The Lady in Red

Adolescent boys are by nature like happy puppies. They are in the full bloom of youth with none of the responsibilities that come with adulthood. Life is all ball games, candy bars, and sneaking cigarettes lifted from their father's pack. They have boundless energy, unbridled curiosity and short memories. Grudges are forgotten long before they can darken the soul, and every new day is bursting with promise. They travel in groups seeking new adventures and knowledge. Everything is shared including wildly incorrect information about life and love. Then one day, that testosterone that has been simmering below the surface bubbles over, and the brain, up until now the organ in charge of decision-making, now takes a back seat to the all-powerful Captain Johnson. Boys' behavior from then on is no longer in their control. Thoughts of women rule their every waking moment. 

The icky girls, who heretofore were to be teased, ridiculed and scorned, were suddenly persons of interest. Developmentally and socially, girls are well ahead of boys at this age, so we never had a chance. They already knew the power they held over us and we were doomed. We began "allowing" them to hang around on the stoop with us. Being social dinosaurs we didn't know exactly how to interact with them. A punch in the arm might be the closest we could come to a display of affection. Nobody ever really got to first base much less second despite the wildly exaggerated stories of romantic conquests. Usually we just struck out with the bats on our shoulders. Since the local girls were yielding nothing on the s-e-x front, we turned our imaginations elsewhere.

There was a strikingly good looking older woman who lived on the block that caught our interest. Most of the young women in our neighborhood were married early unless they just could not attract a mate. That was certainly not the problem for this gorgeous woman who went by the absurdly unsexy name of Tillie. She was probably in her early thirties with raven hair and green eyes. She was a working woman who dressed well, but not so well as to hide the kind of figure that men stopped to admire...kind of like Joan on "Mad Men". Every afternoon Tillie came up from the subway stop at Rockaway Avenue and walked down Somers Street to her house. We would wait on Tommy Dowd's stoop on the corner for her to walk by. After a while she began to smile and wave at us. I'm sure she considered this just a friendly gesture, but every guy on that stoop imagined that wave was an invitation meant just for him.

Tillie had a parade of beaus who called on her with regularity. Most looked like they had just returned from auditioning for the role of Boston Blackie, a popular private detective of the time who sported a pencil-thin mustache. They wore pleated slacks and silk sport shirts and drove nice cars. We hated them of course because of what we imagined they were doing with Tillie behind closed doors. Sometimes as we walked past her house at night, we would look up at the lighted window hoping to see anything, even a silhouette on the shade, but to no avail. We had to be content with our regular afternoon sightings and the fantasies they spawned.  

Summer was optimal Tillie viewing weather. She would wear these backless sun dresses that got our hormones trembling. Once a week she wore a devil-red number with matching red high heels and a red and white sun hat. If any of us spotted her coming up the subway steps in that outfit, the word got spread in a hurry, and attendance on the stoop rose accordingly. If she had been shopping and was carrying packages, we would trip over each other with offers of help while less attractive neighborhood women struggled with their bundles. One of our lovelorn number (Vinnie) claimed Tillie invited him in one day for a glass of lemonade. Whether true or not, this brush with intimacy gave us hope. Every so often someone would say: "Tell us the lemonade story" and Vinnie would begin to recite the tale like an old man surrounded by his grandchildren.

One day Tillie just stopped showing up. Nobody knows if she got married and moved away or left for another reason. We missed her but life went on. I wonder if it would please her to know she was the last thing a lot of young boys thought about before dropping off to sleep. Probably not.

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There Goes the Neighborhood

Many Brooklyn neighborhoods have come full circle. During the Fifties they were alive with either family residences or thriving factories. Then in the Sixties came the exodus. Far-away places like Long Island, New Jersey, and even underdeveloped NYC Boroughs like Staten Island and Queens became the new destinations for Brooklynites. Neighborhoods like Red Hook, East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush and Brownsville became places where you rolled up the car windows and locked the doors before driving through. Poor minorities looking for cheap housing moved in with the assistance of greedy real-estate developers who engaged in a practice called "block-busting." As Blacks and Hispanics moved in, Whites panicked and tried to sell their houses in a down market where prices were dropping daily. Businesses relocated as the supply of skilled workers fled to the suburbs. Soon, neighborhoods that once thrived were graffiti-covered, burned out slums. 


During this period, Manhattan also boomed to the point when living or doing business there soon became unaffordable. People began to look for places to live where rents were reasonable, and suddenly the old, run down neighborhoods began to show signs of life again. Their proximity to Manhattan facilitated by a viable public transportation system made them attractive to younger tenants. Make no mistake, it took courage to be the first to consider living in these areas. The houses needed maintenance, crime rates were high, and a lot of supporting infrastructure like schools and shopping were poor. But if you were willing to live with these conditions for a while, some great bargains were to be had. Landlords with little hope of selling or renting property were more than willing to let them go cheaply just to get out.


Some interesting groups led the movement to revitalize these Brooklyn neighborhoods. Artists were among the first, attracted by high-ceilinged lofts with great light. Restaurateurs too were often willing to take a chance. For a fraction of what it would cost to open in Manhattan, they took a risk and their faith was soon rewarded with paying customers. As people flocked to the restaurants they began to see the possibilities in the old brownstone buildings and the momentum built. Another early group to put down roots were gays. They wanted enclaves where they could live together without homophobes hassling them. Many had money and soon major renovations were underway. Neighborhoods like Park Slope and Sunset Park owe their resurgence to the gay community.

You might think that reclaiming and repopulating dilapidated neighborhoods would be a good thing, but there was opposition. Established residents complained about gentrification...that Yuppies were pushing them out. I suppose there is something to this phenomenon when viewed from their perspective. In the end though, when you look at what these once viable areas had become and the prospect that they would only get worse, I think the movement to rehabilitate them made good sense for the City before we turned into another Detroit. New York is heavily weighed down with welfare programs and citizens who not only contribute nothing to the society, but only take from it. The resources to pay for public welfare programs comes mainly from taxes, and what better way to increase tax revenue than to collect property tax revenue where none was collected before.


There may be some consequences to gentrification, but on balance I think it brings far more positives than negatives. If you feel the neighborhood is getting too expensive for you, here's a thought...get an education, get a job, and join the parade.

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No Shoes, No Shorts, No Service

The other day a friend of mine posted on Facebook, chastising people who come to church dressed like they were going to a picnic. She's right of course. The standard for acceptable dress in church has slipped a long way. As boys at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Brooklyn, we were required to attend 9 o'clock Sunday Mass as a group with our classmates. Attendance was not optional. We sat together all dressed in our school uniform of white shirts and blue ties. We were also subject to surprise inspections by nuns on the lookout for dirty fingernails and shined shoes. We stood, knelt and sat in the church pews like a platoon of soldiers doing close-order drill, all in instinctive response to the little "froggie-clicker" wielded by the nuns. If you missed Mass and didn't bring a note explaining why on Monday, the Inquisition would begin. Few of us were crazy enough to take the risk.


For me, one thing that set Sundays aside from other days was going to church. We lived in a working class neighborhood where many men did physical labor to feed their families. We usually saw them in their scruffy overalls carrying brown bag lunches to the Rockaway Avenue subway station. Women wore drab housewife's smocks with most of the color bleached out of them from hanging on clotheslines in the sun. Kids ran around in patched corduroy pants or dungarees and hand-me-down coats and shoes. These were our weekday clothes and they served their purpose. All that changed on Sunday. Even the poorest families had "Sunday clothes". They may not have been the latest style, but they were clean and neat and worn only on Sundays.


Some days I wake up trying to figure what day of the week it is; retirement removes the weekday-weekend distinctions we make while we are working. Sundays don't have the same feel for me as they used to. Back then, it was different. The church was maybe a 15 minute walk from our house. Along the way we would run into neighbors all decked out in their Sunday best on the way to Mass. They seemed friendlier, as if by donning their church clothes, they somehow changed their personalities as well. Even the grouchy old men who chased you out of their yards from Monday to Saturday might favor you with a forced smile. It was like an ant hill come to life...people you saw every day going about their business were now united in a single purpose...dressed up and marching to church to spend an hour with God. 


It wasn't always easy to recognize them. Mrs. Marino's faded, flowered house dress was gone and in its place a smart silk suit with a fur-trimmed collar. She wore make-up and high heels and walked with a slightly grander air than usual. Mr. Marino was recognizable only by his wrinkled, mahogany face burned brown from years of laboring in construction. Although no longer young, his strength showed through the dark blue suit he wore without favoritism to weddings and funerals alike. Around his starched white collar, held in place by a Holy Name Society tie pin, hung a brown and cream colored tie that clashed horribly with his suit. Well-worn but polished brown shoes and unfashionable white socks completed the ensemble. 


All the people in church dressed this way. The ushers (all in suits) were stationed at the door to head off violations of the dress code, and did not hesitate to enforce them. Women were reminded to cover their heads, and if their dresses were a bit too low cut, were handed modesty scarfs to pin over their cleavage. Anyone stupid enough to show up in shorts or tank tops was politely told to go home and change. If somehow a woman got by the ushers, she could count on getting a lecture about proper dress from the priest along with her Communion. Sandals and sneakers might not make the cut either. As harsh and old-fashioned as these regulations might sound, having a respectfully dressed congregation somehow lent dignity to the service...it reminded people that they were in a special place and privileged to worship in freedom.


My friend clearly remembers these days too, and, like me, is offended to see how much things have changed for the worse. It's not just in church where decorum is ignored. People show up in public places wearing pajama bottoms, flip flops, embarrassingly short shorts, and my favorite, the guys with their pants lowered to show their underwear. Mr. and Mrs. Marino would be aghast.

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Do Not Pass Go

On a rainy day, when playing outside is not an option, kids today hardly notice because even on sunny days, they rarely play outside. They have TV, computers, video games, Kindles, i-Pods, Wii and a dozen other electronic marvels to occupy them. When I was growing up in the Pony Express days, we raced into the house after school, pausing just long enough to change out of our white shirt and blue tie school uniforms, before we hit the streets. Our parents were glad to be rid of us as it gave them a few more hours of quiet. Not much kept us indoors; our play time was spent in the great outdoors. There were days though when maybe a pounding rain would keep us in the house, and that's when our poor mothers racked their brains for something to keep us busy. There was no electronic smorgasbord of entertainment delights, all we had were board games.

Even the poorest homes in our neighborhood could scare up a Checkerboard. Our red and black Checker 'men' were kept in an old Chock-Full-O-Nuts coffee can in the back of a kitchen cabinet. One of my dearest memories of childhood is playing Checkers with my mother, and when he was not working one of his two jobs, my Dad. We didn't have much one-on-one quiet time with our parents, so these games were kind of nice. I think when I was younger and just learning the finer points of the game, Mom would take an occasional dive so I could win. Then, like all mothers since the beginning of time, she would praise my skill and fuss over how smart I was becoming. My Dad, however, played for keeps. When I finally got good enough to beat him on the up and up, I think he was genuinely proud. Maybe for the first time he saw a future for me that did not involve wearing a paper hat.


Another indoor favorite was Monopoly. I was lucky enough to have my cousins living just down the street, and I can recall spending many hours in marathon Monopoly sessions. I never bothered to look it up, but I'm willing to bet that the game of Monopoly was invented by someone with a house full of screaming kids. There was something about that game that kept kids mesmerized for hours on end. We all had our favorite playing pieces; I liked the race car or the top hat. Although they didn't make a big deal of it then like today's learning-obsessed parents, the game helped kids learn how to count by moving their game piece around the board the required number of spaces indicated by the dice; we learned about money and making change; discovered the value of developed real estate in rental income; we practiced our reading on the Community Chest and Chance game cards; and felt the Capitalist's thrill of victory when an opponent went bankrupt or got sent to jail.


If there were enough players around, Bingo was always an option. We had the dog-eared game cards and the little wooden discs with the calling numbers from B1 to O79 stamped on them in red. We took turns being the "caller", clearly a position of honor. We used pennies to cover the called numbers that were on card. There is no greater sense of anticipation and excitement in today's video games that matched the feeling we had when our card was nearly covered with pennies and we were waiting for them to call N35 so we could jump up and yell Bingo. The game originated in Europe and reached North America in 1929,where it became known as "Beano". It was first played at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia. New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe renamed it "Bingo" after he overheard someone accidentally yell "Bingo" instead of "Beano". A Catholic priest from Pennsylvania approached Lowe about using bingo as a means of raising church funds. The rest is ecclesiastical history.


Too many of today's forms of play are solitary and do not help children develop social skills and family togetherness the way group games like Monopoly did. I mean how are kids going to learn life's most valuable lesson: whoever ends up with all the money wins.

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