BABY BOOM, 50s STYLE

My dear friend Bill Goulding and I both grew up in the Bronx during the same era, and one night we began discussing the typical baby carriages of those times...completely over the top for mothers who took baby out for some sun and stayed in their own neighborhood, visiting friends a few blocks away.

To quote Bill: "Those big carriages with the double big wheels that could carry a ton...dragging them up the stairwells with the big bag around the steel bar that steers the carriage filled with junk...extra diapers, five hundred bottles, and formula ("Oh he is a big eater...gained five pounds in three weeks...he's going to be a fatty like his father! ha ha ha.") Idiots!!!

Not only were the carriages huge, but they were adorned with the mandatory (and ubiquitous) metal "blanket holders" in case a gust of wind might blow it away, baby pillow with the kid's name embroidered on a pink or blue! ribbon that went across the pillow, a celebratory carriage bow, color-coordinated to the kid's gender, or some other ridiculous attachment to "keep the baby occupied" and the over-stuffed nightmare baby bag that carried everything from cloth diapers (at least 10 extra, just in case!) to clothing changes to pacifiers, and those '500 bottles' mentioned by Bill ~ one for juice, one for water, at LEAST two for milk...all this for a day trip 10 or 15 minutes from home.

And the comments! 

Bill again:  My favorite quote...a neighborhood idiot woman looking into the carriage at the baby "He has your mouth and your husband's big head!!!" (nice) 

We're planning just one more (and end up with five in five years.) 

I'm having him christened next week...I already told my mother-in-law I want a bigger carriage as a christening gift rather than money.  "ANTONIO FRANCIS BIAGGI"

Is it any wonder that both Bill and I never married or wanted children???

"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.

YO! WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD!

Once upon a time, there was a place known as 'Little Italy in the Bronx' or, as we were known then, Arthur Avenue & 187th Street (pronounced a-hun-87th) in the Fordham area. I was born there in 1946, at Fordham Hospital (long since gone) the vanguard year for the infamous Baby Boomer generation...so I came of age in the Fifties/Sixties, during its post-war, most innocent, beautiful and safest time.

We used brown paper grocery bags for garbage back then; nobody ever heard of plastic bags much less used them. Some had diaper services for recycling cloth diapers ~ not skeevy plastic that take 10,000 years to disintegrate. Milk came in glass bottles, or thick wax containers with little pop-up 'buttons' to open and pour. It lasted longer, tasted better, and we'd cut down the empty containers for school projects, feeding stray animals, etc.

People had seltzer bottles delivered in wooden crates. No one had ever heard of "diet" anything ~ soda was soda, period. Except for an Italian specialty, unknown to many outsiders, the fabulous Manhattan Special ~ little did we know that it was carbonated black coffee we were drinking, but it sure kept us going all day long...no obesity problem in those days. We were buzzed!

Man, we played from morning to night, with a quick break for dinner (we usually had heroes or pizza for lunch, enabling us to not go home all day) and out we zoomed again, filling up those sidewalks and streets with kids of all ages and the simplest, most fun games.

A crushed soda can kept us busy for hours playing (Kick The Can.) A 25-cent Spalding (pronounced Spaldeen) pink rubber ball provided a multitude of activities...stoop ball, handball, stickball, ad infinitum. White chalk allowed us to draw lines on the sidewalk for a game of hopscotch, or as we called it 'patsy.' And, as my dear childhood friend Anthony Borello remembers, if someone bought a new stove or refrigerator (which came in big cardboard boxes in those days) well, we hit the jackpot! The boys went to work making little clubhouses, windows and all...until it rained. And the only "internet" was talking over our clotheslines.

Little to no plastic, no 5,000 different versions of the same shampoo or dish detergent, no ugly big-box stores offering cheap Chinese crap, we shopped in our own neighborhood at the many 'mom & pop' stores and best of all, just about everything was labeled or engraved 'Made in the USA.' ('Made in Japan' did make its way into our shopping but we always considered it junk, even then.)

So, how do you like it so far? Doesn't it sound like a place (and time) you'd never want to leave? Because no matter where I've lived since leaving there in 1971, I have been unable to call anywhere 'home' ~ that is how much my old neighborhood still lives in my heart.

I'm not the only one, either. For those of us who were lucky enough to grow up there, we all feel a tug at our hearts when talking about it. We also feel like we're all related because of that shared experience.

More, so much more to come...meanwhile, welcome to the neighborhood!