WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Brooklyn in the 1940’s and 1950’s has been so well recorded by writers of my generation as to discourage yet another painting of a too familiar landscape. But, after years of so justifying procrastination, a heart attack presented me with a period of medical disability and a sense of time running out with a promise unkept. And so, for my family and whoever else may find some enjoyment in it, this project was begun.
What I have to offer is the familiar from an unfamiliar perspective. I wasn’t born in Brooklyn; I came as a child at the age of seven. I wasn’t an immigrant from a foreign land; I came from a Saturday Evening Post sort of rural America to which Brooklyn seemed like a foreign land. I wasn’t Irish, Jewish, Italian, or Black; what I was, though the term was then unfamiliar, was a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). I was a Protestant minister’s son, coming with my family to a place where we were instantly transformed into members of a disappearing minority group.
Some have called this era “Brooklyn’s glory years,” and in the overall picture as well as in most of my own experience, this was surely true. But, much as I loved that time and place, I belonged to a minority for whom those were years of decline and decay. In our home and church, we lived amid the faded glory of a gas-lit Victorian golden age, when Brooklyn was “the Borough of Churches,” and Protestant gentility was the dominant cultural force. Our church’s members were the remnants of early Dutch and English settlers whose produce and dairy farms had made the Gravesend section of Brooklyn one of the few New York City garden-spots that survived into the twentieth century. But a huge wave of immigration, and an accompanying massive building boom in Brooklyn in the years between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, had swallowed up the farmlands, laid down a grid of city blocks, and created mile after mile of brick row houses and small tenement buildings. The older residents were surrounded, overwhelmed, and eventually driven out to the suburbs, by the influx of tens of thousands of newcomers whose arrival quickly turned Gravesend into Brooklyn’s largest settlement of Italian Americans.
The children of these immigrants, the first American-born generation, were the bilingual friends and acquaintances among whom I grew up. I was in, but not of, their world; and the perspective this gave me is the substance of my story. What we had in common was parents whose ways represented a past being rapidly left behind – theirs in one way and mine in another. What we shared was childhood and youth, a neighborhood and a city, at a time when even Brooklyn had a certain hard-edged innocence filled with promise and hope.
But what to name this story? Names have always been a problem for me, starting with my own. My mother named me “Lionel.” It had no family history behind it, nor was it a tribute to some admired Lionel in my mother’s past. It was chosen simply for its oddity and so that I, like my brother LeRoy after me, might share the same first initial as our parents: Linden and Lucy. My mother thought it was cute. My father’s thoughts on the subject are unknown; but cuteness was far beyond his comfort level, and Lionel was a name he could rarely bring himself to pronounce. Throughout the fifty-five years of our acquaintance, he rarely called me anything but “Kid.” I left our house a thousand times on the wings of his injunction, “Tell ‘em all you know, Kid.” I came up to bat in a softball tournament in Cocoa, Florida sometime in the mid-1970’s when, for all I knew, my father was hundreds of miles away in Brooklyn, and his voice called from the bleachers behind the plate, “Knock it outta here, Kid.”
I visited him for the last time just before his 80th birthday in July of 1991. He was a patient at Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital
