4th Street Memoir
by
Loretta Masullo Comfort
In 1959, life
was defined by one city block. When I
was seven years old, E. 4th St. between Avenues L and M was my whole world, and
it was more than enough to entertain, educate and nourish me emotionally. Living in Flatbush in post-war Brooklyn, I
had all I needed to be happy. Kids
sprouted up in nearly every semi-detached house on the block. In my house alone, we had six kids in what
would be considered a small house today.
The
top floor of the house had three bedrooms. The front bedroom looked out onto
Friends Field, a green space for the Quaker school. The living room, dining room, kitchen and sunroom were on the main living
floor. The bonus feature of the house
was a finished knotty pine basement with
kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, large living area with a bar, and a
very menacing furnace room. My parents
had six kids in nine years. I guess the
house was a little crowded for so many people, but we didn't really notice. Our house was full of happy siblings and
tired but loving parents.
My
parents and our attached neighbors, the Andersons, took pride in keeping our
houses in tip-top shape. When siding needed to be replaced, they studied
samples of popular new products together and agreed on a gray shingle with
veins of black running through it. The
brick porch and lower parts of the structure were painted white. My dad and his family were landscapers who
owned a large piece of property around the block from us, between Ocean Parkway
and E. 5th St., that served as my grandparents' home, plant nursery and place
of business. That's why our garden on E.
4th was always the nicest on the block.
While
my mom spent her days tending to babies, doing laundry, cleaning and cooking,
all of the older kids relished our time outside with our friends. We had the freedom to roam the block as well
as to traipse in and out of our playmates' houses. All the parents in the neighborhood kept an
eye on us. The Scotts, who lived three doors
down, had four daughters as well as a resident grandma who collected cats of
all colors and tended to a healthy Concord grape vine in her backyard. We'd help ourselves to the bounty and pop the
soft interior of the grapes out of their deep purple skins, chew the pulp and
spit the seeds out through our puckered lips.
They weren't all that tasty for eating off the vine, but we'd try again
each year as the season came around, hoping for a sweeter harvest.
Each
neighbor on 4th St. had her own quirks, which ultimately broadened my outlook
on the world. At the Scott's house, I
was introduced to eating unheated baked beans with a spoon right from the can.
Not exactly like my dad's more labor intensive lasagna or veal marsala, but not
bad. Every once in a while they made
delectable Swedish pancakes rolled with strawberry jam and covered in powdered
sugar. Yum! Whether it was food or children, on E. 4th
St. it was share and share alike.
Our
neighbor across the alley was Helen, a nice Italian lady who wore crisply
ironed shirtwaist dresses and reminded me of the proper June Cleaver on Leave
it to Beaver. Every summer she
hosted her niece Ginny from Hartford, Connecticut. We were the same age and must have been in
sync with our TV viewing as we eagerly set up a communication system we saw on Dennis
the Menace. Tin cans and a string
long enough to reach from her summer bedroom window to mine directly across the
narrow driveway provided our nighttime fun.
We whispered loudly into our cans until our words were slow in
coming and our eyes closed.
Coming
from the mid-west, my mom had no family nearby to keep her company or assist
with children. The Broomheads from
England lived across the street in a multigenerational household. The elderly Mrs. Broomhead was a godsend,
frequently helping my overwhelmed mother with us six kids. Mrs. Broomhead, I think, needed a break from
her own complex extended family in her small home. She helped fold laundry, provided some adult
company for my mom and taught us traditional nursery rhymes in her lilting
English accent. She'd rock the baby to
sleep reciting a sweet rendition of "Hey Diddle, Diddle" that my
little sister Annie remembers to this day.
Dispersed
among the many Italian families were an equal number of mostly Orthodox
Jews. Susan, one of my best friends, was
one. As I learned my catechism in first
grade at St. Athanasius School, I taught Susan the dogma I was required to memorize. Questions such as "Who is God?" or
"Why did God make you?" had specific answers we were required to
learn by heart. One sad day, Susan told
me that I was not allowed share my religious training with her anymore. Her mother was concerned that she was too
interested in Catholicism. I was
disappointed because I liked being the teacher.
Of course, in first grade, I didn't know the difference between my
religious and secular education. My
sister Liz with whom I shared a bunk bed can attest to that. I bossily instructed her to parrot our
prayers each night, a Hail Mary, Our Father and the Pledge of Allegiance. I didn't realize until a few years later that
the Pledge was a tribute to our country, not a prayer.
Italian
or Irish Catholic, English Protestant, German Jew, Greek Orthodox—
it made no difference to
us kids what your background was as long as you were up for a rollicking day of
play with all the kids on the block.
Video games and computers were non-existent and TV was just becoming
more mainstream. If it wasn't pouring
rain or driving snow, we'd be outside riding bikes, jumping rope or playing
hopscotch. Ball games abounded. "A my name is Alice" was a favorite
among the girls. The object was to bounce a small pink Spaldeen ball while
reciting specific fill-in-the-blank sentences that changed slightly with each
letter of the alphabet. For example, I
might start, "A my name is Alice and my husband's name is Al and we come
from Alabama just to sell you apples."
Every time you came to a word that began with the letter you were
focusing on, you would bounce the ball under your leg. After the letter A, it might proceed with
"B my name is Betty and my husband's name is Bob, and we come from Boston just to sell you
balloons." The object of the game
was to get through the entire alphabet without making a verbal or physical
error with the bouncing of the ball.
SPUD was another game played with a Spaldeen. It was a group game similar to tag but with a
ball. The person who was "it"
would throw the ball as high in the air as possible and run away from the
ball. Whoever caught the ball would call
"SPUD" and everyone would stop in place. The person who had the ball could take three
giant steps in the direction of the person closest to him and throw the ball in
hopes of hitting that person with it. If
the person succeeded, the other person would then become "it." We were lucky to have a dead end street at
the end of the block so we could play SPUD and
kick the can in the street. Few cars
ventured there, and the ones that did belonged to our friends'
parents, the Good Humor man or the milk man, all of whom knew to look out for
us. Parents on the block cared for us,
but were just as likely to reprimand any child as they were to invite them in
for a cookie or to bandage a scraped knee.
While
I loved being physically active, games of imagination or pretend were my
favorites. Playing cowboys with my holster loosely buckled on my hips and
galloping as if I were riding a horse like Roy Rogers was an obsession one
year. Writing and producing plays was
another favorite of mine. My younger
brother Alfie will never forget (or forgive) when I dressed him up in tan
tights, a long green shirt with a belt (to mimic a tunic) and a pointy green
hat with a feather to play the lead in my production of Robin Hood.
One
summer, our garage served as a sort of Grauman's Chinese Theater after I got
all the kids on the block to help me empty it of bikes, lawnmower, rakes and
the like. At my direction each friend
chose a stick of colored chalk to create squares on the cement floor. We spent hours tracing our hands and feet
into each square. We then signed each square with the names of our favorite
actors and singers. Elvis, Sinatra,
Doris Day, John Wayne and were among them.
An episode of I Love Lucy served
as my inspiration for this mega project.
Another
time, my friend Valerie and I turned the playhouse in her backyard into a
voting center. This first encounter with
politics coincided with the election of 1960 between Richard Nixon and John
Fitzgerald Kennedy. I was eight years
old. The young, handsome,
charismatic—and Roman Catholic—war hero, JFK, created quite a stir. Spurred on by talk at home, westaged a mock election for the kids in
our neighborhood. On election daythe
neighborhood kids filed into Valerie's backyard to vote. Methodically, we checked them in and handed
them a paper ballot to fill out in privacy in the playhouse "voting
booth." Kennedy ended up winning
both the kids' and national election.
Catholics basked in the glow of having one of their own as president, and
much of the country was taken with the beautiful young couple in the White
House.
If you were
a kid,
life was pretty darn good back in the mid 50s and early 60s. We played, went to school, watched TV, ate
dinner with our families. There were
some disappointments, of course, but 60 years after the fact they seem
ridiculously minor. There were evenings, for example, when I was too slow
running home to get a nickel from my parents after hearing the bell of the ice
cream truck...so I went without ice cream that day. I'd pout when my friends didn't want to play
what I wanted to play, and I was the odd man out. My most frequent ongoing challenge was with
my mother, who expected me to help with housework--washing dishes, sweeping the
floor, or making my bed. I studiously
attempted to ignore her requests. My
now-admitted laziness resulted in ongoing battles. That's about as bad as my life got in those
days.
As I matured a bit, my life started to be
influenced by outside forces, not just my family and cadre of neighborhood
friends. One thing I didn't fully grasp
at the time is that some of the routines we practiced at school or in the
neighborhood were forewarnings about what was to come. Periodically, air raid drills sounded while
the neighborhood kids ran around playing like maniacs. I recall having to quickly get to an air raid
shelter in the middle of a game of Chinese jumprope. We knew the drill. Get to the nearest air raid shelter,
designated by a yellow and black sign, and stay put until the siren sounded
again for the all-clear.
It
seemed too that once a month the alarm sounded over the PA system in
school. All classes funneled into the
hallways away from outside windows. We stood in silence in a double line and
were instructed by the nuns to pray for our survival if indeed we ever were
attacked by the Russians.
I
even recall taking Sunday afternoon rides in our powder blue Mercury station
wagon to look at sample bomb shelters that could be installed in your
backyard. At seven or eight years old, I
didn't grasp the significance of the drills or visiting samples of bomb
shelters. It was just something we did.
Unfortunately,
these inchoate fears became distressingly real when our young president took to
the airwaves to announce that the Soviets had clandestinely built up weapons,
including nuclear warheads, in Cuba. The
resulting thirteen-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union
suspended the carefree life we were living on E. 4th St. JFK took a hard stand demanding that the
Russian weapons be removed, and East
Coast residents were faced with the real possibility of obliteration. Those were thirteen days of intense
fear. Thirteen days of contemplating our
doom.And—thirteen
days of no playing. Grocery store
shelves were nearly bare as neighbors purchased canned goods and other
non-perishables to sustain us when the missiles came. We lined the shelves behind the bar in our
basement with the canned goods, jugs of water, flashlights, candles, matches,
can opener, a deck of cards, transistor radio, blankets, a first aid kit and
more. I remember organizing and
reorganizing the cans just to pass the time.
The windows in our basement were boarded up. All of us on 4th St. were as prepared as we
could be. We waited and prayed—Jewish
prayers, Catholic prayers and Protestant prayers—any and all were welcome. Families stayed close to home watching Walter
Cronkite on the TV news or listening to the local radio station for any morsel
of information that might indicate our fate.
Thankfully,
our prayers were answered on the morning of October 28 when the Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Russians would dismantle and remove the
weapons from Cuba. Everyone on our block
heaved a collective sign of relief. Just
as we finished exhaling, there was a knock on our door. "Can Loretta come out to play?"
Valerie called. The parade of children
continued with Susan, Kathy, Patrice, Howie and the rest. The good life was back! After being cooped up together for days, the
parents on the block were happy to release their children once again to the
1300 block of E. 4th St. where we loudly and now safely roamed once more. In a moment's time, balls were flying again,
tinny bicycle bells were ringing, and hopscotch grids were being drawn. The children on the block shouted, giggled,
smiled and played until darkness brought that afternoon of fun and relief to a
close.
At
dinner that night, our family said an extra prayer of thanks, and our parents
agreed to read just one more story to us before bed.
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