My Old Neighborhood Remembered (15 page)

Charley Rosen in his biography writes, “In the final analysis, however, it appears that Jack's misdeeds were fueled by that most ancient and universal of sins, hubris. He was too smart. Too smart to think the rules applied to him. Too smart to imagine he could ever get caught.”

Because the trajectory of Jack Molinas's life is so bewildering, we have had those four books written about him. The narrative line of his story has the capacity to make one feel superior. This was a person of uncommon abilities, he spiraled into the dark and tawdry, meanwhile look at what
I
accomplished, one could say, and that would fit nearly anyone, any accomplishment, since the comparison is with someone who self-destructed and became a disbarred lawyer, a convicted felon, and was murdered. It is for me, though, one of the most upsetting stories of the old neighborhood. Jack Molinas, purely the basketball star, before all his wheeling and dealing, when he walked through the neighborhood with his self-confident stride, owned those streets. As a young man he was so luminous that when he passed me on the sidewalk and nodded, nodded acknowledging me, I felt good about myself.

Under a Carolina moon, my friend, Freddy Krongold, told a French-Canadian girl from a small town in Canada that he was an expert ice skater. Freddy had never ice skated. After high school he studied to be a draftsman and was working as a draftsman in jobs around the country. On one of these road jobs he met the girl who was herself traveling and working. He thought it was safe in a balmy Southern locale to endear himself to her by bragging about his skating prowess. Unfortunately, he had fallen for her and was to travel to a Canadian town with a French name he couldn't pronounce properly to meet her family. Her brothers were going to be very pleased to meet him, she told Freddy, and were looking forward to going ice skating with him.

Freddy lived in my building and home for a visit, he came to me, beleaguered. He was standing in the doorway of my apartment holding hockey-style ice skates he had just purchased. He needed me to go ice skating with him. He had to learn in a hurry. He had about an hour to spare for it and then he was traveling to see her in Canada. We had known each other for years, I would have done anything for Freddy, but I needed to point out to him that he was asking the wrong guy. I didn't know how to ice skate either. He didn't care. He had to learn this and in a hurry. I suggested he was never going to learn well enough to pull it off. He insisted we try, that I go with him and somehow it would work out.

We had a neighborhood ice skating rink. We didn't grow up with it or we might have known how to ice skate. The arrival of television claimed one Bronx movie house after another, and in an attempt to salvage the space, the Oxford Theater, a few blocks away, had been converted to an ice rink. I went there with Freddy and rented skates. He wore his newly purchased pair. This was a low-rent rink, the walls were movie theater walls. Only a couple of people were on the ice, no skating instructor was available, not even a rink attendant, and locking arms, we slid onto the ice, our feet flew out from under us and we landed resoundingly on our derrières. For about an hour we skidded all over the rink, constantly falling, crashing into the side walls. Our best move was to grab onto each other for support and fall to the ice together.

We might have been making a little progress, I mean, a little, but the progress was not on the level of Freddy being able to get out on the ice and skate with boys from a Canadian town with a French name he couldn't pronounce properly. We were falling less frequently, but still falling, like snow.

Bruised, aching, we left. Freddy said he would think of something, but skating wasn't it.

I should note that somewhere in Freddy's courting of this girl he suggested to her that he might convert to Catholicism. He told me he went to church with her and the priest was very impressed with how pious he looked. Freddy said the priest was mistaken about his pious look. Freddy, another Jewish boy who never went to services, admitted to me he was merely bored.

A couple of weeks later, Freddy came to my door and presented me with his ice skates. They were mine. He was never going to put them on again. He made up a story in Canada that he wasn't feeling well and got out of going ice skating with the brothers. He saw the girl for a while. The relationship didn't last. Eventually, he married someone else.

I went back to the rink and figured enough out so that I could get around and stop myself by grabbing on to the side board. I used the skates when I moved to Manhattan because taking a girl to Wollman Rink in Central Park was a pretty nifty cheap date. Some of the girls didn't know how to skate and I encouraged them to try, saying I would show them. Nothing to it. I had Freddy's skates a long time and then the leather gave out. I wore them skating with my children.

He was the only man in the neighborhood I ever saw carrying a manila envelope. And nobody carried a briefcase. I later learned the man, my friend's father, worked in photoengraving and took proofs home at night to check them. The absence of a manila envelope or a briefcase in the possession of the men going to and from work each day helped define my old neighborhood as working class.

My friend's father held an office job. Most of the men did not. The majority of the women stayed at home, my mother in the minority. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen were known to live in the Bronx — most likely in the art deco elevator buildings on the Grand Concourse, in the Pelham Parkway area, in the prestigious Lewis Morris Apartments on the Grand Concourse near 174th Street, or in the more affluent River-dale section of the Bronx.

Geographically, Riverdale was located in the Bronx, but we never considered Riverdale in the northwest part of the borough, with its new apartment buildings and many private homes, as
really
the Bronx and Riverdale residents welcomed that distinction. People didn't say they came from the Bronx if they came from Riverdale.

A few elevator buildings and private homes were located in our neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhoods. Largely it was building after building, block after block of similar undistinguished-looking walk-up apartment houses inhabited by working class residents.

At 1940s and 1950s prices and apartment rents, a Bronx man could earn no more than $100 a week in the pay scale of those years and raise a family. And with the free tuition City University system in place then, his children could go to college. Within the earnings limitations of the trades the men worked in or the stores they owned, many of them must have thought they were doing well for living in the Bronx. The Bronx was still a step up from the lower east side and the tenement sections of Manhattan where many of their parents and perhaps they themselves had lived.

If the urban blight in the Bronx which began in the 1960s had never occurred, the demographics of the Bronx still would have changed from the years when I grew up there. Take this one person as an example. Martin Garbus attended Bronx neighborhood public schools and then the Bronx High School of Science. He was among the first male students to graduate from tuition-free Hunter College in the Bronx and then went to N.Y.U. Law School. Martin Garbus became a prominent attorney and author. His father owned a candy store in the Bronx. The educated children of Bronx working class parents, children who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, people like Martin Garbus, were not going to remain in the Bronx. They were going to leave for a different way of life from their parents, so they could one day carry the manila envelopes and the briefcases their parents did not.

Going with my mother to buy my clothes was extremely awkward. I would look around to see if anybody was watching. It was important to reach the point when I could go on my own to buy things for myself and that was about the time I was high school age.

When I was in college and needed a sports jacket, I went by myself to the Simon Ackerman store near Fordham Road and picked out a sports jacket I thought was really nice looking and fit well, a tan jacket with a lighter tan thread through it, a near-plaid effect. I was very pleased with my jacket until I wore it in the presence of someone who went to the University of Pennsylvania, a friend of a college classmate of mine. My classmate's friend made a remark about the jacket, that it was okay, but nothing
he
would ever wear. He preferred darker colors for his clothing, which he bought at Brooks Brothers.

I needed to wear the jacket, but from then on I felt ill at ease about it, that a guy from Penn wouldn't wear it, that my choice of this jacket made a statement about me, about social class.

I found a picture of myself recently and I was wearing the jacket I had come to feel so ill at ease about. It was a very nice jacket and I looked terrific in it.

In our neighborhood most of us who were college-bound were headed for colleges in New York City. City College, Hunter College, N.Y.U., Fordham, Columbia were the main New York City colleges attended by people I knew.

One boy from the neighborhood said his parents, postal workers, created a savings fund when he was born and he was able to go to an out-of-town college. Sounded brilliant to me. He chose Ohio State. Bobby Santini, the basketball player, went to Iona College in New Rochelle, close to New York City. His older brother, Billy, went to Notre Dame. That was the extent of the people I knew of who lived nearby going to colleges that were not in the city. So few of us went to out-of-town colleges simply because our families couldn't afford it.

People like my friend, Ben Miller, who were good in math, were planning on going to schools of engineering, in his case, City College. In the Cold War 1950s, it was nearly patriotic to study engineering. America needed engineers to compete with the Russians, it was said, and the jobs were there.
The New York Times
ran pages of want ads for engineers.

Leslie Zucker, one of my classmates at Creston who went to the Bronx High School of Science, knew that he was going to be a dentist. I didn't know anything. I had skipped that term in junior high and merely by completing a certain number of classes, skipped another term at Clinton, so I was a high school senior making my college decision as I turned sixteen, as did others in my situation. But in my case, my ignorance about myself cannot be understated. This was my reasoning: I wasn't good at math, so I couldn't study engineering. I wasn't good at science, so I couldn't study medicine. I didn't like memorizing, so I couldn't go to law school. Business remained. I would go into business. My mother worked in business, my cousin was in business. He had moved from motion picture publicity to selling movies to television stations. Business, an amorphous thought, business, was the place for me, I concluded. I ignored that my scores had been high in English and history and never considered being a liberal arts major somewhere. I thought my smart choice was to apply to a business college. In a family discussion with my mother and sister, I offered my intelligent analysis of myself, why I should go to a school for business.

I assumed my mother could have afforded to send me to an out-of-town college, but when I expressed my preference to go out of town, my sister, who was then married, uncharacteristically did not support me. She said, “How can you go to college out of town and leave Mother alone?” I wasn't going to endorse the idea of being company for my mother forever. At age sixteen, I complied and looked into the main undergraduate business schools in New York City. They were City College downtown on 23rd Street and N.Y.U. on Washington Square. Whether it was merited or not, the business college at N.Y.U. seemed to be slightly more prestigious than City College, if for no other reason than you paid to attend. My mother offered that she could afford it and the consensus was my first choice should be N.Y.U. and I was accepted there.

In the 1950s, the N.Y.U. School of Commerce, Accounts, and Finance was essentially a trade school which granted a diploma to be used for finding work. Students were required to take half their courses in liberal arts and half in business subjects. Both sides of the curriculum were lackluster. The liberal arts courses were an academic notch below the English and history courses of my senior year of high school. The business courses included invented subjects, such as a course in which you watched movies, industrial films created to promote industries, like the latest developments in the canning industry.

Traveling to school by subway each day was like going to a job. My classes were completed in the early afternoon and I worked part-time after classes in the stacks of the 42nd Street Library.

A requirement for graduation was a semester each of bookkeeping and accounting during freshman year. Another version of math to me, I managed to pass with my nose barely over the finish line.

The social character of the school was partly influenced by the presence of the students enrolled in the School of Retailing within the college. These students, primarily female, were looking forward to jobs as retail store buyers and executives. The female students came to school dressed for the future, usually wearing high heels and clothing similar to the kind my mother wore to work — a school where the girls dressed like your mother.

None of them were ever going to go out with me. I was too young for them and the way I dressed compared to the way they dressed, I was probably too gauche. I wore a sweater and jeans. In cooler weather, a raincoat. In my first years of college, I was still dating high school girls, hoping, as they turned up, that they were at least high school seniors.

We boys in the neighborhood, in dreamland, bought condoms from our friendly pharmacist. We kept a condom in our wallet, just in case. It left a ring on your wallet, which was inclined to happen when you never had reason to remove it.

The girls I dated during my college years came largely by way of blind dates — through fellow counselors at the children's camps where I worked, through new friends I made at N.Y.U., through girls I didn't connect with, but who were willing to pass me along to someone else. One of the counselors, an older fellow who was in graduate school, told me, “You know, when you go out with a girl, she's just as nervous as you.” This was helpful. I didn't really know that.