This Is All I Got

By Anthony Sargent

This Is All I Got, looks back on a short period of time in a young boy’s life when the world seems to be spinning out of control. The years of innocents that shape our aspirations and excite our minds with dream of something better. As we live each day in the cold stark reality of struggle and rejection. What propels one to fulfill a dream. When does innocence end? Join Willy as he navigates the street of Queens, New York in the turbulence of the late 60’s. As the world around Willy shifts and leaves his childhood behind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665528924

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© 2021 Anthony Sargent. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/25/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2893-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2891-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2892-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021911912

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. 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.

CONTENTS

Prologue 1955 Bye Bye Dodgers

Chapter 1 This Is All I Got!

Chapter 2 Names Will Never Harm Me

Chapter 3 The Bronx is Burning!

Chapter 4 Brooklyn and Out

Chapter 5 Strike Three You are Out

Chapter 6 Blood on the Street of Queens

Chapter 7 The Gangs All Here

Chapter 8 Bad Things Come in Threes

Chapter 9 I do Polish Wedding

Chapter 10 Escape from the Gulag to East New York

Chapter 11 Let it Snow, let it Snow!

Chapter 12 Lights Out, Summertime is Here

Chapter 13 Dark Places

Chapter 14 Lemme a Dime

Chapter 15 The Edge

Chapter 16 Haitian in the House

Chapter 17 Get the Hell Out of Queens

Based on a True Story

PROLOGUE 1955

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Bye Bye Dodgers

N ineteen Fifty-five what a year! So many events happen that year that would change the course of history and have a direct effect on my life. First, the Brooklyn Dodgers won their first and only World Series beating the cross-town dynasty and rivals the New York Yankees. To me the Yankees always represented the bought team. The team that the owner always bought the best players. The owner had the money, and he brought the best players to New York. New York was the big apple and the place to become a star. The team that no one could beat. Yankee fans always had that cocky; I’m the best attitude. Many an argument and fist fights played on the streets, playgrounds, and bars in New York. Passion and loyalty a New York trait one that was bred in me.

As I grew up rooting for the Mets. The underdogs of all underdogs the story of my life. It was great to hold on to dreams that anyone can be a winner. I threw a few punches as discussions of the Mets and Yankees among friends lead to arguments. Those long hot summers sitting around on the stoop, the discussions would lead to arguments and then to fists. All for nothing’ as my dad would say. For what a stupid baseball team, come on." Me and my friends would always make up immediately after or the next day. Shoot, we needed players to play our own street ball.

1955 the Yankees had Don Larson, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle an unstoppable all-star machine. The last time the Dodgers and the Yankees faced each other was in the 1947 World Series and the Yankees won in seven games. 1947 was the year the first Black ballplayer played in a World Series and he was a Brooklyn Dodger. Jackie Robinson number 42. The first black to play in the once all white major leagues. Up to that point the blacks had their own league called the Negro League.

In 1955 the Yankees would face off against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series for the right to be called World Champs. On this historic night in cozy Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers history was about to be made. The wooden ballpark stood still that autumn night; October 4, 1955 as the Bums of Brooklyn battled their cross-town rivals the New York Yankees from the Bronx.

For seven days the fans were choosing sides and the city was alive. The series was tied three games to three as Brooklyn won all three games at home and the Yankees returned the favor at, The House that Ruth Build. The bars in Flatbush, East New York and Crown Heights that ran along Atlanta Avenue were crowded that night as the Schaffer flowed from the taps. South Brooklyn would stay up late that night.

Some were lucky to get tickets as the small stadium that held only 32,000 fans. Most others gathered around black and white television sets in bars, on streets and in dem cold water flats. The rich Brooklynites who owned color television got to see the game in color. It was the first World Series in living color, and the older folk’s just listen to Vic Scully call the game on the radio. Vic Scully, a good ole Irishman, born in a Bronx tenement would be the voice of the Dodgers for many years. It’s time for Dodger baseball.

That night the people of Brooklyn prayed in the many churches throughout South Brooklyn, hey say a prayer for those bums. Others crossed fingers and hoped for a miracle as the air was full of electricity. The Bums clinked to a two nothing lead in the sixth inning. And then as the baseball historians would write. The game’s defining moment occurred that would bring the residence of Brooklyn together for one last time. The young and old, the rich and poor, the Italian, Jew, Slav, Pole, and even the blacks and Puerto Ricans would cheer as one on the streets of Brooklyn that night under clear October skies. It was a marvelous night for a baseball game, and it was great night to win.

In the bottom of the sixth Johnny Podres walked Billy Martin and then Gil McDougal outran a bunt to put runners on first and second with nobody out. Johnny Podres was a left-handed Polish pitcher, and the Brooklyn Poles loved their homegrown hero; he was one of us. The connection of player to fan was magnetic, the players were one of the family. The players and fans walked the same street and drank in the same bars.

The people of Brooklyn would stand up and move closer to the radio. Like moving closer would change the outcome or help them hear better. That nervous feeling one gets like a parent watching a child perform for the first time. The sign of the cross was made many times throughout Brooklyn and fingers were crossed.

Yogi Berra, who got his nickname from a teammate while playing in the minors, was up to bat next. Everyone loved Yogi Berra even Dodger fans. Yogi, the son of Italian immigrants, one of five boys, small in stature, not that good looking. Yogi had a big heart and was so likeable. Yogi was one of those players that always gave one hundred percent. Everyone loved a hustler, especially a short squatty one. And Yogi was one hell of a clutch hitter. The Dodgers fans sensed doom and a big Yankee rally. It had happened so many times before.

Yogi, swinging at the first pitch as he so commonly did sliced an outside pitch hard down the left field line. When the ball left the bat it easily looked like a game tying double as the ball headed towards the corner of the field. The air stood still, and the crack of the bat produced silence around Brooklyn, even the trains on the El seem to be noiseless! But only for a moment, that moment seemed like forever. As backup outfielder Sandy Amoros the fastest man in baseball, a Cuban native; came running out of nowhere to snag the liner as he speeded towards the stands. In one swift motion. Sandy then wheeled around and threw the ball to PeeWee Reese the shortstop another hometown favorite, who then tossed the ball to Gil Hodges catching McDougal off first by inches. What looked like a game tying double turn into game killing double play?

The people who witnessed the catch and event would talk about it the rest of their lives. It’s really too good to describe, Amoros would say.

Seven nail biting outs later the residences of Brooklyn explode with joy. The joy lasted through the night but would come to a permanent end two year later as the Dodgers would pack up their bags and move 2,000 miles west to Los Angles. And when the Bums left south Brooklyn it seemed like the long-time residences would leave too. The people and businesses where leaving to places like Staten Island, New Jersey, Queens, and Long Island. Bye-bye Dodgers, bye-bye the people and bye-bye the spirit of Brooklyn.

People would remember and talk about the Dodgers for a long time afterwards and recollect great moments. PeeWee Reese, Mr. Enthusiasm, the team captain would be remembered for his heroic act a few years earlier. PeeWee walked over and stood next to Jackie Robinson the first black ballplayer before a game in Boston when the crowd and his own teammates were booing him. It must have been hard to be the first of your kind to be in the big show. Jackie Robinson had to be a special man. Reese was a man who acted from his heart and did the decent thing. I grew up through the racial tension of the time and the danger that came with that tension. As my mom would tell me, good people are good people, don’t matter the color of their skin, prayer to the lord. Those words would help me as I grew and had to size up the people I came to know.

The Ivy League rich kid Walter O’Malley owned the Brooklyn Dodgers, made his fortune in public work projects, and knew he had a winning team that would reap him profits. But more importantly to his rich folk friends he can brag he knows how to build a winner. A life-long New Yorker who grew up in Hollis Queens and attended Jamaica High School loved his baseball. Loved his Brooklyn Dodgers and loved Brooklyn. As a kid, O’Malley would attend as many games as possible. Upon graduating college during the great depression, he attended Fordham University and earned a law degree. He married his high school sweetheart and moved to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, an Irish, Waspy enclave and immediately purchased season ticket to the Dodgers.

After years in public works and private law he joined the Dodgers organization. O’Malley slowly acquired enough share to become owner of the team. After the 1955 championship O’Malley recognized he needed a bigger, newer more modern stadium. A stadium that sat more than the thirty-two thousand fans that packed into the old wooden structure of Ebbets field. As a city planner and a wise investor, he watched as the area surrounding the stadium began to slowly deteriorate. The stadium was old, and the neighbor was getting older. The ethnicity of the neighbor was changing. O’Malley knew the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans moving in could not and would not pay to see the game live. O’Malley knew if the team stayed in south Brooklyn the white fans would not show to the games. It is what it is.

O’Malley was not a man who would run, a dreamer who became a millionaire. O’Malley had plans to build a privately-owned domed stadium, the first of its kind. He hired the famous architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, secured the finances, and planned the site at the old Atlantic Yards on Atlantic and Flatbush Avenue. What a great spot for a new baseball stadium. The yards, warehouses and factories were all closing and moving elsewhere. The docks were drying up and the land was cheap. The stadium would be in walking distance to the Long Island railroad and access to the entire New York city subways system. O’Malley planned to invest millions to redevelop the surrounding area. A man reinvesting his own millions in a place where he grew up. A poor Irish emigrate kid born in a Bronx tenement. What a story of giving back to one’s community. A rag to riches story. The glory of living a good life and then giving back. How American is that?

The America dream come true. More importantly Brooklyn would retain a baseball team moving from 55 Sutter Street in Crown Heights three very diverse miles down the road to Prospect Park. Prospect Park where O’Malley and his wife lived while raising their two kids. The story could not get much better.

Unfortunately, in steps another Yalie, Robert Moses, New York City Building Commissioner. The man that many say help kill Brooklyn and the Bronx. The man who laid the groundwork for years of housing the poor in towers of death.

Moses offered O’Malley a spot in Queens to house his baseball team. A city owned stadium in Flushing Meadows. O’Malley the millionaire businessman stood his ground and told Moses, We are the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers. Two power brokers butting heads, O’Malley a self-made millionaire private citizen verse Moses, a hired government worker with political strings. Both men with vision, both men who wanted to control. Poor man wants to be rich, rich man want to be king, and the king ain’t satisfied ‘till he rules everything.

O’Malley looking out for the common man the people of Brooklyn and his own pocket at the same time. Moses was looking out for the wealthy interest groups, politicians, and his own legacy. The battle was short lived O’Malley was a smart man he knew he could not fight city hall. O’Malley made one last offer for the Brooklyn Navy Yards, ten times as much as his first offer. O’Malley the dreamer was so close to fulfilling his dream. O’Malley did not hesitate when he did not get his way; he promptly moved the Bums to Los Angles California in 1957.

Some say when the Brooklyn Dodgers left town so did the hearts, and the spirit of the Brooklyn people. And in turn the good people of Brooklyn left, and overnight areas of South Brooklyn became destitute and have never recovered. Moses would erect towers of public housing project all around Brooklyn, ending home ownership. Creating a class of people who would be depended on the government for generations. People who had no reason to invest in their neighborhood. People who had no team to root for. People who would cry out for help and never be heard.

East New York, Brooklyn the once thriving community had the means and motive. ENY had a mix of Polish, Germans, Italians, and Jews living working and growing together for four decades. When the Dodgers left the neighborhood slowly at first then rapidly changed from white, blue collar European first and second generation immigrates to black and Puerto Ricans.

Moses did not wait long as soon as the Dodger moved to the city of Angles, Moses demolished Ebbets Fields. One very cold day in February, a wrecking ball began banging away at the walls of Ebbets Field. A small crowd gathered, and a brass band played Auld Lang Syne. Brooklyn as we all knew it died that day.

In its place Moses erected the Ebbets Fields Housing Projects, it was Brooklyn’s tallest apartment house. It was the first living space for the poor. A few years later Brooklyn would be full of tall, bleak, cement structures. Apartment buildings for low- or no-income residents. Known as the projects! Moses the great city planner with his Ivy League education who grew up on Fifth Avenue, son of a real-estate magnet. Had no clue, or did he? That he was sealing the faith and ending the American dream for the next generation of Brooklynites. The next generation who happen to be black and Puerto Rican. In a few short years East New York, my birthplace where my parents grew-up would soon be known as the Killing Fields. Poverty, drugs, and gangsters would occupy the streets of Brooklyn. Forgive him, for he knows not what he does.

The Fifth Dimension

Marty McFly has a metaphysical connect from the present back to the future. On November 12, 1955 Marty McFly appeared in the small town of Hill Valley, California as a high school student where his mother falls in love with him. Yes, you heard me right his mother falls in love with him. Marty has travelled back in time from 1985 to 1955, same place Hill Valley, California different time. Marty helps with the courtship of his dad who becomes his high school friend.

This complicated weaving of events creates great drama as Marty and his best friend Dr. Emmett Brown who invented the time travel machine are caught in a metaphysical dilemma. Marty’s travels back in time creates an amusing catch-22. A look back in time to happy great America of 1955 with its small towns and happy Americans pursuing the American dream of life, liberty and the pursue of happiness.

The 50’s was a time of innocence. The growth of a powerful middle class after World War II. From 1946 to 1966 people were having babies in great numbers. People were making money, holding jobs, buying houses the county was in a boom. People were happy. Christian values, family values, conservative values were in full play in America.

The King of Rock and Roll

In nineteen Fifty-five the music industry experiences a revolution that would change the industry forever. A new young singer from Tupelo, Mississippi by the name of Elvis Presley was singing about his Mama and that is alright. Every boy loves his mama. In some boys’ life’s it the only adult who sticks around.

Elvis Presley did not invent Rock ‘n’ Roll he just turned an entire nation of teenagers into crazes dancing machines to the shock of their parents. Gyrating’ his hips like a top and shakin’ his body like it’s was about to erupted. Elvis was singing like a black man in white man’s body, and music would change forever. Elvis was anointed by the world and they called him King. Elvis played his guitar like no one had before him did. Strumming hard and breaking strings. Music became a popular pastime for the middle class and wealthy white folks. Teenagers would spend their summers listening to new rock and roll at the dismay of their parents. Spend money on 45’s and albums and new stereo systems. In ten short years the popular Benny Goodman big band type music would disappear, and rock would be king. During the 60’s Rock would turn to Pop; then would turn to drugs and the transition would be felt for generations. And in the end Elvis would find himself caught up in same drugs that kill Rock’n Roll. Elvis’s drug addiction would take his life. Elvis would not be the first or last popular Rock’n Roll icon to fall victim to drug abuse.

Back of the Bus

Nothing speaks more highly of a silent protest. Coming together as one unit in silence protest, to protest a wrong. The silence treatment produces a louder response. And speaking ‘bout the south, as Elvis was making loud noises Rosa sat quietly. In 1955 a woman name Rosa Parks, a small reserved black lady did not relinquish her bus sit to a white man. Was Rosie a plant by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People? In 1955 in the south many laws existed that told blacks what blacks can and cannot do. These laws were called Jim Crow Laws. These laws were established after the abolishment of slavery in the south. These laws were instituted to allow white people to feel better about themselves.

On buses in Montgomery, Alabama, the first rows of seats were reserved for whites only; while blacks, who paid the same ten cent fare as the whites, were required to sit in the back of the bus. If all the seats were taken and another white passenger boarded the bus. A row of blacks’ passengers sitting in the middle of the bus would be required to give up their seats, even if it meant they would have to stand.

In 1955 in Brooklyn it was first come first serve for seats on the bus. No one batted an eye where you sat. But at the time most blacks stayed out of white neighborhoods as the whites stayed out of the black neighborhoods. No one likes that heavy stare coming from a group of people. Like being in a fishbowl, worst being surrounded by sharks. The gut telling one that I am in the wrong place.

Rosa worked hard all day as a seamstress and housekeeper for a white couple in the white part of town across the tracks. My little grandma was a housekeeper and seamstress, but she worked for the rich white people in Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. Rosa would take the bus ride every day from her home on one side of town where the blacks lived to the other side of town where the whites lived. Rosa would care for another woman’s’ family and return every night to care for her own family.

One day something inside Rosa told her the law was wrong and she was not going to move. Maybe these feelings were brewing for some time. In her own words, People always say that I did not give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Rosa Parks being an activist was just fed up with being mistreated it was time to stay in her seat and make a stand. Rosa was arrested and had to pay a $14 dollar fine. And in support of Rosa the black people of Montgomery stop using the bus for the next 381 days. That is over a years’ time. No violence, and people made do without the bus, Don’t ride for freedom was the call. The Montgomery Bus Boycott ended when the Supreme Court ruled that the bus segregation laws in Alabama were unconstitutional. The south was slow to follow the laws. Some say this started the civil rights movement that ten years later would lead to the Civil Rights Act 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Brown and the White Mixer

As the story goes in 1955 in Topeka, Kansas Linda Brown and her sister had to walk through a dangerous railroad switchyard to get to the bus stop for the ride to their all-black elementary school. There was a school closer to the Brown’s house, but it was only for white children. This violated the Fourteenth Amendment ratified close to one-hundred years earlier in 1868. This amendment after the Civil War was to protect ex-slaves. It addressed citizenship rights. That each state should provide equal protection to all its citizens be they black or white. And with this the Federal district court decided that segregation in public education was harmful to black children. Because all-black schools and all-white schools had similar buildings, transportation, curricula, and teachers, the segregation was legal.

The Browns and their lawyer Thurgood Marshall appealed their case to Supreme Court stating that even if the facilities were similar, which many believed at the time that black schools were inferior. Segregated schools could never be equal. Supreme Court declared that the separate but equal doctrine was unconstitutional. It contended that to separate children from other children of similar age and qualification purely on the ground of race, generated feelings of inferiority in those children. In the ensuing years, many lawsuits were filed which changed the course of history concerning education and employment. The Court decided in 1955 that state laws requiring separate but equal schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment signed into law in 1868. School integration across America began.

The Death of Emmett Till

Another incident more tragic during the summer of 1955, leaves you with a chill. Makes you think about the evil some men carry. Deeper in the South a young black boy name Emmett Till was down in Mississippi, where Elvis the King was born. Emmett was just visiting his grandma for the summer. Emmitt was from Chicago a big city up North, just like Manhattan and Brooklyn. Most Northern cities have been integrated for years as far back as the civil war and before. This did not mean blacks and white got along, but more level heads tried to prevalent. Blacks kept with blacks and whites kept with whites. And in most parts, there was a respect for each other. It was the whites that had to open their hearts and show empathy. Tim 7:15; As in everything do to others as you would have them do to you.

Emmitt mother was raising Emmitt by herself, his daddy run off. Sadly, as I grew up many of the black boys I knew, did not know who their daddy was. That running off thing seem the status quo and it really put a hurting on an entire generation of black boys, and it continues today. Emmett’s mom felt it was best for him to spend some time in the country with his grandma, while giving her some free time to get her act together.

Up north in Chicago, Emmett talked, played, and went to school with white children. Segregation in the south was still being practiced. While he