Just Kids From the Bronx (11 page)

I. C. (“CHUCK”) RAPOPORT

TV and film writer
; Paris Match
and
Life
magazine photographer

(1937– )

People don’t realize that the Bronx is so hilly, especially where we lived in the Macombs Road area. There was a huge flight of steps going up from the street below to Davidson Avenue, where the entrance to our building was. Our apartment was on the first floor facing the back so because of the hill we were at eye level with the Jerome Avenue el. I was watching the trains go by when I was about five years old. What I saw were subway cars filled with men in uniform. When I asked my mother who they were, she said, “They’re soldiers going off to war.” I couldn’t fully understand this at the time, but she said it with a lot of sadness in her voice. When the war ended in August of 1945, we were away on my bubbe and zayde’s farm in Winsted, Connecticut. My mother told me and my cousins to go up and down the country road so that we could bang on pots and pans with a spoon to announce that the war was over. I was eight years old at the time.

In the Bronx your neighborhood was also like a small town. You didn’t leave it. If you went downtown, you were going into the city—Manhattan. Or summers you might be lucky enough to go to “the country,” usually meaning someplace in the Catskill Mountains, or in our case my grandparents’ rural cottages, where you were surrounded by the same people. Since my neighborhood was like this small town, I was provincial in my outlook. I was this naive kid. Maybe it was just in our family, but for instance we didn’t listen to music in the house even though I took accordion lessons. We didn’t even listen to music on the radio. We listened to comedy shows.

There was no library in our house. We had a set of classics but they were never opened. When I finally started writing, I went from illiteracy to writer overnight. And as for my being a photographer, I didn’t want words. Words were the enemy. I was uncultured in an uncultured world as far as my eye could see. Even my friends didn’t talk about books and reading. I had to read for school but I never liked it. Thankfully in high school there were lots of different kids from all over the city. I found out that the whole world wasn’t brought up the way I was. I went to the High School of Industrial Arts. I could draw. I think I got in because my older brother went to that same school. He was a very good artist. They’d always ask me, “Are you related to Mel Rapoport?”

I had this love/hate thing for my brother. And I definitely wanted his approval so often I’d play dumb so as not to compete with him. I was the good kid and he was the boss over me. My parents would leave us alone without a babysitter. They said that if there was ever a problem to just call the super. My brother and I were jumping from bed to bed and one of the beds collapsed. So we called the super and he jerry-rigged it. When my parents came home, my father figured it all out—and my brother got blamed. My father hit him with a belt. My brother was about nine years old at the time. I was six. He was humiliated and scared and hurt and he hated me for it. My reaction was don’t get into trouble. I steered away from pushing those buttons, but my brother wasn’t so lucky. Maybe he had ADD, which wasn’t diagnosed in those days.

When I went away to college in Ohio I was still kind of naive. If you grew up Jewish anywhere in New York, you were still a New Yorker. Jews from Cleveland were different. They had their own midwestern shtick. It was culture shock going away to college. The students drank. In my house while growing up there was no drinking. There was no such thing as social drinking. We had cream sodas or milkshakes. I thank my parents for that.

Although I was naive and didn’t know about the world, I did have some street smarts. When I was still in the neighborhood, some of the kids got together to form a gang. We had taken an oath where we swore to protect each other. The threat was mostly from the Irish kids in the neighborhood, especially at Easter. That was the brown-shoe, black-shoe period. The Irish Catholics wore black shoes, and when you saw that you knew right away that you were in trouble. They weren’t killers or anything like that. It was mainly humiliation. You ran when you saw them, but sometimes you were cornered. You were made to sing or dance. You couldn’t escape it.
Sing the National Anthem
, or
Say the Pledge of Allegiance
. You were stuck there and they’d laugh. We figured out that we had to travel in groups, calling out so other kids in your gang would come running. Sometimes there were fistfights, and eventually adults would break them up. Both sides would split if cop cars came.

Those street smarts got me through a lot of different situations. I basically felt I could manage and survive in the real world.

When I was working for
Paris Match
I was sent to photograph Marilyn Monroe, who was going to leave Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. There were three of us from the same magazine. I was standing with them and thirty or forty other photographers so I decided to go to the apartment building across the street for a unique angle. I went to the third floor and rang the doorbell. A little old Jewish lady went to the inside of her door. “Who’s there?” I explained who I was and that someone was coming out of the hospital any minute and that I had to photograph her.

“Who’s coming out of the hospital?”

“Marilyn Monroe.”
Ching, ching.
The door locks opened. I was let in. I went to the opened window and put my arms on the windowsill. I had the Bronx chutzpah to ask, “Do you have a pillow I can lean on?”

I took a series of pictures that really told the story of what Marilyn Monroe was like, with all of these people surrounding her. She had been followed out by at least a dozen and a half people. She stood on the street near the curb, talking to the radio and TV guys—she never stopped posing—and I got a series of pictures different than anyone else. The problem was, they didn’t use any of my pictures. You have my permission to use this one.

COLIN POWELL

Retired four-star general in the United States Army, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. secretary of state

(1937– )

I wasn’t much of an athlete as a kid, but I liked playing all the street games, especially one that involved kites. Do you remember the trolleys? We’d take some empty soda bottles, put them into tin cans, and then put them on the trolley tracks. Then when the trolleys came by they’d smash the cans and pulverize the glass so that it was like a powder. We’d glue the powdered glass onto the kite string and attach razor blades to this long tail we had made with torn-up sheets. Then we’d fly the kites on our rooftops and try to cut the kites of the other kids, and some of those kids were on rooftops a block away. It was our version of being in World War Two, shooting down planes.

We never thought of ourselves as living in the slums. We lived in tenements, not slums. We didn’t think of ourselves as terribly poor. Our parents worked hard and their aspirations and all our relatives’ aspirations had to do with getting an education and getting a job. Not necessarily getting a college education, but working and earning money to support oneself and one’s family, with the highest goal that of getting a job with a pension.

I was fortunate to have a tight family. Outside of my immediate family of my mother, father, and sister, there were also aunts, uncles, cousins, and close family friends who lived on our street, Kelly Street, in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. The Bronx is like a small town, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone else’s business. I found that comforting. The neighborhood was warm and embracing with everything I cared about being within a few blocks of where I lived: the schools, the church that we went to, the library, the stores. The stores especially defined the neighborhood for me.

There was Teitelbaum’s drugstore. My sister was best friends with their daughters. Across the street was Kaiserman’s bakery. Then on 163rd Street there was a tailor and dry cleaner. There was the Puerto Rican bodega, the Chinese laundry, a kosher chicken market, and then there were the candy stores, also usually owned by European Jews. Remember the egg cream? It never had an egg in it. The candy store also sold newspapers. No one in the neighborhood ever read the
New York Times
. The only newspapers we read were the
Mirror
, the
Post,
and the
Daily News
.

There was an Orthodox synagogue across from Teitelbaum’s. I used to earn a quarter to turn the lights on and off on the Sabbath, which religious Jews are not allowed to do themselves. I was the Shabbos goy, the non-Jew who was able to work on the Sabbath when Jews were forbidden to do so.

Starting at age fourteen, I worked in a store owned by Jay Sickser, a Jewish storekeeper in our neighborhood who sold baby furniture and toys and spoke with a thick Jewish accent. It was there that I eventually picked up some Yiddish words and phrases. The customers, of course, never knew that. I understood enough to be able to report what I heard to Mr. Sickser so that he knew what the customers were saying to one another about getting a good deal. With that information he would be able to talk to the customer and close the deal.

But the best place was Sammy Fiorino’s, the Italian shoemaker’s shop, which was where we used to hang out and play poker. Nickel-and-dime stuff. There were off-duty cops who were playing with us when some new cops came in to break up the game. They left us alone when they found out who was there. We set them straight.

I had a bike and I used to ride it to Pelham Bay Park, which was a good distance, but when our family went to Orchard Beach, which was part of that park, we all jammed into our car. Once a year, though, we had to go to Jones Beach, for a dip. We went there because our parents believed that the dip would protect us for the whole year against getting sick. Orchard Beach was on Long Island Sound. It wasn’t the ocean. Jones Beach was on the ocean, and that made a big difference to them.

Do you remember those Dollar Savings accounts? I used to save my earned money in my account and my parents also put money aside for me. By the time I graduated from college, my father emptied that account and gave me six hundred dollars. That was a lot of money in those days.

Early on in school I was just trying to survive, but there were a lot of things I learned that were part of our education that I will always be thankful for. We had something called arts appreciation. I’ll never forget listening to Ravel’s
Bolero
and feeling how beautiful that music was. And seeing a Rembrandt painting, probably shown with an old lantern-slide projector.

They also had something called religious instruction. That meant that on Tuesday afternoons you got out of school an hour early to go to the church or synagogue that you belonged to. The Catholics went to their church, the Jews went to their shul, and the Episcopalians, like me, went home. I loved that.

In our whole large family we have a lot of professionals, and there has never been a divorce. That doesn’t mean that everyone was always happy, but it does mean that the family itself was valued and keeping it together was important.