Just Kids From the Bronx

by Arlene Alda

  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.

  LLOYD ULTAN

  Historian, author, educator

  (1938– )

  I was born in 1938, and I like to say that I’m as old as Superman and Bugs Bunny and one year older than Batman. I guess it was in my DNA or I got it from osmosis or something like that, but from the time I was a toddler I’d ask my parents, my aunts and uncles, what happened before I was born. The question was usually about what happened with my family—with my grandfather, and even my great-grandfather, who was still alive when I was young.

  My parents were caught up in the Great Depression. My mother used to laugh when she’d say she went to Theodore Roosevelt High School—in one door and out the other. She actually quit to take care of her family. She therefore always felt the lack of education and so she educated herself. She did crossword puzzles to increase her vocabulary. She listened to classical music concerts with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony on the radio, and she read historical novels. She said that was the best way she could get to understand history. My father, on the other hand, wanted to be an architect. He was in his first year at City College when he had to leave to take care of his family. My younger brother got my father’s interest in architecture. I got my mother’s interest in history. So I’m a historian and he’s an architect.

  When I was two years and ten months old, we lived one block west of the Grand Concourse. There was a hill there. We were walking when my mother suddenly grabs me and we run up the hill with her holding my arm. We stand on the barrier that separates what would be called the service road from the main part of the Grand Concourse. I have no idea why we are there. I remember so distinctly that across the way, on the opposite barrier or mall, there was a woman
with a pageboy haircut wearing a print dress. Suddenly this woman leans forward, turns to her left, and starts applauding like a seal. I look in the direction she’s looking, and coming up the Grand Concourse is a car. And in the back of the car, talking to a person next to him in the backseat, is our president, Franklin Roosevelt. I turn to my mother, who is still holding my hand, and I say, “President Roosevelt? Here?” Of course, as far as I was concerned as a kid, Roosevelt’s first name was “President.” But I knew that he was an important man because everyone knew his name. Everybody talked about him. And every time there was an election, my mother took me into the voting booth and I watched her cast her ballot.

  The Grand Concourse was also a big parade route, especially on Memorial Day and July Fourth. There would be flags, bands, veterans’ groups, and after them the civic groups. Because these parades were huge, the massing of units would occur along the side streets. They would come into the Grand Concourse as the last contingent in front of them passed by. I think because of that, every Thanksgiving morning I turn on the television to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. To this day, I love a parade.

  Between the ages of seven and fourteen I had asthma so I really couldn’t do much in the way of athletics. Whenever I ran, even just a short distance, I’d find it difficult to breathe. So I never developed any skills of hitting or running with a ball. One result of this was that I turned to books. I read a lot. The first book I ever took out of the New York Public Library was a history book. The book was a historical novel, called Og, Son of Fire. Toward the end of third grade, the teacher said, “Next year when you go to class, you’ll have two new subjects, history and geography.” I said, “Ooo!” and the kid next to me said, “What’s that?” I was sort of in my own world, and I was perfectly happy with it.

  Even though my parents didn’t have much money, they were determined that their kid was going to get everything that New York City had to offer. So every weekend we went someplace else. One place we went was the Bronx Zoo. First of all, it was free. I found out later that you had to pay on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, but nobody went there on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I got to know what all the animals were and where they were. The African Plains had already been built so I saw the animals roaming around in what was close to their natural habitat. I can still walk around the Bronx Zoo and know exactly where I am, even with all the new installations.

  My parents made it very clear when I was in elementary school that if I wanted to go to college either I had to get a scholarship or I had to do very well and get into one of the city colleges. So I got into Hunter College in the Bronx, which was only eleven minutes away by subway.

  After World War Two, they wanted to integrate Hunter to get their hands on the GI Bill money. They couldn’t do it as an all-girls’ school, but they could preserve the all-girls’ atmosphere by keeping the Park Avenue branch that way and integrating the Bronx campus. When I got there, in the freshman class of 1955, Hunter’s president, George N. Shuster, said that this was the first Hunter College class that had an equal number of men and women.

  For my graduate work, I bless Nelson Rockefeller because I was able to get a New York State Regents College Teaching Fellowship to Columbia University, which is not very far away from the Bronx. That paid my entire tuition plus room and board. They gave the money in one lump sum for me to decide how to spend. Whatever was for tuition was tuition. But as for room and board? I stayed at home in the Bronx instead. And of course Columbia University, at that time, had some of the top historians teaching there. Richard B. Morris for colonial and American revolutionary history, Harold C. Syrett, who at that time was editing the papers of Alexander Hamilton, and William Leuchtenburg, who taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories. These were the top historians of the day and it was wonderful.

  In 1977 two things happened in the Bronx, both in the same month, and within days of each other. In October 1977 Jimmy Carter was at the United Nations to attend meetings and speak before the General Assembly. At lunchtime, he gets into his limousine and of course he’s followed by all the press. He goes up to the Bronx to Charlotte Street, and suddenly he’s walking on rubble. Block after block of rubble. The print photographers take out their cameras when they see Jimmy Carter walking along Charlotte Street and the television cameras do the same thing and suddenly—poof—this is seen all around the world. The image of the Bronx until then, at least in many eyes, was that of a largely middle-class area, upwardly mobile, healthy. And then all of a sudden these pictures come on and people’s jaws drop. Then the New York Yankees are in the World Series that year and it’s a night game. The Goodyear Blimp is circling overhead for occasional shots from that angle. You see this shot of Yankee Stadium from above, gleaming in the darkness, and suddenly the blimp moves, Yankee Stadium hovers out of view, but the narration is still going on. And this is on ABC television. It’s broadcast nationwide and also picked up internationally. You see the outline of the streets and the little pinpoint streetlamp lights and the rest is all blackness. And then somewhere, about ten blocks to the east of the Concourse, what hovers into view is a huge tongue of flame leaping to the sky. Howard Cosell is the broadcaster and he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what Jimmy Carter saw. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” And I’m at home going “Aghhhhhhhh,” grabbing my head. The combination of the two really shook the image of the Bronx.

  A few years later, the nail in the coffin happened with the filming of the 1981 movie Fort Apache, the Bronx. People in the neighborhood are complaining to Paul Newman and Ed Asner about all the negative things in the movie. So Newman and Asner meet with these people at a local diner and explain that they can’t stop production because all this money has already been spent. They have to go ahead. But they did promise that at the beginning of the film they would put in a disclaimer saying that not everything is like this in the Bronx, and that there are good people living in the area, etc. etc. etc. And true to their word there is a disclaimer at the beginning of the film. But I defy anybody by the end of the film to remember the disclaimer at the beginning! Danny Aiello is also in the film. He plays a bad cop. In one of the most shocking parts of that film, he’s standing on the top of a triangular burned-out building, and he takes the perpetrator, puts him over his head, and throws him over the parapet to the streets below. Shocking! Before that scene is shot, Aiello is approached by the director. “Danny, come up with me in my car. I’ll take you to the set.” When they get there, the director says, “Now you go to the top of that building and shoot the scene.” Danny Aiello takes a look at the building and says, “That’s my house. That’s where I grew up!”

  DION DIMUCCI

  Singer, songwriter, guitarist, multiplatinum recording artist

  (1939– )

  I lived a block away from the Bronx Zoo. By the time I was sixteen I think I saw every animal alive on the planet Earth. I was five feet away from lions and tigers and gorillas and monkeys and seals and snakes and giraffes and rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses and llamas and just every animal imaginable. And in those days you could get really close to them. So what a fortunate person I was. I’d jump over the fence on Southern Boulevard and meet giraffes and hippopotamuses. I mean, it was wild. You could get a few feet away from an elephant. Where else can you do this?

  I was also just a hop, skip, and a jump from the Botanical Garden, where we’d swim. We’d dive off bridges into the streams and climb trees and what seemed like mountains. You could be Tarzan for a day. I feel very fortunate that these things too were like a stone’s throw away from me.

  But there’s a lot of angst and fear and anger when you don’t know how to do life. I wasn’t getting that kind of guidance from my parents. Maybe they didn’t get it from theirs. We’re all part of something bigger than ourselves. Whatever the reasons, none of us in my house knew how to deal with emotions, so I grew up with this fear of people. I don’t mean just economic insecurity. I don’t mean fear of p
eople punching you in the face. I mean in an emotional sense, where you don’t know how to handle things. It’s kinda like—you become this kinda macho guy. You cover up all your feelings. You hide some deep psychological weaknesses. I had this feeling that I was supposed to be born knowing everything. Of course, that wasn’t the case, but you’d pretend that it was by acting that way.

  I lived one block away from Tally’s Pool Room on Crotona Avenue and 183rd Street. Once, Willie Mosconi came and played with the neighborhood champion Joe Rock, and what a wonderful day that was. It was like a saint or royalty was coming through, all dressed up in a suit. It was unbelievable. We looked at him—we’re not worthy. He was like the Pope of Pool.

  My father had a lot of wonderful qualities, but he never had a real job. He would paint and sculpt and he would take me to the museums in New York, but he didn’t work. I had uncles, though, who were wonderful electricians and policemen and they were hard workers, all of them. They were also tall. They looked like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant to me, but they weren’t in my neighborhood.

  What was in my neighborhood, up on the corner at Joe’s bar, were these mafioso-type wannabes. I had a number one record and they told me, “Give us the record and we’ll put it in the jukebox and when the kids come out of school, they’ll pass the bar, they’ll hear the record and they’ll buy it.” It was number one! They said, “I want you to be with me.” I said, “I am with you.” “No, I want you to be with me.” I said, “I am with you.” And then we go a little more into it. I said, “I can’t kiss your ass. I’m not a ‘yes’ man, I’m a rock ’n roller. I can’t do that. I can’t be like these people who walk around kissing your ass.”