Anything For Thanksgiving?
Autumn in our neighborhood meant touch football, just as spring meant roller skates, stickball, and later, baseball.Piles of leaves were good to jump and roll in, perhapsbecause there weren't as many dogs in the city then. The fewpeople in the neighborhoodCortelyou and Argyll was onelocation, Ditmas Avenue anotherpeople unfortunate enough tohave horse chestnut trees next to their houses, now had toput up with hordes of us, armed with sticks carried just toknock those chestnuts down, and sometimes we hit the houseswith our sticks, missing the chestnuts hanging in clusters.They were not good to eat, not even roasted, but they couldbe put on a shoelace to compete in a game where you let yourshang down while your opponent tried to knock it apart by snapping his down on yours, three shots a turn.
There were all sorts of recipes to harden chestnuts, butI think one of my best harvests all mildewed when I tried toharden them in the dark in the ice trays of an old, nonworking refrigerator. Some would be coated with nail polish,and when you smashed another guy's chestnut yours was a "onekiller" or whatever total of kills the other person claimedfor his.
One triplefigure killer looked like and felt like apiece of rock with a hole drilled in it.
It may have been.
Whether you knocked a chestnut from the tree with astick before the nearby homeowner threatened to call thepolice, or if you just were the first kid to get to the treein the morning after a wind and rain storm, one of thepleasures of harvesting a potential killer was finding itsitting all shiny light brown inside its green protectivecovering. The husk broke away easily, if it had not crackedupon falling, and each chestnut, sometimes two in a "shell,"was a newly oiled masterpiece.
The chestnut phase of fall didn't last long. It maysound surprising, but we didn't look forward to Halloween asmuch as to Thanksgiving.
"Trick or Treat" in our Brooklyn neighborhood was not a big deal, certainly not the circling cars and youngstersranging down to toddlers led by the hand, sometimes evencarried, that line up at my door nowadays at Halloween. Ieven feel constrained to put on my old Army overcoat, avestige of ROTC days, with a pair of boots leftover fromVietnam, and drill the urchin kids, mothers waiting in minivans, fathers in pick-up trucks, of my current hometown so that they may have the chanceto perform to earn their miniature Hershey Bars or Reese's Pieces.
Most look blankly at me when I suggest they perform a trick to earn their treat. I know that in many places in America, "Trick or Treat"was an extortionary device to fend off the shennanigans of the visiting goblin-beggars, but back on Westminster Road,Halloween meant doing a lot of chalking of sidewalks andmaybe some burning of leaf piles, but little in the way ofdoortodoor begging and nothing in the way of serious pranks.
What we did have and what I looked forward to was goingfrom door to door on Thanksgiving morning, in costume,usually just old clothes with our faces blackened by burnt cork, and begging "Anything For Thanksgiving?"
A few pennies rather than an apple or candy were themore common gratuity, and occasionally we did pick up a dimeor nickel. But I could make a few dollars and still be all washed for the family part of Thanksgiving, stuffed turkey with everything else.
I think the custom of begging at Thanksgiving was already dying out in the late forties when I first started going the rounds, and I don't recall any such begging in the late 1950's, but since high school football wasn't much in Brooklyn, it did fill the morning in nicely for a few years. By the time I got too old for it, we were watching black and white NFL football, with, I think, Detroit traditionally losing to somebody for Thanksgiving.
Joyce Ann Turner was one of the older girls onWestminster Road who used to go out with us and she reallynailed me late one Thanksgiving morning, a few blocks fromhome. "See that house on the corner?" she told meconspiratorially, "You're sure and bound to get somethingthere." I went to the door of a wellkept brick house, one thatlooked like it had a yard service and bushes from a nursery,just the sort of place that might dole out dimes or better toa scrawny kid in blackface.
I rang the bell.
No answer. I rang again and again and again.
I had to give the homeowner a chance to show hisgenerosity. After all, the oldest girl beggar on the blockhad assured me I'd get something. The door finally opened.
"Anything for...." I didn't even finish before the tallbalding man who had flung open the door launched into alecture on disturbing a doctor while he was trying to work,how dare I, and don't dare do it again.
Too bad you weren't around for the eighties, fella, to see how much money you really could have made.
And Joyce, I forgive you. You taught me a lesson for Thanksgiving.
The Subway
The subway was, as it still is, the lifeline for all of New York City, for many residents of Brooklyn their way to work "downtown,"which meant the Court Street area, or "the City," Manhattan. But whether it was a subway to Coney Island or Sheepshead Bay or the Prospect Park Station near Ebbets Field, or on toupper Manhattan and the Polo Grounds, or Yankee Stadium inthe Bronx, or the "old" but not really the "oldest" MadisonSquare Garden for Ranger hockey games or Knick basketballgames, both of them being mediocre or worse in those days, and quite consistent at it. For occasional trips to the old Metropolitan Opera with my sister, or a Broadway show with Nancy Conway when we were in college, the subway was a fast, inexpensive outlet to showtime in New York.
When Pat Summerall kicked a field goal in the snow toforce a playoff game with the Brownsno matter what therecord books say, it was more than fifty yards; I knowbecause I was sitting at the fortyfive and he was more thanfive yards to my left, no matter how far back in themezzanine at the old Stadium I wasbefore the "Greatest Gamein History" against the Colts, but that was only because thenewspapers had been on strike during the two great games theprevious weeks; when the Rangers won one, a rarity, in suddendeath against Montreal in the playoffs, Sullivan to Hebenton,and we were hanging over the balcony first row at the oldGarden because you couldn't see all the ice from beyond thesecond row; when I sat through "La Boheme" in English fromthe last row, center of the old Metropolitan Opera, when mysister's friend couldn't gothat was in the eighth gradeorwhen Bus came to my grammar school one day and took me out ofSister Mary Olivia's class so I could stand with him on atruck and catch a glimpse of General Douglas MacArthur beingwelcomed by a huge ticker tape parade after President Trumanhad fired himwe got to all those worldclass events, plusthree major league baseball teams, can you believe it, fromone city, winning the world championship in the same decade? when we did all that from Brooklyn it was by subway.
The subway was also an eight year commute for me to highschool and college, an hour and a half each way for thelatter at Fordham in the Bronx, that my sons at Clemson andthe University of South Carolina don't want to hear aboutagain, and neither do my students but you could get a lot ofreading and some nap time in, too. What percentage of yourcollege reading, C.C.N.Y. or N.Y.U. or Columbia or St. Johns perhaps, was done on the subway from Brooklyn?
A nickel, a dime, fifteen cents for a token, horrors, iteven became a political campaign theme, the "token mayor,"but it was inexpensive, fairly clean and safe, usually fastand reliable, too. It made life beyond the neighborhoodpossible, with a speed that the trolleys and buses couldn't touch. The subway went under long barriers of the boroughs with a single extended roar. Even today, if all the highwaysexperienced gridlock, a smooth running subway system couldstill bail my old city out. But back then it worked.
When I mentioned going by subway to Coney Island for anafternoon at Steeplechase ParkI don't remember how the kidson Westminster Road decided what day we would go there, butsomehow we did, maybe it was when Eugene came over fromNewark to stay with his aunt during the summer to get awayfrom the rough crowd in Newarkanyway we would head forSteeplechase Park and buy a dollar ticket good for 12 rides,always start with the horses on rails that ran the perimeterof the park before getting skinned on the slides or spinningtables, and when I mentioned this to my younger brother whostill lives in the City, Manhattan, not Brooklyn, all hecould talk about was how afraid he was at age seven of everyride in Steeplechase Park. . . of almost falling off thehorses, to being scared by the fairly tame roller coaster,fairly tame when compared to the Cyclone and other terrormachines outside the park. He still remembers a nurseapplying ointment and gauze to a skinned arm.
What I remembered is that we learned to wear longsleeves and be careful.
I also recall that on my way home one day I paid for aroot beer outside the park with what I thought was an oldworn out quarter but what the man at the counter insisted was a slug.
He grabbed back the root beer from me and kept the"coin."
"Well, at least give me my coin back," I insisted,thinking that maybe the attendant at the change booth atStillwell Avenue on the B.M.T. would let it get by.
"You can't have it back either."
This was in the days before sitdowns and protestsbecame second nature, when the guy running the store was theboss there.
I turned away and asked my friends for the loan of a nickel or dime, I forget which. No one had any change left.They had all spent all their money at Coney Island, as I did, but my mistake, I now realized, was in saving my questionable coin for last.
I was desperate. I went up to a transit authority
patrolman in tears, not faked. "That's o.k., kid." I guess he had done this before. "Go through the gate." I thanked him through my tears and I was grateful that it wasn't as hard to get on the subway as I thought it would be.
(I think my mother had told me once that if I ever needed money to get home to ask a policeman and get his badgenumber so we could sent it back to him. I can't imagine my mother losing her purse, because she kept it tucked sotightly under her arm when she went shopping or walkedthrough the subway, but I think she had to borrow a dime oneday this way herself, but the officer at Coney Island just pointed to the gate with no impatience, condescension, or disbelief.)
Of course, it was a lot cheaper living at home and usingthe subways to commute to college, but the inexpensive costand the convenience sometimes were balanced out by otherfactors. Such as a crowded subway car in winter with peopledressed for twenty degrees outside and the temperature eightyin the car and not an inch of room to move around.
Jean Marie Harrington used to hold her compass in herhand, even when she wasn't doing geometry homework, becauseas she told my former neighbor, Joan Halter, and me, shethought it might save her being pressed too close by somedirty old man.
Subway problems were always evident as soon as you gotdown on the platform in the morningevening breakdowns,stopping in the tunnel in the dark, were not as annoying,since it wasn't a matter of getting to a class or job ontimebut when we walked down the steps to the platform andfound a crowd three deep, we knew the trains were runningslow. The doors would open, no one would get off, and thenwe would push our way on, gently only because we would bebody to body with these folks two stops to Church Avenuebefore switching to an express train.
"Don't let him in," one man said to the woman at thedoor one day as I tried to be the last one on. "How can Istop him?" said the fivefootthree secretary, notunreasonably, but although I was pushing sixfeet tall atthat stage of my commuting career, I still tried to bepolite. It may have been that particular day that the crushwas so bad that an old man collapsed but we did not noticeuntil he moaned a few times, next to one of the white polesthat lined the center aisle. Not only did we help him up butsomeone gave him a seat and somehow we managed to scruncheven closer together to give him a little more "breathing"room. It was not until a stop or two further that wediscovered that there was an even smaller and older man,probably close to eighty, who had fallen even further downnext to that same pole and who was too weak even to moan forhelp. Again the proffered seat; I trust they somehowsurvived to ride the subway again.
There were, of course, beggars in the subway, oneregular with an accordion, one man who carried cup and caneand sang a strange little song, bowing and half genuflecting at times for his nickels and dimes. Father C. Dismas Clark,the original of "The Hoodlum Priest," had given us a retreat talk one time and this tough, St. Louis I think it was, midwestern Jesuit who really talked out of the side of his mouth had told us that even if we thought the beggar was faking to give him a coin lest we pass up the real needy one.
I understand there are a lot more beggars and a lot more crime in the subways these days, even if it was worse a few years ago.