Just Kids From the Bronx (2 page)

For more than a hundred years the Bronx has been associated with the Yankees, the Bronx Bombers. And across the generations so many Bronx kids, me included, cheered them on, with many of the boys dreaming of playing pro ball. Bobby Bonilla, who spoke of his “indescribable love” for his supportive father, was able to realize his baseball-player dreams. And Michael Kay, fueled by an intense love of the Yankees and by his own resourcefulness, figured out early on how to get involved. “I was practical and rational, even as a nine-year-old,” he told me. “
If I’m gonna be part of the Yankees, I’m gonna be that broadcaster!
So I’d interview my friends with a tape recorder.” Michael Kay himself hit a metaphorical home run when he grew up to become a sports journalist and Yankees broadcaster.

*   *   *

T
HE
B
RONX STORYTELLERS
in this book have found their niches in the fields of religion, law, education, entertainment, business, finance, science, medicine, government, politics, sports, acting, music, drawing, photography, architecture, graphic design, journalism, cartooning, writing, and dancing. Both in spirit and in fact, with their contributions to the larger community, they exemplify possibility. I am so grateful for what started out as a lark, just a fun trip back to the Mayflower. It led to one of the richest experiences of my life: the meeting of the people in and the making of
Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was, An Oral History
.

A
RLENE
A
LDA

PART ONE

FRESH AIR … A LUCKY BREAK

I knew that I wanted to be someone.… I wanted to be revered by the family … not only by my immediate one, but my extended family as well.… They all were so excited when I finished medical school that they had this large party for me. I still have the pictures. Actually, it spawned many other doctors in the family whose fathers said to them, “Forget about being a wallpaper hanger. If Mickey could do it, then you could do it!”

—M
ICHAEL
(“M
ICKEY
”) B
RESCIA
, M.D.

A. M. (“ABE”) ROSENTHAL

Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent and longtime executive editor of the
New York Times

(1922–2006)

For seven years I lived with my five sisters and our parents, Sarah and Harry, among flowers and trees, dancing fountains, wilderness paths, birds singing in their ecstasy, and such stupendous quantities of a particular treasure as to send my mother into paroxysms of acquisition greed.

“Fresh air!” she would announce. And then from her lips came the command that rang through every apartment in the Bronx neighborhood every day: “Go grab some fresh air! Out! Fresh air!”

As other American pioneers and gamblers kept moving west, the Jews of New York kept moving north toward fresh air. For Harry and his Pirate Queen the road led from the tenements of the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where young warriors waited in ambush to pounce on the new kids and eventually declare peace. The adult pioneers worked six days a week and every hour of overtime they could get. They saved every penny with pleasure, looking down from the peak above the sea to the pass above the fruited plain-Mosholu Parkway station, far north, only a few miles south of the New York suburbs boundary line.

Beyond the station, as far as a housepainter’s eye could see, stretched Van Cortlandt Park. The ride on the subway was usually an hour or more each way. Coming home, fresh air awaited, ready to be consumed in large gulps, a reservoir never dry. And during the day, breathing the paint or the lint, a workingman knew that at least at home the wife and the children were breathing that fresh air, all day long.

The pioneers stood and gazed at their children and then went to the bank with their deposit books every few months.

Paradise was known as the Amalgamated, for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, which built good housing for its members. Members of other unions were eligible to buy apartments too. Papa’s credentials were his card in the housepainters’ union and the bankbook of his life savings.

By the time we moved into our apartment Sarah and Harry had been on the waiting list for about two years.

They both knew Harry would make a living as long as he could climb a painter’s ladder or crawl out a window to a scaffold. With overtime here and there he could come up with the eighty dollars a month to meet the maintenance charges. They never again might have such a chance, a great park across the street, four bedrooms, living room, nice big kitchen, and “double exposures,” which gave the apartment cross ventilation from the breezes of park-fresh air whenever you raised a window sash.

Harry and Sarah went to the savings bank, took out one thousand dollars, almost all the money they had saved. They took the cash to the office of the union cooperative and put it on the table. They were gambling that money, and every dollar they would be able to put together from Harry’s work, for God knows how many years. They figured that with good luck some months Harry would make enough to pay off some of the cooperative’s loan for the rest of the apartment, in addition to the maintenance. In the months he was short, the building management would almost always wait another month.

We lived in those co-op buildings the first years of the thirties, when the only thing thriving in America was hard times. The eight complexes consisted of half a dozen six-story apartment buildings, each built around a courtyard that blossomed in the spring and flowered almost until the snow provided inexhaustible hills of snowball and snowman. Just across the street was our forest, Van Cortlandt Park, which not only sent out sweet perfumed fresh air for generations of workers’ children twenty-four hours a day but also provided a golfing link. Golfers, who were not experts, hit balls into the hands of boys waiting to scoop them up and run to return them for a nickel apiece.

Twenty-five years later, when I was an American correspondent in Eastern Europe, I saw Polish workers and their wives in a shabby seaside resort on the Baltic going for a walk in the nearby forest or marching for hours along the narrow beach, up and down, up and down. They went back to the little boardinghouses for meals and rushed outside as soon as they could for what else? Fresh air. Then they sat in wooden chairs to put their faces into the pallid sunshine. That week on the Polish Baltic I was a boy again and the workers were my parents.

In 1967 I was appointed an assistant managing editor of the
New York Times
and immediately set off for Europe to share the magic moment in journalistic history with the foreign staff of the paper.

The first stop was London, where Anthony Lewis, then the bureau chief and a brilliant correspondent of lucidity and range, gave a dinner party for me at the Garrick Club. During the cocktail hour there was one of those sudden drops in the noise level and the voice of a British member of the staff could be heard clear and true as a royal trumpet: “Tell me, Abe, do you think there will ever be a Jewish managing editor of the
New York Times
?”

Everybody froze, glass in hand, a living tableau. I turned slowly, martini still half raised, heard myself say, “Well, I sure as hell hope so.” There were a few titters, and somebody decided it was time for dinner.

Sure enough, justice triumphed, and a couple of years later I was back in London, this time to celebrate with the crowned heads of Europe my appointment as managing editor.

The morning after my arrival, I picked up a copy of the
Times
of London outside my hotel room door—Claridge’s—saw “Up from the Slums of the Bronx to the Editor’s Chair, Page 3” on the front page. I knew they were singing my song and turned the page.

I saw it at once: a long story from the Washington correspondent of the
Times
, a kind of strange-customs-in-faraway-places piece in which the writer tried to explain to the British public exactly how it had come about that a poor boy from a slum in an exotic part of New York seldom visited by tourists, who attended a free college with the social prestige of a herring, whose parents were born in Russia and who also happened to be, well, Jewish, actually became managing editor of the most important, powerful, and prestigious newspaper in the United States.

It was written with a sense of kindly wonderment, as if explaining the customs of Ugandan tribesmen to the British audience.

There was a certain poignancy in the piece, discernible perhaps to only two people: the author and me. The writer was Louis Heren, who had been the correspondent in India of the
Times
of London during my years there. He had told me often that though he stood high in the regard of the proprietors of the
Times
of London, he and they knew he could never become its editor. He was born a Roman Catholic and had compounded that initial error by attending the wrong schools.

I sent Louis Heren a message of thanks, also informing him that the Pirate Queen would have been furious if she knew that Mosholu Parkway
1
would ever be described as a slum.

*   *   *

Note: This excerpt from Abe Rosenthal’s unpublished memoir is printed here with permission from Shirley Lord Rosenthal. It is the only contribution in this book, aside from my own, not derived from a live interview.

CARL REINER

Award-winning actor, writer, director, producer, and comedian

(1922– )

My father wasn’t a joiner, so we were never synagogue members. When I turned thirteen, he persuaded a rabbi to rent him a synagogue in a poor neighborhood for a Thursday morning bar mitzvah for me. My only training for the event had been with another rabbi who, for a few months, was willing to teach me what I needed to know. My father, my mother, my older brother Charlie, and a group of strangers, old Jews with beards and prayer shawls, were the only ones who attended when the time arrived.

And it wasn’t like today, where kids write their own speeches. My father wrote the speech for me, in both flowery language and beautiful handwriting. “Worthy Assembly. You’ve afforded me a great honor this day, when you have come to this temple of God to take part in and celebrate on the day I have become a bar mitzvah.” It went on in the same manner, ending with “May God be with you in my endeavor to be a good member of society and a good Jew. Amen.” This speech was actually the same one my father had written for my brother Charlie, who had said it at his bar mitzvah a few years earlier.

Over seventy years go by when a granddaughter of our old neighbors the Fishmans contacts me out of the blue with something she thinks I’ll be interested in. It turns out to be her family’s copy of that same speech in my father’s own handwriting. My father had written it out for the bar mitzvah of Murray Fishman, her father, who was a year younger than I was. So that speech was delivered at three different bar mitzvahs at three different times.

I was thirteen and officially a Jewish man in the eyes of the elders, but my friends, who were older and maybe more religious than I, had already taken part in a minyan, a group of ten adult male Jews who get together for prayers. There have to be a minimum of ten or the prayers won’t be valid. If I saw men in our neighborhood with prayer shawls, I quickly crossed the street. I always dodged being part of a minyan, especially since I had learned only what I needed to learn for my bar mitzvah by rote. I knew no Hebrew. I couldn’t read the prayers.

But one day I was with my friends walking down our street when we were all called in for a minyan. Since I was part of the group I couldn’t escape. I had no choice. When everyone else started praying, I didn’t know what to do, so I prayed too—but in Hebrew double-talk. My guilt lasted many years, because at the time I thought that I was preventing the prayers of nine faithful Jews from reaching God because of my gibberish.

*   *   *

M
Y INTEREST IN
performing was sparked early on by my mother’s family. Her brother had been in Irving Berlin’s show
Yip Yip Yaphank
. He played the spoons and he sang. And my mother’s sister, Adele, was just a funny woman who made us laugh. We also went to movies and listened to comedy shows on the radio. I guess that people are born with a talent for comedy, but if you’re in a household that accepts humor as a potent force then you also develop it.