You know, we always called each other goodfellas. Like you said to, uh, somebody, "You're gonna like this guy.
          He's all right. He's a goodfella. He's one of us." You understand? We were goodfellas.  (Henry Hill in Goodfellas)

I’ll never forget the first time I watched Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film Goodfellas, starring Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta. The opening scenes sucked the breath right out of me. I gulped and gazed at a past that seemed awfully familiar. For the first time in my life I understood what the overused phrase “there but for the grace of God” meant.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Things changed dramatically when I inherited Billy Walker’s job at a drugstore on Rockaway Parkway. It was owned and operated by a guy named Morrie. About six years earlier, Morrie hired Grace Church kid Tommy Norris as his clerk. Tommy worked there for three years, and then Morrie hired Billy, from the Gang and the Church, to take Tommy’s place. Billy worked there for two years, got a better paying offer from a construction company, and passed the job to me. It was one of the best jobs imaginable for a bright but naive young man.

We accumulated a lot of expired bottles of barbiturates and amphetamines on those shelves, some only weeks past their expiration date. It seemed like a waste. I knew barbiturates were dangerous, so I avoided them; but what harm could a Dexamyl do? Being on the cross-country team, I figured a little pick-me-up before practice—but never before a meet—might help. It didn’t. I’d slip a Dexie into my mouth with some water just before changing into my running gear, but the effects never seemed to be enough to make me faster, more alert, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I stopped taking them after three or four practices. Still, my teammates and other Canarsie High kids thought they were wonder drugs, so what could I do?

My career as a drug dealer lasted less than a month. First of all, my supply was severely limited. We only had a few bottles of dextroamphetamines in the basement. I wasn’t above selling expired stuff, but there was no way I was going to steal stuff out of the prescription drawers. Also, I didn’t want to take too many out of each bottle because I knew someone somewhere might be keeping a record. Judging by the fact that I was never caught, I may have assumed too much.
 
Fact is, I didn’t really like being a drug dealer. The money wasn’t great. How much does one charge for expired pharmaceuticals? Probably a lot more than I did. I was the bargain basement of drug dealers. Also, I never felt quite right about what I was doing. I saved every drug dealing dollar I made, maybe fifty or sixty, and eventually put them all in an envelope and gave them to a poor woman to whom I’d often deliver legitimate prescriptions. Like my gambling winnings, I felt guilty keeping them.
 
Once Morrie learned that I was trustworthy—well, given the previous stories, maybe trustworthy isn't the right word—he gave me two of my most important duties: filling prescriptions and fetching supper.

Getting Morrie’s supper was fun and sometimes profitable. Most of the time my boss packed his supper, which he heated on a hotplate in the back. Microwaves were a few years away. A couple of days a week, however, Morrie sent me for a sandwich. Sometimes he was generous enough to buy me one too. My favorites were the veal parmigiana from Armando’s, with an aroma that could not be held in by aluminum foil and called to me all the way back to the store; and ham salad from a non-Kosher deli. I never gave too much thought to why Morrie, a Jew, would eat ham salad; I just joined him. To this day, when people consider ham salad to be a paté made of chopped ham with bits of pickle floating in it, I cringe. Morrie and I ate a perfect blend of diced ham and mayo on a bed of lettuce. For years, after Easter’s traditional ham dinner, I’d beg Sandy to dice some leftover ham and make that kind of ham salad for me.
 
Supper with Morrie was awesome. Morrie was a firm believer in adding milk to soda. Root beer, with its inherent smoothness, seemed a natural for milk. Dr. Pepper and milk worked surprisingly well together. I started to draw the line when my boss insisted I add milk to a Coke. Some things just aren’t done! But the boss is the boss, so I tried it. I survived, but I never looked forward to those suppers. Even Armando’s veal parmigiana had trouble overcoming that taste. Nevertheless, Morrie and I bonded over those quiet suppers. I earned more of his trust.

That trust was shown in another part of the supper routine. Morrie generally ate around the time we made our daily bank deposit. He would open the register, count the till, and remove most of it. Then he’d prepare a deposit slip and put the wad of bills with it in a zippered pouch. My instructions were to walk to the bank, make the deposit, and stop by the deli or Armando’s for our meal. Each time I’d carefully tuck the pouch under my shirt and inside my pants so as not to arouse eyes bent on mugging.

One day, upon my return with our supper, and an empty bank pouch, Morrie seemed very quiet. We ate our dinner in silence, and then I settled into my end-of-the-day closing routine. Finally, before we locked the doors and went home, Morrie told me what had happened. While I was gone with the day’s profits, two guys came in and robbed the store. Morrie’s silence was part shock and part wanting to be a calming presence when he told me.
 
My first reaction was to laugh.

“They robbed the register? How much was in it? Fifty bucks? And here I was carrying hundreds in my pants right down the street.”

My second reaction was to wonder why Morrie hadn’t somehow signaled the fire station across the street. He always said he’d trust the firefighters over the police to help out if there were trouble at the store. But there were no firefighters. That provoked my third reaction. Why were there no cops? Could they have come and gone so quickly? I didn’t think I’d been gone that long. Was Morrie going to give a statement at the 69th Precinct later that night? Why didn’t the cops want to talk to me? I never asked those questions. I only connected the theft and the lack of investigation years later. My naiveté knew no bounds.

After a few months of quality service on my part, and some safe transport of sandwiches, cans of soda, and pouches of cash, I was ready for what would become the most important part of my job: filling prescriptions. This was another time when a more worldly-wise employee might have wondered why he, a high school kid, was filling prescriptions and the guy with the Pharmacy degree was sitting in the back room talking on the phone to some guy named Joey or visiting with regulars like Mooch and Curly, who never bought more than a candy bar but often tossed me a buck. I didn’t wonder, I just learned how to read physicians’ scribbles, count pills, measure powders for emulsions, and make a little extra profit by gently scratching the word “sample” off pills donated to Morrie by his brother, a physician, so we could sell them at full retail.

Filling prescriptions was great. I started teaching myself Pharmacy. I’d read the trade magazines that came monthly to the store. That’s where I learned about the latest wonder drugs and how they’re marketed. One time, we got a prescription for a drug Morrie had never heard of. He was about to call his brother when I said, “I know what that is. It’s manufactured by so-and-so for patients with such-and-such. I read about it in last month’s Journal.” I showed Morrie the article, he called our wholesaler, and within an hour I’d ridden my bike to T & J and back so we could fill the prescription. After that, I gave serious thought to becoming a pharmacist; so much so that when a recruiter from Columbia University School of Pharmacy came to Canarsie High to talk with the two kids who worked at drug stores—me and Mike, who worked at GlenRock Drugs—I was mildly interested. Then I realized I’d have to take more chemistry, which I hated, and decided on Bible college.

The question remains, why was a high school kid doing the work of a degreed pharmacist? You may have guessed already. Morrie had another job. I’m not really sure what Morrie’s other job was. I’ll just describe it and let you put a label on it.

Morrie spent a lot of his time on the telephone. People, all men actually, would come to talk with him while I was sweeping the store, stocking shelves, or filling prescriptions. Then he’d get on the phone and talk about things like “who looks good in the third at Aqueduct?” or how much money to put on the number three horse at Yonkers. It was while working for Morrie that I learned words like “perfecta” and “trifecta,” things I’m sure I would have missed in pharmacy school.

I did, however, get to do a few other things with those guys. By my senior year in high school I had my driver’s license. For some reason, they often needed a driver. I was pretty sure they had cars and wondered why they didn’t drive themselves, but I never mentioned it to Morrie. I’d just take the guys wherever they wanted to go: home from the drugstore, to and from girlfriends’ houses, that kind of stuff.
 
My favorite driving chore was when one or two of them would ask me to take them to Yonkers Raceway, just north of the city. The “trotters” ran there, the horses that pull their jockeys in those little cart-like seats. The guys liked to bet on, and watch, the trotters run. Since alcohol was heavily involved in these excursions, they needed a designated driver, and that would be me.

We’d drive up to Yonkers, I’d drop them off at the entrance, and whoever owned the Lincoln, Cadillac, or Chrysler would toss me the keys and a fifty and tell me, “Enjoy yourself, kid. Get a nice steak. Come back at 11:30.” I’d skip the steak, get a couple of slices of pizza, and read a book for a couple of hours. It was a great way to pocket about $45 at the end of an evening.

Guys like Morrie’s friends lived all over Canarsie in the sixties. Years later my dad told me that’s why the neighborhood always felt so safe. No petty criminals would mess with the locals. You never knew whose house you might be breaking into and what might happen if you got caught. Personally, I never gave it a thought. I just knew we walked the streets at all hours; there was virtually no crime, except occasionally when a neighbor would wash up on the shore of Jamaica Bay with a bullet in his head.

Maybe I did give it one thought. I had a friend whose dad was a garbage man. Not a city garbage man, but one of those men with a garbage truck that had someone’s name on the side. They called it “private sanitation.” Every year or so, this kid’s dad would go to the Oldsmobile dealer and drive home in a brand new Olds 98, their snazziest vehicle, kind of a middle class Cadillac. I always wondered how he could do that on a garbage man’s salary. But I never asked.

Work at the drugstore, plus my side job as a driver, put me in an exciting new financial position. I was able to buy my own car and also to travel by air to visit Billy Walker at college in Florida and to visit Clair in Buffalo. When the Grace Church youth group took their annual excursion to Rye Beach Playland, I could pay my own way and treat some of the other kids to snacks. I was riding high that last summer before Bible college.

Years later I talked to Pop about my youthful exploits as an amateur pharmacist. He explained some things to me about the neighborhood we called home. I won’t go into details. You can probably guess them if you’ve seen any gangster movies in the past fifty years. Private sanitation was a “Family” business. The funeral homes with their elaborate Italianate sculptures and owners who spent thousands on Christmas displays we kids drooled over, they were “Family” too. We were a “Family” neighborhood; safe, sound, and sometimes deadly.

“Phil,” my dad added, “You know Uncle Tom [Mom’s cousin] married a Gambino, right?”

The first time I watched Goodfellas I gulped. Now you know why.

I think my favorite band of the mid-60s was the Dave Clark Five. I admired Denis Payton, their tenor sax player. Scott, Sal, and I even tried to duplicate the Dave Clark sound (as well as the Beatles). Scott played guitar, I played sax along with a bass guitar plugged into a tape recorder for an amp, and Sal played drums fashioned from a set of hassock covers. We weren’t quite ready to be featured on Cousin Brucie’s radio show.

In the latter part of the 1960s, AM radio was still king. My favorite station, WABC, played your basic Top 40 hits, which included the Beatles, great but far from the earth-shakers they were a couple of years earlier. Other musical styles forced their way onto the charts, bands like Steppenwolf and the Stones, and folk duo Simon and Garfunkel; but bubble gum music (à la 1910 Fruitgum Company and Ohio Express), essential pop from Tommy James and the Shondells and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap; and future Muzak staples like MacArthur Park (Richard Harris), Love Is Blue (Paul Mauriat and his orchestra), and This Guy’s in Love with You (Herb Alpert) dominated the AM airwaves.
 
Then, one afternoon, Scott came over. His face shone like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai; maybe not literally, but Scott had visibly been in the presence of something holy. He burst through the back door and said,

“Do you have an FM radio?”

“Beats me. Why?”

“WABC has an FM station, and they play stuff nobody plays on AM. It’s like underground stuff. I can’t explain it. You’ve gotta hear it.”

I told Scott that Pop had a little box on top of the hi-fi, and it may have been some kind of radio that hooked into the record player. No one ever used it, but we could check it out.

“Oh my God,” Scott exclaimed, momentarily forgetting the Second Commandment, “Your dad has an FM receiver!”

We turned it on, and switched the hi-fi to “on” without putting a disk on the turntable. And then we listened.

“Oh my God,” I uttered under my breath, momentarily forgetting there even was a Second Commandment.

I was hearing Cream’s White Room for the first time. I might as well have been standing at the Grace Church altar for the first time, waiting for the Spirit to fill me. And filled I was.

For the next two years I planned my day around that FM receiver. I exulted in the protest songs of Joan Baez and Country Joe and the Fish. I laughed at the tongue-in-cheek rock of Frank Zappa and folk of Tom Paxton. And then I heard a style of music that totally, in 1968 vernacular, blew my mind.

A twangy guitar and plunky piano introduced a song about someone who “pulled into Nazareth,” feeling “‘bout half-past dead.” What was that? The vocals were spectacular, but they weren’t quite right. Voices in harmony but not in synch. Instruments sounding like they came from somewhere deep in the woods. I didn't like the sound, but I loved the sound. I wanted more. By this time, I had my own stereo, a portable with speakers you could detach from the turntable and separate from each other by about twelve feet. I’d sit dead center between them and feel the music shift from side to side. I asked Pop to find Music from Big Pink by a band called The Band.

“What band?”

“The Band.”

“That’s what I asked,” said Pop with more than a hint of exasperation. This was becoming an Abbott and Costello routine.
“The Band. That’s the name of the group. And the album is Music from Big Pink.”

Pause.

“I know it’s a stupid name, Pop, but that’s the record’s name. Please get it for me. I’ll pay you back. Oh, if they don’t have it, I’ll just wait. Don’t surprise me with something else. Please.”

Pop arrived home that night with a square, flat package. He said,

“I asked the guy at Sam Goody about Big Pink. He didn’t know what I was talking about. But he checked the catalog, and he came back with this.”

And there it was. No Buggs. No embarrassment. I had my own copy of the Holy Scripture of underground radio.

I have to admit the first few notes of the first song, Tears of Rage, put me off a bit. It was more backwoods-y than I had expected. But by the time I reached their cover of the country classic Long Black Veil, The Band had secured a permanent place as my favorite band. A year later, Scott and I saw them live at the Felt Forum in Manhattan. Tom Rush opened for them in that intimate little space deep within the confines of Madison Square Garden. I know heaven exists because Scott and I spent an evening there.

The following spring, Scott and I made plans to attend a music festival being planned for upstate, something called Woodstock. We could afford the tickets for three days, and we figured we could sleep in the car and buy food on site. What a plan!

Mom said, “Ask Pop.”

Pop said, “No.”

I’m sure the same conversation, with slight Yiddish overtones, took place at Scott’s house. We never got to Woodstock. Four hundred thousand other kids, including a friend or two from P.S.114 days, did get there and scattered around Max Yasgur's farm in lower upstate New York. Of course, if you counted all the people my age who say they were there, the number by now has reached into the millions.

Scott and I made it to a lesser rock event a year later: the New York Pop Festival on Randall's Island. Nobody talks about that one, but it happened. You can Google it. I think even the bands that showed up (and many didn't) now claim they weren’t there that weekend in July 1970.

Some of the same headliners from Woodstock were there. John B. Sebastian, formerly of the Lovin' Spoonful, kicked things off. Steppenwolf was there—John Kay wearing the tightest leather pants I'd ever seen—as were Grand Funk Railroad, Jethro Tull, and some others. Van Morrison was slated to be there, but I don't think he showed.

It was supposed to be three days of music, like Woodstock, but in a more secure environment than a pig farm. The festival was held in Downing Stadium, a decrepit concrete arena where semi-pro football teams played and city-wide track meets were held. The stadium sits on Randall's Island, smack dab in the middle of the East River in the shadow of the Triborough Bridge. Instead of 400,000 hippies in a muddy field, we were 25,000 mixed up New York kids on a football field or on the concrete seats.

The New York Pop Festival of 1970, before it was erased from people's memories, somehow acquired the sub-title "ill-fated." Seems some radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society, among others, were promised mic time. They just took it upon themselves to decide when and how much of that time to self-promote. As political groups jockeyed for space on the stage (and in front of those mics), some of the bands did their own fighting. Jimi Hendrix's people almost pushed Jethro Tull's roadies off the stage because Hendrix wanted to follow Steppenwolf the first night. After the concert promoters and security people broke up the fight, Hendrix decided that only he would choose when he would play. (Well, he might've been a bit of a diva, but he was one of the absolute greatest guitarists ever.)

Eventually, by late Friday night, the first night of the festival, everyone had played or preached or fought except The Jimi Hendrix Experience. We knew he was there, but he just wasn't playing. We sat around waiting, sometimes napping, as Friday evolved into Saturday. It was sort of fun. Scott and I sort of slept on the 30-yard line. And I sort of got to see a rather pretty girl's breasts through a semitransparent red blouse. (There's a first time for everything, they say.) Finally, damp and tired, Scott and I moved into the concrete bleachers, still hoping Hendrix would play.

Sometime after 4:00 a.m., while most of us were sleeping, smoking weed, or having sex, Jimi Hendrix took the stage. He played through a set that included Purple Haze, All Along the Watchtower, and Hey Joe. He played a lot longer than the original one-hour time allotment.
 
None of us cared that it was now almost morning. We were mesmerized by the master guitarist's music and his antics. Creating semi-melodic feedback by playing his Fender Stratocaster directly into the speakers, using his teeth as a pick, striking chords then swinging the Strat round and round his neck while the chords swung round and round the concrete walls of Downing Stadium before flying off into the night.

Then it happened. The notes I'd been dreaming of all night began their ascent into the now graying sky.

At Woodstock, Hendrix had stunned the crowds with his hyper-feedbacked rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. He hadn't played it much since, but we hoped he might play it on Randall's Island. Then again, maybe not. Rumors were spreading that he was tired of the song. But there it was—Ta ta dum dum dum dummmmmmmmmmaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhwwwwwwwaaaaahhhhhwqwwaaaahhhhwaaaah-CRASH--The Star-Spangled Banner replete with rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air, all from one left-handed Strat.

Somewhere in the middle of the anthem, the first rays of sunlight peeked over the stadium wall and shone right on Scott and me.  We thought we'd gone to heaven. (Who could have known then that in two months to the day that's where Jimi would wind up?) As the sun came up, Hendrix's final power chords were still reverberating through the ancient arena. Nobody moved. Nobody even cheered. Twenty-five thousand people were silenced by the wizardry of Jimi Hendrix in perfect tune with the fireball rising in the east.

It was heaven. It was life.

The Beatles changed everything, and they did it by being only slightly different from everything else. Along with covering a lot of earlier rock & roll tunes, like the Isley Brothers’ Twist and Shout and Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven, they created their own style of fifties music with songs like I Saw Her Standing There. They sang a show tune on their first American LP--Till There Was You from The Music Man—and then wrote songs like If I Fell and And I Love Her, which could have been in any Broadway musical of the sixties.

Beatles’ vocals could be raw, as heard in their cover of Carl Perkins’ Honey Don’t, but it was their sweet harmonies that, I believe, aided their acceptance by the parents who bought their kids Beatles records. The Fab Four’s early U.S. hits, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, exhibited some of the tight two-part harmonies for which the Everly Brothers were known. In an era where harmony was the stuff of clean cut quartets like the Four Freshmen and the Ames Brothers, and of course duos like the Everlys, it didn’t hurt that Paul and John complemented each other’s vocals so well.

The Beatles didn’t just revolutionize music by subtly altering the norm. They changed cultural perceptions. Their worldview was somewhat reminiscent of the “Beat” culture of the 1950s, but they behaved more like the clean cut kids next door than like the beatnik caricature incarnate in TV’s Maynard G. Krebs. Sure their hair was longish and floppier than most young men’s, but it wasn’t wild or dirty. As a result, John, Paul, George, and Ringo seemed safe.

I didn’t join the Beatles bandwagon in the winter of 1964, like so many of my peers. I was still playing Little Deuce Coupe regularly on Pop’s hi-fi. As “Beatlemania” entered the American vernacular, with the Liverpudlians’ first U.S. tour in January, I was not even a fan, which brings me back to my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson.

Mrs. Wilson was an institution at P.S.114. Judy’s mom studied under her, as did many other moms and dads in the neighborhood. The stories passed down from one generation to the next served either to terrify the new classes, which was generally the case, or make certain students determined to make her life hell. I was one of the latter.

For some reason, maybe my being a “top dog” sixth grader, I would not kowtow to Mrs. Wilson’s demands. I learned from my older friends in the 93rd Street Gang that her first name was Jenny and that she hated the slanderous nickname she’d had for years: Jungle Jenny. From then on I chose to let that slur slip from my lips as often as possible and as close to her earshot as I could safely get without being identified. Word got out that I hated her, even though I felt toward her like I did about most people: since they didn’t care about me, I didn’t care about them.

Shortly after the New Year began, Mrs. Wilson assigned my class to write a satirical essay, something to poke fun at current events. Being in the middle of a Cold War with Russia that threatened to end civilization as we knew it, only a year following the assassination of President Kennedy, and at a time when people were starting to hear about a tiny land somewhere in Southeast Asia called Vietnam, poking fun at current events took a lot of chutzpah for a teacher, even one as venerable as Jungle Jenny. I decided to take her up on it and write a seriously funny essay.

What would I write about? I asked the second funniest man I knew, after Uncle Freddy: Pop. He said we should see what was in the newspapers. We checked the Daily News. There on the front page was a photo of four nicely-suited and tied, albeit mop-haired, young Englishmen getting off a Pan Am jet right down the road at the newly-renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport.

“Who are they?” Pop asked.

“It’s that English band, the Beatles.”

Pop stared at the newspaper for a minute, quickly scanned the article, and said, “You should write about them. They look funny.”

And I did. With a little help from… Pop, I composed a two-page essay giving my take on the craziness that was Beatlemania. I exaggerated a bit, which good satire does even in sixth grade.
 
I was proud of my essay, and I hoped Mrs. Wilson would be too. I waited anxiously for the papers to be graded and returned. 

The day she returned our satires, Jungle Jenny called me to her desk. 

“I want you to read your paper aloud today. It made me laugh.” 

And then she handed me an A+.

Something changed in me that day. I began trying a little harder in class, and I stopped giving Jungle Jenny so much trouble.

A few weeks later, Mrs. Wilson wasn’t in class. Mr. Shore, the assistant principal, came into our class to introduce a sub; and he told us that Mrs. Wilson’s husband had died, and she would be taking some time off.  She was gone a week, maybe two. When she returned she called each of the thirty some-odd students in my class up to her desk. When it was my turn, she reached into her bag and brought out an emerald tie tack.

“This belonged to Mr. Wilson. He wore it often. Philip, I know he would want you to wear it too.” 

And that made my conversion complete. I thanked Mrs. Wilson two ways. First, by saying the traditional ‘aw shucks’ kind of “Thank you,” and then by never calling her Jungle Jenny again, no matter how near or far away she was.

When I entered seventh grade I became a permanent part of the 93rd Street Gang. I started using profanity for the first time in my life. The desire to keep my old friends from P.S.114 while fitting in with the gang created the conflict within me that I’ve described previously. And my collection of 45s grew, along with a newfound love for the Beatles.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked their music in and of itself, but Aunt Barb’s neighbor, Faith, liked them too; and during my junior high years there was nothing that made a Beatles song more enjoyable than listening to it with Faith in her parents’ living room. We sang a lot of songs together those years. I even became one of the millions of members of the “official” Beatles Fan Club.

My first favorite Beatles song was She Loves You. I was disappointed to find it did not appear on my first Beatles LP, the Capitol Records U.S. release called Meet the Beatles. That album did have I Wanna Hold Your Hand, everyone else’s favorite, but not mine.

Meet the Beatles created the first of a few ripples in the otherwise tight relationship between Pop and me. I’m not sure if his disdain for the Lads had something to do with his being part of a less popular American quartet or whether he just didn’t “dig” the new music of the British Invasion. And I’m even less sure about his motive for a purchase that embarrassed me even more than him.

After days of begging, I finally got Pop to agree to bring a copy of Meet the Beatles home from Manhattan. (I bought 45s at my local music store with money earned delivering the Canarsie Courier. Large purchases like LPs required parental financing.) When he arrived home from work on the long-awaited day, Pop had an odd look on his face. To this day I don’t know if it was mischief or desperation; but he said he couldn’t find the album I wanted, so he got me something “just as good.”

I opened the plain brown wrapper, all the purchase really deserved. I practically gagged. There in all its counterfeit glory was an album called The Beetle Beat by a band called The Buggs. The album featured covers of I Wanna Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, along with other England-inspired songs representative of the “Original Liverpool Sound.” To make the ruse complete, the record claimed to have been “Recorded in England.” I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. I hated my father for that moment. And I was embarrassed to be his son.

Summoning up more grace than the evening warranted, I thanked Pop; but I told him I still wanted Meet the Beatles. A few days later, when no one was around, I played the Buggs’ record. Well, they didn’t sing badly, they just weren’t real. Turns out their sound wasn’t Liverpool either. The album was recorded in the band’s homeland of New Jersey.

Eventually, thanks to Pop’s clearer thinking, and my ability to buy the occasional album with my own money, I obtained a respectable collection of the Fab Four’s American releases. Some of them were even Christmas presents. December 25th 1965 found—wonder of wonders--Rubber Soul under our tree. And I spent my first Christmas as a high schooler back in Aunt Midge’s guest room, with Uncle Paul’s new stereo record player, listening to my copy of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

That was 1967. My musical world exploded again less than a year later when my friend from up the street, Scott Robins, introduced me to FM radio.

Harry Chapin describes the obsession of a certain Dayton, Ohio, drycleaner in his song, Mr. Tanner. Of Tanner, a popular singer at local venues, Chapin said, “Music was his life.”

I know how the fictional Mr. Tanner felt. While my life has been filled with religion and its commensurate guilt, with love and its share of heartbreak, and with friends and acquaintances I will never forget, mostly my life has been made up of music. Some people say their life should have a soundtrack; perhaps mine had a score.

The first movement began offstage sometime in the 1930s when my dad, his brother-in-law Hank, and two other young men from Grace Church formed the Grace Gospelaires. From then almost until his dying day Pop was singing. Hymns, gospel choruses, opera, standards, and showtunes filled his repertoire. He sang in the shower, in the kitchen, and while cutting the grass. I’m sure, along with Mom’s sweet alto voice, Pop’s tenor glided into my ears as soon as they were formed. It wasn’t long until I caught the tune bug.

I learned the children’s choruses we all sang at Grace Church in the fifties: Jesus Loves Me, Jesus Loves the Little Children, Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam. The Sunbeam song never made much sense to me. I never saw a sunbeam. I drew sunbeams coming from every sun in my watercolor and Crayola masterpieces, but they beamed in my imagination. Maybe not even my own imagination. I think sunbeams are drawn from a collective child-consciousness. That’s why they all emanate so perfectly from every sun, whether the child uses purple crayons, yellow finger paints, or pink watercolors. But no one really sees them, and who would ever want to be one—pressed for all time on a sheet of white paper.

I sang along with the other kids in Sunday school, but my love of singing really began when I started memorizing songs my brother listened to late at night on his little Philco table radio.
 
The first song I recall hearing on that radio was Fats Domino’s version of Blueberry Hill. Something about the way Fats articulated every one of the first four words so succinctly: I. Found. My. Thrill. I can still hear it clearly after sixty-plus years. I remember Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue too, but only because his staccato Sue-uh-oo grated on my preschool ears.

By the time I entered P.S.114, I’d developed a taste for Top 40 music and began adding to my repertoire. The first song I sang in public was Burl Ives’ A Little Bitty Tear. I was sitting in the rocking chair at Grandma and Gramps’s house on East 94th Street on a Saturday night. I don’t know why, but I felt like singing; so I did:

     A little bitty tear let me down
     Spoiled my act as a clown
     I had it made up not to make a frown
     But a little bitty tear let me down
 
Why did I learn that song? How melancholy must an elementary school kid be to want to sing about a guy whose true love is walking out the door and he’s trying to hold it all together? I was a hopeless romantic before I knew those words went together.

After taking requests for Little Bitty Tear Saturday after Saturday for a few months, I finally learned another song: Crying in the Rain by the Everly Brothers. Can we identify a theme here?

Grandma’s rocking chair evoked emotions throughout my childhood. From the exuberance of a preschooler bouncing up and down while singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme to the gut-wrenching tween singing about raindrops mingled with tears, that rocker summoned my deepest feelings and expressed them through music.

I guess my feelings during my preteen years were feelings of loneliness, maybe a fear of abandonment by someone who loved me. I did, after all, admit to having no friends, only acquaintances. Why did I claim that? I had Judy and Kurt. I had Scott. Was I so afraid I’d lose them that I couldn’t bear to call them friends?

Looking back to my earliest years, and then through high school, I can convince myself I had few deep relationships. But the wonder of social media has returned some of those “acquaintances” to my life. They tell another side of the story. So many times in recent years a face I haven’t seen since Canarsie days shows up in social media and mentions the impact I had on their lives. Apparently more people knew me than I realized. I wonder how things might have turned out had I believed in the love I was receiving every day. Maybe I’d have spent less time in the rain.

Along with listening to the radio, which brought about dramatic changes in me during my last two years in high school, I also listened to records. It began in Uncle Freddy and Aunt Barb’s basement.

Uncle Freddy’s collection of 78 rpm albums was small but legendary. It featured hits by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, Gene Autry, and Arthur Godfrey. My favorites were the songs by Spike Jones and his City Slickers. I loved their parodies so much that Uncle Freddy actually gave the box of 78s to me when they moved to Florida. The whole Gang would come over to hear and laugh at Jones’ tongue-in-cheek takes on Cocktails for Two, My Old Flame, and the William Tell Overture, aka the Feitlebaum song. That was the song about a horse race featuring such memorable lines as “it’s cabbage by a head” and “banana is coming up to the bunch.” Eventually the long shot, Feitlebaum, proves victorious. It’s a comedy classic. I still have Uncle Freddy’s copy.

I began accumulating my personal record collection some years before Uncle Freddy’s gracious gift. My first LP was Let’s All Sing with the Chipmunks. I was thrilled when I discovered it under the tree on Christmas 1959. I received the second Chipmunk album for my eighth birthday. The next Christmas I added Around the World with the Chipmunks. Judy, Kurt, and I learned all the songs. Our favorite was the one about the Japanese banana. Spoiler alert: according to the song, no such fruit exists.
 
My friends outgrew the Chipmunks by the end of the school year. I stopped playing the albums, but the songs sang in my head for...well, I guess Japanese Banana still sings up there from time to time.

Although the Chipmunks dominated my LP collection into the 60s, I had already started accumulating my 45s. 45 rpm records revolutionized the music industry. Whereas 78s were made of brittle shellac and easily broken, vinyl 45s were durable enough for teenagers to play at parties where they might not be as careful with them as their parents were with 78s. They were also cheap and smaller than any other record. 

My initial date being a fiasco, I decided to avoid the practice most of my adolescent life. Still, there was something about hanging out with some members of the opposite sex that I just liked. I could confide anything in them. I knew they cared and they knew I cared. There’s romance in that, yet without romance.
 
That’s the way it was with Faith, too.

Faith lived next door to Aunt Barb and Uncle Freddy on Ocean Avenue in Lynbrook, Long Island. Her bedroom was on the second floor of her house, exactly parallel to mine, which was on the first floor of Aunt Barb’s. We got to know each other shortly after Faith’s family moved in. From then on I still loved Aunt Barb and laughed loudly at Uncle Freddy, but I found a friend in Faith while tolerating Adam, her little brother.

Faith was beautiful, quick-witted, and Japanese, which to 12-year-old me meant she was exotic. We spent almost every minute together the three or four times each year I’d visit my aunt and uncle. On countless nights, Faith and I opened our windows and talked until all hours as if there were not a story, and about 15 feet of lawn, between us.

We, and Adam, and some other kids, would walk to a nearby park to play on the swings and self-propelled merry-go-round. (What do they call those things?) We’d walk to Zinetti’s for ice cream sodas when we had the money. One day, Faith’s family took me to Rockaway Beach to spend the day at their restaurant. My first thought was, Japanese! Exotic! It was actually just a hamburger joint, a lot like the one in Bob’s Burgers, but it was fun hanging out on the boardwalk all day with Faith and Adam.

My second date occurred the afternoon Faith said, “It’s hot today. Let’s go to the movies and see Bye-Bye Birdie. It’s my favorite movie ever!” And away we went; oddly, with no Adam in tow.

The World of Henry Orient, an adorable lesser-known Peter Sellers movie led off the double feature. Then Bye-Bye Birdie proved to be a lot of fun. The rest of that week Faith and I practiced the dance moves.

My only two dates in junior high school, and so different. Was it my crush on Gail that ruined the library date? Was it my crushless, lustless I-think-you-are-beautiful-but-more-amazing-as-a-friend feelings toward Faith that made a movie merely the jumping off point for lots of laughs? Damned if I’ll ever know.

I wish I could arrange a reunion with Faith. I bet we’d break a bone or two trying to dance to Birdie. That’ll never happen. Working at a friend’s family’s Carvel store one night in 1969 someone showed me a newspaper obituary. “Didn’t you used to know a girl from Lynbrook named Faith? Shit! She walked in front of a train.”
I don’t know why she did that, but I hope she’s still dancing.

I didn’t go on another date for five years, and, at the time, I didn’t feel I was missing anything. All the other guys and girls were getting their hearts broken. Not me. I did have a part in some relationships, however. Once I started writing songs and poems, guys would ask me to come up with just the right words or verse to impress their girlfriends. Cyrano incarnate! Still I remained dateless.

There was one other time in junior high when I almost made a connection with a girl. Of course it didn’t work out. I thought at the time it was because I was shy; maybe I was just clueless.

Because the names Baisley and Blank are so close alphabetically, I often sat next to Joyce in class, especially in homeroom two years running. Joyce Blank was very pretty in a wabi sabi way. All her imperfections made for a very attractive package, which, of course, meant she was too good for me. Or so I thought.

One day in eighth grade homeroom, I saw a hand slip a note into my desk. Odd, no one had slipped me a note since fourth grade, so long ago. I read it.

“Do you LIKE me?”

The hand and the note were from Joyce. Did I like her? Well, I’d dreamed for two years that we might have an actual conversation. Did I like her? Okay, she wasn’t Gail, but I’d messed that up beyond repair. Did I like her? Yes, I think I did, which is why I panicked.

What if she was only asking because she thought I actually liked her and she wanted to be sure before she told me to bug off? What if she was just trying to relieve the boredom of homeroom? The thought that she might be revealing a liking of me—skinny, ugly me—never crossed my mind.

At best, I might have said something like, “You’re okay.” At worst I might have ignored her for the rest of the year and my life. I honestly don’t remember, but don’t expect to find her in these pages again. Maybe I was more clueless than shy.

My adolescence continued to pass undisturbed by girls. I graduated from Isaac Bildersee Junior High School in 1967 and moved on to the recently-constructed Canarsie High School. There I kept admiring attractive girls from afar, and helping other guys win their hearts, but I remained outside the dating crowd. That all changed one night in the summer of 1968.

The summer before my sophomore year of high school, Billy Walker helped me get a “real job”; he recommended me to Morrie, the co-owner of a local drug store. I started high school somewhat gainfully employed.

I walked the eight and a half blocks to work most days, and occasionally rode my bicycle. Generally working from 4:00-8:00, closing, I always enjoyed the walks home through the streetlight-illuminated Canarsie streets.

During the summer, I’d plan my walks for when some of my favorite church ladies were on their porches or in their tiny gardens out back. Weird, huh? A fifteen year old “gang” member hanging out with little old ladies. But I liked them. They treated me like an adult, fed me all sorts of good stuff, and they told me stories of when they were fifteen, back before “the War,” which we all knew didn’t mean Vietnam.

Helen Van Houten lived on East 94th Street a few blocks south of my grandmother. Inside Grace Church she was a tiger, enforcing her strict code of behavior on us kids. At home in her backyard, the summer sun dwindling after my shift at the drug store, Helen was a pussycat. She was sweet, kind, and a great conversationalist. A lot of my walks home included a stop at Helen’s.

One night, as I let myself through Helen’s gate and made my way to the glow of the Coleman lantern she kept on a wrought iron table out back, I noticed two shadows in the lamplight. Helen had company. She welcomed me and mentioned to her guest that I was the one she had told her about.

Helen’s company turned out to be Clair, a nice-looking girl a year older than I. Turns out Clair’s dad had been pastor of Grace Church for a few years in the 1950s. As a matter of fact, I was born the day Clair’s family moved into the Grace Church parsonage. Clair’s family had kept in touch with Helen over the years, and Clair had come from Buffalo to visit.

Sweet, dangerous Helen had known all along that Clair and I might hit it off. After a little small talk, Helen excused herself and told us not to stay out too late.

We stayed up until Helen had to come back out and tell us to call it quits. The next night and the next night it was the same. I can’t recall a single thing we talked about. I only remember every topic was fascinating. I’d never experienced anything like that before, not even with Judy. And then she was gone.

Clair and I promised to write each other. Well, you know how kids are when they think they might like each other. Most of the time, the letters are never written, and certainly never sent. We wrote ‘em and we sent ‘em at least once a week. Even our letters sounded like conversation around a Coleman lantern. God, it was an awesome feeling.

The week at Helen’s was in June. By July I was ready for a Grand Gesture.

Heading into my junior year at Canarsie High I was alone again. This time, however, I had a… What did I have? Did I love Clair? I never even hinted that to her. I don’t know what emotions she might have felt toward me, but that didn’t matter. We both enjoyed each other’s company whether in person or on paper. So maybe she wasn’t my girlfriend, but she was mine.

Flush with cash from the drug store and a heart way bigger than my brain I came up with the ultimate means of showing Clair just how important she had become to me. But it would require some secrecy, stupidity, and a ride to the airport.

The stupidity I had in spades. For the airport ride I needed a guy with some knowledge of air travel. Billy Walker had read up on flying, and he had heard there was such a thing as student discounts by air carriers. He said all you had to do was present some identification at a ticket agency, fill out an application, and in a week or so you’d have a student ID for air travel. It worked!

Soon, armed with my wad of cash, Billy’s knowledge of all things aeronautical, and enough gas to get us to and from Kennedy Airport, off we went to purchase a ticket for Buffalo. Yes, Buffalo. The Grand Gesture was to be an unannounced visit to Clair. Now for the secrecy.

Billy swore he’d never tell anyone, and he didn’t. The airline’s customer service person sold me a window seat, LaGuardia to Buffalo, cash, no questions asked. Why LaGuardia? I knew that airport was near Shea Stadium, which had a subway stop. I could walk from the subway to the airport, I figured.

Ticket purchased, partner in crime safely silenced, I waited until the appointed day of departure. Did I have a detailed plan in mind? Alas, no. I didn’t even know the location of the town where Clair lived, other than it was somewhere east of Buffalo. I just assumed I’d find it.

I’d been in training for this mission for over a year, taking longer and longer walks out to the Island. My brother had done the same walks while in high school and after returning from the Marines. I tried to outdo him, one time walking all the way to East Meadow, a distance of 22 miles.

For the Grand Gesture, I’d be walking from the Buffalo International Airport all the way to a place called Elma, somewhere east of someplace. I imagined it to be about 15 miles. I was ready.

The big day arrived. I acted completely normal, which should have tipped Mom off that I was up to something. I had my ticket and a couple of changes of clothes in a small duffel bag. I’d even used Pop’s AAA Travel Guide for New York to book a room that night at the Holiday Inn. You didn’t need a credit card back then. My word as a gentleman was good enough since I’d be paying cash. Mom was home, and, being a Friday, Pop was at his office. With any luck, I’d be checked into the hotel before they even missed me.

I made the plane on time, although the walk from the subway station to the airport was longer than I anticipated, and closed my eyes for a nap during the short flight. When I arrived in Buffalo, it was still early. Just time enough to get to the hotel before Pop got home and Mom wondered why I wasn’t at the dinner table.

I found the Holiday Inn on the little map in the AAA Guide. Not knowing I could have called for a free shuttle ride, I walked the mile or so to the hotel and checked in without a problem. Then I unpacked my duffle and went to the bathroom.

It was perfect, the trip so far and even the bathroom. There was a phone in it. I’m not kidding you. There was a freakin’ phone on the wall of the bathroom. Perfect. I sat down and dialed my home number. I had my story down pat.

“Mom, could I talk to Pop for a minute?”

“Where are you? You sound like long distance.”

“Yeah, Mom. That’s what I want to talk to Pop about.”

“Hey, Pop! Hey! I got a chance to see the Buffalo Bills practice tomorrow. Can I go?"

Man, I was smooth. I had it all planned out.

“No, Pop. In Buffalo. That’s where I am.”

“[Expletives deleted.]”

“I flew up to visit Clair. Figure I’d take in football practice tomorrow. It’s on the way to Clair’s house. Then I’ll get there midafternoon.”

My smoothness was intoxicating.

“No, Pop, they don’t know I’m coming.”

“Get back home on the next flight!” yelled Pop uncharacteristically.

I said I would and then hung up the phone and flushed.

A few minutes later Pop called back. He’d called Clair’s parents. They thought I was nuts, but they said I might as well not waste the trip. If I walked there the next day, they’d let me spend one night at their house, and they’d take me to the airport after church on Sunday.

And that’s pretty much how it went. Clair’s folks were cordial to me the whole weekend. She and I took some nice walks together on the country roads. We sat out in their backyard until someone said it was late—just like at Helen’s. And that was the real purpose of my trip. I had to experience that kind of conversation again. I’m a sucker for genuine conversation, mostly with women, but guys are okay too. I’m lucky to have a wife I never tire of talking to any time of day or night.

As for Clair, it wasn’t love. It was never love. But it was something.

Three summers later, Clair was back at Helen’s, studying for her second year nursing exams. I’d just finished my freshman year at Lancaster Bible College. After a tentative start, we picked up right where we left off in Helen’s backyard—talking. We actually went on a date that time, to Shea Stadium to see the Mets. I drove. No need for the subway.

Returning after the ballgame, I walked Clair into Helen’s backyard. We talked, as usual. She said my trip to Buffalo three years earlier almost blew it for me with her dad, but she convinced him I was an okay guy. Thanks, Clair.

When Helen called her in, Clair walked me along the side of the house toward the car. She grabbed my arm, turned me toward her and kissed me. Then I kissed her, I mean really kissed her. I’d only ever kissed one girl before, and that was just a peck. This was a kiss. And then she pushed me away delicately.

“You know,” Clair said, “We’ll probably never see each other again.”

She was wrong.

I’m a romantic. I believe in Grand Gestures to win the hearts of fair maidens. I cry at some point during every play I see. I’ve seen Wicked in London and Chicago and tear up every time Elphaba rises from the trap door to rejoin Fiero.

Unrequited love was my specialty. Harry Chapin wrote the words that fully encompass my early life in the song Paint a Picture of Yourself (Michael).

      You’re happiest when you’re chasing clouds
      With a halfway broken heart.
 
It’s easy to maintain a broken heart when you are shy around the opposite sex; heck, when you’re shy around people in general. I could never speak comfortably with the girls in my classes at P.S.114. I was never one to pass little “I like you, do you like me” notes to the cute Italian girl just one seat over. As I got older, I wrote those notes, more sophisticated versions, for my guy friends to pass to their girls. Love poems and the occasional love song flew from my Bic on command, but always for someone else, not me.

 
There was one girl I never had trouble talking to: Judy Phillips, who lived directly across the street from me in an upstairs apartment. Judy could run like the wind, which I admired. She was smart in every subject and skipped a grade in school, making her only one year older than I, but two grades ahead. And she looked a lot like Mary Tyler Moore, which made her totally unattainable. But she was my friend; next to Kurt, my best friend.

 
Judy was a hereditary member of the 93rd Street Gang owing to her brother having been a member a few years earlier. All the guys had crushes on her. Eventually, sometime in high school, she became Billy Walker’s girl. High school romances usually don’t last. Friendships do.
 
 
I really don’t know how I got to be close friends with the cutest girl in the neighborhood, but I’ll hazard some guesses.
 First was the fact that Judy, Kurt, and I lived less than 300 feet from one another. Other gang members lived farther away, some more than two blocks. That’s a continent by Brooklyn standards.

Second, we all went to Grace Church. While it is true that Judy’s best friend, her “BFF” in this century, was Susan who lived right next door, Susan was Catholic. Sometimes you just couldn’t hang out with them. Maybe they were fasting or something. Besides, telephones were for calling best friends. Kitchen tables, living room floors, and back steps were for hanging out with the guys. Judy, Kurt, and I were “the guys.”

I have to admit, I liked best the days when Kurt didn’t show up on the stoop and it was just Judy and me. I wasn’t nervous around her, like I was with other girls. I felt free to talk about the things that really mattered to me because they seemed to matter to her too. Like my stuffed animal collection. They were real to me, and Judy didn’t make fun of me for it, unlike the other gang members.

 
I did admire Judy, though, long after the crush wore off. She was a reader, and so was I. I remember one day when I was over at her house and she was so excited about a story she had just read about Harry Houdini. It was in some kind of kids’ anthology. She let me borrow the book that night. I’d never borrowed a book before except from the Canarsie Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, so Judy was the first non-librarian to lend me a book. For that I will always love her. But the crush ended long ago.

I almost had a date with Judy once. Not a romantic date; this was in college and any thoughts of romance with Judy were long gone. We just thought it might be fun since, at the time, we were living only 60 miles apart; she in Philadelphia and I in Lancaster.

At the end of each school year, Lancaster Bible College held their Spring Semi-formal. It was like a high school prom (which I never attended, of course) without dancing and with gowns and tuxes not required but almost always worn. My freshman year I was dating no one around the time to be getting a date for the Semi, so I thought it might be fun to visit with an old friend and invited Judy. She readily accepted, also thinking it would be fun to catch up over a fancy country club dinner.

As the event neared, I actually was thinking it might be nice to have a real date with Judy, although I truly expected nothing to come if it but laughs. A few weeks before the big night, Judy called me. I knew something was up. She told me she had liked this guy on her campus, John Ward, for some time and had long hoped he would ask her out. Guess what? He did! John invited Judy to her college’s spring fling, and, of course, she said yes. And, of course, the two events were on the same night.

When we finished our conversation I felt a little sad. I’d lost my date for the Semi. But I felt a lot happier than sad. Why? Because my friend was happy, and that made it all right. Every once in a while I still talk on the phone with Mrs. Judy Ward.

Eventually, I developed another crush, and this led to the worst date and the best reunion ever.

I began playing woodwind instruments in fifth grade when P.S.114 offered group music lessons after school one or two days a week. I thought the bassoon with its rich brown color and deep reedy sound would be perfect for me. Like the new recruit with a background in catering is always assigned to the motor pool, I was assigned to the clarinet.

I took to the clarinet with surprising ease and soon began private woodwind lessons with a teacher who envisioned for me a stellar career as a musician. I was good, but I was so shy that every solo was an exercise in terror.

After two years of clarinet I was ready for a challenge, which came in the form of a tenor saxophone. I picked it up quickly and was soon playing solos in band, orchestra, and jazz ensemble. I didn’t love any of it.

I did, however, love Gail, the first chair flutist in band and orchestra. She was the absolute cutest girl I’d ever seen; maybe, and there are those who might debate this, even cuter than Judy.

Short, like Judy, Gail had what looked to be the softest, silkiest dark brown hair I’d ever seen. I admired it almost daily from behind her in orchestra and band.

I crushed hard on Gail, and, of course, I kept my feelings hidden deep inside me. But there comes a time when even a timid seventh grade boy has to lay his heart on the line. I asked Gail to go on a study date with me to the most romantic place I could think of: the Main Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza.

I’m a reader; always have been. I tested off the charts in Language Arts while I was still in fourth grade. To me, all libraries were special, and the legendary Main Branch was the ultimate exotic location. What better place to spend a day with Gail.

Wonder of wonders, Gail said yes. Gail said yes!

With my impeccable sense of timing, I made the date for the day after Thanksgiving, a day off from school. Oh my God, I’d have Gail all to myself for a whole day. I couldn’t believe it.

I couldn’t believe it. Like I could never believe I was good enough for those solos in orchestra, I absolutely refused to believe I had anything to offer the cutest girl in seventh grade. When the big day came, I showed up, I went through with it, but I froze just the same.

I think Pop took me to pick Gail up at her house. Then he dropped us off at the bus stop for our ride to the library. While waiting for the bus, I thought I’d be debonair and pick up a truly adult piece of literature to read on the trip: The Sporting News, that venerable weekly newspaper covering every American sport in season and out of season. That day I read it cover to cover while Gail waited for me to make conversation.

She waited through the bus ride to Grand Army Plaza. She waited for conversation about anything other than our school project while at the library. Then she waited all the way home to Canarsie while I sat reading my paper in silence. In my defense, I was awed by Gail and totally terrified I’d screw up the date. I screwed up the date. Gail and I remained one riser away in band and orchestra right through high school, but we never spoke another word to each other.

Until the Internet. Until social media. Until Facebook.

Facebook made people do crazy things in the early 2000s. One of those things was allowing a group of fun-loving but not A-list grown-up kids who had known each other at P.S.114 to reacquaint. Slowly, over a period of two years, I reconnected with old friends and acquaintances. I started talking with a couple of them about an upcoming trip to New York to speak at a conference and to visit my brother. Maybe a few of us could get together. Next thing you know, I got a friend request from Gail.

I made my trip to New York, had a fun dinner with three other old friends, plus Gail, and we set a date and potential location for a reunion the following spring. Canarsie High never has reunions because with 1,500 kids in a graduating class you hardly knew anyone, let alone wanted to visit with them ten or twenty years later.

Undaunted, our little group of event planners booked a restaurant for a champagne brunch. We invited everyone we knew and thought might like to be there. During the intervening months, Gail and I chatted a few times via Facebook Messenger. She told me about her husband, from whom she was separated, and I told her a little about my recent divorce. This time I listened carefully without my head in a newspaper.

The big morning came and we gathered at the restaurant. A couple of dozen P.S.114 grads enjoyed reminiscing over Bloody Marys and mimosas. Then the call came that brunch would be served. Gail, who had been visiting with long lost girlfriends across the room, stepped beside me. “May I sit with you?” she said. And finally, face to face, we talked.

You can’t grow up in a big city, any big city, without playing in the street. It’s not that playgrounds didn’t exist, it’s just that a) they’re never close enough to actually go to regularly, and b) every story about an abducted kid includes the phrase “last seen headed toward the park.” So into the comparatively safe streets of metropolitan areas go kids after every school day and all summer long.

Street games fell into three distinct categories. There were team sports like punchball and touch football; roller skating, where half the fun was sitting on the curb talking with your friends about the latest Top 40 chart; and the running and hiding games like freeze tag, iron tag, hide and seek, and ringolevio.

Team sports seem to have produced the most conflict, perhaps because they relied on the highest degree of participant integrity. First, there was the trust issue. On any given summer day, one of us was bound to have a cousin or friend from off the block join us. Every member of the opposing team had to trust the outsider wasn’t a ringer.

Second, and most obvious, ball games produced controversies based on split-second bits of action. Was she safe or out? Was the receiver in bounds or did his right big toe catch just a hint of the curb? Since we never had referees or umpires, decisions in such cases were reached by consensus, at best; argument, usually; or fistfight, at worst.

Just as every rule has an exception, so did our tradition of never having referees. The glaring exception was the 93rd Street Football Championship, also known as ‘The Day Scott, Sal, and Phil Turned Pro.’

The sports world turned upside down on January 15, 1967 when the National Football League, represented by its venerable champion, the Green Bay Packers, deigned to play the upstart American Football League, in the form of the Kansas City Chiefs, at a neutral site, the Los Angeles Coliseum. The Packers won handily, confirming what was in the mind of most pro football fans, that the AFL was no real competition for the NFL.

Joe Namath and his New York Jets would change those minds just two years later. However, the fall of 1967 witnessed Canarsie’s own championship right in the middle of East 93rd Street, when Scott, Sal, and I took on three kids from another block in an officially timed and refereed winner-take-all, pole-to-pole touch football game.

We’d never played a game like that before. Our games generally ended only when we got tired of playing, when the score got too lopsided, or when an unwinnable argument ensued after a close play. Timed quarters weren’t part of our routine. Refs weren’t either, but one of our neighbors sensed this was an important competition and offered to observe in order to prevent any game-ending conflict.

Having Sal on our team was not necessarily an advantage for Scott and me. He was chunky, clumsy, and slow. Still, he played every game we could think of, even though he was usually the last player chosen. But Scott and I were a well-oiled machine. He knew just how to catch my stubby-fingered spirals, and our Mississippi counting was always perfectly in sync. In spite of Sal, we had this game.

Street football games had a unique format, although they featured the two-hand simultaneous touch tackles common to touch football everywhere. The field, however, was the distance between two telephone poles. No lines were drawn on the pavement, so each team received four downs in which to navigate the entire field. If you failed to score in three plays, you were given the choice of “goin’ or throwin’.” Goin’ meant using fourth down for another attempt at the end zone. Throwin’ was the equivalent of a punt. Actual kicking was forbidden due to the chance of a broken window or dented car hood. You got six points for a touchdown. No extra point conversions allowed. Touchdowns had to be definitive or else an argument would end the game.

It was a closer contest than we thought it would be. The visitors, whose names I don’t recall, scored first and kept us out of the end zone for an uncomfortably long period of time. Finally, near the end of the first half, the Phil-to-Scott connection kicked in. Our favorite play would have Scott running full speed for three Mississippis, faking a turn toward me, and then running to the end of the nearest car and expecting an almost indefensible pass over the hood or trunk. Two or three of those put us in scoring position. On the next play, Sal snapped the ball and instead of blocking just ran the three steps into the end zone, turned, and caught my pass dead in his chest. Tie score!

In the second half we took the lead and, although it wasn’t a rout, our victory was never in jeopardy. When the referee called, “Time,” we led by two touchdowns. The three 93rd Street boys were champions. And then we were more.

After the game, our referee/timekeeper/spectator made an announcement to the winning team.
 
“Guys, I’m really impressed with the way you worked together to beat the other team. I want to give you something to celebrate your victory. My wife and I are getting ready to sell a few of our things, and I’d like to give you each something.”

He disappeared down the block while we stood around with puzzled faces. A few minutes later he returned with a box of household items and declared that, since I was quarterback, I should get first pick. I looked the box over and then chose a wall clock. It was kind of sixties modern. In later years I’d see that same design in a few other houses across America.

Scott and Sal made their choices, and the guy was gone. We looked at each other and grinned.

“You know what this means, right,” said Scott.

“We’re professional football players,” I replied.

“What do you mean?” Sal asked, always a step behind the rest of us.

“We played a game and got paid,” Scott explained.

“We’re pros.” I said. And I’ve never thought any different.

That clock hung on our living room wall, mostly covering an oily stain in the wallpaper, until the day Mom and Pop moved to Pennsylvania. I think it finally died sometime after Sandy and I hung it in our first home.

The 93rd Street Gang wasn’t really into sports, but the other kids in the neighborhood made up for their lack of interest. Scott, Sal, and I; sometimes Freddie Lombardo, who lived next door to Sal; and sometimes Robbie Renaldo, from a nearby block; played everything in almost every season. But winters, except for snowball fights and sledding down Suicide Hill next to Grace Church, were for hockey.

We didn’t play ice hockey on East 93rd Street, and street hockey with roller skates and a little blue ball wasn’t yet a thing; but we were passionate about “push-pull/twist-twist hockey”: those games with the little hockey players on metal rods. For two years in the late sixties, the living room at 1304 rivaled Madison Square Garden for hockey excitement.

Back then the National Hockey League consisted of only six teams, about twenty players each. We reproduced it by choosing teams and memorizing every player in the league. We changed lines and defenses, we called penalties, and we kept stats. Every game featured two players and an announcer/referee. The announcer was a non-playing league member. We were all so good at that, any one of us could have walked right into a radio or TV studio and applied for a play-by-play job.

Since there were six teams, but only five players (Scott, Sal, Robbie, my brother, and me), and since I owned the game, I got to play for two teams, the New York Rangers and the Toronto Maple Leafs. Every time I visit a Tim Horton’s coffee shop I can't help thinking, “That guy was one of my defensemen.”

Although Scott was a formidable representative of the Montreal Canadiens, and John no slouch with the Boston Bruins, both seasons ended in a playoff between the Rangers and the Maple Leafs. I always chose the Leafs, and the person with the next-best W-L record took over for my Rangers. I think the Leafs won Season One and the Rangers pulled an upset at the end of Season Two.

The Baisleys and the Robinses adored hockey, the real life kind we watched on television and in person at minor league Long Island Ducks games in Commack Arena. It was this love that led to one of my most memorable sporting conflicts. It wasn’t a close call on a penalty, though. This would be a conflict between church and skate.

It began innocently enough with Scott and I securing tickets to a Saturday afternoon Rangers game. While tickets in the sixties cost considerably less than today, they were still pricey to high school kids. But every once in a while you splurge. We enjoyed the game from our nosebleed seats in what was then the “New” Madison Square Garden, near Pop’s office on Eighth Avenue.

Down in Philly there was a new arena too: the Spectrum. Someone must have skimped somewhere in its construction because, after only a few months, part of the arena’s roof blew off in a storm. Philly’s new NHL team, the Flyers, were forced to play their next home game at a different location. They worked out a deal to play that game, against the Oakland Seals, at Madison Square Garden.

How does one fill the seats at a sporting event between two expansion teams no one cares about in a venue that is home to neither of those teams? The solution was announced during the second period of Saturday’s Ranger game. Anyone with a ticket to that game, could get into the Sunday Flyers game for free on a first come, first served, basis.

Free professional hockey! But there was a catch. The Rangers were playing the Chicago Blackhawks at the Garden on Sunday night. That meant the Flyers game had to be played on Sunday morning. Therein lay the conflict; for me to go with Scott to the hockey game, I’d have to miss church.

Missing church was something a Baisley didn’t do. My great-grandfather’s name was on a stained-glass window in the sanctuary. Combined with my parents’ status at Grace, the only way their son was missing Sunday school and morning worship was for illness; and it better be serious illness like chicken pox or measles.
 
I did miss one Sunday one time. That was when I had to go to the bathroom right before the service started, and I was a little late making my way from the men’s room, which was in the Sunday school department, to the sanctuary. Billy Knudsen was hanging back as well.

“Let’s skip,” he tempted.

I’d never even thought of that before. But it was summer. The choir wasn’t singing, so Mom and Pop would be sitting hand-in-hand toward the front on the right side. The Grace Church members of the 93rd Street Gang always sat in the back, right side. Mom and Pop would never notice if I just weren’t there. I could sneak in at the end while everyone was shaking hands, and who would be the wiser?

“You coming?” my tempter implored.

“Sure.” And off we went through the Sunday school doors. We were headed for adventure.

Adventure found us three blocks away in a vacant lot on the corner of Avenue L and East 91st Street. Vacant lots were rare, but not unheard of in 1960s Canarsie, but one so close to a major shopping area was a bit unusual. Even more unusual was the mustachioed gentleman who stopped Billy and me as we walked by.
 
“You guys wanna make a dollar?” he asked.

Remember, this was mid-twentieth century Canarsie, not twenty-first century anywhere. We didn’t feel threatened. Heck, it’s not like we were going to the park. It was just a vacant lot, a little weedy but otherwise bright, cheery, and very public. And a dollar apiece was big money to junior high kids.

“Sure!” we both exclaimed.

The man asked us to walk through the lot picking up any trash we saw. He said something about wanting to clean it up for a potential buyer. He then handed us a couple of cardboard boxes and we were off. We figured it would take about half an hour, leaving us plenty of time to reappear at the church in time for the end-of-service handshaking.

Things went pretty well at first. We picked up some old newspapers, a bunch of candy wrappers, and a few tin cans. Then we hit the macaroni salad. There must have been twenty pounds of the creamy white substance hidden among the weeds. It didn’t smell bad enough to be that old, which was encouraging; but neither of us wanted to pick it up in our bare hands. A stroke of pure luck had us stumble across a bent old serving spoon about then. God was smiling at the little church-skippers.

After scooping up the last of the noodles and boxing the remaining trash, with just enough time to race back to Grace Church, we found the lot owner. Hands out, expecting two crisp one dollar bills, we each heard two quarters plop into them. A dollar. Split two ways. Disappointment turned to practicality: one chocolate ice cream soda, one egg cream, and a pack of Juicy Fruit. Per person. Not a bad morning’s work.

Billy and I weren’t caught that day, but the guilt kept me from ever wanting to skip church again, until the Flyer game. How could I not go to a free NHL game? What to do, what to do?

For once, in a rare instance of not overthinking, I chose to be totally honest with my parents. Okay, I hedged a bit. I told Pop first. Being a hockey fan, he might understand better than Mom, who was only a church fan.

The conflict between church and skate came to a head that evening, but it didn’t last long. The overarching principles were clear from the start of negotiations. We were evangelical Christians, descended from Huguenots who fled France in the face of persecution. Christians went to church on Sunday; it was simple as that. But those old Huguenots were Baisleys—Beselles originally—and Baisleys value two things along with their religion: hockey and thrift.

By a score of two to one, free hockey beat church. Scott and I went to our hockey game and, during the process, ran into NHL superstars Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, who were playing in the evening game against the Rangers. I still have the photo of Hull signing my ticket stub from the previous day's game. I’ll always respect my dad’s religion for the tolerance he showed me that day. Maybe he’d learned a bit from his persecuted Huguenot ancestors.

I hated school, didn’t you? When did a day in school ever come close to being as much fun as a day not in school?

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a bad student. I was a very good student, well-read, almost as well-mathed, and exceptional at things like sewing and music. I simply didn’t like being told what to do for six hours a day plus a couple hours of godawful homework.

I liked learning. I liked the challenge of gaining new skills. I even sort of liked being around other people, at least until they made me want to tuck into a shell like a turtle. It was just that school was the one place my inadequacies were proven every damn day with every damn assignment.

During my years as a student, I never used profanity, except in seventh grade. That was the year my brother returned from the Marines. It was also the year I was trying to be like my ninth grade Gangmates. With John’s tutoring, and the Gang's encouragement, I learned to speak the lingua profana.

After seventh grade I rarely, if ever, swore, not even under my breath. I felt no need to. My history of foul language can be summed up in words I’ve often told my seminary students: “I never drank until I went to seminary, and I never swore until I became a seminary professor.”

But that was now; this is then, and back then I wanted to like school, but school was where I could never be as good as I needed to be for the world that held me in judgment and for myself, who was my toughest judge. Classroom presentations, such as book reports, terrified me. I’d read a book in just a few days. If a teacher would have sat down with me over a Yoo-Hoo and asked me about the book, I’d have gladly discussed it for hours. But to write a book report the way I thought the teacher wanted it, well, that was impossible to my public school self. It would never be as good as it needed to be.

I struggled with written assignments all the way through college. Due to my failure to turn in assignments, I got Ds in English Composition and English Grammar, even though the professor recommended me to write for the school newspaper.

Let’s face it, I was a paradox. And I knew what that word meant and how to spell it by fourth grade. By seventh grade I was ready for bigger and better things: cheating and general mischief.

Tests never bothered me. I had a lot of general knowledge, I read a lot of books of all genres, and I knew intuitively how testing worked. But I was always a little reticent to trust those things. So I began perfecting the art of cheating.

I never looked to someone else’s paper for answers to a test. I never outright claimed someone else’s work as my own, except once in fifth grade before I understood the concept of plagiarism. My specialty was the “cheat sheet,” and I created some of the best.

The most obvious way to cheat on a test was to write the possible answers on body parts. This worked particularly well for math or science formulas that you just couldn’t remember, or important dates and people for a history exam; but I never stooped so low as to get ink all over myself.

I wrote the names, dates, formulas, what have you on small pieces of paper in very fine print. Those papers were custom-designed to fit in inconspicuous places. I wore ties a lot on test days. Cheat sheets fit well in ties, and, if you use a heavier weight paper, they are easily and quickly retracted.

I hid cheat sheets everywhere: on the edges of books in my desk, in shirt sleeves and pockets, anywhere they were in my view but not the teacher’s. My all-time favorite hiding place was a stroke of genius. The night before the test, I painstakingly wrote, in minuscule print on a piece of paper about a half-inch by five inches, everything I thought I might need to know. Then I carefully rolled and inserted the paper into the clear chamber of a Bic Stic pen.

What was the secret? You’ve guessed it by now, I’m sure. The more intricate the means of cheating; the more you learn in the process. All those hours spent writing the information on tiny slips of paper cemented that data in my brain. I never actually used any of the cheat sheets I created, and I doubt any of my disciples did either. I knew they wouldn’t. That’s why I knew they could be entrusted with the secret.

Along with cheating, or really not cheating, I was also guilty of some general mischief. I was not—repeat, not—a troublemaker in junior high. If there was a troublemaker at Bildersee J.H.S., it was the school’s namesake.

Isaac Bildersee was a Brooklyn school administrator in the first half of the twentieth century. He sparked controversy when, in December 1947, he tried to remove all religious symbolism from Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations in Brooklyn public school classrooms. His plan lasted about two days when the school superintendent put the decision to celebrate religiously in the hands of each school’s principal.

At Bildersee J.H.S., I pretty much kept to myself with a few rare exceptions.

I only cut school one day in three years, during my last semester. I did it to try and experience what other kids were doing. I was miserable and actually snuck back into Bildersee in the afternoon.

I set to work after school that day. Earlier in the year I had come into possession of an extra copy of the eighth grade English book. I also knew where Pop kept his single-edge razor blades. They were a match made in thirteen-year-old heaven.

First, I carefully cut through each page of the English book, a neat rectangle large enough to hold what I needed. Then I realized the pages needed support, so I taped sections of them together, not tightly, just enough to make them stable but still looking booklike when closed. It worked! I filled the hollowed-out book with Pop’s multi-tip screwdriver and a small adjustable wrench. I was ready for Science class.

The next day I tucked my alternative English book into my book bag and headed to Bildersee. I sat in one of the back corners of Mr. Balter’s class, with no one behind me, which fit well with my plan.

During Balter’s typically thrilling (to him) class, I used my stash of tools to quietly undo every screw and remove every nut, along with some of non-essential supporting bolts. The sturdy wooden desk stood, upheld by gravity alone.

When the bell rang, I gently slid my chair out from under the desk. Nothing was disturbed. Nothing looked amiss. As I exited the room, the next class entered. Two of the boys came in already engaged in an altercation. By the time they reached their seats near the back of the classroom, the verbal sparring had escalated into shoving. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the final push. I turned into the hallway and heard the crash of falling plywood. Smiling broadly as I made my way to the next class, I thought I heard Balter scream, “Baisley!” But I may have been mistaken.

The next period, from my seat in Algebra II, I watched as two custodians carried the desk, legs folded on top like the arms of a body in repose, down the hallway. Their heads solemnly bowed, the men gave the desk a proper transport to the room in which it would be reconstructed. I beamed.

Isaac Bildersee died just six weeks before I was born in 1952. Too bad. I think I might have liked him.

Someone once said, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Hillary Clinton also said it, but she never claimed the maxim as her own. It may be an old African proverb. It has certainly been restated in many different ways over the centuries.

Oddly, when Ms. Clinton first said it, a lot of people got their feathers ruffled; something about her denigrating parents, I think. I suspect Clinton’s naysayers have never lived in a village, or ever had to parent someone else’s child, or maybe were never children themselves.

I’ve visited the kind of villages in Africa that originate proverbs like the one about raising children. In them, for better or worse, children are community property. They play in public spaces, but many of those spaces are public simply because children play there. Somewhere there exists a title to that space, and it’s in some grown-up’s name; but kids share it as if it belonged only to them, all of them.

I grew up in a village. True, it was part of a Zip Code of nearly 100,000 people, which was part of a Borough of four million in a city of eight million. But the extended block on which the Baisleys lived was a village; we kids, the 93rd Street Gang and the other kids who lived there but weren’t lucky enough to be in the Gang, were community property.

This sense of community parenting showed itself in small ways and in big ways. Like most city neighborhoods of the 1950s and 60s, kids roamed Canarsie streets freely. The first one out in the morning, at least on Saturdays and in the summer, would run to the next one’s house and see if they were up yet. Typically, on those mornings or late afternoons during the school year, you’d hear the cry, “Can Joey (or Kurt or Judy) come out and play?” Usually they could unless they’d been recently grounded for misbehavior.

Play dates were still in their inventor’s mind. Our parents never made appointments for us except for pediatricians and dentists, and those were things we hated. Play was spontaneous, wherever and whenever kids happened to be.

Where parents got involved, usually, was once the children settled into someone’s house. Then it was, “My house, my rules.” No one ever had qualms about disciplining someone else’s child for misbehavior. Believe me, we feared other parents way more than we feared our own.

For me, community parenting was most effective at mealtimes. True, most times the command from Mom was, “Be home for dinner.” That meant 5:50 p.m., when Pop got home from his office. Sometimes, however, an invitation from a mother, such as Mrs. Robins, superseded Mom’s command.

Lucille and Ken Robins were Scott’s parents. Scott was Jewish and, therefore, not part of the Gang. But he lived on the block and he was my friend, at times my best friend. It was with him that I made the daily trek home from Isaac Bildersee JHS every day. You know, the ones that were ten miles uphill. Okay, they were ten and a half blocks, and only the half was a long block, but it was far for a kid.

Those walks home seemed longer when you had to go to the bathroom. I always had to go to the bathroom after school. Public school restrooms were for a) smoking, b) dealing in contraband, or c) getting beat up. I avoided them as if my life depended on it, which I believed it did. So Scott and I would walk those blocks as fast as possible, talking all the way to keep our minds off our bladders.

Thanks to Mrs. Robins, I had the joy of Jewish mothering. While I was in her home, I followed her rules. No flopping onto furniture. No entering rooms other than the living room, kitchen, or bathroom. And take your shoes off before entering. Never had a problem with Mrs. Robins’ rules, not even the one about eating everything on your plate.

I was a picky eater at home, according to Mom. I liked to keep my meat, potatoes, and vegetables separated: meat not touching potatoes and vegetables not touching the plate. I might have suffered through green beans. I especially liked them raw as I’d walk through the grocery store with Mom. She’d always tell the clerk how many I’d eaten so they could estimate the cost of goods devoured. I liked corn, but that’s not really a vegetable, is it? Same thing with tomatoes. Every other green or veggie-like thing was against my principles. Except in Mrs. Robins’ domain.

Scott’s mom could get me to eat anything. Broccoli? Yes, ma’am, I like broccoli. Cauliflower? Sure thing! Brussels sprouts? Well, I don’t really like them, but why not? Eventually, mothers talking the way they do, Mom found out what I was eating. My life changed that day.

For the few years we lived in Oregon in the late 1990s, my first wife, Sandy, got to be that kind of mother. Though not rigidly at 5:50, most nights we all ate together, she and I and our children, Stephen and Kellyn. That was such an oddity in 90s suburbia that our kids’ friends used to wrangle invitations to dinner just to eat with a whole family. Sometimes we’d play silly games at the table. They’d laugh and laugh and then report back to their parent or parents, who’d stare in disbelief that such relics existed.

The Baisleys, the Robinses, the Sullivans, the Bongiovannis, we were all relics. But we ate our vegetables—together.

There were exceptions to the rule about Canarsie parents not getting involved in their children’s play. The parents of the 93rd Street Gang were the exceptions. They not only got involved, three or four times each summer our parents actually created memorable events on our behalf.

The biggest parent-initiated Gang event remains embedded in my mind even after half a century. I can’t remember any amusement park trip that beats the day Susan’s dad took us to Steeplechase. We needed at least one other driver, so Uncle Nat drove too. (I’m not sure whose uncle he was. Just like Pop being Uncle Artie all over Canarsie, so Nat was everybody’s Uncle Nat.)

Steeplechase Park was at Coney Island, but it wasn’t Coney Island. Coney Island was the Boardwalk, the Wonder Wheel, Nathan’s, and salt water taffy. Steeplechase was rides, not a lot of them, but they were super cool because, except for the Parachute Jump and part of the park’s eponymous Steeplechase ride, they were indoors. Not until I visited the Mall of America as a middle-aged man did I again experience such a place.

We started the day with the Steeplechase, a horse race ride. Six or eight kids could ride at one time. It was a genuine race. We contorted ourselves into the most aerodynamic postures. We did anything and everything to get the horses, side by side in their predetermined course, to go faster to win the race. I suspect, and maybe always suspected, that each race’s winner was preordained, like some Calvinist lottery. But who cares? Finishing second that day felt like the crowning achievement of my life.

Next up was the big Slide that ended in a spiral that gradually spit you out. It was wood, like everything at Steeplechase; smooth, slick, dark brown wood. They gave us burlap bags on which to make the descent. We were warned not to dare let any fleshy part of our body touch the wooden surface on the way down. You could burn off a finger that way. Properly chastised, we slid. Fast. Hot. And in maybe five seconds it was over and each of us, in turn, rolled off our burlap. For a short ride, no one felt cheated.

We rode other rides that day. The Himalaya I remember slightly. The Fun House I only recall because Billy Knudsen led us in singing a song with the repeated line, “Sweet marijuana” as we progressed through its various chambers. One of the rides placed you and three others in a low car that sped so quickly on a round course that all the riders ended up pressed into a single human blob. I don’t remember what it was called.

During the day, we wandered outside Steeplechase as well. Some of us rode Coney Island’s three great wooden roller coasters, the Thunderbolt, the Tornado, and the awe-inspiring Cyclone. The truly brave souls dared the Parachute Jump that soared above Steeplechase. It pulled you high into the air and then dropped you a ways before yanking your body back up and then letting it down slowly from a dizzying height. I wasn’t one of those souls. No one rode Coney’s famous Wonder Wheel. Perhaps it seemed too tame for the Gang.

There was nothing tame about the ride I have replayed in my mind over and over through the years. I know I did it—twice. I just can’t grasp the complexity of its design. That great feat of engineering was the Bobsled.

Steeplechase’s Bobsled doesn’t exist anymore, like the park itself, and I’ve never seen another. No twenty-first century insurance company would dare underwrite it.

The ride, which consisted of two to four people packed into a bobsled-like car, starts on a track similar to a roller coaster. The track guides the car to an incline and then pulls it upward, again like a traditional roller coaster. Just past the crest of that incline the ride changed from traditional to bizarre. The track ended and the now-free car sped through a twisty-turny course with high semi-tubular walls. The riders, if working together, could create a little extra excitement by leaning into the curves, forcing the car higher up the wall. Next to being stared at by a mother elephant with babies to protect, and no fences to protect me, the Bobsled ride was the most thrilling experience of my life.

The Gang piled happily into Mr. Sullivan’s and Uncle Nat’s cars at the end of the day. Although many of the Gang had been to Steeplechase before, and would go again with their parents and younger siblings, nothing could match the fun of that day we spent riding the rides together.

Other parents added their unique forms of entertainment to the Gang’s repertoire of experiences. Billy Knudsen’s dad owned a boat. I’m not talking rowboat here; a lot of dad’s or uncles had those. Mr. Knudsen’s was a cabin cruiser with a swimming deck in the stern. We earned our sunburns the day he took us out in the bay.

Mom and Pop couldn’t afford a cabin cruiser or a trip to Steeplechase, but what they lacked in quality they more than made up in quantity.

During the summer months, a community band gave weekly concerts in the park behind the school administration building in Valley Stream, Long Island. The audience would bring folding lawn chairs and place them on a big macadam square in front of the spacious bandstand. Other spectators spread blankets on the grass around the pavement.

Mom and Pop loved what they called The Concert. They made it out to Valley Stream as often as they could, and most of those times they filled the station wagon with members of the 93rd Street Gang.

Gang members weren’t really thrilled about the style of music. It was mostly stuff for old people, thirty and up. We did, occasionally, join in the sing-alongs. That was where the band played the kind of songs our parents sang around Grandma’s piano on Saturday nights, things like By the Light of the Silvery Moon with sound effects, and everyone was supposed to sing along. And they did. That’s why the generation raised on the Beatles and the Stones can still sing Let Me Call You Sweetheart.

We never sat with Mom and Pop at the Concerts. We’d walk to the outer edge of the park and sit on or by the bridge that crossed a little creek. It was darker there, for making out if you had a significant other. You could hear the music, if you wished to listen, but it was quiet enough for conversation. I loved Tuesday nights in Valley Stream and the laughter and, yes, singing on the trip home: seven kids and two parents. That’s not helicopter parenting, unless the chopper is a Huey that drops you off, let’s you do your job, and returns to get you out of trouble. I appreciated the Gang’s moms and dads for thinking of us without trying to become us or curtailing our kidlike ways.

The closest thing to neighborhood parenting I’ve experienced in the past quarter century occurred when the church we were attending in Newberg, Oregon, decided to start its own youth group. This was a big deal because during the five years of its existence, its youth remained part of the founding church’s youth group. By now the church had grown to well over 150 people in each of two Sunday services in its rented building.

The kids themselves, most of them anyway, were clamoring for their own group. The pastor, wisely, called a meeting of all interested kids along with their parents. From its very beginning, this group was to be a collaboration between kids and parents.

We all learned a lot at that first meeting. For starters, we learned there were too many kids for just one group. We also learned that high school kids have different needs and expectations than middle school kids. We made a decision to meet again soon in two groups, but that both youth group design teams would include kids and parents.

My son, Stephen, was a founding member of the senior high group, and I was a founding parent. Once the group got going, the kids generally planned the meetings and chose the events. We parents were there for support and occasional guidance, but not to run the show. Still, the kids liked having us around. I enjoyed the friendships forged with church members I hadn’t met before.

The two youth groups were so successful that within a few months the church hired a youth pastor to oversee them. He did not run the senior high group; the kids did. His daughter was in the group, but when he showed up it was as her father, not as the boss.

A lot of trust developed in those teenagers; trust in each other and trust in their parents and the other parents. We had a lot of fun doing things together, like our improv nights based on the Whose Line Is It, Anyway comedy show popular on TV. In the more serious moments, the high school kids felt free to ask real questions about faith and life. The group even founded a puppet ministry for the church’s children, complete with puppeteers, musicians, and sound and light techs, all under eighteen.

As they neared the end of Stephen’s final year with the group, I learned that neighborhood parenting was still alive and well if we allow it to be.

One spring evening before graduation, the high school kids met in one of their homes. It was the night where they would celebrate the five group members who were graduating. At one point in the meeting, each graduate was asked to take a seat in the middle of a circle of all the kids and whichever parents were there. Each graduate was to share their dreams, hopes, and concerns for their immediate future, and the group would listen, giving words of affirmation and support.

Stephen’s turn in the center arrived, and he sat in the chair. Then he spoke to directly to me.

“Dad, I’m going to say some things that you don’t know about. Mom knows, but you don’t. So I’d like you to leave the room. I’ll tell you eventually, just not tonight. Okay?”

What was he going to say? How did Sandy know it and not me? I thought I knew my son, and he’d been keeping secrets? How dare he tell other kids’ parents and not want to tell me? How dare he ask me to leave the room?

But he did. And I did. Sometimes your best parenting is done by someone else’s parents. I hear it takes a village.

I dearly loved the kids I spent most of my early life with: the 93rd Street Gang. We were not your typical New York City street gang except in a few very select ways. We always left the block in a group. Even though on only one occasion do I recall ever being threatened by a group outside our neighborhood, and that was just hyped-up bluster, we preferred not to leave the hallowed macadam and concrete of East 93rd Street, between Flatlands Avenue and Avenue L. And we really only hung out between Avenues J and K. In other words, we lived on stoops belonging to the Kriegels, the Phillipses, the Sullivans, and, rarely due to Isaac, in my backyard. That backyard part changed dramatically after Pop built his screened-in patio.

I always looked up to my dad as an athlete and a man of faith, but I never really saw him as a carpenter until he got the idea to use the east wall of an old shed to create an elaborate lean-to that featured three sides made of wood-framed storm windows in the winter and wood-framed screens in the summer. It was a work of genius.

I never knew from where Pop got the idea for the screened-in patio, maybe from a magazine. I suspect the plans were drawn by one of Pop’s three engineer brothers-in-law. But Pop built it, with very little outside help. It was a true work of art, as well as a work of Art.

The roof was sturdy enough to hold three or four kids playing on it. The windows were secure enough to withstand a couple of serious hurricanes. The patio even extended enough past the old shed to allow a storage area to be built that provided an off-season home to the screens and windows. Genius.

More than all those things, the screened-in patio gave the Gang a refuge from the weather when it was inclement and from Isaac all the time. The patio was enjoyed on summer nights by the Gang, on Sunday afternoons by family and Mom and Pop’s friends, and on Sunday nights after church by the kids from Grace. We held our “carouses” there when we weren’t carousing at the parsonage.

Being denied almost every worldly pleasure our non-Grace friends enjoyed, the one thing we got was an after-church gathering—a carouse—about once a month, where we could really just be normal kids. Okay, we couldn’t swear, and at the parsonage we couldn’t even listen to Top 40 music. But the silly icebreakers, the serious talks, and the snacks were worth it. Add the Beatles and the Stones to the mix, at least in the screened-in patio, and it was almost heaven for kids who thought heaven was only for them.

No, we were not your everyday street gang. Add the Catholics to us Grace kids and we were something else, but something good. So we never left our friendly confines except as a group. And we would stand up for each other against any outsiders, no matter how hard we fought among ourselves. Those are gang-like things, right?

There were some less-than-gang-related activities, however. Somehow, Billy Knudsen got hold of a Super 8 movie camera and the Gang became filmmakers.

The Soupy Sales Show was hip enough to attract guests like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. It featured pies in the face—Soupy’s trademark—as well as sketches kids laughed at but only grown-ups understood. The Gang loved Soupy, none more than me.

I bought every piece of Soupy Sales merchandise I could get my parents to spring for. I had a big Soupy button I wore to church proudly. But the piéce de résistance was my oversized “official” Soupy bow tie, bright red with white polka dots. I actually wore it to school one time, but the teachers made me take it off: too distracting. Not too long ago, I think I saw it in a box somewhere. I’ll have to look again.

As much as I loved Soupy Sales, he and his show provided me with two of the greatest disappointments of my young life. The first was all on Soupy himself. The second I’m sure he had little to do with.

One year, during the successful run of his New York television show, Soupy was forced by the network to work on New Year’s Day. He was not happy, so he decided to do something outlandish, but not intentionally bad, on his show that day. Because Soupy regularly broke down the “fourth wall,” he spoke directly to his viewers; that is, the predominantly little kids who tuned in every day, even on New Year’s. Soupy simply instructed his young fans to go into their parents’ bedrooms (assuming they were sleeping off New Year's Eve), remove the green, wrinkly papers from their purses and wallets, and send them to him at the address shown on their TV screens. He really didn’t mean it seriously, or so we who believed in him believed.

Soupy may not have taken himself seriously, but his little fans certainly did. Within days the network was deluged with hand-printed envelopes containing cash. Soupy announced on air that all monies received would be donated directly to charity. A very embarrassed WNEW wanted to suspend Soupy, but a groundswell of fan support—presumably his young adult and teen fan base—held the network in check.

I was in-between, maybe 13 or 14. I knew Soupy was kidding, and it didn’t bother me at first. Then I heard about little kids, who trusted their idol, stealing money from their parents’ rooms. It didn't feel right. He should’ve known better. I didn’t know then why he did it. Maybe it would have mattered. I don’t know. I was just disappointed in my pie-faced Soupy.

If idols are false gods, that would have made Soupy Sales my false god. But the Real (if you’re so inclined to believe) One bestowed on me an even greater disappointment that year.

Have you ever wanted something so strongly you started to believe you deserved it? And then the more you wanted it you almost felt it was already yours? That’s how I felt about the full-scale rideable replica of a nineteenth century high-wheel bicycle that was first prize in a contest held by one of Soupy’s sponsors. All I had to do was enter, or write a short essay, which would have made me even more confident, aspiring reporter that I was.

I sent in the requisite box top, index card, essay, whatever and, like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, waited for my prize. I dreamed about that bike. I truly expected to win that contest. Why? Because I had prayed about it.

I prayed about it every day before, during, and after The Soupy Sales Show. I imagined myself seated over that giant front wheel high above the kids with their 26” Raleighs and Schwinns. I knew the bicycle was mine.

The contest ended. I waited to receive news of when the high-wheel was coming, or at least a congratulatory letter telling me where to pick it up. Nothing.

It was God’s fault.

Dammit! I’d prayed as hard as anyone ever prayed for anything. Okay, maybe not as hard as Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, but God didn’t answer his prayer either.

Something died in me the day I realized the high-wheeled bicycle wasn’t coming. No, I didn’t lose my faith, but I was severely disappointed in a God I thought would do anything for me. You might call that being dis-illusioned; that is, having my illusions about God removed. To a thirteen year-old it just plain sucked.

After Soupy Sales there was Batman, who was big everywhere. The 93rd Street Gang had to capitalize on that, and this time we had a plan.

Setting up our Batman movie took days, maybe even a week. We had starring roles to cast, which went to Eddie Gentile (Batman) and Billy Knudsen (Robin). Our movie would include all the male villains from the TV show that we could think of: the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, even a one-episode minor bad guy called False Face, who always wore a mask and a black turtleneck with his trademark FF on the chest. We needed the lowest rung on the Gang’s ladder for that role: me. Still, there must have been an unspoken lower rung. In spite of Cat Woman’s popularity on TV, and with two talented female Gang members available—Judy and Susan—we stuck with an all-male cast.

Casting cameo roles, so vital to our movie, took a bit of inspiration. We needed someone older, but not ancient, to play Commissioner Gordon. Since my brother was still living at home, he seemed the perfect choice. His military bearing gave him the right look for a street-wise career cop. Since I had the only house and yard big enough to pass for the Wayne mansion, the role of Alfred fell to Pop. With utmost dignity he followed the script to the letter and brought Bruce Wayne the batphone when the call came from the commissioner. Pop was an awesome Alfred: so dignified, so proper, with a little twinkle in his eye.

The plot, as in all our films, was tentative. Still, the plan called for a bank robbery, a police chase, and a major fight scene. It could never happen today. But in 1966, the necessary events actually transpired, with a little luck.

First, we needed a bank robbery. Well, Canarsie had a lot of banks, but which one would allow a half dozen teenagers with a camera to film a robbery? The first one we asked, it turns out. Try that in the 21st century. We were given permission to film the bad guys entering the bank in costume and then leaving the bank with bags of loot, which we provided. No customers were in any way put out by the filming.

Second, we needed a police chase. We planned to ask or beg a police officer to chase us on foot, but as we stood around the bank setting up the shoot, two NYPD vehicles happened to pass by. Our camera operator was johnny-on-the-spot and captured the whole scene, which was spliced into the film to make it look like the cops were chasing us. It was perfect.

The scenes where Commissioner Gordon called Batman and where Alfred delivered the batphone went off perfectly. Our remaining challenge was getting the superheroes into Police Headquarters. It only took a little persuasion from our cameraman, the only one of us not dressed in a ridiculous costume. He simply walked up to the Desk Sergeant of our local police precinct, explained what we were doing, and received permission to film Batman and Robin running into and out of the police station. It was as easy as robbing a bank.

The battle royale between the heroes and villains took place in the dunes of Seaview Park by Jamaica Bay. Some films are known for their elaborately choreographed fight scenes, such as those in John Wayne movies like McLintock. Ours was just an excuse to roll around in the sand. Barely waiting for a stage punch, we dove into the dunes; we rolled down them, somersaulted down them, and sometimes fell down them for no apparent reason. Eventually, all us villains were incapacitated and justice prevailed.

Today, our effort would have been posted to YouTube, and maybe someone would notice and next thing you know we’d be pseudo celebrities. In 1966, when the movie premiered in Eddie’s basement, and then went on the road to a few more basements and dens, we were genuine celebrities, stars of the highest magnitude, at least on the block. At least in the neighborhood. And that’s where it really counted.