I guess I started liking rock n roll around 1955 , when Alan Freed was on the radio.. It was 1010 WINS on AM radio. It was on in the evening. Bill Haley and the Comets were rockin' with Rock Around the Clock. They say that song was the start of Rock and Roll. 1955 had a weird mix of music, Bill Haley, then non- rock and roll like the Four Aces singing Love is a Many Splendid Thing. A favorite of my parents. The Penguins doing the classic Oldie called Earth Angel. Chuck Berry doing Maybelline. Then Johnny Desmond doing a weird song like Yellow Rose of Texas. I would take my portable radio, a big Emerson and blast it. I remember that radio, it was light and dark brown plastic, it took flashlight batteries, and it had a plug that hid away inside it , when you wanted to go portable. We would carry these fairly big portables to school to listen to the World Series. I remember listening to the 1956 World Series when Don Larsen pitched a perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. I think it was the only post season no- hitter EVER until 2010 when Roy Halladay did it. Back to radios and music. These radios were smaller than boom boxes, and they had tubes inside them. Then in 1959, my Uncle Jack bought me the most awesome radio. It was Japanese. It was a SONY. This was an unheard of company. All radios were American or German before Sony came along.This radio did not have tubes, it was an 8 transistor radio. It was so thin. Thinner than a pack of cigarettes About 5inches long, 1/2 inch thick maybe 3.5 inches high. That's about how I remember it, I could probably look it up and get the exact specs but basically this thing was small and cool.
It started the trend of tiny radios.It was an AM radio, FM existed but mostly for classical music. In 1956 Rock and Roll was really going strong, now most of the records playing were more to my liking. You had Little Richard singin Long Tall Sally, and Elvis Presley doing Hound Dog. The Dells singing O What a Night, the great Doo Wop tune In the Still of the Night by the 5 Satins. Frankie Lymon with Why Do Fools Fall in Love and I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent.Elvis had about 6 hits maybe more in 1956. Alan Freed was going strong. I'd keep a radio under my pillow, listening to Come Go With Me by the Del Vikings or Over the Mountain by Johnny and Joe. My mom would think i was sleeping but I'd be rockin' out. There were great Doo Wop type tunes before 1955, but I didnt know about them until the early 60s, songs like The Wind by the Diablos (1954), Goodnite Sweetheart by the Spaniels (1954) Sincerely by the Moonglows (1954). The 50s had the great DOO WOP hits. a few of my favorites were Could This Be Magic by the Dubs (1957), Tonite Tonite by MelloKings (1957), I'm so Young by the Students (1958), There Goes My Baby by the Drifters(1958), Teardrops by Lee Andrews and the Hearts (1957) Dedicated to the one I Love by the Shirelles (1959), 1000 Miles Away by the Heartbeats(1956) and Teenager in Love by Dion and the Belmonts (1959) .
OK , yeah I know I can go on and on with great songs. Time went on and from 1963- 1965 me and my friends discovered great echos in the hallways of the projects. There was a song i think by Billy Joel about "lookin for an echo". That was so true. All we wanted to do was hit harmony. 3 guys was good for harmony. You had a baritone and 2nd tenor and a 1st tenor. If we had a few more singers we had a bass, a falsetto, and a lead singer. The harmony was what counted. It was kind of strange but for our purposes we didnt need a lead singer with a great voice, we just needed him to lead us so we could do the background. The first songs most of us would do, were songs that we all sang the words to like Fine Little Girl by the Arcades, or You Baby You by the Excellents. We also liked to do songs like Roaches. " Roaches crawlin over my motherf'n walls tryin to get to my mother fn balls,etc
We used to hear some of the groups that made it , when we went to 35th St. beach in Rockaway and hear the Shangra La's ( leader of the pack) singing. Or around Manhattan Beach the Emotions singing Echo. Vito and the Salutations were real good and they sang Unchained Melody. There was a guy named Speedo from Canarsie who was the lead of the Impalas ( Sorry , I Ran All The Way Home) he started a group called The Caravelles, they were amazing. I went to see them in Bushwick at the 7 Martyrs Church. Me and my friends stood out in the crowd, since we were the only white folk there. But hey , it was harmony and we loved harmony. Joey and the Excitements were a fantastic ENY group. Nino and the Ebbtides were from ENY and had a hit called Jukebox Saturday Nite. Mike and the Holidays who were friends of mine had an album out. Mike had an amazingly great voice. One nite me, Elk, Moony, Woody, and Mike were singing in Elk's house. It was being recorded, we did When We Got Married by the Dreamlovers, it was absolutely amazing. That was the best harmony I was ever part of. My regular group was the Escapades formally Al and the Candlelites. I sang bass for that group. Did a thing like Bom Bom Dip Di Dip di Dip BoDoDDo Bom, that was my part when we did My Girl by the Eternals a fast version of it. That was me Fuzzy, Mass, Big Wick and Lil Wick. we had good harmony, but low harmony. When Me Mass and Woody hit harmony it was higher notes and really good. Me and a guy named Chup had good harmony together and with Woody hittin the high notes it was all good. We liked singing, " just to kinds of people in the world( by Little Anthony), Your Way ( Camelots). My group Johnny and the Pumps, well we did Sunday Kind of Love (DelVikings) one guy in the group had a heavy Brooklyn accent and the first line of the song said THROUGH with my old love and he would say TROO with my old love, if we didnt laugh we got through the song. That group was discoverd by this guy Frank , he became our manager and we recorded a few demos. We had high hopes of becoming famous. We sang and sang. Our friends Johnny and the Moonlites a Puerto Rican group was really good, we used to hear them sing at concerts in Bklyn and they got an album made. Most of the time we would meet up, and just sing backgrounds like bom bo bom shoobee doo wah, bom bo bom shoobee doo wah,,, we didnt need words, just notes. The song Bells of Rosa Rita by the Admirations was a good Doo Wop song because they would chime off "ring out , ring out ring out" several times in the song. When groups did that you could really hear the harmony. Cleveland Street Boys sang well, they used to do a song about Reindeers drinking from a crystal stream, was real nice. They were a neighborhood gang, and 4 or 5 of them used to sing. I sang with them a few times.
If we got some wine, aka "singin juice" oh it helped us hit the high notes, and it sounded better.
Singing was one of the main things we did. We loved it. And those of us who were into the singin, or the listening to the Doo Wop sounds, still love it. We used to go to Times Square record store in Manhattan to buy what they called "credit records". These were hard to get records, and they would put a price on them. Stormy Weather by the 5 sharps was worth $500. If you had it youd get that much credit in the store. Slim , Anita, and Harold worked there. It was famous for Doo Wop.
We used to steal alot of 45's from parties, and from record stores. My friend Crutch taught me that you dont steal one record, you should pile up a bunch and take 20 at a time. we had record stealing jackets, with big slits in the lining to just throw them in. Crutch was never suspected, because he was on crutches. That's the Polio dude I've talked about. He was the best. Anyway, we all had huge record collections. The singing Doo Wop even continued into the college days at LIU singing with a few of the guys "People Get Ready" by the Chambers brothers. And Super Bowl Sundays I still get together with Mooney , Woody and Chup and hit some harmony.
The Doo Wop lead singers had great voices. Then in the 60s, aside from Soul Music and Blues, the rock singers like Beatles, Stones ( who I love), etc, didnt have good voices, and couldnt hit harmony. They sang alot in unison , which is soooo not harmony. 50's groups all wore the same thing. All the bands dressed alike. That's why the movie "Up in Smoke" cracked me up when they needed outfits to play and they got waiter outfits , it was hilarious to me. The Stones were the first group I know of that went on TV, "the Clay Cole Show" and all wore different clothes, sweatshirts, jeans, t shirts, all wore different things. I really thought that was so great. Eric Burden and The Animals were the next ones to wear what they wanted ( House of the Rising Sun). Rock and Roll took a turn from Doo Wop, but it was a great turn.
The Danny and the Juniors song says it all " Rock and Roll is here to stay , it will never die"
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
ESPERANTO
I'd like to give a shout out to my readers in Czech Republic, Spain, Ukraine, Cambodia, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Mexico, Holland, Italy Spain,Russia, Ukraine(my ancestors country) , Morocco, Israel, Japan and of course the U.S.
WIth such a diverse population reading the madness that comes out of me. I probably should be
writing in the language of Esperanto. The basic idea of Esperanto was to have a language spoken all
over the world. No political attachment, in the name of peace. It is an interesting language, and I might add
it to my list of languages that I speak a little of. Esperanto is spoken in 115 countries around the globe
and it is spoken by anywhere from 10,000 to 2,000,000 people actively or fluently. George Soros speaks Esperanto. There are many who speak it as their native language i.e. the language spoken at home.
ADIAUX POR NU KAJ DANKON
WIth such a diverse population reading the madness that comes out of me. I probably should be
writing in the language of Esperanto. The basic idea of Esperanto was to have a language spoken all
over the world. No political attachment, in the name of peace. It is an interesting language, and I might add
it to my list of languages that I speak a little of. Esperanto is spoken in 115 countries around the globe
and it is spoken by anywhere from 10,000 to 2,000,000 people actively or fluently. George Soros speaks Esperanto. There are many who speak it as their native language i.e. the language spoken at home.
ADIAUX POR NU KAJ DANKON
Monday, February 28, 2011
Airport Security
Did you ever notice how white the teeth of airline security people are? It's from all the toothpaste they confiscate. Some probably even open toothpaste stores or sell it on ebay. There does not seem to be anything logical about the confiscation of toothpaste and other liquids over 4 oz. They let people through with no problem if they have 50 packages of a 2 oz liquid. A friend of mine had cleaning fluid samples, a whole bagful, all of the packages were about an ounce or two each, and they let him through no problem. I got no hassle with 4 oz of cough medicine. But the toothpaste they took away. Sealed , unopened, in the box. Into the confiscation or should I say gift pile. They make you take your shoes off, don't they know that some people's feet stink? meanwhile, you can bring a computer on board. A computer can surely be a deadly weapon in the hands of a skilled martial arts person, so can the cans of soda or juice they give you .
None of it makes sense. My solution, everyone flies naked. I guess if that plan happens, Virgin airlines will soon change their name
None of it makes sense. My solution, everyone flies naked. I guess if that plan happens, Virgin airlines will soon change their name
Friday, February 18, 2011
BLACKSMITHS
Blacksmiths forge iron into weapons, utensils and horseshoes.
Who thought of this horseshoe thing. Someone decided to take this custom made iron shoe and nail it into a horses foot (hoof). That is sick. Can you imagine going to buy a pair of shoes and when you find a pair that fits you , the salesman grabs your leg ,,then grabs a sledge hammer and big nails. Hammers the nails through the shoe into your foot.OUCH! ever hear a horse scream OUCH!! Why is finding a horseshoe a lucky thing? I think the horse was the lucky one to get it out of his foot.
Why aren't there little horse shoes for goats, sheep, hmm,... dogs.
Who thought of this horseshoe thing. Someone decided to take this custom made iron shoe and nail it into a horses foot (hoof). That is sick. Can you imagine going to buy a pair of shoes and when you find a pair that fits you , the salesman grabs your leg ,,then grabs a sledge hammer and big nails. Hammers the nails through the shoe into your foot.OUCH! ever hear a horse scream OUCH!! Why is finding a horseshoe a lucky thing? I think the horse was the lucky one to get it out of his foot.
Why aren't there little horse shoes for goats, sheep, hmm,... dogs.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Kids working in East New York
The way I saw it, East New York had alot of opportunities for a kid to make some extra spending money.
Of course, most of us got a few bucks a week allowance money from our parents. Obviously that wasn't enough, a kid has gotta have his candy, his ice cream and his baseball cards. The candy's of choice, that is, my choice back in 1959 were Hollywood ( kind of like a 3 musketeer with nuts), 5th ave ( a clark bar with 2 almonds on top), Clark bar ( maybe a Reese,s cup spread out into the consistency of a kit kat), mallow mars ( they came with a coupon to get prizes, it was a marshmallow cup), Lik-m-aid(koolaid but you just ate the powder), Payday (covered with peanuts no chocolate), wax lips ( they were wax lips that you chew very sick thing), fudgethingie with a spoon( tiny spoon you eat the fudge, i have no idea what the name was),
chunkie(raisins nuts whatta chunk of chocolate),chuckles ( hated the red and the black ones, loved the yellow and orange, my friend always took the green one from me), red hots ( hot hot hot),frozen milky ways bars( yep we would freeze them), bon bons ( only available at the movies, filled with ice cream chocolate coated), malted balls ( only a few of us liked these),non pareils ( white sprinkles on chocolate disk) one time i had white bugs on my non pareils grossed me out and i never bought them again, Bonomo's turkish taffee ( you smack it and crack it), junior mints ( soft chocolate coated mints, i still buy them), and thickly salted pumpkin seeds ( so salty), red pistachio nuts ( why red, our fingers got red, our mouths got red), then we didnt like the bad breath fixer stuff but bought them occasionally black jack gum ( licorice tasting), violets (gross), sen sen ( teeny weeny little flat things a mixture of soap and licorice) ,,, and oh I forgot an old favorite PEZ, gotta love pez,,amazing alot of these are still around today. Today I buy Hershey with almonds, M&M peanut, and Kit Kat mostly.
OK, back to making money.The first money maker was making pitchers of lemonade and selling little paper cups of it for 5 cents a cup. That was a young kid job. When we reached 10 years old we became prostitutes ( haha nonono just kidding). We used to go behind the projects to the factories and find stuff they threw away. The glass factory had these semi-circular pieces of glass that worked as magnifying glasses. We would burn our arms with them, as the sun got really hot you could burn other people's arms too, we would sell them to people who didnt want to go look for them. Then one day we found cans of cleaning fluid. A big score. When I look back on it, they were garbage, useless rejected cans. We sold these for a dollar each. We had about 30 of them, that was a huge score. I don't know if we lived in a dumb neighborhood, so people bought them, or maybe they just felt sorry for us poor kids trying to earn a living. Some of us became newspaper delivery boys. we wore a sack with papers and dropped them off at people's doors in the projects. We didn't do the bike thing and throw it in front of houses like in the movies. We were in the projects, it was up and down the staircases. We made two cents a paper. I delivered the New York Daily Mirror. Then we went on to be delivery boys. Mind you , no girls did this stuff, It wasn't chauvinism , Girls were just smarter than us. The first delivery job was a Speedway on Stanley Ave, Henry was the owner, he gave us 10 cents per carton delivered. Can you imagine how heavy that was, a full carton of canned goods, and you had to walk about 2 blocks to deliver it, no bike , no wagon, carry it. A 60 lb 10 year old skinny kid that I was lugging these cartons for 10 cents. I did like riding down to the basement on the conveyor. I think we werent supposed to do that. Then i moved up in the world and delivered for the drug store. There were two on Stanley Ave. Alben, and Good Ray, they both paid 25cents a delivery. more than twice as much money and a little bag to carry. And the people appreciated getting their drugs, so you got a much bigger tip too. Drug store tips were a quarter to a half dollar. Supermarket tips were about a dime. When there were no deliveries, we would fill cough syrup bottles, and coke syrup bottles. Coke syrup was a big drug store item back then, it stopped nausea. Why did they stop selling that, it tasted great.
As we got older we got more industrious. Me, Richie and Red, came up with a great idea. Everyone seemed to like bagel or bialy with cream cheese and lox ( smoked salmon). Kids hated the stuff, we liked hot bagels and bialys but hated the stink of the fish. I love it now by the way. So , the idea was to go to every apartment in 2 projects.over 1000 of them. Well, we couldnt do all of them but we went to quite a few. We took orders for Sunday breakfast deliveries. The usual order was 6 bagels, 6 bialys, 1 lb of cream cheese, 1/2 lb of lox,we may have had some other fish too. like herring or smoked whitefish. We got the money in advance. Our prices were half of what it was in the stores. They were low prices because we just made the price up. We thought it was a great idea, and by the response it was HUGE.
I forget how much money we collected, and we figured on making a ton of profit. So we got close to $400 on our first run. The sad part is , there was never a second run, we didn't want to rip anyone off. We just got too busy, playing punchball, or skelly, or I dunno, we just forgot. We kept the money and enjoyed it. Noone ever came looking for us. I don't think we told our parents. My father was a cop, so he probably would have thrown us in jail. Instead it was our secret little one day business adventure, that had great potential, but turned out to be a one day HUGELY profitable day. Then , I got a steady job on Sundays. I worked at the chicken market on New Lots Ave. near Ashford St.. In the morning the chickens would be loose, running around, keeping in shape. This was a kosher chicken market. My job was to catch the chickens. There were two ways to catch a chicken. One was grab them by the wings from behind. Be careful they scream and can peck you. The other was with this long metal hook. You scooped the legs out from under them. Then I'd carry them by the legs and put them in a cage. When a customer came in, I'd have to grab them a live chicken. Take them in back, to the "kosher neck cutter" theres a name in Yiddish for it, something like Sheichel, i tried googling kosher neck cutter but nothing came up.This guy wore a cap, he would slash the chicken's neck in one svelte swoop, then stuff the birds head in this can, and the blood would drain. Then pluck the feathers in the machine. It was a very busy place with fresh chickens. The chickens didnt get the antibiotics and hormones that today's chickens get. They were tough, fresh city chickens, eating corn and worms, and who knows what. If you were lucky you got them with an unborn egg ( no shell on it) it was inside them. Great in chicken soup. That was an intersting job. Another was shoveling manure and walking horses to cool them off at the riding academy. Lots of good employment for very little pay, but lots of fun.
One day, it came to us, in a dream. Let's start a business. So what better business than a Radio Repair Shop. We got a free room at the Community Center to start our shop. We would go to the junk yards on Flatlands Ave. and take car radios out of cars. That part was fun. Take the knobs off first, then juggle it around and pull it out, the speakers were usually right on top of the radio. We would take a bunch back to the shop. We would get one working so we would have music. The rest would get stripped for parts. We had lots of tubes. There were 4 partners in this business. Yep, it was big business. A couple of us would go to the drug store and test the tubes in the tube tester. We had capacitors, resisters, tubes, speakers, a soldering iron, screwdrivers, wire cutters. We were very professional. We put our sign up and business started coming. Transister radios were making an appearance on the scene, and the big Emerson's that were portables with a plug, and RCA's were fading out, as Sony came out with an 8 transistor radio, small compact and totally cool. Many years later boom boxes came about. Strange how things go in the opposite direction after a while. Business was booming, we had a big backlog of radios to fix. Our major problem was, we had no idea how to fix radios. If it had tubes we would test them all and hope we would find a burnt out one and we were successful at fixing it. Others, we would check things with this ohm meter or something, and occasionally we found a broken wire. I had my first soldering job on a nice little portable. The wires were so small, the solder was so big. I liked the way solder bubbles and melts. So I splash some on the broken wires i twisted together. I gotta say it held really strongly. But the whole radio was covered with melted solder and melted black tape. It was a mess. Good thing the radio had a cover. Who cares how messy it looked inside. Look inside a mouth with tons of fillings, disgusting, but it works. So it was the same attitude, our work wasnt pretty but at least 10% of the time we fixed your radio. Some we couldnt fix. In a month or so, the shop closed down due to lack of satisfied customers. But we learned alot about different colored wires, and how hot solder is. We learned how easily plastic melts, speakers puncture. It was definitely a learning experience.
When I hit 7th or 8th grade, I got a really important job, working in the dry cleaners. I was the bagger. I did some miscellaneous work there also, like spraying the soapy stuff on stains, or soaking badly stained clothes in the 'perc". Perc was short for a long chemical name, that i'm too lazy to look up right now. It was deadly stuff. It came out of the "cooker". It certainly took stains out of clothes. Someone had to shovel out the perc from the cooker everyday. It was like shoveling pounds of ash, like they do on the coal engine trains. The thing is, the fumes were hazardous to your health. But in 1962 nothing was hazardous to your health. So I shoveled. It made me so high , that when i was done shovelling , I'd bump into racks of clothing , knocking some on the floor. What a great job. I also got free dry cleaning as a benefit. The owner didnt know we had 6 people in our family and alot of clothes to clean. When he saw the piles of clothing I brought in to clean, I thought he was having a heart attack.
And then there was Big Bill. Bill was a big black guy with slick hair and sometimes a bandana. He was the presser. Bill got paid by the piece. Some articles of clothing worth more than others. I was the guy who counted the pieces and wrote down how many Bill pressed. if the total came to 120 I would round it up, to maybe 374. Bill loved me. The owners caught a few of my accidently on purpose mistakes and I no longer did that. It was back to bagging the clothes. I would hang some clothes on this metal stand, roll down a bag, rip the bag off the roll, shake it a few times to puff it up and get it right over the clothes, then twist tie it and staple the ticket on the plastic. Of course if it was an opposing Little League uniform, a few extra things took place. Like, stapling the legs together , spitting on the clothes, putting pins in so they'd get stuck. nice things like that. I was the fastest bagger known East of the Mississippi. I got paid $1 an hour , off the books. The job got passed down to my friend Johnny, the Richie, and a few others. I would pass the Cozy Bar ( which was next door to the cleaners) with my mother and Big Bill would say hello, my mom would say " you know people from that dirty bar?" I'd say oh mom that's Big Bill. She would just roll her eyes.
There were other jobs later on, although not boring, sometimes interesting , like working in Pitkin Pawn Brokers ( i said pawn not porn ). The owner would give people money for anything they brought in. One time he gave a guy $5 for a suit with poop in the pants. GROSSSS. Another guy bought a watch that stopped every two hours. The guy refused to go get it fixed. Repair was free. He would come into the store and set his watch every two hours. The weirdest people came into that shop on Pitkin between Osborn and Thatford. Brownsville, USA.
It was fun growing up in East New York, establishing a work ethic. Ahh yes, kids today, have video games much better idea.
Of course, most of us got a few bucks a week allowance money from our parents. Obviously that wasn't enough, a kid has gotta have his candy, his ice cream and his baseball cards. The candy's of choice, that is, my choice back in 1959 were Hollywood ( kind of like a 3 musketeer with nuts), 5th ave ( a clark bar with 2 almonds on top), Clark bar ( maybe a Reese,s cup spread out into the consistency of a kit kat), mallow mars ( they came with a coupon to get prizes, it was a marshmallow cup), Lik-m-aid(koolaid but you just ate the powder), Payday (covered with peanuts no chocolate), wax lips ( they were wax lips that you chew very sick thing), fudgethingie with a spoon( tiny spoon you eat the fudge, i have no idea what the name was),
chunkie(raisins nuts whatta chunk of chocolate),chuckles ( hated the red and the black ones, loved the yellow and orange, my friend always took the green one from me), red hots ( hot hot hot),frozen milky ways bars( yep we would freeze them), bon bons ( only available at the movies, filled with ice cream chocolate coated), malted balls ( only a few of us liked these),non pareils ( white sprinkles on chocolate disk) one time i had white bugs on my non pareils grossed me out and i never bought them again, Bonomo's turkish taffee ( you smack it and crack it), junior mints ( soft chocolate coated mints, i still buy them), and thickly salted pumpkin seeds ( so salty), red pistachio nuts ( why red, our fingers got red, our mouths got red), then we didnt like the bad breath fixer stuff but bought them occasionally black jack gum ( licorice tasting), violets (gross), sen sen ( teeny weeny little flat things a mixture of soap and licorice) ,,, and oh I forgot an old favorite PEZ, gotta love pez,,amazing alot of these are still around today. Today I buy Hershey with almonds, M&M peanut, and Kit Kat mostly.
OK, back to making money.The first money maker was making pitchers of lemonade and selling little paper cups of it for 5 cents a cup. That was a young kid job. When we reached 10 years old we became prostitutes ( haha nonono just kidding). We used to go behind the projects to the factories and find stuff they threw away. The glass factory had these semi-circular pieces of glass that worked as magnifying glasses. We would burn our arms with them, as the sun got really hot you could burn other people's arms too, we would sell them to people who didnt want to go look for them. Then one day we found cans of cleaning fluid. A big score. When I look back on it, they were garbage, useless rejected cans. We sold these for a dollar each. We had about 30 of them, that was a huge score. I don't know if we lived in a dumb neighborhood, so people bought them, or maybe they just felt sorry for us poor kids trying to earn a living. Some of us became newspaper delivery boys. we wore a sack with papers and dropped them off at people's doors in the projects. We didn't do the bike thing and throw it in front of houses like in the movies. We were in the projects, it was up and down the staircases. We made two cents a paper. I delivered the New York Daily Mirror. Then we went on to be delivery boys. Mind you , no girls did this stuff, It wasn't chauvinism , Girls were just smarter than us. The first delivery job was a Speedway on Stanley Ave, Henry was the owner, he gave us 10 cents per carton delivered. Can you imagine how heavy that was, a full carton of canned goods, and you had to walk about 2 blocks to deliver it, no bike , no wagon, carry it. A 60 lb 10 year old skinny kid that I was lugging these cartons for 10 cents. I did like riding down to the basement on the conveyor. I think we werent supposed to do that. Then i moved up in the world and delivered for the drug store. There were two on Stanley Ave. Alben, and Good Ray, they both paid 25cents a delivery. more than twice as much money and a little bag to carry. And the people appreciated getting their drugs, so you got a much bigger tip too. Drug store tips were a quarter to a half dollar. Supermarket tips were about a dime. When there were no deliveries, we would fill cough syrup bottles, and coke syrup bottles. Coke syrup was a big drug store item back then, it stopped nausea. Why did they stop selling that, it tasted great.
As we got older we got more industrious. Me, Richie and Red, came up with a great idea. Everyone seemed to like bagel or bialy with cream cheese and lox ( smoked salmon). Kids hated the stuff, we liked hot bagels and bialys but hated the stink of the fish. I love it now by the way. So , the idea was to go to every apartment in 2 projects.over 1000 of them. Well, we couldnt do all of them but we went to quite a few. We took orders for Sunday breakfast deliveries. The usual order was 6 bagels, 6 bialys, 1 lb of cream cheese, 1/2 lb of lox,we may have had some other fish too. like herring or smoked whitefish. We got the money in advance. Our prices were half of what it was in the stores. They were low prices because we just made the price up. We thought it was a great idea, and by the response it was HUGE.
I forget how much money we collected, and we figured on making a ton of profit. So we got close to $400 on our first run. The sad part is , there was never a second run, we didn't want to rip anyone off. We just got too busy, playing punchball, or skelly, or I dunno, we just forgot. We kept the money and enjoyed it. Noone ever came looking for us. I don't think we told our parents. My father was a cop, so he probably would have thrown us in jail. Instead it was our secret little one day business adventure, that had great potential, but turned out to be a one day HUGELY profitable day. Then , I got a steady job on Sundays. I worked at the chicken market on New Lots Ave. near Ashford St.. In the morning the chickens would be loose, running around, keeping in shape. This was a kosher chicken market. My job was to catch the chickens. There were two ways to catch a chicken. One was grab them by the wings from behind. Be careful they scream and can peck you. The other was with this long metal hook. You scooped the legs out from under them. Then I'd carry them by the legs and put them in a cage. When a customer came in, I'd have to grab them a live chicken. Take them in back, to the "kosher neck cutter" theres a name in Yiddish for it, something like Sheichel, i tried googling kosher neck cutter but nothing came up.This guy wore a cap, he would slash the chicken's neck in one svelte swoop, then stuff the birds head in this can, and the blood would drain. Then pluck the feathers in the machine. It was a very busy place with fresh chickens. The chickens didnt get the antibiotics and hormones that today's chickens get. They were tough, fresh city chickens, eating corn and worms, and who knows what. If you were lucky you got them with an unborn egg ( no shell on it) it was inside them. Great in chicken soup. That was an intersting job. Another was shoveling manure and walking horses to cool them off at the riding academy. Lots of good employment for very little pay, but lots of fun.
One day, it came to us, in a dream. Let's start a business. So what better business than a Radio Repair Shop. We got a free room at the Community Center to start our shop. We would go to the junk yards on Flatlands Ave. and take car radios out of cars. That part was fun. Take the knobs off first, then juggle it around and pull it out, the speakers were usually right on top of the radio. We would take a bunch back to the shop. We would get one working so we would have music. The rest would get stripped for parts. We had lots of tubes. There were 4 partners in this business. Yep, it was big business. A couple of us would go to the drug store and test the tubes in the tube tester. We had capacitors, resisters, tubes, speakers, a soldering iron, screwdrivers, wire cutters. We were very professional. We put our sign up and business started coming. Transister radios were making an appearance on the scene, and the big Emerson's that were portables with a plug, and RCA's were fading out, as Sony came out with an 8 transistor radio, small compact and totally cool. Many years later boom boxes came about. Strange how things go in the opposite direction after a while. Business was booming, we had a big backlog of radios to fix. Our major problem was, we had no idea how to fix radios. If it had tubes we would test them all and hope we would find a burnt out one and we were successful at fixing it. Others, we would check things with this ohm meter or something, and occasionally we found a broken wire. I had my first soldering job on a nice little portable. The wires were so small, the solder was so big. I liked the way solder bubbles and melts. So I splash some on the broken wires i twisted together. I gotta say it held really strongly. But the whole radio was covered with melted solder and melted black tape. It was a mess. Good thing the radio had a cover. Who cares how messy it looked inside. Look inside a mouth with tons of fillings, disgusting, but it works. So it was the same attitude, our work wasnt pretty but at least 10% of the time we fixed your radio. Some we couldnt fix. In a month or so, the shop closed down due to lack of satisfied customers. But we learned alot about different colored wires, and how hot solder is. We learned how easily plastic melts, speakers puncture. It was definitely a learning experience.
When I hit 7th or 8th grade, I got a really important job, working in the dry cleaners. I was the bagger. I did some miscellaneous work there also, like spraying the soapy stuff on stains, or soaking badly stained clothes in the 'perc". Perc was short for a long chemical name, that i'm too lazy to look up right now. It was deadly stuff. It came out of the "cooker". It certainly took stains out of clothes. Someone had to shovel out the perc from the cooker everyday. It was like shoveling pounds of ash, like they do on the coal engine trains. The thing is, the fumes were hazardous to your health. But in 1962 nothing was hazardous to your health. So I shoveled. It made me so high , that when i was done shovelling , I'd bump into racks of clothing , knocking some on the floor. What a great job. I also got free dry cleaning as a benefit. The owner didnt know we had 6 people in our family and alot of clothes to clean. When he saw the piles of clothing I brought in to clean, I thought he was having a heart attack.
And then there was Big Bill. Bill was a big black guy with slick hair and sometimes a bandana. He was the presser. Bill got paid by the piece. Some articles of clothing worth more than others. I was the guy who counted the pieces and wrote down how many Bill pressed. if the total came to 120 I would round it up, to maybe 374. Bill loved me. The owners caught a few of my accidently on purpose mistakes and I no longer did that. It was back to bagging the clothes. I would hang some clothes on this metal stand, roll down a bag, rip the bag off the roll, shake it a few times to puff it up and get it right over the clothes, then twist tie it and staple the ticket on the plastic. Of course if it was an opposing Little League uniform, a few extra things took place. Like, stapling the legs together , spitting on the clothes, putting pins in so they'd get stuck. nice things like that. I was the fastest bagger known East of the Mississippi. I got paid $1 an hour , off the books. The job got passed down to my friend Johnny, the Richie, and a few others. I would pass the Cozy Bar ( which was next door to the cleaners) with my mother and Big Bill would say hello, my mom would say " you know people from that dirty bar?" I'd say oh mom that's Big Bill. She would just roll her eyes.
There were other jobs later on, although not boring, sometimes interesting , like working in Pitkin Pawn Brokers ( i said pawn not porn ). The owner would give people money for anything they brought in. One time he gave a guy $5 for a suit with poop in the pants. GROSSSS. Another guy bought a watch that stopped every two hours. The guy refused to go get it fixed. Repair was free. He would come into the store and set his watch every two hours. The weirdest people came into that shop on Pitkin between Osborn and Thatford. Brownsville, USA.
It was fun growing up in East New York, establishing a work ethic. Ahh yes, kids today, have video games much better idea.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Chew Your Food
Thinking back a few years, i was at a business meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. I was talking up a storm to everyone trying to get more business. A lot of talking was done at the bar and between the bar and buffet.
The buffet was pretty good, as far as buffets go. I'm not a big fan but these were dishes served by people, so no dirty hands, or feet for that matter were going into the food. They had steak shish-kebabs, spaghetti, shrimp, chicken on skewers, etc etc. There I was talking and talking eating my kebabs, suckin' down my spaghetti. As i'm talking my voice changes and it's harder to push out the words. It gets even more difficult but I keep on giving my sales pitch to a couple of guys. My big eating problem has always been , I don't chew. Not a good thing. I look at the plate and do not notice the 5 inch stick from the shish-kebab on my plate. I think "holy shish-kebab sticks!" I sucked the damn stick down with the spaghetti. One of the guys I was talking to said , you better get to a hospital. So, i'm waiting in the lobby,and trying to talk to this young woman there, who it turn out was the granddaughter of the best Lemon Ices in East New York. What a small world. She was Willy's granddaughter from Willy's Ices on Atlantic Avenue, right near the White Castle. I was amazed. She was even more amazed, 1) that I knew of Willy's Ices 2) that i swallowed a 5 inch shish-kebab stick and am still talking
So I get to an Emergency Medical Trailer, they take an x ray, and they tell me, They can't believe I actually swallowed that. I told them it slid down like stiff spaghetti. They told me if i'm in severe pain to come back right away. As it turned out, I wasn't in severe pain, and about 3 days later, I called my whole family in to see the sight of a big ol' shish-kebab stick floating in my toilet bowl.
From then on I chewed my food. And it is a good thing I did, because a week later, I was playing golf, and went to eat at the restaurant at the golf course. I ordered a triple decker sandwich that is held together by toothpicks. Wouldnt ya know it? I'm eating and chewing , and i bite into something hard. It's a toothpick. Apparently when the chef stuck the toothpick in( the ones with the colored frizzly stuff on the end) it broke off so you couldn't see it. So what does he do, he doesn't remove the broken one and just sticks another one in. So it's a good thing I started chewing. Scarey stuff.
The buffet was pretty good, as far as buffets go. I'm not a big fan but these were dishes served by people, so no dirty hands, or feet for that matter were going into the food. They had steak shish-kebabs, spaghetti, shrimp, chicken on skewers, etc etc. There I was talking and talking eating my kebabs, suckin' down my spaghetti. As i'm talking my voice changes and it's harder to push out the words. It gets even more difficult but I keep on giving my sales pitch to a couple of guys. My big eating problem has always been , I don't chew. Not a good thing. I look at the plate and do not notice the 5 inch stick from the shish-kebab on my plate. I think "holy shish-kebab sticks!" I sucked the damn stick down with the spaghetti. One of the guys I was talking to said , you better get to a hospital. So, i'm waiting in the lobby,and trying to talk to this young woman there, who it turn out was the granddaughter of the best Lemon Ices in East New York. What a small world. She was Willy's granddaughter from Willy's Ices on Atlantic Avenue, right near the White Castle. I was amazed. She was even more amazed, 1) that I knew of Willy's Ices 2) that i swallowed a 5 inch shish-kebab stick and am still talking
So I get to an Emergency Medical Trailer, they take an x ray, and they tell me, They can't believe I actually swallowed that. I told them it slid down like stiff spaghetti. They told me if i'm in severe pain to come back right away. As it turned out, I wasn't in severe pain, and about 3 days later, I called my whole family in to see the sight of a big ol' shish-kebab stick floating in my toilet bowl.
From then on I chewed my food. And it is a good thing I did, because a week later, I was playing golf, and went to eat at the restaurant at the golf course. I ordered a triple decker sandwich that is held together by toothpicks. Wouldnt ya know it? I'm eating and chewing , and i bite into something hard. It's a toothpick. Apparently when the chef stuck the toothpick in( the ones with the colored frizzly stuff on the end) it broke off so you couldn't see it. So what does he do, he doesn't remove the broken one and just sticks another one in. So it's a good thing I started chewing. Scarey stuff.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Reserved Seating
Reserve Seating, that's what we need. I was on the subway in NYC , it was so crowded and not a possibility of sitting down. The city is looking for revenue, so how about reserve seating on the subway. You walk right in through the masses to your comfortable reserved seat. Now we move to a nice sunny weekend in June, in Central Park. After walking all day, I'm ready to sit down. Every bench is taken. Homeless people sleeping on them, dogs sitting next to their masters on the bench, every part of the wall by the lake people are seated, even the good spots on the lawn is taken. Reserved seats in Central Park, a place to sit when you need to sit. Walking and walking through the city, and not a bench to be found. More seats, more reserved seats. Wait for the bus, have a seat, wait for a cab , have a seat. Anywhere, maybe just have them pop out of the ground when you insert your RSC(reserved seat card). Then there are the private seats. I went to Bloomingdales today (haha), walking and shopping , my feat were killing me. THe only place to go was to the floor that sells shoes. That's the only place with seats. Of course they were all taken, private reserve seats in Department stores, or any stores. Maybe your feet are tired,OK so you pass a furniture store and go in for awhile to lay down on the sofas they have. But you cant do that everyday. We need seats in Supermarkets. In the summer when the stores are air-conditioned , it will be a pleasure to sit in the produce section. It would be like being in the country or on the farm. So that's the idea,
have seats everywhere. Here's my slogan " Rest your feet and have a seat"
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