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  To the young writers and scientists and artists and musicians and actors and educators and doctors and lawyers and nurses and sports figures and business people and politicians who are the future of the Bronx …

  and to the memory of my parents who had the good sense to move to the Bronx in the first place.

  “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”

  —Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

  FOREWORD

  A few summers ago, my husband, Alan, and I were at a friend’s house on Long Island, having predinner snacks and drinks, when I heard the words “… in the Bronx,” said by Millard (“Mickey”) Drexler, whom I’d met for the first time minutes before.

  “Are you from the Bronx?” I asked.

  “I’m from the Northeast. Barnes and Arnow Avenues,” Mickey answered.

  “You’re kidding. Which building?”

  “The Mayflower,” he said.

  “That’s unbelievable! That’s my building.”

  We tried to figure out why we hadn’t met when we were kids. The Mayflower has ninety-six apartments. That’s a lot of people, but the age difference (I’m eleven years older) was probably the biggest factor. When I was in high school Mickey was a toddler. That age gap disappeared completely when we talked nonstop like long-lost friends at dinnertime, deciding that it would be fun to go back to the Mayflower together.

  So a few months later we went, new buddies revisiting our old building. Alan, Mickey’s cousin, and a few of Mickey’s longtime friends from the neighborhood came with us. It had been well over fifty years since either Mickey or I had lived in the Mayflower and thirty years since I had last visited. Would Mickey be able to see his old apartment? (No. No one answered the doorbell when he rang.) What did the Mayflower look like now, seen with our grown-up sensibilities? (On the outside, the same as ever. A six-story, tan and brown brick building, taking up half a city block.)

  Mickey, chairman and CEO of J.Crew, led the way inside, the rest of us following. The lobby looked stark—a big contrast to my upscale Manhattan apartment building, with its lobby furniture, area rugs, and walls hung with art. The simple Mayflower interior served as a pointed reminder of the unexpected turns my life had taken. Still, I felt totally at home seeing the familiar, worn terrazzo stairways and floor of the old building, which triggered vivid childhood memories. Energetic girl on a rainy day, running and jumping in the hallways. Bouncing a ball. Noises echoing. Typical working-class Bronx Jewish first-generation kid. Me. I clearly saw and heard myself as that ten-year-old girl again, tossing my beloved Spaldeen ball.

  Mickey and I began comparing notes about our families and our oh-too-small apartments. I was fascinated by his stories—of his aunt Frances and how she became his renegade role model; of how, when he attended the Bronx High School of Science, he first started getting knowledge of lives different from his own. Lives where some kids even had their own bedrooms and where the family expectation was that the children, without a doubt, would go to college. Standing with Mickey, a picture of confidence and success, in our shopworn surroundings, both of us excited about comparing stories about our pasts, started me wondering about other interesting and accomplished people from the Bronx. What were their stories? What were their childhoods like? Who influenced them? How did they find a place for themselves in the larger world, the one beyond their own Bronx neighborhoods?

  The idea for Just Kids from the Bronx was beginning to hatch.

  I started out cautiously by interviewing only friends. Mickey was among the first “kids” I talked with. Two longtime pals of mine, the producers Martin Bregman and David Yarnell, were also delighted to be included in my project. Regis Philbin, both a friend and a wonderful storyteller who lives down the hall from me in our Manhattan building, eagerly said, “I’ll be happy to talk to you. I had a great childhood in the Bronx.” The enthusiasm they all showed for the project, along with the comic adventures described in those initial interviews, launched this book. Friends then recommended friends, and acquaintances mentioned names they had recognized but didn’t know personally—“Did you talk to So-and so?” I knew my growing helter-skelter list of names excluded many who were worthy and interesting, which meant this book was not to be a comprehensive history of all the great people of the Bronx. But happily, this informally gathered group hinted at the actual changing demographic of the borough over the years, which went from being predominantly Jewish, Italian, and Irish in the earlier part of the twentieth century to the current majority populations of African Americans and Hispanics, all of them sharing some pride in the borough that helped raise them. When I talked with Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR), the only living jewelry designer to have a retrospective of his work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he said, “I’m glad that you’re doing a book about the Bronx. I’m sick and tired of hearing about Brooklyn.”

  * * *

  I EDITED THE conversational interviews, taking care to preserve each person’s own wording. I arranged the material chronologically, so the differences and similarities in each person’s life, along with the changes in the Bronx itself, would be more apparent. As the volume of candid, personal stories grew, I found I was deeply touched and gratified by the trust these wonderful Bronxites had in me, basically a stranger to most of them.

  I became riveted as the three graffiti artists of Tats Cru told of their exploits in the 1970s and ’80s, and what it meant to them to have people see their art on the outside of the number 6 train, rolling from the Bronx all the way through Manhattan, into Brooklyn, and then back again to the Bronx. I was transported by Al Pacino’s lyric description of the sounds of the world on his roof in the 1940s: “And at night—at night, there was this cacophony of voices, especially in the late spring to late summer. You would hear the different accents. We had them all. There were Italians, Jews, Irish, Polish, German. It was like a Eugene O’Neill play.”

  I laughed, with total surprise, when David Yarnell told me about his risky exploits in the ’40s, secretly growing marijuana in Bronx Park. Teenagers did things like that then? And then there was the eight-year-old Ken Davidson, in the ’50s, playing with his young band of buddies in the rocky, empty lot next to their apartment house, setting fires—literally playing with fire, despite his mother’s warning, “You could burn your eyes out.”

  I was moved and informed by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s descriptions of his experiences with racism when he was an innocent and unsuspecting preteen. Similarly, I was appalled by the not so subtle racism that Joyce Hansen encountered in high school when her college guidance counselor said college was for smart kids and therefore not for her.

  And who knew that the Bronx River was home to an important population of giant snapping turtles? For Erik Zeidler, born in 1991 and still living in the Bronx today, exploring the Bronx River “was like opening presents whe
n you’re not sure what the present will be, whether it’s going to be something you really want or nothing. Seeing and finding these giant turtles in the river is a present I’ll never forget.”

  Hearing Erik talk about the turtles in the Bronx River reminded me that there is more parkland in the Bronx—25 percent of the place—than in any other borough of New York City. I was lucky enough to grow up about seven blocks away from Bronx Park, where the Bronx River flows, and which is also home to the world-class Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden. I was naively happy then and am humbly grateful now that, although I lived in a more or less urban community, I could explore the park, which first sparked my abiding love of flowers.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES OUT-OF-TOWN FRIENDS ask, “The Bronx. Exactly where is it?”

  “You know,” I say, “the Bronx is up, the Battery’s down, like in the Comden and Green lyrics.”

  The Bronx is the northernmost of New York City’s five boroughs. It was incorporated into the city at large in 1898, and it is the only borough on the mainland. The other four boroughs are either islands or attached to Long Island.

  The Bronx got its name from one of its first settlers, a seventeenth-century Scandinavian named Jonas Bronck, whose lineage has been traced to Sweden and Denmark. He arrived in New Netherland in 1639, farmed some six hundred acres in what is now the Mott Haven section, and his tract was known as Bronck’s Land. The river ran south of Bronck’s Land and, with a change in the spelling, the river and eventually the whole borough were named after him.

  The separate Bronx villages that arose long after Jonas Bronck’s life and times evolved into neighborhoods … communities that were like hometowns. And as in other hometowns across the country, the dwellers knew most everyone and most everyone knew them. Though the people whose stories I listened to for this book came from many different neighborhoods and grew up in different decades, all of them came from places where parents and neighbors, schools and teachers, stores and storekeepers, houses of worship and clergy were important parts of their lives.

  By the time I finished editing the more than sixty interviews, from ninety-two-year-old Carl Reiner’s to twenty-three-year-old Erik Zeidler’s, I was delighted to see an additional narrative emerging, one of changing decades and disparate times linking arms with one another. Children of Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants giving way to children of African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican newcomers, and I felt moved and connected to them all.

  During World War Two, Avery Corman played stickball in the streets, using the simple treasures of a Spaldeen ball and a broom handle for a bat. Even though I was a girl, and girls didn’t play stickball then, those were my years of carefree playing in the streets too. Years later, similar games continued with even poorer kids creating their ball out of recyclables. As hip-hop’s Grandmaster Melle Mel, born Melvin Glover, told it, “We’d take a milk container and a soda bottle and wrap the soda bottle in newspaper and stuff the soda bottle inside the milk container and shape it like a football.” Yes! I could imagine doing that as well, if I had to.

  For more than a hundred years the Bronx has been associated with the Yankees, the Bronx Bombers. And across the generations so many Bronx kids, me included, cheered them on, with many of the boys dreaming of playing pro ball. Bobby Bonilla, who spoke of his “indescribable love” for his supportive father, was able to realize his baseball-player dreams. And Michael Kay, fueled by an intense love of the Yankees and by his own resourcefulness, figured out early on how to get involved. “I was practical and rational, even as a nine-year-old,” he told me. “If I’m gonna be part of the Yankees, I’m gonna be that broadcaster! So I’d interview my friends with a tape recorder.” Michael Kay himself hit a metaphorical home run when he grew up to become a sports journalist and Yankees broadcaster.

  * * *

  THE BRONX STORYTELLERS in this book have found their niches in the fields of religion, law, education, entertainment, business, finance, science, medicine, government, politics, sports, acting, music, drawing, photography, architecture, graphic design, journalism, cartooning, writing, and dancing. Both in spirit and in fact, with their contributions to the larger community, they exemplify possibility. I am so grateful for what started out as a lark, just a fun trip back to the Mayflower. It led to one of the richest experiences of my life: the meeting of the people in and the making of Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was, An Oral History.

  ARLENE ALDA

  PART ONE

  FRESH AIR … A LUCKY BREAK

  I knew that I wanted to be someone.… I wanted to be revered by the family … not only by my immediate one, but my extended family as well.… They all were so excited when I finished medical school that they had this large party for me. I still have the pictures. Actually, it spawned many other doctors in the family whose fathers said to them, “Forget about being a wallpaper hanger. If Mickey could do it, then you could do it!”

  —MICHAEL (“MICKEY”) BRESCIA, M.D.

  A. M. (“ABE”) ROSENTHAL

  Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent and longtime executive editor of the New York Times

  (1922–2006)

  For seven years I lived with my five sisters and our parents, Sarah and Harry, among flowers and trees, dancing fountains, wilderness paths, birds singing in their ecstasy, and such stupendous quantities of a particular treasure as to send my mother into paroxysms of acquisition greed.

  “Fresh air!” she would announce. And then from her lips came the command that rang through every apartment in the Bronx neighborhood every day: “Go grab some fresh air! Out! Fresh air!”

  As other American pioneers and gamblers kept moving west, the Jews of New York kept moving north toward fresh air. For Harry and his Pirate Queen the road led from the tenements of the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where young warriors waited in ambush to pounce on the new kids and eventually declare peace. The adult pioneers worked six days a week and every hour of overtime they could get. They saved every penny with pleasure, looking down from the peak above the sea to the pass above the fruited plain-Mosholu Parkway station, far north, only a few miles south of the New York suburbs boundary line.

  Beyond the station, as far as a housepainter’s eye could see, stretched Van Cortlandt Park. The ride on the subway was usually an hour or more each way. Coming home, fresh air awaited, ready to be consumed in large gulps, a reservoir never dry. And during the day, breathing the paint or the lint, a workingman knew that at least at home the wife and the children were breathing that fresh air, all day long.

  The pioneers stood and gazed at their children and then went to the bank with their deposit books every few months.

  Paradise was known as the Amalgamated, for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, which built good housing for its members. Members of other unions were eligible to buy apartments too. Papa’s credentials were his card in the housepainters’ union and the bankbook of his life savings.

  By the time we moved into our apartment Sarah and Harry had been on the waiting list for about two years.

  They both knew Harry would make a living as long as he could climb a painter’s ladder or crawl out a window to a scaffold. With overtime here and there he could come up with the eighty dollars a month to meet the maintenance charges. They never again might have such a chance, a great park across the street, four bedrooms, living room, nice big kitchen, and “double exposures,” which gave the apartment cross ventilation from the breezes of park-fresh air whenever you raised a window sash.

  Harry and Sarah went to the savings bank, took out one thousand dollars, almost all the money they had saved. They took the cash to the office of the union cooperative and put it on the table. They were gambling that money, and every dollar they would be able to put together from Harry’s work, for God knows how many years. They figured that with good luck some months Harry would make enough to pay off some of the cooperative’s loan for the rest of the apart
ment, in addition to the maintenance. In the months he was short, the building management would almost always wait another month.

  We lived in those co-op buildings the first years of the thirties, when the only thing thriving in America was hard times. The eight complexes consisted of half a dozen six-story apartment buildings, each built around a courtyard that blossomed in the spring and flowered almost until the snow provided inexhaustible hills of snowball and snowman. Just across the street was our forest, Van Cortlandt Park, which not only sent out sweet perfumed fresh air for generations of workers’ children twenty-four hours a day but also provided a golfing link. Golfers, who were not experts, hit balls into the hands of boys waiting to scoop them up and run to return them for a nickel apiece.

  Twenty-five years later, when I was an American correspondent in Eastern Europe, I saw Polish workers and their wives in a shabby seaside resort on the Baltic going for a walk in the nearby forest or marching for hours along the narrow beach, up and down, up and down. They went back to the little boardinghouses for meals and rushed outside as soon as they could for what else? Fresh air. Then they sat in wooden chairs to put their faces into the pallid sunshine. That week on the Polish Baltic I was a boy again and the workers were my parents.

  In 1967 I was appointed an assistant managing editor of the New York Times and immediately set off for Europe to share the magic moment in journalistic history with the foreign staff of the paper.

  The first stop was London, where Anthony Lewis, then the bureau chief and a brilliant correspondent of lucidity and range, gave a dinner party for me at the Garrick Club. During the cocktail hour there was one of those sudden drops in the noise level and the voice of a British member of the staff could be heard clear and true as a royal trumpet: “Tell me, Abe, do you think there will ever be a Jewish managing editor of the New York Times?”