791 Coney Island Avenue: Brooklyn: What It Was Like to Grow up in Brooklyn in the 1920S, '30S and '40S Before Wwii

By George DiGuido

A kid of Italian immigrants grows up in South Brooklyn and Flatbush during the 20s, 30s, and 40s, playing Johnny-on-the-Pony, Ringalevio and Spin-the-Bottle.

Life was simpler then, before the breakup of Ma Bell, the corporate takeovers, and junk mail. His generation was deeply affected by the Great depression; the Big Band music of Goodman, Dorsey, Ellington; movies of Cowboy and Indians, Fred and Ginger; Mickey and Judy; the New York Worlds Fair; and Pearl Harbor, which forced them to leave home and go to war in places they could hardly find on a map.

REVIEW

What great fun! Ive never been to Brooklyn, and I feel I know the old
place - and love it. Although those simple, innocent, carefree, halcyon
pre-war days of 50, 60, 70 years ago are long gone, they surely come alive in this
charming, laugh-out-loud poignant memoir of Brooklyn. DGuido writes as if
hes talking to his reader over a beer, making the story both appealing and very
accessible - a la Neil Simon, in tone and the story itself.

Thanks to the author for recapturing a kinder, sweeter, gentler time with
such wonderful recall. Id love to send this book to several former
Brooklyn-ite friends. I cant imagine anyyone from that era or place whod not enjoy
this breezy, good read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 18, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462841684

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Copyright © 2002 by George DiGuido.

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Contents

S I X F O R E W O R D S S I X

O N E

TWO

T H R E E

F O U R

F I V E

S I X

S E V E N

E I G H T

N I N E

TEN

E L E V E N

T W E L V E

T H I R T E E N

F O U R T E E N

F I F T E E N

S I X T E E N

S E V E N T E E N

E I G H T E E N

N I N E T E E N

T W E N T Y

T W E N T Y-O N E

T W E N T Y-T W O

T W E N T Y-T H R E E

T W E N T Y-F O U R

T W E N T Y-F I V E

T W E N T Y-S I X

T W E N T Y-S E V E N

T W E N T Y-E I G H T

T W E N T Y-N I N E

To my Mother, my Father,

and my brothers, Charlie and Mike;

the solid infrastructure for this book.

And to Barbara, who said: Why don’t you write it all down?

S I X F O R E W O R D S S I X

Before going off to World War II, 791 Coney Island Avenue was the last place in which I lived. I say place. Home may be a better word though I won’t call it that because a home seems more like it should be a building of its own. Or is that a house? After the war I lived in my first true house: four rooms, four walls and a G. I. mortgage. Buildings that people live in are variously called: house, home, residence, domicile, dwelling, habitat, apartment, condo, quarters, digs, dump, shack, pad. Pad, that’s it. 791 was the launch pad to the rest of my life.

Throughout the years of my fourth through sixth decades I was haunted by a recurring dream. In them I was always somewhere in the city, chiefly Brooklyn, though at times Manhattan or Queens, either on foot or some form of conveyance. In these dreams I was always on my way back to 791 Coney Island Avenue though this goal was never made explicit, that is, I never said, Well, I think I’ll head home now. Rather this was manifestly understood. In one dream I and kid brother Mike were walking somewhere near Marine Park. I was leading. I took Gerritsen Avenue to Nostrand and headed east on Kings Highway. We walked and walked. It was the wrong way. I woke up. Other times I was on a subway train near Washington Heights, or at the World’s Fair grounds, or in downtown Brooklyn; none of the trains ever reached Cortelyou Road-my stop. One time I did get all the way back to Coney Island Avenue, walking on the west side of the street a half a block from where I lived. That close. Then a blank. At times I was driving a car or was on a bus, but always, always, my mode of transportation was heading me back in the general direction of home. Never once, never but never in these dreams-and over the years there must have been a hundred of them-was my dream resolved by my arrival back at 791. I would awake.

Or the scene would shift. Or the dream would vanish. I never got home.

In the year 1609 Henry Hudson, engaged by the Dutch East India Company to search for a Northwest Passage to the Orient, sailed his vessel, Half Moon, north through a narrow waterway, discovering a land-locked bay of immense size and beauty. For hours he had been coursing westward along a coast dotted with low hills and white sand beaches. Inside the bay off his starboard beam the land he had been following terminated in a pulse of soft green hills rising to a height of more than two hundred feet. The Dutch who followed him called this place Bruekelen-broken land. Later, the English anglicized it to Brooklyn.

Since the 791 address was so integral to my experience, I have imagined a scenario about how its site may have figured in the lives of people before me: 1630.

Indian Chief: Here is where I have decided to build my hut. Tell the council they are to move the Masssapequas westward to this place. Subordinate: What shall I give as the reason, O chief? Chief: This land lies halfway between the clam fisheries south, and where the-men-who-wear-too-many-clothes now live on the tip of the island they bought from the Manhattans. We will barter with these men.

1776.

General Washington: I trust we can stay a step ahead of the British, but the men are tired and we must halt. This is a pleasant plain. What did you say the Dutch called it?

Aide: Vlackebos, sir-wooded plain. Flat Bush is how we translate it.

Washington: We will bivouac here and resume our retreat in the morning. Inform the troops.

1827:

Land developer: As I have said, sir, this is an excellent and still open area. It is called Flatbush, part of the old Dutch Midwout section. A remarkable value for being so close to New York, don’t you think?

Financier: Yes. Open an office on this site and draw up some plats. Give the streets names such as Albemarle, Rugby, Stratford, Argyle and Dorchester.

1938:

Fanny Guido: Mike, I found a new place for us to live, at 791 just a few doors south. The kids can still stay at P. S. 139.

Michael Guido: Again, Fan? Haven’t we already moved seven times in the last nine years?

Fanny: Mike, by taking the apartment on the top floor we save five dollars rent every month.

Mike: Oh, OK. I’ll have the guys on the truck give us a hand.

Casting about for a phrase to describe the milieu that was Brooklyn, New York, before the second World War and what it was like to grow up there, I am tempted to say it was a time now gone with the wind.. Unfortunately, the phrase has been taken.

The words: Last night I dreamed I went to Brooklyn again are also appropriate. But someone said something like that in describing a place called Manderley.

Nevertheless both phrases describe precisely how I feel about the time and place in which I and other Brooklyn kids lived during those halcyon days before we were all abruptly catapulted into adulthood by the housepainter from Munich. Being neither sociologist nor historian, I shall not go into the million reasons why those times no longer exist. Instead, I will describe that place as I fondly recall it from the not too deep recesses of my mind; that particular, magical, melting-pot place called Brooklyn, and that time now gone with the wind.

Most likely all the people born in Brooklyn during the first two, three or four decades of the 20th century have left the place. I doubt they have forgotten it. With passing years they have probably become aware that in the borough of their birth, over a very short span of time, something unprecedented happened. In that unique and small spot on the earth called Kings County some combination of things conspired to come together to spawn a truly outstanding crop of first generation Americans. What it was no one can tell; a state of mind, perhaps-an attitude shared in common by their parents which said: let’s-get-the-hell-out-of (country) and-build-us-a-better-life-for-our-kids. The mar-

velous result was George Gershwin, Barbra Streisand, Beverly Sills, Edward Teller, Larry King, Barbara Stanwyck, Carl Sagan, Frank Capra, Georgia O’Keefe, Leonard Bernstein, Vince Lombardi, Billy Rose, Malcom Forbes, Charles Ives, Julius LaRosa, Shirley Chisholm, Danny Kaye, Irwin Shaw, Roger Sessions, Mae West, Robert Merrill, Paul Mazursky, Woody Allen, Irving Thalberg, Norman Mailer, Eli Wallach, Lou Gosset, Jr., Dom DeLuise, Isaac Asimov and Joan Rivers, to name a few.

Could I have possibly played Ringolevio, Johnny-on-the-Pony, Stickball and Stoopball on the same streets as some of these? Twirled yo-yos on identical corners? Spun-the-bottle in the backs of the same halls?

At the beginning of life how can one have any inkling of that which lies ahead? Do any of us spend a moment speculating on this when we are ten, twelve, even eighteen? In our early years how can we know the length and wonderful potential of the road that stretches immaculate before us all? In what way, for instance, could I have foreseen all the marvelous doors to the rooms off that road which awaited my key and mine alone? Looking back I do not consider I have missed one of any particular consequence, and if I did I will never know it. Looking back it is clear that I entered into one I should not have. But I am convinced that my happy, formative years on the streets of Brooklyn helped shape my trenchantly positive approach to life. I cannot therefore imagine how any door I passed could have led to any greater fulfillment than that which I have been lucky enough to experience.

O N E

In the year 1901 Carlo and Giovanina Iodice left Portici, a small town on the Bay of Naples in the shadow of Vesuvio, no more than a couple of tomato throws from the city of Naples itself. Boarding ship with two children in tow and their few belongings crammed into two large bags, their differing states of mind were all too visible on their Neapolitan faces: Carlo’s was lighted with pure elation; his wife’s-because the decision to leave was unilaterally her husband’s-mirrored gloom itself.

For three years Carlo had worked as a barber on North German Lloyd liners out of Naples to New York. Crossing after crossing had built his dream. The more his ship pulled into New York’s harbor and he saw its welcoming statue high on its pedestal, the stronger became his conviction to leave his homeland. Countless times at day’s end with his vessel moored in her Hudson River berth and all passengers ashore, he had leaned at the ship’s rail gazing at the wondrous Mondo Nuovo skyline, promising himself and his family those shimmering, golden skyscrapers. Several times he had gone into the city itself with his friend and shipboard worker, Tomaso Paolucci, whose brother lived in Brooklyn, and he fell in love with what he saw.

On a dreary April day in Portici when a pouring rain seeped through the cracks in the stone-walled house in which they lived, turning the dirt floor to mud-a not uncommon occurrence-he said to his wife, Giovanina, I have decided we should leave Italy and go to America.

His wife had heard this before and had always talked him out of it. Now she dredged up the arguments that had always worked, in addition to a new one, as new as the baby she had given birth to in February, a daughter christened as Filomena-my mother to be.

This time the arguments did not work. "Please, Carlo. Can you not get this idea out of your mind? We are Italians, not Americans. I have just given you another child and our Giovanni is barely three-years-old, they are too young to travel. Please, mia caro, America is so far away. I am afraid of it. I don’t want to leave Mama and Papa and my sisters and brothers. What will I do without them?"

You have a husband. You have children.

Mama does not want me to go. She says the land is full of savages who kill people as soon as they move away from the cities and into the countryside. Mama goes every Sunday all the way up to San Marcellino in Napoli, to the basilica where she was baptized, to pray to Saint Teresa and light a candle so God will change your mind.

"God will not change my mind and I will not change it. It is good that we go. Many of our people have been leaving our country. I hear the Germans on the ship all the time saying that many of their families have gone to America and they like it there very much. Now we will go too. We have nothing here. A cold stone house and a ground that shakes and frightens us every time Vesuvio feels like belching. "

No, Carlo. We have something precious here. We have our families who love us. If you leave you will break the heart of your mother. She loves you very much, you are her eldest son. Think of her.

It is no longer my duty, Giovanina, to think of my mother. Papa will take care of her, and Pietro is old enough to help. I am thinking about you. And our children. I am thinking about a better life for us.

"Carlo, in America our bambini will have no family. We will have nothing. We will have no church. No festival days. We will know no one."

That is not true. Tomaso-you know him-the young man from Pozzuolli who works with me on the ship. He has a brother who lives in New York in a part called Brooklyn. He has already lived there for a year and now Tomaso is going to move there too. We will know them.

Carlo! Tomaso is not married and you have told me yourself that he’s a little wild. He can go and do what he likes. We cannot. He will fit in good with the savages over there. Don’t you remember Father Benedetto telling us all to remain in this country, poor as it is. He said Italy needs us. Remember the time he told us about the American war between brothers. What kind of people must they be to spill the blood of their own kind? Brutal, I say.

"Ah, Garibaldi and Mazzini, they did not spill Italian blood during the risorgimento? Do you think they fought only the French and the Austrians? If Americans are brutal are we Italians not? A noble cause is worth noble blood and we are now a united people because of this." Modulating his voice to a less than lord and master tone, he took his wife in his arms. "Mia cara, you will like it there, just as I do. Listen to this, this is wonderful. Tomaso’s brother lives in a house where there are many other of our people in all the streets and houses around him. So many that you might even think it is Napoli. His house has water inside, not a well outside. There is a toilet down the hall. All the gas lamps have been removed and they have the new lights that work with electricity; it is almost a miracle. Giovanina, nobody told me this. I saw it for myself?’

Convinced that Carlo would begin official proceedings to carry out his threat-and to Giovanina it was just that-she resorted to two days of inconsolable weeping which terribly upset her three-year-old son who matched her tear for tear. Carlo was resolute. He knew there was a better world out there. Thanks be to God for his job aboard ship and for showing him the way to the new world. How, otherwise, would he have found it?

September 19, 1901, dawning sultry and bright over the placid Bay of Naples with hulking gray Vesuvio wisping smoke into the late summer sky as if ready to belch again-that was Carlo’s day. At last. The day his ocean liner weighed anchor, spewed soot and smoke and slipped out of its lovely blue port between the two green jewels of Isolas Ischia and Capri, bound for Gibraltar and points West.

Would this be an Italian story if that day had not begun with some overtones of Commedia dell Arte? Of course not. Carlo, shepherding three-year-old Giovanni (John) before him, forced his wife-whom he had decided to call Jenny because it sounded more American-up the ship’s gangplank as she flailed about, calling down all the Saints from Heaven even as she cradled my seven-month-old mother-to-be in her arms.

Ah, but the Napolitano spirit is nothing if not resolute. Jenny, while Carlo was busy checking in with shipboard officials, voted with her feet. Defiantly rubbing spit on the spot where the vaccination needle had pricked her arm-thinking that would negate its effect-she got herself and her children escorted back down the gangplank by a ship’s officer who believed her story that there was yet another child who, in the commotion of boarding, had somehow gotten separated. She would look for him and be right back. Refusing the man’s offer of help, she lost herself in the milling mass of frightened, garlicky emigrants on the dock. Carlo caught up with her as she was trying to arrange transit back to Portici.

In fact, both sets of my grandparents, following the streets-of-gold American dream at the very floodtide of southern European immigration, had guessed right, and as a result both my mother and father-to-be were brought to a rip-roaring, ready-to-stand-up-and-be-counted young country. Having successfully gotten through the first World War by 1918, and a mini-depression which followed in ‘20, ‘21, the country was on its way to becoming industrialized, prosperous and sassy.

Prohibition was in full swing, but bootlegging was rampant and times were good. America, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.

In America, Borough of Brooklyn, Jenny cried. Carlo, take me back. Take me back, Carlo. I want to go home.

Si, si, mia cara, her husband said, "when Roma comes here I will take you back."

Grandma thought he meant a ship called Roma. But Grandpa meant the city, Roma. (If he intended this to be humorous, it was not.) When the ship never came, Grandma finally realized she would not see her beloved country nor her parents again.

Meanwhile she had won a concession. She made Carlo promise to give up his seafaring. Which he did. Apparently needing the smell of brine in his nose, however, he took a job as stevedore on the Brooklyn docks at Bush Terminal. There he carried two-hundred pound sacks of tea and sugar from ship to dock, and then to wholesale warehouses across from Bush.

Pilferage was common along the wharves bordering Third Avenue in those days, and Grandpa Carlo was as guilty of this as the next poor, working stiff, though he consistently resisted efforts to cooperate with the more serious practices of racketeering, loan-sharking, extortions and murder fostered by the Longshoremen’s Union bosses who controlled dock doings. Many of these men were violent criminals, with most if not all under the control of Mob boss Joe Adonis. Grandma Jenny later became convinced it was Grandpa’s lack of cooperation that eventually led to his undoing. Under suspicious circumstances one day, a swinging boom from a giant crane struck his head, knocking him from the loading deck of a freighter into the water. He was fished out in very poor condition and later died from pneumonia related to the injuries he received. But he had accomplished his goal. He had lived in his new country for thirteen years-too short, perhaps, but long enough to assure his progeny of having that better life of his dreams.

The funeral at Brooklyn’s GreenWood Cemetery was completely

Italian, of course, meaning the full litany of tearful wailings, tons of flowers and threats from my grandmother to fling herself into the open grave and onto the casket so she could be with him forever, amen. After the family tossed their obligatory handsful of dirt into the hole, Father Marsala of St. Michael’s-who loved Carlo for reasons more noble than the fact Carlo occasionally donated a pilfered piece of imported china to the Parish house-gave a spiritually moving eulogy in which he equated GreenWood with Carlo’s not-quite-final port of call. The good priest looking heavenward, all the devout Catholics nodded tearfully, knowing precisely what he meant.

When the Montis-my grandmother’s family in Italy-got news of their son-in-law’s accident and demise, they wrote, urging their daughter to return with her children to her homeland on the next boat. To them Carlo was a good-for-nothing renegade who had callously abandoned Italia Bella-and, see, did we not tell you he’d spirit you away to America, that dangerous, savage place? Jenny, having had time to evaluate life in her new country and finding it good, sent back a letter which included a crude sketch of an American flag with the inscription: Io sono Americana. She signed it Jenny Yodice (Yo’-diss), having willingly accepted the Americanized spelling and pronunciation of Iodice (Yo-dee’-chay) supplied by a lackey at Ellis Island. Sadly-though not inexplicably, given the Italian temperament-she never heard from her family again.

My father, Michael DiGuido, was five years old when he landed with his parents on Ellis in 1903. They came from a region on the other side of Naples, north, on the road to Monte Cassino, site of the stalemate battle between the Germans and the Allies during WWII, and not too many miles from where the Iodices lived. He could remember only two things about Italy: the volcano smoking, and people screaming hysterically when their church burned to the ground.

At Ellis the family name, DiGuido, was also Americanized by some helpful official to just plain Guido. Grandfather Giorgio DiGuido, thanking God that his family was being admitted at all, said nothing, accepting the change. Adding insult to injury the official called them,

Guy-doe, a corruption of the more euphonious Gwee-doe. Grandfather used the Ellis Island pronunciation all his life (trying to be American, I presume), and my father followed suit. When I was in my fifties I changed it back to my grandfather’s name in a Chicago court: DiGuido, pronounced in the Italian manner.

Most immigrants could not afford to let their children attend school for too many years. My mother, Filomena-more often than not now being called Fanny-was taken out of seventh grade and pressed into service in her mother’s dry-goods store on Brooklyn’s Third Avenue and Eleventh Street. There she learned about money and human nature, which, coupled with her empirical knowledge of just about everything else, was enough to get her handily through the rest of her long and beautiful life of ninety-two-plus years.

Father grew up tough on the aromatic banks of the industrially-polluted Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn’s Red Hook section. He was exceedingly strong, with a barrel chest, forearms like tree limbs and big hands. Not permitted to go beyond eighth grade, he set to work doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, and in 1918, with America’s entry into WWI, enlisted in the United States Army. He served in South Carolina and the only battle he saw came when he and another buck private both wanted to take the Captain’s horse out for a warm-up canter. Rolling on the ground locked in mortal combat they fell into a trench and spent the next few days in sick bay, each with a severely sprained back.

On being mustered out my father went to work baling bags at a paper factory in Bush Terminal, where he twice won a competition as the fastest baler of bags in Bush. The story he enjoyed telling most about his work concerned a ride in one of the terminal’s cage-like freight elevators. As it was ascending, the cable snapped and the car fell three floors to the basement in a crash of twisted metal and splintered wood. An African-American worker was with him and of their reactions Dad said, He turned white and I turned black. For the rest of his life my father refused to step foot on any elevator, even when visiting friends who lived on the second floor of an apartment building, though brother Charlie and I coaxed, chided and reassured him to death. My mother remembers his walking up twelve flights of stairs in a Manhattan building rather than to get on one of those damn things again.

missing image file

Dad on the right, making sure he’s next to the prettiest of the Bush Terminal workers. 1926.

My father left his Bush Terminal job because he wanted to join the New York Police Department, but was turned down because he lacked a quarter of an inch in height. This is why the NYPD turned out to be Irish. All Irish guys are a quarter inch taller than Italian guys. My father then answered a newspaper ad from a company with a machine that could Stretch Your Body A Full HalfInch-the 1920 version of a medieval torture rack. He scraped up three bucks and went to get stretched. It didn’t work. Dad wanted his money back. The man would not give it. My father hit him and broke the guy’s jaw. Fortunately Dad had signed no form, so they could not trace him to his home.

Someone told him about another City of New York department, the DSC, Department of Sanitation Corps. This group did not care if you were a midget as long as you could hoist a garbage can or drive a truck. Dad had driven Army trucks, loved to drive, and with this in mind he joined the DSC.

Mother met father through a marriage broker. In January of 1922 Grandma Jenny was at the Columbia Street Fish Market looking for a nice fresh piece of baccala.

Ah, Giovanina, she heard, "Come stai

It was Signora Baldacci whom she had not seen for two years. How grown your daughters must be by now, she said. And pretty. Are some of them ready for marriage?

Well, yes, Grandma had two out of five: Fanny, Julia, Mary, Lena and Rose. Fanny being the eldest, she was first at bat, with Julia in the on-deck circle. The rest were safely sequestered in the dugout. I have this lovely boy, Senora Baldacci explained. "His mother is a friend of my comare’s uncle’s cousin."

She didn’t say that the boy had been engaged before because this may have frightened off Grandma. The engagement had ended in this way: Calling on his betrothed one day, the boy had paused outside the partially opened door to his fiancee’s family’s flat when he heard her screaming at her father with very unladylike language. The father slapped her face and left to go to work. When the boy entered, the girl directed her wrath at him.

Stunned, he said, If you treat your father with such disrespect will you do the same to me? Maybe we should both think about this a little more before we get married.

The girl uttered an oath which he took as his cue to leave, disappointed and saddened at how something he had counted on could so suddenly blow up in his face. No sooner had he reached the street, two stories below, when the girl flung open her parlor window and threw the engagement ring onto the slushy sidewalk at his feet. The End.

At the fish market Signora Baldacci and Grandma Yodice agreed that the two young people should meet each other. A week later the boy, twenty-three-year-old Michael Guido, was escorted through a howling snow storm by the broker to the Yodice’s Third Avenue flat above Grandma’s drygoods store. Only the four principals were present for this getting to know you session, both Grandfathers having by this time left this earth for realms beyond. The Yodice boys were not there: John was married, Henry was working and Charles was at P.S. 124, a block away. The Yodice girls had been excused by their mother, lest Michael, seeing daughter number two or even three, might, God forbid, like them more than Fanny, the only one whose turn had come to meet the opposite sex.

In the parlor, Fanny and Michael were placed at a discreet distance across from each other, though not so discreet that they could not eye each other appreciatively. Grandma Yodice served Marsala wine in small crystal glasses and almond biscottis bought at Angelo’s across the street. Fanny helped serve and in this way got herself momentarily closer to the male lead of the drama, who looked very strong and masculine with his five o’clock shadowed face, strong nose and a head full of coarse black hair. He smiled at her and eyed her ankles-which were trim-as she served him. Fanny was a petite twenty-year-old with straight shiny black hair and bright brown eyes. And since this was designed to be more a video event than audio-at least as far as the two lead players were concerned-Fanny and Michael did not talk to each other.

Pretty sloppy out, Michael said to no one in particular as soon as he entered the apartment, and the way my mother remembered it, aside from an occasional yes or no to a question from Grandma Yodice, these were the only words the young man got to speak during the entire period of his inspection.

Forgive my asking this, Signora, the broker said, "because I’m sure I know the answer, but the two young people will of course attend Mass every Sunday?"

She appeared uncomfortable in asking, but as agent for Signora Guido she had to return with hard facts so the boy’s mother could evaluate what type of family her son might be getting in to; and since this was a preliminary meeting it was not yet essential that the boy’s mother be present.

"As you