All Those Years Ago

(Originally published 8/29/12)

On August 29, 1977, exactly thirty-five years ago, the world was a decidedly different place from my youthful perspective and, too, in practical reality. Simpler pleasures ruled the roost. This day in history saw three Bronx boys—Kingsbridge denizens aged twenty-six, seventeen, and fourteen (me)—embark on an adventuresome itinerary that kicked off just after sunrise.

Our first stopover was the Brigantine Castle in the shore town of Brigantine, New Jersey. In the mid-1970s, the commercials for this haunted house attraction on the Atlantic’s edge inundated local New York City television station airwaves. It was something we just had to check out and we did. But the overall experience didn’t quite live up to the grand hype. It seems the castle's employee-performers were phoning it in that morning while springing out of shadowy niches, stabbing us with rubber knives, and flinging rubber rats into our paths. The Brigantine Castle was out of business several years later. It burned to the ground before a developer could demolish it. Perhaps it really was haunted.

Our journey found us next in pre-casino Atlantic City, where we strolled the historic boardwalk. I don’t remember why, but the three of us expected Atlantic City to be a sparkling jewel on the ocean and not a dilapidated and seedy eyesore. Seaside Heights was eye candy by comparison. Nonetheless, it was nice to see that a Philadelphia Phillies' player named Greg "the Bull" Luzinski and a former one named Richie Ashburn were scheduled to appear at the legendary Steel Pier. We didn’t stick around long enough to uncover what they were going to do when they got there.

Onward to Philadelphia and Independence Hall, where I at long last laid eyes on that crack in the Liberty Bell—up close and personal. Finally, with evening fast approaching, the icing on the day’s layer cake: a visit to Veterans Stadium and a Phillies versus Atlanta Braves baseball game. And yet another first for us—witnessing live a game played on artificial turf. Veterans Stadium was among the multi-sport, cookie-cutter, synthetic grass stadiums that were the rage in the 1970s. They’ve since become passé and most of them have been demolished, including Veterans Stadium. Fortunately, Greg Luzinski made it back in time from the Steel Pier and and was in the starting lineup.

After a fourteen-inning game that took a little over four hours to complete, it was back to the Bronx in the wee hours on a sleepy high—a thrill-packed, 1970s-style adventure and one that cannot be replicated in the new millennium. Whereas both the Brigantine Castle and Veterans Stadium are gone with the sands of time, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell endure. And the Bronx boys—now sixty-one, fifty-two, and forty-nine—humbly accept there will not likely be another thirty-five-year anniversary to commemorate.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Bummer Summer Ramblings

Once upon a time, I loved summer, I really did. What, after all, wasn’t to like? Oh, sure, it could get ghastly hot and humid in the Bronx. And, too, I grew up on the top floor of a three-family house with seven residents sharing one bathroom, no air conditioning, and intermittent brown outs courtesy of our local utility Con Edison. That’s the way it was when I was a young and callow fellow. But, come on, summer was about a vacation by the sea—the New Jersey shore or Long Island—baseball, the Good Humor man, and incessant stoop chatter by young and old alike. School was also out, which counted for an awful lot. That fact alone made sleeping with a wet washcloth peachy keen.

Those bygone summers are distant memories. Nowadays, I see more pesky lantern flies than lightning bugs, which were ubiquitous in my neighborhood when I was a boy. Most of their former habitats have been built upon and their mating modus operandi has been simultaneously stymied by omnipresent lighting sources from home security cameras, streetlamps, and automobiles galore. I fondly recall sitting on the concrete grounds of the alleyway adjoining my home and enjoying a Good Humor cola-flavored Italian ice with a little wooden spoon. The ice and spoon cost twenty cents. It was, if memory serves, a solid ice ball, but I relished the thing on those warm, quiet, dark summer nights replete with lightning bugs and a reassuring calm. It didn’t matter to me that the spoon inevitably passed through the paper cup multiple times during the ice shaving. The sticky struggle to reach the bottom was well worth it. That’s where most of the cola coalesced, infusing the finishing bites with an incredible summer taste sensation. Of course, there were better brands of Italian ices around, like Marinos, but they, sadly, were not peddled by the Good Humor man.

Time waits for no Good Humor man. Oops, that sentence, I fear, violates many of today’s college and university speech codes. Nevertheless, I’ll soldier on and, when needed, use the phrase, “Kill two birds with one stone,” and not as Stanford University suggests, “Feeding two birds with one scone.” Also flagged as a violent turn of phrase: “Bury the hatchet.” But I digress, the streets of my youth are presently overrun with Grubhub and other delivery drivers on fast scooters and electric bikes, revving cars with tinted windows, and the occasional "dune buggies" that look like something the Joker rode around in on the Batman TV series. No more Good Humor trucks pass by—the fleet has long been retired. The ringing of the bells heralding their arrival are no longer heard. Mister Softee, though, still haunts the back streets with the familiar jingle playing ad nauseum and further disturbing the peace. I checked out the price of a Mister Softee milk shake: six dollars for a rather small cup in my opinion. I remember when it was served in a monster cup that had to contain at least a quart. The shakes cost around sixty cents sometime in the mid-1970s, which the inflation calculator puts at some four dollars in contemporary dollars, which doesn’t sound too out of whack, except that the shakes are half the size.

Contrast that with the tuition of my high school years (1976-80), which I recall as being around $800 for the year. Without fail, in the middle of the summer, a packet arrived with all kinds of depressing back-to-school information, including an apology from the principal for raising tuition by eight or ten dollars. That price tag seemed steep back then and it was for my parents, who sent multiple kids to Catholic grammar and high schools. Plugging in the inflation calculator again: $800 equals $3800 in 2023 dollars. My alma mater’s current tuition: $10,000. When I graduated college in 1984, my tuition for two semesters totaled $5,000. Today that money could buy me about $15,000 worth of goods and services. Manhattan College’s tuition for the coming year: approximately $50,000. What gives? All I can say is “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” Also, don’t take out the loan if you can’t repay the lender. I always thought that some of my college courses were a ridiculous waste of time, especially when considering the enormity of the tuition bill. Today, with higher education crazy expensive and increasingly Orwellian, that waste of time and money assumes a whole new meaning.

So, I look around at what has become an urban dystopia. A passing Grubhub guy is doing a wheelie while on his scooter. Hope he’s not delivering a pizza. All I can say is: This is now and that was then.

 

 

The Waning Agog Factor

(Originally published on August 10, 2014)

Thirty-seven years ago on this day, I was at once in Boston and agog. The adult impresario of this Bronx to Beantown adventure was a neighbor and friend named Richie. My brother Joe and I—two teenagers absent as-yet-invented iPads or flip video cameras—accompanied him to what then seemed like a very faraway and even exotic destination.

While we were out of town the “Son of Sam” was captured. A Boston Globe headline in a sidewalk newspaper machine alerted us that the fiend was in police custody. We were pleasantly surprised when we dropped a dime in the slot and the machine’s front door pulled open, permitting each of us to grab a paper. Evidently, man and boys alike had never purchased one from an inanimate object. I guess we thought it would be dispensed like a bottle of soda or a candy bar. Still, we felt like we were a long way from home when we read the details about this serial killer, a man who had been in our midst during that especially hot summer and the summer before.

We had seen the Red Sox at Fenway Park the night before and also peed in a communal urinal there, which was yet another first for us. I sat beside a gangly grandfather and his grandson, I surmised, because the latter called the former “Pops.” Pops was pretty old and, when nature called, had more than a little difficulty navigating the ballpark’s steep steps and cramped aisles. He was a dead ringer for Our Gang's Old Cap. The Red Sox beat the Angels 11-10 that night in a back and forth slugfest. The Globe deemed it one of the most exciting games ever played. Richie, however, noted how “dilapidated” the environs were, and obviously liked the sound of the word, branding countless Boston edifices and nearby locales with the same unflattering moniker.

Dilapidated or not, the three of us were generally agog throughout the trip, blissfully going about the business of exploring foreign terrain before anything called e-mail or Twitter existed. Joe had a hand-me-down, fold-up camera with him that took blurry pictures. Richie wore a strap around his neck attached to an over-sized instant camera during our sightseeing. His photos developed a bit on the green side, including shots at Harvard University and of the Charles River. No flash meant no pictures could be taken of the Green Monster by night. On our way home, we naturally couldn’t pass up America’s most historical rock in Plymouth. This rather pedestrian boulder had at some point cracked in two and been cemented together—not a particularly compelling visual and even less so in shades of instant-picture green.

There were no digital cameras or iPhones in existence, so thus no capacity to post our pictures on Facebook, which wasn’t around either. We were merely content with being agog as we climbed the Bunker Hill Monument and toured Old Ironsides. The dilapidated surroundings all around us actually astounded us. We called home from pay phones. In the present age of instant gratification, with all too many people engrossed in their Blackberries or some such technological device—and walking the streets like oblivious automatons—I fear that the Agog Factor just ain't what it used to be…can’t be what it used to be…and that’s really kind of sad.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

The Cough Drop Kid

(Originally published 2/13/13)

I knew a kid in grammar school whose favorite candy wasn’t candy at all, but a cough drop. It was, however, displayed and sold alongside the Sweet Tarts, Razzles, and York Peppermint Patties—so perhaps it was candy after all. The candy store proprietors in the neighborhood didn’t mind that ten- and eleven-year-old kids were purchasing and eating cough drops like they were Milk Duds and Mary Janes. They didn’t request purchaser evidence of a cold, allergy, or scratchy throat. And nobody suggested, then or now, that there was anything wrong with selling cough drops in the same fashion as Bubble Yum, Good & Fruity, and Starburst.

When it was time to graduate from said grammar school in 1976, graduates one and all were asked to share a fond, funny, or noteworthy remembrance—from their first-grade to eighth-grade educational experiences—for possible inclusion in the class yearbook. You know, for the montage page of fond, funny, and noteworthy remembrances—like the time the bee flew up Suzy Q’s uniform dress during recess, or the time Frankie McGuirk got bus sick—and lost his cookies—on a class field trip to an amusement park in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. I submitted the memory of the Cough Drop Kid, who was renowned for both loving a particular brand of cough drops and John Wayne. My special memory didn’t make it into the yearbook—the school censors, I guess, didn’t think it appropriate or interesting enough. And the memories competition was pretty stiff in my esteemed graduating class.

Fast forward almost thirty-seven years since grammar school graduation day—and forty years plus since the Cough Drop Kid indulged in his favorite candy. It’s 2013 and, as fate would have it, I spoke with the Cough Drop Kid today. He’s still alive and kicking. We chewed over his peculiar childhood addiction to a certain cough drop. Funny, but in middle age, we both couldn’t remember the brand name. It definitely wasn’t Smith Brothers—we were certain of that much.

Courtesy of the vast wealth of accessible information now at our fingertips, I Googled the phrase “soft cough drops.” I remembered the Cough Drop Kid’s preferred product was different from the competition. They were not rock-hard lozenges, but chewy. And, lo and behold, there they were: Pine Brothers. I recalled immediately their familiar 1970s box and the drops special shape and texture. While they were reasonably soft as a rule, sometimes they could be quite hard and they always stuck to your teeth. The Cough Drop Kid harked back to a lost love. I refreshed his memory, too, that a classmate, who had him as a “Kris Kringle” at Christmastime, bought him a box of cherry-flavored—his personal favorite—Pine Brothers cough drops.

The Cough Drop Kid and I were now left to wonder if Pine Brothers cough drops were still around. Neither of us had seen them for some time, but then we weren’t looking for them. Happily, we can report, they live on, although these unique cough drops evidently went on a hiatus for a spell. They are being pedaled in the new millennium as “Softish Throat Drops”—and oddish description. Perhaps the Cough Drop Kid will revisit the Pine Brothers cough drop—this “softish throat drop”—in the near future and report back as to whether or not the magic is still there.