Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Skates, Spaldeens and Buster Browns


When I was a kid we lived in the Pomonok housing project in Flushing, Queens, a half hour’s subway ride from Times Square, long before the projects turned dangerous or the borough went Asian. The car-free playground just out the door always offered a glorious assortment of games, and after school I’d play punchball with a spaldeen, run bases, shoot marbles, play jacks, or jump rope with a clothesline chanting “Policeman policeman do your duty, Here comes Susie the American beauty” until my father whistled out the window or it was too dark to catch the ball, whichever came first. My usual means of transport was clamp-on roller skates.
Jack the Ice Cream Man, a neighborhood institution, didn’t only sell popsicles and chocolate marshmallow push-up sticks, he also organized races and yo-yo contests, with bird whistles and glow-in-the-dark plastic skulls as prizes.
Everyone stayed home from school on the Jewish holidays, even the black kids, with the exception of me and a few other red diaper babies unfortunate enough to have principled left-wing parents. I remember two ways a marginally better-off kid might lord it over the rest of us: to own a baseball glove, and to play potsy (that’s Queens for hopscotch) by tossing a red checker instead of the standard-issue bottlecap onto the squares.
There were other tomboys on the playground, but I was the only one who convinced my mother to let me wear boys’ shoes under my dresses – in the fifties that meant not sneakers but Buster Browns with leather soles – so I could run faster.

We had a piano for my father to play Bach, Mozart, and Count Basie. At age four I sat down on the stool like he did and slammed my open hands on the keyboard expecting music to come out – I still remember my shock at the cacophony! I got to start piano lessons afterward, learning to read notes about the same time I learned to read words.
In 1954 I was scheduled to be a guinea pig for the Salk polio vaccine but I hated injections (I still do, that’s why I’m so good at giving them). My mother spent hours giving me make-believe shots with a bobby pin so I wouldn't pull my arm away at the moment of truth. She told me I had to get used to needles because I would need them to take away the pain of having a baby – an issue fresh in her mind since my little brother was just two years old. At the last minute I caught a cold and didn't get the vaccine after all, disappointing everyone except myself.  When they taught us in medical school that some of those first batches hadn't been adequately inactivated and had given lots of kids paralytic polio, I took it as a sign of personal grace.
My health suffered no serious threats. Perpetual scabs adorned my knees – when my mother once hinted there would come a day when I would no longer have them, I didn’t believe her. I landed on my coccyx roller skating and couldn't sit down for a week, I split my chin open showing off at potsy, and there were warts to paint, but no broken bones and no appendicitis. I even managed to hang on to my tonsils.
Pomonok has changed some, but – according to one contented denizen recently – “Residents are born, raised, and never leave here!” So next time you hear anyone badmouthing “the projects” maybe you’ll remember my project: kiddie heaven.
*****
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2 comments:

  1. How I envy your childhood in the city. I grew up at the edge of the woods, and there were no kids around except a neighbor boy 3 years older than me (fat chance he was going to play with a little girl) and my brother 6 years older.
    One day two kids my age (maybe 9?) came up - they were visiting their grandmother down the street and she must have said there was a girl up the street they could play with.
    They came and asked if i wanted to play. Heaven! "What do you want to play?" "We have a jumprope". "I said, yeah, but there are three of us, and only one jumprope."
    I didn't know you could play with two kids holding the ends.
    I did have constant scraped knees rollerskating (with clamp-on skates, i also had clamp-on ice skates, with double blades) and remember the last scraped knee in my first year of high school, a bit embarrassing.
    I read little lulu comic books because i dreamed of living in an actual neighborhood with sidewalks where you could go visit a friend all on your own, and maybe get an ice cream or a candy at a local store without having to be driven there by a parent. What a dream! Once i moved out I never lived outside of a city.

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