Neighborhood

At a recent dinner party, with couples aged sixty-five, and older someone asked the question as to whether things were better when we were growing up than they are for children today. Most of us agreed that was, indeed, the case. This from people who had been witness to the aftermath of The Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War. A recent article in Time Magazine indicated that life expectancy in 1900was about 47 years and is now 78 years. It is projected that children born today have a fifty percent chance of living to 100. Nevertheless the "good old days" aeem to us seniors to be just that.

I believe my growing up years were better than those of my children, who were born in the sixties, largely because of location--a residential area of West Bronx v. the suburbs of Philadelphia.

3280 was, and still is, a six story apartment house for perhaps forty families. There was a fenced-in roof "garden" for residents to sit and take the sun. In those days 3280 was predomimnantly Jewish. It sat behind what was then an elementary school and was a block from a large park commnecting two larger parks. Bronx Park housed a Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo. Van Cortland Park had a large lake for skating in the winter. Two major shopping areas, two movie theatres, an Indepndent Subway System station and bus lines were with walking distance. The schoolyard provided recreational activities for thousands of children. Motherts congregated on summer afternoons, sitting on camp chairs and rocking baby carriages. Husbands had their oiwn area where they chatted about businbess and smiked their pipes and cigars. A large playground area surrounded the public reservoir and had football fields, playground eqipment, a wading pool, a running track and bicycle path. Public benches aorund the "Oval" provided respite for people on hot summer evenings. 3280 housed at least half a dozen families with children my age. We would wander from one apartment to the next, moving only when the parents became intolerant of the noise or horseplay and commanded, "Go play sopmewhere else." In the days before television we never lacked for friends or activities to occupy us. A Superintendent,the Super" was there to service the heating system, shovel snow, cut the hedges, and make minor repairs. Schools were free of drugs, teachers commanded respect, and the education provided was good. All of my friends went to college. Subways were safe so that, as adolescents, we were free to travel to other aras of the Broinx, to Manhattan, and, later, even Coney Island by subway. What I am describing here would be called today a "community." We called it our "neighborhood."

Aftert VJ Day post-war America entered a peiod of relative prosperty, at least for the middle class. The next step upward from The Bronx was a move to the suburbs where houses had lawns and the area was less crowded. My parents moved to Yonkers. We became lawn mowers and gardeners. No longer convenient to public transportation, my father had to drive to work in Manhattan and pay for parking.
When I married we started out in a garden-type apartment in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. The tenants were young families, like ours, with babies and toddlers. As soon as I was able to afford the downpayment we, too, moved to the suburbs. My children had few friends on the block. Pople largely kept to themselves.

Shortly before my mother died, my sister and I took her to visit the old neighborhood in the Bronx. 3280 was now occupied by Hispanic people. The old school yard was a parking lot for teachers or others. The area may still be a neighborhood but no longer middle class. We rode the old elevator to the fifth floor but I was reluctant to ring the bell of our old apartment. Thomas Wolf was right. "You can't go home again."

Cloakie

I am not dissatisfied with my profession as a psychologist. I believe I have helped people with emotional problems and I continue to do so now. Yet I often wonder about the road not taken.

My father, Sam, manufactured women's coats and suits in the grament district of New York City. They were called "cloakies." His business was housed in a ninth floor loft on West 38th Street.

Sam made a high priced garment and sold to the better department stores in the city. Summers I helped out, assisting the packing and delivery man. I pushed the carts loaded with fur trimmed broadclothes to middle men or stores within walking distance, took packages to the post office, swept up around the operators and Louie the pressor.

Sam made a good living, especially during the war years, but he never wanted me to take over his business. My parents' plans for me were to become a doctor--an aspiration which represented high status and was worry free in their eyes and which I never completely fulfilled. Yet it might have worked out differently.

Our neighborhood in the West Bronx was one of the nicer sections of the city. We overlooked the public school and were within walking distance of parks, shopping areas, playgrounds and public transportation. Most of us were second or third generation children of immigrants who had succeeeded economically. My father was unemployed during the Great Depresion but bounced back and was able to start his own business. The children of our neigborhood became physicians, dentists, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and successful businessmen. A block from our apartment house teens gathered alomng Mosholu Parkway and socialized on warm summer evenings. Among the group were two boys who later made it big. Calvin Klein and Ralph Lipshitz, now known as Ralph Lauren. I didn't know either of them but would have recognized them at thew time along the park fence. I've read that Lipschitz returns to the neighborwood frequently to visit his old apartment.

When I need to get a rise out of friends who know me well I point out that I, too, might have gone into the garment business and become a "cloakie." I, too, might have become a Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren. "You can't properly match a shirt and a tie," I am reminded "and if you dress well today it's because your wife picks out your clothes."

My mother, let her rest in peace, would say, "It was nicht bershert." It was not destined. So be it.

Fact or fantasy

Inserting autobiographical material is a hazardous business. Of course, every author projects some of himself into whatever he expresses. That is the assumption behind projective testing, a lost art. (It never was a science.) But using actual incidents or real people as the basis of your characters invites trouble.

In Shrink: Odyssey of a therapist I used myself as the hero. A large section of the book is taken from my own experiences. I did grow up in the Bronx in a Jrewish family, I attended Cornell and The University of Pennsylvania, and served in the army. I became a psychologist, worked for many years at a residential facility for handicpaped persons, and maintain a private practice. At some pont in the novel fact ends and fiction begins. Even in the autobioographical material, however, I made some changes to fit the personality of Morrie. Friends who know me, who have read Shrink draw their own conclusions, sometimes accurate, often erroeous. Both my wife and a female friend see the friend as the model for Morrie's wife--flattering to my friend, not so good for my wife. I have been asked whether I was ever attacked by a client in my office. I have not. I co-worker assumes that the hero of the sequel, Finding Jackson, also Morrie, is based on a mutual co-worker. (It is not. Still me.) I have never treated a multiple personality. I have never treated anyone who believed themselves to be reincarnated. If someday I do perhaps I'll know how to provide an intervention.

The locale that served as the birthplace for the villain in Shrink is based on the town of Thompson in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. To my knowledge there has never been a murderer who came from Thompson. Seven miles to the north on Route 171 is the town of Susquenhanna. A suburb called Great Bend, is
the spot where the Susqehanna River, originating in New York State, turns around on itself and heads back up to New York, only to turn back, merge with its western branch and empty further south into the Chesapeake Bay. James Michener in his novel Chesapeake, describes a fictious Native American, expelled from his tribe, who comes down the river and settles along the bay. A later chapter describes two explorers who go up the river, searching for its origin. They must choose at what is now the town of Sunburry, where the two branches merge, as to which branch to follow. Susquehanna is the birthplace of B. F. Skinner, who was during his life the foremost Anmerican psychologist, known for his studies of operant behavior in rats. Though Skinner did not treat patients, many of his students became clinicians and applied operant conditioning techniques in their work.

I owned eighteen acres along Route 171, north of Thompson and know the area well. I had a cabin built, doing some of the work myself, and used it for about fifteen years as a recreational property. I spent many happy hours exploring the countryside and meeting the people who live there. My favorite activity was to sit at the couter of one of the local diners and engage the person next to me in coversation. They were wary of talking with strangers but once I revealed that I owned land nearby they were comfortable talking to me. None of the people in my story a re mopdeled after anyone in Susquehanna County. One of these days I will donate a copy of my book to the library in Montrose, the County seat, where some of my story takes place. I also used the town of Honesdale, alomg Route 6 in Shrink. Thompson is between Montrose to the west and Honesdale to the east. I went to camp in the town of Lake Como, Pennsylvania,across the river on the New York side. not far from Hancock or Honesdale. A children's camp in the area also figures in my story.

I don't know if I will ever be sufficiently masochistic to write another novel. It's not the writing that deters me but the marketing. If I do become tempted my characters will be totally fictional.

Paying Peggy

My wife and I are enjoying the Winter Olympics. They bring to mind my experience over twenty years ago when I was responsible for a fund raising ice show for Elwyn, Inc. We had arranged for several top ranked ice skating amateurs to skate, including Scott Hamilton, the Crothers, and others. But the real draw was Peggy Fleming, whom we paid to skate for three performances. It was my responsibility to chauffer Peggy to each performance and ensure that she was treated well. Peggy was a huge hit amd she filled the arena each time. I found her to be a gracious and personable lady but I tested her patience with me.

In addition to ticket sales we had develed a program book which we sold at the event for two dollars. I collected the money, stuffing my pockets with singles and depositing them after the performance at a night drop at a local bank. The last performance was a Saturday evening. I was to provide Peggy and her husband, a dermatologist who served as her business manager, with a check. After the matinee I had no time to make the money drop-off. My friend Al invited me back to his house for a quick supper, offering to let me leave the cash with him and to drive me back for the last show. Al indicated that when he leaves money in the house he wraps it in wax paper, marks it FISH and places it in the freezer. So we did just that.

After Peggy's last performance Al suggested we pay Peggy and say good-bye.
I reached into my pocket and found no check.

"Where is it?" he demanded.
"I think it must be wrapped up in your freezer, marked FISH."
"You tell that to Peggy, I'm not going to." Apologetically, I explained the situation to Peggy.
"Just send me the check," she replied. No one could make up a story like that."

The following year Peggy could not make the event. The stands were empty.