Leaving West 83rd Street: Much of My Life in Short Essays

By Kenneth P. Marion

The journey through childhood to adulthood on Manhattan's West Side is told here through the eyes of an essayist. Short stories about a life lived with the comfortable and the poor, Jews and Gentiles, people of color and White people, private and public school stories next to those about the pool hall and the bowling alley.

Eighty-Third Street was in a neighborhood rich with color translated here into words providing a sometimes fun and sometimes serious view of life in the '50s and '60's. These essays are about that life and its components, the friendly and the not-so-friendly, and the growing pains.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684983308

Book preview

Contents

Part 1—Family

Part 2—People/Places

Part 3—Early Years

Part 4—Junior High

Part 5—High School

Part 6—College

Part 7—Later

Part 8—And More

Preface

I started this project a year after leaving my last job. I had been thinking about a book for many years and never got past a list of possible stories. Then my friend Talia Berk started blogging, and in a duh moment, I realized that what I wanted to write was a natural for that format. Then my friend Gael Kennedy Hannan published her book based on her blog, and whammy, this effort was born.

Talia had an even bigger role when she sat with me in a coffee shop and taught me about WordPress. I will never be able to thank this young woman enough because this writing has truly brought something special into my life.

While Talia was the beginning, there would be no blog without the support and editing of my daughter, Alyse Marion Black. There is no way that I will ever be able to thank her for the time and thought she has put into this ongoing project. Her criticisms have always been kind and gentle, as well as almost always right on target. She is a remarkable young woman.

Some of this work has been a struggle to write, always wondering if I’m revealing too much or telling stories out of school or being unfaithful to my title. Helping me over these humps was Chris Lorraine and, through the darkness of block, my friend Lindsey Freebird Freeman.

I did physically leave West 83rd Street in 1978; I don’t think it has ever left me.

Additional Acknowledgements

There are some special people, all readers, who have continuously inspired me to do more with their comments and support.

Eldest, my daughter Rachel Tiran, who comments frequently on and off the site.

Seth Marion, my youngest, who has frequently said, I didn’t know that and Tell me more.

To Jean, thank you for your support throughout this work and so much else.

Jon Katz, an old friend who was rediscovered because of the original blog and even contributed photos as well as thoughts and embellishments to the stories I’ve told.

Ron Schanz and Stu Scharf, two of my oldest friends who have reminded me of events that became stories that appear here.

And there is Ira Blumstein; conversations with Ira have led to many story ideas, and I am therefore indebted.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sula Page, friend and confidant who gave the manuscript a most thorough editorial read.

I owe the debt of any son to his parents about whom I frequently write. And lastly, thank you to all my readers.

Introduction

When I started, I wrote:

I have happily arrived at sixty-six years of age with the many stories of a lifetime and lots of baggage.

So begins the journey of my blog, linking my distant past through my middle age to the present me.

I am prepared to share with you what brought me to this particular present and the details of what that present looks like.

We will travel from West 83rd Street in Manhattan to Long Island, New York, to Forest Hills, Queens. Sometimes the links will be quite obvious. At other times clarity will not be easily achieved; there is a path, and we will make this trip together.

Leaving West 83rd Street will be filled with stories in the form of essays—some very short, and some relatively short; some for you to read for your pleasure, and some for you to read and perhaps think upon.

Here at the beginning, allow me to provide you with some basic facts:

And Now We Are Four read the announcement of my birth. Edith, Ira, and Linda were joined by Kenneth Philip, all living in apartment 9E at 222 West 83rd Street. It was September 3, 1949. My sister had joined them in 1944, and we would stay that way until she left for college.

For most of my memory, Dad was a writer, Mom was an office manager, and Linda was a smart ballerina.

I have lived in nine decades from the end of the ’40s through to the present.

I was taken home from the hospital to 222 West 83rd Street and didn’t leave West 83rd Street for any significant amount of time until just after my 29th birthday.

I went to public schools through my master’s degree. Dad died just before my twenty-first birthday, and Mom when I was forty-four.

I married in 1978 and divorced twenty-nine years later. I have three remarkable children and, so far, five amazing grandchildren.

I have worked in drug programs and multiple psychiatric hospitals. I had the most fun when I was a public affairs director at a now closed hospital in Suffolk County, New York.

Some of what you will read here has been published elsewhere; it’s all my work, my story, my becoming.

Please join the journey and feel free to comment at [e-mail].

Part 1—Family

Mom and Dad, but Mostly Dad;

Mom;

Coffeepot;

Radio;

The Great Dane;

the Fishing Trip;

Sports in 9E;

Passover, Then and Now;

Choose Life for Now;

Illnesses Strike, One;

Riverside;

Death;

and Death 2

Mom and Dad, but Mostly Dad

I’ve now met my fifth grandchild. My father never met his first. Dying at the age of sixty in 1970, he missed most of my life and my sister’s. This was somewhat atypical for West 83rd Street.

My memories of my father include the firehouse, the fire dispatchers’ office in Central Park, building a bed for my sister, baseball in Riverside Park, and getting yelled at. Of course, there are other things I remember, but these were the big ones.

The Saturday morning baseball games with other boys from 222 and their dads took place in Riverside Park between 82nd and 83rd Streets in a stand of four trees in the shape of a baseball diamond. I think then trees were London Plain. It was a spring and fall affair, fathers and sons. I recall it as fun. West Side kids in a West Side Park with their West Side dads.

Since my father didn’t believe in corporal punishment, he used his voice to express his dissatisfaction with my behavior along with, in the teen years, grounding and withholding of allowance. It’s the voice that sticks with me, and unfortunately for many years, it was the voice I replicated in my own house.

Dad certainly had things in his life to be angry about: his mother died when he was born and his father soon ran off, leaving him to be raised by a maiden aunt: my great-aunt Betty. She also lived on the West Side in the ’80s and later in the Hotel Breton Hall on the east side of Broadway between 85th and 86th Streets. And he lost an eye as a child. I never knew what the disease was, but it was a medical matter, not other trauma. He had a glass eye and a spare. I only saw him once without it when he was failing and coughed so hard it came out.

*****

I have my own issues. Mom had TB when I was an infant, and we were kept apart. It wasn’t until my thirties that I put this together with my abandonment and attachment issues. I don’t remember her and I ever being particularly close.

Images of my parents always include a glass and a cigarette. Both smoked and drank. The alcohol caught up with my dad in the 1960s. He lost his job due to alcohol and, later, his life to the combination of the effects of smoking and drinking.

Yes, I am the child of two Jewish alcoholics. I believe that I suffer from COPD because I smoked from thirteen to thirty-three and lived my childhood with secondhand smoke and being allowed to puff their cigarettes. I also know I couldn’t drink brown liquors like scotch because they did.

In spite of all this, they gave me a solid Jewish education and a good value system, both of which I’ve been allowed to share with my children and hopefully my grandchildren.

Mom

I’ve been bad about writing with my mother as a focus. I suppose that’s because I don’t think we had much of a relationship until later in her life, and by then it was unwell mother and helper son. I may be denying stuff, but I’m not so sure. As this week contains both the anniversary of her birth (December 1) and the anniversary of her death (December 5), I thought it was time to write this piece of life at 222.

Mom was one of the three weird sisters: Eleanor was the beautiful one; my mom, Edith, was the smart one; and Lillian was the youngest. Aunt Lil always laughed as she told that. I knew my aunt Lil as a professional success and a leader of a national Jewish organization.

Edith was actually Mom’s middle name. Irene was her first name, but she switched them. I don’t know if it had anything to do with my father’s mother’s name being Irene.

In the fifties and sixties, a working mother was not typical. Mom was the office manager of a very successful dental practice on Madison Avenue. When the senior dentist passed away in 1971, less than a year after my dad, she moved on. She became executive secretary to a vice president at Group Health Incorporated.

I don’t remember doing things alone with Mom while growing up, but I do remember things with the family. Mom lit the Shabbat candles, and the four of us ate together; whether the table was in the dining room or in the living room depended on the year.

I’m not even sure Mom came to school plays and things. I know that Dad was at The Mikado in sixth grade at PS9 because he was the director, but whether Mom attended is unknown.

I remember going to the theater as a family. I remember those parties around the Thanksgiving Day parade on Central Park West in the apartment of her boss’s friend.

Liquor always flowed freely at home. I remember living room gatherings where Mom drank gin and Dad drank scotch. Mom smoked Kents, and Dad smoked Chesterfield Kings.

While Dad did not believe in corporal punishment, Mom felt differently. I only remember being struck that one time when Dad was in California on business in the ’60s, and she smacked me. I went directly to the phone and ratted her out. The only other incident of physical violence that I recall occurred between mother and daughter at the dinner table. It was over in a flash of anger.

I remember clearly in 1970 when Dad was in the hospital, my mother and her boss took me out for dinner and taught me how to eat a lobster. We were almost alone that time.

My parents had moved into apartment 9E at 222 in the very early 1940s. It was always home to her. In 1950, she was confined in the bedroom with TB, and from then on, she always had an air conditioner. It was in fact the only room in the apartment that had one for a very long time!

My parents both used taxicabs. I don’t remember either of them saying they rode a bus or the subway. I don’t know how I learned mass transit. Cabs were fine except for the time Mom smashed her thumb in the door of one that had just delivered her home.

The engagement ring that Mom wore was the one that my father’s mother had worn. Grandma died in childbirth. It was always known in the family that this ring would go to the woman I chose to marry.

I came home one day in 1978 and said, I’d like the ring now please. Mom was a bit surprised. The diamond has now passed to the next generation, going to my son’s wife.

When she was discharged from a hospital stay in the early ’90s, Mom insisted on going back to 9E. She really needed to be in structured care, but she insisted. Mom always got her way. It didn’t last long, but I learned a lot about how to apply for Medicaid so that she could move into a nursing home which she needed. She had lived in apartment 9E for close to fifty years.

Mom died in a nursing home accident. It had been a sad journey for her, and one I’ll never forget. I had been gone from 222 for fifteen years when she passed.

Coffeepot

I’ve been writing now for several years to bring to myself and others the memories of a West Side childhood in the ’50s and ’60s. I think there is certainly no more odiferous memory than the aluminum coffeepot perking on the stove every morning.

The pot on the stove was part of every morning that my dad was home. If he was away on business, everything was timed differently. He drank only Savarin brand in the red can. The aroma when a new can was opened is one of those smells I can conjure—well, sort of.

The coffee grounds were scooped into the basket which sat on the upright and then covered and placed in the pot which had already been filled with tap water. The little glass bubble in the center of the lid placed on the pot came quickly to life, and the kitchen filled with coffee, coffee, coffee.

Dad drank his black. I remember a heavy white ceramic mug.

The stove it sat on had four burners and five knobs. This was the stove that had removed my sister’s eyebrows when she turned on the gas and then lit the match to stick in the little hole. Those were the days when you applied butter to a burn.

For many, many years, the kitchen floor was linoleum, but after a significant flood from the washing machine which stood as the centerpiece in the kitchen, my mother determined the concrete floor should be painted a brick red and left otherwise uncovered. I know that I broke more than one glass on that hard surface.

No, there was no dryer. Well, except for the wooden contraption that was suspended from the ceiling and lowered by pulley. Clothes which had been spun in the washer were hung on this wooden frame and dried on their own. The rope broke more than once in my life. One of the many things the building’s handyman was able to fix.

Outside the kitchen was the dining room. The wallpaper was a bright red on a wall made of plywood that had been used to divide the space into a dining room and Dad’s study. The floor here, like the living room and hallways, was parquet. In fact, the floors throughout the entire apartment were wood.

One of the other unsafe