Summer Reading: A Refulgent Novel and an Erudite Sports/Social History

 

First, the novel: Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies is another under-the-radar American classic, joining others I’ve read and written about in this space, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, John Williams’ Stoner, and A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley

 

The likeable narrator and protagonist, Nathan Glass, is a lung cancer survivor, now retired from a life insurance company.  He is divorced and seeks anonymity by relocating to his old Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.  He envisions it as the place for his life’s ending.  Instead, it would be a new beginning.

 

Park Slope is the perfect setting for the metafictional parts of the novel as Auster himself lived there.  He passed away earlier this year; it was his obituary that reminded me to read him.  I was interested in this particular novel as I too had lived in Park Slope as a young adult during my first marriage. 

 

Nathan has no relationship with his ex wife other than being disdained by her.  He is estranged from his only daughter, Rachel, and Auster engineers their reconciliation as the consequence of a subplot.

 

So much of modern literature is about families coming apart.  Instead, Auster sees Nathan as a change agent, endowing him with a charisma that is instrumental in bringing families and people together, including a niece Aurora (“Rory”) and nephew, Tom.  In this regard, this is an unusually joyous post modern piece of fiction of redemption and second chances, so deeply satisfying.

 

Tom was a brilliant graduate student when Nathan last saw him years before.  Chance encounters plays a significant role in the novel such as when Nathan finds a dispirited Tom working in Brightman’s Attic, a local bookstore.  That encounter sets everything in motion.  He takes his nephew to lunch at Cosmic Diner where Nathan flirts more than usual with his favorite waitress, Marina, not only to impress Tom but because he was in “such buoyant spirits. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed [Tom}, and now it turned out that we were neighbors – living, by pure happenstance, just two blocks from each other in the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, NY.”

 

From there, a cast of unrelated characters are brought together in some way:

  Tom, his nephew and Rory, his niece (who was held captive by her second husband, a religious cult member).

  Rachel, Nathan’s daughter.

  Lucy, Rory’s nine year old daughter (who Rory sends alone to Tom in a daring attempt to free her daughter from the cult).

  Harry Dunkel (aka Brightman), ex convict, gay, a lover of books but engaged in art and manuscript forgery.

  Nancy Mazzuchelli (aka the “B.P.M. – Beautiful Perfect Mother”), who Tom has an unrealistic crush on, Uncle Nathan straightening that out, and who figures prominently at the novel’s denouement.

  Stanley Chowder, proprietor of the Chowder Inn in Vermont, which Tom and Nathan think of buying with Brightman, their idea of “Hotel Existence.”

  Honey Chowder, Stanley’s daughter, a 4^th grade unmarried teacher who invades Tom's life.

  Joyce, Nancy’s mother, a widow, who unexpectedly becomes Nathan’s lover.

 

There are more characters in the air, but these are the ones who Nathan, survivor of chemotherapy, keeper of “The Book of Human Folly,” his notebook of "every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I have committed during my long and checkered career as a man,” comes to touch or rescue in some way.  He literally rescues his niece, Rory:  “Aurora chose to talk to me because I was the one who had gone down to North Carolina and saved her, and even if we had been out of contact for many years prior to that afternoon, I was nevertheless her uncle, her mother’s only brother, and she knew that she could trust me.  So we got together for lunch several times a week and talked, just the two of us, sitting at a back table in the New Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, and little by little we became friends, in the same way her brother and I had become friends, and now that both of June’s children were back in my life, it was as if my baby sister had come alive in me again, and because she was the ghost who continued to haunt me, her children had now become my children.” 

 

234 Lincoln Place

I had such a personal investment in reading this book as I lived at 234 Lincoln Place for a couple of years.  I remember running from that brownstone apartment, frantically trying to get a cab on Flatbush Avenue at 2:00AM one night in late February, 1965 to get my ex wife who was in labor to the Brooklyn Hospital.  Auster mentions The Berkeley Carroll School at 181 Lincoln Place which would have been a half block from where we lived.  Such a school could not have existed then, before gentrification.  In fact, that is what stands out so strikingly reading the novel: the degree to which the neighborhood has changed just during my lifetime.  It’s become Brooklyn’s version of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, another one of my old abodes.  Many of the places he mentions, the diners, the bookstores, the schools, didn’t exist then.  But streets, such as Carroll Street, where our friends at the time, Morris Eaves and his wife lived, and 7^th avenue where we did our shopping, and of course Prospect Park, resonate.  The mention of Carroll Street reminded me of Morris, so I Googled my long forgotten acquaintance and school-mate who became a Professor and a well known William Blake scholar.  I thought I’d write him, sadly only to find his recent obituary. 

 

We moved from Park Slope as my ex wife wanted to go to graduate school after our son was born, so we moved back to downtown Brooklyn to be near LIU. 

 

I envy that Auster had developed deep roots there and his love of everything Park Slope glitters in this novel. 

 

Our protagonist/narrator, Nathan, after performing such healing reconciliations and introductions, has a medical emergency which again parallels one that deeply resonates.  He had all the symptoms and the pain of a heart attack.  And suddenly he’s in a hospital.  He was convinced his life was over. “I was in there with myself, rooting around with a kind of scrambled desperation, but I was also far away, floating above the bed, above the ceiling, above the roof of the hospital.  I know it doesn’t make any sense, but lying in that boxed-in enclosure with the beeping machines and the wires clamped to my skin was the closest I have come to being nowhere, to being inside myself and outside myself at the same time.  That’s what happens to you when you land in a hospital.  They take off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you stop being yourself.”

 

In the ER and in his room, while tests are being made, other patients come and go; they face a common foe.  I’ve been there myself on a number of occasions, and I know the feeling which Auster painfully resurrects.  While lying there his mind works overtime, trying to make sense of all of it and he has an epiphany for a business: “to form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared – and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of a life” (Actually, a damn good idea as he envisions the financing to be a surcharge on a life insurance policy – something he knows something about.  In effect, it’s a vanity book, but fully paid for via the insurance policy.  Why not?)

 

“[O]nce the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold on to for the rest of their lives.  Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all.”…“One should never underestimate the power of books.”  I emphasize the last sentence as it aptly describes The Brooklyn Follies and I can imagine the author talking to me, as a motivational statement to finish my own memoir which I now have in draft form, dragging my heels to complete merely because of ‘who cares?’ outside family and friends.  I think Auster would say “who cares who cares?”

 

Spoiler alert here about the ending (although I knew it in advance – there is even some foreshadowing --and the knowledge only intensified the impact for me).  Luckily for Nathan, the presumed heart attack turned out to be merely an inflamed esophagus and he is discharged from the hospital and is on his way home early in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, in a joyous mood about the future. “Overhead, the sky was the bluest of pure deep blues.” The conclusion of this early post 9/11 novel comes down like a sledgehammer.

 

There is a segue from the Auster book to the second, a work of non-fiction:  Auster was a baseball fan and in fact it was said he became a writer because as a kid he had an opportunity to get Willie Mays’ autograph but he didn’t have a pencil.  From there on in, he carried one, and a pad, and that began his writing career.  (No doubt the beginnings of “The Book of Human Folly”.) So as I was reading the Auster novel I was finishing what would most aptly be called an encyclopedic narrative, The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  It really deserves its own full blown entry, but how does one review an encyclopedia?  It has New York City in common with Brooklyn Follies, and like the novel it makes a special personal connection.

 

The story of the unique, almost symbiotic development of the city and baseball is laid out by Baker as a Dickinsonian novel with a huge cast of characters.   “Whitman called it ‘America’s game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our laws; it is just as important in the total of our historic life’” “To Mark Twain it was ‘the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming, 19th century’“.

 

Mirroring American life, the game’s owners were “in the game for the most American reasons: organize commercialize monopolize“

 

Before 1890 its development was a somewhat random event.  By then it began to resemble the game which we follow today and became our only major professional sport at the time.

 

In NY it was a multi ethnic affair, mirroring the city itself, German, Irish, even eleven known Jewish players, but like other sins of society, Afro Americans were not accepted, even in NY.  They began to develop their own leagues; many of those teams and players of major league caliber. 

 

As the sport grew, “the vertical city was born, “skyscrapers, bridges, churches, museums but perhaps the greatest creations during the beginning of the century were the city’s train stations.  “Built less than 10 years and a few blocks apart, “the new Beau Arts Grand Central terminal, lavish with statues and it’s soaring, 125 – foot ceiling adored with a gorgeous blue map of the zodiac. And across town, Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania station, a symphony and steel and honey marble, large enough, in the novelist, Thomas Wolf’s phrase ‘to hold the sound of time’ yet still a structure of measureless beauty.“

 

It’s all here in this definitive work, with all the heroes and miscreants that made up our national pastime and the building of the world’s greatest city.  The writing is spellbinding such as these two pages describing the glories of the city in the 1920’s.  The reader feels a part of a previous era:

 

Baseball, NY, and the 1950’s was my childhood.  On our way to school we’d argue about who is the best centerfielder in NY.  I said Mantle, a Dodger fan said Snyder, and the lone Giant friend said Mays.  He was right of course. 

 

Mays and Ruth are a category onto themselves.  The book ends before the Mays era though.  In fact I was finishing this book when the Say Hey Kid’s death was reported.  He began his career in the Negro leagues, playing briefly for the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons joining Ruth as the greatest baseball player ever.  Ruth‘s heroic feats and gargantuan appetite for everything life had to offer though are covered in detail in Baker’s book.

 

Negro Leagues Kansas City Monarchs 1920-1965

So many of the minor players can be found in its pages; such as Phil Rizzuto who went to my high school and was rejected by the Dodgers and Giants, but the New York Yankees recognized his fielding, bunting, and love of the game and the rest is history.  When Ann and I were having dinner at the Stadium Club sometime in the 1980s, and he was broadcasting with Bill White, they came in to have dinner before the game.  He called out to everyone that he had a headache and was wondering whether anyone had an aspirin.  My wife’s handy pill box came out while she exclaimed, “I have some, Phil.”  He came over to the table and I told him that my father went to Richmond Hill High School with him to which he exclaimed his patented “Holy Cow.”

 

I can’t remember another social / sports history that can compare to The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  Holy Cow!

 

Crow Fair and Desperate Characters

One of the pleasures on the boat is having some time to read.   Thomas McGuane’s short story collection, Crow Fair impressed me, reading one short story each evening to completion.  He is a gifted writer and although Montana is his focus and thus the western experience of writers such as Wallace Stegner and Raymond Carver encroach, there are also palettes of Updike and Cheever.  His characters are universal, flawed, sometimes funny, but fundamentally ones you identify or sympathize with, real people in stories that are so natural the denouement suddenly seizes you.  Above all, survival, emotionally as well as physically, is a leitmotif threaded in these stories.  Now I fully understand his close friendship with Jim Harrison.

His story Hubcaps has an exposition that is reminiscent of a Cheever story….By late afternoon, Owen’s parents were usually having their first cocktails.  His mother gave hers some thought, looking upon it as a special treat, while his father served himself a ‘stiff one’ in a more matter-of-fact way, his every movement expressing a conviction that he had a right to this stuff, no matter how disagreeable or lugubrious or romantic it might soon make him….Owen’s mother held her drink between the tips of her fingers; his father held it in his fist.  Owen could see solemnity descend on his father’s brow with the first sip, while his mother often looked apprehensive about the possible hysteria to come.

On a Dirt Road is particularly Carver-like. Ann and the protagonist “need new friends.” A couple moves in a home down the dirt road street where two cars cannot pass, so they see their new neighbors in such a mode neither acknowledging the other. Ann wants to have dinner with the Clearys, old friends, of which our protagonist has tired. Ann says she'll go alone with them to a local pizza joint. Off she goes and our protagonist decides to go meet the new neighbors who turn out to have “issues.”  Nonetheless on the spur of the moment he invites them to go to the pizza place to surprise his wife and the Clearys. The surprise is on him.

In A Long View to the West a man is caring for his dying father who is in the habit of telling or I should say retelling the same stories.  Clay asks his father how he feels about dying, the reply being ‘How should I know? I've never done it before.’  This is when he realizes that he is more frightened than his Dad, also realizing that he needs those stories.

Motherlode is about a “cattle geneticist” who gets caught up in a dangerous scam, way beyond his level of expertise, and he pays the consequences.  The suspense is so carefully built by McGuane that the reader is caught unawares at the end of the story.

Prairie Girl is about a woman who rises from “Butt Hut,” a brothel to bank president, by marrying a gay man from the banking family, having a child by him, and raising the boy as the true love of her life. Peter always wonders about his Mom, never realizing the truth.

River Camp incorporates all the writer’s themes, the role of nature in our insignificant lives, dysfunctional relationships, and the danger that lurks just below the surface because of something which is greater than ourselves.  Two old friends, sometimes adversaries, book a strange guide to lead them on a camping trip in the wilderness, learning more about each, their wives, and then the brutal truth about the guide and what nature has in store for them.

The title story Crow Fair concerns two brothers who learn that their dying mother, suffering from dementia, had a long affair with a Crow Chief who they set out to find. In so doing, the brothers go their separate ways.

Idiosyncratic, funny and sad at the same time, and beautifully written, McGuane tugs at the reader’s heart with simple truths about life.  I’ve mentioned only a few of the stories.  These stories, like Cheever’s and Carver’s deserve to be reread.

Now on to an outstanding novel. Thanks to Jonathan Franzen’s unremitting praise of a “forgotten novel,” I picked up Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters before leaving for the boat.  Here is yet another American classic I could put in the same class as John Williams’ Stoner which was written only five years earlier (Stoner 1965; Desperate Characters 1970).  Those were turbulent years and each novel deals with the turmoil in subtle ways, but mostly through relationships.  Each is written in absolutely exquisite, compact prose. 

Fox’s novel has a special familiarity to me as it is set in Brooklyn, near Brooklyn Heights in the late 1960s, my last years in the exact same place.  Her descriptions of the decadence of New York City are real as it was written at the time when it was experienced.  This is juxtaposed to the decay of the inner lives of the two main characters, Sophie and Otto Bentwood.  They are a childless couple, in their early 40s, living in the slowly gentrified neighborhood bordering Brooklyn Heights.  They also have a Mercedes and a house on Long Island with a barn.  They should be happy, right?

Early in the novel, to Otto’s displeasure, Sophie feeds a feral cat who suddenly lashes out at Sophie, sinking its teeth in her hand.  The incident is the undercurrent of the entire novel as the reader is left wondering whether her decision to not immediately seek medical attention will have serious consequences.  In this regard it is a novel of suspense.  Otto advises that she do so, although, interestingly, he is not absolutely insistent. 

Otto is breaking up with his law partner, Charlie Russel, who has his own marriage difficulties. However these partners, friends from college have gone their separate ways professionally.  But the plot is secondary to the lapidary writing, sentences, paragraphs you just find yourself dwelling over.

When the cat first appears, ramming its head against the glass door, Otto explains “’Ugly Bastard!’ The cat looked at him, then its eyes flicked away.  The house felt powerfully solid to him; the sense of that solidity was like a hand placed firmly in the small of his back.  Across the yard, past the cat’s agitated movements, he saw the rear windows of the houses on the slum street.  Some windows had rags tacked across them, other, sheets of transparent plastic.  From the sill of one, a blue blanket dangled.

When Otto is out of sight, Sophie defies him by feeding the cat, even petting the cat as she serves up some milk.  The cat’s back rose convulsively to press against her hand.  She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire.

What struck me was that “friendly human touch” is absent from her marriage and that she suppressed her cry because of Otto being nearby.  Here is a marriage in crisis.

Fox is one of these rare writers who can capture the essence of a person in few words.  Here is her description of one of their friends, a psychiatrist, Myron Holstein who caters to writers and painters:  He didn’t know a thing about her, not even after ten years, but she loved the air of knowingness; the flattery that didn’t obligate her.  And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer’s costume.  He wasn’t a seducer.  He was remote.  He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

That last sentence reminds me of Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns or George Barker’s poem To My Mother: “She is a procession no one can follow after / But be like a little dog following a brass band.”

It’s a stalemate relationship between Otto and Sophie.  He refuses to answer the telephone.  She asks, why? “Because I never hear anything on it that I want to hear any more.”  They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom.  Then he asked her directly why she was angry.  She said she wasn’t angry at all; it was just so tiresome of him to indulge himself about the telephone, to stand there so stupidly while it rang, to force her to do it.  How many of us have played the same tug of war with our spouses?

As a woman in her early 40’s, Sophie’s body is changing.  It comes somewhat as a shock to her:  Her body was not her own any more, but had taken off in some direction of its own.  In this last year she had discovered that its discomforts once interpreted, always meant the curtailment, or end, of some pleasure.  She could not eat and drink the way she once had.  Inexorably, she was being invaded by elements that were both gross and risible.  She had only realized that one was old for a long time.  Old for a long time, how familiar!  Brilliant writing!

As a student I once spent a long time in the emergency room waiting area of the Brooklyn Hospital.  Note how Fox’s sense of realism conjures up such a room in the late 1960s.  Her writing brings alive an experience I had more than 50 years ago: It was like a bus station, an abandoned lot, the aisles in the coaches of the old B & O trains, subway platforms, police stations. It combined the transient quality, the disheveled atmosphere of a public terminal with the immediately apprehended terror of a way station to disaster.  It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined three walls.  It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays.  On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef.  There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes – cleaning fluids embedded in fabric and blooming horridly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns – all the exudations of human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind.

Yet the heart of the novel is a philosophical question as “desperate characters” seek meaning in a hostile universe, a snapshot of New York City when it reached its nadir in the late 1960s.  As Franzen asks in his introduction: “What is the point of meaning – especially literary meaning – in a rabid modern world?  Why bother creating and preserving order if civilization is every bit as killing as the anarchy to which it’s opposed?”  Striving for the answer, Franzen has read and taught the novel many times.

John Williams’ Stoner has been called “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of.” Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters is in the same league. 

Visiting the Past to See the Future

I just finished reading Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters which is set in Brooklyn in the late 1960s.  More on that in another entry whenever I can get to it, but the novel  unfolds not only in the Borough of my past, Brooklyn, but mostly bordering the downtown section which is my old home and haunt, beginning with my student days at Long Island University.  For years my friend Bruce and I have talked about revisiting the university together as Alumni, but we’ve never been able to coordinate the days.  He’s not around the corner, living in Massachusetts so I forgive him.  But as I closed the Fox book last Monday the urge was strong to revisit and I was compelled to act on the urge as planning never seems to go right so I turned to Ann and asked her whether she wants to go with me the next day.  Why not give me a little advance notice (she had an appointment) she asked, but she promptly cancelled that appointment, agreeing to join me on my impromptu adventure.  I emailed my son Jonathan to ask whether he might want to meet us at Juniors in downtown Brooklyn that day for lunch (revisiting would not be complete without sitting in that landmark once again).

He was surprised by our plans and asked whether we’d be driving in.  No, I said, Metro North to Grand Central and then the IRT #5 train to Nevins Street – needed to experience it all (after all I commuted to the school by subway from Queens for the first semester in 1960).  We’re crazy he said, too much to negotiate, too many stairs, the jostling crowds, etc.  Crazy I am I guess but the trip to and from was as meaningful as the visit itself, and less stress than driving and quicker too.  All part of the “fun.”

So we emerged from the Nevins Street station and were greeted by a Brooklyn I hardly recognized.  Looking east and west on Flatbush Avenue revealed a skyline of a different place although some of the same tired buildings were standing.  I seem to remember a Bickford’s (or was it a Horn & Hardart?) there, long gone.  Walking west towards the Manhattan Bridge there was the LIU I remembered, the old Brooklyn Paramount building and adjacent Metcalf Hall where all of our classrooms were.

The door to the Paramount was open, a guard manning the desk, so we went in and showed him my “student ID card” – the last one I carried during the 1963-64 semester year. 

He looked at it in disbelief as If I was a Martian but good naturedly directed us to the Admissions Office.  As I student I worked there part-time, processing applications and I worked in the library as well.  The Admissions office is essentially in the same place, but the entrance is no longer on Flatbush, but inside the campus gates so we entered there and I presented my ID card to the receptionist. “Oh my God,” was her response.  “I have to show this to the Associate Director,” which she did. 

We were told there is a tour at 2 PM so before lunch we had some time on our own to visit my old dormitory.  Again, my card was greeted by disbelief but that allowed me to look around at the cafeteria and the student lounge there, all changed of course.  I told the guard at reception – pointing at the three elevators – that when I lived there they were segregated.  “Segregated?” he was obviously surprised by the implication.  Yes, I replied, two of the elevators went to the men’s floors and one was for the women.  “Huh” he said, “there were separate floors for men and women?”  Yes, in the early 60s, that is how it was.  Times have changed.

Then I couldn’t resist getting a photo of myself in front of 175 Willoughby Street, that old apartment house being my second residence after graduating and the one I lived in with our young son, Chris, until I was divorced.  The building has been refurbished and looks better than when I lived there some 50 years ago.  Our apartment had a clear view of the New York City skyline, but that is now blocked by a new apartment house.

So after these two nostalgic visits, off to Juniors.  Same as I remember it, and the same late 50s early 60s music playing, displays of Brooklyn landmarks, in particular the Brooklyn Dodgers, or “dem bums.”  There we met Jonathan who was born long after I left Brooklyn.  As in the past, Juniors serves way too much food but even so we couldn’t resist capping off our lunch with a shared piece of their famous cheesecake.  Yum!

So, Jonathan went back to work and we walked back across the street, way too early for the 2pm tour, hoping for a brief private tour.  They were waiting for me. “Here he is!”   

They had already planned a private tour for an “old” alumnus, so were lucky enough that Tiarra, a student admissions assistant, the same position I had, was available to take us around.  The change and additions to the school were striking.

What impressed me most about the LIU of today is its forward-looking, and application-results-oriented strategy, intended to give its students the best opportunities for employment after graduation.  It’s the hands on direction the school has taken, with its life-sciences and entrepreneurship focus as well as the facilities that students now have to maintain their health (what a gym facility!) and their social lives (i.e. social media and the numerous cafés), that really overwhelmed me, facilities which were unimaginable in my time. 

Nonetheless it was nice to see the humanities thriving there as well, including its own theatre (in my day the theatre department produced plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music).  It was quite a trip down memory lane seeing the old Metcalf building, the Paramount, and my dormitory, but so impressive to see the new campus and its flourishing multicultural student population getting ready for the real world.  I think LIU is really in sync with the times and Brooklyn itself. It’s reinvented itself many times during its nearly 100 years in the Borough, a resilient survivor and innovator in the competitive world of higher education.   

The facilities as I noted are phenomenal.  A new gym, Olympic size swimming pool and endless exercise machines beckon.   

I was wondering about the need for a second gym but Tiarra said the old Paramount (above) was going to be restored to its former splendor in conjunction with the Barclay’s Center as a theatre for events, the students getting discounts.  Smart strategy for income methinks, sort of functioning as an endowment for the university.

Still the past has not been forgotten as the gym pays tribute to athletes of years gone by.  I liked the billboard sized poster of some of the basketball stars I saw play, including Ed “Cornflakes” Johnson, Luther Green, and Albie Grant.  Albie was a small center / power forward who I grew close to in my senior year.  A wonderful person  -- a great optimistic personality – who died way too early in life.  To watch him play was among the more significant moments in LIU athletic history.

After a couple hours of touring, we were beat, but happy, and headed back to the IRT just as the #5 train pulled in, nearly full but we managed a seat until Grand Central, and then back “home” to our boat.  I’m proud to be a LIU graduate, a school which has managed to adapt to and change with the times, giving its students an opportunity to succeed in the 21^st century world, as I like to think I did in the 20th.

I’ve written several pieces about my Brooklyn years in this blog, but the one which is most relevant to LIU is this link.  Included there is a piece I wrote for Confrontation Magazine about 10 years after graduating.  It still says it all about my experience then, and for convenience sake I repeat it below.

L.I.U.-My World in the Early'60s

Downtown Brooklyn sandwiched between the placid decade of the 50s and the Vietnam War was not unlike other communities in having a sense of optimism about its future. A thriving commercial center for small merchants, it had major islands in the same sea: the New York Telephone Company headquarters, the Brooklyn Hospital, Abraham and Straus department store, the Fox and Paramount movie theatres, the Board of Education, Fort Greene Park, and Long Island University.

It was September 1960 when I emerged from the DeKalb Avenue subway stop and made my way for the first time to L.I.U. Standing at the comer of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue, waiting for the light to change, Junior's and the Dime Savings Bank behind me, I faced a drab office building rising above the ornate but faded Brooklyn Paramount movie palace.

Farther behind me was a middle-class Queens community, my universe until this moment: a community of hard-working people imbued with the conviction that all things were possible in this society if one tried hard enough; it was with this sense I was going to college to learn business. But this seeming past eternity of punch ball; the Bungalow Bar man; picture-card trading; piano and guitar lessons; grammar school report cards that included grades for penmanship, neatness and posture; the Bunny Hop, Elvis ("a-wop-bom-a-lu-bop ... "); Ike; and high school (" ... if you don't take Latin, you won't be able to get into college .. ") was possibly fading, for I stood on the border between two lives, two cultures: was my background going to be my future, could I emerge out of this bland and benign landscape into myself? Brooklyn would have much to do with the answer.

Sitting in my first class on the 8th floor, becoming a regular occupant of that same seat, I could see the digital clock on top of the Dime Savings Bank blinking at me. This and another clock on top of the Williamsburg Savings Bank farther up Flatbush Avenue became lighthouses in my Brooklyn experience. When, the following year, I lived in the dormitory, returning late in the evening from a night in Manhattan in a blinding snowstorm, I sensed these silent timepieces watching me scurrying home.

In later years I lived in downtown Brooklyn, worked in Manhattan for a publishing firm, and regularly flew to the mid-west. Coming into LaGuardia Airport, we would sweep over Brooklyn and see the downtown area reaching out to Prospect Park while the fingers of the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges bound Brooklyn to Manhattan. Below was the beacon of the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock. Then, as now, I am drawn to that unique community I once called home.

I remember the student union on the ground floor of the small building adjacent to the Paramount building. Smoke hung in the stagnant air, bodies slumped on worn lounge chairs and elbows rested on Formica tables. Nixon versus Kennedy was the subject of heated discussion. These students, mostly from Brooklyn, seemed confident in their belief that politics could remake society. Eventually I found myself caught up in political causes as my apathy of the past waned.

With John F. Kennedy our new President-elect, the campus had a new vibrancy. A professor, delayed by listening to Beethoven's Eighth Symphony in his office, entered the classroom gesticulating those glorious rhythms. One professor challenged us to an exam: think of a question and answer it, the grade being as dependent on the nature of the question as on the answer. Another accepted a twisted pretzel from a student on the school quadrangle and published a poem on the experience.

Meanwhile I moved into the dormitory, severing remaining ties with a prior somnambulistic life. My room faced the front of the campus, with the monolithic slab of a factory that would become the shell of the architecturally renowned Humanities Building to be constructed a short time later. Behind the factory stood downtown Brooklyn, my microcosm of the real world.

The lack of classroom space mandated that the university rent space at Brooklyn Polytechnic, a neighboring institution where some of my classes were held. We made our way there along Myrtle Avenue, the elevator line rumbling over our heads, past furniture stores and shells of buildings. Decay was evident, but it was defiant decay: people stubbornly made their homes and pursued their lives here.

The return trip was frequently along Fulton Street, connecting the City Hall area with Flatbush Avenue and downtown Brooklyn. There, the cacophony of tiny record stores blurted out" ... baby, baby, baby, baby don't you leave me ... " merging with" ... be-bop-a-lu-la, she's my baby ... " The Chinese restaurant on the second floor beckoned, but I moved on toward the Dime Savings Bank, past shoe, appliance, fabric and other stores.

Across from the Dime Savings Bank was McCrory's, which embodied most of the merchant's downtown Brooklyn expectations. Here I was greeted at the door by the aroma of newly manufactured goods mixed with those of different foods cooking in various sections of the store. In the basement was a grocery where we bought food to supplement the fare in the dormitory. Shoppers would scrutinize the merchandise with almost-total seriousness as the IND subway loudspeaker announced, through corridors connecting to McCrory's, a train's arrival.

Opposite Junior's restaurant, then as now the neighborhood's most famous food emporium, was another restaurant, Soloway's, a luncheonette run by a Greek family. Hamburgers sizzled in grease while french fries were bathing in deep fat. Students gathered around most of the tables and at the counter while strains of "Run Around Sue" thumped from the jukebox.

Junior's itself was reserved for special occasions when only the most obscene dessert would suffice. Also, late at night, when we could study no more, some of us went across to Junior's bar to chat with Pete, the bartender, who offered a different education: would Maris hit 60 home runs? Mickey Mantle was the better ballplayer, Pete opined. Pete had a thick neck with a trim gray crew cut. He was a kindly father to us, probably not realizing the important role he played in our student lives.

Manhattan was a short shuttle over the Manhattan Bridge via the BMT, and occasionally we went there. Perhaps on a date, sitting at the back of St. Patrick's Cathedral until dawn to beat the curfew for female residents of the dorm; or to Greenwich Village for a Black Russian or to see a production at Cafe LaMama or on the second floor of Max's Kansas City restaurant, where the Theatre of the Absurd played; but Brooklyn seemed to be all the world we generally needed and that was where we usually stayed. We sat on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, and took in the vista of the Brooklyn Bridge, downtown Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and further up, the spire of the Empire State.

During club hours we crowded into the auditorium to hear Malcolm X speak. Or we listened to local political candidates, heated debate overflowing the classroom after the speaker left.

The Cuban Missile crisis brought us back to days when, as schoolchildren, shades were lowered, lights turned out, and we were instructed to get down on our knees below our desks and cover our heads. Our mortality, and civilization's could be ended by design or by caprice. We frantically darted about the dormitory, discussing whether we might soon be drafted.

I remember other areas I did not know until those days in Brooklyn. Working as a receptionist at the Brooklyn Tuberculosis Center several evenings a week, I participated in a too-common side of Brooklyn life: poverty. Sick, helpless people came, seeking assistance. I processed forms and offered reassurance, but felt ineffectual.

As a dormitory counselor I sometime had to accompany students to the emergency room at the Brooklyn Hospital behind the university. I spent a week there myself, with pleurisy, in a ward. The squalor and the human tragedy I witnessed are echoed in the works of Theodore Dreiser which I read in the hospital for a term paper, seeing Frank Cowperwood's lobster and squid locked in deadly combat as symbolic of our struggle with life in this land of Brooklyn.

Next to the hospital was a prison. There, from the upper floors of the dormitory, the prisoners could be seen endlessly marching in circles. The prison was later destroyed to make room for a bigger hospital, the demolition ball pounding the 19th-century slabs into rubble, crushing the infinitely trodden steps in the courtyard.

Walking past the Admissions Office one Friday afternoon, a friend came running toward me. "Did you hear, Kennedy was shot?" Incredulous, I rushed to my dorm to listen to the radio. It was true.

I had tickets for a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that night, one of the few cultural events in New York City that was not cancelled. An unrehearsed version of Beethoven's Egmont Overture was performed rather than the regular program. We filed out, silent, stunned, weeping openly. In quick succession Oswald was apprehended, and while we watched it on TV, Jack Ruby assassinated him.

With the advent of these acts, in particular as the Vietnam War encroached on all our lives, I knew the life I had known in Brooklyn could not remain the same. What changed, some years later, was often for the better for me. But whatever the benefits and the sad moments, I shall remember Brooklyn most as the place that allowed me to change into myself.