Just Kids From the Bronx

by Arlene Alda

  DANIEL (“DANNY”) HAUBEN

  Artist, educator

  (1956– )

  I moved into this building when I was nine. I was very quiet and shy, so my mother accosted every kid that looked like he was my age, saying, “I have a son your age. You have to come visit him.” So there was this kid who lived down the hall, David Schwartz, and the two of us connected. The apartment building we lived in was newly built, and since we were the first tenants we had all of these empty packing boxes and cartons. David and I built forts out of the boxes. Then we drew a street map on a big piece of cardboard and colored it in with Magic Markers. My father brought home gears from the company he worked for and we’d stick them together with clay and make little vehicles that drove on the roads we created. We decided that the cars needed drivers, so we purchased small plastic Wishniks and Rat Finks from vending machines. My mother would even make outfits for them. Eventually these became the inhabitants of a town that evolved over the course of the next six years. We called the town Edge City, and it became more and more elaborate. We wrote laws and wrote about the adventures we had with the town. We had lights and we eventually even had water running to it. We created these elaborate organic dwellings, with Plexiglas windows, that emerged out of the countryside. My friend Karl built a balsa wood outhouse as his contribution, so David and I assessed it and decided that Karl could also be in on our adventures. The only time my mother got upset with me was when we started hauling in bags of cement and plaster and then started drilling, sending clouds of dust billowing through the apartment. The town kept developing until we were into our midteens, at which time it was up on a coffee table that took up most of my bedroom.

  That town was something that we created. It was its own world. It had its own logic and its own story. It reflected the world that we knew but it was something different. And I think I’m trying to do the same thing in my paintings. The more I get into a painting and the more I work on it, the more it develops its own logic and becomes its own world. And then my job is to try to make it enticing for others to enter that world in some way.

  I went to Music and Art High School, but I dropped out after one year. I always hated school. Maybe it’s my nature or maybe it was the influence and support of my older siblings. Maybe it was because it was the sixties and there was this kind of free vision of life. What I hated was people trying to control my behavior and my thinking and to what end? I didn’t know. I just didn’t take to discipline for its own sake or to being taught things that nobody had ever bothered to try to help me understand why we were learning all this stuff. Albert Shanker, head of the teachers’ union, was my hero because we had all these days off from school, due to all the teacher strikes going on at the time. The thing was, when I had off, I would go to class at Cooper Union with my brother Eddie or to bookstores with my brother Jay. I was very excited about learning, but I wasn’t excited about school. And I was excited about engaging with the world. So fast forward to tenth grade, where my parents were actually instrumental in helping me transition out of high school. They had me sign into a school down in South Jersey where my sister lived, just so the truant officer would have a harder time tracking me down.

  All my friends were still sitting in classes when I got my GED. When I was eighteen, I was living in this apartment with my mother, father, grandmother, and then my sister moved in with her infant son. It was a no-brainer. I had to get a job and get out of there. By then I had already traveled to India and hitchhiked across America with my girlfriend. I moved in with Jimmy Boyle, my only friend who had his own place.

  I had taken these civil service exams. I was very good at taking tests—or cheating at tests. For example, I had taken the post office test, but only got like an eighty or something. You’re competing with veterans and disabled people who get ten to fifteen extra points so you have to get a very high score to get the job. One third of the test was memorization. There’s a list of fifteen names and fifteen addresses connected with those names. You were supposed to stare at the lists for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then when the lists were taken away you were supposed to connect the dots. Well, if you spent a fraction of that twenty minutes copying the list … Needless to say, I aced that part of the test. I worked the graveyard shift at the Bronx General Post Office for one and a half years.

  Luckily I was then invited to move into a commune in the Boston area with my brother Eddie and a bunch of people who were eight or nine years older than I. Living there I was able to focus on my art to a greater degree. What I found myself working on, in my first large painting, was the view from my parents’ apartment in the Bronx. When I was seventeen, I had done a Magic Marker drawing of the view, so that became the starting point for that painting. I started it in Boston, but I finished it back here in this apartment in the Bronx. I moved back in with my parents when I was twenty-four and then went to the School of Visual Arts.

  To attempt to capture the view from this apartment with this sprawling urban landscape and amazing sunsets is a daunting task. When I was younger I couldn’t imagine drawing or painting such a thing because it’s simply overwhelming. But I think that aspect of it was the thing that stuck with me. My early impressions of that vastness were very strong. How do you do it? How does one manage? How do we urban dwellers process all of the information, the myriad of sounds and sights that surround us and are constantly bombarding us? How do you bring order to the randomness and chaos? How do you create art that reflects all these things but that has its own logic, enough to draw the viewer in? That’s the trick.

  * * *

  Note: Danny Hauben and his wife, Judy, told me about their conversation when they met for the first time at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

  Danny: “It’s so much easier to meet people here in Virginia. New York, you know, it’s like everybody is in their own world.”

  Judy: “Oh, you live in New York. Where do you live?”

  Danny: “I live in the Bronx.”

  Judy: “Is that nice?”

  Danny: I had no answer for that! I had never heard that response before. Who says such a thing?

  LOUISE SEDOTTO

  Educator, principal of P.S. 76 in the Bronx

  (1957– )

  I grew up in a semidetached home where there were always people coming and going—family, people from the block, people from the neighborhood. My mother cooked these Italian feasts so she was prepared for whoever stopped by. If it was dinnertime, they’d just sit down to eat. There would be a three-course meal, starting with the soup, and at the end my father’s job would be to cut the fruit. Then, of course, came the black coffee and lots of conversation around the table.

  My brother is eight years older than I am, so if he had friends come by after school they would eat. Whoever came would always sit down and join us, whether it was during the week or on the weekend. My grandmother also lived in the neighborhood, just a few blocks away from us. My father is one of ten kids, and my mother is one of seven, and each of their siblings had four to five children. It was a very large family, with extended family too. My childhood was a good one. You know, comfortable.

  My mother had an uncle, Morris, who loved to entertain. He would come occasionally with his buddies and he’d play the harmonica. Even though he worked for the IRT he had a show with his friends who played with a band. They would set up in the backyard and the whole neighborhood would come by. They came for the music, and of course my mother put out food. It was a gathering with music and dancing and eating. It was a simple life, not complicated by too many distractions.

  I went to a parochial grammar school and later to parochial high school. In the Catholic schools we still had nuns as teachers. My father owned a dry-cleaning business and we would always take home the habits the nuns wore. He dry cleaned them for the whole school. I always loved school even though it was very strict. I seem to have been very disciplined because I knew that I was in school to do my work. If there were a mischievous boy or
someone like that, Sister Mary Eymard would stand him in front of the room. I’ll never forget George Rogee. We were in third grade, and he was chewing gum. Sister made him stand in front of the room with the gum on his nose. That must’ve been about 1957. Sister would also walk around with a ruler and hit your hands. It was intimidating, oh yeah, and yet I had some wonderful nurturing lay teachers as well. And those were the ones I was very involved with.

  There was Mrs. McGann, who wore perfume. I loved walking past her. She was also very well dressed, which made her so very different from my mom, who never even wore makeup. I was fascinated with those teachers who came well dressed to school, wore makeup, and smelled of perfume. I was just so amazed at the glamour of it all and it impressed me. And then again, I actually loved the work. I always wanted to be at my desk, I guess, to please them, but when I went home I played school for hours, especially since my father had bought me a school desk for my bedroom. I was always the teacher, and my imaginary playmates were the students. I knew even then that’s what I wanted to be—a teacher.

  I always felt that the people in the Bronx were so friendly and down to earth. I bought my first house there but when I moved up to Westchester it was very different. Playdates for the kids? Something we never had when we were growing up.

  There’s an old saying, “You can take the girl out of the Bronx, but you can’t take the Bronx out of the girl.” So here I am, back at a school in that borough. I’m home.

  * * *

  Note: P.S. 76 was the neighborhood school that I attended as a kid. I don’t think we had any particular academic distinctions at that time. It is definitely a better school now than when I was there in the late 1930s and ’40s.

  STEVE JORDAN

  Drummer, musical director, composer, producer

  (1957– )

  Music was always in my house—always in the family. Music and baseball. Those were my two favorite things. My parents were big music fans. My mother used to sing classical music, actually. My father is an engineer/architect, but you could swear that he was a musician. I was sitting with him a couple of days ago, and he sang that great old Lionel Hampton tune “Flying Home.” He sang the solo, the saxophone solo, verbatim. That’s where I get that from, because I can sing a solo break too.

  I was the class clown in school, so for a couple of years there my parents had to stay on me. But I wasn’t like an evil kid. Nothing like that. Any time I got grounded, the one thing they didn’t take away from me was studying music. So when I was sent to my room, I could listen to music and I could practice. So I was like, Hey, this isn’t too bad. In fact, it kind of helped me focus.

  From the age of two years, I played on pots and pans and, in fact, I was always also playing records for people. My parents were fascinated about how I knew, before I could read, how I knew which record was which. I had figured it out. I must’ve been able, because I have this photographic memory kind of thing, to just identify the labels and the print on the labels. I could remember which song was sung by which group by the look of the label.

  When I was about eleven or so, if my aunt was having a party or somebody in the neighborhood was having a party, I was the deejay. If my class was having a party, I would deejay the party. I was on this AV—audiovisual—team in school. There was this record player that was made for schools, a big mono speaker, just one speaker, but it was heavy duty to withstand children. It always had a really big sound ’cause it was a bigger unit. It had a little bass happening. It was very sturdy. I always remembered that record player. So years later, I was producing a record—and they were still records in those days—in Milwaukee. I was going down the street and saw this AV repair shop, so I walked in and I saw all the stuff that I used to have in school. I bought all of it. So I have one of these record players in my home now. It sounds fantastic.

  And of course I was a baseball fan. I played second base from the age of about seven years old through the clinic and then Little League. In the back of my head, my dream was to be the second baseman for the New York Yankees. To begin with, I wasn’t very tall. In fact, I was always trying to figure out how to grow. I gotta get taller here. I’d try standing up straight. I loved milk, so I drank a lot of it. They had to lock up the fridge. One of my best friends, Steven Grant, was a guy who was almost like six feet when I was five-four or something like that. Actually, he went on to play professional basketball. It kinda drove me nuts that he was so tall. My dad had to take me to a shrink because of it, to talk it out. To have this doctor explain to me that it was okay and that it doesn’t mean that you’re any less of a person or anything like that. You know, it got serious. The strange thing is that my father is six-one, so there was always hope. Hope springs eternal. I was gonna get there.

  My mom started a neighborhood association. That was a big thing in the sixties and seventies—to try to get your communities back. The organization started a day camp, so the whole camp was able to get tickets to go to a Yankees game. It was the old Stadium, and of course we were sitting in the bleachers, where the seats were black. Those seats were about twenty degrees hotter because of that black paint. It was really a bizarre design, but the reason for it was because if you’re hitting, if the bleachers were white, you wouldn’t be able to see the ball, so there had to be a black background.

  The Yankees did their best to try to help out the community. They teamed up with Con Ed and came up with a program called Con Ed Kids. They’d get a bunch of kids from different communities around the city and you’d get into a game for free. You’d also get a special gift, besides the seats from Con Ed. Some extra perk. There was this guy called the Answer Man. His name was Earl Battey. Now Earl Battey was a professional major league catcher who played for the Minnesota Twins. So he’s sitting out there in the 900-degree heat and there’s a field full of kids—just millions of them. Around the seventh-inning stretch, it’s time for him to ask a question to one of the kids, and if you got the answer right you’d win two free tickets to sit in the mezzanine section at the Stadium and then get your picture taken with a Yankee. So we’re out there—a sea of kids. And now it’s time. He asks the question. And I, with all the other kids, I’m like—Hey teacher—and I raised my hand and I pinned on the Answer Man, and he looks right back at me, looks right into my eyes, and poses the question to me. So this is like incredible. The question is, “Who plays second base for the New York Yankees?” I’m like, What? I’m like, This is crazy! Or maybe the question was, “Who’s number 20 for the Yankees?” Something ridiculously easy for me.

  The second baseman for the Yankees at the time was a gentleman named Horace Clarke. It was a very tough position for him to fill because he was taking the place of the great Bobby Richardson, who had played second base for the Yankees. His number was number 1, and he was an all-star. I mean, he was a great Yankee and everybody wants to be like Bobby Richardson or Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris. And so these are the lean years for the Yankees, right after they won all the championships. Mickey Mantle’s still on the team, but they’re not doing so good. So it’s like okay, Who’s number 20 for the Yankees? Well, it’s Horace Clarke. He’s from the West Indies, I’m of West Indian descent, and to top it off my dad’s name is Horace. So they ask me this question—it’s like—Is that the question? Don’t you have a more difficult question? So obviously I answered the question correctly and I won the two tickets.

  My dad, Horace, took me to the game, which was the prize. I got on the field and I got my picture taken with Bobby Murcer, who was the guy who was supposed to be the next Mickey Mantle. It was amazing, of course. The Yankees. The Stadium. Earl Battey. Con Ed Kids. It was a Cinderella kind of thing.

  NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

  Astrophysicist, author, science communicator, and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York

  (1958– )

  Kids have different profiles in school. Some are shy, some are sociable, some are purposely disruptive, and some are the class
clowns. And I’ll bet you that every successful comedian in the world today was a class clown in school, and that they would have been subjected to the ire of their teachers accusing them of disrupting the lesson plan.

  At no time is anyone saying that maybe this person can become a world-famous comedian. Teachers generally don’t think this way. They want to homogenize who and what you are so that you are quiet, that you get high grades, and that you’re not disruptive. And your grades are their currency of judgment for your promise and performance later in life. In casual questioning that I’ve done, if you corralled the most influential people in the world—this could be attorneys or novelists or journalists, playwrights, poets, people who shape our culture—and put them all in a room and ask, “How many of you got straight A’s in school?” I bet none of them would raise their hands. Include in that a list of CEOs and inventors. If hardly any of them got straight A’s, then what is it that we’re trying to breed in our students if you’re after straight A’s? Maybe there’s something else that matters if school is to prep you for being a productive adult. Yes, you want to get as high a grade as you can. But if a student is left to feel inadequate, that’s an unhealthy learning environment.

  There was a teacher in the sixth grade who cut out an ad for me about taking classes at the Hayden Planetarium. But it’s not like she said, Oh, I recognize that this guy is brilliant. That’s not how it came across. It was Look what he’s doing. Maybe we can find some way for him to invest that energy differently.