Rant #2,207: My House

I am a nostalgic type of person.

I love to look back at the past, and I have a pretty good memory for things that happened in my life 20, 30, 40, 50 or more years ago.

I don't remember everything, but I do remember more than most people seemingly remember about their formative years.

And I am not talking about their teen or pre-teen years. I am talking about even their years as a toddler or as a bit more than a toddler, ages maybe four to seven years old.

I remember a lot, but I don't remember everything.

I have talked extensively here about my old neighborhood of Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, where I lived from the age of seven to 14 years of age, the years which I believe are the most important years in a person's life, where you go from literally a little kid to a young adult--and it happens so fast, and those years shape you for the rest of your life.

And my memory of those seven years often irk people, because I remember things that, let's say, they don't want to remember.

But I don't talk as much about my years prior to that, because, well, I don't remember as much about those years as I do about the Rochdale Village years.

However, they were very important years in my life.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in a hospital that doesn't exist anymore and hasn't existed for decades. I think it was called Caledonian Hospital, but I really don't remember for sure what it was called.

I lived with my parents on Avenue N in Brooklyn for my first year of life, and then we moved to Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, my family's first venture into that borough.

During those years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kew Gardens Hills was a very hardscrabble area, made up of hard-working people, mainly blue collar but some white collar too.

The neighborhood I grew up in was a very notorious one, due to a number of things that happened there when I lived there.

The glue-sniffing craze--where kids would buy model airplane glue, sniff it, and get the resultant actions that you might think one would get for sniffing this stuff--started right in my neighborhood, and could have started right in the building I lived in, an address that I don't remember, but it was a three story building of apartments, much like other buildings in that area.

Anyway, I have an early reminiscence of one summer night, where the police led out a group of about 20 pre-teens and teens from the basement of our building, all of whom had been sniffing glue.

In the vicinity of our building came two incidents that not only shocked the neighborhood and the city, but also the rest of the country and perhaps the world.

One was the famous Alice Crimmins case. Crimmins was an absolutely beautiful woman in a bad marriage who did away with her kids in a dumpster around the corner from my house. Thought of as one of the first tabloid-driven stories that was driven as much by the gruesomeness of the crime as by Crimmins' absolute beauty--and covered as such by the New York Daily News and the New York Post--the story predated later, similar stories, but this was the first one covered as such by the New York newspapers, each looking to one up the other by printing another photo showcasing the beauty of this eventually found guilty cold blooded killer.

The other story was the Kitty Genovese story, where the young Genovese was walking home at night from work, was attacked by someone, and her cries of help were supposedly not paid attention to by those living in the neighborhood where this incident happened. It showed man's inhumanity to man, people not taking action when they should have, and made local, national and international headlines, and is still referred to to this day when people talk about looking the other way when situations occur.

But heck, when these things happened, I was just a kid, so they didn't affect me, until I was older and I realized that these things happened right in my neighborhood, the place that I called home during the early years of my life.

I remember jumping up and down in my bed or crib when "American Bandstand" was on TV. I remember telling my mother that I had to go to the bathroom, and that signaled that I was finally toilet trained. I remember the Marilyn Monroe incident that I described yesterday, and my very first memory of just about anything was George Reeves' death, and my young thoughts about "How could Superman die?"

I went to P.S. 165 (see photo), a thriving school in neighboring Flushing, during kindergarten and first grade. The school was an excellent learning institution, and I remember Mrs. Gold, my first grade teacher, who was older and was actually heading an experimental class I was in, where we combined first, second and third grade work into one year. Could it work? Yes it did.

And was Fran Drescher in my class? She might have been, she went to the same school, is my age, and when I look at a class picture, some of the girls do look like what she could have looked like back then, but I am not sure.

I remember my friends from that era, although not their last names, I remember David and Danny and Julie. I remember a girl who beat me up at will, whose name was Carla Maybloom. I remember a girl named Debbie, a beautiful blond girl who had an equally beautiful sister who was confined to a wheelchair with some malady that I don't remember.

I remember my parents' best friends at the time, Stu and Marge, who had kids my age. When they moved to Westbury, Long Island, I remember going to their house--we still lived in Kew Gardens Hills, but were looking to move--and being mystified at someone living in their own home as opposed to an apartment.

I remember listening to Chipmunks records with Danny and Julie; I remember hearing Spanish spoken for the first time by the kids of a new family in the neighborhood; and I remember seeing people who were not my skin color for the first time, squatters who lived in the basement of our building and whose baby was named "Swee' Pea."

I remember watching a lot of TV. I remember my father trying to get me to watch a baseball game on TV, and me not being interested at that time ...

But I also remember coming home from school on that fateful day in November, and watching non-stop coverage of the JFK assassination. And yes, I remember watching when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and I remember running into the kitchen and telling my mother that "something had happened" and that she should come into the living room.

I remember watching "Ding Dong School" and "Modern Farmer" and "Wonderama" and "Let's Have Fun" and every cartoon show that was on at the time, including my personal favorite, "Huckleberry Hound."

And I also remember buying comic books after school with change that I "found" in the living room, put there by my father after a day at work.

Yes, I remember the bugs that infested our apartment and building, my mother's frantic cries to the super to fix the problem, and I also remember my mother being pregnant and confronted with a neighbor, who knew well of my mother's situation, yet came into our house with a case of German measles. My father subsequently went to Saturday services at the local synagogue for weeks to pray to God for a healthy baby, and when my sister was born, she was fine.

I remember myself having measles, being quarantined for weeks, and when it was over, having photos taken of me in the style that was popular at the time.

But by July 1964, we moved to Rochdale Village, and my time in Kew Gardens Hills was history.

The area fell into some disrepair in the 1970s, but has rebounded since then, with the area featuring excellent access to shopping, to good schools, and to the subway, where getting to Manhattan is a snap.

The squalid apartment that we lived in goes for big bucks today. and the area is a good one, probably better now that it was when I lived there.

Those are some of my memories of the area. It was a fun time of my young life, but a lot of that time is fuzzy. I remember much more about Rochdale Village, which is really the neighborhood that I feel I grew up in, for better or worse.

But those early years ... I won't ever completely forget them.