by Avery Corman
Freddy lived in my building and home for a visit, he came to me, beleaguered. He was standing in the doorway of my apartment holding hockey-style ice skates he had just purchased. He needed me to go ice skating with him. He had to learn in a hurry. He had about an hour to spare for it and then he was traveling to see her in Canada. We had known each other for years, I would have done anything for Freddy, but I needed to point out to him that he was asking the wrong guy. I didn’t know how to ice skate either. He didn’t care. He had to learn this and in a hurry. I suggested he was never going to learn well enough to pull it off. He insisted we try, that I go with him and somehow it would work out.
We had a neighborhood ice skating rink. We didn’t grow up with it or we might have known how to ice skate. The arrival of television claimed one Bronx movie house after another, and in an attempt to salvage the space, the Oxford Theater, a few blocks away, had been converted to an ice rink. I went there with Freddy and rented skates. He wore his newly purchased pair. This was a low-rent rink, the walls were movie theater walls. Only a couple of people were on the ice, no skating instructor was available, not even a rink attendant, and locking arms, we slid onto the ice, our feet flew out from under us and we landed resoundingly on our derrières. For about an hour we skidded all over the rink, constantly falling, crashing into the side walls. Our best move was to grab onto each other for support and fall to the ice together.
We might have been making a little progress, I mean, a little, but the progress was not on the level of Freddy being able to get out on the ice and skate with boys from a Canadian town with a French name he couldn’t pronounce properly. We were falling less frequently, but still falling, like snow.
Bruised, aching, we left. Freddy said he would think of something, but skating wasn’t it.
I should note that somewhere in Freddy’s courting of this girl he suggested to her that he might convert to Catholicism. He told me he went to church with her and the priest was very impressed with how pious he looked. Freddy said the priest was mistaken about his pious look. Freddy, another Jewish boy who never went to services, admitted to me he was merely bored.
A couple of weeks later, Freddy came to my door and presented me with his ice skates. They were mine. He was never going to put them on again. He made up a story in Canada that he wasn’t feeling well and got out of going ice skating with the brothers. He saw the girl for a while. The relationship didn’t last. Eventually, he married someone else.
I went back to the rink and figured enough out so that I could get around and stop myself by grabbing on to the side board. I used the skates when I moved to Manhattan because taking a girl to Wollman Rink in Central Park was a pretty nifty cheap date. Some of the girls didn’t know how to skate and I encouraged them to try, saying I would show them. Nothing to it. I had Freddy’s skates a long time and then the leather gave out. I wore them skating with my children.
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ABSENCE OF A MANILA ENVELOPE
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He was the only man in the neighborhood I ever saw carrying a manila envelope. And nobody carried a briefcase. I later learned the man, my friend’s father, worked in photoengraving and took proofs home at night to check them. The absence of a manila envelope or a briefcase in the possession of the men going to and from work each day helped define my old neighborhood as working class.
My friend’s father held an office job. Most of the men did not. The majority of the women stayed at home, my mother in the minority. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen were known to live in the Bronx — most likely in the art deco elevator buildings on the Grand Concourse, in the Pelham Parkway area, in the prestigious Lewis Morris Apartments on the Grand Concourse near 174th Street, or in the more affluent River-dale section of the Bronx.
Geographically, Riverdale was located in the Bronx, but we never considered Riverdale in the northwest part of the borough, with its new apartment buildings and many private homes, as really the Bronx and Riverdale residents welcomed that distinction. People didn’t say they came from the Bronx if they came from Riverdale.
A few elevator buildings and private homes were located in our neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhoods. Largely it was building after building, block after block of similar undistinguished-looking walk-up apartment houses inhabited by working class residents.
At 1940s and 1950s prices and apartment rents, a Bronx man could earn no more than $100 a week in the pay scale of those years and raise a family. And with the free tuition City University system in place then, his children could go to college. Within the earnings limitations of the trades the men worked in or the stores they owned, many of them must have thought they were doing well for living in the Bronx. The Bronx was still a step up from the lower east side and the tenement sections of Manhattan where many of their parents and perhaps they themselves had lived.
If the urban blight in the Bronx which began in the 1960s had never occurred, the demographics of the Bronx still would have changed from the years when I grew up there. Take this one person as an example. Martin Garbus attended Bronx neighborhood public schools and then the Bronx High School of Science. He was among the first male students to graduate from tuition-free Hunter College in the Bronx and then went to N.Y.U. Law School. Martin Garbus became a prominent attorney and author. His father owned a candy store in the Bronx. The educated children of Bronx working class parents, children who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, people like Martin Garbus, were not going to remain in the Bronx. They were going to leave for a different way of life from their parents, so they could one day carry the manila envelopes and the briefcases their parents did not.
* * *
THE TAN JACKET
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Going with my mother to buy my clothes was extremely awkward. I would look around to see if anybody was watching. It was important to reach the point when I could go on my own to buy things for myself and that was about the time I was high school age.
When I was in college and needed a sports jacket, I went by myself to the Simon Ackerman store near Fordham Road and picked out a sports jacket I thought was really nice looking and fit well, a tan jacket with a lighter tan thread through it, a near-plaid effect. I was very pleased with my jacket until I wore it in the presence of someone who went to the University of Pennsylvania, a friend of a college classmate of mine. My classmate’s friend made a remark about the jacket, that it was okay, but nothing he would ever wear. He preferred darker colors for his clothing, which he bought at Brooks Brothers.
I needed to wear the jacket, but from then on I felt ill at ease about it, that a guy from Penn wouldn’t wear it, that my choice of this jacket made a statement about me, about social class.
I found a picture of myself recently and I was wearing the jacket I had come to feel so ill at ease about. It was a very nice jacket and I looked terrific in it.
* * *
COLLEGE
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In our neighborhood most of us who were college-bound were headed for colleges in New York City. City College, Hunter College, N.Y.U., Fordham, Columbia were the main New York City colleges attended by people I knew.
One boy from the neighborhood said his parents, postal workers, created a savings fund when he was born and he was able to go to an out-of-town college. Sounded brilliant to me. He chose Ohio State. Bobby Santini, the basketball player, went to Iona College in New Rochelle, close to New York City. His older brother, Billy, went to Notre Dame. That was the extent of the people I knew of who lived nearby going to colleges that were not in the city. So few of us went to out-of-town colleges simply because our families couldn’t afford it.
People like my friend, Ben Miller, who were good in math, were planning on going to schools of engineering, in his case, City College. In the Cold War 1950s, it was nearly patriotic to study engineering. America needed engineers to compete with the Russians, it was said, and the jobs were there. The New York Times ran pages of want ads for engineers.
Leslie Zucke
r, one of my classmates at Creston who went to the Bronx High School of Science, knew that he was going to be a dentist. I didn’t know anything. I had skipped that term in junior high and merely by completing a certain number of classes, skipped another term at Clinton, so I was a high school senior making my college decision as I turned sixteen, as did others in my situation. But in my case, my ignorance about myself cannot be understated. This was my reasoning: I wasn’t good at math, so I couldn’t study engineering. I wasn’t good at science, so I couldn’t study medicine. I didn’t like memorizing, so I couldn’t go to law school. Business remained. I would go into business. My mother worked in business, my cousin was in business. He had moved from motion picture publicity to selling movies to television stations. Business, an amorphous thought, business, was the place for me, I concluded. I ignored that my scores had been high in English and history and never considered being a liberal arts major somewhere. I thought my smart choice was to apply to a business college. In a family discussion with my mother and sister, I offered my intelligent analysis of myself, why I should go to a school for business.
I assumed my mother could have afforded to send me to an out-of-town college, but when I expressed my preference to go out of town, my sister, who was then married, uncharacteristically did not support me. She said, “How can you go to college out of town and leave Mother alone?” I wasn’t going to endorse the idea of being company for my mother forever. At age sixteen, I complied and looked into the main undergraduate business schools in New York City. They were City College downtown on 23rd Street and N.Y.U. on Washington Square. Whether it was merited or not, the business college at N.Y.U. seemed to be slightly more prestigious than City College, if for no other reason than you paid to attend. My mother offered that she could afford it and the consensus was my first choice should be N.Y.U. and I was accepted there.
In the 1950s, the N.Y.U. School of Commerce, Accounts, and Finance was essentially a trade school which granted a diploma to be used for finding work. Students were required to take half their courses in liberal arts and half in business subjects. Both sides of the curriculum were lackluster. The liberal arts courses were an academic notch below the English and history courses of my senior year of high school. The business courses included invented subjects, such as a course in which you watched movies, industrial films created to promote industries, like the latest developments in the canning industry.
Traveling to school by subway each day was like going to a job. My classes were completed in the early afternoon and I worked part-time after classes in the stacks of the 42nd Street Library.
A requirement for graduation was a semester each of bookkeeping and accounting during freshman year. Another version of math to me, I managed to pass with my nose barely over the finish line.
The social character of the school was partly influenced by the presence of the students enrolled in the School of Retailing within the college. These students, primarily female, were looking forward to jobs as retail store buyers and executives. The female students came to school dressed for the future, usually wearing high heels and clothing similar to the kind my mother wore to work — a school where the girls dressed like your mother.
None of them were ever going to go out with me. I was too young for them and the way I dressed compared to the way they dressed, I was probably too gauche. I wore a sweater and jeans. In cooler weather, a raincoat. In my first years of college, I was still dating high school girls, hoping, as they turned up, that they were at least high school seniors.
We boys in the neighborhood, in dreamland, bought condoms from our friendly pharmacist. We kept a condom in our wallet, just in case. It left a ring on your wallet, which was inclined to happen when you never had reason to remove it.
The girls I dated during my college years came largely by way of blind dates — through fellow counselors at the children’s camps where I worked, through new friends I made at N.Y.U., through girls I didn’t connect with, but who were willing to pass me along to someone else. One of the counselors, an older fellow who was in graduate school, told me, “You know, when you go out with a girl, she’s just as nervous as you.” This was helpful. I didn’t really know that.
Of all those dates, all those girls, somehow I remember one evening in particular. Who arranged the blind date, I do not remember. My date lived in an apartment building in the east Bronx and perhaps nothing suitable was playing in the movies, or it was suggested by the go-between, and we ended up not going out, just sitting in her living room talking so as to get to know each other. She was a plain girl, extremely shy, extremely quiet. I knew the requisite chemistry was lacking and I wasn’t going to see her again, but I was appropriate. I stayed a couple of hours, talking, and then I said it was time to leave, except she said something that held me in place. “But I bought a cake.” She had gone to the bakery and bought a cake for her blind date, a cake that was in a box on the kitchen table. I said that was nice and we should have some and she cut a slice of cake for each of us, and we sat at her kitchen table and talked some more and ate the cake, and I thanked her for it and left knowing I was not going to call her again, not knowing these many years later I would recall an extremely shy, extremely quiet girl who bought a cake.
An advantage of going to school downtown was that you became familiar with different places to go on dates, which was important since you were always trying to show what a sharp guy you were — performances of Brother Theodore and his tales from Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe. Greenwich Village coffee houses. An Italian restaurant near N.Y.U. where men played bocce while you ate. Broadway shows — in the second balcony. Greenwich Village art movie houses. Staying in the Bronx would work, too, if you took a girl to the Ascot, still showing foreign films.
Ben Miller and his folk singing widened his base of operations and he included me. He met some private school girls, high school seniors, and I went out with one of them. I mentioned to a friend that where the girl lived, in a duplex apartment on Central Park West overlooking the park, was the most beautiful apartment I had ever been in. My friend, who was from the Bronx, began referring to her as, “Duplex Annie,” thinking he was being clever, unaware he was responding with hostility to the difference in backgrounds.
My dating relationship with the girl lasted only a few dates. I remained friendly with her for a while afterward. She went on to Sarah Lawrence College and fixed me up with a couple of her college friends. Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville was not far from where we lived and a neighborhood friend of mine with a car went on a double date with me. We took our Sarah Lawrence dates to a restaurant in the Bronx near Long Island Sound. Considering how much we were prepared to spend for a first date, and a blind date at that, we thought it was a pretty good place — with a dance floor, the music supplied by a juke box. The girls’ attitude indicated it was not to their standards. “Guess you’re not going all out,” one of them said sardonically. Another time a girl from Sarah Lawrence stayed at the Central Park West apartment so I could go out with her. Somehow the subject of dogs came up. She owned nine dogs, she said. I asked what you would do with nine dogs. “We hunt,” she answered.
These were girls who went away to spend college weekends with Ivy League boys. My brief period of dating these girls as a boy from the Bronx was heavy with implications about stations in life and uncomfortable.
My mother wanted to live in a place more suitable to her improved economic status. She chose an area of the Grand Concourse where elevator buildings predominated and stores did not occupy the street level. 1695 Grand Concourse was an elevator building just south of the Lewis Morris Apartments near 174th Street. The kitchen and bathroom fixtures in the new apartment were modern, the tree-lined Grand Concourse, without stores, was picturesque here. The Bronx is what my mother knew, where she wanted to be and it is indicative of her feelings about the place and the stability of the Bronx in the 1950s that she could think of a move from one part of the Bronx to another as upwardly mobile.
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The time when our neighborhood friends were our friends exclusively had been changing as we went to our different colleges. We seldom had time to spare for schoolyard basketball. Because I worked part-time, I hadn’t been socializing in the neighborhood as I once did, and as I proceeded at N.Y.U. even the banal course work required study and term papers. Others had demands on their time. Our growing-up neighborhood life was ending. And it was ending at the very time I moved away from the neighborhood.
After my latest summer as a camp counselor I returned with what I considered to be a new intelligent self-assessment. As a camp counselor, I wrote lyrics for parodies of pop songs for Color War and other camp events and discovered I had a flair for it. I had chosen the business world. I was in a business college and if I had a way with words I decided what I would do with it. I would become an advertising copywriter.
I began to major in marketing and started taking courses in advertising. One of my classmates, Marty Daniels, worked on the business side of the college newspaper and suggested I join him on the staff. I worked on the newspaper selling advertising space to Greenwich Village stores and restaurants and I wrote ads for the advertisers. When N.Y.U. combined the newspapers for the three undergraduate colleges on Washington Square into one newspaper, I became the business manager. The newspaper office was a hangout for people who worked on the paper, for their friends, for students trying to get articles into print about some area of their interest. The place was alive, a contrast to my moribund classes. I no longer worked part-time after school. I was in the newspaper office every day.
