So…Booman wants to take issue with my assertion that the suburban white South Shore of Long Island was a “middle class/lower middle class hellhole” in the late ’50s/early ’60s, eh?
Wuz he there?
Of course not.
Did he learn to fight his way home in Jr. High School until the larger denizens of that particular hell decided that maybe it wasn’t worth the pain to fuck with him?
I kinda doubt it.
And then he says:
Also, if most of your friends in high school went to top-flight schools, that tells me all I need to know.
OK…that’s it.
Read on for the truth of the matter from a survivor.
A spiritual survivor of a nasty place and time.
Once again:
Also, if most of your friends in high school went to top-flight schools, that tells me all I need to know.
Then you do not “need to know” much to make up your mind, Booman.
Let’s get specific, here. OK? A little real, I-was-there-and-here-it-is history lesson follows.
I chose my friends very carefully, Booman. Very carefully. Still do. As you say above, being able to choose highly intelligent friends in such a hellhole may precisely be explained by the “high, upwardly-mobile expectations of [the} post-war Jewish community, [the members of which] had already demonstrated that path by getting out of the [c]ity.” The whole school system from 7th grade on up operated on a tracking system. Advanced, Regents and Applied. Loosely translated, that meant smart, normal and not so smart. Loosely societally translated it meant mostly Jewish, mostly Protestant and mostly Catholic. So it went. Segregation was not limited to African-Americans and other people of color. It was just…a little subtler. I was surrounded in class by easily 60% or more Jewish kids for 7 years after grammar school, and of the maybe 8 or 10 students out of my 500 or so-sized graduating class who went to Ivy League-level schools, I can only remember two who weren’t Jewish. I was too rebellious to go that route myself although I had the SAT scores, but my “crowd”…one of them, anyway… was comprised of mostly those people minus a couple of real, dedicated classroom wonk-nerds.
I had another crowd…the musicians. Almost all Irish, Jewish, Polish or Italian. All except me were in the lower tracking segments and all of us were fuck-ups of one kind or another, but also none of us were willing to be picked on by the athlete bosses of the school.
And yes, Merrick was a white town. Pre-Civil Rights Act America was segregated, lest you forget. By law in some states, by custom almost everywhere. (It still is, of course, only…differently.) I broke that line quite consciously at the time by going to jazz clubs and sitting in, by studying with black musicians and by just generally being a decade or two or three ahead of the societal pack. Why? How? I dunno. Just lucky, I guess. The music hooked me, and it was straight up…up, up and away, really…from there. There was one black kid in the school…he was from Freeport/Roosevelt too (see below) but somehow the districting lines had included his house in lily-white Merrick. His last name was “Lincoln” and he was a long distance runner. Those ironies escaped me at the time, although they now hold great poetic meaning for me.
A 5 minute drive west from Merrick were two areas…a northern section of Freeport and most of Roosevelt…that were almost entirely black. The Freeport section had been Italian for a couple of generations but had white-flighted sometime just after W.W. II…a common story on the whole Northeast coast. The only other dedicated jazz player of my age that I knew in the area, God rest his soul, fell victim to the jazz/heroin thing and is long gone now. He was Italian, and his grandparents still lived in their old Freeport neighborhood. We used to go over to their house where his grandmother would ply us with massive amounts of wonderful Italian food, then go to a little bar around the corner and sit in with whomever was playing there if they would let us do so. They usually did. Real musicians are usually totally without any prejudice whatsoever other than an aversion to no-playing assholes and their cousins, no-listening assholes. We were plainly trying to play, at the very least.
15 minutes north was a great jazz club right in the heart of wealthier-than-shit Westbury…the Cork and Bib. To give you an idea of the cultural dissonance of the place, next door was a shop that sold polo equipment. (!!!) I used to go there every chance I got to hear musicians like John Coltrane, Miles Davis and the Maynard Ferguson and Stan Kenton bands. Eventually I was kind of adopted by one of the truly great jazz bass players, Chubby Jackson (also from Freeport) and he started to school me in the ways of the jazz scene. At the same time the wonderful jazz trumpet/cornet player Carmel Jones had sessions there mid-week and he was very kind to me as well. I used to take the LIRR into NYC and go to the classic jazz clubs of the time…Birdland, the Village Vanguard, the Five Spot etc…and also search out the great jazz recordings in little hole-in-the-wall record stores. There was essentially no jazz available on TV or radio…no modern jazz, anyway…except for a couple of late, late night stations, one out of Harlem and the other out of Baltimore. I didn’t get much sleep for several years as a result.
Other than the jazz scene and the beginnings of real integration in the sports world, almost all black/white societal interfaces in most of America were pretty much limited to master/servant relationships. Waiters, maids, car repairmen…worker/boss/customer kinds of things. I was lucky enough to have been catapulted out of that situation by the music, but brother…a powerful catapult was necessary at the time for that sort of thing to happen. The nascent hypnomedia certainly didn’t give anyone a clue. Bet on it.
Take a look at the Buttafuoco/Lohan pictures from my previous post (Both from that “Merrick” of the soul.), Booman, and smell the hellholeness of it all.
Some of us escaped fairly whole, but most of my classmates went straight down into the whites-only America that has, 30 and 40 and 50 years later, produced the political base that has supported creatures like George W. Butch, Senator Cus “I am not a bagman!” D’Amato, Representative Peter “Nuke those wogs!” King, and the whole Fox News system.
If that ain’t a “hellhole”, I don’t know what is.
I was there, brother, and I ain’t playin’.
Not a bit of it.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
Yup. Yer right. Booman done pissed me off, this time.
So it goes.
AG
if you wanna rip on where you grew up, that’s your business. I can show you some hellholes where no one goes to Yale or Harvard, and no has gone there in generations, or ever. I can show you plenty of places that used to be nice but all now total hellholes that have a median income that’s one-third instead of three-times the national average.
And I can find you a million or two million Joey Buttafuacos from all corners of the country.
I get your point, though. Merrick isn’t, and wasn’t Greenwich, Connecticut.
I want to “rip” on the system that eventually created the hell in which we are all living now, Booman.
And those “hellholes where no one goes to Yale or Harvard, and no has gone there in generations, or ever?” I duuno about “ever”, because there are kids coming out of the nastiest ghettos in America who end up going to school at prestigious universities…not many, but some. And those ohe neighborhoods? Not the ” total hellholes that have a median income that’s one-third instead of three-times the national average” but the ones right on the edge of that kind of place? The border neighborhoods like most of non-gentrified NYC? That’s where the real deal lies, Booman, and that’s where I have chosen…except for an ultimately disastrous move to the ‘burbs almost 20 years ago in a moment of family-fueled weakness…to live since 1965. In Roxbury, in the Lower East Side and Red Hook before before they got Bloomberged and Giulianied, in the garment district lofts, on the Upper West Side before it got all Sex-And-The-Cityed, when you could hear gunshots every damned night, and now inna Bronx.
The music that I play? Jazz and latin music? It came from those neighborhoods and from the preceding working class but still relatively poor black and hispanic urban neighborhoods of America from around the turn of the century on through until Papa Bush and his CIA cohorts turned most of them into crack-ridden deserts.
You can find “a million or two million Joey Buttafuacos from all corners of the country?”
That’s precisely my point, Booman. The cultural desert that was South Shore L.I. at the time wasn’t in any way out of the ordinary in the U.S….it was the beginning of what we are now seeing as a possible final obliteration of the real “American dream.”
Freedom.
That’s what the various “Occupy” movements are really saying, Booman. There is a lot of foofaraw about how they have to present a list of demands if they are going to succeed. Their demands are really exactly same as those of the Tea Party and the Paulistas and other Libertarians.
As was mine in Merrick.
Get on up offa me!!!
And as it still is today.
Bet on it.
AG
Let me ask you this, Arthur.
If I’m not mistaken, and I don’t think I am, Dana Milbank is Jewish and grew up in a culture that was already established in your time, and which produced one Merrick Ivy Leaguer after another. I am familiar with that culture, although mine was mated less with Irish and Italian working class folks than with the true protestant Establishment of this country, and with a whole lot more racial diversity.
My best friend? His Jewish father was the co-head of the Princeton English Department. My three other closest friends? One’s father was a Jewish engineer with a degree from Pratt. Another’s father was a Jew who taught Near-Eastern Studies at Princeton. Another’s father was Englishman, married to a Swede who taught Rocket Science at Princeton (now at Stanford).
What’s my point? In a culture that expects and demands academic achievement, you can have a group of friends who go to the top schools in the country. Such cultures do not arise in hellholes.
When I told you I could find you places where no one has ever gone to Harvard or Yale, I had in mind a lot of rural areas of our country, not necessarily our inner cities. But it doesn’t matter.
Go hang out in the hills of Western North Carolina and tell me if you can find a high school where six or seven people are going to go to an Ivy League school. I used to know an Okie who went to Princeton. He was a drug dealer. He was also the only guy from his hometown who had ever come east to go the school.
Fuck it. Just the fact that you could go to the City and buy jazz records meant your hometown wasn’t a hellhole.
BooMan, I grew up in a very nearby town in the same locale, south shore Nassau county, Long Island. Merrick is still (and long has been) a fairly affluent town. Suffice it to say that characterizing it as a hellhole pushes severly the boundaries of the word’s meaning.
One man’s…or boy’s…hellhole is another’s comfort zone.
So it goes.
And conversely, of course. Most of the places where I have lived and worked since I was 20 years old..very happily, a great deal of the time…would likely not suit you.
You say that you are Lifelong Democrat and all around nice person?
I’m a lifelong radical and I am not “nice” very often.
So it goes, Pt. II.
AG
Buying jazz records? I worked for my money, Booman. I was a working musician by the time I was 16 and I broke roads in Levittown…an even lower circle of that particular suburban hell than Merrick…during a couple of summers as well.
And…
“Such cultures do not arise in hellholes?”
See my comment below.
A barren hellhole of the spirit.
AG
Born in Freeport on St. Mary’s Place. 1962. Moved away at 7 to various places like Galveston and West Palm Beach, but came back when I was 15.
At that time Freeport was still divided, north to south, into clear racial lines. The south was always white, even at that time. From Merrick rd. north to Sunrise Hywy was Hispanic, mostly Puerto Rican, and from Sunrise north into Roosevelt was entirely African American.
There wasn’t a whole lot of mingling going on, I’ll tell you that. Unless of course you were looking for weed and other goodies.
To be straight, no one I knew in Freeport gave much of a damn one way or the other about Merrick and it’s people. We always had a beef though, with the next town to the west, Baldwin.
Anyway, I can’t really say Freeport was a hellhole, although many of the things you describe, like having to be vigilant and tough because of the constant threat of being jumped and having your ass kicked around, are certainly true. But on the other hand, I don’t know of anyone from there who went on to a major university, let alone Ivy League. Our culture then would have laughed a kid like that outta every hangout we frequented.
So, even though we’re talking about different decades, I can’t really picture Merrick being any kind of hellhole. Freeport can’t be described that way and Freeport had a lot tougher culture than Merrick did.
Come to think of it though, Huggy Bear, the 6’5″ beast of a kid that hung with us, did make it to the University of Arizona on a football scholarship. That is, til he blew out his knee and came back into the Freeport fold. Still there too. Working man, like most of the people I know/knew. Not particularly liberal in their politics, though. Definitely more than a few Tea Baggers and even Palinites amongst them. In that sense I guess you could call it a hellhole or a cesspit.
Well, Supe…like I said, there are hellholes and then there are other hellholes. I lived in Freeport (on Ray St. right next to the Baldwin border) from 1st grade through 3rd grade. Early ’50s. For me at that time it was a paradise of sorts. There were docks and boat basins at the western end of Ray St. and I went snapper fishing and/or crabbing there almost every summer day. Kids were everywhere and Casino Pool (a salt water swimming pool near the waterfront) was my other hang. Freeport was almost Tom Sawyeresque then. Little adventures that seemed so big. Lots of friends, a functioning extended family…my mother’s parents lived with us and my father’s parents were a 15 minute drive away. Bicycles, little girls to pursue (No one had actually been kind enough to explain sex to me, but it was everywhere.), Little League baseball, a really good library, what I remember as a very happy school experience…even the year that I had to deal with crabby old Mrs. Duntley.
Life was good. Life was safe!
Race simply didn’t exist then. Not to a working class white Irish kid it didn’t, for sure. My grandfather would take me to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to watch the Dodgers play…black players like Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella and Junior Gilliam were just the way things were. If they could play, they were OK. So was the fact that people of color lived in different neighborhoods. Just the way it was. He also taught me to read great books…Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Conan Doyle, etc., to think, and to rail against Republicans. We went to religious instruction at Our Holy Redeemer church once a week…the nuns were nasty!!!…and mass every Sunday.
Idyllic Freeport.
Looking back on it, Freeport had some soul, brother. Waterfront soul. Woodcleft Canal soul. Ethnic soul. Jones Beach soul. Fisherman soul. Salt water soul. Working class soul.
Merrick was…different. It was a couple of years later in my life…we had moved to Pittsburgh (a disastrous decision on so many levels) and Merrick (North Merrick, to be precise…not as affluent as the waterfront areas, to say the least.) seemed as if the same kinds of people who lived in Freeport were trying to be middle class and not quite making it because they had to try so hard. And it was violent, Supe. I do not remember a single violent incident amongst the kids when I was in Freeport…well, there was a fat bully who lived on our block but the older kids and the mothers pretty effectively nullified him right out of the box…but from 6th grade on out in North Merrick it was “Danger on the playground!!!” and “Danger walking home from school!!!” almost every day. Kids sharpened the buckles of their garrison belts and fought with them, carried razor blades in their pomaded pompadours…it was really funky. Look at Joey Buttafuoco’s face. Like dat. Italian, Irish and working class Protestant versions thereof.
Like dat.
And it wasn’t just because I was a few years older, either. My mother worked in the local grammar school…first as an aide and then later as a teacher after she got her degree…and she saw the same thing on down through the lower grades. But when we went to visit family in Freeport and in the Five Towns area, there seemed to be none of that.
A strange little town.
Upwardly mobile and at the same time downwardly moral.
And I started to get into trouble. Right from middle school. Never had before, but in Merrick? Great academic grades, a burr under the saddle of almost every teacher. Class clown, only almost always directed at the authorities. George Carlin Jr., I’m sure. (We even look alike.) I had a friend…this was in 7th grade, remember…whose father was a liquor salesman. He’d swipe his father’s sample bottles and we’d get drunk at lunch. I eventually got in such trouble with an incompetent, truly racist band director my senior year of high school that we started a petition to get him fired. That didn’t work…Duh!…and since i had been the instigator I was suspended from school for several weeks. Some friends of mine burned his car in the school parking lot in retaliation.
A pink and white ’56 Pontiac.
I remember it well.
He ended up in a mental institution the next year and I ended up playing the music that he so hated.
So it goes.
And so it went.
We drove hopped-up early ’50s Ford and Mercurys, drank a lot of beer (Drugs hadn’t even entered the consciousness of white suburban teenagers yet…not for a couple of years.) and tried to get laid 24/7. Not the brainiacs..except for me, I guess…but the “goodfellas?” Yup. Bet on it.
This is a privileged community?
Not when I was there it wasn’t. I was pursuing some girls from Great Neck around that time. That was a “privileged community.” Not Merrick.
Merrick was a society in the earliest stages of the breakdown that soon followed after JFK’s assassination was what it was. And it continued that way for at least 6 years, because my two younger brothers hit the same shit so bad that eventually my parents moved to Maine to get them away from it all.
Merrick? Dunno much about it now, but when I was there it was a shithole of the soul. Nothing less and not much more.
Bet on that as well.
AG