My Old Neighborhood Remembered

by Avery Corman

  At Creston, unlike elementary school, we moved period by period to other teachers and other subjects. Some classes seemed to be holdovers from The Depression years, including something called, showers. We thought it might have been a Board of Education-mandated subject from the time when poor children might have taken showers they didn’t have at home. We didn’t shower during showers; it became an additional gym period.

  We were required to take shop — woodworking or sheet metal — and the origin of this subject was likely an intention to teach boys usable vocational skills. In woodworking my group made the traditional Board of Education lamp in the shape of a pump, the pump handle turning the lamp on and off. The shop teacher did not have a future carpenter in me. I labored through shop. He paused along the way in the school year to match our faces to the names in his book. “Who is Corman?” he asked. When I identified myself, he said, “Corman, if you pass shop, my name is Santa Claus.” I passed with the help of a couple of my classmates who practically made the entire damn lamp for me.

  Typing was a subject we boys dreaded, except for the apples of their enlightened parents’ eyes who came into the class already knowing how to type. The keys of the typewriters in the typing room were blacked out. Looking at that menacing keyboard filled us with a feeling close to despair. How would we ever learn on those horrible machines? The woman who taught typing was a perfect complement to the menacing keyboards. She was stern and unremittingly demanding. Taking that class was what it must have been like being in reform school. And, yes, we all learned to touch-type.

  The home room teacher of 7SP1 was a disagreeable man. Let’s give him a break on the name and call him Mr. S____. He carried on a note-passing relationship with a married woman at the school. He may or may not have been married himself. We knew nothing about him. We were to bring his notes to the other teacher and wait to receive notes back. He distributed the messenger assignments among us. On reading her answers to himself in front of us, he would often smile slyly and send a note in return. My last male teacher was the dignified Mr. Katz. Now I had this Mr. S____ enlisting boys with rampant imaginations as the carriers of his messages to an attractive, bosomy woman.

  He dropped one of us out of the “SPs.” Raymond Nielsen had been my classmate throughout elementary school. A quiet boy and an excellent athlete, he was singled out in 5th grade by Mrs. S____ as part of her ongoing denigration of us. She praised Raymond, declaring him to be “the only he-boy in the class.” This gets circumstantial. Mr. S______ was Jewish. Raymond was Protestant. Raymond’s father was known to be the superintendent of a building, a super. Was there class bias on Mr. S____’s part? Religious bias? He told us Raymond was no longer in the class, the only one dropped, and Raymond took his place in a conventional 7th grade class, losing the chance to skip a grade.

  Academically, the most renowned high school in the Bronx was the Bronx High School of Science. Students were required to take a test for admission to Science and Mr. S____ restricted who could and could not take that test. We decided that he wanted to look good within Board of Education circles with a high percentage of his students getting into the school. He might also have been watching out for us and wanted to shield from disappointment those unlikely to get in or those who would have difficulty at the school if they did get in. This was possibly his motivation, doubtful, but possible. He told me I could not take the test. Was it even within Board of Education regulations for him to prevent me? Since it was prestigious to go there and several of my friends in class were applying and it was one block away from my apartment, I felt badly about it, which was foolish of me. The school stressed science and math where I was weakest and I would have struggled there.

  I didn’t see much of Raymond after he was transferred out of our class. We had not been close friends and he did not live nearby. A couple of years later when I was in high school I came upon Raymond on the street and we chatted. He had spent his time in the regular Creston classes after being dropped from the “SPs,” took the test for the Bronx High School of Science and was accepted. He was a student at Science. So much for Mr. S____’s judgment. Where Raymond Nielsen eventually went after that, what became of him, I am at a loss. I greatly admired him.

  I would like to summon the exact details. I cannot remember. I might have talked when I wasn’t supposed to. I might have been late to school. I might have thrown Mr. S____ a disapproving look when he assigned me or one of my classmates the task of delivering one of his precious notes to his lady friend. Whatever earned his wrath, he announced to the class that we were going on a trip to the Museum of Natural History and everybody in the class was going except me. The Creston building was occupied from grades K through 6 by elementary school boys and girls, and 7 through 9 by the male junior high school students. Mr. S____ told me I was to spend the day of the trip in a seat in the back of the room in a 1st grade class. He arranged it with a 1st grade teacher who announced to her little students when I entered the room that I was there as punishment for bad behavior and I took a seat that day to the giggling of the little 1st graders.

  I asked Richard Kobliner, the person who had told me about the P.S. 33 reunion, if he knew what became of Mr. S____. Richard said he had heard he became an assistant principal or the principal of a school somewhere. Well, good for you, Mr. S____. You shouldn’t have embarrassed a 7th grader with a punishment like that. You never know who the 7th grader will turn out to be. He just may grow up to be a writer and write about you.

  Those of us who had seen real basketball played in Madison Square Garden and fantasized about playing the game as it was supposed to be played could act out our fantasies at Creston in the intramural basketball program. Here was our first chance to play full court basketball with referees and foul shots. Our class fielded a competitive team. We had one of the tallest boys in the grade who went on to play basketball for Clinton High School and a few other above average players. I was able to be the playmaker just as I had seen it done in Madison Square Garden.

  In junior high school something began, playing organized basketball, bringing the ball up court, setting up my team-mates, shooting running one-handers. I played basketball in the intramural program at Creston, then the intramural program in high school, on club teams in community centers, on camp counselor teams summers when I worked as a counselor. I wasn’t outstanding, not like the players I watched from the sidelines at Creston. For the levels I played at, I was good enough.

  I have always felt extraordinarily grateful to my friends from my old neighborhood, those boys I grew up with from the time when we were little kids to when we were teenagers, playing on Creston Avenue and in the the Bronx High School of Science schoolyard. The facts of my family background which seemed so enormous to me didn’t matter to them. They didn’t care who my father was. They accepted me and that was crucial in my life. First, and most importantly, with my neighborhood friends, and then with organized basketball that began in junior high school, I learned I could be one of the players. I could be like other boys.

  * * *

  THE BRONX ZOO

  * * *

  We could have measured our lives by the Bronx Zoo. When we were little, we were taken to the children’s zoo section. We went to the Bronx Zoo by trolley, part of the treat. Trolleys were phased out of the Bronx in the 1940s. Then we were old enough to go with friends rather than with someone from one’s family.

  The Bronx Zoo was never taken for granted or considered a place meant only for tourists. This was our zoo and it was important. On days when the weather was clear and it felt right, my friends and I would say, “This is a zoo day,” and we would go. Over the years we explored every part of the place many times over.

  The African Plains with its cage-free environment, the animals separated from the public by a moat, was a highlight and a source of conversation among the children of the neighborhood. You think the lions could jump over the moat if they wanted to? What would happen if a lion got out? What would you do? Our ima
ginations, stimulated by the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies, led us to what-would-happen-if-they-got-out for a variety of the zoo’s inhabitants.

  The seals, especially at feeding time, were headliners. The duck-billed platypus from Australia was a good novelty and usually attracted lines of visitors — the creature was so odd, a kind of duck and beaver combined.

  Before modern zoo environments began to feature simulated natural habitats, the presentation of the inhabitants could be ramshackle, but also could result in appealing exhibits like the penguins close up at ground level in an outdoor enclosure, Charlie Chaplin-ing around.

  The first time you went to the zoo with a girl was a big day in your life. The zoo was a logical place to go on a date that wasn’t an evening at the movies. It meant you were old enough to be seen walking around with a girl during the day.

  * * *

  THE 1951 CITY COLLEGE BASKETBALL SCANDAL

  * * *

  Our “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” moment was when the news broke in the winter of 1951 that basketball players from New York City colleges had been rigging the scores of games for gamblers. A national story and a New York City story, for the young people in the neighborhood it was also a Bronx story. Among the City College fixers were three ballplayers who had played for Bronx high schools. Irwin Dambrot and Ed Roman lived in the Bronx and had played for nearby William Howard Taft High School, and Ed Warner had been a star at the Bronx high school many of us attended, DeWitt Clinton.

  The news was incomprehensible. As with all local college basketball players, they were major sports figures in New York. These were our heroes who had fallen. College basketball was more important than professional basketball. The local college teams played their home games in Madison Square Garden and young sports fans rooted for college teams the way people root for professional teams today. You were an N.Y.U. fan, a City College fan, an L.I.U. fan, and you took sides when they played each other and rooted for the local team when they played a team from elsewhere.

  Although the 1951 scandal involved fixers at N.Y.U, L.I.U., Manhattan College, Toledo, Bradley, and Kentucky, in the media it became known as “The City College Basketball Scandal” because of the number of City College players involved and the stature of the City College team.

  In the 1949-1950 season, City College won both the NIT and the NCAA championships. The NIT title was more highly regarded than the NCAA then with the games staggered and the finals for both played in Madison Square Garden. With its starting team consisting of former New York City high school ballplayers, City College was the ultimate New York City-style basketball team with considerable ball movement, everybody capable of smoothly handling the ball on offense.

  In the NIT tournament, City defeated San Francisco, and then top-ranked Kentucky by 39 points, then Duquesne and Bradley to win the championship. In the NCAA tournament, City defeated Ohio State, North Carolina State, and for a second time in the post-season, Bradley, seven straight unexpected victories in the two tournaments. They were the pride of the city for an instant as a Cinderella Team. Their accomplishment, the double championship, still stands. Teams can no longer play in both tournaments.

  The point spread was at the core of the scandal. The players apparently were not trying to lose games. They were trying to win, but by fewer points than the team was favored to win by in the betting line, so the gamblers would collect on their smart bets. The players could walk off the court winners of a game, cheered by their fans, and pocket their payoffs. Less frequently, players were given bonuses for running up the score over the point spread, the gamblers betting those games the other way.

  The scandal surfaced when Junius Kellogg of the Manhattan College team reported a bribe offer to his coach. The bribe was brought to the attention of the police and events began to unravel for the fixers and the gamblers. Along with Ed Roman, Irwin Dambrot, and Ed Warner, their City College teammates, Al Roth, Norm Mager, and Floyd Lane were also arrested.

  Eventually, we learned City College had rigged the outcomes of games during the very season they ended up winning the double championship. We followed the story, we talked about it — I was fifteen then — we couldn’t believe they would do such a thing.

  Stanley Cohen, another teenager in the neighborhood, became a writer and as an adult, still absorbed by the scandal, wrote a book about it, The Game They Played, named by Sports Illustrated as one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time.

  Thirty-two players were involved, some who were headed for basketball careers in the NBA, including the gifted Sherman White of L.I.U. The new professional league had betting problems of its own. Games were being taken off the board by bookmakers who would not accept bets because they were suspicious of planned outcomes. The NBA was never going to allow players involved in the scandal to play in the league. For the few thousand dollars they each received, the ballplayers were punished dearly. Over the years they did get past the ignominy and put together respectable lives.

  The ballplayers caught in the scandal grew up in a city where a distinct betting culture existed in its working class neighborhoods. Many neighborhood people were habituated horseplayers. Battered by The Depression, people were looking to win bets for the sheer money of it and for whatever positive feelings they would have from winning. In the Bronx were the candy stores that attracted bookmakers and bettors. In our neighborhood you could see the more desperate versions of the bettors crouched over their racing forms day and night in Bickford’s Cafeteria, located at the Grand Concourse and 188th Street near a cars-to-the-track bettors’ candy store. A regular in the candy store and in Bickford’s was the most famous local bookmaker, Joe Hacken, also known as, Joe Jalop.

  When we reached high school, betting cards proliferated among us, administered by the slicksters in school, the cards containing the point spreads for the week’s upcoming college football games and we bought the cards and made our picks.

  Intrigued by the subject of the fix scandal, when I was older I went through copies of The New York Post and looked at the point spreads of all the games played in the 1949-1950 season by the teams that were named to have rigged points. I compared the point spreads with the final scores of the games. The New York teams that were said to be fixing games, C.C.N.Y., N.Y.U., L.I.U., and Manhattan College, failed to win by more than the point spread in far more games than the District Attorney’s office announced as fixed games. They may not have covered the spread, in gambling parlance, because that was the way those games played out. But they may have fixed more games than the District Attorney was willing to reveal to the public. We will never know. Whether the fixing of basketball games went beyond the seven colleges identified is something else we will never know. I suspect the fixing was more widespread than we were told.

  The ballplayers in the scandal had to have been aware of the extent of gambling in their neighborhoods. They saw the point spreads listed in the newspapers for every game they played. They would have heard about NBA games being taken off the board and the rumors that NBA players were rigging games, the everybody’s-doing-it argument. We can feel sympathy for them if these cultural influences were working on them and if they felt they were unpaid workers in a business operation run by their colleges and by Madison Square Garden, with others profiting from their labor. And we can feel sympathy for them because they paid an extremely high price for their college-age blunder. But Junius Kellogg reported his bribe offer. They did this thing and they didn’t have to do it.

  Shortly after the news of the scandal broke, I was talking about it with friends in a candy store on 184th Street. One of the older girls from the neighborhood was listening to us. She was a student at City College. “For years they’ve been saying everyone at City is a Communist,” she said, despondent, “and now this.”

  * * *

  EMIL VERBAN

  * * *

  I had an Emil Verban autograph, the only one in the neighborhood, I’m sure. A second baseman with the St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Phi
llies, and Chicago Cubs from the mid-1940s to 1950, he is known today perhaps only to baseball fanatics. He was a major player to me and I rooted for him.

  My mother called me at home from her job at J. W. Mays in Brooklyn and said she helped a baseball player named Emil Verban pick out some children’s clothing at the store and he gave her two tickets for the game that night in Ebbets Field against the Dodgers and if I wanted to go I should come out to the store and meet her. We went to the game, Dodgers-Phillies. Coincidentally, one player was signing autographs on the field near the grandstand after the game was over, Emil Verban. I rushed my mother down to where he was standing and he remembered her. They had met only a few hours before. She introduced me, he said hello, shook my hand, and gave me his autograph.

  This was neither the first nor the last time my mother took me to a game. When I was growing up she took me to baseball games, football games, basketball games, hockey games. Going to Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds was always exciting, but they were nearby. Going downtown to Madison Square Garden was particularly exciting. In her earliest years of working, with very little money at her disposal, selective in what she could manage to do, she would go with me to Sunday afternoon hockey games and we would walk up several flights of stairs to sit in the upper reaches of Madison Square Garden. The tickets for Sunday afternoons didn’t cost much, so she could do it — amateur hockey, teams like the Sands Point Tigers, and minor league professional games featuring the New York Rovers, a farm team of the New York Rangers. Sometimes on a special night when there was no school the next day, she spent a little more money and would go up to the balcony with me for a Rangers game.