The Gravesend Connection

By Stan Pollack

With a masterful grasp of what was at stake in World War II, STAN POLLACK, in his third novel, has effectively recreated a time on the brink of being forgotten. These were the most dramatic years of the Twentieth Century (1933-45) when the worlds nations descended reluctantly into a tumultuous war.
HOW HITLER REALLY LOST THE WAR
The story succeeds in that tricky business of combining true history with believable fictional actors injecting themselves onto the world stage. The cast of characters teems not only with famous personalities of the time, but ordinary fictional figures whose deeds were never recorded into history books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 18, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465323798

Stan Pollack

In retirement, author Stan Pollack discovered a prolific tendency to write and publish a half dozen books covering several genres in a short time. "The Golden Age of Tongue Kissing" is a semi-autobiographical story weaving a memorable and humorous accounting of a growing-up experience in Brooklyn, New York. Two novels followed, each inspired by actual past events. "Specific Intent" is a fast-moving detective versus fugitive chase placing the main characters in exotic locations around the world. "Does God Have a Sense of Humor" allows the reader to decide. Inspired by current political events, "Upset 2020" fictionalizes the election of our nation’s first third-party president. "Suddenly 80: Finally Single and Lovin’ It" is a laugh-out-loud portrayal of discovering new freedom and liberty in the Golden years.

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The Gravesend

Connection

55063-POLL-layout.pdf

Stan Pollack

Copyright © 2009 by Stan Pollack.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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55063

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

IN MEMORY OF SWEET MAGGI

MY FAITHFUL DOG AND BEST FRIEND

WHO LIVED FOR MY LOVE AND WAS

NEVER DISAPPOINTED

PROLOGUE

WHAT’S A GRAVESEND?

Gravesend is the location of this story. It is one of the original six towns of Brooklyn, having been settled by the English in 1643 as a haven for religious dissenters. The area originally included an enormous expanse of land covering most of Southwest Brooklyn and also encompassed Coney Island.

The name Gravesend rightly blends two influences, the early Dutch and English that shaped its development. It was originally named by the Dutch from their words grafes and ande, which together means end of the grove. The English influence was more permanent as Gravesend is a city at the mouth of the Thames River.

In 1524 explorer Giovanni Da Verrazano became the first white man to sail along Gravesend Bay. The sight must have startled hundreds, perhaps thousands of Indians living near the water’s edge. Almost a century later Henry Hudson and his ship The Half Moon dropped anchor in September, 1609, before going on to explore a river, now known as the Henry Hudson River, which would lead them to China. Some of the crew went ashore and recorded in the ship’s log their observations of an area that in the future would become Coney Island, as a place with pleasant grasses and flowers and goodly trees as ever to be seen and very sweet smells came from them. This was Brooklyn’s first recorded accolade.

Lady Deborah Moody, Brooklyn’s first liberated woman, founded Gravesend. She was a strong willed widow who sought the religious and civil liberties she felt were lacking in her native England. For the first time in America, settlers in Gravesend were guaranteed the right to worship as they pleased, and for the first time in America, also sanctioned a town-meeting form of government. Gravesend Cemetery, one of the oldest cemeteries in America, continues to this day to protect the remains of those who bravely settled the area in the mid 1600’s.

During the American Revolution British troops came ashore from Gravesend Bay when the famous Battle of Brooklyn was underway. During the 1800’s Gravesend was primarily rural. Farmers of Dutch, German and English descent worked the land. The exception came towards the end of the century with the development of Coney Island. Resorts, hotels, racetracks and amusement parks began to line the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, Gravesend is the home of multiethnic communities. Faintly visible remnants of the past inspire future dreams.

CHAPTER 1

STOOP TO CONQUER

The year was 1943. I was fifteen years old, living in Brooklyn, New York. While we were apartment house dwellers, my friends, to distinguish their way of living from that of families who occupied the apartment houses, called their homes a private house. In essence, they actually were rows of two, four, or six family semi-attached brick buildings lined up like soldiers. They all featured STOOPS with four or more white or red granite steps leading down from their glass-paned front doors to the sidewalk. Stoops were built with a hefty wall on each side of the steps that gave the space within substance and a sense of enclosure. The structure was meant for ascending or descending, certainly not for hanging out – goodness gracious! It was a place for kids, but was also occupied by adults surveying the street life from their own informal amphitheater.

To one side of the stoop, under the windows of what was called the front parlor room, was a small square of earth contained on three sides by a three-foot hedge. What one did with a patch of dirt was optional. There could have been a fountain placed there with a cherub peeing into its center. It never worked. A World War II Victory Garden rarely worked either. Those that nurtured the plantings may have succeeded in producing four tomatoes hanging limply off their vines and two cucumbers as big as your thumb. Certainly this crop was not enough to feed the families living behind the farm. Then again, we were not farmers, but we did our best to help the war effort.

As far as we kids were concerned, the best use of this acreage was for the game of Land. This was a knife flipping game that divided the earth below into territories to be conquered. We would divvy up the area into squares and toss penknives into the soil, slicing up additional inches of land for ourselves. This activity was a copy of what Hitler was doing in Europe at the same time, admittedly on a much larger scale. Later on, similarities of this pastime to the theorems of plane geometry were sure to escape us in high school.

I rose early on this particular day and was the first of my friends on the streets. This gave me the opportunity to select any stoop that struck my fancy. I chose one with the most steps and perched myself on the very top one. This gave me a bird’s eye view of my surroundings. The stoop was already sun-baked and the warmth felt comfortable on my knees and the palms of my hands. This was the first day of our summer vacation. The forecast called for temperatures to rise into the high nineties. It would be a no-brainer for us, when we all got together, to head to Coney Island’s cool ocean waters. However, we would get a late start, as sleeping-in, for my friends, on this first vacation day out of school, took priority over everything else. After a short subway ride our train pulled into the station at the end of the line. We had arrived at Coney Island.

Our fellow passengers debarked with their beach chairs, lunch pails, towels, and other necessary paraphernalia ready for a day in the sun. The beach and the boardwalk lined the Atlantic Ocean and an exciting amusement center lined Surf Avenue. A blind man exiting the train would have known immediately where he was. One was seized by the smell of fresh salt air ocean breezes mixing with the aromas of burnt sugar from spinning swirls of cotton candy. Screams from the brave riders, starting their downward descent on clickity clackity roller coasters, could be heard over the roar of the ocean’s waves crashing vigorously onto the shimmering sands of the beach.

The non-stop organ grinding music from the carousel rides added to the tumult of noise and smell. There were sideshows on the streets leading to the boardwalk. Hurry, hurry, hurry cried out the Barker. See the Fat Lady! See the Snake Lady! See the Bearded Lady! See Sheila the Mermaid! Hurry, hurry, hurry. There were sword swallowers, strong men from the Amazon, the wild man from Borneo, Ting and Wing, the double-headed single body Chinese twins and a parade of other freaks and frauds. The Great Garibaldi, the human cannon ball, was shot out a cannon ten times a day.

Scary, but exciting rides were appropriately named The Whip, The Cyclone and The Tornado. All of this fun was housed in one convenient place called Steeplechase Park. When you entered, midgets and clowns greeted the women and young girls with high-powered air hoses that blew their dresses over their heads. Playful sex did not end there, for many of the rides inside were designed for innocent sex as well as fun. Wind machines, revolving barrels, tunnels of love and others of this ilk, induced touching, hugging, falling and bumping.

The boardwalk was lined with shooting galleries, penny arcades and games of skill. They all featured enticing prizes. However, my friends and I never won anything better than a three inch Kewpie doll.

Webster’s Dictionary says that the origin of the word honky-tonk is unknown. I have no doubt that if Mr. Webster had visited Coney Island, he would have realized immediately it was born here.

So, how do you define Coney Island? For openers, it often comes as a shock to people who visit for the first time and find it’s an actual place, in an actual manic zone, with an actual boardwalk and one of the largest and best beaches to grace the Atlantic seaboard. Coney Island is the machinery of exhilaration. It has a magic hold on the imagination. It’s a community that’s entirely devoted to having fun. Here is a poor man’s paradise, open 24/7 and a worldwide symbol for letting the good times roll. There is no other place more synonymous with noise, summer and joyful chaos. Coney Island is surely the most widely known part of Brooklyn, sitting at the edge of Gravesend.

It was always possible to squeeze a few more thousand people onto the beach, no matter how crowded it was, except for today. The entire beach was overrun with so many sunbathers it seemed as if there would not be a place for us to park our bodies. Miraculously, we came across a space large enough for three. It was not a prime spot, but our choices were few. We were on a ridge of wet sand facing, or better yet, butting up to the Atlantic Ocean. It was low tide and so this new piece of real estate had just become available. Dead jellyfish and the shells of horseshoe crabs lying upside down like shallows bowls, washed in on the retreating surf. Everything around us smelled bad. Nature’s beauty only surfaced when birds with legs like toothpicks scurried in front of the crashing surf. The tracks left by the birds in the wet sand were washed away by the next rolling wave. To think that this same scene repeated itself for millions of years blew me away. Above us, small planes with enormous wings, slowly pulled banners across the sky reminding us that things in the world were not right. UNCLE SAM NEEDS YOU! DON’T TALK CHUM, CHEW TOPPS GUM!

We were frolicking and having a ball, living a sun-baked life on the beach. The sounds of screaming voices came from the hordes of bathers as they tiptoed into the ocean. First time visitors found it surprisingly frigid. From our vantage point I could peruse the entire beach behind me. There were lost children crying their hearts out, being lifted high into the air by lifeguards on their wooden perches. Hefty tough looking policemen wearing dark long sleeve shirts and matching dark colored trousers, were standing lined up against the rail of the boardwalk overlooking the masses of bare bodies. They all held a hand upon their holstered guns. Did they think that they could shoot across the beach without losing their jobs? Behind the cops, big clown faces smiled down from the false fronts of amusement parks. Somehow, even though the faces were portrayed smiling, they looked evil to me. Off went the siren of an ambulance backing up to the steps of the boardwalk. Two medics, equipment in hand rushed towards a crowd of people surrounding a person at the water’s edge. A young girl, who must have stepped on a broken bottle, was hopping across the beach towards the first aid station. Bad things were happening everywhere.

Business on the beach, oblivious to any surrounding problems, was in full swing. I watched vendors hawking ice cream, popsicles and cold sodas. Then I spotted the pretzel man dressed in long black flannel pants rolled up to the knees carrying a six-foot pole dangling thirty or forty salty pretzels. Among these legitimate enterprises were those who worked in the grey areas. Gypsy fortunetellers, holding a deck of tarot cards in their hands, offered to tell your fortune for twenty-five cents. That’s for each, of course. Then, the heavy hitters showed up selling watches or fountain pens hot off the docks. Punk kids, who never smiled, moved through the crowds selling chances to win money with their Punch Boards. You could spot these characters because they were the only people on the beach not wearing bathing suits. They kept one eye on a possible future customer and the other searched for an undercover cop. I once overheard some older guys describing a girl as a Punch Board. I was still unable to make the metaphorical leap although understanding that something bad was being said.

Standing up to shake out wet sand from our crotches, we looked at each other’s new pinkish hue. It was time to seek out a shaded shelter. Hopping briskly across the hot sand, we paused briefly on unattended blankets to cool off the soles of our feet, until we reached the shaded space under the boardwalk. It was here that I discovered hints of a sleazy life. First, there were these white rubber things lying limply in the dirty sand. I bent to inspect it.

Don’t touch it, cried out one of my pals. Don’t you know what that is?

We then came across a group of guys lying on their backs looking through the cracks of the herringbone-patterned boardwalk. They were positioned to grab quick glimpses of ladies’ underwear. Some of the passing girls above knew what the boys below were up to, so they gave them more than they dreamed of. We headed to the shaded arcades. Sea winds blew through the open doors. We stood in our bare feet and bowled wooden balls down chutes. We spun the wheel to make the miniature steam shovel in the glass case clutch the prize. We wanted the real penknife or the silver cigarette lighter. We won only the gumballs!

Twilight approached. The crowds began trekking slowly back to the elevated train station on Stillwell Avenue. We joined the movement and boarded the Sea Beach train line homeward bound. The sea gulls sensing the change began to whirl about in crazy patterns reclaiming their territory. We arrived home as the sun was setting, and raced for a stoop, any stoop. Here was a place to sit and relax, to talk about things, sneak a cigarette or pitch pennies. We re-studied the chalk drawings of nude figures on the sidewalls along with the misspelled dirty words that delivered the message anyway. This space became a cozy place for some who never had their own room. It was the most privacy they ever had. It was a place to ponder regrets or contemplate the future. After all, it was the STOOP!

CHAPTER 2

THE RE-VISIT

The year is 2009. I am eighty-one years old now. Physically I am no longer a resident of Brooklyn, but in my heart I have never left. I chose this particular day to re-visit my old stomping grounds and view the scene as it is now. The best view, as I had remembered it, would be from the highest step of the highest stoop on the block. The last time I sat there I had climbed the steps two at a time. Now, it was like climbing Mount Everest. I did wonder if the people living there now, upon seeing me, would chase me away, or even call the cops. Fortunately, neither happened. I could almost hear the clip-clop of the milkman’s horse making its rounds. The horse learned the route and would anticipate the next stop by lazily meandering to it while the milkman moved along the sidewalk completing his errands of exchanging full bottles for empties.

Overall, the block had not changed much except, everything looked older and somewhat worn. Then again, so did I. The quietness in the air was broken now and then by chirping birds. Suddenly an enormous cylindrical tank mounted on a flatbed truck appeared. Jets of water shot out