Souvenirs from brooklyn

I was born on September 9, 1927 in a home (1075 60th Street) in Brooklyn, New York, and I was born to an elderly Italian woman who was an amateur midwife. My poor mother! I weighed 9 pounds! No hospital. On a feather bed. We lived in a 3-family apartment building owned by my grandfather, who spoke little English, but tried. If we got on his nerves, he used to say, “Go up the stairs!” I remember a big party when he received his citizenship papers. I used to help him study for his exam. When he appeared before the judge, he said: “I don’t speak English very well, but I study hard. I hope you will make me a citizen.” The judge said: “Nuncha, worry, Nunzio, I’m going to pass you on.” The judges haven’t changed much.

In my early years we lived on 58th Street in Brooklyn between 11th and 12th avenues. There were few cars then. I remember that all the street vendors had horses and carts. One used to come yelling: “Hey banana”, another, “Aschallola (endive) frisca (fresh) … another,” Fresh fish. “We loved the arrival of the ice man in summer. blocks of ice with your ice pick. The chips would fly and we would stick to them. It was our ice cream. My parents didn’t have a refrigerator. We had an ice box in the summer. I remember the ice was melting and dripping into a pan underneath. emptied periodically. In the winter we had a big metal window box the size of an air conditioner. My mom kept butter, milk and eggs in it. There was no ice bought in the winter. We weren’t poor. This was common. The milkman he had a horse and a cart. The horse knew his route and walked ahead of him to the house next door while delivering. He left the milk in a little box outside our door. There were no school buses. I walked several blocks to school PS 10 5 since I started kindergarten through sixth grade. n I graduated I went to Pershing High School, which was 13 blocks away. Three of them were blocks of avenues. My kids don’t believe me when I tell them that I walked barefoot through the snow to get there. All of this is true except perhaps the barefoot part.

When I was 13 we moved to the Marine Park section of Brooklyn. 2049 Brown Street. A single family home. The Mondells were proud owners of their homes. My mother’s family was furious with my father because he took her miles away to “country” where they would never see us again. In fact, it was quite underdeveloped and remote at the time. There were potato farms only a block away. It was a bus and train trip to visit my grandmothers. We didn’t have a car, but we did it every Sunday. There, the family gathered with aunts, uncles, and cousins ​​for all-day traditional food. There was a lot of food and homemade wine, singing, talking and playing. And lots of love

We had no telephone, no television, no computers, just a small radio. But, curiously, we were happy.

Two blocks from our house on Nostrand Avenue there were streetcars running. They weren’t going very fast so we used to hitchhike in the back. When we finally got a phone, it was a shared line. Then we went to a dial phone and my dad bought a car. A new 1941 Chevy for $ 800. We were rich!

When I was 15, I was working in a one-man butcher shop after school. I delivered orders by bike and helped in the store. There I learned a valuable lesson that I pass on to aspiring businessmen. One Saturday we had finally closed and I was exhausted. Saturday was a long day and it meant cleaning the boxes when the store closed, scraping the butcher blocks, depositing fresh sawdust, etc. We were about to leave when the phone rang. It was Mrs. So-and-so calling. You forgot to include bacon in your order. Could my boss ask the boy to give him something? I needed it for breakfast on Sunday. Well my mouth went a mile a minute … “She’s crazy.” I told my boss. “No way”. “Carl,” she said patiently, “butchers cost a dime a dozen. I need all the customers I can get. Either you deliver the bacon or you don’t come on Monday.” Well, I wanted the job, so I reluctantly accepted. PS: He took me in his car and they gave me a good tip. Moral of the story. Every customer is important if you want to stay in business.

I graduated from elementary school and went to James Madison High School, WWII was in full swing. No butter, no tires, no gasoline, no sugar, no coffee. Almost every house had a little flag with a star that indicated that the family that lived there had someone in the service. Unfortunately, some had gold stars, which meant that the man or woman from the service had been killed. My father was an air raid warden and voluntarily patrolled the streets at night to make sure everyone had their lights off.

Then my time came. I was seventeen years old and enthusiastically enlisted in the Navy. Wouldn’t they know that the day they called me to active duty, August 11, 1945, the Japanese surrendered (it was the atomic bomb and I, I suppose), the war was over? After completing my tour, I was discharged and returned to Brooklyn, went to college, got married and here I am living and working in Kingston, NY. I have to tell you that I love the Hudson Valley though. It is a good place to live. Unlike Tony Bennett, I left my heart in Brooklyn and it will always be there.