Summer Time and the Living is Sticky

The forecast today is for mid-nineties in New York City. Summer in the city has always been rough. but in the 1950s, air-conditioning existed pretty much in movie theaters only; everywhere else you had to rely on your imagination to keep cool. This was back in the day before casual business dress, so any poor schlub in an office job had to put on a suit and tie and descend into Dante's Seventh Circle of Hell, otherwise known as the NYC subway system. As sweaty commuters stood cheek-to-cheek reading the Miss Rheingold ads, ancient fans would blow very hot air into their faces at 60 miles an hour. Women divided their time between fighting off gropers and keeping their foot-high beehive hairdos from collapsing in the hot Santa Ana winds.

I guess toward the end of the 1950's, office buildings began to install air conditioning, so at least oppressed employees climbing up out of steamy subway stations could get that blast of resuscitating cold air as they hit their building lobbies. People who weren't lucky enough to work in offices got little relief during the long, hot summers. It was especially rough for people like firefighters who had to don 50 pounds of heavy gear to fight fires, or cops who wore those old-fashioned wool police uniforms that buttoned up to the neck. Construction workers and utility workers also suffered (as they still do today) by not only laboring in the heat, but often in holes in the ground that intensified their discomfort. 

Kids too had to find ways to beat the heat. Going to the beach was great if your parents were in the mood to take you. I remember well the ride to Coney Island, first on the A train from our local Rockaway Avenue station to Franklin Avenue where we changed for the elevated Brighton line. The backs of your legs stuck to the straw train seats as you took what felt like an interminable ride to our destination, Coney Island Avenue. Then a walk up narrow streets past the tacky souvenir shops, then under the shade of the boardwalk onto the hot sand where you did the "beach blanket mambo" (stepping on the corners of other people's blankets to avoid scorching your feet) until finally, looming on the hazy horizon, the cool Atlantic ocean appeared.

Kids found other ways to cool off like going to the local playground to romp in the wading pool. This was a bowl-shaped concrete enclosure with shower sprays of water shooting out of openings around the "pool", which held maybe two inches of water. If you fell while frolicking in this cement death trap, a trip to the emergency room was a real possibility. We also opened street hydrants, or Johnnie pumps as we called them, and created our own little asphalt beach. Kids came pouring out of hot brick houses to play in the street. Sneakers were a good idea to help prevent stepping on rocks or broken glass. (See trip to emergency room.) Unsuspecting cars rolling slowly down the block with open windows were considered fair game. Evil boys used tin cans to direct the stream of the water gushing from the hydrant into 1954 Chevys, and then ran like hell.

If putting a man on the moon was ranked as man's greatest challenge, then teaching summer school physics in non-air-conditioned classrooms to disinterested kids who had already failed it once must have come in a close second. I remember enduring this fate in high school. I can still see the anguished face of the poor teacher who had sacrificed, gone to college, and became an educator in the hope of improving young minds. He was reduced nearly to tears by a room full of young thugs who wanted no part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and who thought Sir Isaac Newton was the guy they named the cookie after. To make matters worse, the class was given at New Utrecht High School, located a few short train stops from Coney Island. We could almost smell the hot dogs from Nathan's wafting in on the breeze coming through the open window.

Anyone reading this might get the mistaken impression that summers in the 1950's in Brooklyn were terrible. In fact, they were glorious, and I wouldn't trade those memories for anything. (OK, maybe for a red,

Jaguar XKE, but nothing else.)

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Remembering

Today is Memorial Day, a time to reflect on all the brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep America free. We wage war somewhat differently today than in wars past. We have unmanned drones that can be used to take out enemy strongholds, we use technology like satellites, computers, night vision goggles, I even read where we have developed a gun that shoots around corners. But in the end, there are soldiers at the end of those guns who must leave their families and risk their lives so that we may be secure in our beds. Our enemy too is different; they fight for no country and under no flag, hiding behind women and children while they inflict their unspeakable evil in the name of their god.

Growing up I watched the young men from our neighborhood go off to war. I actually envied them as they walked down the aisle in church at Sunday mass in their starched uniforms, their bearing proud, serving their country with honor and courage. It never occurred to me that inside those uniforms were young men who had to go to strange places like Korea and Viet Nam to face other young men bent on killing them. They basked in the admiring glances of young girls and old men who had fought in earlier wars, never knowing if they would ever walk down that church aisle again. They must have been frightened, but they did their duty. When I was growing up, very few challenged the idea of not serving one's country if called; not doing so would mark them as cowards in the street culture that saw war as heroic.

I remember a photo from my mother's album of black and white pictures. It showed my handsome godfather, Rocco Crachi, in his combat uniform, sitting atop an army motorcycle on some battlefield in Europe during World War II. Rocco was my father's best friend, and because he was overseas when I was baptized, his brother Gaspar stood in for him as a proxy at the ceremony. My cousin Frank did a hitch in the army that took him to Grassano in southern Italy, the ancestral town of our family. The only other member of our family circle I can remember actively serving in the military was my cousin Peter Caruso, who served in the navy. Pete lived in the apartment above us and I believe was aboard a destroyer in the East China Sea. Thankfully, all came home unscathed, at least physically.

I served 8 years in the army reserve, and the most exotic place I visited was San Antonio, Texas. The only real danger I faced was making it out of the border town bars in Mexico in one piece. I served after Korea and before Viet Nam, so I don't know what it feels like to come under enemy fire. I can only imagine how terrifying it must be to have bombs exploding around you and bullets whizzing over your head. Lately, the word hero has been devalued somewhat in my opinion, but soldiers in wartime who face the possibility of death every day still qualify as heroes under the old definition of the term. Ordinary men display extraordinary courage in the most dangerous circumstances, and their deeds are set down by all who witnessed them. Not surprisingly, these heroes who do make it back are reluctant to speak of their experiences. 

World War I was called the war to end all wars. Sadly, that was a wildly optimistic sentiment. What is really different for all the wars we've fought before and since? Germany, Japan and Korea, once our bitter enemies, are now our trading partners. China, Viet Nam and Russia are now popular American tourist destinations. I'm tired of wars. I'm tired of seeing pictures of mothers and children putting small American flags at their husbands' and fathers' graves. All the billions we spend to wage wars could be better spent to alleviate the hunger and suffering in the world, and yet we persist in trying to kill each other in the name of religion, territorial imperatives and ideological differences. I can only pray that my grandchildren will live in a better world and will hear of war only in history books.

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I Hear That Train a Comin'....

On Saturday we visited Yankee Peddler Day at Staten Island's Richmondtown Restoration Center. It was better than the flea markets they typically run where vendors are selling junk jewelry and used CDs. This event actually featured antiques and memorabilia from the past. Naturally, I remembered all this stuff because I too am an antique. One vendor was selling old electric trains and accessories. The sight of these treasures immediately awakened the twelve-year old buried in me and I made a beeline for his table. I could tell the guy was Old School; dressed in jeans and a black tee shirt with a mane of wavy silver hair, he looked like the lead singer for a Fifties doo-wop group.

He looked bored and I could tell he wanted to talk, so I happily obliged. I told him I was a model railroad buff (whatever a buff is), and we easily slipped into a conversation about Lionel vs. Marx or American Flyer trains, HO vs. Standard scale, and how train collecting has declined as a hobby. When I was a kid, model trains were on every boy's Christmas list. I had the Marx Standard gauge set, but later as an adult, switched to the Lionel HO gauge just to save space. I remember as a kid, we would set the trains up around the tree every Christmas. My father would lay down the track that had to be nailed to a plywood board. Looking back, I think one of the reasons I loved these trains so much is that working on them was one of the few things my Dad and I got to do together. He worked two jobs to pay the mortgage, so I valued any time he had to spend with me.

Once the metal tracks were down, we would lightly sandpaper them to ensure the train wheels encountered no friction in their trip around Tiny Town. We then set out the model buildings including the post office, general store, Woolworths and the bank. We had specialty trains like the cattle car that required a trackside platform accessory where the cows could be offloaded using magnets to move them jerkily along. We also had a water tower that loomed over the tracks and was used to simulate filling the black metal locomotive with water. Of course there were Styrofoam tunnels for the locomotive and its trailing freight cars to pass through, and an electric gate that came down automatically to block traffic while the train roared by.


Once the trains and layout were set up, my Dad's job was done and the trains were mine. Just watching them go round and round became boring after 30 seconds, and so I released my imagination to liven things up. I would take some logs from the log car, lay them across the track, and use them to help masked outlaws derail the train so they could rob it. I also like to see how fast the train could go in reverse before it careened off the tracks and took out the post office. Sometimes I would use my little, plastic cowboy and Indian figures to stage epic battles where brave lawmen would jump down onto the moving train from the top of the Styrofoam tunnel to fight the murderous redskins who had boarded the train with mayhem in mind. (I usually waited until Dad was out before doing this stuff or he would have brained me.)


As I spoke with my new Yankee Peddler friend , he lamented how today's kids knew only one thing: computers and electronic games. When the batteries ran down or the computer locked up, they were like lost zombies. He said he was getting too old to keep up with the hobby, especially since the only store on Staten Island that sold model railroad trains and accessories closed a few years ago. He offered me a good deal on the stuff he was selling, but I politely declined explaining that my railroad days were behind me. I used to set the trains up every year for a time, but my own kids seemed more interested in Transformer action figures than model trains. Once in a while I get to a train show in Manhattan, and there is always the great model train display at Northlandz in Flemington, New Jersey that has floors and floors of layouts.

Model railroading was great fun for me, both as a kid and an adult, but most important, it gave me some quality time with my Dad, something I will always cherish.

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