New York, New York ------- the greatest city in the world.

My folks got here in the early 1920's.

I got here in the late 1920's.

My life began in Manhattan at the old Jewish Memorial hospital under the Third Avenue El at 138th street, Harlem.  Since I don't have any memories of that, I will start in the Bronx,  three years later

The pullulating Bronx.  That's how I once heard it described.  I didn't know what pullulating was, so I had to look it up in the dictionary.  You will have to, too.  It sure was pullulating.

The Bronx in the 1930's was an exciting and relatively safe place to grow up in.  There was a lot I didn't know, however.

To begin with, I didn't know, and am still not sure why it is called "The" Bronx.  The other four Boroughs of New York City:  Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island are just called Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island.   No one ever calls these boroughs:  The Brooklyn, The Queens, The Manhattan, or The Staten Island.  There is only one borough that gets the prefix "The" in front of it.  THE Bronx.

Maybe it has something to do with the old Dutch farmer who had a farm north of Manhattan when it was still called  "New Amsterdam", before the British came and renamed it "New York".  Since it was just old man Bronck's farm north of Manhattan, I guess they didn't bother renaming it and just referred to it as that farm north of Manhattan called the Bronck's place.

To this day, it is still called The Bronx.  No one ever calls it Bronx - like I came from Bronx, or I lived in Bronx, or I grew up in Bronx, or the Yankees played in Bronx.  It is correct to say the Dodgers played in Brooklyn, but the Yankees played in The Bronx and I grew up in The Bronx.

The Bronx was a world of its own, in those days while I was growing  up.   Actually it was a split world.  There was an "East Bronx" and a "West Bronx".  The only other borough that had this kind of split was Manhattan.  There was an "East Side" and a "West Side" of Manhattan.  Manhattan also had an upper and lower split, on both the east and west sides.  There was a "lower East Side" and an "upper West Side" in Manhattan.  The divisions in Manhattan were principally determined by wealth and social position, and there were wide gulfs in each.  Traveling a  few blocks in Manhattan could place you in  another world.

It was not so in the Bronx.  In the Bronx the divisions were mostly ethnic.  There was a large Jewish population in the West Bronx, mostly from eastern Europe and western Poland and Russia.  The East Bronx was mostly Scandinavian, Irish and German from northern Europe.  I grew up in the East Bronx, my parents were from northern and southern Ireland.

I was born in the old Jewish Memorial Hospital on 138th Street and 3rd Ave on the upper east side of Manhattan, near Harlem, on November 16th, 1927.  Calvin Coolidge was President and Jimmy Walker, the "Toast of the Town" was the famous playboy mayor of  New York.  He spent most of his time with the "Show Girls" in the nite-clubs down around Broadway and uptown in Harlem.  His  favorite dining place was the "Tavern on the Green" in Central Park in Manhattan.  He made Willy Brown, the current mayor of San Francisco look like a choirboy.  Somehow, he found time to sign my birth-certificate in 1927, the year of Lindbergh's flight to Paris and two years before the bubble burst on Wall Stree.

As soon as they could, my parents moved out of  the Manhattan Irish ghetto where I was born.  It was dominated by immigrant  kid's street gangs.  My father had a good job with "Con Ed" (Consolidated Edison Gas and Electric Company of New York).  He could afford better housing, so " we moved on up " to a fancy apartment in the Bronx.

I wasn't a swinger in the "Roaring Twenties".  I was more like a crier.  I am told by my aunts and uncles, I spent most of my time crying for them to rock me to sleep in their arms while singing "Babyface", a popular tune of the time.  I missed  the Harlem Rennaissance and "Lucky" Lindy's take-off from Roosevelt field in Long Island.  I slept through the stock market crash of 1929 and woke up for the "Great Depression" of the 1930's.  I listened to FDR's "fireside chats" and learned the words "New Deal", "Fair Deal", "Brain Trust" and WPA and CCC.  I got the idea  that "I had nothing to fear but fear itself" (especially as long as my mother and father were taking care of me).  The great man, FDR, pulled us out of the doldrums, won the war and.could have been re-elected 10 times if he hadn't grown old and died in his fourth term.  Teddy is on the mountain in South Dakota but Franklin was in the people's hearts.

During my early school years I saw the headlines from WW II.  Years before Pearl Harbor, I knew about the "Rape of Nanking"  and the bombing of helpless civilians in Guernica in Franco's Spain, and the Condor Legion and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.  During playtime in the school yard at Holy Family Parochial School on Blackrock Avenue, kids in the third grade matched bubble gum cards showing a graphic picture on one side of Japanese soldiers raping women and tossing Chinese babies back and forth on their bayonets.  We were indoctrinated at an early age.  The war scenes made a big impression on 9 year olds.  WW II propaganda started early in America.  There was no doubt about who the bad guys were and who the good guys were.  This was 5 years before Pearl Harbor.

Mussolini's..invasion of  Abyssinia and his mistreatment of the "Lion of Ethiopia" (Haillie Selassie) was also noted by small eyes.  The impotence of the "League of Nations" was also apparent. Chamberlain's trip to Munich and his slogan at the top of the airplane ramp, "Peace in our Time", headlined the "RKO PATHE NEWS".  Appeasing Hitler slowed down the "blitzkreig" through the lowlands about ten minutes. The end run around the useless Maginot Line more than made up for time lost in negotiations.  The bloody retreat from the beaches of Dunkirk and turning out the lights in Paris.shook everyone awake.  This wasn't just an Asian struggle in a far-off land.  It was in Europe, the land of our parents.

Rommel and the Afrika Korps in Tobruk and Montgomery and the British at El Alameien, and both sides singing "Lily Marlene".  It seemed like a great adventure.  American pilots flying with the RAF and John Wayne fighting with the marines in Guadacanal and Bouganville.  How could we lose?  God and Hollywood was on our side.

I was14 on December 7th 1941, when the Japs sank the Arizona, with most of her crew, in Pearl Harbor.  Four years later, at the end of the war, I was 18 and I stood in Pearl Harbor and saw with my own eyes the Arizona still sitting on the bottom, with most of her crew still inside her.  But, we won.  The Japanese Empire was crushed and the 1000 year Reich lasted only 12 years.  Mc Arthur became American Caesar in Japan and Truman beat Dewey, against all odds.

The roaring twenties, the depression thirties, and the wartime forties rounded out my childhood and my adolescence in the Bronx, with a three year monastic hiatus in the middle of the war when I went to Brunnerdale in the Rolling Hills section of northern Ohio, outside of Canton.  During those three years from 1942 to 1944 I was isolated from the war and all other secular activity.  I learned to meditate and live within myself.

Coming back to a description of my early days in the Bronx during the 1930's depression, prior to our entrance into WW II.,    I was three years old  when  my parents moved uptown to an apartment on Gleason Avenue in the East Bronx.  My father had a secure job with one of the largest utility companies in the U.S. (Con Ed of New York).  Gleason Avenue was close to the end of the East 138th Street trolley car line.  Three years later, in 1934, we moved to a better apartment at 2165 Chatterton Avenue up on Castle Hill,  close to the Pelham Bay I.R.T. Line.  We lived in a fancy apartment building, with marble halls and a doorman and a covered walkway awning stretching out to the curb.  We had definitely climbed  up the social ladder from Harlem and the Third Avenue "El".

I grew up in a this German-Irish enclave in the northeast Bronx.  Some of the old-time residents called it "Unionport", from its Civil war days.  I remember the parades on "Armistice Day" celebrating the ending of "the war to end all wars" on "the 11th hour of the11th day of the 11th month".

Without concious realization I  grew up in a country struggling out of a worldwide economic depression, while trying to follow George Washington's advise to avoid European entanglements.  Isolationism was the creed of the American heartland (the mid-west), but I lived on the East Coast, the land of the immigrants, in the biggest, atypical city in the U.S., New York City.

There was no call for isolation  in the German-Irish enclave where I grew up.  If we were to go into WW II, the sentiment in our neighborhood was to fight on the German side and twist the tail of the British lion until he howled.

My mother and father and all my uncles and aunts (there were at least twenty of them) had all passed through Ellis Island.  I was the first one born in this country.  I grew up hearing tales of the I.R.A fighting the English "Black and Tans".  We weren't isolationist, and we  were definitely not pro-British Anglophiles.  We still remembered the "Battle of the Boyne" and the more recent defeat at the Post Office Building in Dublin.   De Valera was a hero in our house and Michael Collins was kin on my mother's side.  We did not trust the English.  The enemy of our enemy was our friend, even if his name was Hitler.

All of my playmates were either Irish or German.  American was a second nationality to us.  Bumpsy Schnieder, Joe Kaul, Fritz Fuchs, and Rick Koenig were all German and as close to me as Jackie Daley, Frankie Mc Dermott, Tommie Rooney and all my Irish playmates.  Most of the Germans in our neighborhood were from the Black Forests of Bavaria.  We had no upperclass Protestant Prussians.  Most were hard working Catholic peasants who came to America for the same reason our parents had - to secure a better economic life.  They were the pillars of our community and our church, Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, founded by Father Nageleisen, agood German pastor, who later became Monsignor Nageleisen while I was still a pupil at Holy Family Parochial Elementary School.

Hanging out with my German friends, I attended several Hitler-youth Brown Shirt Rallies up at Clausson Point.  There were speeches and "oom-pah-pah" bands and marching and sauerkraut and hot dogs.  I paid scant attention to the political speeches while I was busy  gobbling down the free soda and ice cream and sauerkraut and hotdogs.  There was much sport and athletic contests and swimming.  I had a great time in the woods and the beaches at the Brown Shirt Rallies.  No need to tell you I was politically naive at 12 years old.  Hot dogs and sauerkraut got my vote, and we didn't like the English anyway.

Moving on uptown was the goal of every Irish tenemant dweller living in a railroad flat in Manhattan.  My father was one who made it.  We moved into the Castle Hill neighborhood in the northeast Bronx at the end of the trolley lines , the bus lines and the subway lines.  The subways were't even subways where we lived, although we still called them that.  They were above ground and were more properly called called "els", short for elevated trains.

New York was, and probably still is, a great place for public transportation.  When I was a kid, a nickel (5 cents) took you every where.  For a nickel, you could ride on a magic carpet.  You could ride for hours on a transit system that took you to all sorts of exotic places.  New york was the world in microcosm.  If you didn't have a nickel and you were a fresh little Irish "mick" running with a rat pack, you could leap over the turnstile.  The world was open for fresh little "micks" who were nimble and  quick.  We were nimble and quick, and we jumped over  the turnstile stick.

Life was a race in New York.  Years later I read a book called, "What Makes Sammy Run".  They made a movie out of it.  There were a lot of Irish and German and Italian and Puerto Rican and Black Sammy's running in New York.

In New York the race did go to the swiftest.  You ran or you were run over.  This envirinment was the only one we knew.  This is probably why New Yorkers are not universally loved and admired once they leave New York.  We didn't care, we loved New York.  With the exception of Chicago, the rest of the country was blank up to the Pacific Ocean.  Everything worthwhile was altready in New York.  We were provincial sophisticates.

In our neighborhood at the top of the east Bronx, sitting on top of  Manhattan  on the East River, which turns out not to be a real river (it is part of Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean flowing into New York Harbor)  there were only two kinds of people - Germans and Irish.  They seemed to get along pretty well.  My two oldest sisters married Germans.

The German kids worked harder than the Irish kids in school.  With one exception - me.  To tell the truth, they probably worked harder than me, too, but  it was hard to prove.  From the fifth grade on, I won all the "1st Prizes" for "best student of the year".  It didn't endear me to the Irish, my own kind, they were more interested in who was the "best fighter".  But, it did earn me a lot of supper invitations to German homes, where the parents wanted to see the secret of my study habits as I did "home-work" with their children after supper.  The truth is - there was no secret - I was just a nimble "mick" with a nimble mind.  But, Donald Vogel and Bumpsey Schneider did manage to win "2nd Prizes" behind me.  When I went to Brunnerdale in 1942, I took Donald Vogel with me, #1 & #2 from Holy Family.  Donald became the Western Regional Director of the "Congregatio Pretiosissimum Sanguinum" (CPPS), the Society of the Most Precious Blood, and I became a sailor.

Early school in the Bronx was good to me and for me.  The Sisters of Saint Agnes taught me all I needed to know, in an atmosphere that rarely challenged me, leaving me much time for self indulgence.  I had a happy childhood.
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The parochial school system operated to protect me.  The bad kids got transferred to public schools,  and the really bad ones wound up in the CCC  (Civilian Conservation Corps) and got shipped off into the woods somewhere.  Bikeriding, rollerskating, hopping on the backs of trolleys, buses and subway rides to Coney Island and Pelham Bay was my life,  and I loved it.  I was never depressed during the "Great Depression".

My first memories of life on "Castle Hill" was the Jewish candy store around the corner on Castle Hill Avenue.  I lived at 2165 Chatterton, 20 yards from the corner of Castle Hill and Chatterton.  The candy store was on Castle Hill halfway between Chatterton and Blackrock Avenue.  It was sandwiched in between an Italian vegetable store and an Italian barber shop.  Next to the vegetable store was a German butcher shop and a German bread shop.  Next to the barber shop was a Italian shoe repair.  On the corner was a Jewish pharmacy.  Across the street was an Irish bar.

The Irish were wll represented up and down Castle Hill Avenue by a host of Irish bars, at least one on every block from Eastern Boulevard (now Bruckner Boulevard) up to Westchester Avenue and the IRT  Pelham Bay line.  My father's favoritess were the 7 Corners, on East 177th Street (now the X-Bronx Expressway),  Quinn's,  and the Chatterton (only 40 yards from our front door - an important advantage on cold slippery nights).  My favorite, when I reached 17, was Joe & Joe's (it wasn't Irish, but the Italians knew how to make better meat balls and spaghetti).

Before becoming a teenager, however, "ole man Fisher's" candy store  was the "egg cream" palace and the comic book for me and the other pre-teens in our local neighborhood.  Our "neighborhood" (we never knew the word "Hood" in those days) stretched about 10 blocks west (up to the IRT),  and about 20 blocks east (down to the "End", where the East River flowed into Long Island Sound under the Whitestone Bridge, which was built in 1936). It was roughly a long thin 30 block rectangle extending about 2 blocks north and south.  We didn't go further than 2 blocks south, because it was all Italians controlled that neighborhood, down there.  To the north, there was nothing much beyond 2 blocks, except garbage dumps and industrial wharehouses and a big incinerator bordering Westchester Creek.

Westchester Creek was our "Niagra Canal".  No fishes swam in this incredibley  polluted black tar and oil film and raw sewage slime creek.  It was our "ole swimming hole".  How we survived, I don't know.  We violated all the scientific findings concerning ecological pollution and health risks.  In our case, ignorance was bliss.  We dove off the Bruckner Boulevard Draw-Bridge spanning Westchester Creek and off the sewer pipes adjacent to it when the gate keeper chased us off the bridge.  Diving off the top of the raw sewage pipe spewing into the creek made us perfect our "East River Crawl".  Years later, when I went to seaman's Boot Camp at the end of WW II, I learned that this was the same stroke they thaught us for swimming through burning oil after a torpedo attack.

While still in that early teen era, prior to our pool hall and bowling alley years Ole man Fisher's candy store remained the home of Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Spiderman, The Green Lantern, the Shadow,  the Flash, The Torch (a man made out of flame), Namur (an underwater man),  and a host of other demi-gods and hero's whom I have half-forgotten. The classical mythological heroes appearing in today's comic strips were not in comic book form at that time.  Our heroes sprang from the fertile imaginations of contemporary writers.  It was a time for creating legends not copying them.

Had I known how much those 10 cent books would be worth today, I would have convinced  my mother to nail my closet door shut instead of sweeping them out, by orders from on high - my mother.

Mr.and Mrs. Fisher and their 30 year old retarded son, Irving, ran the candy store like a medieval jail.  It was a necessary tactic.  When the store became crowded, the kids would steal them blind.  Ungaurded candy was swallowed immediately.

Irving gaurded the door, while Mr.Fisher gaurded the cash register and watched over the open boxes of candy displayed on top of the counter.   Mrs. Fisher was the custodian of the large, 4 foot high, glass candy display counters in the rear of the store.  You would point to what you wanted through the glass and she would get it for you (without the benefit of  tissue wrappers and rubber gloves, such as those in use today).  It was assumed she had clean hands.  Actually, it wasn't even assumed.  No one cared whether she did or not.  The candy was swallowed before the germs had a chance to move.

Germ theory was unknown in the Bronx in those days.  If  you could swim through the raw sewage and prophylactics and industrial sludge in Westchester Creek, you didn't have to worry about whether Mrs. Fisher's hands were clean or not.

Since we didn't all die of plague; I guess we must have gained some high degree of  immunization.  Years later, when I sailed to Shanghai and became too fastidious to swim in the Whangpoo, I guess it was a sign of maturity.  Then again, there were no visible bodies floating in Westchester Creek and there were in the Whangpoo.

There was a lot of construction work going on in New York during the 1930's under the old public works projects of the WPA.  People made fun of it, but there would have been many hungry families without the WPA  (another reason why the people loved FDR).  In my house, we felt slightly superior because my father did not work for the WPA.  He had a steady job with Con Ed due to his "Old Country" Irish mafia connections.

The WPA construction sites provided us with most of  the materials we needed to build our own toys.  Only the rich kids bought toys; we built our own.  One of our favorites was a wooden scooter made by hammering steel roller skates into the bottom of a 6 foot long 2 X 4  and then nailing a wooden orange crate, with handles, onto the front end of the plank.  We raced down the steepest hills we could find with these primitive locomotives.  Buying manufactured skooters in the department stores, like the rich kids, was out of the question for us.

All of our recreational activity was cost free. Even the movies were free.  The large blackout curtains used at theatres in New York, during WW II, allowed us to sneak in the back door unobserved.  And the subways that could take you on a trip miles and miles away, lasting for hours, was also free.  All you had to do was wait until you saw a train enter the station,  wait until it was departing, and then leap the turnstile, dash across the platform and jump onto the back of the moving train, hanging onto the door chains as the train departed the station.  It would be an unusual, foolhardy, adult station master who would even try to duplicate  our feat in order catch us for not paying the 5 cent fare.

Basically, the life and daily routine of unsupervised teens and pre-teens in New York City (and probably in most big cities, then and now) is that of predator/prey.  Which end you're on changes from time to time.  It is an exciting life when you can fly from subway to subway, Borough to Borough, street to street, building to building, park to park, river to ocean - all for a nickel - no transfers and no time limits.  A wild random adventure on a magic carpet -- the New York Subway System.

There are as many tales of the city as rides on the subway.  Some good.  Some bad.  The big difference between then and now is that we were more like urban prairie dogs rather than wolves and jackels or primitive raptors like the present generation of predators.  We were a pre-TV generation unexposed to todays more spectacular  violence.  We were unevolved by today's standards.  Still, we had our moments of puerile and juvenile pleasure.  As I got older, the opportunities to observe and learn more about the history and wonders of the physical universe became more my cup of tea.  Libraries and museums opened doors for me.

STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION