MEMOIR: Grammar school days

I recently received an e-mail message day from a stranger, who I will call Stanley P., asking whether I would be interested in attending a reunion of students who had ever attended P.S. 64, a Bronx, N.Y. grammar school. I attended this school from kindergarten through the 8th grade and graduated in January 1938.

Stanley had obtained my name and e-mail address from the younger sister of the only one of my boyhood friends with whom I am still in contact. Stanley was evidently a friend of hers, and she had identified me as a P.S. 64 alumnus.

The only school reunion that I have ever attended was in 1992 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my DeWitt Clinton High School graduating class. The P.S. 64 reunion, Stanley explained, would be open to all former students whether they had graduated or not.

As I recall, only about 200 men and their spouses attended my high school class reunion. It was held in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. The turnout was exceedingly unimpressive, for there must have been at least 2,000 boys in the 1942 graduating class. (DeWitt Clinton High School, which was in the Bronx, was not coed, and it was considered to have the largest enrollment of any of the nation's high schools.)

But the idea of a grammar school reunion intrigued me, and I told Stanley that I would attend. He said that he and a group of other alumni plan to hold the reunion next winter in south Florida, where they felt many former P.S. 64 students would be located. I know of at least five of them myself living or wintering in Florida. As some one who graduated 70 years ago, I assume that I will be among the oldest attendees at the reunion.

P.S. 64 is located on a square block bounded by East 170th and 171st streets and Walton and Townsend Avenues. It is a densely populated neighborhood that was once predominantly Jewish and is now predominantly Hispanic. Long after my graduation, the school began to run only through the 6th grade.

My memory is slowly fading about many important matters. Strangely, however, I still remember that the school's principle was named Jacob J. Shifro and that my first-grade teacher was a Miss Bayer.

I entered kindergarten there on the same day as my cousin Herbert. One of us was so nervous on the first day of school that he threw up. For decades Herb and I argued whether he or I was the culprit. The argument was resolved three years ago at my 80th birthday party when Herb, who was the party's master of ceremonies, announced to the guests that we had both thrown up on our first day in school.

One of my most memorable experiences at P.S. 64 occurred in the second grade, when we learned how to write with the old-fashioned, sharp-pointed pens that had to be dipped into an ink well.

A fellow classmate and I decided to demonstrate that the pen could function as a dueling instrument as well as a writing instrument. I obviously had no talent as a fencer. In less than a minute, my opponent, whose name I still recall (Jerome Stahl), broke through my feeble defense and thrust the pen into the bridge of my nose, close to my right eye.

Red blood, blended with the blue ink from Jerome's pen point, began pouring down my face. The school nurse rushed into the classroom and immediately called for an ambulance. With its siren blaring and its emergency light flashing, the ambulance delivered me to the hospital in minutes.

I was quickly patched up and sent home, where my mother nearly collapsed from shock as she saw my heavily bandaged face. The wound healed rapidly. I remember that Jerome and I remained friends, but I never engaged him again as a dueling opponent.

About 35 years ago,when I was living in Parsippany, N.J., I drove my pre-teen age son and two of his friends to see a baseball game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

The traffic was unusually light that day, and it became apparent that we would get to the ball park very early. I decided to take a detour to show my son and his friends my old neighborhood. Our first stop was the P.S. 64 school yard, which I had colorfully described as an athletic paradise during my boyhood.

We were shocked to find an empty school yard surrounded by a tall, barbed wire fence. The yard was littered with broken beer bottles. Several tough-looking teen-agers lounged outside the fence, closely inspecting us as if we might be members of a rival gang.

We quickly departed. For me, the experience had been exceedingly sad. What I had remembered as a boyhood paradise turned out to be like a depressing scene from "The Blackboard Jungle." To my son's two friends, however, my personal image was significantly enhanced by the experience.

To have played and survived as a boy in the P.S. 64 school yard, they figured, I must have been one tough kid.

MEMOIR: The games we played

I am amused when I hear suburban mothers talk about having to make "play dates" for their children. There evidently aren't enough kids on their streets or neighborhoods with whom their own children can play. So arrangements must be made to obtain playmates.

I then remember what my childhood was like on the teeming streets in the Bronx during the mid-1930s and early 1940s. The center of my boyhood play was the single block on Clarke Place, located on a hill that extended eastward from Walton Ave. to the Grand Concourse. As I recall, there were at least eight five-story apartment houses on that street. I would estimate that each building contained an average of 75 apartments.

This meant that there were about 600 families on that single street. The result was an abundant supply of play mates of both genders and a wide range of ages. There was no need for mothers to arrange "play dates." One quick look out of my kitchen window would immediately inform me whether there were friends outside available to play with.

Despite the absence of conventional athletic facilities in our neighborhood, sports dominated my childhood. My friends and I had an unusual assortment of games that were suitable for a narrow, hilly street with parked cars on either side and a steady stream of traffic. Aside from auto traffic, we had to contend with peddlers on horse-drawn wagons selling milk, fruit, vegetables, and other merchandise. We were thus forced to accommodate ourselves to piles of horse manure as we played.

We were very imaginative in devising games derived from baseball. The street was usually crammed with people walking or standing on the sidewalks, and hundreds--perhaps thousands--of vulnerable glass windows and doors providing a backdrop for our game. Obviously, we could not play regular baseball with a hard ball. It was acceptable, however, for two boys to simply play catch with a standard baseball if our adult neighbors were not inconvenienced.

Our most popular game was called "stickball," using a broom stick and a rubber ball in place of a bat and a regulation baseball. The ball was either a pink-colored "Spaldeen," a brand-name ball manufactured by the Spalding sports goods company, or a used tennis ball with the felt cover removed.

A sewer-covering in the middle of the street served as home plate. First base and third base were marked off in chalk in empty areas between parked cars. In an emergency, a car itself would serve as the base. Second base might be another sewer-cover, if it was located far enough up the street from home plate. If not, it would also be outlined in chalk.

Our idea of a power-hitter was a boy who could hit the ball the length of at least two sewers. In terms of distance, that was our equivalent of a hit into the bleachers of a regular baseball field. But with no physical barriers to hold him back, a speedy outfielder was expected to catch the ball on the fly.

The police considered stickball to be a nuisance, if not a hazard for innocent pedestrians. We were therefore frequently harassed by the cops who tried to stop our game. We handled that threat by posting look-outs--boys considered too young and unskilled for our level of play--at the end of the street to alert us. If cops were spotted, the game was temporarily halted.

Because we were on a hill, we usually played stickball without pitching. We often competed with teams from neighboring streets. When we played them on our block, we enjoyed a competitive advantage against opponents unaccustomed to playing on a hill. Of course, we were handicapped when we had to play away games on level streets, especially if the opponents insisted on playing with pitching.

Our stickball teams normally ranged in size from four to as many as eight players, depending on the number of kids looking for a game. When we didn't have enough men for stickball, we played alternative games with such quaint names as box ball, triangle, punch ball, baseball-off-the-wall, and curb ball. These were primitive approximations of conventional baseball, depending on the architectural features of our street and its buildings.

These games were based on the amount of space on the street and the number of available players. Triangle, for example, was played across the narrow street with two contestants and two imaginary bases. One boy slapped a rubber ball with his bare hand, trying to avoid the reach of his opponent. The opponent's failure to catch the ball was the equivalent of a hit in conventional baseball.

We also played games that were our primitive versions of basketball and football. The nearest regulation basketball court was about 10 blocks away at the local school yard. The kids living closest to the school yard monopolized the school's basketball court. Rarely if ever did those of us from Clarke Place get a chance to use the court during non-school hours.

We devised our own basketball game, using the lowest rung of an apartment house's fire escape. That was the "basket" and the sidewalk was the "court." Our "basketball" was the same type of small rubber ball that we used to play stickball.

We had two games derived from football. We naturally played without tackling, so shoulder pads and helmets were unnecessary. We did, however, play with a regular football. In place of a tackle, the runner would be "brought down" with a two-hand touch. But blocking was allowed, and as a skinny kid I would frequently have to contend with guys considerably heavier than me when I played on the line. I preferred playing as a wide receiver. I was a fast runner, and I would rush down (or up) the street, trying to outrun the defensive back to receive a pass.

We played with as many as six men on a team. A run around end often required the ball carrier
to sprint on to the sidewalk, contending with baby carriages and assorted on-lookers. I still recall one incident in which the runner smashed his knee on an apartment house wall while on an end-around play. It was a brutal collision, and the player was rushed to a hospital. As an adult, he was still sufficiently disabled because of the accident to be rated for limited service when the Army drafted him during World War II.

When we didn't have enough players for touch football, we played a game called "association" with a rubber ball. (I never knew the origin of the name.) The objective was the same as in regular football--i.e., to get the ball across a designated goal line.

The goal line was usually a sewer-cover. As few as two men on a side could play this game. It was simply one man throwing the rubber ball to his team mate, who would try to dodge the defending opponent and run across the goal line without being tagged.

As I look back on these boyhood experiences, I wonder whether the young boys who now require "play dates" have as much fun as my childhood friends and I did in those ancient days, playing primitive street games that substituted for conventional sports.

ABOUT ME: A mini bio

I am the first generation of my family born in the U.S. If my Yiddish-speaking grandparents had not been wise enough--or lucky enough--to have brought their children here from the former Czarist Russian Empire shortly after the start of the 20th Century, I could have been among the 6-million Jews slaughtered by Germany and its Ukrainian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian, Polish, and Romanian supporters during the late 1930s and early 1940s. But because of the immigration of my grandparents, I was privileged to become an American and to escape the religious and ethnic persecution my ancestors suffered for so many centuries in Europe.
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I was born in 1924 at 17 East 107th Street, an apartment house located between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Manhattan's East Harlem neighborhood. I didn't live there long enough to have any distinct memories of the place. But our apartment must have been a very crowded home. It housed not only my parents but my maternal grandmother, my mother's two unmarried sisters and, I believe, a rent-paying boarder. Arriving in the U.S. during World War I, my grandmother's widowed father also lived in the apartment, where he died shortly before my birth.

I was delivered by a midwife in my parents' bedroom. The world-famous Mt. Sinai Hospital was--and still is--located only a few blocks away. But my family apparently had more confidence in the birthing skills of a midwife, who was my grandmother's sister-in-law.

To the uninitiated, the idea of living off New York's Fifth Ave. might sound exalted. But our apartment was on the wrong end of that fabled thoroughfare. Fifth Ave.'s opulent, more desirable blocks are nearly a mile south of 107th Street. Our modest and heavily crowded neighborhood was inhabited largely by working-class Jews only a decade or two removed from the ghettos of Central and Eastern Europe.

Several blocks to the east of us was a neighborhood that was predominantly Italian. During my childhood, New York City neighborhoods were primarily defined by ethnic group, religion, or race. With the rise in immigration since World War II, this neighborhood cultural pattern has been reinforced.

When I was born, East Harlem was represented in Congress by Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who was later to become the city's world-famed mayor. With a Jewish mother and an Italian father, he was exceptionally qualified to be the neighborhood's Congressman. Although it probably had no political influence, LaGuardia was also an Episcopalian. His Catholic-born father was a band master in the U.S. Army, and presumably converted in order to foster his military career.

My mother claimed that movie star Lauren Bacall was born on our street a few months before me, and that she pushed baby carriages in nearby Central Park with Lauren's mother. I can't confirm my mother's claim because no where in the actress' own autobiography is there any mention of me.

Still another celebrity reportedly born on East 107th Street--many years before me--was the late Moss Hart, the renowned playwright. A couple of blocks away is the birthplace of another great playwright, Arthur Miller. Sad to say, my life has never been influenced by all this enormous theatrical talent.

By the end of the 1920s, many of the neighborhood's Jewish inhabitants had become sufficiently prosperous to move to more attractive surroundings--to the Bronx in my family's case and to Brooklyn in Lauren Bacall's and Arthur Miller's. As the Jews departed from the area they were replaced by Puerto Ricans, transforming the neighborhood into what became known as "Spanish Harlem."

What had essentially been a Jewish "ghetto" had become a Hispanic "barrio." Curiously, the same kind of ethnic transformation was to occur many years later in the Bronx neighborhood to which my family moved when I was about three years old.

(To be continued)

MEMOIR: The synagogues on 169th Steet and other matters

My parents lived in the same apartment in the Bronx for 42 years. It was located on the Grand Concourse, one block north of 169th Street. The Grand Concourse used to have an exalted image as a boulevard where only affluent people could afford to live. To debunk the idea that my family was wealthy, I have always explained that there were two types of apartment houses on the Concourse--those with elevators, doormen and canopies at the front entrance and those without such signs of elegance.

We lived in the latter type of apartment house. It was a five-story, walk-up tenement with 90 apartments and a shabby front courtyard. It had seen better days before we moved in during the late 1920s. I lived there from the age of three to 18, until military service removed me from an overwhelmingly Jewish immigrant neighborhood and exposed me to a new world.

The focus of my old world was the formidable array of synagogues ("shuls" in Yiddish) located on 169th Street, the block around the corner from our apartment house. There were five different congregations on the street, each with its own unique characteristics.

At the southwest corner of the Concourse and 169th Street stood Temple Adath Israel, a huge, handsome edifice that exemplified the old joke about the "edifice complex" of some religious institutions. The temple was affiliated with the Conservative Jewish movement, and its members tended to be more prosperous than those of the other congregations.

My pious Orthodox grandmother, who lived with us, was offended that men and women sat together in Adath Israel, and that it employed an organ and a choir with both men and women. Grandma frowned whenever I went there to attend a friend's bar-mitzvah or to be taken to Yankee Stadium by the temple's youth group.

I never had the heart to tell Grandma that I saw the temple's rabbi, who usually accompanied the boys to the ball game, eat non-kosher hot dogs in Yankee Stadium. Grandma, who never accepted any form of Judaism other than Orthodoxy, would have questioned the validity of his rabbinical credentials.

For many years, the temple's cantor was a man named Reuben Tucker. He later became known as Richard Tucker, the world-famed Metropolitan Opera tenor. He was an observant Orthodox Jew who declined to wear Christian religious symbols required for some of his operatic roles. But he was obviously less concerned than my grandmother about the temple's non-Orthodox religious practices.

The temple had a large finished basement used primarily as a ballroom. A section was partitioned off and leased to a tiny Orthodox congregation which was evidently comfortable sharing a building with a congregation whose religious practices were far less traditional than its own.

The basement-based congregation was composed of several dozen old men who faithfully appeared daily for morning and evening services. I never understood why they prayed apart from the much larger Orthodox shuls on the street.

They seemed to be living out the old joke about the shipwrecked Jewish man existing alone on a desert island. When a rescue party appeared, they were surprised to see that the man had built two shuls. When questioned why he had built two different synagogues, he pointed to one of them and explained: "Oh, that's the shul I don't go to."

Actually, my guess is that the old men in the basement congregation were all "landsmen" who had known each other in the same village back in Eastern Europe. They apparently wanted to continue praying together in their new homeland.

For much of my boyhood, the land next to Temple Adath Israel was an empty lot dominated by an enormous, tall rock that was a popular playground for the neighborhood boys. Our favorite game was called "king of the hill." It was the source of countless bruised knees and elbows as teams of boys struggled against each other to get to the top of the rock. (I bear a scar on my left knee from an injury suffered during of one of those boyhood skirmishes.)

In my very early teens a new synagogue was built on the property. I don't recall its formal name, but it included the word "Sephardic" in it. This identified it as a synagogue composed of descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain four centuries earlier and who had settled in the former Ottoman Turkish empire.

Its members were largely immigrants from Salonika, Greece and Smyrna (now known as Izmir) in Turkey. The Sephardic congregation was Orthodox, like the Ashkenazi shuls with which it shared the street. (Ashkenazi Jews originated in central and eastern Europe.) To me, however, the new synagogue had an exotic atmosphere because its rites of worship differed from my own shul's, and its rabbi preached in Ladino (also known as Judezmo) rather than Yiddish.

I still remember that the Sephardic rabbi was named Asher Marciano, and that he came from Sarajevo in Bosnia. (I am confident that he was unrelated to Rocky Marciano, the famous heavyweight boxing champion.) Rabbi Marciano wore a white turban when he was seen walking in the street, which for me emphasized the exotic quality of the new synagogue.

Next to the Sephardic temple was my family's Orthodox shul, Tifereth Beth Jacob. Our rabbi was a saintly, white-bearded man named Levitan. When I was very young, I imagined that God in heaven looked like Rabbi Levitan.

The shul conducted a religious school which I attended from the age of six until I had my bar-mitzvah at 13. I delivered my bar-mitzvah speech in Yiddish, a language I can no longer speak. Unlike the gala celebrations that are now commonplace, the festivities at my bar-mitzvah were quite simple. Following the synagogue services, about a dozen relatives gathered around our apartment's dining room table, drinking wine and nibbling gefiltah fish.

Only boys were admitted to the shul's religious school. Classes were conducted after public school hours at least three days a week and on Sunday mornings. I still remember the teacher, Mr. Halpern, who was an unemployed CPA.

As is the custom in Orthodox synagogues, men and women did not sit together. In our shul they were separated by a curtain. Behind the barrier, my grandmother would meet informally with a group of women after Sabbath services, reading Bible stories to them in Yiddish.

Unlike the other ladies, most of whom were barely literate, my grandmother had received a religious education at home in Russia. In our shul in the Bronx she was regarded as the congregation's unofficial matriarch.

Another Orthodox synagogue--this one a Hasidic congregation--was located further down the street, on the northwest corner of 169th Street and Walton Ave. The Hasidim are a mystical Jewish denomination whose religious practices are marked by exceptional emotional fervor. There are dozens of Hasidic sects, each based largely on East European geography and the leadership of individual charismatic rabbis.

My father had been raised in a Hasidic environment on Manhattan's Lower East Side, but he was no longer religiously observant. He was curious about the Hasidic shul on 169th Street, however, and visited it once or twice.

He encountered an even more emotional--almost boisterous--religious fervor than he had known in his youth. Half in jest, he attributed that to the "crazy Hungarian" origins of the sect that had founded the shul. He claimed that the Polish Hasidim with whom he was raised were more sedate.

I was last on 169th Street about 25 years ago. I was saddened to see that Temple Adath Israel was vacant and boarded up. I don't remember what happened to the Sephardic and Hasidic synagogues. But the saddest sight was seeing that my own synagogue, Tifereth Beth Jacob, where I had read to the congregation from the Torah at my bar-mitzvah, was now an "Iglesia Pentacostal."

MEMOIR: The child prodigy who lived across the street

Leon Fleisher is one of the great concert pianists of our time. Critics have compared him to the likes of Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz. Now 79, Fleisher made his public debut at eight in San Francisco, where he was born, and at 16 performed with the New York Philharmonic.

His illustrious career was interrupted at 36 when he lost the use of his right hand due to a debilitating ailment known as focal dystonia. But he continued performing in public, limiting his repertory to selections for the left hand. He also became a renowned orchestral conductor and teacher at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Over the past decade, he has regained the use of his right hand and has resumed his regular concert and recording career.

My own personal impression of Fleisher goes far beyond his international eminence as a concert pianist. I remember him as the child prodigy who lived across the narrow street from my family's apartment in the Bronx when I was growing up. He lived on the fifth floor of 1325 Grand Concourse and I lived on the third floor of 1299 Grand Concourse.

Both our apartments had windows facing Clarke Place, which was a block north of 169th Street. Weather permitting, our windows were always open. Young Leon practiced constantly, and it may well be that the gorgeous sound of his piano helped foster my lifelong love of classical music.

But we both had some far less worldly neighbors who did not share my love of Leon's music and who failed to recognize that we had a child prodigy in our midst. They regarded Leon's playing as an annoyance, and I can still remember them often calling the police to complain about the "noise" from Leon's apartment.

I recall that the Fleisher family moved to our block when he was about 10. I also recall that Leon's father had been a taxi cab driver in San Francisco. According to neighborhood lore, a wealthy patroness of the arts in that city recognized that young Leon was an exceptionally gifted child.

She arranged for the family to move to New York City so that Leon could study with the legendary pianist, Artur Schnabel, and have private tutors for his general education. I do not recall that Leon had any playmates or that he ever played outside on our street which was always packed with hordes of boys and girls at play. When he was seen outside, he was always dressed in an extremely formal style that was probably the fashion of boy prodigies.

Leon had an older brother, Ray, who was close to me in age. (I am three years older than Leon Fleisher.) Ray was a popular member of our "social and athletic" club, initially known as the Mohawks and later as the Eagles. I don't know whether he had any musical talent, but he was one of the best stick-ball and touch-football players in our gang.

I was inducted into the Army in 1943 and never saw Leon Fleisher again until about 15 years ago when I attended a concert in Trenton, N.J., where he was appearing as a soloist with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Over the years, of course, I had closely followed his career, deriving vicarious satisfaction over his reputation as one of the world's most prominent pianists.

When the concert ended, my wife and I succeeded in being allowed back stage, where I introduced myself to Fleisher as having grown up on Clarke Place, where I had been his brother Ray's friend.

Fleisher was extremely gracious as we tried to recall our early lives on "the block." (I don't know whether he was aware that he was not the only musical celebrity produced in our neighborhood; opera soprano Roberta Peters and pop singer Edie Gorme were our contemporaries.)

Fleisher told me that his brother Ray lived in California and had been a chemical engineer before his retirement. The only name that he could recall from his brother's gang of friends was a boy he called "Sluggo." I had to correct him that the nick-name had been just plain "Slug," and that the boy's real name was Seymour.

Neither of us could figure out why, after so many decades, that Slug was the only name he could recall from Clarke Place. Perhaps it was because it was an exotic one for a Jewish kid of that era.

I did not tell Fleisher that after my discharge from the Army in 1946 my mother urged me to take out her friend's daughter Beverly on a date, and that Beverly informed me that she was also dating Leon Fleisher. I recall being glad to learn that the boy prodigy, who had had such a seemingly restrictive boyhood, had successfully entered into the social whirl as a young adult.