, and like almost everybody at Tilden during those years, I knew that its namesake was a New York governor who had won the popular vote for president in 1876 but been deprived of the job because supporters of Rutherford B. Hayes had stolen the election in Congress.<br /><br />The school wasn’t perfect. As early as 1958, a police officer was regularly stationed outside. We abandoned the annual Thanksgiving football rivalry with Jefferson High School ... because more injuries were suffered in the stands than on the field.<br /><br />After last week’s announcement by the Department of Education, I dug out my 1964 Tilden yearbook. Since we graduated on the stage of the old Loew’s Kings, I’d been in touch with a handful of Tildenites and knew what had become of them. Robert Ellman became a teacher, just as he’d predicted in the yearbook. Marilyn Schwartz became an educator, too, and acquitted herself in the thankless role of spokeswoman for the school district that includes Columbine High School in Colorado. Paul Nussbaum had said he wanted to be a politician; he became chairman of a giant hotel chain.<br /><br />Most of the girls said they wanted to be teachers or stenographers. One boy wanted to be a roofer. Was that really what they aspired to? ... Did Ilene Kleinman become a psychiatrist? Did Philip Asher become a choreographer? Judy Gitlin had been voted most likely to succeed. Did she? At what?<br /><br />At Tilden, fewer than 44 percent of students scheduled to graduate last June did so, and only half of those got a Regents diploma.<br /><br />In the 1930s, Tilden established the school system’s first guidance department to effectively deal with what was quaintly described as juvenile delinquency. Now it is considered one of the city’s most dangerous schools.<br /><br />In the Tilden I attended, nearly 98 percent of the students were classified as “others,” a euphemism the Board of Education used to designate people who were neither black nor Hispanic. Still, the mix of ethnicities and religions made the school much more multicultural than any place I’d ever been.<br /><br />By the time Mr. Sharpton graduated, the proportion of “others” had shrunk to 63 percent, which was still considerably more than he would have encountered if he had stayed put on Lenox Road.<br /><br />Right around the time Mr. Sharpton was attending Tilden, Sam Levenson was asked how the old neighborhood had changed since he taught there. More mixed, he replied. “No matter where I go, or how successful or unsuccessful I am,” he explained, “I never in my life shall ever feel that ‘they’ are coming. There is no ‘they’ to me, because I know about being ‘they’; I have been ‘they.’ ”</span>EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-20251646663647719822006-12-12T22:21:00.010-05:002013-01-23T16:07:18.282-05:00Hold On To Your Tilden Sweat Shirts, Folks<div align="justify">
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<span style="font-size: 78%;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">From the official Samuel J. Tilden High School website:</span></span></div>
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<a href="javascript:" onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.tildenhs.org/';return true;"><span style="font-size: 78%;">www.tildenhs.org/ </span></a><span style="font-size: 78%;">Brooklyn 5800 Tilden Ave Brooklyn, NY 11203<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 130%;"><span style="font-family: courier new; font-style: italic;">The staff of Samuel J. Tilden High School is a staff committed to excellence. This excellence will be evidenced in the development of out future leaders. It is our plan to insure that the young people that graduate from these portals are prepared with the social and academic skills necessary to achieve in an ever changing, technologically developing world. Within our young people we will reinforce the positive values that they bring from their homes and their communities. As they develop a sense of self-worth and dignity, they will also develop a strong appreciation for their own culture and respectful tolerance for the lifestyles of others. We will reaffirm the necessity for our youth to be academically prepared, socially concerned, and intellectually discerning human beings who will feel confident and adept in an ever changing multicultural and multifaceted environment.</span></span><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">Well, it seems that not everyone agrees with the above statement. Certainly not the New York City Department of Education ('Board of Education' to us Boomers) who on December 11, 2006 said that it would close five failing high schools that had proved unsalvageable.<br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">That honorable distinction was bestowed on Tilden, as well as Lafayette and South Shore, and two small Manhatten schools.<br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">The Brooklyn schools will be replaced by collections of small schools with about 400 - 500 students, typical of the Bloomburg administration, which has closed or is in the process of closing 17 other large schools across the City.<br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">Education officials said the schools to be closed had notably low four-year graduation rates, did a particularly poor job helping students who were already behind as incoming freshmen, and proved exceedingly unpopular with prospective students.<br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">In addition, the schools all had safety problems. Extra police officers and security guards were put into each of them after each school was named an 'impact school.' (South Shore and Lafayette were taken off the list after improving.) Hey, remember when Ralph was the only cop assigned to the school and there probably wasn't enough for him to do.<br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">At Tilden, 43.5 percent of students scheduled to graduate in 2006 did so. (What was the graduation rate the year your graduated? Did you even know anyone who did not graduate?)<br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">Don't throw away your Tilden keepsakes.<br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">They're sure to become great conversation pieces. You can tell your grandchildren that you remember when Tilden was a great school in a great neighborhood, in the best borough of the greatest city.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 130%;">A sad day.</span></div>
</span><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1163645314558647772006-11-15T20:54:00.002-05:002013-11-10T12:14:35.339-05:00Class Jobs - more<br />
I<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> don't remember class presidents prior to the fourth grade, but from that point on until I got into junior high school we always had a boy president - not that it really mattered because the president didn't do squat. Every year the boys would decide who they wanted as president and then procede to nominate at least two girls.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Duh!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was simple. Boys voted for the only boy; girls split their vote between the two or more girl candidates. There was no platform; no promises; but lots of patronage. (More about patronage later.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Who knew then that we were being prepared for the real world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Every year the same drill, with the same inevitable outcome.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The president had real power - unless the teacher didn't like him which was the case with any boy duly elected. So, the teacher would appoint a monitor - the kid who would be sent to the main office to retrieve messages or supplies, but more importantly he or she was the rat, the stooly who would stand up in front of the class when the teacher left the room. When the teacher returned, the monitor would report all the miscreants and their often exaggerated crimes. Recently, a federal law was enacted to protect whistle-blowers and I'll bet Congress had these class monitors in mind when they drafted the law.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I had taught for a while at Abraham Lincoln High School (It was NEVER Lincoln High School. Either Lincoln or Abraham Lincoln High School) but it wasn't until I joined Meyer Levin Junior High School that I perfected the fine art of patronage. If I had twenty eight kids in my class, my goal was to give each one a job. And they loved it! There were so many kids in my official class doing 'stuff' that I thought about assigning student supervisors. I was once late to class and when I came in every one was doing his/her assigned job.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Hampton Gathers was my favorite. First, I loved the name. Some days I would call on him five or six times a period, just to hear the sound of his name. Hampton Gathers. He was my main man. This kid was ultra cool before cool was even invented. He was what I unofficially called our lollipop monitor. As important as his job was, it was, at best, a part-time assignment. But Hampton embraced this job with his whole being.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Let me refresh your memory.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Every room had a round red sign, about twelve inches in diameter. Stenciled on each side was the room number. And this sign was attached to a wooden dowel about the size and length of a teacher's wooden pointer. During a fire drill, and other occasions requiring evacuation of the building, the teacher was expected to carry the sign aloft as he and the class behind him left the building. This way, the class, in the ensuing frenzy could easily reassemble.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now, on paper, this sounds like a plan.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And if there was one thing this teacher shared with his students, it was the opportunity on some early spring afternoon, when the leaves are just beginning to bud, to leave the building for a nice stroll out Beverly Road and left along Ralph Avenue, cross Tilden Avenue and observe the miracles of nature and possibly make a quick detour toward Tomain Joe's Luncheonette.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What this teacher did not particularly like was having to carry the silly sign in the building, let alone out in the street.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Hampton Gathers to the rescue. My main man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Had this been a real emergency you would have been instructed to get out of Teacher's way unless you can run faster than him." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Hampton was pressed into service maybe three times that year and on one occasion for an unexpected fire drill. The latter caused major administrative concern. The smart money put the blame on Hampton who vigorously denied any wrongdoing. Everyone knew it was not a scheduled fire drill because it wasn't a particularly warm day; Dr Herselle would never schedule a drill where students might be required to put on coats. And the last thing he wanted was a posse of piqued panicked parents parading into the principal's office.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">My absolute best student assistant was Carol G. On the first day of class, my first day in the school, Carol told me I would need a class secretary and she would be happy to be that person. She was in my 8th grade SP official class. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Any way, Carol, at the ripe age of 13, was better organized and more mature than most of the secretaries I've had since leaving teaching. And, she could print like a typewriter. Remember, this is before computers. I mean this kid was great. Carol's arrival signalled the end of most of my administrative duties. (She later expanded her duties to be our son's babysitter. How neat was that?)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There was one job in junior high school, because of its importance, that could not be relegated to students. During passing between classes, all teachers were required to stand outside their classroom to observe the flow of student traffic. For what? To break up fights? In Meyer Levin in the sixties? To watch for kids passing on the right or weaving in traffic? Ha! Pity the poor student who inadvertently made a left turn across oncoming traffic to enter a classroom without first going to the designated u-turn area, so marked on the corridor floor with turn arrows. Amazing the power of the system. Three years in the school. I don't think I ever saw a kid knowingly cross that line and if he had, what punishment is appropriate? Well, technically it is a moving violation. We may have to bar you from graduation ceremonies. I used to like calling a kid walking on the other side of the hall to see me and see how they would react. Invariably the student would walk forty feet further down the hall, make a u-turn at the designated arrow and come back to where I was standing. By that time I had forgotten what I wanted to say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I don't know if teachers were exempt from the white line rule, but until I got tenure, I wasn't going to take any chances.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">One more chapter on Meyer Levin - its teachers - and then we'll mosey through the neighborhood again. I'd like to hear from some of you who lived east of Ralph Avenue. No, not you, Billy. You lived south of Flatlands Avenue and that was Canarsie - or Flatlands. Definitely not East Flatbush.</span>EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1158889098693655662006-09-21T21:08:00.000-04:002013-12-02T18:21:46.729-05:00Street Merchants<em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Update to this article: Wow, did this generate interest! All the mobile food vendors. 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. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Let's save that for another discussion.</span></span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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 suit?")</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRkEI_G0CBd9ocSCU2wtKLO9G44WPWjXNm4bkUrqwB76EVZT3_hIxVgnxWl1TcpWmqp9QepXWOdt1SLUM13YO2DSOVBdExzHe_AFOq0K06H9wG4VNg2xZWdlHQ-MugvvHepX65/s1600/good+humor+truck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRkEI_G0CBd9ocSCU2wtKLO9G44WPWjXNm4bkUrqwB76EVZT3_hIxVgnxWl1TcpWmqp9QepXWOdt1SLUM13YO2DSOVBdExzHe_AFOq0K06H9wG4VNg2xZWdlHQ-MugvvHepX65/s320/good+humor+truck.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But there was an entire retail world that came to our door. There were the obvious 'seasonal' vendors. The ice cream guys in the warm weather. In our neighborhood, the Good Humor man reigned supreme. 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 </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1z52GURhSnuIHHdf16DiWwFRIfapXYiaS1hBU_3WU0jW2tfLU3K_EX08f9hLESVW5KEg5b5AONQB_dgsbrNwlzRHN8CJSyAmrMgMQWLejoXn2KB6UNfT69zeOOCdltPORt652/s1600/Bbar+truck.jpg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1z52GURhSnuIHHdf16DiWwFRIfapXYiaS1hBU_3WU0jW2tfLU3K_EX08f9hLESVW5KEg5b5AONQB_dgsbrNwlzRHN8CJSyAmrMgMQWLejoXn2KB6UNfT69zeOOCdltPORt652/s1600/Bbar+truck.jpg.png" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Well, not quite.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There was the junk man with a horse-drawn wagon with a bunch of cowbells jingling on the back 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. 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjznK3X5azTE88L7XAxnxq5q5_H4qUvG9IZwLVpKebWOc8tYPpRkUla9OUozx1-gQQ2sZN3fvys_NJwBHiEKwYQ0F7Vo0m0hLRk3VQOvCJHqB1BrB56OhTn86S-E_ugN54GiLhR/s1600/vegetable+Joe's.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjznK3X5azTE88L7XAxnxq5q5_H4qUvG9IZwLVpKebWOc8tYPpRkUla9OUozx1-gQQ2sZN3fvys_NJwBHiEKwYQ0F7Vo0m0hLRk3VQOvCJHqB1BrB56OhTn86S-E_ugN54GiLhR/s320/vegetable+Joe's.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. 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. Come on, did you know anyone who rode to school on a school bus in the fifties and sixties? This was Joe's 'store' in an earlier life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The knife sharpener guy intrigued me. He announced his arrival with a special sounding gong. H<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">e 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. Now there was a dreamer! Lawnmowers? Who had a lawn? 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."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj5C423TVSogu4v1gr7vasJfBKzFS4a8_oODPhJOwTEfS10wGyd2GPI1zesXhe2k-oeR-TCEiKGeuT4TGkNogRjENvX5b5KsBAHwmEQGpMY-3WS-R-w5TuWkovIFb2UfMnjtPp/s1600/merrygoround.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj5C423TVSogu4v1gr7vasJfBKzFS4a8_oODPhJOwTEfS10wGyd2GPI1zesXhe2k-oeR-TCEiKGeuT4TGkNogRjENvX5b5KsBAHwmEQGpMY-3WS-R-w5TuWkovIFb2UfMnjtPp/s1600/merrygoround.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi92MnwAk-qFV51bteiy84DIfNN8mgpzWhPDwt5ZVc1H9lFCixdjwzYtw4FnbrLSoyu4KmevkhaqAD6yA5fv9Hj9cckUKCyF85QE7Q1FdzJXNhGbFpDPG-DXKGOSphgvwRog2SW/s1600/whip+truck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi92MnwAk-qFV51bteiy84DIfNN8mgpzWhPDwt5ZVc1H9lFCixdjwzYtw4FnbrLSoyu4KmevkhaqAD6yA5fv9Hj9cckUKCyF85QE7Q1FdzJXNhGbFpDPG-DXKGOSphgvwRog2SW/s1600/whip+truck.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And then there 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.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The ice man not only cometh but wenteth. By the time I joined the human race 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 retained 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 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2F3Cl2m4tAqmRk2Xa2A4i5k8LJkXmSdEtxaRvtOJOZf76bBAoP9BlAFT0GldyKi-dgswJk4O3eBL8XKDCpzLa7ZTZxQNSwwgdVpk8q3wfQCX1JSrCjUO8YOtCKbycAlEF3qC/s1600/divco+milk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2F3Cl2m4tAqmRk2Xa2A4i5k8LJkXmSdEtxaRvtOJOZf76bBAoP9BlAFT0GldyKi-dgswJk4O3eBL8XKDCpzLa7ZTZxQNSwwgdVpk8q3wfQCX1JSrCjUO8YOtCKbycAlEF3qC/s1600/divco+milk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2F3Cl2m4tAqmRk2Xa2A4i5k8LJkXmSdEtxaRvtOJOZf76bBAoP9BlAFT0GldyKi-dgswJk4O3eBL8XKDCpzLa7ZTZxQNSwwgdVpk8q3wfQCX1JSrCjUO8YOtCKbycAlEF3qC/s1600/divco+milk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
</a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2F3Cl2m4tAqmRk2Xa2A4i5k8LJkXmSdEtxaRvtOJOZf76bBAoP9BlAFT0GldyKi-dgswJk4O3eBL8XKDCpzLa7ZTZxQNSwwgdVpk8q3wfQCX1JSrCjUO8YOtCKbycAlEF3qC/s1600/divco+milk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW2F3Cl2m4tAqmRk2Xa2A4i5k8LJkXmSdEtxaRvtOJOZf76bBAoP9BlAFT0GldyKi-dgswJk4O3eBL8XKDCpzLa7ZTZxQNSwwgdVpk8q3wfQCX1JSrCjUO8YOtCKbycAlEF3qC/s320/divco+milk.jpg" width="320" />d</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5t1Jh5IVAGYXKiS2Gi_GOHBgP78nOheP7jAf-16BYTvOif7nGthEY1kRe_VC8qn-63Sii56uQD-9baLejYG9OrvBmpFU7Rn3eWH1ZosJHMjo1b3N_CkiPfbPrSl0qeKgEYcE5/s1600/milk+wagon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> </a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP91tE4G8ObRZbm_HVtob5Q3H3x9Qi_BnA2mZni4YmrATYKvlborsvXPp2mAsOjMu23LxI0IRoaIVlvdNivvSXQpNb034jWcql9vW4w8EAUcwlw3onlmbdTpvP_aEembpcxtsX/s1600/milk+wagon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP91tE4G8ObRZbm_HVtob5Q3H3x9Qi_BnA2mZni4YmrATYKvlborsvXPp2mAsOjMu23LxI0IRoaIVlvdNivvSXQpNb034jWcql9vW4w8EAUcwlw3onlmbdTpvP_aEembpcxtsX/s320/milk+wagon.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia;">Hey, wanna know sumpin? The milk deliverers 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! </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">By the way, I was never sent for a quart of milk. It was,"Go to Lou's and get a milk." Later on, it was "Go to Bohack and get a container of milk." Sending a kid for milk was easy back then. Ever check out the milk display case in a modern supermarket?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">What ever happened to those flat-topped Canco containers with the lid in the corner? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Here's another by-the-way: Milk, when you were growing up came only in quarts. The advent of half-gallon containers signaled the beginning of the end for home delivery of milk.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Cross the Hudson and people look at you kinda funny when you call it a container when what seems like the rest of the world calls it a carton.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Who did I miss?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiLtapXvgUXsLVVYVkK6mVbnituxLFz6LEZUBHJ5FRp1z0wLHa5QYyY0YmiEF5DiaeHSXFdEXKP-LBvholqgsbQjAXK075Q0xszM5oqu5hiV4OgwiH8EF-rznopjOssmUYOq7p/s1600/good+humor+truck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a> </div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1156727645362664972006-08-27T20:54:00.002-04:002014-08-18T13:50:43.209-04:00A Road By Any Other Name<strong><span style="font-size: 130%;"><em></em></span></strong><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I guess I'm not quite finished with the street name change thing. Please indulge me. This won't take long.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The neighborhood, East Flatbush, started life as Rugby, (hence the Rugby Theater, The Rugby branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Rugby post office. Get it?) yet you have to travel to the equivalent of E14th St to find a Rugby Rd in the heart of what is now Ditmas Park and its million-dollar Victorian mansions. Rugby Road starts at the Parade Grounds at Caton Av and ends around Av H where it assumes its more pedestrian E 14th St.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I had a friend who lived in an apartment house on the corner of what is now Dr. Wesley McDonald Holder Av and Detectives R. Parker and P. Raffery Way.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">(Try giving that address to a cab driver!) The names honor local residents and the</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> intersection is Schenectady and Snyder Avs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">'Schenectady' isn't one of those words that just rolls off one's tongue, and it sure isn't easy to spell - not like Utica or Troy or Albany. OK. 'Rochester' was already taken, but there have to be easier names.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I've tried to figure a pattern for the street names along Church Av or Linden Blvd between New York Av and Kings Highway . </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">New York Av is the equivalent of E35th. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Brooklyn Av, the equivalent of E36 St, sneaks in and messes up the theory but the next wide street is six blocks east of New York Av- Albany Av(E41st); followed by Troy Av (E44 St) and then Schenectady (E47) and Utica (E50).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The wide streets have upstate names. And at three-block intervals. But, why no names for E53rd or E56th? And why are some two-way streets?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Well, back to Schenectady Av. It's interesting that it's the only named street that most people from the neighborhood feel more comfortable referring to in writing as E47th. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Want to know if someone is really from Brooklyn? Ask them to pronounce Nostrand Av.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">NOS trand? No way! NO strand? Way!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Well, I apologize for the digression. Thank you for your patience.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Next session, we'll talk about commerce in the neighborhood. Where we bought stuff; where we ate out; what we did for fun that wasn't free.</span>EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1156025192864970462006-08-19T17:56:00.000-04:002013-02-24T19:13:28.279-05:00<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/225/3424/640/eflatbush23_b.1.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" height="214" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/225/3424/320/eflatbush23_b.1.jpg" style="clear: all; float: right; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" width="302" /></a><span style="font-size: 130%;"><em>What Ever Happened</em></span><span style="font-size: 130%;"><em> To Linden Ave? Deehan Ave? Wilde Lane?....</em><strong><br /></strong></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 130%;"><strong><span style="font-size: 100%;"></span></strong></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 130%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><strong><span style="font-size: 100%;">surprise quiz</span> -</strong> </span></span><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">match the original street name (column A)with the one you remember from the sixties (column B):<br /><strong>column A </strong></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;">Grant</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;">Wilde Lane<br />Vernon<br />Linden Av </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;">Deehan Av </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;">and, so you don't feel like a total loser:<br />E 44 St </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><strong>column B</strong></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Linden Blvd </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;">Troy </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tilden</span><a href="http://picasa.google.com/blogger/" target="ext"></a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Linden Blvd (2)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Snyder</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;">Church Av </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">See the bottom of this blog for answers. No cheating! No help from your parents!</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin: 0in 0in 13pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
<em>Before we begin, did you read the posting in the column to the right? Did you read the blog that appears below this one? Good!</em></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin: 0in 0in 13pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The picture, courtesy BrooklynPix.com, at the upper right of this blog is
what is now Linden Blvd looking west at Utica Avenue toward
E49th St taken in 1924. If you look carefully, that tall building on the left,
about two blocks away is PS 135. The tracks in the foreground carry the Utica
Avenue trolley. Check out the cobblestones. Smooth roadway had not yet entered
the lexicon of road builders.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">There were some major thoroughfares that took us out of the
neighborhood, but none could offer us the vast</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">opportunities afforded by Linden
Blvd. Whereas Church Avenue and Utica Avenues provided easy transport to all
three subway lines and various connecting surface lines, their ultimate
destinations were all within the confines of the five boroughs. Even Kings
Highway - my, what a regal name - while it meanders through so many Brooklyn
neighborhoods and grows to an eight-lane giant by the time it reaches East
Flatbush (yeah, the Department of Traffic considers the curb lane as a lane,
even though it's primary purpose is for parking) it meets an ignoble, and some
may say, untimely end at Howard Avenue in East New York. Even Utica Avenue at
its southern terminus contributes to Flatbush Avenue's march toward Floyd
Bennett Field and the Marine Park(way) Bridge. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 18pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In all fairness, even Linden Blvd has a humble beginning, with
its start at Flatbush Avenue between Caton and Church Avenues as a one way
eastbound street. How many of you have ever visited the Flatbush branch of the
Brooklyn Public Library on Linden Blvd just east of Flatbush Avenue? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 18pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you were fortunate to grow up in a family with a car, NY
Route 27 - Linden Blvd - was the way to get out to the country. Route 27 starts
at the Gowanus Expressway, shares the right of way with the Prospect Expressway
and then heads east on Caton Av until Bedford Av where Caton ends and makes a
slight left turn to join Linden Blvd. At this point Linden Blvd is flanked
primarily by six-story apartment houses, interspersed with the occasional
two-family house. While not high-end, the houses do exude a degree of
upper-middle-class class - many had doormen, at least in the nineteen thirties
and forties; by 1960 they had long-since peaked. By the
time the traveler reaches New York Avenue there are more and more four-floor
'walk-ups.' No elevators! And more two-family homes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 18pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've been unable to confirm this, but while I was growing up on
Linden Blvd rumor had it that the white line down the center of Linden Blvd
separated more than just the on-coming traffic. It allegedly also served as the
boundary between the six-seven and the seven-one police precincts, now part of
Brooklyn South. The word was, 'Don't ever get hit by a car while standing on
the white line; neither precinct would respond. Drag yourself to either side.'<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 18pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Further east, probably around New York Av, the white line (yes,
'white'!) also served as the boundary between Erasmus Hall and Wingate High
Schools, once the latter opened in the late fifties.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 18pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is nothing of any architectural significance until Albany
Av and St. Catherine’s RC Church and school. If you lived in the neighborhood
and you were Catholic, you went to St. Catherine's. As a result, the local
elementary school, PS 235, on Lenox Rd at East 39th St was predominantly
Jewish.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="line-height: 18pt;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Seven blocks east was East Flatbush Jewish Community Center, on
the corner of Schenectady Av. Well, actually, not on the corner. The plan was
to build a sanctuary on the vacant lot on the corner and convert the original
building into a community center - a dream that never materialized. The
building is now a church. Diagonally opposite is PS 135, an imposing five-story
building that was old sixty years ago. And a block further, across the
street was a brand-new health care facility. (Help me out folks: I think it was
a nursing home. Interboro?)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I bought my first tank of gas at the Texaco gas station on Utica
and Linden. (27.9 cents for regular, leaded gas and they checked my oil!). 1959
was a very good year. I learned every bump and pot hole on Linden Blvd.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Rugby library's first home was east of Utica, in a row of
stores on the north side of Linden Blvd, before it moved to a new, larger building on Utica and Tilden Av.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Linden goes through another change east of Kings Highway. The
intersection of Kings Highway, Remsen Av and Linden Blvd has to be the most
pedestrian-unfriendly intersection in the City. (Actually, in 2003 there were
92 accidents at the intersection, ranking it the fourteenth most dangerous
intersection in the City. In the early fifties there was some talk and plans were proposed to make one of the roadways under ground. No doubt the plans were left on the center island of the intersection and no one was brave enough to retrieve them. Pennsylvania Av at Linden Blvd was more dangerous -
103 accidents that year.) Anyway, on its steady march to the 'country,' Linden
Blvd now becomes an eight-lane monster. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Linden Blvd had an interesting traffic control arrangement as it
sliced through East Flatbush. Not every intersection had a traffic light. Small
signs well-hidden on lamp posts at each corner advised drivers to stop at the
intersection if the light ahead of them was red. In most cases the lights were
at three-block intervals. For example, Albany Av had a light and the next
eastbound light was at Troy Av. The next light was at Schenectady Av, three
blocks to the east and then another three blocks at Utica Av which sported an
overhead signal. This traffic control concept might have been successful had it
been a universal policy throughout the City or if Linden Blvd were in the
middle of a desert with no foliage growing in front of the traffic lights or
the small signs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Traffic lights were black four-sided box-shaped lights which
were effective only at intersections that were true right angles. They were
mounted on stantions about ten feet high at the curb on the corner. Usually two
signals controlled an intersection, mounted diagonally across the street from
each other. And, they were absolute. Either the light was red or it was green,
and the second the light turned red for one direction, it turned green for the
waiting traffic. In a nod to fairness, the Department of Traffic experimented
with the equivalent of an amber signal. Just before the signal would turn red,
both green and red signals would be lit. In New York, that was typically viewed
as a signal to speed up.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now, for the poor hapless driver waiting, say at East 43rd St.,
to cross Linden Blvd. He was instructed via a small sign where normally there
would be a stop sign to look in both directions to see if the light was red for
traffic on Linden so he could cross. Even if it were red, there was a
fifty-fifty chance that some Linden Blvd driver would not stop at East 43rd St,
but continue on to the next traffic light. Obviously, to make this work, all
the lights had to change at the same time. If our hero made it across Linden
Blvd he was greeted at Lenox Rd with a yellow stop sign (with reflective bead
letters) and another stop sign at Clarkson. Standardized red stop signs were
still years away as were three-light traffic signals and progressive signals to
keep traffic moving at a steady pace and yellow lines down the center of the
street. Someone in the City government woke up and by the end of the fifties,
Linden Blvd had joined the ranks of other streets with a more conventional
traffic control system.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Although
it loses its identity somewhere at the Queens border and becomes North Conduit Rd,
it still maintains its Route 27 title as it continues east on The Sunrise
Highway which was built in the 1920's to alleviate the congestion on Montauk
Highway. It will go through several such changes until 122 miles from its
western beginning, it ends at a non-descript traffic circle at Montauk Point.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">OK. A word about Vernon Av - not to be confused with the Verson in Long Island City. As anyone who spent at least one semester in Tilden High School, the street and eventually the school was named after Samuel J. Tilden, an attorney and New York governor who battled Boss Tweed's Tammany Ring. In the most contested presidential election of the nineteenth century Tilden came up one electoral college vote short to Rutherford B. Hayes despite gaining the popular vote and there went Brooklyn's claim to having a president of the United States. Hey, it couldda been worse. You coulda graduated from Vernon High School.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
Our next session, we're going to discuss where we bought 'stuff.' You know,
like food, clothing. Like I said, 'stuff.'<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><strong><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Quiz Answers:</span></strong><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grant - Snyder Av; Wilde Lane (later became Church Lane)- Church Av; Vernon - Tilden Av;
Linden Av - Linden Blvd; Deeham Av - Linden Blvd; E44 St - Troy Av.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/225/3424/640/eflatbush01_b.jpg"><span style="font-size: 130%;"><strong></strong></span></a><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1155524809914702072006-08-13T22:43:00.001-04:002015-06-18T16:20:20.034-04:00Commuting in mid-century East Flatbush<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/225/3424/1600/flatbush11_b.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/225/3424/320/flatbush11_b.jpg" height="313" style="float: right; height: 244px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; width: 134px;" width="190" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 130%;"><em><strong>Commuting</strong></em></span><br />
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<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/225/3424/1600/image037.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/225/3424/320/image037.0.jpg" height="226" style="float: left; height: 173px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 260px;" width="346" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 78%;">Both pictures courtesy of BrooklynPix.com a great resource for all things Brooklyn (Thanks, Brian)</span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I've always had long commutes. (I'm a firm believer real men don't have short commutes.) My commutes - more like journeys, than commutes, started when I was 12.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There was no easy way for me to get to Winthrop. Meyer Levin would have been closer, but I graduated in '55 and the school was not a option. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was less than a mile - as the crow flies. For mere mortals, it was a little longer: Church Avenue trolley ( yes, 'trolley.') to Utica. Then, the bus up to Winthrop St. Then, 2-blocks to the school.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I don't remember what qualified a student for a transportation pass, but I sure qualified. No one else had a longer commute to school. Each month a new pass. They were called bus passes, but I was the only one in my class to use it on a trolley.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I got the free monthly pass for a while. Then I remember paying a dollar a month. By the time I got to high school I paid a nickel per trip. Anyone out there remember what the deal was?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I liked getting on the bus or trolley and flashing my pass. Unlimited use on school days. Sometimes we'd ride the Utica bus up to Empire Blvd to White Castle for lunch. That was cool. Lunch consisted of six hamburgers and a cola. Close your eyes; think small square hamburgers smothered in onions on a soft roll. Six of them lil babies. Then compare that to the tuna fish sandwich on stale Wonder bread your mother packed for you in waxed paper that sat in the wardrobe until lunch period on a hot Spring day. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">No contest!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Waiting for the trolley and the actual ride was an exercise in optimism. First, you hoped it wasn't stuck behind some double-parked delivery truck. (This problem was more prevalent on Church Av which was narrower than Utica Av.) Then, although you were supposed to wait at the curb at those corners with the blue enamel 'trolley station' signs, you hoped the motorman would see you, so you would step into the safety zone near the tracks and hope that the small warning sign and the white lines painted in the street would protect you from on-coming motor vehicles. See the picture at the top right. That sign would have to be on a car driver's hood for thedriver to read it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There was a sub-group of optimists- usually teenagers - who would hop on the outside back of the trolley, stand on the bumper and hold on to the window mouldings and hope they wouldn't fall off. The trick was to hold on but crouch down below the window line to avoid detection by the motorman looking in his rearview mirror. Their optimism often came to a near-fatal end. Falling off was the least worry of the options. Being run over by the vehicle following the trolley was a very real possibility. Being detected by the motorman who would stop the trolley and go after the kids with a steel rod used to change the track switch at junctions was another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Our claim to mischievous behavior consisted of putting pennies on the rails and waiting for the trolley to flatten them. Amazing what a couple of tons rolling over a penny can do. Years later a friend of mine admitted to putting a rock on the Utica Av tracks and watch to his horror as the trolley derailed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Utica Av trolleys were gone by the time I started junior high school. The tracks were still there as remembrances of things past. In fact, Utica Av south of Tilden Av was only partially paved. The center of the roadway had two sets of tracks which were mounted on wood crossties embedded in the dirt but the intersections were paved The end of the Utica line was Avenue N where there was a massive car barn that served the Flatbush and Utica lines. The car barn was converted to a bus garage when buses replaced the trolleys.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Hegeman St. was the eastern end of the Church Av trolley. That's where the car barn was for the Church Avenue line until, in the early fifties, it was ultimately replaced by a very unglamourous 'turnaround' near Bristol Street. (The 'destination' sign on the trolleys said 'Bristol')</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The picture at the top left of this blog shows a Church Av trolley sometime before 1950 at its eastern terminal at Hegeman St. If you look closely at the 'destination' sign on the back of the trolley it says 'Ralph Av.' Someone must have been messing with the sign. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Utica Av line and some of the cars on the Church Av line (like the one in the picture) were what is known as double-ended cars. They had trolley poles and motorman controls at each end, thus avoiding the necessity of having to turn the cars around at the end of the line. The car would come to the end of the line; the motorman would make sure all the coins were out of the fare box and 'flip' all the wood seat backs so the seats now faced in the other direction. And then he would take his coin dispenser (used to make change; the 'exact fare' concept had not yet been invented); get out and lower the pole in the back and raise the pole in the front to the wire. The final step required him (It was always a 'him' back then.)to throw the track switch with a steel rod he'd slip between the 'points' of the rail so when he started on the reverse trip the trolley would switch to the other track. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">(By the way, after August 31, 1969 riders had to have the exact fare. No longer would drivers make change.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">There was a short one-track shuttle trolley that ran along Tilden Av from Nostrand Av to the west entrance of Holy Cross Cemetery at Brooklyn Av. It may have run only on weekends. Two blocks east; two blocks west. And so it went, all day. Change the poles at each end of the trip; probably left half the seats facing in each direction. Talk about a low-stress job.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">By the time I rode the trolley by myself these old double-ended cars had all been replaced by sleek, streamlined PCC cars and the Cemetery shuttle had been replaced by a bus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Presidents' Conference Cars (PCC) were trolley's last gasp at competing with buses and represented a radical change in design and operation. They came on the scene in 1936 and as lines elsewhere were converted to buses, they wound up on the McDonald Av and Church Av routes, the last trolley lines in New York City. (October 31, 1956 was the last day of operation for the trolleys.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The neatest thing about the Church Av line was the tunnel under Ocean Parkway. No one knows the rationale for the tunnel. One school of thought says it was to appease the rich people on Ocean Parkway who didn't want the noise; another group claims it was to avoid the long red light at that intersection. The tunnel was unpaved; originally it was just a single track but later widened to two sets of tracks set into the dirt. Every once in a while a motorist - usually at night - would learn that it was a private right of way for trolleys only. For some reason the vehicles, perhaps on sheer momentum, could make it down to the bottom, at which point they would have to be towed out, disrupting trolley operation in both directions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I finished high school taking the Church Av bus to Erasmus on Flatbush Av. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Buses: no soul; no character; no fun.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Again, take a look at Brian Merlis' </span><a href="http://www.brooklynpix.com/" style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">www.brooklynpix.com</span></a> for more great East Flatbush pictures.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" preferrelative="t" spt="75" stroked="f"><v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><v:path connecttype="rect" extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t"></v:path><o:lock aspectratio="t" ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype><v:shape alt="" id="_x0000_i1025" style="height: 132.75pt; width: 201pt;" type="#_x0000_t75"><v:imagedata href="http://www.subwaywebnews.com/Buses2/Fresh%20Pond%20Trolley.jpg" src="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CNEILBE%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image001.jpg"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" preferrelative="t" spt="75" stroked="f"><v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><v:path connecttype="rect" extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t"></v:path><o:lock aspectratio="t" ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype><v:shape alt="" id="_x0000_i1025" style="height: 132.75pt; width: 201pt;" type="#_x0000_t75"><v:imagedata href="http://www.subwaywebnews.com/Buses2/Fresh%20Pond%20Trolley.jpg" src="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CNEILBE%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image001.jpg"></v:imagedata></v:shape></span></v:imagedata></v:shape><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1154556688555065592006-08-02T18:07:00.000-04:002015-07-10T16:47:22.419-04:00School Fixtures<br />
<strong><span style="font-size: 130%;"></span></strong><em>First, a bit of housekeeping. If, as you scroll down this page everything is in one long, very long, paragraph, then you are not reading this in the original format. Someone has stolen my blog for their own use. So, to see it in its original, please go to EastFlatbushMemories.blogspot.com</em> <br />
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I went to Winthrop JHS – an expanded version of the typical 200-series Brooklyn public schools. If you went to Somers, you'd have no trouble finding your way in Winthrop. Same layout. White brick (well, the purists would call it 'cream'), 4-story building, auditorium to the right with massive chandeliers, wood seats, linoleum floor that was buffed daily.<br />
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The weirdest class was co-ed guidance where the hot topic consuming most of the semester was whether girls in junior high school should be allowed to wear makeup. Wow!!! Now that really held the interest of the boys in the class. The common element for both groups was that they both wanted lipstick that didn't wear off. (In fewer than ten years later I was leading student discussion groups on unwanted teenage pregnancies. I had two pregnant girls in my eighth grade official class. The hell with the attendance award. That made my class a contender for the school fertility award! ) More about the junior high angst later.<br />
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I had Miss Casey for math, Mr. Zeitlin for woodworking, Mr. Spear for Guidance. Some terrifying woman for Spanish and learned English grammar and the parts of a sentence from an elderly woman who had the inate ability to make thirty fairly bright kids double over with fear. Our big courtyard discussion was deciding whether it was better to have English in the morning and get it over or prolong the agony until after lunch. The cowards wanted to prolong it, as did the perennial optimists who hoped that by prolonging what everyone knew to be the inevitable that she might die during lunch, or better yet, a fire drill would be scheduled. Neither of which happened. What did happen was that I learned grammar and, you know what? It was logical and it was fun. How many of you can parse a sentence? Find the verb, the subject, the object? How many of you really understand subject-verb agreement? Good old Whatshername left her mark on me! And I went on to share this joy with countless other students.<br />
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There must have been more to my education, but that’s about all I remember about the two years in JHS 232, Winthrop Junior High School.<br />
<br />
Except for the school fixtures – the perennials. The constants that were there when you started school and were still there five, ten years later when you came back to visit (or still there as a student). The same constants that your older brother talked about when he went to the school. No change. I mean the really important things that really matter when you’re growing up.<br />
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I mean fixtures like Winthrop’’s version of Tomaine Joe’s; Tilden's Ralph, the cop; the pretzel guy; the Mr. Softee truck and Pop the hot knish guy. Knishes were seven cents; pretzels only a nickel. (Do you split for the extra two cents and get a knish sprinkled liberally with a month’s worth of sodium, or go for the pretzel and ten ounces of mustard?) These are weighty decisions when you’re thirteen.<br />
<br />
<br />
Wait a minute. Breathes there a person who knows not what a knish is, or even how to pronounce the word? Whaddayou, from Cleveland or sompin? <br />
Get off this site, now! <br />
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Pop’s personal hygiene was a topic of much speculation and we agreed that his bathing coincided with major natural events, primarily lunar eclipses. But, one thing about Pop: he was dependable. Here was a guy who truly embraced the Post Office motto.<br />
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Every day, rain or shine, there he was pushing that little cart with four squeaky wheels and his inventory, if you could call it an inventory since it consisted of only one product – knishes. I mean HOT knishes. Now, we’re talking about simple days before microwaves. Even if they existed, he’d need a 600 foot extension cord. It was years later that the topic came up and we wondered how did he keep them hot for so long. The concensus was that there was a charcoal or wood fire at the bottom of the cart. We’re not talking about crispy two-inch high Mrs. Stahl's things; these were soggy, greasy, ultra hot, flat jobs delivered on a small piece of wax paper that did nothing to protect your fingers from the molten blob of knish. And, anything that tasted that good had to be really bad for you.<br />
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Anyway, back to Pop and his fully insulated wagon that looked as though it was a junior high school metalworking shop project that started out as an ashtray. We thought Pop was unique unto Winthrop. How could there possibly be another hunchbacked ninety-year old with a thick European accent of undetermined origin?<br />
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And then it happened. <br />
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I seen it wit my own two eyes. Pop had a twin in the business and there the two of them were both pushing their carts up Utica Avenue toward East New York Avenue. I couldn’t believe it. At first I thought I was seeing double. And then, around Rutland Road they were joined by a third. Damn!. Pop was one of triplets – all in the same family business. Each hunched over his cart; they looked alike; they walked alike, they dressed alike. Jeez. Stepford wives of the pushcart cuisine world.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6X_tQo7NUMtTQHqI3IMqaD39tyAG8_dIIbIfLiCb-EqTjhpmlq2KP2sVXgGv1gyq4LeZH8G1y3B9W5Qe8jMvbB-UwmI3GrmIzKDll4cCV-nHNA1SZRmB8iqGvcxf8NL6pJSqd/s1600/knish+fixture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6X_tQo7NUMtTQHqI3IMqaD39tyAG8_dIIbIfLiCb-EqTjhpmlq2KP2sVXgGv1gyq4LeZH8G1y3B9W5Qe8jMvbB-UwmI3GrmIzKDll4cCV-nHNA1SZRmB8iqGvcxf8NL6pJSqd/s1600/knish+fixture.jpg" /></a>You mean EVERY school has a Pop? Say it ain’t so! There can’t be!<br />
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The picture to the left is a fine example of nepotism at its best. Shown is a vendor who must be Pop's grandson working outside the E58th side of Tilden. No way Pop would let anyone, even mishpuchza, encroach on his "Winthrop turf.'<br />
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Here's an update: Seems there was a guy, Ruby, who muscled in on Pop's turf. We're talking up-scale because this guy had a van for his inventory. Same dress code, same hygiene standards. His franchise may have been further south, closer to Tilden and Canarsie High School. But his presence no doubt signaled the death knell for the Pops of this world.<br />
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On days I didn’t bring my lunch we would go to the corner luncheonette. Now, you wanna get some blank stares? Try explaining what a luncheonette is to someone who grew up west of the Hudson or east of the Queens border. In any case, the place to be seen at lunch was Pinky's, a block from the school on Rutland Road for what was possibly the world’s worst hamburgers and french-fries.<br />
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Pinky's was a spatial phenomenon. At 10:30 in the morning, it looked like a typical corner Brooklyn luncheonette with enough seating at the counter and in the booths for maybe twenty customers. Two hours later half the Winthrop student body would cram into Pinky’s, <br />
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But, once every two weeks my friends and I would treat ourselves to a deli sandwich on Clarkson and East 51st.<br />
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I’m talking real kosher deli and real corned beef and pastrami and fat French fries – not those string things that Pinky passed off as French fries. Anyway, the sandwich was under a dollar, the French fries were probably a quarter. I don’t have a clue how much the Dr. Brown’s Celray Tonic or cream soda was. Now that was living! Cholesterol had not yet been discovered. (Think Ratner's; think jars of chicken fat as a delicacy.) <br />
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I feel so strongly about the passing of kosher deli's that I've devoted an entire chapter to them. Check the table of contents.<br />
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Raise your hand if you ever ordered a pastrami sandwich with mayo? Let me guess; you're from Ohio, right?<br />
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But, I digress.<br />
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Years later, outside the main gate to Brooklyn College was ‘the’ pretzel guy. Sold them, also for a nickel, out of the trunk of his Pontiac – a new Pontiac every year. (Why was I knocking myself out in school when this guy with the speech impediment that wouldn’t allow him to say ‘fresh pretzels’ without screwing up one or both words so it sounded like presh fretzels, he had a new car every year.)<br />
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Four years in the school. There he was every day. Went to the same grooming advisor as Pop, the knish man.<br />
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I went back for my Masters. There he was, still hawking presh fretzels.<br />
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A regular school fixture.EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1154394831327686252006-07-31T21:13:00.001-04:002013-01-23T17:06:15.832-05:00Sorry<strong><em><span style="font-family: courier new; font-size: 130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></em></strong><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Two of the cardinal rules I learned as a beginning teacher: First, Don't ever do anything that may require you to make a public apology to one or more students; and, second, if you do something worthy of an apology, don't hesitate to own up to your mistake.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now, with that said - I apologize for the last inane assignment. You remember, the one where you were to name ten Brooklyn high schools that were in existence in 1960. Who knew that other Brooklyn bloggers would latch on to this?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And I thought it was so brilliant! Let's see if I can make it up to you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Here's the list - semi-geographically. .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Sheepshead Bay, Thomas Dewey, Lincoln, Lafayette, Ft. Hamilton, New Utrecht, Madison, Midwood, Prospect Heights, Erasmus Hall, Wingate, Tilden, South Shore,Canarsie, Jefferson, Bushwick, Boys, Girls, Clara Barton, Brooklyn Tech, Roosevelt. OK, we'll throw in Brooklyn Tech, Wm. H. Maxwell Automotive and Grady VHS. And, I'll allow half of Franklin K. Lane - the half in Brooklyn.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Let's fast-forward 46 years but first, raise your hand if you remember when high schools were named after famous people - mostly presidents or local politicians - or the neighborhoods in which they were located.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In addition to the old standbys: James Madison, Midwood, Sheepshead Bay, South Shore, Clara Barton, Lafayette, New Utrecht, Ft. Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Brooklyn Tech, George Westinghouse, FK Lane - a number of the larger high schools have been divided into smaller specialty, boutique, schools:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Erasmus has now been divided into separate schools and is referred to as Erasmus Campus: Hospitality and Tourism, Business/Tec, Humanities, HS for Service and Learning, HS for Youth and Community Development.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Several of the older schools have reinvented themselves:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Canarsie International High School, William Grady Career and Tech Educ HS, Bushwick HS for Social Justice, Thomas Jefferson HS of Civil Rights, Wingate International Arts and Business High School/High School for Public Service Heroes of Tomorrow (Wow, I'd like to see what this looks like on a sweat shirt!) , Dewey High School for Service and Learning, International HS at Prospect Heights</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And several new schools have joined the roster:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">W.E.B.DuBois, Paul Robeson, Edward R. Morrow, Medger Evers, Rachel Carson HS for Coastal Studies, Leon M Goldstein HS for the Sciences, Harry Van Arsdale.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Boys High School and Girls High School have been combined into one (What happened to the possessive apostrophe?)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What school is now High School for Youth and Community Development? or Brooklyn High School for Science and Environment?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">If you've been out of Brooklyn for a while these will throw you:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">International Arts Business School, Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment, HS for Global Citizenship, HS of Telecommunication Arts and Technology, Brooklyn HS of the Arts, South Brooklyn Community HS, FDNY HS for Fire and Life Safety, HS for Enterprise and Technology, HS of Telecommunications, Pacific HS, Brooklyn HS for Music & Theatre.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Tilden? Sorry, still just plain ole Samuel J. Tilden. (update: Oops! Spoke too soon.. See more recent posts!)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Again, these are just Brooklyn public high schools. Let me know if I omitted your school.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Remember when elementary schools were known by just their numbers? Most now also have names:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">135 - Sheldon A. Brookner</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">208 - Elsa Ebeling</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">219 - Kennedy-King</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">233 - Langston Hughes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">235 - The Lenox School (my elementary school)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">244 - Richard R. Green</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Junior high schools are now intermediate schools, grades 6, 7, 8. Does the 2- or 3- year SP still exist? I taught at Meyer Levin for three years. No one could get that name straight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<em style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Some current sample student demographics*:</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Tilden: 2095 Black, 143 Hispanic, 13 Asian, 13 White</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">IS 285 (Meyer Levin): 975 Black, 37 Hispanic, 6 Asian, 6 White</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">IS 232 (Winthrop): 811 Black, 37 Hispanic, 6 Asian, 5 White</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">135: 747 Black, 30 Hispanic, 1 Asian, 11 White</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">233: 755 Black, 39 Hispanic, 1 Asian, 6 White</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">244: 1027 Black, 28 Hispanic, 4 Asian, 8 White</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Do you remember your school having so many students?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 85%;">*courtesy NYC Department of Education 2006</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Next session: We're going to talk about 'school fixtures.' I don't mean the desks or those great chandeliers in the auditoriums. I mean...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Well, you'll see. And then, we'll move on to some other topics. But first...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Capitalization hint: high school is capitalized if it is part of the school's name: Erasmus Hall High School or if 'high' is the first word in a sentence (High school was fun. I went to Tilden High School, but: 'I went to high school.')</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Also: You graduated FROM high school; not 'graduated high school.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 85%;">(Sorry; I couldn't resist. I feel better already!)</span>EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31558682.post-1153845525538115782006-07-25T12:09:00.001-04:002015-06-16T21:15:22.976-04:00Boundaries<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Welcome.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">For starters, let's set some boundaries. Not an easy task. Defining boundaries for East Flatbush is not unlike trying to nail Jello to a wall. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I always thought East Flatbush was a clearly defined, commonly agreed upon geographic area. It obviously isn't.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">To most Brooklynites, East Flatbush was a convenient area that kept Flatbush, Canarsie, East New York, Brownsville, Crown Heights and Pig Town from bumping into each other.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But, for this Blog I've set some arbitrary boundaries; albeit we'll take some liberties from time to time and journey outside this center of the universe as well as allow 'outsiders' in.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">So, conjure up this mental map of our universe: Starting at the intersection of New York and Clarkson Avenues, go South to Cortelyou Rd, then East to Schenectady Avenue, make a right (South) to the railroad right-of-way (the old New Haven or South Brooklyn Railway or Long Island, Conrail freight line. You know, the tracks on the embankment with the overhead power lines), then East to Rockaway Parkway. Make a left (North) up to Clarkson; make a left (West) to New York Avenue.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now, that's our world.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">If you lived on a Parkway (other than Rockaway) forgedaboudit! If you lived north of Kings County Hospital, you lived in 'PigTown' (When did it get to be called Wingate?) If you lived south of Holy Cross Cemetery, it technically may have been East Flatbush, but that is uncharted territory and we ain't goin' dere. South of the tracks mentioned in the preceding paragraph and you were in Canarsie and further south: Mill Basin - neither of which is <strong style="font-family: arial;">EAST FLATBUSH.</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Don't argue with me; it's my Blog.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">OK; so on occasion we'll stretch the boundaries. In subsequent blogs we'll talk about hallowed ground that belonged to Brooklyn - not to a neighborhood of the borough: Kings Highway, the Junction, Flatbush Avenue, Coney Island/Brighton Beach, Downtown, Ebbets Field, the beaches.</span></div>
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<strong style="font-family: arial;"><em><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Our target audience:</span></em></strong></div>
<ul><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">If you remember where you were the day John Kennedy was assassinated, you are in our target audience. Give yourself 50 points. </span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Add 5 points if you remember riding a trolley car on Church Avenue; </span></li>
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</span>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Add five points if you know the east bound destination (last stop) of the Church Avenue trolley; Add ten points if you remember trolley tracks on Utica Avenue south of Snyder Avenue. </span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Add five points if you know what SP means. </span></li>
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</span>
<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Five points each if you remember the name of the bank on East 51st and Church and the one on Nostrand and Church, the name of the drugstore on Church and Utica. </span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">And ten points for remembering plaid and green stamps.</span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Passing grade:65.</span></li>
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</span></ul>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<em style="font-family: arial;"><strong><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Homework:</span></strong></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Name from memory ten Brooklyn high schools, excluding vocational schools, that were in existence in 1960. In our next session, we'll be discussing some interesting facts regarding East Flatbush schools - both elementary and high schools.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now remember, no cheating and 'no fair' if you ask your parents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br /></div>
<strong><em></em></strong><br />EngTchrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14181975905657947500noreply@blogger.com0