Just Kids From the Bronx

by Arlene Alda

  VALERIE SIMPSON

  Pianist, singer, composer

  (1946– )

  Both my grandmothers lived in the Bronx and had pianos, but nobody in the family could play them. That was the setup for me to learn, because everyone could sing. I can only think that the pianos were there, just waitin’ for me to come along—destined to play them because of the musical gift that was given to me. My grandmother put me in front of the upright and I just kind of knew it. I was four or five when I started playing piano by ear.

  When I was about eleven years old I took piano lessons and learned to read music, but for a long time I fooled the teacher because she’d play the song and I would just remember and repeat it. Then she got hip to me and stopped playing, so I had to learn to read the notes. I played Bach and Chopin—classical music—and then I got a scholarship to a place called Chatham Square. It was at that time I realized I was never going to be a classical pianist and that I didn’t want to be one. I quit and started playing more on my own.

  I was raised on Jackson Avenue in a three-story building that my grandmother owned. When it came time for junior high school, our neighborhood school wasn’t that great, so I was bused to Junior High School 22, which was a better school about fifteen or twenty minutes away. We were the first black students to go to that school so I felt a big responsibility because I was going to get this good education and I was going to represent the whole black race. Don’t mess up now! I wanted to do well. Nobody told me that, but I felt it on my own.

  In that junior high school a lot of good things happened. They had musical programs, and when the teachers found out that I played the piano I got out of class a lot. That worked out really well for me. I was recognized for what I could do musically, and they made a way for me to do it. Some of the kids saw me get that special treatment, like getting pulled out of class, so I wasn’t exactly a favorite among my peers. I can remember almost getting into a fight with a girl because she thought I was stuck on myself, you know. Teacher’s favorite. The girl was bigger than me, so my younger brother, who was bigger than both of us, intervened and got me home.

  Because I was such a standout in junior high school, when I got to high school I became almost like wallpaper. I disappeared. I didn’t want to be the one that got called out in that same way anymore, so I played very little piano in school in those days.

  But I loved playing handball in the Morris High School yard, which was right across the street from us. I was really good at it. I’d hit those low balls, you know. I still have a great affection for handball even though I don’t play anymore. I play table tennis. I have a Ping-Pong table in my home that looks like a piece of art deco furniture and I’m real good at that game too.

  One of my grandmothers was a minister and she gave me the job of being her church pianist. As a church pianist you come across many people who get up and sing but often start in one key and end up in another, so I learned how to follow. From that early training where the ladies get up with those big hats, full of the spirit and end up not where they started, I could play even if I didn’t know the song. My grandmother paid me to be the pianist. Even when she didn’t have enough money because the congregation was too small, she’d pay me from her own pocket. And she’d make sure she paid me what she agreed upon, because she said that a deal was a deal. She instilled certain values in me. A deal is a deal. Keep your word.

  My grandmother was married and owned this house that we all lived in. I always liked the fact that although she was this minister when she came home she was the wife who cooked for her husband. She changed her roles and put on the hat that she needed to wear and didn’t have a problem with that. She didn’t have to be the head honcho at home. She was an interesting study for me to see—a woman who did many things and handled each thing in its place. Later on I could see how hard that was because some men might get jealous and not want a woman to be in control. She handled all of that really well.

  It was through a church in Harlem, not my grandmother’s church, that I met Nick Ashford. He was homeless and had come to New York to make his fortune as a dancer, but that didn’t work out too well for him. He came to the church where he was told he could get a free meal. In addition to his dancing Nick wrote gospel songs, and since I played piano we were like a natural pair.

  We all get honored in so many different ways as we go along, but the one that really got to me was when I was honored by the Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. to be part of the Bronx Walk of Fame. It touched my heart in a special way because it’s where we come from. It’s where we started. When I think that I represent the Bronx to such an extent that my name is on the Grand Concourse—that gives me a sense of real pride.

  ARTHUR KLEIN

  Pediatric cardiologist, president of the Mount Sinai Health Network

  (1947– )

  I spent a good part of my growing up listening to family immigrant stories—who brought whom to the United States, how they got there, how they ended up in the Bronx, which in those days they thought was nirvana. The immigrant stories always had adversity. There was suffering. There were bad times in Russia, and there were the Depression and the recessions when they finally got to the United States. But most of these stories were colored with humor. I think that was a very important cultural influence on me.

  In our extended family, there were a lot of Sarahs, there were a lot of Roses, there were a lot of Helens, and there were a lot of Sylvias. My mother had two first cousins. One Sarah was Fat Sarah and the other Sarah was Dumb Sarah. I just thought those were their names: Fat Sarah and Dumb Sarah. Dumb Sarah was the most likable person in the world. She would do anything that you asked her to do, but reasoning was not part of it. She was always amenable. The other Sarah, on the other hand, she was the one you had to be careful about how much cheesecake you laid out when she came over for coffee and cake.

  In 1948 my grandfather’s first cousins, who managed to survive the Holocaust, were sponsored by him and came over. And to us, these people were forever known as “the Greeners,” because the slang Yiddish term for newcomers was “greenhorns.” I thought that was their name because they were never called anything else. The Greeners are coming for dinner tonight was what they said.

  There was predictability to life that gave me, as a child, a tremendous sense of security. As the family grew, my grandmother couldn’t prepare the Friday night dinner for everyone, so wherever you lived—our whole family lived in the Bronx, and for years we all lived in the same building and neighborhood—you went to my grandmother’s for dessert and coffee. That was predictable. Our Friday night ritual.

  The men played pinochle in the dinette, and the women were generally in the living room chatting. The kids were in the back bedroom doing whatever we did—mostly watching TV. My grandmother had a TV early on because she liked to watch The Loretta Young Show.

  My grandmother would make an announcement that it was time for coffee and dessert, which meant that she moved the cut-glass fruit bowl from the kitchen into the dinette and put it down on the table, no matter at what stage the card game was. My grandfather was always pissed off because it was invariably in the middle of a game. And she would say to him, “Sha. Be quiet. Enough.”

  My grandmother also had this habit, which, by the way, to the day my mother died, she also had. She used to keep playing cards in the pocket of her housecoat or apron. Then she picked up crumbs or dust from the floor with the two playing cards, using them like a dustpan and a small dust broom. If my grandmother was sweeping the floor of the kitchen on Friday night, and if the men were playing cards and she didn’t have cards handy, she’d go right over to the table and take two cards off the table—without asking, of course. My grandfather would say, “What are you doing? The woman’s an idiot,” and she would look at him with complete disdain and say, “What are you complaining about? You got a tableful!” Then—“The man’s a meshuggener.” A crazy one. Those last words were not said to him but to the broad air.
r />   My grandfather had a view of America that was also part of the Friday night gatherings. We were to hear the world according to Grandpa. He was very clearly seen as the patriarch. That stability in the family was very important to me. There was a real sense that this was the family hearth. Even though it wasn’t a big sprawling home or the farmhouse, it was the Bronx version of that.

  When the Russians launched Sputnik my grandfather went crazy. “What’s the matter with the Americans? Couldn’t they see that the Russians were going to concentrate on this?” His notion was that Americans could be self-congratulatory and lazy. “This country has to wake up.” The reason he had such a profound influence on my life is that he would always say, “The future is science.” We have to beat the Russians. We have to be the technological leaders. We can’t sit on our laurels of having won World War Two.

  Quite frankly, if I were to be true to my real passion, I would’ve been a history teacher. But for my generation, and I’ve heard this from a lot of my friends, there was this pressure to go into a scientific career. That was the future of America, and we couldn’t risk falling behind. It was patriotism linked with the sense that European Jews had made a huge impact on science in Europe and it was now our responsibility here. My grandfather was the one who taught me how many German and Russian Jewish scientists were involved with the Manhattan Project and theoretical physics. It all made a big impression on me.

  I went to a Bronx school, yet I got the best secondary education I could possibly have gotten in the whole country. When I graduated from Bronx High School of Science, there were twenty-one of us in my graduating class who got into MIT. We were the largest single contingent from any high school in the United States going to one of the foremost universities in the country.

  DAVA SOBEL

  Science writer, author, educator

  (1947– )

  Usually when people hear my name, they think that my parents wanted a boy, but that wasn’t so. My parents already had two boys and they wanted a girl. My father, who was a doctor, mostly an obstetrician, enjoyed making up baby names. That’s how I got mine. He delivered a baby the day Alaska became a state and he tried to convince the poor woman to name her baby Ala.

  Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was slightly more privileged than others in the neighborhood. My parents were better educated than most, and compared to the people next door, for instance, we had the larger house. We also owned a boat. My mother was a chemist, in addition to my father being a doctor. My parents had met in chemistry lab at NYU. But I know that I certainly didn’t feel privileged, because at one time I wanted to buy something or other for myself and didn’t want to ask my parents to buy it for me. I saw an offer for a kit of greeting cards in a magazine, which you could sell door to door to make money, so I sent away for it. When it came, my mother was horrified. She had to explain that I could not go door to door to our neighbors, who would be offended by my asking them to buy something from me. That was a revelation. I had no idea that it wasn’t the right thing to do, probably because my parents were not at all pretentious.

  My father worked at Harlem Hospital and we had a variety of people who came to our house. Everyone was welcome. He also had many patients who couldn’t afford to pay and he treated them for free. They cooked for him. They knitted sweaters. They did what they could to pay him something for his services.

  My parents had this forty-foot sailboat, which also had an internal motor. We kept it on City Island, and in the summertime when it was hot my mother and I would just stay out there and sleep on the boat. The sky was always there. My mother became very interested in astronomy and the constellations when my father became interested in sailing. She then went to night school to become a celestial navigator. My mother had a sextant and had even bought herself a little toy planetarium projector—a box that projects constellations on the ceiling of the room. It was probably a study aid for her to learn the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. So that’s what I grew up with. If I have a love of learning, it was because my parents were always interested in learning. I was a studious girl. An obedient girl. I wanted to live up to my parents’ and teachers’ expectations. Early on in school, we were tracked for special interests. By third grade I was in science class. I found a report card in my mother’s old filing cabinet. There were long boxes in which to make comments. My third-grade teacher wrote that I was interested in knowing about life on other planets. How prophetic!

  The Botanical Garden was a short walk from our house. My mother loved it. That made it more meaningful to me, as a kid, than they perhaps might otherwise have been. She was an enthusiastic gardener and visited often. She even had a vegetable garden on our roof, planted in five-pound buckets from the Burger King on White Plains Road. At the southern end of the Botanical Garden there’s a waterfall and a building called the Snuff Mill. What a great place that was to go on dates, which usually involved kissing—not truly X-rated but what passed for it in those innocent days.

  Although the Botanical Garden was right near us, I loved the area directly across the street from us. There was a huge lawn that was public property. It may have been part of Bronx Park, but it was separated from the park itself. On summer evenings, people would take their chairs out to sit and talk there or play cards. There were beautiful trees and it felt like ours. Once, coming home from high school, I saw a group of men cutting down a giant elm tree during the time of the Dutch elm blight. This particular tree was a monument. It was gigantic. I was so shocked that the tree would have to come down, and I stood there, bereft, when one of the guys said to me, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.” That was the Bronx. An unexpected mix.

  My mother’s younger sister, my aunt Ruth, had worked in the Roosevelt administration. She was a special assistant to the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes. She’s still alive, living in Manhattan. She’s 101. Coincidentally, my brothers had gone to Christopher Columbus High School, where my oldest brother was a classmate of Anna Italiano, who later became Anne Bancroft.

  In 2001, Bancroft was in a made-for-TV movie called Haven, which was based on my aunt Ruth’s true story, which took place during World War Two. In the movie, Anne Bancroft portrays my grandmother. There’s a wonderful scene where Bancroft is horrified that the secretary of the interior is sending her daughter, played by Natasha Richardson, into danger in the middle of the war. That danger referred to my aunt Ruth’s assignment from Ickes that changed her life. During World War Two she was sent to bring back a thousand refugees. Most of them were Jews and many of them had been in concentration camps. They were gathered in Naples, some of them still in their striped prison clothes, and put on a ship with a thousand wounded American soldiers and Ruth. They were even attacked during the crossing.

  My aunt Ruth spoke German and Yiddish and took down the stories of the refugees. At the time, it was very difficult for refugees to get visas to enter the United States. Her story came out because the newspapers wrote about how the State Department was pretending that the denial of visas was not going on. It was a scandal. Aunt Ruth has written and talked about her amazing life a lot. She’s been a real role model for me because she was both a writer and a woman with children.

  The Bronx was such a good place to grow up in because the boundaries were so fluid. The neighborhoods were mixed and so were the schools. People from many different countries lived there, people of different socioeconomic levels. However, at that time, I personally knew few Hispanics and African Americans. In fact, at Bronx High School of Science, out of a class of 860-something there were only eight black students. That made me very aware of social injustice. One summer I picketed the White Castle on Boston Road. I was thirteen or fourteen and had come under the influence of a boy, Peter, who was slightly older than I was and who came from a politically aware family. I think he was reading Marx by the time he was in junior high school. He told me about this protest at the White Castle. I thought protesting was a really fine thing
to do, and so I joined in.

  When I mentioned this to my father, he said, “What?” and said I was not to go there again because picketers had actually been shot at. However, when my aunt Ruth went to Washington for the March on Washington in 1963, she took me with her. On the plane we sat behind Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. I was sixteen years old so the whole experience was exciting. When we got to D.C. my aunt had to write a story or something, so I wound up on the Mall walking by myself and listening to the Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” speech. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I think I must have known how historic it was. I had never seen so many people in one place before. And the spirit of it! I was there from another state walking alone, but everybody there was united in purpose. I remember that feeling, and I’m so grateful that I could be there to be part of it.

  ROBERT F. X. SILLERMAN

  Businessman, media entrepreneur

  (1948– )

  My father’s fortunes went up and down, so my childhood was full of highs and lows, mostly measured by where we lived. My earliest memory is of a lower-class apartment building on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. My father had lost whatever money he had at the time, so we had moved there from Manhattan. We were grandparents, parents, my brother and I—six of us, in that small space. I’m sure there were distinctive sounds and noises, but I don’t remember them. However, I clearly remember the sulfur smell from the match you had to light for the stove.

  After four or five years we moved to what I thought was the Taj Mahal—a two-family house in Riverdale on Vinmont Road. It wasn’t large, but at the foot of Vinmont was the school with its baseball field, and that was like Disneyland. It was wonderful. And coming from a virtual tenement to a house, albeit a two-family one, I couldn’t imagine that it could get better. Especially with the ball field so nearby.