New York in the 1950s had a lot going for it. For one thing, it had three professional baseball teams. Being a small boy, I appreciated that. Most of the games were on TV, and our families gradually all obtained TVs. By 1955, almost everybody had a TV at home, and they worked most of the time.
Regarding TV, we had it much better than the rest of the country. We had seven channels of TV; the rest of America, which we casually regarded as the countryside, or the farms, or the stix, was lucky to receive two or three channels. Nowhere, of course, had TV all day and all night. It was all snow everywhere between midnight and about seven a.m.
The Radio in New York was outstanding, at least in the number of stations. There were a few stations dedicated to popular music, which quickly became dominated by Doo-Wop. In 1956, Elvis Presley's success insured that a lot of full throttle rock-and-roll was included. It was all still very regional, and a lot of the best rock records never made it to New York, but between the baseball and the radio, one remarkable thing happened.
Both baseball and the radio were thoroughly integrated. My generation was the first whose heroes, in sports and music, included black players. Some children grew up in households where the adults were infuriated by this, and were very vocal about it. Those children took a certain message from that. My family never mentioned it, so for me it was simply a fact. I loved Doo-Wop sung by groups of Italians, groups of white boys and girls from mixed backgrounds, groups that were all black, and, remarkably, by groups that included white and black singers. When rock hit, Little Richard and Chuck Berry became very popular. Many big hits came from black artists in New Orleans. Same stations, salt and pepper. Not so remarkable, perhaps, because that racial mixture was also present on the baseball field. No, let's call it remarkable in general. None of it would have been conceivable only ten years earlier.
I benefited from all of that, but I was still a small child who was stuck in a very limited space.
All through my elementary education my experience of New York was limited almost exclusively to my neighborhood and rare trips to the nearby transportation hub of Flushing. My area was coming to the end of its heavily industrial period. I might as well mention the name of the place: College Point. There were still many large factories. Chilton Paint; Max Factor make-up; two big defense plants (working on military contracts); the giant Kleinert's Rubber plant; Lilly Tulip (maker of most of the paper plates and cups in America at the time); a commercial refrigerator factory; Hoffman soda; and any number of smaller factories turning out everything from baby furniture to coffins. It was a busy place. Many of the houses were still heated by coal, adding to the dust, the smells, and the general pollution of the industry.
As though to balance out the filth, large swaths of the town had an absolutely bucolic air about them. These were once the large estates of the millionaire industrialists who built the town in the Nineteenth Century. Now they were covered with pleasant single-family homes, carefully arranged in the midst of the lavish planting of trees that had covered the old estates. The town had a long coastline along the East River, which is, in actual fact, an estuary, but there you go. It must have been beautiful back in the age of sail, before the advent of the automobile. It was still pretty nice in the 1950s.
But only barely. I am a Baby Boomer, and in every way that I can think of, that has been both a blessing and a curse. I have always been part of a large bulge in the population. I was one of a huge number of children about the same age. On the good side, this meant that I could always walk out the door and find someone to play with almost immediately. I could walk to the park on any day that was free of rain and find other boys waiting to start a baseball game. There was a distinct drawback in this swarm of children, however. The luck of the draw being what it is, many of these children, boy children, did not harbor only benevolent feelings for the rest of us. They had discovered their own strength, and had begun to delight in inflicting it on other boys. Even the three baseball teams were a source of conflict among the boys of College Point. Fans of the Yankees were accustomed to winning every day, so bullies gravitated to the Yankees. If the Yankees won, these bullies might get overheated and feel like starting a fight. If the Yankees lost, it's a long season and even the Yankees were bound to lose sometimes, their fans might be inclined to win a fight to even their scorecard for the day. There was a cross-town rivalry between the Yankees and the Dodgers, and that could lead to trouble. Honestly, no one seemed to care much about what happened to the Giants. They might as well have been from Jersey.
The demographic in College Point varied only from semi-prosperous to rather poor, favoring the poor side of the bell-curve. If you were out of your home, you were going to get into a certain number of fights. This was a fact that drove some of the boys to stay at home and avoid the fray. You simply never saw them outside of school. That was not an option for me. I spent as much time as possible out with whomever was around, come what may.
We had zero adult supervision during our revels, but eventually we had to go home. Sympathetic, nurturing, cheerful, and loving parents were in the minority. I observed some, and heard tales of others. The truth is that it was a lucky boy or girl that lived in a family where their parents were happy to have a couple of nice children, and actually showed it in words and deeds. Money was not important; the children who felt loved were rich, and to be envied. Most parents viewed their children's lives as already well out of their control, and that's the way they liked it. Let the chips fall where they may! The best that most of us could hope for was benign neglect, and the absence of physical violence. I would have traded a finger or two for that last option.
It is my unfortunate duty to report that my parents did nothing to make my life easier, and worked diligently to make matters worse whenever they could. There was a division of labor. My mother was in charge of screaming and beating, and my father became an expert in malign neglect. Even if he was home, which was a rare occurrence, he was so good at giving me that look of disgust and turning his back that I would almost had rather gotten a beating. Almost.
All of the other fathers who were absent from the home as much as my father were either policemen or gangsters.
I should add that I had a wonderful little sister, almost five years younger than me. She was so kindhearted and courteous, so obedient and gentle, that even my demonic mother took a much softer line with raising her. It is as though my mother could sense that anyone who roughed up such a wonderful child would be struck dead by God in an instant. My adult self fully realizes how my father's rejection of our entire family must have been very difficult for my sister, but she endured it without complaint. She is still kindhearted and gentle on the outside, with a core of high-carbon, weapons-grade steel.
I do dearly wish that I had been sent to the public schools. What a luxury it would be to have school as a place of refuge! I'm sure that some of the teachers must have done some yelling, but I am informed, and believe, that they were forbidden to hit their students. And the mean boys, I'm sure that they'd give you a hard-ass look once in a while, but they were also restrained from actually punching you in the stomach at school. Once the final bell had rung, and you were on your way home, all bets were off. It would be a race to see who would hit you first. One of the other boys, or your mom, driven mad by some gossipy phone call or something. Anything. My mom didn't need prompting. She generated her own mysterious hostilities.
The peace of the public school was denied me. I was sent to the Catholic school, where we were left all day at the mercy of the Sisters of St. Dominic. In the course of eight years, I do recall at least two of these poor, exploited, religion-besotted women fondly, and, I think, two others with mere indifference. Many of them were demonic. They were constantly hovering, waiting to strike suddenly. The slaps could leave a welt that would earn me another beating when I got home (my mother could tell that I had been hit at school). The famous rulers, the flying textbooks. Isolation. Chewing and swallowing chunks of that awful Kirkman's Borax Laundry Soap. (My vocabulary was already quite colorful, and I've always been a chatter-box.) Today's United Nations would declare the behavior of those nuns “torture.”
I'm going to gloss over my high school experience. There, too, I was denied the pleasures of public school. Mostly, the presence of girls. There was almost no physical punishment at my all-boys Catholic high school, no, there the abuse was all verbal and emotional.
High school brought one major advantage: it broadened my horizons. My school was now remote from my little neighborhood. Two buses were required to get there, with a transfer in Flushing. The atmosphere in Flushing was much more urban, more cosmopolitan. It was still almost exclusively white at the time, but it had a more international feel to it. There were first-class magazine stands near the subway entrance, so I could buy Punch magazine and the New Music Express newspaper (both English). There were record stores that had almost anything that you could think of. The pizza was better. Just window shopping the stores along Main Street was wonderful. Alligator shoes! Rolex watches! It was a big step up.
My last few fights came during the summer before high school. We were all getting too big for it, and people were starting to get hurt. I had no desire to hurt people or to get hurt.
I got through high school without getting into one fight. My strategy for this success was lining up close relationships with several boys with whom no one in their right mind would consider starting trouble in any way. Consider that at high-school ages, one may have friends that are over six feet tall, weigh 180 or 190 pounds, can do a couple of hundred push-ups without breaking a sweat, and are not loathe to pick up and break someone who picks a fight with their good friend, Freddy. For a reference point, imagine that I am standing in a bar, drinking alone. In walks Howlin' Wolf, and he says, “hey, Freddy, how the fuck are you?” And I say, “hey, Chester! First one's on me! Set 'em up! It ain't a party till the Wolf shows up!” Now imagine, if you can, anyone in the bar fucking with me after that. Ever.
Regarding authority, I had mastered the art of passive aggression. I can sum up my approach in one number: out of 291 boys in my graduating class, I was number 271. I ignored them, while working diligently on my self-education. I was a library fan, and paperback books magically appeared in my room, lacking receipts. I hated authority of any kind. I hated all adults and spoke to them at all only when it was absolutely required.
My greatest failure during those four years was social. I had many friends, but I got all the way through high school without finding a girl-friend. And believe me, I was looking. I was friendly with a lot of girls. We spoke and laughed together often on the phone. They smiled and said hello if we saw each other around. But if I so much as asked them to the movies on a Saturday, they would laugh and say, “no!”
Not to worry. Everything got better after high school.
To Be Continued.
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