Young, Poor, and Happy

I GREW UP IN BROOKLYN during the Depression years of the 1930s. It was a hard time for everyone, and that certainly included my family. Technology was nascent. There were few cars in the neighborhood. No one had a television and hardly anyone had a telephone. Airline travel was still a novelty.

Interference from the government was limited, and politics was mostly national. Media meant newspapers since radio was barely emerging, and TV broadcasts were only in the minds of Philo Farnsworth and Charles Jenkins. It was a hard time, but in some ways life was simpler and less stressful as long as people had a home and there was food on the table.

I was born in the East New York section of Brooklyn on the border of Brownsville, the last of four sons separated by more than a dozen years from my two oldest brothers and seven years from my youngest brother. All were born in the 1920s before the Depression changed everything for many Americans. Money was always hard to come by in our family.

My three brothers left home in their early teens to earn ten dollars a week at best. Sol, my oldest brother, lied about his age and moved to Oregon to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Later he joined the Navy to serve in WWII. My next oldest brother Bill also lied about his age and joined the Merchant Marines. He was a gunner in the famous Liberty Ship Convoy to Murmansk that aided the Russian war effort. A majority of the seamen in the convoy died in deadly attacks by German U-boats, but fortunately Bill survived. Bob, my youngest brother, sold magazines in places as far away from New York as Hartford, Connecticut, which in those days was about eight hours by bus from Brooklyn. He too lied about his age to join the United States Marines, surviving WWII campaigns in Saipan and Okinawa.

While still in grammar school, I was the only one left to stay with my mother during WWII. My mother hung an 8 × 12 inch banner with three blue stars (representing her three sons in the armed forces) in a window for all to see. Thankfully, none of the blue stars turned into gold stars representing those who lost their lives.

Both of my parents were born on farms located near Minsk, Russia. They immigrated separately to the United States in 1913 and 1914 just before the start of WWI. Mother became a cleaning woman to make enough money for us to survive. Since I was an infant when I lost my father, I did not have the opportunity to know him. My mother kept in touch with one or two people from Russia, but I never met any relatives, if there were any.

We lived in a third-floor walkup on Hinsdale Street, Brooklyn in a line of twelve identical buildings mirrored by those across the street. The one block on Hinsdale Street between Dumont Avenue and Livonia Avenue was my neighborhood. Virtually all my friends lived on this block that housed approximately one thousand immigrants.

But thinking back to my youth, I remember being happy every day. It may have been partly due to genetics, but I strongly believe that it was also due to positive thinking, a sound philosophy even then—and playing all kinds of sports every day.

I was a good athlete, well known in my neighborhood for that attribute. I played all of the typical street sports, including punchball, stickball, baseball, basketball, hockey, kick-the-can and even football.

A baseball was a sphere of taped-over string, which at one time was the core of a real baseball that had lost its cover years earlier. A typical bat had been broken in at least two parts, but was taped together by electrical tape to resemble a real bat. A football was made of a tabloid newspaper such as theDaily News orDaily Mirror folded three times and tied with string to resemble the size o