little memories

Glimpses, Smells and Tastes of a World Long Gone

There was a time when cigar boxes were basic building blocks for a child’s inventive mind, when burlap bags could round out your personal wardrobe and cellophane opened fantastic vistas into the universe. In other words, I grew up before plastic and before television. I remember wooden toys, tin and lead soldiers, ba;sa aeroplane models… and often wonder where all the silver paper went. Probably to the same Land of the Lost as stamp albums and cockamamies.  

The day bubble-gum returned signalled the bed if the war. If you had a penny, you could buy one from the large glass ball near the front of the candy store. Soon fathers would be coming home, except for those who rested in foreign fields.

Something new on the avenue. The message went around. The man from Israel was selling something called pita. He had numbers on his fore-arm, like grocer from Hungary.

They said that chubby Mary lived in the basement of her pizza bakery. She was so fat she could never get out. She was always there and it only cost five cents a slice.  No wonder she never went anywhere else.

The pushcart man stood in front of the school and sold two kinds of knish, kasha. Both delicious after a full day of classes at PS 164. For another nickel you could get a dixie cup of soda. Those were the days!

Right under the el and across from the Italian church was a bakery that sold all kinds of marzipan goodies. They also had ice-cream cakes, lady fingers and charlotte rousse on a plate. An electric train went along the wall on a ledge. You wrote your order neatly on a pad of paper and it went to the man behind the counter. Then a little while later the train delivered what you asked for. But you had to pay the man at the cash register by the door before you went home.

Again back then everything was a penny or a nickel.  Except a two-cents plain which was a glass of spritz vasser without any flavours. So you could buy from a wooden barrel a big half-sour dill cucumber for five cents in a piece of waxed paper and walk home contented. Also a little twisted chewy pretzel for a penny or a big one with large chunks of salt for a nickel. No wonder kids searched the streets and alleys behind shops for empty soda bottles to turn in for two cents each.

My mistake. I never heard of mocha ice-cream, so I ordered it. When the dish arrived, there was a funny smell. A small spoon in the mouth. Ugh! Coffee.  How to tell the friends around the table that it was the worst thing I had ever tasted. At least until about 1944, when grandma offered me spoonful of her coffee.  I was four years old. And it was probably chicory, anyway, since it was wartime and there was rationing.

One evening, when my father was still not home from, the war, when my grandpa was already dead, my grandmother and my mother took me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It was under the El on Old New Utrecht Road, which is a funny name for a street. Everything is strange in the grown-up world and things aren’t what you think they are.  The windows had reddish glow and the lights in the glass were bright green and flashed rhythmically.  The Chinese lettering hid the scene inside. To my four-year-old eyes, this was a Japanese place, and the Japs or Nips were bad guys who were killing grown-up kids from my street. So I refused to go in, although I could smell very delicious foods within. My grandma went inside and very soon the manager, two cooks and the waitress came out to tell me they were Chinese and not Japanese.  When we went in and sat around the table the meal came out—chicken egg-drop soup, chicken chow mein, and then a tiny white round thing that my mother called a mothball but I knew was ice-cream. The Chinese, I knew were good people, even though they looked like japs and also write in a funny alphabet.

If you went to a delicatessen, like Skilowitz, and who didn’t? whatever you ordered you had to have with it a bottle of Dr Brown’s celery tonic, little plate of fat and fluffy French fries, as well as half a dill pickle.  Sandwiches were either corned beef or pastrami on rye, maybe sometimes for the connoisseur sliced boiled tongue, each with a generous shmear of hot mustard. Some older people were known to order a cherry soda, since there is no accounting for taste.

On a winter or summer holiday, as soon as you crossed the state line past Utica, you could get birch beer. Not the post-modern chemical version from Mother’s Real Birch Beer, but the really real kind, straight from the trees. So they said. And, boy, is it better than root beer or sarsaparilla!

Howard Johnson’s was the only fast-food chain (‘franchise’) out on the highways.  From them you had to get curlicue fried potatoes. Why else drive through the countryside?

No hamburgers back then. Only meat patties with onions, sliced gherkins and, for the totally unkosher, slices of Velveeta cheese.

Everyone had strips of button candy.  They were pink, white and blue. By easting special patterns you could create secret codes to pass around in the classroom. The messages were important only in the sense that they defiance if the teachers and befuddled classmates not in your gang.

My grandma Molly took me on what may have been one of the last trolley cars from 13^th Avenue to Stilwel Avenue the Boardwalk in Coney Island. We went over a little bridge of stinking muddy refuse-filled water—to go to what was thus still technically an island. No coneys or rabbits then. Only a horrible near-solid stench. Later we went by subway and el. By then you really had to use your imagination to see Stink River. The connection with Coney Island from Brooklyn was complete. Only the smell continued—for many years; or was that a proustien memory?  Officially what had been a nearly three-mile long creek was reduced to less than a third of its original size and so what had been an island became a peninsula.

I searched the cardboard boxes left by storekeepers on the curb near thier shops for the garbage collector. There were billing pads with still usable squares of carbon paper, pencil stubs big enough to draw with, envelopes with local and foreign stamps you could soak off, and many other treasures. Unfortunately most of what I brought home was soon re-designated—I presume by my mother—for the household rubbish, usually while I was away at school. Nevertheless, the hunt was a worthy adventure.

Cockamamies. What are they and how are they used? They are sometimes called transfers or decalques. They are pictures printed on thin, almost see-through tissue paper. You lick your arm and then press the picture down. The result is a temporary tattoo. In current usage something that was bizarre and useless was cockamamy. For instance, this list of things I remember from Boro Park.