Hide-and-Go-Seek, hand-me-down clothes, and Ketchup Bread.
I was born on October 18, 1943, in a Brooklyn hospital at 9:11 PM. Although I didn’t know it then, the time on the clock of my birth would be just as important to me as the day I was born. Even more so. It was hard for me to accept that I was a year older until it was 9:11 PM on the eighteenth of October in any year. Mom said I would wait patiently for 9:11 PM to come, and only then would I feel a year older.
Such early signs of being fanatic about time as a youngster were a little strange. Or it could be an omen of what would control my life in the future. I remember one day I was late for school. Seeing tardy on my report card, I made certain it would never happen again. If my mother had trouble getting me out on time, I would run to school so I wouldn’t be late.
And one day, when a hurricane was on its way, I asked Mom, “Is a hurricane rain that hurries?” It spoke volumes about how, at such a young age, time was part of my psyche.
Map courtesy StreetEasy
Things were much safer back then, and parents let us walk to school. My mother drilled into my head that I should remember where I lived. “105-18-89th Street, Mom,” I would say, and then she would walk away. “And never talk to strangers,” she would add. She never told me why it was so important to know where I lived, but I knew it was in case I got lost.
I knew this because Mrs. Sileo, my first-grade teacher, preached it to all of us at school. She also became our second-grade teacher. And even though we all liked her, we were disappointed when she announced that we were all getting promoted to second grade and so was she. We all just wanted a new teacher the next year to have something different.
After second grade, my third-grade teacher was Miss Williams. She was younger than Mrs. Sileo and added more to her format than Mrs. Sileo did. She set aside time for activities beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic, letting us paint with watercolors once a week. Everyone had to bring one of their fathers’ old shirts to wear on painting day so we wouldn’t soil our good school clothes.
However, my older brother Kenny would tell me of how a teacher in the sixth grade didn’t let him go to the bathroom, making him wet himself. Then he was humiliated by being made to stand in front of the classroom to display his lack of control. This draconian way of teaching dominated the 1940s. It got even worse when teachers hit students for what they presumed to be misbehavior well into the late 1950s. It stayed hidden for years because students were afraid to tell their parents, fearing more shame.
Back in the day, playing ball in Queens (photo, Ephemeral NY)
Kenny and I often played baseball down the street from where we lived, on 89th Street. It was on a vacant lot with two billboards joined at the corner intersection, east on Liberty Avenue and south on 89th Street. There was an open pit filled with rocks. There was the perfect place for home plate at the foot of where they met and about 10 feet in front of the pit. When games were not being played, it was used to roast chestnuts and bake potatoes.
One time I was standing too close to him while he was up at bat. He swung at a pitch and missed, but hit me in the head. He immediately dropped his bat, grabbed my hand, and ran as fast as he could, almost dragging me home with blood gushing from my head. When we got home, my mother wiped the blood from my forehead and applied ice cubes there wrapped in a towel and had me lie down. There weren’t any emergency rooms to go to, no walk-ins for urgent care. Everything was fine. Years later, while having a CAT scan for another injury, the incident was evident on the scan with scarring but with no consequences where I got hit.
Then, in the summer, when it got dark, the cars slowed to a crawl, which let us play Hide-and-Seek in the streets. All the parents would sit on their stoops to keep an eye on us. We would use a utility pole for home base, but when Jerry’s ice cream truck came down the street, we would stop the game and get online for ice cream.
Ketchup Bread (photo by Allison Walker Payne via Medium)
Like most working-class Americans with Depression-era roots, people had a tough time providing for their children. I can remember when food was limited. On occasion, Heinz baby food in jars was served for dinner. Also, Mom was very inventive. For example, ketchup served on buttered white bread was called Ketchup Bread. We didn’t complain because we thought everyone else ate the same.
New clothes were also an issue. I was the first to get hand-me-downs from my older brother, Kenny. And when I outgrew them, I remembered all the problems of wearing his clothes, especially his winter coat. “Teddy, when you get the coat I am wearing, know that the left arm sleeve is torn, and to get your arm through it completely without it folding and preventing your arm from pulling through, you must hold the torn sleeve until your arm passes through into the sleeve.”
Teddy looked confused. He was already wearing some of my clothes and wasn’t interested in hearing anything about Kenny’s clothes. Mom and Dad smiled but secretly felt bad that their children knew they would be wearing each other’s clothes when they grew out of their own.
We only bought new shoes when our feet grew a bigger size. But before we grew out of them and the soles wore out, we put cardboard inserts made from cereal boxes in our shoes to cover up the holes.
