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In answer to Gary Pager (1/61), Warren Bratter (6/60) continues the “Weequahic lifestyle” discussion:
This brief note is not to contradict your description of the Weequahic lifestyle as a “real struggle to maintain,” but to offer a variation on that theme; briefly describing the Weequahic lifestyle that I lived during the 1950s.
Both my parents worked. My younger sister Ellen (6/62) and I were daily cared for by our maternal grandmother who watched over us until our mom and dad arrived back home from downtown after work. I can’t speak for Ellen, but as a boy growing up in Weequahic, I have never forgotten, nor will I ever forget, the whirlwind excitement and effervescence, athletic, intellectual, and social, that was my everyday life in our Weequahic neighborhood until I left for college.
Dot and Harry owned our modest home on Clinton Place. Most, but not all of my closest friends’ families were also homeowners; but many others were renters. We had one car for the household, a black, though not very stylish, two-door Chevy. Although my father’s younger brother Morty owned Syd’s, I can rarely recall a time when, as a family, we went out to eat. The rare exceptions being the Weequahic Diner for a ceremonial meal like a graduation; or Ming’s when several neighborhood families decided to celebrate an important milestone.
Syd’s, however, was the center of gravity of my Weequahic social life. It was here, among the most diverse crowd of older guys and impressionable teens, that I was exposed to the world. It was a place of single-named, small-time thugs, legitimate tough guys, carousers, older brothers of friends, aspiring athletes, especially aspiring Golden Gloves boxers. It was an endless stream of just plain folks schmoozing and eating, including, though not in my day, Philip Roth. Here amidst this vast humanity, I openly learned about the strategies and tactics to combat the struggles of developing my own manhood. Especially, and directly by virtue of the much-discussed concept of menschkeit, that notion of a man who is honorable, loyal, fair, strong in body and mind.
Untermann Field, across the street from Syd’s, was where I spent some of my most memorable fall afternoons playing for the Weequahic High Football Team. In spite of our modest win-loss record during my four years on the team, we always played in front of packed houses where neighbors paid no entrance fee to freely mingle during a Saturday game. The cheek-by-jowl football locker room world exposed me, literally and figuratively, to the entire range of the Weequahic neighborhood’s humanity.
Between Untermann and the High School was the Chancellor Avenue Elementary School. It’s playground, always jammed with kids whether winter, spring, summer or fall, was managed and overseen by the “Nobles” of our Weequahic neighborhood, Messrs. Barone, Drexel, and Harris. No private camp could have been better. In addition to the lessons absorbed as listeners at Syd’s, this blacktopped elementary school field became our field of dreams where my generation of young men actively came of age athletically and individually striving relentlessly to follow the examples of these remarkable men. Our personal development was deeply indebted and credited to them. They were learned in the ways of movement; dexterous in the management and guidance of the emotional and physical lives of the young adolescents whom they inspired each weekday afternoon by word and deed for so many years.
Finally, entering the decade of the fifties, just five years removed from the end of WW II and the Holocaust, Weequahicers of my generation were assertive economic and social strivers struggling to be better, smarter, happier, and more affluent than those who would exclude us. All good things. Warren
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