My Old Neighborhood Remembered

by Avery Corman

  By the time of high school we could get student discounts to hockey games and I would also go with friends to baseball games. I no longer needed my mother to take me. As she progressed through her business life, she evidenced no interest whatsoever in sports. She never would have gone to a sports event with a friend or watched a game on television. She did ask me to go with her to see plays. She loved theater. The woman she became, successful, well-dressed, sophisticated, to look at her you wouldn’t have imagined she once sat high up in the Madison Square Garden balcony for hockey games. Years later, I recalled for her how she took me to games, this in light of her turning out to be completely disinterested in sports. She said, “I thought a boy growing up without a father should go to sports events.”

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  HIGH SCHOOL

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  The all-around smartest students in the Bronx generally went to the Bronx High School of Science. Administrators at Science and Science graduates have pointed to the school’s highly impressive list of distinguished alumni and properly so. But every Bronx high school produced good citizens and people of achievement and some who made a significant impact in the world at large, the likes of Rosalyn S. Yalow, a graduate of Walton High School in the Bronx. After receiving a doctorate in nuclear physics, she worked as a medical researcher at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital in the 1940s and went on to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

  New York City’s public high schools predominantly operated on the principle of large schools moving large numbers of students through a large variety of subject offerings. I went to DeWitt Clinton. If I went anywhere else — apart from the Bronx High School of Science, which surely would have been a problem for me — I am positive I would have done as well in the classes in which I did well and I would not have done any better in the classes I stumbled through.

  Clinton was located on Mosholu Parkway near the northern end of the Grand Concourse. The all-boys school was not a zoned-by-neighborhood high school. About ten percent of the students were African-American, largely from Manhattan, the rest of the school population mainly came from throughout the Bronx — Jewish, Protestant, and Irish-American and Italian-American Catholics who had chosen not to attend Catholic high schools.

  In looking over my high school graduation yearbook from the class of 1952, I took note of how many teachers were male. These were most likely the men who entered teaching at the time of The Depression and because they were culturally restricted by their backgrounds they were never candidates for jobs in corporate America. Postwar they were well along in their careers and not going anywhere else, as were their female teaching colleagues, restricted by the-smart-girls-become-teachers bias of the time. Several of my high school teachers were markedly superior to the professors I was to have in college.

  From the outset at Clinton I started playing basketball in the intramural program and that helped bring the large school down to size. In my home room was my friend, Ben Miller. Ben played guitar and was building up a playlist of folk songs with which to be charming with girls. I considered him highly advanced. We found out if we could get into the school chorus we could be in the home room for the chorus, a home room with few people in it and a relaxed atmosphere. I reasoned I must have been able to sing, since I had been picked out by that music teacher in Hebrew School.

  The teacher for chorus, Mrs. Brotman, was quite pleasant in her demeanor and played some notes on the piano and asked me to match the notes with my voice. I could. I was in the chorus. And so was Ben. The home room was informal and there I stayed for the remainder of high school.

  The chorus was divided for vocal arrangements into four parts. I was the baritone line above bass and we had first and second tenors. A third of the members of the chorus were African-American. Most of them sang in their church choirs. Because of these students we had a decent chorus.

  We sang at assemblies, graduations, and we sang carols in the hallways at Christmas time. I was fairly good at holding my part, but under pressure of performance you could sometimes feel the entire structure collapsing, the bass line and baritone line drifting into the tenor line that was carrying the melody. We would start out singing something like the Fred Waring arrangement of Dancing in the Dark, four-part harmony, and by the time we reached the end we were practically singing in unison. Not a bad sound, but not four-part harmony. Sometimes we got it right.

  Apart from being in a group with more African-Americans than I ever had contact with before — and more than I would have contact with in college — listening to some of these church choir-disciplined singers and singing along was an uplifting experience. One young man, Gordon Rivers, had a high, soaring tenor voice and was so passionate when he sang, he would completely lose himself in song, never pausing, just singing. Mrs. Brotman would have to call out, “Breathe, Rivers! Breathe!”

  The only varsity letter I received in high school was a letter for music, not anything an athletically-minded boy was going to wear on a sweater, still I was happy to have it. As it turned out, being in the chorus was not just gaming the system on home room. Singing with those real singers was wonderful.

  When I was finishing my first year of high school, a student protest atypical of those days occurred. All New York City teachers were paid the same salary. Arguing that their specific skills and, in some cases, additional education should be factored into their pay, high school teachers were seeking an increase. Mayor William O’Dwyer, overseeing the New York City budget, refused the high school teachers at a time New York State had just given the teachers’ supervisors at the Board of Education a 30% raise in pay.

  In protest through the union, the teachers voted to cease participating in extracurricular activities, shutting down high school clubs and sports teams. When I reached school one morning, a crowd was gathered outside, people talking excitedly. Instigated by the teachers, a students’ march was planned down the Grand Concourse and we were to meet up with students from Theordore Roosevelt High School and then go on to City Hall. I was in. A march? Playing hooky en masse? Sure, bring back our teams!

  At City Hall we became part of a crowd of thousands of shouting students. The New York Times reported 10,000 students demonstrated citywide and 3,000 converged on City Hall. The demonstration consisted of students milling about and yelling at the City Hall building and at the police. This was a protest with a limited attention span. I left with the crowd jamming the subway trains leaving the vicinity.

  The next day we were back in school amid a troubling rumor. The principal was going to keep a list of everyone who was out of school for the protest and we would be penalized when and if we ever tried to apply for college.

  A police department official said the students’ demonstration was the work of “subversives.” No penalty was exacted against us and no immediate gains were made by the teachers.

  The teachers’ boycott of extracurricular activities carried through the school year that followed. Under a new mayor, Vincent R. Impellitteri, the teachers were granted an increase, bringing their annual maximum pay to $6,500. We engaged in our one uncommon outburst and settled back into the familiar. Other student demonstrations did not occur. We were in the 1950s and in the Cold War, with public officials looking for Communists in everybody’s soup.

  While we were in elementary school they had us ducking under our desks on command in classroom drills in case the Russians dropped an A-Bomb on us. Now we were supposed to beware of stealth Commies. Our teachers were required to comply with the Feinberg Act which prohibited New York school teachers from being members of the Communist Party. Even The New York Times was not above using the rhetoric of the anti-Communist New York tabloids. A New York Times headline was:

  FEINBERG ACT BARRING RED TEACHERS UPHELD BY STATE COURT OF APPEALS

  “Red Teachers” from The New York Times? The witch hunt mood of the day played out in our classrooms at Clinton in that nothing was ever said about the mood of the day. Our teachers were probably fearful o
f bringing attention to themselves by discussing the nation’s preoccupation with Communism and in place of a teaching opportunity we had silence.

  My 6th grade teacher had tried to lead a classroom discussion as to whether teachers should be fired if they were members of the Communist Party. I offered that I didn’t think anybody should be fired for belonging to anything. After the class a couple of my classmates teased me and the way they did, 6th grade-level teasing, was to call me a Communist.

  I became fascinated with the hearings that pitted Senator Joseph McCarthy against Owen Lattimore, an expert on Asia who taught at Johns Hopkins University. I rushed home from school to watch it on television. Lattimore was accused of being a Communist agent by McCarthy. The confrontation was outstanding theater, the feisty Lattimore with brisk, staccato phrasing rebutting the sneering McCarthy: “I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party.” “I hope the Senator will, in fact, lay his machine gun down. He is too reckless, careless, and irresponsible to have a license to use it.”

  For a high school student, the impact of watching McCarthy in action on television against Lattimore was powerful. Who could be concerned about Communists and Communism after watching Joe McCarthy?

  My family was typical of the families I knew in the neighborhood, the only political thing anyone did was vote — for Democrats. We heard of enclaves of Socialists in the east Bronx. The writer, Vivian Gornick, who lived in the east Bronx, has referred in print to her “slightly irreverent left-wing household.” Not our household. My mother had cousins with a chicken farm in Tom’s River, New Jersey, whom she said were Communists, a notion that seemed to me as far away as a chicken farm in Tom’s River, New Jersey.

  The patterns that showed up earlier in junior high school became definitive for me in high school, high grades in English and history, low grades in math and science. Combine the numbers and my high school average was 83 at the end.

  I was in a history class with some of the better history students. The bell would ring to end the period and they would get up to attend the next class, trigonometry for most of them. I did not join them. I was taking intermediate algebra . . . for . . . the . . . very . . . slow . . . Spread out over two terms instead of one, it was known in school as “Idiot’s Algebra.”

  For my chemistry Regents exam I was sitting in the stairwell outside the classroom still cramming with my Barron’s prep book seconds before the exam was to begin.

  The principal of the school, Walter Degnan, a strict disciplinarian, enjoyed a grudging admiration among the students — for his foot speed. If he happened to spot anyone leaving the building to cut classes, Mr. Degnan, in his street shoes, would chase after him and usually run him down, a smart tactic in an all-boys school, establishing he was not a man to cross.

  A cultural amenity at Clinton were the plays staged by Actors Equity in the school auditorium. Not community theater performed by amateurs, the actors were professionals, members of Actors Equity. The admission price was little more than the cost of a movie ticket and attracted adult Bronx residents and, inasmuch as the performances were staged in our school, Clinton students. I volunteered to be an usher which enabled me to see the plays without paying, productions like Arsenic and Old Lace, Blithe Spirit, Pygmalion.

  The high school years for people of my age coincided with the Korean War, a gray war at a gray time, a war without bunting. Unlike World War II when our neighborhoods breathed with the events overseas, the public was not galvanized except for those unfortunate to serve and for their families.

  From the summer of 1950 to the summer of 1953, the United States tallied more than 35,000 dead, a serious number for what was sometimes called in the media a “police action” and a “conflict,” rather than a war. As an elementary school child I had followed the war maps in The Bronx Home News during World War II. As a high school student I was now buying The New York Times at the candy store downstairs and reading the war coverage on my bus ride to Clinton in the mornings. The Bronx Home News was no longer published. Its optimistic slant on war news gone. We received instead in Life magazine, David Douglas Duncan’s photographs of the faces of American servicemen, portraying how much of a slog was this war.

  In 1951, General Douglas MacArthur reinterpreted the chain of command in his own behalf. President Harry S. Truman reasserted civilian control of the military, dismissing McArthur in the middle of the war. MacArthur took a victory lap for his career in a speech before Congress, his “Old soldiers never die” speech. My family voted for Truman as they had for Roosevelt and my allegiance was not with MacArthur. The word, “stalemate,” was being used to describe the war, which inched along through the rest of our high school years.

  We were proud of our school the way most high school students are proud of their high schools. Our pride did not manifest itself in attending games by our school teams. Most of the people I knew in school did not attend football games. As for the basketball team, when they played a home game sometimes I stayed in school and watched. Less frequently I would attend an away game. With a choice between watching a game played by other people and playing ball ourselves after school, many of us preferred to play ball. My neighborhood friends were mainly distributed between Clinton, Science and several Catholic high schools. They did not customarily attend their school games either. We were still playing schoolyard basketball in the Science and Creston schoolyards as we were growing older, trying to hold on to our relationships with each other.

  In the summer before my senior year at Clinton, I was a junior counselor at a sleepaway camp. I returned there as a regular counselor the following summer and worked as a counselor in other camps the next two summers when I was in college. I was fifteen that first summer and went from sitting on the sidelines when others danced at parties, which had been my specialty, to attempted dancing with the girl counselors.

  Previous to the summer I had been invited to a party by people I played basketball with on a community center team and I didn’t know how to dance well enough to dance. I feigned a foot injury and attended the party limping.

  At camp I was so nervous about dancing, I invented my own style of the slow fox trot — very fast. One of my counselor friends called me, “Speedy.”

  Back in the city I went on a few dates with girls I met through the counselors at camp. Socially, I was about as smooth an operator as I was in math.

  A school tradition was for seniors to wear a hat designating them as seniors. Inexplicably, chosen for the senior class hat was a French foreign legion model with a flap hanging from the back. We must have looked absurd to the world at large wearing these hats to school, but we bought them because they announced to everyone at Clinton that we were seniors.

  We were coming to the end of high school. Several of my classes had been outstanding and the same could be said by anyone who attended public high schools in the city then with that unusual generation of teachers. I received from a teacher whose name was Dr. Bernhard, a 96 in English, the highest grade I had ever been given. I was very pleased, but that was all. I was unable to see that it might have had some significance.

  Clinton had its prized students in the school population, its honor students, its Arista. The main advisor to these boys was “Doc” Guernsey, who had been a pal to the elite students for decades and was beloved by them. My final grade in English did not significantly change my overall academic record. I averaged out to be an average student, so I did not know “Doc” Guernsey, nor did he know me. His colleagues who were friendly with the prized students did not know me either and I did not know them. I passed through high school completely anonymous academically.

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  THE PARADISE PIZZERIA

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  The Paradise Pizzeria was our Stork Club. When we started dating this was the place you took a girl you wanted to be seen with because other guys and other girls might be there to see her with you.

  Located at 184th Street and Morris Avenue, it was the place people went
to after a movie or for a stand-alone meal on an evening out. A legitimate neighborhood restaurant, not a slice joint, The Paradise had size, quite a few tables, and a jukebox. Now and again a neighborhood weisenheimer would drop money in the jukebox on his way out of the place, running away laughing with his friends, leaving behind something like five repeats of an irritating recording like Eddie Fisher’s rendition of Oh! My Pa-Pa.

  Given the number of places there were to buy pizza in the Bronx — which expanded exponentially in the 1950s — and given that the Bronx had its own “Little Italy in the Bronx” area with the Arthur Avenue section of the east Bronx, I would not go near saying The Paradise served the best pizza in the Bronx. I will say it was delicious.

  A thought about the Arthur Avenue area. For my sister, cousins, and their boyfriends, Arthur Avenue was an eating destination — sometimes they brought me along — the Arthur Avenue area featuring the first steak house many Bronx residents ever went to, Dominick’s, eventually superseded by another Dominick’s. The original Dominick’s was pridefully regarded by Bronxites as good as any steak restaurant downtown. I wouldn’t have been able to weigh in on that, never having eaten in a steakhouse downtown.

  To the rear of the Concourse Center of Israel synagogue was a small chapel on Creston Avenue, wood-shingled with a few outside stairs, the small house used for daily prayer service. Those stairs became a neighborhood hangout for the boys and girls from the immediate vicinity. We took turns sitting on the steps, at times only the boys while the girls leaned against cars or gathered nearby, at times, the reverse. And at times we mixed, with the spillover extending to the sidewalk. Testing out our emerging mental capacities, we would play charades together and sometimes order pizza from the Paradise.