"WHERE EVERYBODY KNEW YOUR NAME..."

Or more than likely, your nickname.

First stop every morning, the corner candy store. On my block, it was Jimmy's. On my cousin Evelyn's block (East 189th) it was Eleanor & Larry's. There were as many candy stores as there were names in my old neighborhood, and they provided a place to meet your friends, greet your neighbors, get the final (4-star) edition of the NY Daily News and check out the latest comic books, neatly stacked on a wall rack.

And if it wasn't an early-morning Manhattan Special (espresso 'soda') that got us going, it was the famous egg cream, chocolate or vanilla (but no egg, and please don't ask me why.) Except in my mother's case. She always tried to trick us into making a "malted" for us at home and slipping an egg into it, but we always knew because it tasted "funny." So she'd say "All right, let's go to Jimmy's for a malted" but she'd stash two eggs into her pocketbook and surreptitiously hand them over the counter to Jimmy's son Nicky to add to his malteds for us and we never knew the difference. (Must have been the U-Bet syrup.)

Oh, and egg creams (seltzer and a squirt of sweet syrup with a delicious foamy top) really did cost as little as the sign in the picture. Try buying ANYTHING for 8 or 12 cents these miserable greed-gone-berserk days...

Candy stores were a haven for kids, especially in cold weather, if the owner allowed a bunch of raucous kids to hang out in the back, playing the jukebox and pinball machines and just goofing around, waiting for warmer weather to arrive. Some days, Jimmy would have enough and just throw us all out for a while, but he always let us return. A lot of us didn't have families like those we were seeing on TV and really needed a place where we felt part of a different kind of 'family' ~ our own.

Comic books were 10 cents, Classics Illustrated a quarter. If my mother had allowed me to keep even half of my voluminous comic book collection, I could be retired and living on my own 100-acre farm today. And after we read them, we'd trade with our friends ~ hey, at least we were reading, even it was 'only' comic books, not staring at a computer screen all day long like little zombies, growing fatter and more illiterate by the minute.

I first submitted "The Neighborhood" to all the major syndicates as a comic strip that took place in the 1950s, but I guess nobody cares about what happened such a long time ago. Little do they know how nostalgic people are for those times. And even if you didn't live them, you can still vicariously come to know and love them as much as we did.

So, again, welcome to "The Neighborhood"...as it was, and always will be in my heart.