Brooklyn Savvy: Lessons Learned and Memoirs

By Joe Perk

How did your childhood friends, playground, and adventures shape the rest of your life? This is how they shaped mine.

Tucked in New York City, there is a small track of land where multiple nationalities live close and like it. It’s called Brooklyn. Brooklyn was life. We grew with it and learned from it. Friendships that strived together lasted forever, from cradle to grave. From knickers and cold-water flats to air raids, these stories cover from Korea to Harlem, through grammar school, two wars, and a time in Harlem white people knew little about, and finally, from Rockefeller Center to Radio City.

Brooklyn lives are summarized in one paragraph: Your father was a cross between cop and conscience, and your mother, between priest and conscience. You can fool the latter; don’t mess with the former. Huck Finn had the Mississippi; Joe Perk and his friends from Thirty-Sixth Street had Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. “Don’t cheat a friend and never give a sucker an even break” was just one life lesson bred in Brooklyn. Even somewhere today, I bet someone is buying that bridge again.

Brooklyn friendships and adventures shaped a life strategy used in the battlefields of Korea, in working as a telephone repairman in Harlem, in supervising telephone installations in Rockefeller Center, and in conducting hundreds of investigations as a security chief investigator. The stories are real, however unreal they seem. The people are real; however, most of them are gone. The lessons are real, and a kid from Thirty-Sixth Street—a marine staff sergeant—still lives by them.

“Brooklyn Savvy, in a few words, is thought, motivated early, when the brain is most susceptible.” (Joe Perk)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796013474

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Joe Perk.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2019901160

ISBN:                Hardcover                                  978-1-7960-1349-8

                          Softcover                                   978-1-7960-1348-1

                           eBook                                        978-1-7960-1347-4

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.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/16/2019

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

We Are Brooklyn

Where It All Started

Made in Brooklyn

Free Ice Cream

Right Place, Right Time

Pots and Flowers

Fun in Brooklyn

The Slap

Out of Town, 1939

Green-Wood

The Wind

The Saturday Evening Post

This Hallowed Ground

Saint Michael’s, 1942

The Aircraft Carrier

Junkyard

Pigeons

Chain Link to Con Game

Odd Jobs, 1943

Father McGloughin

Brooklyn’s Finest

The Church Bazaar

The Blackout, 1943

Scrap Drive, 1944

A Snow Job

Brooklyn Personified

The Phoenix

The 1934 Chevy

A Brooklyn Street Tale

The Buccaneers

The Coach

A Guy Named Joe, 1948

Harlem, 1950

Volunteers—Korea

Ash Wednesday—Brooklyn at the Range

The Last Inspection

Our Last Weekend

One Brief Moment in Korea

The Dream, 1952

The Shoe Shine

Discharged, January 1954

Harlem as an Installer, 1957

The Princess

Saturday’s Overtime

The Spanish Couple

Girl in the Rain

High Finance

It’s Different up Here

Radio City to Harlem

The Harlem Foreman

Breaking Appointments

A Small Piece of Paper

The Governor

Brooklyn Works at Ma Bell

Most Memorable Moment, 1962

Nocturnal Regrets

Conclusion

Quotes

References

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Percy R. Pyne

Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York

This book is dedicated to

the four who enlisted in the forgotten war—Eddy, Jamesy, Bobby, and Herk.

Semper Fi.

Tuzy

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to my son, Bill, for putting up with the endless changes he had to type over through the five years that this book required to get the stories in their proper order and for answering the many phone calls at all times through the years to listen to the stories. His encouragement kept me going.

We Are Brooklyn

You get mad at it in the morning when the trains are slow and at night when you can’t find a place to park and when you line up for a sale and it’s sold out before you enter the store. They do it all the time. That’s Brooklyn, yet with all this, you love it.

When you go away, you call the very next day just to see what’s going on. When someone asks you what’s so good about it, you say, unashamed, My friends, there are no people like Brooklyn people.

Oh, I’m aware not everyone likes our mannerisms or our accent. We talk too much and too loud and, most of the time, before the other person is finished. We read a lot, not just the headlines, and we can handle it if someone puts something over on us. We’ll remember it. We talk straight, so there’s no mistake.

Some say we brag, but it’s more like telling how proud we are of the things we’ve done. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, four of the five most famous ships in America were commissioned: the Monitor, the world’s first modern warship; the Maine, whose sinking caused the Spanish-American War; the Arizona, whose sinking launched America into World War II; and the Missouri, on whose deck the war ended.

The first transatlantic cable to Europe was strung from the stern of the USS Niagara. The USS Iowa launched on August 27, 1942, and became the flagship of Admiral Bull Halsey. The battleship era, which started with the construction of the Maine ended at the same spot fifty years later with the mighty Mo hitting the water on January 29, 1944.

How about the young seaman who reported for duty here on June 20, 1919, named Humphrey Bogart? At the height of WWII, seventy-five thousand people worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in an area half the size of Central Park.

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They made them tough in Brooklyn.

The Missouri shrugged off a Japanese Kamakaze plane, April 28, 1945.

Where It All Started

There is a stone statue of an old side-wheeler ship as it is sinking off the Jersey Shore. Around the ship, buried on the hill, are the graves of people who died that sorrowful day. People come to this area to see that ship and never know that a short distance away, there’s a secluded walkway leading to one of the most beautiful, scenic sections of Green-Wood. There, behind a wooden bench, is a mausoleum with the name Percy R. Pyne etched in stone over the doorway. Whoever placed that bench was not aware it would become such a favorite place—a place men still talk about years later. You could sit there, listen to the birds (and believe me, you don’t hear them all over Brooklyn), and look out toward the lake; and never in the world would you believe you were in a cemetery.

I know Percy is still there. Hey, Percy. Remember me, Tuzy? I know you listened to every word, every half-baked scheme we had through the years. You must have had a good laugh listening to our adventures and how we thought we could conquer any challenge we set for ourselves. We discussed them all right here: the raid on the aircraft carrier, the free ice cream, the scrap drive, the car that became a tank, the pigeon raid where Mike almost got caught, the blackout, the junk dealer, and the pots and flowers. Oh yeah, the magazine salesman and the pigeon dealer too. I bet they would never have called the cops on us. The air raid warden never guessed what it was all about. Percy, I don’t know if you ever heard, but I finally owned up to stealing my father’s car. I told him on a Father’s Day, but I wasn’t near him. I promise I’ll tell you all about it the next time I come up from Florida and visit all my relatives. I’ll introduce you to my grandchildren, who already know about you. We all have nocturnal regrets; enjoy mine.

We have a saying for a person who talks like this: He thinks who he is. Many nationalities make up our neighborhoods. No one acts like he’s better than anyone else. Believe me, cold-water flats have humbled many a family. Because we live so close, we know one another’s relatives and friends; we’ve shared their success and their misfortune. You can’t get closer than that.

Our neighborhoods became a way of life because our people made up the neighborhood. It’s remarkable how every time you go far from home and bump into someone from Brooklyn, they can be from Red Hook, Flatbush, or Bay Ridge and they may be black, white, Jewish, Irish, and for the last five decades, Spanish. You immediately feel comfortable, like they lived next door for the last twenty years. That’s Brooklyn people, and that’s why I love it so much. So if you don’t mind living close, come to Brooklyn, and in three days, you’ll know what time to get home to find a spot to park. Most of all, you’ll become part of the biggest family in the world. Your only regret will be what took you so long.

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Tuzy and Eddie

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Tuzy and Herk

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Greenwood Cemetery

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Sonny and Tuzy in front of Percy R. Pyne Mausoleum

Made in Brooklyn

There is only one street for me—Thirty-Sixth Street; just saying it makes me smile. I can’t say there’s no other street like it; I believe a lot of streets in Brooklyn were the same way. The block was composed of (yes, that’s the right word—like putting a song together) Irish, Italian, Polish, German, and a few Norwegians, one being my mother.

To describe the female leads, I’ll do it this way: with movies. If you didn’t see any of these movies on the big screen, you might look at Turner Classic Movies. They’re still on, and I thank Turner every night. The girls I grew up with fit these movie stars like sisters. Just a minute, where do you think Hollywood got these stars from? Gene Tierney, Susan Haywood, Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake, Shelley Winters, Lena Horne, and Barbra Streisand—that’s right, from Brooklyn. Any one of the girls I knew could have played the same roles, except for Barbra Streisand. Brooklyn could only make one of her.

We made a huge mistake in 1989 when we had a reunion, thinking no girl would want to come. I realized it when Florence showed up with her brother Joe. I asked them about their other brother, Anthony. Joe said he wanted to make it. He always said, Tuzy saved my life.

Florence had a good time; I sure wish we had tried to see if the other girls would have liked to join us. One girl I would have liked to see again was Helen. We all drifted apart when the Korean War broke out. What a shame. I hope they’re all well and happy. I’m just sort of nostalgic, thinking about all of them, especially when I look at the pictures of us at an outing on Staten Island.

My first love was Doris, a beautiful redhead. I remember cutting through Prospect Park, taking a shortcut home, after the game at Ebbets Field was rained out. Doris wore a light-blue raincoat. If it was chilly and raining, I never noticed. I heard later Doris married some old guy of twenty-four.

Doris’s cousin was Helen. Helen was a perfect Irish girl. She was beautiful and full of energy. She was my Doris Day. I remember one night at Sunset Pool with the whole group around, thinking it was too bad because it would have been nice if it was just me and Helen. Helen would have stood out on any block. Helen’s sister was Joanie, and there was no one sweeter. She was the daughter of Rosie O’Grady and June Haver. There was Jeanie—that’s Debbie Reynolds. And Philly—she was Ruth Roman. Now you get the picture. I did see Doris’s mother years later. She was at her son Frank’s store.