The Adventures of a Latchkey Kid

by Robert Hodum

  Dennis probably discovered that side of Grandpa, while I just knew him as a quiet, paterfamilias who when in the mood told us some wonderful yarns about the leprechauns, his beloved Little People, and how his Great Grandfather on the maternal Ryan side, Joseph Ryan, dug his way out of paupers prison with a spoon that he pilfered from some inn in County Cork. He was a stowaway who jumped ship and swam ashore to Staten Island in the late 1700s. He wound up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was his son who fought at the first Battle of Bull Run and had his middle finger shot off by “a Confederate S.O.B.” as Grandpa liked to call them. I loved Grandpa John’s stories.

  The moment we hit the street Dennis unrolled the pack of “cigs” from the cuff of his T-shirt and lit up.

  “Not a word,” he said, pointing a finger in my face.

  Off to the soda shop we went. His instructions to me were clear: keep my mouth shut, stand away from the group and never, under any circumstances, say that I knew him.

  I agreed.

  His gang, all dressed the same as he, liked to do the slow, open-palm drag-slap to greet one another. The slower the drag and the harder the slap, the more alpha male coolness one had.

  “How’s it hanging, Denny boy?”

  That was something only the blonde wearing the tight sweater and jeans could call him. And, yes, tight jeans were for hoods, the in-crowd, and chinos, for the rest of us dweebs.

  I sat on the side of the shop’s front porch as they all cursed up a storm and joked around. One guy, who must have been the leader, squeezed his arm around some girl there, and looked over at me.

  “Hey kid, what are you doing here? Waiting for a bus?” he said as he spat over at me. Dennis was quiet.

  The gang erupted in laughter.

  Dennis looked at me with a “keep-your-mouth-shut” glare.

  “Yeah, you, you little turd, what the hell are you doing here? Beat it!”

  I stood up, went over towards the group and looked him in the eye, and said, “I’m here with my cousin Dennis whose babysitting me, so you better not bother me or he’s going to kick your ass!”

  This might have worked on a grammar school playground, but not here.

  The leader grabbed me by the arm and pulled me over to the middle of the group. “You little shit, I’m going to kick your …”

  At that point, Dennis reached over, grabbed this guy’s arm and said,

  “That’s not going to happen! He’s my cousin, and even for a little turd like him, he’s got horns, so leave him alone!”

  My cousin must have commanded respect, because the bully let me go, said something about how I should go play in traffic, spat, turned, and kissed his girlfriend.

  Everybody laughed, Dennis winked at me and I sat back down, kicking the dirt. I mulled over his order, “Not a word!”

  I honored that request for the rest of the day. They all had Cokes, told jokes, petted the girls in the crowd who squealed, and then snuggled tighter to the guys who had gotten handy with them. Boss cars, who was or wasn’t righteous, those fag teachers they had, and punks who they punched in the cafeteria or beat up after school, and tales of who they copped feels from or went all the way with. That day I heard it all.

  They all smoked, some pulled cigs from behind their ears, and couples passed smokes between themselves. They grubbed lights when it was time for a fresh smoke. After grinding their cig butts under their Beatle boot heels on the planks of the wood porch, the guys spat out onto the dirt of the parking spaces in front of the private home made soda shop.

  Dennis left this crew first, saying he had to get me home. Gang handshakes, “See ya man” all around, hugs from some of the girls, some ranks from the guy I pissed off earlier, my cousin gave my foot a gentle kick to signal our moving on. Some girl said to me, “Hey come back when you’re older.” I turned red, and followed Dennis out to the road.

  Out of earshot of his posse, he pointed out, “You did pretty good today. At least you didn’t get beat up.”

  He brushed the back of my head as we walked along, saying,

  “It was OK with you there today. You were cool. Sounds like Marlene likes you … But don’t take that too seriously, she likes everybody.”

  He laughed.

  Right before we got to the door, he pulled me back, and looked hard at me.

  “Not a word, right? Not a word.”

  He was asking me to be righteous.

  “Nope, not a word,” I said.

  I’d make something up about going for a walk to a playground. The adults didn’t ask much except whether I had fun. Of course I did, I’d tell them. After all I was with my cousin Dennis.

  After that day, I didn’t see Dennis much. I overheard that he was working on weekends. Sometimes at Easter or in the summer, we’d all get together. My mom made a point of taking me, and my sister to his high school graduation. Aunt Jessie, wearing a new dress, looking so proud, my grandparents, Mom, Fran and I sat near the stage, cheered when Dennis’ name was called. He sauntered up to the principal, took the diploma, turned and faced the audience, thrusting his arms over his head. His friends’ cheers and whistles came from the back of the crowd.

  My mom looked down, and directed my way a very audible, “Whew! Finally got him through!”

  I looked over. She was crying.

  Grandpa John’s

  Best Tall Tale

  The Irish side, harder hit by the Depression with few books at home, was the impromptu singers, storytellers, and spinners of the fantastical and implausible. During meal taking, they walked the ever-shifting line between truth and hyperbole, and fact and fantasy in their depictions of the weeks’ events at their home’s table.

  Grandpa John Cross, son of Edward Cross and Bridget Ryan, was my link to that world. This hardened sentinel sat at our table for Sunday dinners, his hot cigar ashes burning holes in his sweaters. A firm believer in cleaning his plate before conversation, the stories would flow only after his fork and knife came to rest. He’d speak of his childhood adventures on Delancey Street, going to work with a revolver tucked in his shirt, his grandfather’s loss of his middle finger at Bull Run and the paterfamilias of our family who dug his way out of pauper’s prison with a spoon back in County Cork and came to America in 1791. Grandpa John was the keeper of our family’s history and lore, the king of storytellers, and our family’s sage.

  This overseer of dairy farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, hard-handed disciplinarian of the Cross brood, and guardian of his grandfather’s Irish heritage and shillelagh, when he took a break from his newspaper and removed the smoldering cigar from his mouth, drew tales in the air.

  And this story was his most memorable tale.

  Joseph who jumped ship into the Hudson River in 1791 set the example for us to follow; never be afraid to get wet, strike out on your own when needed and always keep one coin tucked deep in your pocket. Of course, the fact that he dug his way out of a pauper’s prison in County Cork with a spoon he had stolen was only part of the Cross family legend. The litany of misfortunes that could befall you if you left home without a coin in your pocket was a Cross standard. And then there were the tales of leprechauns.

  The greatest of tales involved this family patriarch that mistakenly wore his finest new shoes while shepherding a flock of sheep after Mass one foggy dew County Cork morning. As the tale goes, he heard a rustling behind some bushes at the foot of a hillock, and snuck down to discover that there, crouched over a broken boot was a little person, stitching up the sole of his worn out boot. Well, the young boy Joseph pounced on him and held him tightly, making him swear that he’d reveal his lair and surrender his pot of gold. Well, the little man agreed and suddenly the hollow beneath them opened up into a dirt hole that led down into a cave. Joseph grabbed the little man’s hand and down they went to the bottom where the pot of gold stood glistening and awaiting it
s new master.

  Of course, my grandpa enlivened the tale with dialogue.

  “And what would you have me do, young Joseph”, said the little man.

  “I’d be taking your gold, ya know,” he said.

  “Well, I give you freely my gold, Joseph, as much as you can carry out of my lair.”

  Now Joseph reached down and began to fill his pockets with gold coins, stuffing them down as deeply as he could, pushing down hard on the inside pockets that were worn and old. When Joseph was done, he thanked the leprechaun and reminded him that there would be no tricks that day, and he began climbing up to the light of day.

  Suddenly the ground started rumbling and the rocks shifted. Joseph hurried up to the sunlight as the hole began to close around him. The rocks and dirt began to tighten about him as he pushed through the hole, fraying his pants and ripping his pockets. As Joseph pushed his head into the morning air, the hole was almost solid ground, and with the greatest of efforts, Joseph pulled himself out, losing his left shoe to the hole that became the solid landscape of early morning. Joseph lay on his back, winded. And in the sun of that morning he knew that the one of County Cork’s finest leprechauns had outwitted him. He thrust his hand down in his pocket, and found but one gold coin. His left foot laid bare, his big toe poking out of his torn sock, his left shoe lost to the darkness of the leprechaun’s lair. He stood up, brushed himself off, gathered the sheep, and returned home. When he shared his story and showed his bare foot to his parents, Joseph promptly got a thrashing for having lost that shoe. But he said nothing of the gold coin to his parents.

  As grandpa would continue, it was this Joseph who stowed away to New York, jumped ship, and swam the waters of the Hudson, and with a single coin, started a new life in America. He sired Edward who lost his middle finger of his right hand to a Confederate mini ball at the battle of Bull Run. It was Edward’s son, John, that oversaw dairy farms in Greenpoint with a pistol tucked into his trousers and married Louise Haupert, the daughter of a German dairy farmer. John Francis Cross, the cigar smoking, teller of tall tales and Louise Haupert Cross, the stoic, wrestling fanatic, sat at our dinner table every Sunday.

  It was Joseph’s shillelagh that I’d see in the corner of Grandpa’s living room. I came to appreciate how deep my family’s roots were through those stories. They gave me a sense of belonging to something so much bigger than my life in East Northport. This faceless relative tied us all together, when almost two centuries ago, he left home to find another.

  Happy Hooligan

  My mom’s side of the family was less enigmatic than my dad’s. He rarely spoke of his childhood and family, but there were those moments when our coaxing paid off, and we’d be treated to memorable and unexpected stories of his exploits as a child and his family’s life in Brooklyn. Aunt Mae was often present during those moments when her baby brother opened up and dared to remember. As far as I knew, she was the sole survivor of the original Hodums. I had never met any of Dad’s siblings, never knew his mom, Elizabeth Kammerer, the pianist who spoke her native German and French with her children, or his dad, Herman Hodum, the Bavarian butcher who lived with his family on 256 Colvert Street in Brooklyn. The Kammerer family left Germany in 1873 after the Franco-Prussian War. The Hodums arrived at Ellis Island in 1880.

  My dad, born in 1908, attended an all-German primary school. German was the lingua franca in the Hodum household, at least until the outbreak of World War I. Many who lived in the German section of Brooklyn stopped speaking their native language completely. The moment war was declared against the Huns, all of the street names, as well as any references to German patriots, restaurants or businesses in the Fatherland’s language were changed to English with exclusively American themes. As Aunt Mae said, Grandma Elizabeth continued to speak French, which her mother, born in the Alsace Lorraine region, had spoken to her. Aunt Jules, Uncles Arthur and George, Great Aunt Tata who played the zither when she visited were known to me through stories and the few photos that my dad and Aunt Mae had.

  The Dutch German side gifted books to family for Christmas and birthdays. Reading out loud to one another was a Sunday afternoon pastime in their Colvert Street home in Brooklyn. My father and Mae ended those evenings with violin and piano duets.

  When Aunt Mae announced during one of her visits that the kids in their old neighborhood in Brooklyn called her little brother Happy Hooligan, she must have been trying to defuse a situation that my bad behavior had created either at school or during her visit. I can’t recall the transgression, but Aunt Mae always ran interference between my confession of some act of minor terrorism and the impending whopping that lurked around the corner.

  Of course, the confessions never came willingly, but rather were preceded by either a phone call or a note from my teacher. In the more severe cases, the letterhead of the Principal of Fifth Avenue Elementary School, Mr. Paul Davis, would be waved at me. I actually liked my principal, a calm, stout, meticulously groomed man who I got to know better than I wanted to over the course of the third, fourth and fifth grades.

  Anyway, Dad just smiled when that was revealed at the dinner table that night. He pulled back from his serious Dutch-German poker face that let me know that I should have behaved better in school. But generally, Dad was a mild-mannered Dutchman. Yes, the family was proud of their German heritage, but “Hodum” wasn’t a German surname. Seems that, the Hodums originated somewhere in Holland in the distant past. Our family’s origin didn’t matter much that night. And Aunt Mae’s Happy Hooligan story was the perfect diversion from my impending scolding.

  Well, my dad, Happy Hooligan, was quite a celebrity among the kids and families on the block. Since his father, Herman, owned the local butcher shop, the Hodums were known by German Americans in the surrounding neighborhoods. My dad, the cheery delivery boy and frequent visitor to many homes that had scheduled daily meat deliveries, was known as Happy Hooligan, the kid who ran, not walked, his deliveries to his father’s customers’ homes. So this smiling local kid who sprinted the streets of the community got the name of a goofy, character from the comic section of the Sunday newspaper.

  By Aunt Mae’s accounts, Dad reveled in this moniker and local fame. Since he got a salary of twenty-five cents a week, he was the only kid to have an expense account in the local candy store. Dad was generous with his fortune and treated his buddies to candy once a week.

  Prompted by his older sister, my dad shared his exploits as the youngest patron of the candy store who would settle his account at the end of the week. Turns out that a rolled-up newspaper cone of assorted candy cost five cents. He’d get one cone-full and he and his sweet-toothed cronies would spend the afternoon eating out of this enormous dunce cap-like candy bag. When dad told the story I could actually smell the candy and hear the newspaper being rolled up into a cone.

  After settling his candy account on Friday, he’d put a dime away for the movies and save the rest. Going to the movies cost a nickel back then. An organist provided the sound track to those black and white silent films, apparently playing the same musical runs and flourishes for all the films. Kids back then were as raucous as we were at the movies. There was no concession stand, at least not where Dad went to the movies. Each moviegoer could access the individual treat dispenser on the back of the seat in front. Insert a penny and turn the turnstile handle and you’d get a hand-full of treats all movie-long or at least as long as your pennies held out. Dad, by all accounts, always had a pocketful of change.

  Dad won medals for his record-setting runs on the track team at Franklin K. Lane High School. He still had the medals from his high school alma mater to prove it. When he entered the job market, he got a job as a “runner” for Sunoco Mobil Oil. The butcher’s delivery boy became an office dispatcher, running the streets of Manhattan. His swift feet and computation skills later served him well when he was promoted from runner to accountant, and finally to the General Offic
e Manager in Manhattan for his beloved Mobil Oil. As a kid, I would see Dad sitting at his desk with legal-sized pads of yellow sheets of paper doing calculations in pencil. I remember looking over his shoulders as he did his “computations” as he called them. My brother Harry inherited that mathematical ability.

  Dad liked to spend his money on good cigars and new cars. He bought the first Model-T Ford in the Hodum family, when he advanced from runner to accountant for Mobil. He owned a Dodge, a Studebaker, and several Chevys. Our current Chevy was the two-door, light blue ’62 Impala. He liked to buy a new car every three years. Some years, he’d just show up driving a new car, our old tried and true model gone forever. But sometimes, Mom would remind him that it might be time to visit the local dealership. He never had to be reminded twice.

  By his own account, Dad started smoking when he was twelve. He’d sneak out to the outhouse in his backyard on Colvert Street and light up. He’d blow the smoke through the crescent moon cut out of the latrine’s door. His dad smoked, so Happy Hooligan would raid his dad’s cigar box that was kept on his father’s smoking stand. My dad kept this antique in the living room next to his reclining chair in our house.

  One Saturday, I showed some interest in smoking one of his cigars. He took me out back and had me take a puff from his. I choked and threw up on the spot. I never requested that again. He did the same with me when I asked for a taste of beer. I stuck with 7-Up.

  But, inquiries about me being a smoker were commonplace. My teachers smelled cigar smoke on my clothes, and our dentist, Dr. Fenning, with buzzing drill in hand, frequently had his face in mine. He cautioned me more than once against smoking stogies before coming in for my frequent appointments to fill cavities. I may not have been blessed with the family’s mathematics acumen, nor acquired a taste for stogies, but I certainly did inherit the Hodum sweet tooth.