I’Ll Never Be Pope!: Days Remembered

By Bob Crouch

"This is a collection of stories that chronicle a sometimes side-splitting childhoodmine. I thought the episodic approach was the best way to tell the account. A boys life has no path to follow. Kids wake up each day and live that day. The vignettes spans ten years, from approximately 1938 to 1948, and the locales are Brooklyn, New York and Bellflower, California. I have changed some names, tried to make the stories interesting, clear, honest and easy to follow. The book is a series of little packages. The reader can begin anywhere."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453575826

Book preview

Copyright © 2010 by Bob Crouch.

ISBN:   Softcover   978-1-4535-7581-9

ISBN:   Ebook   978-1-4535-7582-6

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 work is autobiographical. A few names have been changed. It had no ill intent and is largely an expression of humor of a child growing up.

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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Contents

Brooklyn Days

Learning Californian

My New Neighborhood

People

To Lilly

Brooklyn Days

First Memory—Commotion: I am sitting on the curb in front of my house staring into the street. My mother and a large, dark haired woman are in back of me, eye ball to eye ball, shouting at each other. I saw him do it! screams the woman.

He wouldn’t do such a thing! Mom screams back. Red faced, and shaking with rage, stands my four-foot nine mountain of an Irish mother.

A crowd has gathered, traffic has stopped on both sides of the street, and I begin to realize that this commotion in some way concerns me. I am being accused of throwing stones at cars.

But I stay detached. I had thought it through before I started plinking stones at cars. I estimated that a stone was a thousand times smaller than a car. How could I bring down a car with a rock? No harm, no foul.

The screamer gives my mother the double five fingered whammy doddle, and throws her hands in the air, saying she is going to call the cops. She drives off in a cloud of tire smoke. Mom gives the double five fingered whammy doddle back. The crowd explodes into applause, and I am dragged up the stairs by an ear.

When we got in the house, Mom asked me if I was throwing stones at cars, and I say no. She does not believe me and sends me to bed. When I have time to think about this for awhile, and it’s getting close to the time my dad will be coming home, I tell her I might have thrown a few stones. (I learned early how to cop a plea. I’m thinking reduced sentence.) This small incident set a tone for what our family was. Mom was the disciplinarian, but the threat of dad finding out that I had been bad was a serious worry. Mom was close, always there. Dad was more distant, which meant that he couldn’t know all the bad things I had done during the day, so I had a better chance of preserving my reputation with him, and I didn’t want to ruin that. I don’t recall what punishment I suffered, but there was a lesson here. Family is family and no others are. She would defend me from outside forces and raise me by correcting my misdeeds herself. Few others had that privilege. Someone outside our network, who accused me, could not punish me. I don’t know if that idea is unique to the Irish or to Europeans or is worldwide. It’s bound to annoy law enforcement people, but the idea is still with me. Family first.

I suspect that in Mom’s mind was a flashing red light: Law suit!

My Block: My sister, Ann, fifteen months my senior, kept a bike in the basement. To get it to the street it had to be pushed up a winding staircase, half an inch at a time, twisting the handlebars this way and that for fifteen minutes. It took a mighty effort for a little kid. I never asked Ann if I could borrow the bike. I just worked it up to the street and rode. Sometimes Ann would appear at the same time I was making my last breathless surge out the cellar doors. She’d want the bike, arguing it was hers, and I’d argue I got it up the stairs and had a claim to it. Years later, I found out she tried, but could never get the bike up the stairs. She plotted and planned to have me do the dirty work, then took the bike from me. Regardless, I remember the many bright mornings of riding free around and around the block before my sister woke.

Without realizing it, I was developing a concept common to all New Yorkers, the concept of MY BLOCK. In Brooklyn, who you were, was always connected with your block. Everyone had his block, and by the way you told it, yours was always the best. If your block was a little upscale from another block, they were shanty. If your block was a little down scale from an adjoining block, they were haughty. If your block was cleaner, it was because you had pride and kept it clean. If yours had an unusual smell, then it was because we had the best deli. You couldn’t loose in this deal. There was always something unattractive about the other blocks, something wrong and sometime even creepy, like a drunk lived there or a gangster, or even a child molester; or God forbid, the most despised of all worldly freaks. Not a drug pusher, not a drug dealer, but a dope fiend. A fiend! Do you hear the disgust in that word? I never ran into one of them on our block, but I always feared I might.

As I rode around and around my block, a thousand times and more, I was learning every shop, every door, every window, every sidewalk crack, every face, every sign, every dog, every coal shoot, and the cops who protected it all. Pushing off every morning, away I would go. I remember a proud moment when I learned to mount Ann’s bike Western style. You put your foot on the left peddle and swung your trailing leg over. We were Brooklyn Boys, but hoped someone would mistake us for cowboys.

Along my path, around my block, were many, many steel grates, flush with the sidewalk. These grates allowed daylight to enter the cellar windows of the buildings. Sometimes a coin would fall out of a pocket or purse and fall down into the two feet recess below the sidewalk. Every kid kept a three foot stick in his bedroom for the purpose of recovering these coins. I’d stop once or twice on my first runs around the block and if I spied a coin, I’d rush home, grab the stick and rush back to the site of the find. I’d place some chewing gum on the end of the stick, push the stick through the grate and jab the moist gum unto the coin, hoping it would stick. The find was almost always a penny. I lived for this moment and I was off to the penny candy store on the corner

Candy was number one. I lived for it. Just thinking about candy put a smile on my face. There could be no happiness without candy. Without candy there was no reason to live. Without candy there was no reason to look for pennies. Candy was candy.

We heard warnings about candy, of course, like the story of Hansel and Gretel and how they risked being cooked alive because they craved sweets; and stories of kids whose teeth completely rotted away and how they never smiled again, and how we were to run for our lives if a man ever offered us candy on the street, or from a car. My parents never scared me enough by telling me what this man would do to me, so I had a plan. I would ask the guy first, what kind of candy he was offering. I knew I would have a terrible time resisting anything coconut. Candy was candy, for God’s sake.

I’d enter the store with my hot little penny in hand and begin my first browse. I never rushed this most serious exploration. Our candy store probably had from 150 to 200 varieties of unwrapped candies, each in its own large mouth jar. Each jar had a sign that told you how many candies you would get for one cent. Choosing how to spend the penny was a difficult, painful, joyful, yet somber undertaking. A found penny seemed more valuable than a saved penny. It had no strings. It was yours completely. It had to be spent carefully. The average time for my first perusal around all two hundred jars was twenty minutes, which sometimes was followed by a second twenty minute examination.

Did I want to get a lot of crappy tasting candy or a few of the best tasting? I usually went for the high end, or a moderate taste for a moderate amount. It was good training for a little kid in New York, a town that is all about money. And I learned. By the time I had graduated from kindergarten, I had gained some Brooklyn sophistication in commercial matters and was using phrases like, What’s the best deal I can get today? Or Could you give me six for a penny, instead of five? The penny candy store remains the sweetest memory of my childhood!

My block was an island and at times I’d dream of an adventure. I’d stop at a corner and look into the strange territory that was THE OTHER BLOCK. A weird terra incognito that someday would be the great adventure to visit, when I was allowed to cross the street. I’d think, Imagine the sights I’d see!

The Bug Toys: Every spring and early summer our neighborhood became infested with Japanese beetles. My gang of friends and I would take empty glass jars down to the vacant lot by the L station and catch these ugly, long, green beetles by the