Back when I was 4 (in 1950) we had the first TV in the neighborhood. It was an old Dumont with a green, round 8" CRT with the top and bottom masked off. It was as big as a small refrigerator laid on it side, and put off enough heat to warm the room on a cold day. I don't remember much about the sound, so it must have been OK in that department. It went out of tune about every ten minutes and sometime Dad would kick it and suddenly, Voila, a clear picture. He sent me down to the hardware store early every Saturday to get in line with the other kids and run the TV tubes through the tube tester and buy new ones when they failed the tests. This, so we could watch Milton Berle and The Great One those nights without the pop, hum/buzz, stink, smoke effects.
This was before the Crusader Rabbit, Andy's Gang, and Roy Rogers shows. This, all Saturday mornings; the rest of the time, parents held the seats of power, and their remotes were..., us kids. TV in the '50's was a joke by today's standards. TV in the 60's was more junk, lots of it canned stuff in 'living color'. Live TV was as likely to go wrong as it went right. When the current Queen of England was crowned, we waited hours while a military plane raced across the Atlantic with the pictures. Mom was enthralled. Same stuff today, only it's instantaneous.
My most prized possession was my bike, a red and chrome monster Road Master with a coaster brake that weighed almost as much as I did. I used it to ride all over Astoria Queens in a five block radius around 42nd Street and 34th avenue, from just beyond Steinway Street to Kelly Square, 31st Avenue to Northern Boulevard. The Queensboro Milk bottling plant was a block away, and we'd wake to the honking hoot of the air starters in the old C-Cab Mack chain drive delivery trucks.
Things were different then. The neighborhood was all 3 story brownstone tenements with each side of a street inhabited by a different nationality. My side of 42nd Street was the Irish, across the street were the Polacks, the Brits were around our block, the French were around the Polacks' block. Spanish (mostly Puerto Ricans) were next, then Italians, and so on. We all fought, and we all got along thick as thieves.
Milk came in glass bottles with card stock disks sealing the top under a foil wrapper. We'd cadge handfuls of the disks from the bottling plant, then go on block wide skirmish lines shooting the disks from a slingshot-like device that featured a fork style clothes pin, some string and a rubber band. Everyone would go home that night with welts on their faces. Another variation involved a length of scrap wood, a spring clothes pin, the ever present rubber band, and inch or two square torn up scraps of linoleum in place of the disks.
No discarded roll of linoleum ever made it onto the garbage trucks. There was never a shortage of scrap wood or cheap nails; all those fruit crates got busted down and put out in the trash twice a week. We'd make scooters from a crate, a 2x4, some nails and the two halves of an orphan roller skate.
Every day in Summer, that entire block of 42nd street would get the police barricades put up and the street would become a playground. The sidewalk chalk would come out and lanes with sharp turns, curves ,and straightaways would be drawn in so we kids could have roller skate races. Later in the day, it was stick ball with the pink Spauldings and mop handles. Lots of scraped knees and mild contusions those nights going back in to Mom and Dinner, with Dad away on Night Shift. The barricades came down at 5pm, so the work force could come back home and park.
We all knew when to go home because that was when the street lights went on.
A couple of times we'd go on overland bike expeditions to the World's Fair Grounds, maybe a dozen kids strong. We'd pedal up Northern Boulevard, past the Astoria Post Office, Sunnyside Rail Yard, Dejur Amsco, and the Ronzoni Spaghetti plant, eventually crossing under the Roosevelt Avenue Elevated Subway Line in Elmhurst. From there on to Corona, and finally to the Fairgrounds.
Our bikes would have those huge old canvas newspaper delivery sacks hooked around the handlebars, and we'd spend the late morning and early afternoon climbing the huge apple trees, picking the apples, and come home just in time for dinner with those paper deliver bags bulging with Macs and Granny Smiths. The whole neighborhood would smell like baking apple pies for a week after, and cinnamon became a luxury item for while (i.e., you had to pay a nickel extra). Some kids would take turns riding Pony Express on the back fender of one bike. One way or another, everybody would get there and get back. Flat got fixed on the spot, everyone had a well used tire tube patching kit in the black tin can that they came in, friction taped to the underside of their bike seat springs.
Then one day and night, Alfred Hitchcock had the entire neighborhood barricaded off, and filmed the night scenes of The Wrong Man with Henry Fonda right on our street corner (42nd and 34th) and along the street over to 43rd. Next morning it was all gone just like the traveling carnival. NOBODY watched TV that night. Nobody got to see Henry, his part wasn't filmed until sometime after midnight. I imagine Jane could have been a little kid there that day, somewhere back behind the scenes. Probably not. No self respecting movie star would live anywhere near a place like ours.
My best buds were the guys in the Cub Den. We'd all go to Ricky's apartment to watch Mickey Mouse Club after school. We were all going to be Navy Jet Fighter Pilots, just like Ricky's Dad. Once, maybe 15 or 20 years later I saw Rick on a TV game show, maybe Jeopardy or something like that. He was in his full Naval Aviator's blues. At least one of us made the dream come true.
July first was Lock Day. Each kid would take a padlock, a length of string, and a jar of Vaseline out with them that day. The padlocks would fit between the bars of the Subway ventilator grates in the sidewalk with their bottoms all gobbed up with Vaseline. It would be lowered down through the grate to pick up whatever would stick, then get retrieved. Pens, coins, and dollar bills would be harvested that day, along with a couple of pounds of rock hard discarded chewing gum, which got tossed back.
When you ran out of Vaseline, you were done until next July.
People, even back then, didn't realize that those ventilation grates were first installed back when the Subways were steam fired trains, and the tunnels had to get cleared of the smoke. There was soot, scores of years old, still clinging to the sides of the apartment buildings and brownstones, may even still to this day, dating back to probably before WWI.
Amazing what an 8-12 y/o kid could get away with back then. We'd spend hours chasing each other around in bands of kids with toy guns, usually two st9cks nailed together, playing cops n' robbers. cowboys n' indians, Commies and G-Men. Bang, bang, yer dead!
Those days, the 'bad ones' got JD (Juvenile Delinquent) Cards they had to carry around all the time. If a copper stopped them, they had to haul out that card. Nobody tried to hide it, they just did what they were told.
These days, they'd get something worse, becoming PC Pariahs with psychic scars to match, with their parents getting reamed by Batshit Snowflakes in the Principal's Office, petty little tyrants, all.
... And these days folks wonder why parents get a second job, and their kids go Full Batshit and shoot up their schools. Ever notice how most of the time, it's a public school, not a private one?
I miss it still.
Greg
