So…Booman wants to take issue with my assertion that the suburban white South Shore of Long Island was a “middle class/lower middle class hellhole” in the late ’50s/early ’60s, eh?
Wuz he there?
Of course not.
Did he learn to fight his way home in Jr. High School until the larger denizens of that particular hell decided that maybe it wasn’t worth the pain to fuck with him?
I kinda doubt it.
And then he says:
Also, if most of your friends in high school went to top-flight schools, that tells me all I need to know.
OK…that’s it.
Read on for the truth of the matter from a survivor.
A spiritual survivor of a nasty place and time.
Once again:
Also, if most of your friends in high school went to top-flight schools, that tells me all I need to know.
Then you do not “need to know” much to make up your mind, Booman.
Let’s get specific, here. OK? A little real, I-was-there-and-here-it-is history lesson follows.
I chose my friends very carefully, Booman. Very carefully. Still do. As you say above, being able to choose highly intelligent friends in such a hellhole may precisely be explained by the “high, upwardly-mobile expectations of [the} post-war Jewish community, [the members of which] had already demonstrated that path by getting out of the [c]ity.” The whole school system from 7th grade on up operated on a tracking system. Advanced, Regents and Applied. Loosely translated, that meant smart, normal and not so smart. Loosely societally translated it meant mostly Jewish, mostly Protestant and mostly Catholic. So it went. Segregation was not limited to African-Americans and other people of color. It was just…a little subtler. I was surrounded in class by easily 60% or more Jewish kids for 7 years after grammar school, and of the maybe 8 or 10 students out of my 500 or so-sized graduating class who went to Ivy League-level schools, I can only remember two who weren’t Jewish. I was too rebellious to go that route myself although I had the SAT scores, but my “crowd”…one of them, anyway… was comprised of mostly those people minus a couple of real, dedicated classroom wonk-nerds.
I had another crowd…the musicians. Almost all Irish, Jewish, Polish or Italian. All except me were in the lower tracking segments and all of us were fuck-ups of one kind or another, but also none of us were willing to be picked on by the athlete bosses of the school.
And yes, Merrick was a white town. Pre-Civil Rights Act America was segregated, lest you forget. By law in some states, by custom almost everywhere. (It still is, of course, only…differently.) I broke that line quite consciously at the time by going to jazz clubs and sitting in, by studying with black musicians and by just generally being a decade or two or three ahead of the societal pack. Why? How? I dunno. Just lucky, I guess. The music hooked me, and it was straight up…up, up and away, really…from there. There was one black kid in the school…he was from Freeport/Roosevelt too (see below) but somehow the districting lines had included his house in lily-white Merrick. His last name was “Lincoln” and he was a long distance runner. Those ironies escaped me at the time, although they now hold great poetic meaning for me.
A 5 minute drive west from Merrick were two areas…a northern section of Freeport and most of Roosevelt…that were almost entirely black. The Freeport section had been Italian for a couple of generations but had white-flighted sometime just after W.W. II…a common story on the whole Northeast coast. The only other dedicated jazz player of my age that I knew in the area, God rest his soul, fell victim to the jazz/heroin thing and is long gone now. He was Italian, and his grandparents still lived in their old Freeport neighborhood. We used to go over to their house where his grandmother would ply us with massive amounts of wonderful Italian food, then go to a little bar around the corner and sit in with whomever was playing there if they would let us do so. They usually did. Real musicians are usually totally without any prejudice whatsoever other than an aversion to no-playing assholes and their cousins, no-listening assholes. We were plainly trying to play, at the very least.
15 minutes north was a great jazz club right in the heart of wealthier-than-shit Westbury…the Cork and Bib. To give you an idea of the cultural dissonance of the place, next door was a shop that sold polo equipment. (!!!) I used to go there every chance I got to hear musicians like John Coltrane, Miles Davis and the Maynard Ferguson and Stan Kenton bands. Eventually I was kind of adopted by one of the truly great jazz bass players, Chubby Jackson (also from Freeport) and he started to school me in the ways of the jazz scene. At the same time the wonderful jazz trumpet/cornet player Carmel Jones had sessions there mid-week and he was very kind to me as well. I used to take the LIRR into NYC and go to the classic jazz clubs of the time…Birdland, the Village Vanguard, the Five Spot etc…and also search out the great jazz recordings in little hole-in-the-wall record stores. There was essentially no jazz available on TV or radio…no modern jazz, anyway…except for a couple of late, late night stations, one out of Harlem and the other out of Baltimore. I didn’t get much sleep for several years as a result.
Other than the jazz scene and the beginnings of real integration in the sports world, almost all black/white societal interfaces in most of America were pretty much limited to master/servant relationships. Waiters, maids, car repairmen…worker/boss/customer kinds of things. I was lucky enough to have been catapulted out of that situation by the music, but brother…a powerful catapult was necessary at the time for that sort of thing to happen. The nascent hypnomedia certainly didn’t give anyone a clue. Bet on it.
Take a look at the Buttafuoco/Lohan pictures from my previous post (Both from that “Merrick” of the soul.), Booman, and smell the hellholeness of it all.
Some of us escaped fairly whole, but most of my classmates went straight down into the whites-only America that has, 30 and 40 and 50 years later, produced the political base that has supported creatures like George W. Butch, Senator Cus “I am not a bagman!” D’Amato, Representative Peter “Nuke those wogs!” King, and the whole Fox News system.
If that ain’t a “hellhole”, I don’t know what is.
I was there, brother, and I ain’t playin’.
Not a bit of it.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
