HERBERT LOBSENZ

Standing in front of Theresa’s Drugstore, I would often see Maggie walk past, not exactly smiling, but with a happy expression—serene. Every time I saw her it made me wish I could get up the nerve to speak to her. This was before I even knew her name. I still thought of her as “Greer,” my favorite actress, who no matter whether marooned in the Alps with Mr. Chips or waiting for Charles Ranier to regain his memory, had that same serene expression I saw on Maggie’s face. Read the rest of this entry »

Big-Nose Frankie was five years older than the rest of us which meant: 1-we never called him Big-Nose to his face, and: 2-whenever we had a party we went to him to buy the gin because we were not allowed inside the Acker, Merrill & Condit liquor store on Broadway. Big Nose would buy London Gentleman, pour it into Beefeater bottles, charge us the extra seven dollars per bottle, and then dilute it with water, but not so much you couldn’t detect that distinctive London-Gentleman-benzene flavor.

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The Hot Dog Man parked his red and yellow pushcart on the southwest corner of 87th across from the construction site at 565 West End.  I would stand a couple of feet away and watch and he’d frown and tell me to stand back. I never bought anything. My mother had told me that he stored the hot dogs under his bed at night and that if I ate one I might get infantile paralysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Before our landlord switched to oil, I used to love watching the old three compartment coal trucks make deliveries to my apartment house on 88th and West End. The driver backed up to the sidewalk and took a shiny steel chute off some hooks on the side of the truck and ran it from a hatch at the back of the truck down through a trapdoor in the sidewalk. The coal would pour out of the hatch and down the chute to the storage bin in our basement. Read the rest of this entry »

The most interesting deliverymen to watch were the short, dark, silent men who pushed open carts with metal wheels that carried oblong blocks of ice. The blocks were two feet wide, two feet high, six or eight feet long and covered with quilts and burlap sacks to slow the melting. Read the rest of this entry »

There were dozens of guys with pushcarts along the streets—the hot dog man; the Eskimo Pie Man trying to compete against the Good Humor Man’s bells, white uniform, Sam Browne belt and freezer truck full of ice cream bars coated with shredded coconut and toasted almond; the short old man in a thick overcoat down to his shins with a brazier full of coal on his cart who sold chestnuts at the top of the steps of the downtown entrance of the 86th street subway station; and there were half a dozen different fruit and vegetable peddlers alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Every morning before seven, Sheffield Farms and Borden’s delivered milk and cream door-to-door in horse-drawn carts. The milk came in one quart glass bottles wide at the base, narrow at the neck, with an outer cover you threw away and an inner cover with a pull-up tab that you put back on after you poured a glass. Read the rest of this entry »

 The milkman came every morning in his horse-drawn cart, as did the man from Cushman’s with warm seeded rolls and cinnamon buns with raisins for my father’s breakfast. Thursdays, a man in a wood Model A wagon brought fresh butter and eggs from a farm in New Jersey, and Fridays a man with a pedal-operated wheel for sharpening knives and scissors came. He fixed umbrellas too. Read the rest of this entry »

Between the twenty story apartment houses on Riverside and West End, 88th Street was lined with five story single-family homes, some brownstone, some white stone. We knew the people in all the buildings and they knew our parents and our names and how we were doing in school. Read the rest of this entry »

Blue Book and I were playing stoop ball against Matt and Nate one Saturday and just as he went up to the wall to hit, a pigeon on the third floor released a thick wad that landed right on top of his head. Saturday was not one of his treatment days. He wasn’t wearing his snap-brim hat. He stopped in the middle of his approach and looked up. Read the rest of this entry »