Baby It's Cold Outside

I've been playing golf right up to two weeks ago since the temperature has hovered around a pleasant mid-forties before now. It is finally frigid outside. We haven't had sustained low temperatures like this since the mid-1990s, but I remember as a kid that cold winters were par for the course. We wore ridiculous clothes and were swaddled in sweaters, scarves and hats; Mom pinned our mittens to our sleeves so they wouldn't get lost. Bitter cold was no reason to keep us inside though. Playing in the street and school yard  with your friends took precedence over all else, so out we went. Today's little pumpkins stay indoors and watch movies in the Auditorium if the temp drops too low.

In my old house on Somers Street in Brooklyn we had an unheated pantry attached to the rear of the house that led to the back yard. It was so cold that Mom used it like a second refrigerator. She would store things like milk, juice and soda back there and they were always ice cold. It was also Mom's hiding place for things she didn't want me to find like chocolates and snacks she kept in case company dropped by. One day I found what I thought was a bottle of Dad's Fleishman's Rye. Having never tasted whiskey and being naturally curious, I took a big swig. Turned out to be turpentine (which I later found out didn't taste much different from Fleishman's). When I told my mother what I had done, she tried to stuff bread down my throat and beat me with a wooden spoon all at the same time. Quite a feat.

In school during the winter we had radiators that brought steam heat into the classrooms. There were two temperatures possible to achieve with this system, very cold and very hot. In sixth grade we had a Franciscan teacher named Brother Mathias. He hated a warm classroom because he thought it put the students to sleep. (It was him.) Even on the coldest days he would have one of the boys open the windows a crack using the long pole that hooked into a latch at the top of the sash. One day he asked me to do this, an enviable task by the way for a twelve-year old. It was so cold that the window had frozen in place and I couldn't lower it. Giving me his best "you incompetent idiot" look, Brother tried the pole himself. He used too much force and the tip of the pole slipped out of the latch and smashed right through the window. He reddened to the joyful sound of 45 boys suppressing muffled laughter.

On cold days that were also snowy, our daily game of triangle baseball played with the Brothers in the school yard was threatened. The school custodian, a wily Irishman whose name escapes me, would recruit the bigger boys to shovel the snow from the playing area knowing full well how badly we wanted our game. He sat on the sidelines smoking and directing his all-too-willing pack of slave laborers. We knew he was using us but the important thing was clearing a place to play. Running the bases was treacherous on the ice, but the game went on. I can still see Brother Francis in his steel-rimmed glasses lobbing the pink Spaldeen on one bounce up to the plate where the hitter would try to slap it for a base hit.

Sometimes I think we coddle today's kids too much. Everything is planned, supervised and controlled by their parents. They are rarely on their own to learn life's lessons by living. They have so many advantages we never had, but in some respects, I really believe they get cheated.

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Tune in Next Week....

One of the joys of my childhood was the hours spent in front of the silver screen at the Colonial Theater under the el on Broadway in Brooklyn. I have written about how, for fourteen cents, we would get to spend maybe six hours in the dark eating our sandwiches brought from home and watching two feature films, 21 color cartoons, and maybe my favorite of all, the weekly installment of whatever adventure serial they were running that week. Serials were like soap operas for kids; each episode lasted maybe 15-20 minutes and didn't advance the story a whole lot, but it was packed with thrills and of course, a cliffhanger ending that would always bring you back for more.

The budgets on these serials were small and the production values shabby, but they knew how to hook the young boys who were addicted to them. Cowboys were in vogue then, so any serial featuring a cowboy was an automatic hit. The idea of UFOs and space travel was also catching on and was the fodder for a few rocket ship adventure stories. Crime fighters was another popular theme, especially those featuring G-men fighting foreign spies. Most of the actors in these serials were B-list, but some are very recognizable. Clayton Moore, who is best known for playing the Lone Ranger, also starred in Ghost of Zorro, Jesse James Rides Again, Jungle Drums of Africa and many more. Other "names" include Bela Lugosi, Buster Crabbe, Milburne Stone (who later played Doc in Gunsmoke) Jock Mahoney, Victor Jory and George Reeves who starred as Superman on TV.

My favorite cowboy serial was The Phantom Empire starring Gene Autry as a singing cowboy who runs Radio Ranch, a dude ranch from which he makes a daily live radio broadcast. Gene has two young sidekicks, Frankie Darro and Betsy King Ross. Betsy, Frankie and Gene are kidnapped by the Thunder Riders from the secret underground empire of Murania. Ruled by the icy, evil blonde Queen Tika, Murania was 25,000 feet underground, complete with towering skyscrapers, robots, ray-guns, and elevators tubes that extend miles from the surface. Meanwhile the crooked Professor Beetson plans to invade this underground kingdom and seize its radium wealth. One of the appeals of this adventure was that Gene rode with two kids, a boy and a girl, automatically sucking every kid in the audience into the drama.

The outer space genre included Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Captain Video, the latter being one of the few movie serials originated on television. Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe was my favorite. A rocket hovering over the planet Earth is dropping purple dust into the atmosphere, causing instant death! Blasting off to save humanity are Flash Gordon ("Buster" Crabbe), Dale Arden (Carol Hughes) and Dr. Hans Zarkov (Frank Shannon), three inter-planetary adventurers who head back to Mongo, the source of the plague. Upon landing, Flash discovers that none other than their arch enemy, Ming the Merciless (Charles Middleton), is the madman behind the attack. Eluding imminent capture, Flash and his comrades head north, closely pursued by Ming's soldiers who have been ordered to stop the heroic Earthman, no matter what the cost.

Finally there were the cops and bad guys serials including Dick Tracy, Gangbusters, and Junior G-Men staring the Dead-End Kids (Later known as the Bowery Boys). I think I liked Junior G-Men best, again because it featured kids having adventures we could only imagine. We never even stopped to question the idea of a gang of city street kids working closely with the FBI. Their aim was to rescue their leader's father, a scientist who has been kidnapped by "The Flaming Torches," a group of saboteurs in league with a sinister foreign power. Leo Gorcey, the wisecracking leader of the Junior G-Men, was probably in his mid-thirties toward the end of this serial's run!

I think being weaned on radio in the dark days before television gave me a vivid imagination and a thirst for adventure that these weekly movie serials helped satisfy. You knew the wagon with the heroine wasn't going off the cliff, but there you sat the following week munching on your pepper and egg hero while pretending to be a real hero riding hard behind Gene.

Movie descriptions courtesy of Thomas Film CLassics, http://www.shop.thomasfilmclassics.com

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Uncle Mike: 1923-2013

Started the new year with the sad news that my Uncle Mike passed away. He would have turned 90 this May. Michael was my mother's younger brother and the last of the children born to Pasquale and Katerina Camardi. I recall seeing the sweetest photo of Mom and her brother, her in a white dress and him in a white suit, taken at the 1939 New York World's Fair. He was a cool character blessed with dark good looks complete with a pencil-thin mustache that he wore all his life. I remember at our Christmas and New Year's Eve family parties when he was still single he would always show up with a lovely girl on his arm to spend some time with the family before going off for the evening's entertainment. 

As a young man, Uncle Mike liked living large, even when his income didn't support it. He always dressed impeccably and carried himself like an Italian Count. He drove nice cars and went to nice places despite a less than stable financial foundation. I remember overhearing the family discussing his lavish (to them) lifestyle and his reluctance to put his nose to the grindstone and settle down with a nice Italian girl. Once he borrowed my mother's movie projector to show some films at a bachelor party. In with the projector was a reel of old film of my parents wedding, a gift from Negri's Furniture, a neighborhood store that filmed your nuptials if you bought furniture there. Sadly the film was lost and Uncle Mike was in my mom's doghouse for a long time. I can't blame her; I'd give a lot to still have that rare film of my folks.


In his 30's Uncle Mike was seriously dating a girl named Ella. She was pretty, vivacious and got on famously with the family. We thought for sure that this was "the one". The next thing we knew there was an engagement announcement, but Ella was not the lucky girl. Uncle Mike had met an attorney named Lola (whatever Lola wants, Lola gets) and decided to marry her. Her family was well off and apparently happy to have Mike in the fold. I remember going to their wedding. It was probably the first "catered affair" I had ever attended (photo left) where dinner was served by waiters instead of the football weddings we were used to. It was nothing like the elaborate weddings of today, but for poor Brooklyn Italians, it was "tre elegante".

The marriage turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Mike. Aunt Lola was a smart, ambitious woman who would never tolerate a lay-about husband. With her prodding and connections, Uncle Mike crashed the business world and became a purchasing agent for a trucking company. From these humble beginnings he rose steadily in the company, apparently having a natural gift for schmoozing and a good business sense. He worked for many years until finally retiring when he was around 80! Grandma and Grandpa would have been proud to see their son, over whose future they had so needlessly fretted, become a real force in the business community. Uncle Mike also adopted a son, Michael, from Lola's previous marriage, who turned out to be a successful doctor with a practice in Virginia.

A few years ago I was compiling a family history, and Uncle Mike was kind enough to share his written recollections of the old days on Hull Street. There were some lovely details about my grandparents' early lives and Mike's sisters including my mother that I was able to share with my children. There will be a small service this Thursday in Roslyn Heights where Uncle Mike lived. Most of our remaining family members are no longer living in New York, so my sister and I will go to represent the family. I will celebrate Mike's life and remember him as he would wish to be remembered...a guy who loved life and squeezed all he could out of it.

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