My Old Neighborhood Remembered (16 page)

Of all those dates, all those girls, somehow I remember one evening in particular. Who arranged the blind date, I do not remember. My date lived in an apartment building in the east Bronx and perhaps nothing suitable was playing in the movies, or it was suggested by the go-between, and we ended up not going out, just sitting in her living room talking so as to get to know each other. She was a plain girl, extremely shy, extremely quiet. I knew the requisite chemistry was lacking and I wasn't going to see her again, but I was appropriate. I stayed a couple of hours, talking, and then I said it was time to leave, except she said something that held me in place. “But I bought a cake.” She had gone to the bakery and bought a cake for her blind date, a cake that was in a box on the kitchen table. I said that was nice and we should have some and she cut a slice of cake for each of us, and we sat at her kitchen table and talked some more and ate the cake, and I thanked her for it and left knowing I was not going to call her again, not knowing these many years later I would recall an extremely shy, extremely quiet girl who bought a cake.

An advantage of going to school downtown was that you became familiar with different places to go on dates, which was important since you were always trying to show what a sharp guy you were — performances of Brother Theodore and his tales from Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe. Greenwich Village coffee houses. An Italian restaurant near N.Y.U. where men played bocce while you ate. Broadway shows — in the second balcony. Greenwich Village art movie houses. Staying in the Bronx would work, too, if you took a girl to the Ascot, still showing foreign films.

Ben Miller and his folk singing widened his base of operations and he included me. He met some private school girls, high school seniors, and I went out with one of them. I mentioned to a friend that where the girl lived, in a duplex apartment on Central Park West overlooking the park, was the most beautiful apartment I had ever been in. My friend, who was from the Bronx, began referring to her as, “Duplex Annie,” thinking he was being clever, unaware he was responding with hostility to the difference in backgrounds.

My dating relationship with the girl lasted only a few dates. I remained friendly with her for a while afterward. She went on to Sarah Lawrence College and fixed me up with a couple of her college friends. Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville was not far from where we lived and a neighborhood friend of mine with a car went on a double date with me. We took our Sarah Lawrence dates to a restaurant in the Bronx near Long Island Sound. Considering how much we were prepared to spend for a first date, and a blind date at that, we thought it was a pretty good place — with a dance floor, the music supplied by a juke box. The girls' attitude indicated it was not to their standards. “Guess you're not going all out,” one of them said sardonically. Another time a girl from Sarah Lawrence stayed at the Central Park West apartment so I could go out with her. Somehow the subject of dogs came up. She owned nine dogs, she said. I asked what you would do with nine dogs. “We hunt,” she answered.

These were girls who went away to spend college weekends with Ivy League boys. My brief period of dating these girls as a boy from the Bronx was heavy with implications about stations in life and uncomfortable.

My mother wanted to live in a place more suitable to her improved economic status. She chose an area of the Grand Concourse where elevator buildings predominated and stores did not occupy the street level. 1695 Grand Concourse was an elevator building just south of the Lewis Morris Apartments near 174th Street. The kitchen and bathroom fixtures in the new apartment were modern, the tree-lined Grand Concourse, without stores, was picturesque here. The Bronx is what my mother knew, where she wanted to be and it is indicative of her feelings about the place and the stability of the Bronx in the 1950s that she could think of a move from one part of the Bronx to another as upwardly mobile.

The time when our neighborhood friends were our friends exclusively had been changing as we went to our different colleges. We seldom had time to spare for schoolyard basketball. Because I worked part-time, I hadn't been socializing in the neighborhood as I once did, and as I proceeded at N.Y.U. even the banal course work required study and term papers. Others had demands on their time. Our growing-up neighborhood life was ending. And it was ending at the very time I moved away from the neighborhood.

After my latest summer as a camp counselor I returned with what I considered to be a new intelligent self-assessment. As a camp counselor, I wrote lyrics for parodies of pop songs for Color War and other camp events and discovered I had a flair for it. I had chosen the business world. I was in a business college and if I had a way with words I decided what I would do with it. I would become an advertising copywriter.

I began to major in marketing and started taking courses in advertising. One of my classmates, Marty Daniels, worked on the business side of the college newspaper and suggested I join him on the staff. I worked on the newspaper selling advertising space to Greenwich Village stores and restaurants and I wrote ads for the advertisers. When N.Y.U. combined the newspapers for the three undergraduate colleges on Washington Square into one newspaper, I became the business manager. The newspaper office was a hangout for people who worked on the paper, for their friends, for students trying to get articles into print about some area of their interest. The place was alive, a contrast to my moribund classes. I no longer worked part-time after school. I was in the newspaper office every day.

One of the people who wrote for the paper was Elliot Denman, a premier race walker who competed for N.Y.U. and went on to represent the United States in the 1956 Olympics. He thought it would be fun for me to try out for the N.Y.U. track team as a walker and he also approached a classmate of ours. An event was coming up in Madison Square Garden, the intercollegiate indoor track and field championships. A one-mile walk was scheduled. With that event in mind, Elliot showed us the proper race walking techniques and we practiced with him, using as a track, the sidewalk encircling Yankee Stadium. He then took us to the Bronx N.Y.U. campus where the track team practiced on an outdoor track under the coach, Emil von Elling. As we went around the track doing the heel-and-toe stride Elliot taught us, he spoke to the coach. We were placed on the track team. We practiced for a couple of weeks for the event at Madison Square Garden, which was held on a Saturday afternoon.
The
Madison Square Garden and I was in it, wearing a competitor's number at a track meet with a public address announcer calling off events and with people in the stands.

In practices, the other newcomer was faster than I was for short bursts. I was able to outdistance him over the length of a mile. When the race began his strategy was to block me from getting ahead of him. We became involved in a heated duel jockeying for position, preposterously far behind everyone else in the race. My adversary was disqualified for running, was ordered off the track and with a clear path I finished dead last. Elliot won. I was so dead last they were taking up the boards at one end to make way for the upcoming 60-yard dash when someone yelled, “Hold it, there's someone still on the track.”

Some of our friends came to watch and afterward one of them said, “We were laughing so hard, we almost fell out of the balcony.”

Another event was scheduled at the armory on 142nd Street and Fifth Avenue as part of the indoor season and it included a one-mile walk handicap race where you were given a head start based on your previous performances in competition. My fellow newcomer did not enter. I did and received a 300-yard handicap, the maximum. Twelve walkers competed. Two of the others lined up at my starting position with the maximum handicap. The competition was held with some ceremony, a band played as you went around the quarter-mile track.

I lost control of my pace which was supposed to be based on my practice times of the past month. I went too fast and — in a one-mile walk race — nearly collapsed from exhaustion as I crossed the finish line. They had to help me off the track. I didn't finish last. Somehow I managed to finish ahead of one of the two who started with me and another who couldn't make up my considerable head start. I was tenth out of twelve. With that accomplishment, I retired from the track team, sports news which went unreported.

With my college years coming to an end, I was convinced I had outstanding credentials. I would be a graduate of a business college. I had specialized in advertising courses and had been the business manager of my college newspaper. I wrote ads that appeared in the newspaper and also had samples of ads from my advertising copy courses, which I was able to assemble in a portfolio. How many people graduating from college competing with me for jobs would have accomplished that much, I said to myself. I heard that sometimes in an advertising agency you needed to take a job in the mailroom and spend a certain amount of time there as part of your apprenticeship toward becoming a copywriter and that was all right with me.

None of the parents of my Bronx friends were college graduates. We were the first and the expectation was for us to accomplish something with our college degrees. In my case, I had an additional incentive, to not be my father's son. I was not going to be anything like him. I was going to do something I never heard of anyone in my old neighborhood doing, none of the older men, none of the younger men. I was going to be an advertising agency copywriter on Madison Avenue.

It never happened. Prior to my graduation, I sent my resume to advertising agencies, registered with employment agencies and with the college job placement office and covered the classified ads. I did not hear from anyone. I was aware of the difference in the advertising business between advertising agencies that primarily handled consumer accounts and agencies that primarily handled industrial accounts. The prestige was with the agencies with consumer accounts. As my graduation passed and the weeks went by without an interview, I would have been willing to work in any kind of advertising agency.

When four months passed since my first inquiries, I thought about going into the Army and being done with it. The draft was still in effect. Every male had to factor it in. College graduates were being hired, though. Not every employer was demanding that a candidate for a job had to have his military service out of the way. And I was only twenty. From what I had heard, I had a few years before the draft would get to me. I decided to press on.

In my gloomiest moments in the time that followed, I tallied my miscalculations. I should have had the Army out of the way; I made a mistake by not removing that obstacle. I should have tried even harder, been more imaginative in my approach. Above all else, I should not have taken the job I eventually accepted. It was not with an advertising agency, nor was my second job, and each year that passed without working in an advertising agency, I fell behind the graduates who
were
hired by advertising agencies, who did their apprenticeships in mailrooms and in junior copywriter programs, who were already copywriters, and it became too late for me. I was too far along the way in the wrong direction.

By accepting culpability for my unfulfilled hopes, I did not consider the entire equation. Being Jewish with a Bronx address on my resume, graduating from “NY Jew,” as the school was sometimes snidely called, and breaking into the Madison Avenue advertising world of the mid-1950s, where many of the people hired for entry level jobs went to the very schools the Sarah Lawrence girls visited on college weekends, didn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle to me. As I neared graduation I had heard at school that Grey Advertising and Doyle Dane Bernbach might be counted on to hire Jews, but it was unlikely with the other advertising agencies, and the only Jews who might be hired by
any
advertising agency were from more prestigious schools than mine. I disregarded that. I thought I was different and special and with my resume and my impressive college credentials, the prejudices wouldn't apply to me. My resume didn't state I was a Jewish boy from the Bronx, simply someone from the Bronx. I didn't appreciate in that world, coming from the Bronx meant you came from the Bronx. Madison Avenue wasn't populated with people from the Bronx.

Many years after this, at the home of a friend, I met Phyllis Robinson, a pioneer creative executive in the advertising business and a mainstay at Doyle Dane Bernbach. We talked about that period when I was first looking for a job as an advertising copywriter and she said she never would have hired me. She would not have been favorably disposed to the trade school aspect of my background, that I had actually studied advertising in school and taken advertising copy courses, she told me. She would have preferred an English major who had something unusual about him. This was one person's opinion, but an important creative person in advertising, who said my very choice of school and my course of study was in her view, misguided.

For something I wrote further along in my adult life, I spoke to an employment agency person who had been active in placing people in advertising jobs at the time I had been looking for a job. This person confirmed that anti-Semitism and an old-boy network definitely existed in the advertising agency business then, and those years were extremely unfavorable to someone who did not go to an Ivy League school, or at least a prestigious school. The undergraduate business school at N.Y.U. might have been slightly more prestigious than the undergraduate business school at City College, but possibly not, and not sufficiently so to represent a difference to Madison Avenue.

A few years later, everything began to change. “The Graphic Greeks” with people like George Lois, began to make inroads into the art departments of advertising agencies. Then advertising agencies began to hire more “ethnics,” as they were bluntly called, and people like Jerry Della Femina, an Italian-American from Brooklyn, infiltrated the copy departments. Even Della Femina met resistance in his early forays. When he brought his copywriting samples to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency looking for a job on the Ford Motor Company account, he was told his samples were good, but “they don't want your kind.”