People did live before cell phones. I was one of them.
I was born in 1931. My first decade came during the Great Depression. We were lucky since my father had a steady job with the police department. We lived initially on University Avenue in the Bronx up until I was about 6. Then my mother developed tuberculosis and Dad sent me to New Jersey to live with my Aunt May Stuart, my mother’s sister.
Aunt May had married a man who had two grown boys and two girls. Three of the children were in college and the younger girl was in high school. They took me in for about a year until my mother recovered and we were reunited again in the Bronx. It was then we moved to an apartment house on a grassy road called Mosholu Parkway. My father’s sister, Marge, and her husband, Arthur Potter, already lived in the same building but they had no children.
The good life
I will now try to tell you how we lived in the 1930s without cell phones. Personal stories of that era will be in a later chapter. Our family did not even have a telephone. I had to go next door to my Aunt Marge, who had one. This became a problem for me later on when I began dating girls.
You may not believe this, but despite no cell phones, air conditioning, computers and refrigerators, we felt we were enjoying a good life. We even had an elevator to take us to our apartment on the sixth floor. There was a kitchen, bath, two bedrooms and a living room.
We had a big radio but no television until about 1950. TV was first seen as an exhibition at the 1939 World's Fair. It was held in Queens, across the street from where the National Tennis Center is now located. The fair was held on the same site as the World's Fair held in 1964-65. The symbol of that fair was a huge globe that is still there today.
My family did not have a refrigerator. That is why I still use the term ice box. All the apartments had a dumb waiter that was a pulley system to bring up ice and other items from the basement. That would keep food from spoiling quickly, but daily shopping for the women of the house was almost a daily chore.
Our milk was delivered every other day by the same system. There were many cars on the road at this time, but the two milk companies had small trucks pulled by horses. There were bigger trucks that carried large kegs of beer and pulled by big horses called Clydesdales.
The major brewery in New York was the Ruppert Brewery on Third Avenue near 95th Street. It is now called the Ruppert apartment complex. The brewery was owned by a Colonel Jacob Ruppert, who also owned the New York Yankees at that time and it was he who brought Babe Ruth to New York.
The street behind our house was the Grand Concourse and it extended from one block beyond us all the way to the end of the Bronx. It was four-lanes wide divided by two green strips of grass. Even in the 1900s there were cars and buses. About eight blocks south, this road was crossed by a major west-east road that cut that part of the Bronx in half. This was Fordham Road and it was a major shopping street, with a few large department stores like Alexander's.
The public transportation across this street was trolley cars. Initially, they were pulled by a horse but in my day they had become electrified. They were wide open in the summer and only a small grating was left to protect the passengers. Cars could travel the same road.
We had subways in my day. The original ones were elevated above ground and, by the 1950s, several others had been constructed above ground. There was another one about seven blocks down Mosholu Parkway which was above ground and it was called the Third Avenue "L.'' This last one was our choice when we would visit Grandmother Walsh. She lived at Third Avenue on 87 Street, only a few doors down from the station.
In the summer, the subway windows were taken out to make the cars cooler. There were only some mild grill work that kept you from falling out onto the tracks.
My neighborhood
When I was in late grammar school, I had a paper route delivering the Bronx Daily newspaper several days a week. I got a small fee. However, any extra income we got was to take back empty soda bottles and collect the deposit money. That was bad but we realized that was the way the system worked.
A few blocks from my house, an old reservoir had been turned into a huge tract and playground. As bad as I am on ice skates, I was good on roller skates. We played hockey. I used some of my money to rent a bike once in a while and rode it around the old reservoir.
I would also buy gum and baseball cards with gum. They still sell it that way even today. You would trade the cards or sometimes just flip them like dice.
We had a strip of grass down the middle of the entire length of Mosholu Parkway, which was great for playing football. I always played since I owned the football. I always wondered if I was selected for my playing ability or because I had the ball. I think it was because I had the ball. They did not let me play at West Point. They had their own balls.
Hot summers
With no air conditioning, summers were particularly hot. Down in the city, people developed the wherewithal to open fire hydrants. Sometimes, Uncle Arthur and Aunt Marge would take us in their car up to Playland in Rye Beach to go swimming. Dad took his vacation in the summer and we had a house in the Rockaways. Then later, I would go to a public beach in Westchester called Tibbetts Brook.
By the 1940s, we finally got air conditioning, particularly in the movie theaters. We would go on Saturdays for 15 cents and spend the entire day there with one feature after the other and no repetition. Since there were only kids, it was bedlam, but it was cool. They had a matron who was like a ringmaster at a circus.
The national game at that time was baseball. People like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were heroes for young boys like me. My father was a baseball fan, as were all American males, except me. However, I would go with my friends to see the games and be one of the boys. We did not have money enough to buy a ticket.
To get to Yankee Stadium, we would take the Lexington Avenue subway that was two blocks from the house. It cost a nickel. We would get off at the161st Street station and bring our lunch. We would stand at the front end of the subway platform and could see over the bleachers and watch the game from a distance. There was no transistor radios in those days, but we could see the scoreboard. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for baseball, I was one of the boys. Eventually, I outgrew that attitude. At the end of the game, we crossed over to the other platform without paying a second nickel and went home.
Turning on the TV
The next thing that happened was television. This occurred in the late 1940s. There were few shows. One of the popular ones was wrestling from the Bronx Arena. As you were watching, the announcer would like to chew celery as one of the wrestlers was being twisted about.
The first big evening shows were opposite each other. One was a comedian by the name of Milton Berle. Then opposite him was a religious lecture by a brilliant bishop by the name of Fulton Sheen. You had to make up your mind to watch Uncle Miltie or Uncle Fultie.
That gives you some insight into the scientific and technical developments I grew up with. We had a good life. Never, ever did we ever think we were deprived.