You Can Call Him Al

For every action there is a reaction. In this instance, a contemporary pizza pie review resurrecting a man from my past. Submitted for your approval: Recently, I chanced upon “Barstool Pizza Reviews” on YouTube and began watching several from the prodigious series. Pizza has long been a fare favorite of mine and informally reviewing pizza shops, restaurants, and the frozen varieties, too, came naturally to me. Why, pray tell, did Celentano’s discontinue its frozen pizza, the best of the lot during my youth? Anyway, among his one thousand entertaining and informative pizza reviews, Dave Portnoy called on Johnny’s Pizza in Mount Vernon, New York, which is a veritable stone’s throw away from the North Bronx. He gave it an extremely high score, 9.1, the best that I have seen to-date in the videos viewed. And, yes, I remember sampling Johnny’s Pizza a quarter of a century ago—it’s a family business still, I’m happy to report, in the family. Suffice it to say, Johnny’s Pizza deserved the accolades then as well as now.

This is where Al comes in. Once upon a time I worked in a place called Pet Nosh on Central Avenue in Yonkers, also a veritable stone’s throw away from the North Bronx. A customer of ours, who regularly shopped in the store, purchased a weekly mother lode of pet supplies for his wife. She not only fed stray cats and dogs, but donated food to area animal shelters. Prior to learning his real name, Al, I had nicknamed him “John Gotti,” a moniker never uttered in his presence. Time and again, Al went home with piles of a bargain dog food—kibbled biscuit—called Quaker City, which he cleverly dubbed “the motor oil.” From my perspective and a few others, Al truly resembled mafia titan du jour, John Gotti, only his coiffure was not the genuine article, and he wasn’t quite as dapper as the Dapper Don.

As a friendly gesture, Al would periodically bring us Johnny’s pizza pies with their super-thin, delectably charred, crunchy crust. A younger employee referred to them as “tampon pizzas,” a peculiar choice of adjectives, I thought at the time. Al was a good guy on that little snippet of stage in which we cohabited all those years ago. I don’t know where we got the notion—or, perhaps, the inside scoop—that Al possibly consorted with some unsavory sorts. Maybe he told us, I don’t recall. After all, looking John Gotti-esque didn’t mean he was in the same line of work. My paternal grandfather resembled Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, and the former was an iceman who despised the underworld thugs who tried to shake him down. Al, in fact, once mentioned that he owned a fruit store nearby at some earlier date, but he wasn’t exactly convincing as a bloke who endeavored to live the American dream by selling broccoli, sleeves of garlic, and cantaloupes.

Well, with no forewarning one day, Al’s wife materialized to do the shopping for herself—Mrs. Columbo unmasked—and informed us that her husband had been arrested. On what charge or charges, we never learned. She said he was very upset that he had to remove his rug for a mug shot and couldn’t wear the thing in the slammer.

Eventually, Al got out on bail and was awaiting trial. He never returned to Pet Nosh, though, and Johnnie’s uber-tasty pizzas became memories from a simpler time. Word eventually got to us that Al wouldn’t have to stand trial after all. He died of a heart attack before it began. All I can say—regardless of his alleged transgression or transgressions—is that he was one of the good ones. Rest in peace and pizza, Al.

 

Yin and Yang

Walter Mondale died this week. He was a very decent man from a vastly different time—a more sanguine and saner one, I daresay. The politicians were certainly a better breed. The Congress was not then a haven for ambitious Ivy Leaguers with their fingers to the wind. Rather, there were a lot of men like Mondale in Washington, D.C., people from humble origins who lived through a Great Depression, served in the military, and viscerally connected with the common folk. These public servants were true patriots who put their country first, believed in the Constitution, and accepted the results of democratic elections.  

My first vote in a presidential election was cast for the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. Just out of college, I—along with my younger brother—attended a rally for the historic ticket in the New York City Garment District, when it still was literally the Garment District. Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro from Queens was the first woman on a national ticket. As a collector of political memorabilia, occasions, like rallies, inevitably delivered the goods. I came home that day with a treasure trove of fliers, stickers, and posters. Such large, enthusiastic gatherings, though, often gave attendees a false sense that their candidates were destined to win—despite strong evidence to the contrary—the whole enchilada.

And so it was: On November 2, 1984, Walter Mondale told the assembled: “Polls don’t vote. People vote!” We cheered! The excitement was palpable—maybe, just maybe, a miracle was in the making, I thought. Four days later, the people voted and Mondale-Ferraro lost forty-nine states, including New York, which today is bluer than blue.

I was not a supporter of Walter Mondale during the 1984 primary season. In the waning months of my higher education, I threw in with Gary Hart, a politician tailor-made for the idealistic—not woke nutty—younger generation of that day. Columnist Murray Kempton wrote of 1965 New York City mayoral candidate John Lindsay, “He is fresh and everyone else is tired.” That’s how I felt about the Democratic candidates running for president in 1984: Hart was fresh and everybody else was tired, particularly the front-runner Mondale.

Walter Mondale believed in a big-tent Democratic party. Today the big tent is smaller than a pup tent—think one way and watch what you say. And if you don’t think our way—to the letter—you’re a hater, naturally, who should be cancelled and your life rendered null and void. Sadly, when American political life desperately cries out for a reasonable opposition party to an increasingly batty one, there is none to be found. It’s the worst of all worlds and makes me miss Walter Mondale, his Democratic party, and 1984—the year, not the book—even more.

A footnote on the “He is fresh and everyone else is tired” label. Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang is currently the frontrunner in the Democratic primary race for New York City mayor. The tired bunch of woke local yokels running against him—and their acolytes—are really gunning for Yang now, which makes him increasingly appealing to me. Time will speak volumes.

A Garden Grew in the Bronx

(Originally published on June 24, 2013)

With another summer officially underway and everything green and in bloom, I am reminded of “The Garden.” That’s what everybody in the neighborhood called it, and it was a rather remarkable piece of earth. In fact, as time marches on this garden in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx seems more remarkable than ever to me. Like so many things from the past, we took it for granted. It was there and a part of our summers. I consider myself very fortunate that the place somehow endured from 1958 to 1971. After all, this was a period of time when empty lots were slowly but surely vanishing from the local landscape. I was just nine years old when the garden was plowed under to make way for one more building, but old enough to remember its incredible uniqueness and beauty in an otherwise urban landscape.

  

The garden flourished on a sprawling empty lot—multiple empty lots as a matter of fact—on the northwest corner of Tibbett Avenue and W232nd Street. My grandfather and three other men enclosed the space with a makeshift fence comprised of assorted woods and metals. The fence was utilitarian—esthetics weren’t factored into the equation. Built into it, too, were both front and back entrances—doors that opened with actual keys that magically slid pieces of wood over to unlock them. Our Gang couldn’t have devised anything better.

Coincidentally, the garden location was directly across the street from the three-family brick house my grandfather had purchased and, too, the one where I grew up. When he originally moved his family, including my father, into the neighborhood in 1947, he had his heart set on a garden. In stark contrast from where he came from—Manhattan’s Morningside Heights—parts of Kingsbridge were downright bucolic back then. But while my grandfather pined for property with garden space, he needed tenants to help pay the mortgage and settled for a cement backyard and a couple of garages instead.

  

A friend of my grandfather's—already living in the neighborhood—told him not to worry about a garden. There were ample empty lots in the area, he said, in which he could plant one. “Victory gardens”—holdovers from the war—still existed in the environs of Kingsbridge, and my grandfather found a workable plot just up the block between W232nd Street and W231st Street. His garden was one among many garden plots there. When all were evicted so that ground could be broken for buildings that would subsequently be called "Tibbett Towers," it was time to look for another location, even with the pickings slimmer than ever.

  

Before the garden that I came to know was planted, the realtor who had the property on the market gave the gardeners his blessing. His one proviso was that they keep the place clean. It was a different world altogether in the late 1950s. The New York City bureaucracy, for one, wasn’t nearly as intrusive as it is today. Imagine a contemporary realtor—even with the consent of a property owner—permitting strangers to build a makeshift fence around the land for sale. And, too, allowing the construction of tool sheds, an outhouse, a bocce court, and a horseshoe pit with bleachers. Utilizing a fifty-gallon drum, my grandfather even dug a well on the property, which tapped into the formerly aboveground Tibbetts Brook just beneath the surface. This supplied the garden with all the water needed. My grandfather knew there was water to be found there, because just to the south in his former garden space the builders of Tibbett Towers were very literally waterlogged. The tenacious Tibbetts Brook was causing unforeseen and overly expensive problems in laying the foundations, which caused the original builder to go bankrupt. This debacle is possibly why the garden across the street from me survived as long as it did. Prospective buyers of the property were perhaps gun shy—and with good reason.  (The owner of the garden space reportedly hoped that the NYPD would build its new 50th Precinct station house there and, of course, pay his not inconsiderable asking price of $1.2 million. It didn’t happen. They found a more reasonably priced spot a few blocks away.)

  

The garden nonetheless was amazingly fertile. Tomatoes, eggplants, lettuce, peppers, beans, and onions were grown there. The tomato crop was so bountiful that my grandparents would make a year’s worth of tomato sauce with garden tomatoes. My grandfather once planted 148 tomato plants, which he grew from seed in a garden hotbox. The Irish contingent of gardeners grew lots of hearty cabbages because they ate lots of cabbage. Potatoes may have been the only vegetable tried in the place that came up lemons. There was something lacking in the Bronx soil.

  

The garden, too, had fig trees, peach trees, and an apple tree on the premises. Flowers were everywhere. Big, bushy marigolds were scattered about because they repelled bugs worth repelling. Tall sunflowers were bee havens. But what I remember most about the garden were the parties thrown during holidays and on summer weekends. Yes, on someone else’s property there were festive barbecues and, as I recall, lots of adult beverages consumed. Somebody could have gotten hit on the head with a horseshoe, or fallen into the well and drowned. Just looking into the well scared me. But people weren’t conditioned to sue one another back then, so the realtor and the property owner had very little to worry about.

The garden was an oasis in a Bronx neighborhood in a tumultuous time for both New York City and the country at large. When my grandfather passed away in 1965, my father promptly filled his shoes. I always considered it my father’s garden and mine by extension. As a boy, I thought it would always be there, but that was not in the cards. From the perspectives of young and old alike, not only "The Garden" but an entire era was bulldozed on that sad day in October 1971.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

The Goody's...the Bad...and the Ugly

(Another reprise from ten years ago. Simpler times and fast food, too.)

As a seven- and eight-year-old boy in the old neighborhood, I had the good fortune of patronizing a fast-food joint called Goody’s. Located on Broadway near West 230th Street in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, Goody’s, from all that I’ve gleaned, was a small hamburger chain in the New York-New Jersey area in the 1960s, which fast fell by the wayside.

My fond memories of this place have very little to do with the quality, or the taste, of their hamburgers and French fries, which no doubt were mouth-watering delicacies to my immature palate. Rather, it was the giveaway—a hamburger flipper’s mesh hat with a Goody's logo on it—that I recall getting along with a meal, and that I wish I still had today to prop up on my curio shelf right alongside a Bohack’s supermarket set of matches. But, alas, both the freebie hat and the Goody’s chain of stores are in the memory dumpster.

When Burger King took over Goody’s location in the early 1970s sometime, their employees were bedecked in snappy uniforms—the womenfolk wore very cool and very big hats—and one and all were trained in customer service. Times have changed. But in all fairness, a Burger King hourly wage bought more than a Burger King supper forty years ago.

Calling on Goody’s, Burger King, or McDonald’s was considered a special treat for most of us, something akin to a day at the amusement park. There were no families that I knew of who fed at the troughs of these fast-food places for their daily fares. We all just sort of knew that fast foods and health foods didn’t jibe, and we didn’t need calorie charts to put us on the straight and narrow. And, really, many of the so-called “fat kids” in my grammar and high schools would be considered positively svelte in this uber-informed day and age of ours. I just don’t get it. We have so much more health info at our fingertips, but yet we just keep getting fatter and fatter, and more cholesterol laden, and blame Burger King and McDonald's for leading us astray.

I realize that the Goody’s era is considered the dark ages vis-à-vis health and wellness—the place could have had a cigarette machine on the premises for heaven's sake. But fast foods just weren’t on our plates three, four, and five times a week in those ignorant times.

The Kid Behind the Counter

(Another reprise...this one from 2010, when a mere thirty years had passed from that fateful summer.)

In the summer of 1980, which bridged high school and college for me, I worked my first real job in a place called Pet Nosh, a mom-and-pop pet food and supply shop located in the Little Neck section of Queens. It was owned and operated by my older brother and a neighbor named Rich. As part of Pet Nosh’s business plan, the first few years encouraged home deliveries from Queens to Manhattan to the Bronx. One boss man ran the retail store while the other was out and about on the highways and byways generating additional cash flow.

When one-half of the aforementioned pair vacationed during their first summer in business, the as-yet-eighteen-year-old me was left in charge of the store. I'll admit the pay wasn’t especially good, because the Pet Nosh boys weren’t quite awash in capital back then. And, besides, the whole thing was pretty exciting. It was a real adventure being part of a family-oriented business attempting to beat the odds and make a go of it. This was the American dream personified.

I'll not soon forget Rich's encouraging words to an anxious and pretty shy kid that summer a long time ago. “You should be paying me for the experience you will be getting,” he said. At the time, I considered his remark a self-serving volley from a notorious miser. But lo and behold, Rich was right after all, although I do believe that even a teenager—and, in this instance, a relative—ought to be paid a fair wage for his respective toils. The man’s larger point was nonetheless on the mark.

Getting thrown into the shark-infested retail-help swimming hole without a life raft, as I was at the time, was an education for sure. I was compelled to do many things I had never done before, and had no place to hide, either. Servicing the sometimes impatient, frequently demanding, and occasionally very weird and even creepy public at large imparts one life lesson after another. It's a dynamic and unpredictable laboratory. For starters, it requires ample doses of patience and understanding.

Life on the retail frontlines can be simultaneously exciting and harrowing. It should be said that most shoppers just show up to satisfy their needs, pay their tabs, and are on their merry way. They seek no attention and desire, above all else, a certain anonymity. However, a distinct minority could best be described as consumer terrorists, the men and women who make retailers' lives a holy hell. Countless times I arrived home from a day at Pet Nosh physically exhausted—we carted around lots of cases of cat food and bags of dog food—and emotionally drained, too. Encounters with certain customers of ours—the bad apples in the barrel—could be at once mind-altering and downright depressing. It seems there are more than a handful of folks walking the streets with troubled lives and tortured psyches who aren’t content to check their psychological baggage at the retailer’s doorstep.

I was merely a kid behind a counter. But I got a crash course in what could best be described as the multi-hued nature of humanity—the good, the bad, and the ugly. While I wouldn’t advocate paying your employer for the privilege, it is an experience money cannot buy.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Charting Cars in the Bronx

(A reprise from 2011. Ten years have passed and charting cars would still be a major challenge for anyone game enough to try.)

Once upon a time I charted cars on pieces of construction paper. It was in the mid-1970s that the teenage me plopped down on my front stoop, and sometimes at a front window, and recorded the manufacturers of the automobiles that passed by. What an interesting boy I was. We knew car makes back then—be they Dodge Darts, Chevy Impalas, Buick Centuries, and most everything in between—because they were absolutely unique in appearance.

In the old neighborhood, we not only knew a whole lot more people than city folk know today, but we knew the specific kinds of cars they drove, too. Neighbors distinguished themselves with their choice of vehicles and couldn’t, therefore, come and go unnoticed. Now—with some notable exceptions, of course—what is parked along the streets, and in the area garages, look more or less the same, despite all of the amazing technological advances therein.

The colors of cars in the 1970s were also in sync with the fashions of the day in that groovy snapshot in time. Danny C drove a dark brown Ford LTD; Cathy R, a pale yellow Volkswagen. Jack H had a sky-blue Plymouth Duster and Jimmy S, a bright red AMC Rebel. There were people who drove gas-guzzling “boats,” as we called them back then. Arthur M Sr. parked a metallic gold-colored Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight on the street that was the size of a stretch limousine. Others sought out economy cars that were simultaneously affordable and fuel efficient in an age of increasingly high gas prices and, occasionally, outright shortages, courtesy of an awful cartel that is equally awful today, although happily somewhat more impotent.

My father owned a 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne for fourteen years. It had an interior smell—a car-seat vinyl meets gassy residue kind of thing—that inspired carsickness, particularly without something called air conditioning. One member of the family, in fact, would puke his guts out at the mere notion of getting into the car—yards away from it—before every outing. In 1973, the Biscayne was at last retired and the family rode in style in a second-hand Buick Skylark, purchased from a guy on the next block. We were agog riding in a vehicle with the creature comforts of this modern invention called air-conditioning. In 1983, somebody convinced my father to get with the program and purchase a Chevy Chevette, a car that drove so many “people happy” with its super-duper gas mileage. It had a stick shift, the back windows could only go down half way, and no air conditioning. Sure, it got great gas mileage, but we were a spoiled clan by then.

Oh, by the way, Chevrolet won the day in my car charting. There were some foreign cars around then, but they were foreign to most people. And I can’t help but think that most of us would be better off driving whatever the Chevy Chevette of today is—but with air conditioning—than the ubiquitous gas-guzzling behemoths that take up a lot of space on the street, polluted the air, and make us dependent on countries who don't like us very much.

Shops, Stores, and the Family Doctor

My Grubhub restaurant delivery options are multiplying like rabbits. I do, though, find it hard to believe that more than a few of the newly listed eateries would actually deliver to me. Many of them are quite a distance away in the heavily trafficked Bronx and surrounding areas. Why would I order a pizza from a shop that’s closer to where I went to high school—in the East Bronx—than my front door? That’s a recipe for cold pizza! Still, I’m impressed that No. 1 Chinese Restaurant has been added to the Grubhub roster. New on The Block Deli has, too, along with Deli & Food, a winning retail moniker if ever there was one. While distance will probably keep us apart, Freaking Good Pizza and Best Italian Pizza in the South Bronx nevertheless intrigue me.

When I was a boy, pizza establishments were called shops. If we needed to buy fruit, we patronized the fruit store, not the fruit shop. My father was a long-time patron of the local beer store. It had an actual name, I suppose, but I don’t recall ever knowing what it was. Going to the beer store spoke volumes. The old neighborhood had a couple of record shops, not record stores. In those simpler days of funny phone calls, many a store and shop were on the receiving end of them. In response to a bogus telephone survey, Mike, who tirelessly labored at Pat Mitchell’s Irish Food Center, volunteered his occupation as “store clerk.” A neighbor up the street, who made his fortune in retail with a chain of pet food and supply stores, nonetheless disappointed his mother. She ruefully remarked one day that her son was “content on being a shopkeeper.” Mama believed that a suit-and-tie job made the man, not the millions accrued in a cloud of Hartz Mountain cat litter dust.

The passage of time has ushered in a whole host of changes. The funny phone call is largely a relic of the past. Anonymous trolling, I guess, has replaced it, removing the funny part in the process. The old neighborhood beer store is gone, but we can order our preferred brew online if we so desire. Shops selling LPs are a distant memory and so are shops—albeit less distant—selling CDs. I remember the big deal made when cassette tapes replaced records. Will wonders never cease, we thought.

From Grubhub in the here and now to the family doctor back in the day. My family called on a familiar neighborhood GP for decades. His office was on the ground floor of an old walk-up apartment building—grungy but somehow a reassuring presence. Playing outside with my brother on a winter’s eve before suppertime—that’s what we did back then—a wrought iron fence’s spike made acquaintance with the bottom of my chin. I was bloodied all right and a call was placed to the family doctor—not a request for an ambulance—just up the hill from home. Come right over, he said, and Mom and I did just that. Doc stitched me up for another go-round and I still have the scar as a souvenir. He made house calls through the years to my grandfather and grandmother and drove an aunt to the ER. I appreciate that medical science performs miracles nowadays, but I miss the old family doctor and, for that matter, record stores and funny phone calls.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

1984 and 1984

In the spring of 1984—the actual 1984, not George Orwell’s 1984, which is 2021—I was enrolled in a course called “Economics of Peace” at Manhattan College in the Bronx.  It was taught by one of my favorite professors, who referred to the course as “Economics for Peace” and preferred to be called a “humanist” rather than a “socialist.” Anyway, at some point in this rather intimate class setting of a dozen or so students, the subject of women’s increasing role in the workforce was up for discussion. I don’t recall the specifics of the back and forth, but a classmate—a Nigerian man named Leonard—offered his two cents on the matter at hand. He uttered something to the effect that women belong at home doing women’s work, not working alongside him at the office.

Now, you can imagine the reaction from the females in attendance, including our feminist professor, to Leonard’s offhand remark. They pounced on the poor fellow, informing him in no uncertain terms that he was in a college classroom, in America, in the year 1984. Essentially, the ladies laughed off Leonard’s antiquated thinking, which was probably quite commonplace in his native country. And guess what? Nobody on the scene required a safe space in which to suffer a life-altering meltdown—the Campus Ministry was nearby—or cried crocodile tears about how they now felt unsafe on campus. Nor was there any clamoring to cancel Leonard and ruin his life from that moment forward. And there was no Twitter mob outrage back then because there was no Twitter—the good old days.

I’m genuinely happy that I attended college in that simpler, saner, and more sanguine snapshot in time. When students of all backgrounds weren’t in intellectual straightjackets and didn’t live in fear of expressing a contradictory or even controversial opinion. Leonard expressed his opinion and was met with a forceful rebuttal. That’s the nature of free speech. And what better place to debate ideas—even unpopular ones—and to discover that not everybody thinks the same than in an institution of higher learning? Well, that was then and this is now.

It absolutely astounds me that the college-aged woke have no regard for free speech. In fact—like all good totalitarians in training—they see it as dangerous and desire muzzling one and all who don’t walk the woke. They feel empowered in the here and now because they’ve gotten people fired from their jobs and ruined innumerable reputations. They’ve extracted countless craven apologies from folks who have committed no sin other than deviating—even slightly—from woke orthodoxy. And the woke wear their destruction like a badge of honor. Pretty sad, isn’t it? I think so.

These men and women who purport to be on higher moral ground than the rest of us mere mortals are bad apples. This is still the Land of the Free—if only barely—and we must be ever vigilant in protecting what remains of our basic freedoms. Standing up to the woke mob and the march to madness is job one. So, I ask: Are we better off today because a classic sitcom like Seinfeld couldn’t get picked up by a network? Are we better off today because the Indian maiden is no longer on tubs of Land O’Lakes butter? Are we better off today because the movie classic Dumbo now comes with a didactic disclaimer from some pompous oaf? Are we better off today because Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is no longer must-read for high school students? And, finally, are we better off today because a comedian like Don Rickles, who insulted my father at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in 1996, couldn’t exist? I don’t think we are.

Finger-licking Good Times

(A reprise from 2010: Another Pat Mitchell's Story.)

I sometimes feel the New York City Department of Health, via its eagle-eyed restaurant and food-related inspections and recent letter grading, is a wee bit excessive and punitive to beleaguered small businesses. Once upon a time, in a decidedly less regulated era, there was Pat Mitchell's Irish Food Center. The place: Kingsbridge in the Bronx.

Every Sunday morning after Mass at St. John’s Church, it was the tradition of an awful lot of us to call on Pat Mitchell’s near the northwest corner of Kingsbridge Avenue and West 231st Street. After offering one another the sign of peace, the race was on to the place with the fresh donuts delivered from Willow Sunny Bakery in various trays, including repurposed beer-box trays and an especially large one—like a tub you would mix cement in—resting on the unwashed floor. The latter accommodated the heavily powdered-sugared mini-jelly donuts, crullers, and crumb buns, while the former contained the young fan favorite: frosted chocolate donut.

Now, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the contemporary health department bureaucracy would find fault with this retail arrangement. For starters, the donuts were completely exposed to the shop's hustle and bustle and—it should be noted for the historical record—the establishment wasn't renowned for its cleanliness. Post-Mass crowds cramming into cramped Pat Mitchell's to purchase donuts and rolls no doubt contaminated the whole lot of them with their wagging tongues, competing body odors, and general disorderliness.

One particular Sunday morn, I recall handing several frosted chocolate donuts from an aforementioned beer-box tray to a local kid working behind the counter. He grabbed hold of them with his two bare hands. From mine, which weren’t likely the cleanest, to his—the same hands that had been conducting numerous transactions that morning, including taking customers' money and making change. Evidently, there were no disposable plastic gloves around back then.

The icing on the cake, if you will, to this stroll down memory lane: When dropping the donuts into a paper bag, this teenage employee left his fingerprints in the frosting. He then did something that many people would have considered beyond the pale—even by Pat Mitchell's rather liberal standards. Just before Johnny on the spot took my cash, he vigorously licked chocolate frosting off his fingers. While they were finger-licking good times, for sure, this parting salvo took an unhealthy bite out of a one Sunday morning's breakfast a long time ago.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Operation Pig's Foot

(A reprise from 2011: A Pat Mitchell's Story.) 

When I learned the news this week concerning the consumption of black licorice and a certain drug therein called glycyrrhizin—which the FDA says lowers potassium levels that in turn can cause abnormal heart rhythms, high blood pressure, edema, and congestive heart failure—I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I don’t like black licorice. But interestingly enough, when I have consumed black licorice in the past, it always gave me a headache. I didn’t, though, realize I was a couple of pieces away from a coronary thrombosis.

Happily, from where I sit, red licorice was not included in this indictment. For it was red licorice that I used to buy as a penny candy in Pat Mitchell’s Irish Food Center in the old neighborhood during that simpler snapshot in time known as the 1970s. I recall Pat’s brother, Mike, thumbing through and pulling apart individual pieces from a super-sized pack of Twizzler’s red licorice. Ten red licorice strips cost a dime—a bargain if ever there was one. And it didn’t matter to we wide-eyed youths that Mike had been both making sandwiches and change all day long without washing his hands. I can’t ever recall getting sick from a piece of Pat Mitchell’s red licorice.

Funny, though, how this contemporary black licorice story resurrected memories of a little man named Mike from Pat Mitchell’s. He was a pleasant enough leprechaun. My friends and I had nicknamed him “Eh,” because, you see, he calculated customer tabs in his head with lots of expressed “ums” and “ehs” before arriving at a sum total. When the math became a little too involved, Mike—and all the Pat Mitchell employees for that matter—added up figures on paper bags. Plastic grocery bags didn’t yet exist.

In fact, my brother and I used to imitate Mike in his thick but agreeable Irish brogue saying this line: “Three papers…um…eh…dollar-five.” Ah...those were the days...when the Sunday New York Daily News cost thirty-five cents. Store clerk “Eh” even became part of a comic strip I created as a teen. I dubbed him “Eugene Herbert Mitchell,” turning his ubiquitous “eh” mutterings into initials. And, finally, while remembering “Eh,” I would be remiss if I didn’t recount “Operation Pig’s Foot.”

On the countertop at Pat Mitchell’s were jars containing pigs’ feet, which I always found supremely revolting for a variety of reasons. My father used to eat them—or whatever it is one did with them. Perhaps "gnaw on them" is a more apt description. Anyway, I had never witnessed a single person through the years purchase a single pig’s foot…and wondered what a transaction would look like. And so “Operation Pig’s Foot” was hatched. A friend and I went into Pat Mitchell’s with a tape recorder concealed in a paper bag and ordered a pig’s foot. This was the technology of the time—no Flip cams or iPhones. Mike, aka “Eh,” placed a piece of wax paper down on the counter, opened the jar, and reached into the cloudy brine with his bare hand. He plucked a healthy sized pig’s foot out and, dripping brine all over the place, laid it on the wax paper and wrapped it up tight. The recording for posterity of “Operation Pigs Foot” sounded mostly like a crinkling paper bag. But I had at long last witnessed the incredible: a pig’s foot purchase. And pity the poor boy or girl who came in after me to buy red licorice strips.

Sonny Weather Lover

Recently, YouTube recommended to me an interview of the late Sonny Fox, a television host and broadcaster. In the several-minute clip, the man discusses being a POW in Nazi Germany and how it dramatically altered his life outlook. Once upon a time, Sonny Fox hosted a local Sunday morning show for kids called Wonderama. I vividly remember the show with Bob McAllister, Sonny’s successor, as the host.

Anyway, I learned that he was drafted into the army as a teenager and captured in the Battle of the Bulge a year later. Having grown up in the more sanitized and sheltered 1970s, the notion of being shipped overseas and fighting a war was inconceivable to me and so many others of my generation. Compared to the World War II generation, we were a cosseted lot, but nothing quite like the current college-aged youth with their safe spaces, trigger meltdowns, and desire to destroy people who don’t tow the woke line hook, line, and sinker.    

As we near a complete year of COVID-19 disruptions, restrictions, and assorted mania, there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel. Multiple vaccines have come to the rescue! It’s been quite a roller-coaster ride from last March to this one—not especially uplifting but very enlightening on a whole host of fronts. The extremes on both sides of the political spectrum have been unmasked and it’s not a reassuring picture. The scary thing is that the extremists—right and left—appear to be pulling the strings of the two major parties. Wouldn’t it be nice to return to the good old days—pre-social media—when loony conspiracy theories, manufactured and misplaced outrage, and daily calls for censorship didn’t travel at the speed of light? When the loons among us were identified as loons and not in important positions of authority and pulling the levers of power?

Speaking of loons—or Looney Tunes in this instance—a New York Times op-ed columnist, Charles W. Blow, believes that the amorphous animated Pepe Le Pew “added to rape culture” by his aggressive behavior towards the opposite sex. Honestly, I thought the whole point of Pepe Le Pew was that he was a skunk—not a role model for the impressionable. In fact, Looney Tunes characters were, by and large, of very poor character, as it were, and always got their comeuppances. So, this is how far we’ve sunk. The Onion, the premier satirical source of all the news that’s fit to print, is nowadays competing against a reality, which increasingly feels like a lampoon of one.

And there’s no such thing as Dr. Seuss or Disneyland and Mother Goose. I just discovered that a nephew of mine’s favorite book as a child was And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I don’t remember reading that one, but shame on eBay for outlawing sales of the book and others on its auction site. It’s especially absurd considering the stuff that is permitted on eBay. I won’t bother reciting the litany. Thirteen minutes ago, Michelle Obama and the preponderance of the wider world didn’t have a problem with the books.

A much bigger corporate concern is Google’s algorithmic behavior. John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” Google now asks, “If a representation is factually accurate, can it still be algorithmic unfairness?” Apparently, yes, when “it may be desirable to consider how we might help society reach a more fair and equitable state, via either product intervention or broader corporate social responsibility efforts.” If this doesn’t worry you, it should! Coming to a Google search near you—only the facts approved by the woke shirts and skirts. Sonny weather…stormy weather: Sergeant Joe Friday, where are you?

 

Irish Curses, Blessings, and Toasts

(A reprise from 2018, but as relevant as ever.)

When Piels came to the legendary Jimmy Breslin to do a commercial for its beer, he said, “I’m not Bert or Harry…I’m 

Jimmy Breslin, a writer.” Actually, that was part of the advertisement script, which Breslin delivered with urban aplomb. In the 1950s, Bert and Harry Piel were animated television pitchmen for what was then a very popular beer. Jimmy Breslin spieled for Piels more than two decades later. The ad aired repeatedly on local New York City stations in the late 1970s and it remains a classic all these years later. The gifted wordsmith initially described Piels as “a good beer” then "better than good" and finally as "a good drinking beer!" In other words: a bargain for those who valued quantity above quality.

This intro is my roundabout way of pitching a most recent publishing credit: Irish Curses, Blessings, and Toasts. The subtitle says it all: A Little Book of Wit, Wisdom, and Whimsy. What, you ask, does a comprehensive compilation of Celtic sayings and such have to do with a Jimmy Breslin beer commercial from 1978? Except for the fact that it danced like visions of sugarplums in my head, not much at all. You see, when I was initially offered the opportunity to amass and edit this wide-ranging pithy volume, I said to myself: I’m not Colm or Eamon…I’m Nicholas Nigro with a vowel at the end of my name. Ah, but in the writing biz: “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” Later, I amended the vowel thing. After all, Chief O’Hara, Jim O’Gara, Eric O’Mara, and Joe Donahue, too—all have surnames ending in a vowel.

Here’s the story: I grew up in Kingsbridge, an Irish enclave in the Bronx at the time. My paternal grandparents from Italy had originally settled in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. When my grandfather had saved up enough money to buy a house—he had been an iceman and subsequently worked for Sheffield Farms, a milk company—he set his sights on the less populated Outer Boroughs of New York City. In 1946, he moved his family—including my father who was seventeen at the time—five miles north to Kingsbridge. My grandfather not only wanted a home of his own, he wished to settle, too, in an area that was not predominantly Italian. He reasoned that by doing so his wife—my grandmother—would master the English language more quickly and more adeptly. And so it came to pass: the Italian Nigros of Kingsbridge commingled with the Irish majority on the neighborhood’s business hub, W231st Street, at nearby St. John’s Roman Catholic Church run by the likes of Scanlan, Doherty, and Foley, and under the deafening El on Broadway.

The rest, I guess, is history. My grandfather would one day plant and harvest a post-war “victory garden” across the street from his Kingsbridge home alongside men named McGuire, Brady, and Reilly. My father would play stickball on the streets with guys named O’Neal, Gern, and Joyce. And one and all would congregate in front of Pat Mitchell’s Irish Food Center, a neighborhood institution for more than three decades. In fact, I dedicate Irish Curses, Blessings, and Toasts to “Pat Mitchell’s Kingsbridge.” For when I was a youth, a stopover at Pat Mitchell’s after Sunday Mass for fresh rolls and jelly donuts was a revered ritual. It was also the place to purchase brain-freezing Fla-Vor-Ice pops for a nickel, glass bottles of RC Cola for twenty cents, and—the pièce de résistance—penny candies for—imagine that—a penny.

Pat Mitchell’s Kingsbridge was a great neighborhood in which to grow up. It was an era before the Internet, cell phones, and even plastic shopping bags. In my father’s eclectic vinyl LP collection were Clancy Brothers albums. He once told me that his rallying mantra—with his many Irish drinking buddies—was “The Moonshiner” lyrics: “I’ll eat when I’m hungry, I’ll drink when I’m dry. And the moonshine don’t kill me, I’ll live till I die.”

I close now with the vivid memory of a man named Gene Daugherty, a New York City bus driver. He was a fixture at the holiday cookouts thrown in the victory garden’s cozy confines. On more than one warm summer’s night, Gene belted out “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” From across the street where I lived, I could hear the Irishman’s dulcet tones cutting through the velvet darkness. The only lights visible were the tips of lit cigarettes, cigars, and pipes.

You can purchase Irish Curses, Blessings, and Toasts online from the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Paraphrasing Jimmy Breslin, permit me this parting salvo: "It's a good little book. Yeah, that's how I would describe it. It's a good little book!"

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Spring Clues

After a rather cold and snowy start to February, this past week turned relatively mild and winter precipitation-free. It’s a welcome annual ritual, I suppose. At some moment on the calendar—typically the last week in February or early March—clues abound that the beginning of the end is near. As the birds get louder, more numerous, and more active, winter slowly but surely transitions to spring. The snows melt and the earth shows itself again with increasing signs of green amidst the lifeless brown. And the days get longer and longer. Can the pansies be far behind?

Running my errands in fifty-degree temperatures this week—with a complementary light southerly breeze—brought me back to a time and place: the winter-turns-to-spring days of my youth. The sights, sounds, and smells—the clues—of those bygone days came attached to a fair share of excitement and high expectations. Yes, I realize that some bitterly cold days are still possible and, too, that some of worst New York City blizzards occurred in March. But even the most powerful last gasps of winters’ past never derailed or circumvented the inevitable changing of the seasons. Play ball!

What's missing now is the passion of youth. It can’t be retrieved or resuscitated because it exclusively belongs to the young. It’s just the nature of things. Once upon a time, I got high on the thought of Major League Baseball’s spring training taking flight. Hope always sprang eternal for baseball fans in March. Our favorite teams’ records were always zero and zero. My team, the Mets, was tied for first place with everybody else’s. Even though the spring training games didn’t count, I nonetheless loved tuning into them. Hearing the three voices of summer and spring as well—Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner—after a long winter’s slog—was especially exhilarating. Baseball was back and would be around for many months to come. Could the summer and summer vacation be far behind?

Then there was baseball—of the small “b” variety—played in every incarnation imaginable in the old neighborhood. From Wiffle ball to “Throw It Against the Wall” to stickball, March was the segue. A mild one meant the fun and games could commence sooner rather than later. I’ve got stickball scorecards from forty-plus years ago—in which my companions and I kept records of our games and cumulative stats—where our opening salvos occurred in March, usually in the final weeks and days when Mother Nature cooperated. Our scorekeeping chronicled the game’s date, its start and end times, and the temperature upon the first pitch. Visible from our playing grounds was an Exxon gas station clock/thermometer and area icon, which loomed like a colossus in the distance. It's sadly no more, too.

Those were definitely the days. When the first hints of spring ushered in a freedom of sorts. Honestly, I would not want to relive them hour by hour, day by day, and year by year, but I’d relish replaying the best moments, provided I could pass on the worst of them. But since none of that’s possible, I’ll just breathe it all in and remember when the seasonal change brought with it a special charge and singular anticipation. 

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

No Sound and Fury

 

Recently, my desktop sound deserted me. It happened once before—not too long ago as a matter of fact—but I resurrected it by following one of those “How to get your sound back on Windows 7” tutorials. This time, however, my sound played hard to get—really hard to get. Finally, I had to employ the nuclear option, System Restore, returning to an earlier date when both sight and sound were all around and—eureka—they were back in tandem! But then my browser wouldn’t open and I couldn't access the Internet. So, I fast forwarded to the quietude of the present and considered my options. Perhaps it was time for a new computer. After all, I had purchased a reconditioned one ten years ago from Overstock.com for $125. I suppose I got my money’s worth out of it. It’s difficult, though, to part with such an old and trusted friend that rarely—in all those years—gave me trouble.

Without computer sound for a couple of weeks, I realized how much I rely on it in my day-to-living. Not only do I watch a lot of YouTube videos, but every night an Amazon Prime or Netflix program. I also missed the Recycle Bin scrunching sound. What, pray tell, was I to do in the interim between the old and new? Fortunately, I had this obsolete laptop in the closet with a DVD player and some practically obsolete DVDs, too.

Several years ago on YouTube, I encountered episodes of two old TV westerns that I had never seen: Wagon Train and Rawhide. I binge-watched them before they were removed by the Copyright Police. When these two shows debuted—in 1957 and 1959 respectively—I didn’t exist, and when they rode off into the sunset, I was three years old. Neither show ever aired in reruns on local New York stations. Bonanza, on the other hand, was rerun ad nauseum. Anyway, I was impressed. They held up rather well, I thought, and eventually bought several seasons on DVD.

For two whole weeks—while contemplating my next move—I watched various episodes of Wagon Train. They didn’t quite hold up as well as I previously concluded. It’s the inevitable by-product of viewing contemporary period piece westerns like Godless, Deadwood, and Hell on Wheels. The happy endings—with everything tied up neatly in a bow—of every Wagon Train episode just didn’t do it for me anymore. Granted, there was still something relaxing about watching the show’s formulaic plots, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the sanitation and the body odors of every man, woman, and child on those long and often treacherous journeys through rain and wind and weather. Season after season, there were feverish, badly wounded, or otherwise seriously ill folks in bed in the wagons, but nobody, it seemed, oversaw the changing of soiled clothing and linens.

Yes, the return to normalcy has begun. Hopefully, my spanking new reconditioned desktop will last ten years like its steadfast predecessor. It certainly is faster. I had gotten so used to not especially fast that I assumed it was the norm. In other news on the normalcy front, I patronized a local diner for the first time in almost a year. Recently, the Emperor of New York State gave New York City eateries the greenlight to open at twenty-five percent capacity. They had, in fact, reopened at that capacity for a spell and got shuttered again during a virus spike in December. Next week, it’ll be thirty-five percent capacity. Do I hear fifty percent!

It was a somewhat unusual dining experience that commenced with a temperature check and the signing of their guest book—the tracer as it were. But it was the beginning of a long and winding road back to normality, I reckon. I was in that very diner on the eve of the original indoor dining ban last March 16th. Still fixated on Donald Trump a year later, my dining companion then and now wanted to rave about him some more. Enough of all that, I told him, the man’s gone and the diner is serving food indoors again. Let’s talk about the chicken parmigiana hero and fish cakes and spaghetti specials instead and, with some luck, the happier days ahead.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)    

The Winter Blahs

A longtime friend of the family died recently. He was a good man. His wife passed away not too long before him. She was a good woman. Their deaths triggered a distant memory. Connecting the dots back in time, I found myself resurrecting a ghost from the past—this girl called “Blah” from the old neighborhood. Well, actually, Blah wasn’t her real name and nobody ever called her that to her face. Blah was a nice enough person as I recall, but her general demeanor was—how should I put it—blah.

It was my mother who was the wind beneath the wings of this moniker. Some four decades ago, Mom described a young neighbor of ours as “blah” and it seemed so spot on that it merited a nickname that would stand the test of time. As the years passed, Blah became a young woman with a steady boyfriend who was—how should I put it—similarly blah. They were thus the Blahs—plural. Their courtship and subsequent marriage turned the notion that opposites attract on its head.

Anyway, here’s the connection to the deceased family friends. When the newly married Blahs were shopping around for their very first home, the family friends had their house on the market. Located in a suburban hamlet in neighboring Connecticut, it was still a long way from the Bronx, which is where both the Blahs and I resided. Yes, in a country with hundreds of millions of people, the Blahs ended up buying that home—a place I had visited once or twice as a boy. The family friends, who had a big family of their own, also had a swimming pool in their backyard. There weren’t too many of them in the Bronx. I don’t suppose the pool was still there when the Blahs assumed ownership of the property—it was one of those above ground, rather commonplace, circular things. Nevertheless, the moral of the story is this: It’s a very small world that we live in.

Okay, on to more contemporary winter blahs: Garbage is piling up all over town. Recent snowstorms have found the Department of Sanitation otherwise engaged. With picking up trash taking a backseat to snow removal for a spell, it’s now catch-up time. It’s pretty shocking, though, to see the mounds of garbage on sidewalks. It makes one ponder: Where does it all go? How long can we keep this up? Are those recyclables really getting recycled?

Aside from navigating around heaping helpings of refuse this morning, I passed the evergreen hedge that only a week ago—post-blizzard—was peculiarly teeming with flies. There didn’t appear to be any there today. Flies are literally here today and gone tomorrow. On my way to the bank, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men were thwarted by one too many snow-inspired obstacles in my path. I had to alter my course and call on a different branch, which I generally prefer to avoid, even if it is closer to home. This bank typically has a doorman at the entrance of the ATM room—a doorman holding a paper cup. Today, there were two doormen on the scene, both with paper cups. Doorman Number One rested on his walker seat, while Doorman Number Two opened and closed the ATM entrance door for customers. Last week these same men were engaged in a heated quarrel, with Doorman Number One claiming that he was there first and accusing Doorman Number Two of cutting into his take. Looks like they resolved their differences—for today anyway.

And so I part with one final memory of Blah as a girl and her family. It was commonplace back then for neighbors one and all to hang clothes out to dry on clotheslines. Blah’s mother was wont to leave clothes out for days, including during inclement weather. It was not unusual to see stiff-as-a-board shirts, pants, and underwear lifelessly hanging on their clothesline in the dead of winter, soldiering on through the slings and arrows of the season. I am left now only to wonder whether the Blahs had any children of their own and, if so, did they turn out blah, too?

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

 

The Flies of February

There’s this hedge—some kind of evergreen—in the neighborhood. It is swarming with flies. Yes, in the month of February. I was, very literally, assaulted by these irritating insects as I passed by. From a fair distance, I had witnessed my mailman walk that very route before me. No doubt he was targeted, too, by the mob. Granted, the experience was not quite an Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds-style attack, but it was nevertheless as unpleasant as it was unexpected. And the time of year compounded the unpleasantness.

I was heading home from an errands’ run—just a few days after an unwelcome blizzard—and encountering myriad obstacles along the way. Somebody didn’t shovel his or her sidewalk. Okay, backtrack and locate the nearest cleared driveway. Venture then out into the street to bypass the obstruction. Walking, though, on snowstorm-narrowed streets with two-way traffic is a problem in and of itself. While New York City’s very generous salt spreading policy obviously has its benefits, there is a definite downside. You could get clipped by one of the spreaders or slip and fall on the massive amounts of rock salt on the road.

So, really, the Flies of February aren’t appreciated, particularly when they don’t keep to themselves. These irksome winged bugs don’t have a very long lifespan even in the best of times. Being hatched in the cold climes means they are in their prime and even their golden years—metaphorically speaking—without the best of summer’s stink at their disposal.

I see the Flies of February as emblematic of where we currently stand. Forty-three years ago today, I was enjoying the first of three snow days. Courtesy of the Blizzard of ’78, the high school grind came to a grinding halt for one brief shining moment. The city's Department of Sanitation didn’t throw nearly as much ice melter back then or plow the streets as often as they do now. From blizzard to blizzard, I could never have envisioned the depths of the changes in the world we call home. Jimmy Carter was the president in 1978; Joe Biden was in the Senate back then. He’s been around a long time.

I love what Senator Ben Sasse had to say upon being censured by Nebraska Republicans: “You are welcome to censure me again—but let’s be clear about why: It’s because I still believe (as you used to) that politics is not about the weird worship of one dude.” Not only were the blizzards better in 1978, but the political scene certainly was, too.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the crazy spectrum, woke insanity marches on undeterred. It’s unbelievable—and downright sad—what The New York Times, the Gray Lady, has become. If you haven’t heard the latest, search the name “Donald G. McNeil, Jr.” He was a reporter with the newspaper for a very long time. Read his apology letter for his alleged sin. The mob’s taken down another one. Does McNeil actually believe he committed a transgression? Probably not. He should, though, have gone out with his head held high, not with a coerced hostage-like confession letter.

The cudgel du jour is feeling unsafe, even—God help us—in the newspaper business. I feel unsafe, so I want you out of here, rendered null and void. This kind of thing—a new kind of McCarthyism being welcomed in journalism of all places—was not happening at The New York Times or elsewhere when that nor’easter struck with a vengeance in February 1978 and when Jimmy Carter was fifty-three, not ninety-six. Insanity to the right of me, insanity to the left of me, and the Flies in February—I say no thanks to all three.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)