The leaves were matted near the curb. The recent downpour left other traces of debris, dog poop being the most nearly disintegrated of them, happily. Generally, the landscape was freshened and a sense of renewal was in the air. This was my neighborhood: no longer semi-rural perhaps, as a 1938 brochure extolling the virtues of the surrounding environment of the then new Boulevard Gardens apartment complex in North Woodside described it. No, this was Woodside, just past mid-century: visually and in fact, more industrial than ever before, stable, conservative (though we didn't know it), with its residents descendants of Scots-Irish, Irish, German-Americans, a sprinkling of W.A.S.P.S., Ashkenazi Jews, and other assimilated folks or those aspiring mightily to be so, from many other European lands as well, especially Italians, Poles and Greeks, blue collar folks, artisans and laborers, few "eggheads", all proud Americans, nearly all Caucasian, moral, God-fearing (and the very few atheists, homosexuals, beatniks and generic troublemakers knew to keep their traps shut) and most especially, hopeful.
This particular day was like many another. Frying onions, i.e. their odor wafting through hallways of walk-up apartment buildings was familiar and comforting. Children playing on stoops or venturing near the curbs, some shorn of their locks, silently told of the presence of ringworm in some residences and families. The appearance of a 1952 Topps baseball card, like the slightly torn one of journeyman "Chisox" hurler Lou Kretlow that I found in an empty lot near the Northern boulevard Independent Subway station, was not an uncommon or unpleasant occurrence for a rabid collector of these little works of art mounted on neat cardboard rectangles and fragrant, if new, with the sweet dusty residue of pink chewing gum.
The growing urban landscape included small factories and a burgeoning volume in traffic that was the fruit of the full re-tooling for a peacetime economy that the auto industry and other titans of industry and government strove for and welcomed. Peacetime prosperity was a reality despite a bitterly cold Cold War. The afore mentioned empty lot along with others, though they were a kind of endangered species, coexisted with the factories, auto repair shops, food processing plants, tool and dye establishments, etc., much the same way that horse drawn wagons, while dwindling numerically, made their peace with the horseless buggies that became increasingly speedier, larger and more numerous by the close of World War I.
But what of life on this street on this newly sunny late morning, a cold spring one that made my flannel Roy Rogers shirt feel oh so, welcome against my skinny ribbed torso? As I walked past parked cars with their split windshields, some with the new wraparound style and triangular little vent windows, I didn't notice of course, the empty spaces between many of them, the non-existent curbing along some sections of the street or the lack of signs informing drivers of alternate side parking regulations; these were all things yet to be. And there was no sense of how fleeting time could and would someday become. A grade schooler like me only pondered the moment's concern and wondered what Mom had packed in his brightly painted lunchbox with Davey Crockett's image on it. Was the chocolate milk in the thermos remembered? The evening meal may as well have been decades into the future as far as my catalogue of thoughts could tell, though in really just an instant (as an aged one's perceptions of the clock's all powerful ticking could reckon), my next door neighbor's mother would project her cry half way down the street: "Supper's on the table!" Like the latter day characters in Our Town, my observations of the ghosts of my youth are inevitably filled with uber-emotional wistfulness and the indescribable sense of fragility and awareness of the exceedingly transitory nature of persons and events that were then unquestioningly believed to be as solid as Gibraltar and as unchanging as the Kingdom of God.
This day I saw "Big" Mike for the first time. They had told me about him. The frightened whisperings of juvenile tongues pre-disposed toward the thrill of seeing bogeymen had colored utterly my understanding of him. Someone screamed "run!" and I sprinted away toward the safety of other adults whose faces I knew and who did not drag their legs or stare ahead with bulging eyes embedded in a face crimson and twisted with wisps of white down above jug ears. Still, it was his street too. And life on it was no doubt quite different for him than it was for us little ones, ambulating with abandon and quite oblivious to the fact that Mike once ran as we did. When most of us could only crawl or were fetuses in our mothers' bellies, or like the youngest of us, just zygotes, "Big"Mike first became a monster and not as "Big" as those who loved him and remembered he was. A cerebro vascular accident, as the old-time doctors in Woodside termed it, had left him with his speech badly slurred and that big left foot scraping one of his once shiny black shoes across the pavement. They were shoes that he used to proudly wear along with his double rowed brass buttoned policeman's dark blue tunic and sharply pressed trousers. At the dawn of mid-century he also did not hold one of those withered arms uselessly against his chest and his flashes of Irish temper were not horrific wailings, but lightning strikes of anger happily married to a wink and a flash of wit of a seemingly undying mind. Then too, until the stroke he could twirl a nightstick with the dexterity of a teen bound for glory as a juggler or a crackerjack Las Vegas card dealer. When most of our parents were also just beginning their journeys, Mike had, on a Chelsea corner dimly lit by a solitary gas lamp, taken a bullet in the line of duty that penetrated a bicep, but that youth and grit shook off and that made a wiser and stronger cop in mind and body. He was a good man. Many of us did not learn this until years after the cessation of those inadvertent hauntings.
Yes, the only bad man on our street was really just a sick man. Juvenile delinquency though was the new obsession of newspapermen, the purveyors of pop culture and Hollywood moguls. There was money in depicting youthful rebellion or worse. Yet gum chewing in school was still the no.1 concern of educators with the lull between the fright over "Reefer Madness" in the '40s and the spread of "weed" in the mid-'60s just that: a hiatus before the emerging tumor of the drug culture. This interlude was real, however short-lived it proved to be. Teenage gangs were in reality, pubescent folks just hammering out social rules of engagement as they naturally sought their "place in the sun" distinct from children as well as adults. We had such a gang. They never harmed anyone and their desire to "rev" a jalopy's engine, preen before members of the opposite sex and display varsity jackets (uniforms of identity and belonging), carry or have carried school books by one's "steady", were as revolutionary as they got. No need to pretend: as in all human communities, there were real problems. Some girls did "get into trouble" and the less than mature judgment of the teen male, especially behind the wheel of an internal combustion engine vehicle, resulted in many a tragedy, no different than today. But these incidents were fewer, more remarkable and deeply regretted than today's brutal atmosphere of unabating violence, promiscuity and moral ignorance, if not bankruptcy. Creativity and tenderness….art in short, grew on this street as well. It took the form of music: yes, rock and roll, especially the doo wop stylings of acapella all-male groups harmonizing in the alleyways separating our apartment buildings and semi-detached houses. Complex rules of playtime were other manifestations of fertile young minds, the ones not yet made dizzy by pubescence. There was hopscotch, scully, boxball, punch ball, ringalerio and other diversions in our little busy world of socializing, budding grown-ups.
The most significant fact about existence then and there is one that contrasts sharply with reality on the same block today, nearly six decades, eleven presidents and nine or so wars later. Your neighbor and yourself were not only known to each other, but each other's offspring knew that they were answerable to each other's parents, i.e. all adults. Oh, of course there were exceptions. The eccentric old bachelor or the chronic inebriate down near the corner was not in "the loop" about group parenting. But by and large, ours was a block of families, with sizable numbers of small fry clogging the pavement or shouting and carrying on in backyards, the empty lots and the nearby schoolyard, their controlled chaos kept on this razor's edge of civilization by watchful loving eyes of mature men and women who knew the kind of world they had and the kind that they wanted to keep and it was a world permeated by love and structure, meaningful and committed to a future of upholding traditions and mores of beloved ancestors, but one determined to expand peace, prosperity, knowledge and especially to spread the distilled wisdom of liberty, education, good old American innovation and good humor. It is a street that is no more.
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