Readers Report
I lived on Foster Avenue and Albany, played in the park across the street, went to Faragut Pool in the summer, and the bowling alley all year round as kids. Hung in Benny's candy store on Avenue D and Albany, Little Flower School. Went to Erasmus Hall, graduated in 1964; worked in Manhattan, 200 5th Avenue for fifteen years. Met my husband at George's Place (otherwise known as the Town) on Avenue D. We were active in the Knights of Columbus on Foster and East 52nd. My dad was Grand Knight in the late '60s. Moved to Florida in 1979.
I grew up in Borough Park in the fifties. Brooklyn was then and probably still is an alternative reality composed of many alternative realities. To me it was candy stores, the gilded Loew's Theatre, the winter of '48, the elm trees that covered the "block" like a cathedral during the summer, marbles, stoop ball, stick ball, Mr. Weiner next door (the block ogre) ; the sounds of shul mixing with kids play mixing with the rag man and scissor sharpening man and hurdy gurdy man, and. . . . It was Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood in its Yiddish/Italian version. It was the Dodgers, the glue that held it all together. Mostly it was intangible, not a place but a state of being. I've been to Brooklyn once in the past 20 years. . . . I live upstate. I visited the former site of Ebbets Field. I cried. . . .
I was raised at 471 Sheffield Ave. in Brooklyn, went to P.S. 182, Junior High 149, and then to Thomas Jefferson H.S. The boys' dean (Moon Muldorf) at Jeff once called me a bum. Now this bum is retired and living well in Florida. All my relatives lived in East New York on Schenck Ave., Williams Ave., Alabama Ave. I hung out at the corner candy store on Sheffield and Livonia and frequented the Charley Beecher poolroom on Livonia Ave. across from Fortunoffs. We had crazy names: I was known as The Wreck. Brooklyn will always have fond memories for me.
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