TEENS - AUDITORIUM to CHECKROOM

THESPIAN

During most of 1941 I spent weekdays in one location, and weekends in another, about 7 miles away. I did very different things in those places. Weekdays were fun; weekends boring and a bit unpleasant. Then one Sunday, December 7th 1941, as I sat in a large dimly lit closet surrounded by hats and overcoats, news came that, while it didn’t change my life pattern immediately, ushered in a stunning prospect for change. My banal weekend surrounding was an outlandish setting for such a momentous event.

Weekdays, school days, I was a reasonably good third year student at Lafayette High in Brooklyn. Each morning Mully Keevak and I walked 15 short blocks along Benson Avenue to join 5,000 others at the school on Bay 43rd Street, stopping along athe way to whistle Bob Osterberg to join us. Along most of the route Benson was a wide tree lined avenue of private homes. Nearer the school it was surrounded by small truck farms. A short distance beyond Lafayette it dead ended at Stillwell Avenue nearby a smelly little movie theater. The El running along Stillwell ended at Coney Island perhaps two miles further on.

That was my weekday map of the world. My passion at the time was acting in school plays so my rehearsals often left Mully and Bob walking home alone. Perhaps acting was a way to get over shyness but, looking back, I must have been willing to be laughed at. I recall two roles that prove this.

One was as Kenneth Dowey in James M. Barrie’s The Old Lady Shows Her Medals.” It’s a WW I play in which Dowey, a member of the 5th Battalion, Black Watch, appears in kilts. Imagine a kilted kid in Brooklyn in 1941. It certainly drew snickers.

I recall only two lines from the play, but memories are funny. Neither are in the original text but I believe I’m right. One, at the very end has Kenneth, off to war and death, poignantly chanting from offstage “I’ll come back, I’ll come back.” The other, lifted from another author was “Cowards die a thousand deaths. Hero’s die but once.” Our teacher director did a nice editing job.

The other role I remember was the King in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Garbed crown, tights, little sword and all, I was decorated with a drooping mustache and long beard. 

During one performance, my breath blew part of the mustache off. It wafted away and floated lazily to the stage floor. Present laughter. Stopped the show. Recently the Yankee in that play’ and still friend, Fred Hellerman, who remained in real showbusiness beginning with The Weaves along side of Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. Fred apparently held onto memorabilia better than I. Several years ago he sent me this picture of us on the stage.

EARNING BIG BUCKS

Weekends in my other location I was a responsible worker in a tedious job, a family breadwinner, earning fifteen dollars weekly. Quite a sum in those days.

I commuted by train to Crown Heights, and stayed at my father's, and his wife Florence's, apartment in a bustling community along Eastern Parkway. The trip from Bay Parkway to the Utica Avenue station took about an hour. And brought me to a strange-to-me orthodox Jewish world. It was ironic that my dad, a man of the world who despised all religions, particularly his own, was penned up in this Brooklyn community. But he had come on hard times, and this was his hell. He, his wife, and my half-brother Peter, had moved into a lower floor apartment in a brownstone far cheaper than their former eighth floor Sutton place digs close to the East River. His in-laws lived above.

They were kind enough to put an army cot in their living room so that I could be near my workplace. It was canvas stretched between two long poles. Practice for later.

Saturday midday I arrived straight to my workplace, the check room at the Twin Cantors. I worked there well into the evening and then went to the apartment and plopped down on the cot ‘till Sunday morning when the folks treated me to breakfast before my return to work.

My mother, who worked as a catering manager at a similar wedding emporium, had found me this job with Minnie Brown. Minnie, a squat and astute business woman, had checkroom concessions at several establishments. She treated me like a son, but expected certain filial behavior beyond what my real mother had prepared me for.

The Twin Cantors performed at 1128 Eastern Parkway. The twins, Maurice and Bernard Epstein, were an awe-inspiring pair. They never talked to me or acknowledged my existence, but I did see them in action at a few of the eight or nine weddings they conducted each weekend. They would arrive at the Chuppah, the canopy over the marriage couple, from opposite ends of the chapel singing antiphonally in their high Chazzan’s Kapels resembling black baker's hats. The twin in the rear of the room would advance haltingly to the front as he sang. Then they, of quite different heights, so not identical twins, would face the bride and groom as a unit to conduct the ceremony. A performance for enthralled guests sitting enveloped in pastel wallpaper and fluorescent lights.

Minnie coached me on how to get coats on their hangers rapidly and with little effort. One ongoing reward was sharing the checkroom with my working partner, Dianna, a young woman of pleasing shape and few words. I had a “thing” for her which I never expressed, but it kept me alert, even tense at times, as I wondered how I might express my feelings.

The work was neither physically nor intellectually challenging, except for the extortionary period at the end of each wedding when the guests and principals began to leave. I sweated each of these approaching burdens to bring in the “take,” all of which went to Minnie Brown. 

As each celebration ended, the guests, joyous and well fed, presented their numbered tags to retrieve coats and hats. As Minnie had taught me I handed the outerwear out my little window and casually tapped the little brass ashtray nailed to the shelf between us containing three quarters, a signal which registered correctly with almost everyone. I dropped each new quarter into a slot. That was easy.

Last came the happy parents of the bride and groom. Here I swallowed hard and performed as prepped by Minnie. Handing the groom’s father his coat but not letting go of my end I would ask “Were you happy, sir, was it a good wedding?” He would give a little tug but I would not let his coat go. Finally he would get the idea and take out a bill. Five or ten dollars extricated the coat immediately. Less led to another tug of war. And a second prompt from me. Even if the loot were mine I would have hated this as I deposited the big bucks to join the rest of the take in a tray beneath the counter. The extortion didn't end until I had encountered the bride’s father and then the groom himself. But suddenly the world changed.

On December 7th 1941 Dianna and I sat listening to our little radio before the exit onslaught as the marriage ceremonies unfolded in rooms around and above us. The startling news of the attack on Pearl Harbor was at first unbelievable. But when it sank in I understood that my life, all our lives, were in for a change. I don’t think I tugged back coats that day.