Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (8 page)

Elaine Lubar and me posing after a pony ride.
Below
: For all of us, the love of baseball was personal and familiar. We spent hours arguing about, among other things, who was the better catcher: steady Dodger Roy Campanella (
right
) or short-armed swarthy Yankee Yogi Berra (
left
).

To me, however, each team was signified by a member of my small community. The Giants
were
my parents’ friends the Goldschmidts, the Rickards down the street, and, most of all, Max Kropf and Joe Schmitt, the butchers around the corner at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market. Loading me down with huge shinbones for my small cocker spaniel, Frosty, they would mock my Dodgers. I would pretend to be angry, but the truth was I loved going into their shop, the feel of the sawdust under my feet as I moved from the muggy August heat into the cooling air of their enormous refrigerator with sides of beef hanging from the ceiling. Most of all, I loved the attention I received, especially when they called me “Ragmop” in honor of my unruly reddishblond hair. These Giant fans were not dressed in ties and jackets, but wore white aprons, smeared with blood and marrow. Although I tried not to stare, my eyes were often drawn to the rounded stubs of the two fingers Max had cut off while slicing meat. When he caught me looking, he
would hold up his hand as if the wound were a badge of honor. “See, Ragmop, this is what happens if you want to be a butcher.”

The Yankees were represented by the Friedles, and especially Elaine, who was as devoted to her team as I was to the Dodgers. Since the two teams were in different leagues, our rivalry was muted during the summer months, only to peak again during those frequent Octobers when the Dodgers and the Yankees met in the World Series. She could not understand my idolatry of Jackie Robinson, while I, in turn, heaped scorn on her admiration for the shrill, wiry Billy Martin, the Yankee second baseman known for his quick fists and timely hitting. She would frequently take out her scrapbook of Billy Martin clippings to prove her point—how many hits, his latest batting average, his exploits in the field. How she could compare the tiny, pugnacious Martin to the noble Robinson defied my comprehension. Her enthusiasms and knowledge seemed all the more remarkable since her father, also a Yankee fan, did not encourage her love of baseball, taking her brother, Gary, to games and leaving her at home with the claim that she could never sit through an entire game. Finally, at the age of eight, she exploded in a tantrum of outraged anger, and he agreed to take her, choosing a doubleheader to prove his point. I can still see her look of delight and triumph when she returned to tell me she had loved every minute, and had demanded they stay until the last out of the extra-inning nightcap.

The Yankees also had fervent followers in the Lubars and the Barthas, who lived across the street. Elaine (“Lainie”) Lubar’s birthday was the day after mine, and her mother would host a joint birthday party to spare my mother the clamorous assemblage of our friends. Only by dint of their cabana at Lido Beach, a symbol of affluence
on our block, did the Lubars fit the typical image of the Yankee fan. When Lainie and I went to the beach together, I would race from the car to their family cabana—little more than a concrete hut with striped awnings and deck chairs, but to me, an oasis—where soft drinks were stacked in the refrigerator, and we could sit together for lunch, take a shower after swimming, and put on dry clothes to avoid spending the car ride home in sticky bathing suits on sandy towels.

The most memorable of our neighborhood Yankee fans was Gene Bartha, because of his peculiar dog-walking ritual with Clipper, the family sheepdog. Apparently, Clipper had originally been trained to relieve himself on newspaper in the house, for Gene was obliged to carry a paper with him and intermittently place several sheets on the sidewalk as they walked along. I was walking beside him one night when he mistakenly laid down on the sidewalk the sports page, which had a photograph and lead article on Yogi Berra. Seeing what he had done, he snatched it away from Clipper just in time, deftly replacing the sports page with the front page.

The ultimate aristocrats in the neighborhood—the family with the largest lawn—should, by rights, have been Yankee fans, but the Greenes, like the Rusts and our family, were staunch Dodger fans. The Greenes’ home was the only one on our block with a side yard as well as a front yard. I would play with Marilyn, the youngest of their three children, turning cartwheels on their soft grass, lying on my back to divine the shapes of different animals in the clouds, and feeding the rabbits they kept in a hutch on the corner of their lawn. The Rusts’ loyalty to the Dodgers followed the more typical pattern. A large Catholic family with five children, the Rusts had carried their allegiance with them when they moved to Long Island from Sheepshead
Bay in Brooklyn. And, of course, in Flatbush, my father had literally grown up with Ebbets Field, his devotion to the Dodgers so intertwined with his own biography that my sisters and I could no more have conceived of rooting for another team than of rooting against him.

For all of us, the love was personal and familiar. We spent hours arguing about whether Duke Snider, Willie Mays, or Mickey Mantle was the best center fielder. The handsome, smooth-fielding Duke Snider was the most consistent home-run hitter of the three, but Mays had a balletic grace and a joyful fury, while the switch-hitting Mantle had the greatest raw power and speed. Who was the best announcer: Russ Hodges, Mel Allen, or Red Barber? Who was the better catcher: Roy Campanella, steady behind the plate, unequaled in calling pitches, but a streaky hitter, or the short-armed swarthy Yogi Berra, the most dangerous hitter in baseball in late innings? Was Pee Wee Reese, the “Little Colonel,” who held the Dodgers together, a better shortstop than Phil Rizzuto, who led the American League in fielding? And which team had the better double-play combination: the Dodgers with Reese and Robinson, or the Giants with Alvin Dark and Eddie Stanky, whom we called “Eddie Stinky”? For support, we each mustered our own statistics and anecdotes. We carried on our arguments on the street, in the corner stores, and in each other’s homes. If no minds were changed, we took great pleasure in our endless debates and our shared love for the sport.

O
UR NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE
converged on a cluster of stores at the corner of our residential area: the drugstore and butcher shop; the soda shop, which sold papers, magazines, and comics; the delicatessen; and the combination barber shop and beauty parlor. The storekeepers were as
much a part of my daily life as the families who lived on my street. When I entered the drugstore for a soda, or went into the delicatessen to buy some potato salad for my mother, the proprietors would greet me by name and, if not occupied, indulge my relentless curiosity. Since the families who operated these stores also owned them, their work was more than a job; it was a way of life. The quality of the goods they sold was as much a manifestation of their pride and self-respect as my father’s lawn was to him. The personal services they provided were not motivated merely by a desire for good “customer relations” but by their felt relationship to the larger community which they served and looked upon as neighbors. For our mothers, these neighborhood stores supplied all the goods they needed in the course of an ordinary day, and provided a common meeting place where neighbors could talk, trade advice, and gossip as they relaxed over an ice-cream soda or a cup of coffee.

The soda fountain at the corner drugstore, where I helped Doc Schimmenti make ice-cream sodas for the triumphant Little League team.

The sign in St. James Pharmacy, appropriately located on St. James Place, promised “prescription services, reliability, Breyers ice cream, and prompt delivery.” But owner “Doc” James Schimmenti gave much more than the advertisement promised. Fastidiously dressed in a white jacket with a white short-sleeved dress shirt, bow tie, and dark pants, Doc was neighborhood nurse and doctor combined. If one of us scraped a knee, he would bandage the cut. If someone got a splinter, he would extract it. When he printed prescription labels, he put his home number on the front so that his customers could call at any hour if they had a question or needed a refill. He was known to deliver as far away as Garden City and as late as 3 a.m. Even on holidays, he was always available. He was so beloved in our neighborhood that we affectionately joked that the store was named for him—St. James—rather than the street on which it stood.

On entering the drugstore, one encountered an old fashioned soda fountain on the right, with six black stools that twirled around. To the left of the door there were greeting cards and a small bookshelf that held the lending library where my mother rented current best-sellers. On cold winter days, I could come in to warm myself on the grate which heated the store before venturing out again.
Two wrought-iron tables with matching chairs were usually occupied by people drinking sodas and waiting for their prescriptions. The shelves held cigarettes and cosmetics; the counter at the center of the store contained a dazzling display of penny candy. In the rear of the store, Doc ground the powders, poured the syrups, and counted pills to fill prescriptions.

Doc, his wife, Josephine, and the four children who made up his close-knit Italian family worked in the store, tending the fountain, unpacking cartons, or operating the register. On nights when the Little League team that Doc sponsored was playing, the entire family was pressed into action. Doc had promised his players that, whenever they won a game, and they won regularly, he would open the drugstore and treat them all to free ice-cream sodas.

Early one evening, I walked past the store just as the triumphant team was filing in. Doc beckoned me over, and asked me if I might help with the crowd of ballplayers. Unsure of my abilities, but unwilling to miss this splendid opportunity, I walked to the soda fountain with an air of pretended confidence. With Doc guiding me, I pulled the long handle that drew the carbonated water, pushed the short one to add the syrup, and mixed in the cold milk. Finally, with a metal scoop dipped in steamy hot water to soften the hard ice cream, I added two scoops of vanilla or chocolate ice cream and a dab of fresh whipped cream. After the first few sodas, Doc, satisfied, moved away, and I was on my own. My nervous uncertainty drained away as I saw the sodas being swiftly consumed without complaint. I made eighteen sodas that night, handing each one over to one of the boys with a smiling “Here you are,” in imitation of Doc Schimmenti himself. When the boys left, I raced home gleefully, holding the dollar I had been given for my work. “And he even paid me,” I said to my father
that night as I recounted my exploits in soda-by-soda detail.

The butcher shop next to the drugstore, home to my baseball rivals Max and Joe, boasted the best cuts of meat and the freshest vegetables in the entire area. Max, taller and thinner than Joe, was never without his ragged Giant cap as he stooped over the butcher block whistling opera tunes while he cleaved the meat. I was a regular in the store, even when I was only six or seven, for I would do the shopping when my mother wasn’t feeling well. Armed with her list, I would watch as they hauled down a huge slab of beef or side of lamb and carried it to the butcher block to be cleaved and cut into steaks, short ribs, or lamb chops. After the meat was cut, they would turn me over to Artie, the vegetable man, who would pick the choicest fruits and vegetables from the display he had made that morning.

When I came in they would often tease me that I had been fast asleep long after their workday had begun. Before dawn, Max would drive to the Bronx Terminal Market, on the Harlem River near Yankee Stadium, to pick out the day’s meat and vegetables. “Take me with you,” I would beseech him. “Let me see what you’re doing while I’m asleep.” Finally, he agreed, discussed it with my mother and one Saturday morning, picked me up in his truck just before three. My mother had furnished fresh coffee cake, which we devoured as we made our way into the Bronx. Perched on the high front seat next to Max, I began my customary interrogation. Had he always wanted to be a butcher, how had he gotten started, where had he come from? He told me he had arrived in the United States from Germany during the Depression, sponsored by his uncle Ottoman in New York. When he reached the city, however, things were so difficult that his uncle had no work for him.
He saw an ad for a position in a North Shore butcher shop and walked twenty-five miles to Long Island to ask for the job. Though he knew nothing about cutting meat, he persuaded the owner to take a chance. Eventually, they became partners. From that shop, he moved to the store in Rockville Centre.