This set of reminiscences begins with our arrival in the U.S. through citizenship here. Although these are probably less interesting in themselves than war-related experiences, they do relate to growing up while learning a new language and culture. With continuing immigration and English-as-a-second-language controversies, there may be some relevance to my own experience.
Soon after our arrival in October 1949, I started going to grade school, P.S. 105, in Brooklyn. It was decided that I should begin with the 5th grade rather than the 6th, probably to ease the later transition from 6th grade to junior high school. The teacher was Miss Prichinello. On my first day, there was short 20-question test, on American explorers. I remember getting one right answer, Columbus. Of course I'd never heard of Ponce de Leon, de Soto, Hernandez and Balboa. My English was also limited to what I had learned in one year of class back in Bremerhaven, which was British English.
I did find out that I was much further along in math than was being taught here. I had learned how to do multiplication of 3-place numbers without any intermediate sums, while students here were on simple fractions.
It also wasn't long before I distinguished myself as a champion speller. Spelling bees were an instruction favorite, with the class divided into two teams. I was assigned to the side that was used to losing to the champion speller on the other team; now the two of us would just about always spell to a stand-off.
Other students were were very helpful and kind, for the most part. The one exception that I recall is when I proudly brought my stamp collection to school. After it was passed around, some specific German stamps were missing; then two kids, Joseph Vella and Joe Bombardieri, offered to trade these same German stamps for something else. After all these years, I haven't forgotten their names. I still feel the same disgust for adult vultures that prey on the weak.
The neighborhood in which we lived, at 914 55th Street near 9th Avenue in Bay Ridge, had a fair ethnic mix. We lived in a two-family house with my uncle and aunt; next door there were two other German families. The area itself was heavily Norwegian, so a lot my street playmates were from a Norwegian background, including my best friend, Stu Bentsen. Sometime in the spring, there would be a Norwegian parade along Eighth Avenue, with lots of flags and marchers in native costume.
A Norwegian pastor, Brun by name, lived in the upstairs apartment, and he was persuasive about having me attend a Norwegian Lutheran church on 59th Street near 8th Avenue. Our background, like that of most North Germans, was Lutheran, although we were hardly churchgoers. I continued on with Sunday School all the way to confirmation, which included special classes during the year before. Then, as classmates publicly declared themselves to be "saved", I lapsed from even passive belief. Since I did not feel what they did, I became more skeptical and questioning; in short, I began to think about religion as such.
Besides those of Norwegian ethnicity, there were other playmates too. A Polish family lived in a nearby house, with two kids, Frances and Jenny Zukas. Their mother was not all well in the head, but their father was a very gentle man. The younger sister Jenny had a bit of a wild streak; the older sister was a very good student (maybe even valedictorian) but wound up marrying a sailor of no particular distinction. Upstairs in the same house was a Jewish family with a son Barry. Further up the block was Willy, and at the other end of the street lived Joe Lotito, a jolly Italian sort who later became a good friend.
Still on the Norwegian theme, other kids on the same street were Sylvia and Betty Kristiansen, Howard Brunvol, Tom and Odd Titland. As one could imagine, the latter suffered ferociously for his name, common in Norway, and a target here; it was no surprise when he decided to call himself Ed.
Today, as the controversy rages about how to best get kids to learn English to function in the U.S., I can look back on my experience with gratitude for the mixed neigborhood. With my German contact limited to my parents, aunt and uncle, and the two neighboring families, there was no ghetto to return to where the native language would be. To function on the street with the other kids, one learned English and never thought twice about it.
By the time I attended 6th grade, in Miss Brown's class, I had adapted to my new language well enough to become a bit of a nuisance in school with altogether too much chatter. It became a very strange and stressful year. The symptom was that I developed a kind of morning sickness, nausea at the thought of going to school. I wound up missing a fair number of days. My mother hit upon the idea of a tablespoon of port as a stomach soother, not a bad idea at all. I even had a hospital stay for some gastro-intestinal tests, which of course showed nothing physical. Was it all the accumulated experiences, dislocations and changes finally catching up, or stress at home, or all of these?
At some time (I don't know exactly when) Pastor Brun moved out of the upstairs apartment, and it became ours. I can't recall how we shared my aunt and uncle's apartment until then, but I'm sure it was tight and led to tensions. Having grown up for many years in other people's homes (in Germany, in Aue and Bremerhaven), I was used to walking and speaking softly, of being courteous and deferential.
Uncle Erich was an original technophile, installing a TV (one of the earliest) in a tall home-made cabinet. He was also a channel surfer, before the word was coined - just as we might be getting interested in a program, he would switch to the next channel. It was frustrating, but of course it wasn't our TV. Aunt Thea, would unwind with a bit more Ballantine Ale than might have been best for her.
I know that after we moved to the upstairs apartment my mother had what would now be called nervous breakdowns. At various times of stress she would throw herself into a corner on the floor, crying and shouting. My father was helpless, I was a young kid growing up, and of course one didn't talk about it to anyone. These days there would be psychological counseling but, as in the war years, one had learned to just carry on as best one could.
It was probably then, too, that I developed a fascination for burning pieces of paper at home. My parents were terrified that I would burn down the house, but threats and pleading did no good. Maybe it was a kind of rebellion, but the problem soon disappeared on its own.
Somehow, though, with all that as background, I must have had a successful school year in the 6th grade. I remember being awarded "Tom Sawyer" as a book prize, and then wound up being placed in a the "special" class in junior high school, which allowed one to finish the three junior high school years in two.
Junior high school, now often called "middle school", did not seem as bad to me as it is now often pictured, although it had its moments. A few selected memories:
It was a neighborhood school, so I could walk back home for lunch.
There was a bully that had it in for me, probably because I was a quiet kid, so I remember trying to avoid him on the walks to and from school. That was also the time for a first crush, on a very pretty girl, a Sandra Steijer, whom I first saw in a school play, a musical. Of course I did nothing about it, being far too shy, sort of like Charlie Brown and the little red-headed girl.
At the end of the second, and last year, in preparation for the graduation yearbook, the class voted on classmates as "most .... "; I remember receiving "most likely to succeed", but also that the teacher talked the class out of it in favor of a Nathan Gross. No, it didn't ruin my life, but I apparently still remember the disappointment back then.
I recall only one teacher as being young, the French teacher, Miss Roberts. The home room teacher was a Miss Canary, in the more usual older mold. I remember a day in her English class that we were reading "The Bells" by Edgar Allan Poe. The bell-like sounds of the poem brought us to giggling and laughing, so she decided to punish us by having us sit completely silent. Bad idea. Unfortunately a street vendor outside was calling out his wares so the class, after trying valiantly to hold in the laughter, erupted into chaos.
During the years after we came to the U.S., my father Ernst worked at "Walt's Luncheonette", essentially in a manual capacity. Both my parents went to evening school to learn English, as was then accepted practice for immigrants. My aunt and uncle had German friends, including some who worked at the luncheonette, and so we got to know them too. I recall that once I went to somebody's home in New Jersey, my first time away from home. My aunt thought it would be a good idea, my mother didn't, my aunt insisted, and she was right.
The two years in junior high school led to high school in 1953. With my abilities in math, a technical path made sense. New York had, and still has, three high schools in that area that one needed to apply for: Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science. As such they were commuter rather than neighborhood high schools, and so I rode the subway to Brooklyn Tech for the next few years.
Because of the compressed schedule in the junior high school special class, I was lacking some courses that would have had me graduate high school in 3-1/2 rather than 3 years. To regain that half-year, I decided to take summer school classes in English and Physics Lab at New Utrecht High School. The Physics Lab was highly forgettable, but I had a wonderful teacher for English. Asked to write an essay based on a choice of themes, I picked "The Lure of Danger". The teacher had probably meant this as an escape valve so that those who had trouble writing could make up a story. I surprised her by launching into a psychological analysis instead. She then guided me toward more interesting and challenging reading - I'm forever grateful for her recommendation of the "Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens".
Throughout all this time, as was typical in Brooklyn, I spent time on the street with the other neighborhood kids. There was little of just hanging around - there was always some game to be played, whether it needed only two players, or more: stickball, triangle, hide-and-seek, stoopball, poisonball, ring-o-leavio (sp?), and more. The most precious commodity was the pink ball, the "spaldeen". We didn't seem to have the money to buy too many, so we'd spend lots of time looking for the ball lost in the neighbor's ivy groundcover, or fishing it out of a storm drain. Here one also acquired talents like catching stickball fly balls as they rattled down the trees on the street.
It also didn't take long for this recent immigrant to learn about baseball and to follow the Brooklyn Dodgers passionately. They were an ideal team for the common man, with good players, good teamwork, a racial and ethnic mix, and like most of us, no matter how successful, would always lose the last game. In some sense it was actually good that they left for LA shortly after their World Series win in 1955; as the heroes of the '50s faded in LA, the Brooklyn Dodgers remained forever the same.
During the commuting years to Brooklyn Tech, I had somehow become friends with a Raymond Ostensen, of Norwegian background. He was the original nerd, reading books on quantum mechanics, and being physically somewhat awkward. I still recall his peculiar double-clutching elbow motion when throwing a ball. In contrast, I was a highly achieving student, but one without a direction or thirst for knowledge, and would just as soon play ball in the street. Because we lived close to each other and both commuted to Brooklyn Tech, we met and traveled together. Over time, the "friendship" began to grate on me, but I didn't know how to get out of it, so lots of those rides went on in silence.
The Ostensen family gave me another, more bizarre, view of life. The mother was a bit weird, a dedicated Brooklyn Dodgers fan, who would rub a lucky ceramic pig of hers to generate luck for the team. But one day she shocked me totally by saying that, after all, the Germans had done something right by getting rid of the Jews. It was hard to believe that this harmless little lady could carry such thoughts.
After several years in the U.S., we finally took a vacation, at a farm in Callicoon, New York. It was for only a week, but very relaxing and enjoyable. At the end of the week, we had liked it so much that we asked my aunt about staying a second week. The return telegram said, in so many words: "If Ernst doesn't come back right away, then he doesn't have a job any more". After a family council, we decided to stay and go with the consequences.
After returning, my father looked for and found work as a machinist. He had been a metal trades teacher (Gewerbeoberlehrer) and a machinist before that. There were German employment agencies that helped. Eventually this path would lead him to a union position at American Machine and Foundry (AMF), known as makers of cigarette machines and bowling pinsetters.
Meanwhile, we looked for our own place to live. I would imagine that there were high tensions between our family and our aunt and uncle. We found a second-floor apartment at 7008 18th Avenue in Brooklyn, above a dry-cleaning store, and moved there without, as I recall, giving much notice to the aunt and uncle.
I was concerned at the time and later that we still had an obligation to our aunt and uncle, since they had paid to bring us over here. My parents explained that all the exploitation of my father had made up for that. I didn't know enough to judge, but the question still bothers me a bit.
There was a good deal of work to be done on that apartment, fixing walls, painting and putting up wallpaper. I worked alongside my father and learned a lot. For one, the wallpaper was not vinyl, so one had to take great care not to tear it.
The location was a bit of a drawback. The avenue was commercial, with lots of storefronts and a fair amount of foot-traffic. The dry-cleaning store alarm system would go off on a false alarm every so often. Also, I would now wonder whether dry cleaning fumes might have made their way into our apartment. On the other hand, the landlord lived on the third floor. Later, he moved out, and an Italian family moved in. The mother was a prototypical "mamma mia", a friendly bubbly sort. Unfortunately that was a mismatch with my mother's cooler, by-the-book, overlook-no-slight, temperament.
Eventually, we moved back to the previous neighborhood, to a two-family house on a tree-lined shady street, at 935 52nd Street. The landlords were the Nystroms; he was from a Finnish background and she from a Swedish one. Some years later an Italian-American family, the Giambrones, bought the house.
Summer Work:
Many summers were just carefree, play-in-the-street, pickup games with the other kids on the block. No one seemed to go to camp (or I don't recall), and there were no structured activities or games, so there always others around. I also used my bicycle to gain some freedom, cycling to Rockaway Beach with its bigger waves and less crowded sand.
In later years, leading up to and including college, everyone thought more about earning a little money and keeping busy. My experiences were varied, but even drudge work proved valuable in some way.
There was the job in a Manhattan factory that made plastic toys, run by some German owners who had looked for people in a German agency. There was assembly work with acetone (who knows how many brain cells I killed), and some stock clerk work delivering items to the packers. Somehow I decided to begin helping with the packing without anyone objecting. It was actually fun to place the boxes of various sizes into a carton optimally, a spatial talent which I developed and still use. The packers were big burly black guys; there was a lot of humor, and I felt I fit in well. It was a matter of making the most of what could have been a stultifying experience. There was actually one other negative - the factory was next to another building where food was being cooked (processed). All day, a sourish food smell would pervade the workplace.
I had one brief and unsuccessful foray into hawking magazines. Although I don't recall how it all began, probably through a friend, this "job" was selling "Tennis World" magazines at Forest Hills during the-then amateur tournament. I even got to sit in the World Tennis box and saw play close up. But I was a total failure at selling; the idea of shouting some spiel to make people buy the magazine was foreign to this shy kid. After about two days, I gave it up, probably having sold zero magazines.
In college, my good friend Joel helped me get a job in the Cooper Union Library. One of the tasks I was asked to do was to vacuum dust from the books in the Art School Library. The library was empty and unoccupied, so along with the actual work I leafed through many art books and got a start on a bit of an art education.
Another summer led to work in a real engineering office, for a building contractor. My task was to peruse architectural drawings, and to count all the various electrical outlets, then to measure the amount of wire needed to be strung through conduit to connect the outlets. This would become part of a bill of materials. The work was certainly not too challenging, and was not about to make me fall in love with engineering. But if engineering, then not construction - I got so see and hear the lead engineer calling the construction site throughout the day and have nearly apoplectic conversations with "Julie" at the site; I figures he was good for a heart attack before age 50.
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