My Old Neighborhood Remembered

by Avery Corman

  In 1948, Satchel Paige, the long-time star of Negro baseball, became the oldest rookie in baseball history when he joined the Cleveland Indians at 42, an age that was disputed by some sportswriters as being too low. We were captivated by Satch and who wouldn’t be, he was so colorful with his long, gangly motion on the mound. He made a significant contribution to the Indians, going 6 and 1 with a 2.48 ERA in 1948, helping the team win the American League pennant and ultimately the World Series. In our pitching-in stickball games we imitated Satchel Paige, trying to copy his Hesitation Pitch, a sweet moment in New York street games history, little white kids from the Bronx trying to be like Satchel Paige.

  Two seasons after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, their counterpart National League team in New York, the Giants, added two African-American players to their roster, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson. Arrogant and stubborn in their racial prejudice, it took eight years after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers for the Yankees to integrate, one of the last major league ball clubs to sign an African-American ballplayer. Finally, in 1955, Elston Howard was added to the team.

  I could not realize when I started out to be a Yankee fan how calcified the Yankees would be about race and class. Yankee Stadium sat at the southwest corner of the Bronx, removed from the rest of the borough. I cannot recall any outreach of the New York Yankees of those years into the community life of the Bronx. Not a single youth activity comes to mind for the area of the Bronx where I lived that bore a New York Yankees sponsorship. They were the imperial Yankees.

  Radio broadcasts of baseball games were essential listening. At Orchard Beach you could wander along and hear from blanket to blanket on portable radios Mel Allen’s voice calling a game. The very idea of a portable radio was somehow intriguing. It was portable, imagine. My pals would sit on the steps of the side door of the Bronx High School of Science, or another hang-out spot, the steps of the chapel behind the Concourse Center of Israel synagogue and listen to ball games. Except Richie Albert, who owned the one portable radio in our group, would turn it off during a tense at-bat saying he couldn’t stand it and we would be apoplectic, but it was his radio.

  Aided by ticker tape, radio broadcasts of road games were simulated in the studio. They were not a source of humor even with stilted sound effects to simulate the crack of the bat and roar of the crowd and long delays by the announcers as the tape came through. This was serious, interesting stuff, ball games coming to us from distant cities.

  The nicknames: “The Yankee Clipper” and “Joe D.,” “King Kong” Keller, “Old Reliable” Tommy Henrich, “Tiny” Bonham, “Spud” Chandler, “Scooter” Rizzuto. Lawrence Peter Berra was never anything but “Yogi.” I liked the name of one Yankee opponent, the outfielder for the wartime Washington Senators, “Bingo” Binks, just for the sound of it. Because of who he was, I also appreciated Ted Williams’ nicknames, “The Thumper,” “Ted the Thump,” “The Kid,” “The Splendid Splinter.” We respected Ted Williams. When I was older, still living in the Bronx, I took a trip through New England with a friend from the neighborhood and we stopped in Boston and went to Fenway Park. The Yankees weren’t playing Boston. We went there to see Ted Williams play, an homage from a couple of Yankee fans to see Ted Williams in left field at Fenway at the end of his career. He had been having a running spat with the sports writers and the fans. That day in Fenway Park the Red Sox fans booed him. His playing career interrupted twice for wartime service in two separate wars and still he compiled gaudy statistics, likely the greatest hitter of all time, booed in his own ball park. I don’t think he was ever booed in Yankee Stadium.

  In 1946, lights were installed at Yankee Stadium and the first night games were played. To market the idea of night games the Yankees scheduled events before night games were played. Yankee players competed against one another in relaying the ball from the outfield to home plate, in running the bases, hitting home runs. A klieg light similar to the ones used to illuminate the ball park was set up at second base and the catchers tried to hit it on a throw from home plate. I went on one of those nights and it was baseball heaven.

  Rooting for the Yankees allowed for many highlights and then in a separate category was the 1949 season. To be thirteen and follow your team as Joe DiMaggio misses the first couple of months of the schedule with his famous bone spur and returns to hit .346 the rest of the season, and for your team to go into the final two games of the season playing at home against the Red Sox, who are leading by one game and need only one of those two games to clinch the pennant, and for the Yankees to win both games, win the pennant, and then go on to beat the Dodgers in the World Series — I had an outstanding season in 1949.

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  JOE DIMAGGIO’S GLOVE

  * * *

  My mother handed me a baseball glove one night and told me it was Joe DiMaggio’s glove. She was then a buyer and knew various children’s clothing manufacturers and said one of the men she did business with was a personal friend of Joe DiMaggio’s and gave her the glove when he learned she had a son. The best I can say about it was that it was an old, scuffed baseball glove. The glove did not bear an engraved Joe DiMaggio signature. It had not been autographed in ink by Joe DiMaggio. It was so well used you could barely make out the markings, but it was, according to the engraved signature, a Lyn Lary model. Now Lyn Lary had been a shortstop for the Yankees and a Lyn Lary glove was a fairly popular model, but I asked my mother why Joe DiMaggio would be using a Lyn Lary glove. The person who gave my mother the glove apparently anticipated my question because my mother said she had been informed by this man that the players didn’t necessarily use the gloves they endorsed and that Joe DiMaggio liked that particular model. It sounded possible, not likely, but possible. I wasn’t assertive enough to ask my mother to go back and get Joe DiMaggio’s autograph on it or even Joe DiMaggio’s autograph on a piece of paper.

  The next day I took the glove and walked up the short street from our building to Creston Avenue where my friends congregated and I announced I had Joe DiMaggio’s glove, that my mother knew somebody who was a personal friend of his and it was his old glove. The glove was examined and immediately someone declared it was a Lyn Lary glove, that it said Lyn Lary on it. I explained that the players didn’t necessarily use the gloves they endorsed and Joe DiMaggio liked that model. Nobody was buying it. The unanimous verdict was I showed up with any old baseball glove. I kept the glove and I used it for punchball and stickball. Was it Joe DiMaggio’s glove? Beats me. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you have a glove that is supposed to be Joe DiMaggio’s glove and you don’t have proof of it and your friends don’t believe it, is it Joe DiMaggio’s glove?

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  PLAYING BASEBALL

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  We didn’t play baseball, not in my neighborhood. My friends were such obsessed baseball fans, we followed our teams so intensely, so much of our street games had baseball in them, in the rules, in the fantasy aspects, they were street game versions of baseball, but actually playing baseball wasn’t our experience. Boys who lived near parks in the Bronx with sandlot baseball fields, and there were a few such parks, might have had a different experience. Our neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhoods were dense with apartment buildings and retail stores and no baseball fields.

  Creston Junior High School ran an intramural program, basketball indoors in the fall, softball in the schoolyard in the spring. Living right near the basketball court at the Bronx High School of Science we grew up with basketball skills and did well in basketball at Creston. We were also able to make the transition from stickball and punchball to softball in the Creston program and were passable softball players. We had no interest in playing baseball. With baseball you needed to be organized to play, nine players, hopefully, and another team to play against, and equipment. In Brooklyn, youngsters had the Parade Grounds League and Kiwanis-sponsored teams. We did not have a similar institutional presence organizing baseball for our
neighborhood. And the older guys in the neighborhood from whom we took our cues didn’t play baseball, so neither did we.

  We were operating out of self protection — if you don’t play, you lack the ability to do so, and we didn’t play.

  One time in an unusual occurrence a group of us went north to the baseball diamonds at Harris Field, located near Bedford Parkway. We were there to play a pickup game with some boys from that general area whom we knew. My pals were woeful on the field. Playing second base because it seemed right for my physique, I was also woeful. We never went back to a baseball diamond again.

  One of the greatest ballplayers in the history of the game, Hall of Famer, Hank Greenberg, came from the Bronx and played for James Monroe High School in the Bronx. People of my generation were too young to have experienced his full greatness as a ballplayer. He began in baseball in the 1930s. During the war when our awareness of baseball was developing, he was in military service. He came to our notice dramatically when he returned to baseball for part of the 1945 season to lead the Detroit Tigers to a World Series victory. Hank Greenberg played until 1947. One of the major home run and RBI sluggers of baseball history — from the Bronx — from a nearby high school — Hank Greenberg couldn’t inspire our hopelessly asphalt-locked group to play baseball.

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  EDGAR ALLAN POE

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  Poe wasn’t from the Bronx, but he did live there, unlike Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth who only worked there. He lived in a cottage near Kingsbridge Road, historians tell us, from 1846 to 1849. While in the Bronx he wrote Annabel Lee and The Bells, giving the Bronx a nice poetic arc from Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee to Dion DiMucci and Ernie Maresca’s, Runaround Sue.

  At P.S. 33 our teachers made sure we knew about Poe. The Raven, “Once upon a midnight dreary. . . . ” with its mystery and rolling cadence was much appreciated. We were abundantly aware he had lived in the Bronx. He was our guy because a few blocks away from P.S. 33 stood Poe Cottage, his home in the Bronx. The cottage had been moved from across the street where it was first located and it had been restored. Open to the public, Poe Cottage contained furnishings Poe supposedly used, Poe marginalia and a bust of Poe. A small park on the Grand Concourse near Kingsbridge Road, Poe Park, was created as a setting for the cottage.

  Poe’s name was used for neighborhood businesses like the Poe Garage and the Poe Raven Bar. Across the Grand Concourse from Poe Park was the best known bar in that part of the Bronx, Poe Cozy Nook. With the drinking age at 21, it was going to be a long time before I or any of my friends set foot in the place. We all knew about Poe Cozy Nook, a bar that promoted itself with wit. The matchbooks for the bar said, “Flat Beer. Rotten Food. Crummy Liquor. Lousy Service.” Poe Cozy Nook was famous for its advertising; billboards in the nearby subway stations, a question mark leading into an all-type design filling the entire sheet, graphic design ahead of its time, text as the visual.

  Poe Park was a narrow stretch with trees and benches, the cottage at the northern end and a bandstand in the center. Dances with big bands attracting large crowds were held in the park. At first I was too young to go to a dance in Poe Park and then when I was dance age, I wasn’t socially adept enough to go, so dances at Poe Park were never part of my neighborhood life. But what would Edgar Allan Poe, historically regarded as dark and brooding, have thought of the idea that one day people would be jitterbugging outside his cottage? I suspect he would have been more comfortable with the idea that teachers would be teaching him and that local Bronx children would be captivated by his mysterious raven . . . and the bells.

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  “HAVE YOU GOT ANY INFORMATION?”

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  The phrase sounded like a line from a spy movie. By 5th grade we were wandering through office buildings in the Rockefeller Center area, making the rounds of foreign government trade offices accumulating “information” — promotional brochures for the foreign governments’ commerce and exports. We would present ourselves at the receptionists’ desks. “Have you got any information?” we would say and if we hit the jackpot, we would walk away with our winnings. Seldom did a building employee stop us from entering the elevators. We did not look like children up to no good. We looked like children there for “information.” That is what we would say if we were ever stopped, “We’re looking for information,” and we were passed through. Everybody knew what “information” meant.

  Latin America was a key focus of the brochure-gathering. We studied the culture and products of “our neighbors to the South.” The Disney movies, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros had been released during the war and Latin America was in our consciousness and in the minds of curriculum planners and teachers in the New York City schools.

  At the end of a period of study, the teachers would organize culmination parties and show us products of the countries we studied and sometimes introduce their food for us to taste, like guava jelly from our friendly Latin American neighbor, Mexico, which we declared was awful.

  People from Brooklyn referred to going to Manhattan as “going to the city.” We said we were “going downtown.” The trip downtown on the subway was a direct ride on the D train from our neighborhood to Rockefeller Center and most of the trade offices were there. The excursion sometimes included a stop at the Automat. It was intriguing to us how the compartments that were empty suddenly snapped shut and then opened again and the food was ready, macaroni and cheese, baked beans. Coming from a world of small apartment houses and narrow candy stores, we were enthralled by the skyscrapers, the offices, the Automat.

  We were about eleven and twelve and not only moving freely through the Bronx, we were traveling by ourselves without adults to accompany us into midtown Manhattan, making our way back, sometimes doing it solo. This was, no doubt, also true of our peers in the other boroughs. Children of the emerging suburbs enjoyed privileges we might have envied, if only we knew better. But as city kids we didn’t have to be driven anywhere by adults. Independent, we got there on our own. We got the “information.”

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  RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCE

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  “The nuns hit.” The Catholic boys in parochial schools told us that and used it as a proof of how tough they were. As we grew older, some of the Catholic boys studied daunting Latin in parochial school, which earned the respect of the Jewish boys.

  Outsiders may have thought the Bronx then was primarily Jewish. I never assumed it was, not with so many Catholics in my neighborhood. The U.S. Census did not break down population by religion and the best available estimate then was a 1952 survey by HIP of Greater New York estimating nearly half the population of New York City was Catholic, about a quarter Jewish, and slightly less than a quarter Protestant. The Jewish population in the Bronx was undoubtedly proportionately higher than the citywide estimate and some neighborhoods in sections of the east Bronx may have been largely Jewish. Not where I lived. In the Concourse-Fordham area the sense we had was that we were in a half Catholic, half Jewish neighborhood.

  Peter Decker, the former archivist for the The Bronx County Historical Society, lived a few blocks north of my apartment on the northern side of Fordham Road. He has written that he estimated his neighborhood was 40% Jewish, 60% Christian, the Christians overwhelmingly Catholic.

  With several Catholic churches, a Catholic university — Fordham University — the Catholic schools, St. Simon Stock and St. Nicholas of Tolentine in the neighborhood, and with the widely known Cardinal Hayes High School a bus ride away, the Concourse-Fordham area was a magnet for Catholics.

  The Catholic presence, not only in the neighborhood, but in the city at large was always apparent to me. The Daily News, which came into the apartment every day, was intimately allied with the Catholic Church in a conservative political and cultural outlook. Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, an outspoken conservative in church and non-church matters, was a major celebrity within its pages. Another luminary frequently featured in news sto
ries — and this was the tabloid Daily News, crime was its beat — was the Catholic Manhattan District Attorney, Frank Hogan. The upper echelons of the Police Department and the Fire Department were dominated by Catholics and The Daily News was particularly thorough in covering Police and Fire Department officials and activities. The Catholic William O’Dwyer became Mayor of New York in 1946.

  The most important Catholic in the world, Pope Pius XII, whom we saw in newsreels and in the newspapers, was so spiritual looking with his gaunt, solemn face, he seemed otherworldly and very religious. The Jews had no one who looked quite like him.

  Some of the Catholics in the neighborhood went to church on Sundays. Given the large number of synagogues in the Bronx, some Jewish families must have been attending Sabbath services, as well. Not my family or the families of my friends.

  Movies of the time, The Song of Bernadette, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Going My Way, The Miracle of the Bells, with good priests and good nuns doing good deeds, contributed to the idea the Catholics had something going for them that we who were Jewish did not. We were not given The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston as Moses until the mid-1950s.