Is Meets Was

Growing up in Brooklyn, especially on Chauncey Street, we didn’t know there were people with anything more than we had. When we had holes in our shoes, we patched them with linoleum, the floor covering of the time. If our socks had a hole in them, we sewed them. (0nly to cause a blister.) We didn’t have sunblock. There was a lot of sunburn.  When we went to Coney Island, w e didn’t have coolers to pack our sandwiches in. We used cardboard suitcases instead, and we didn’t get sick. Cold cut sandwiches tasted toasted when left in the sun for a while. Flotation water toys were air mattresses left over from World War II. Those lucky enough to own one had to blow it up manually, but what fun we had. We swam in the water at Coney Island, under the Belt Parkway bridges at Bergen Beach, or at Gerritsen Beach, all in Brooklyn. We did learn to swim, without the aid of swimming lessons. One time my brother, Bill, dove off one of the pilings of the bridge at Bergen Beach. My mother, ...

Felder’s Bar and Grill was in Brooklyn, on Howard Ave., between Chauncey St. and Bainbridge St.   The last time I was in that neighborhood was the summer of 2002 or 2003. The curtains in the window looked the same as the ones back in the 1950s. Felder’s Bar and Grill was just across the street and around the corner from where we lived. It was a place for the local parents to “hang out” and have a beer or two after dinner or on the weekends. Although the owner of the establishment was of German descent, most of the patrons were Irish. Irish music was always being played.   A television was installed (1952 or 1953), and the men would watch the ballgames. My brothers and sisters were older than me, and they were off with their social and married lives. This left me at home or “around the corner” with my parents. If Felder’s was crowded, I would sit at a table on the side and have all the soda I wanted. If it was not too crowded, I got to sit at the bar with my father and m...

On Chauncey Street, we graduated from an icebox to a refrigerator in the dining room.   My parents were married for twenty-five (25) years before they owned an electric toaster.   I remember the way we used to make toast. My mother had a wire rack that she placed on the gas burner of the stove. She placed the bread on the wire rack where it would get warm and finally toast on one side. Then Mom turned the bread over to toast the other side. To whip cream, my mother had a beater that she manually turned and turned. It took a lot of elbow grease to whip the cream until it was soft and fluffy and formed perfect white peaks. The used grease and lard didn’t go to waste. We sold it to the local butcher who used it to make soap for the American troops fighting overseas in World War II. The original stove we had was the same as the stoves in the other units. It was porcelain-clad iron. The color was cream and green. It was “T” shaped in appearan...

I am writing these anecdotes for all my children and grandchildren, and especially for Billy who asked how people kept things cold before there were refrigerators.    My earliest memory of iceboxes is of the white porcelain, two-door affair we had on Chauncey Street in Brooklyn, New York. Most of my earliest memories were formed there, at 324 Chauncey Street. The top level of the ice box, where many subsequent refrigerators have the freezer compartment, is where the blocks of ice went. The bottom compartment was where items such as milk, butter, meat, etc. were stored. Under the icebox was a pan to catch the melting ice. It had to be emptied daily. The iceman came around in a horse-drawn wagon, and a few years later he arrived in a motorized truck. He came a couple of times a week in the summer and maybe once a week in the winter. The amount of ice delivered depended on the amount of money our mother had on hand for such a luxury. For a quarter (25 cents), she could buy ...

It has been over a year since I created a blog post, and I am still suffering from writer's block. Rather than leaving this blog dormant any longer,   I am pursuing a wonderful alternative that presented itself at a family reunion this past summer. I was reunited with my cousin, Patsy, who has written a poignant series of stories about her childhood, living on Chauncey Street in Brooklyn, New York. I was enthralled by the incite that these stories provide into the lives of those who I knew so well and yet so little. I look forward to sharing with you  Remembering Chauncey Street by Patricia Jones [Pat Aronica] . On Tuesday, for the next 15 weeks, I will post on this blog, each of the anecdotes written by Patsy about her life on Chauncey Street from the middle 1940s through the 1950s. Photo of many of my cousins who gathered in Andover, NH for a family reunion in July 2013. Many others, who were unavailable when this picture was taken, w...