In the Country of Brooklyn by Peter Golenbock

Author:Peter Golenbock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

John Ford at his first communion from St. Teresa’s, 9th Ward, Brooklyn. Courtesy of John Ford

“As a young boy I went to St. Teresa’s, a parochial school, and in them days the nuns didn’t screw around with you. They’d hit you on the hands, smack you on the head. If you missed church on Sunday, you better have a note. If you were absent, you had to be half-dead. They made you toe the line.

“The better days of my life were spent down in Sheepshead Bay, where the fishing boats used to pull in. Piers stuck out into the bay, and every gang had its own pier. The Pier 9 Boys were from Sheepshead Bay. The Garfield Boys were from South Brooklyn. We had our pier. We didn’t have a name for it. It was just ours.

“When we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, we would dive for coins. People used to go down and buy fish off the boats, and others would stroll along Sheepshead Bay, and they’d throw money into the water, and we’d dive down and stick the coins in our mouths. We could be treading water for a half hour.

“We used to go into the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and swim there naked. People would stroll by, and here were these raggedy-assed kids, and the cops would chase us up the back. We used to sneak into Girls Commercial School and swim in their pool. There were so many things we did. When we were fourteen, fifteen, we would drink Five Star muscatel. It cost 35¢ a pint. We would give the 35¢ to one of the crazy Smitty brothers—they supposedly hung a black guy from a lamppost one time—and he would buy the Five Star, and we would give him a couple of swigs, and then we’d finish off the rest, and we’d stagger home. Nobody thought it was odd. It sounds like the Dead End Kids, but we were living it, and we didn’t even know it. My mother was working, and my father was working. I never went home to a house with anybody in it. I was a latchkey kid, but I never felt neglected. You just went your own way. I used to go over to my friend Johnny Ryan’s house, and his mother would let us smoke. We were nine or ten. She used to get us cigarettes. We’d go into the basement of her house and crawl into the basement of the adjacent grocery store, and we’d steal eggs and bring them back to her.

“During that time, around 1947, 1948, there was a polio epidemic, and they closed the beaches at Coney Island and Riis Park. We always thought we were immune to polio, because there were sewer pipes near where we swam, and shit came floating out of there. None of us got polio, but two of the Irish Dukes got MS.

“Nobody had any money. Of course not. We put oilcloth in our shoes after the big hole came. We never paid for transportation.

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