Was it really different back then?

Warren Langer

By back then I refer to the 1930s when I grew up in The Bronx.

First off The Bronx was not, and I’m pretty sure about this, the slummy, desolate area you picture.

We lived on a parkway with a playground on the other side of our street. My school was a hundred yards away. (And yes, I have told my children about walking miles through the snow.)

There were large parks and ball fields everywhere.

All of our parents, save one, were immigrants. The offspring of That became a lawyer and Broadway actor who studied the Olivier part in England.

Our parents were totally occupied in making a very modest living. My father made $32.50 walking up and down buildings selling insurance.

The non-immigrant was an accountant with a teacher wife. He had played baseball in college and tried to teach us some of the basics.

A losing cause.

Our parents basically left us alone.

We played basketball night and day and friends and acquaintances played for CCNY, LIU and NYU. They were damn good; one was on the team that sold out at CCNY in the first great basketball scandal. He was good, but not good enough to be bribed.

We traveled downtown to The Roxy, Paramount and Radio City movie palaces to see a film and a headliner on stage.  By ourselves.

We saw The Yankees play. By ourselves.

And we traveled to The New York World’s Fair. 1939 and 1940. By ourselves.

At The Fair we rushed in, took the brochures they would allow us to have and rushed to the next building. And then to the next building.

People tell me how much they learned from The Fair.

I basically remember a large brochure from Australia and a smaller one titled Why Burlington?

Not much to take from a Fiorello LaGuardia, Grover Whalen, Robert Moses inspired project but that’s what we did.

There were hundreds of brochures and I ultimately parked them at my brother’s house in Mount Vernon. He, of course, threw them away.

They’re now worth a small fortune. Hmm.

One good friend attended Music & Art High School and naturally became president of Max Factor and later Neutrogena.

Another ran the paper at De Witt Clinton H.S. and ultimately the educational side of PBS in New Hampshire and later in San Jose, CA. A daughter is an army general.

I went to the Bronx High School of Science and developed a vaccine for the swine flu epidemic that was to arrive 70 years later.

I guess not!

I went into advertising and publishing and was never heard from again.

Back to the question. Are things different now?

There was a war on the horizon and it took most of us; a limited few fatally.

We came back and many of us prospered.

We grew up in Depression Years but never really faced hardships. In some respects we didn’t realize we were poor.

Kids now face drugs and guns. Virtually all of them.

Guns we knew from the movies. (I became a radio-gunner in the Naval Air Corps, flew from here to there and back again. I see the mountains of Afghanistan and tremble.)

We smoked and believed we were Humphrey Bogart waiting for Ingrid Bergman.

The streets of today are dangerous. A check of the 6 PM Local News tells you all you want to know about drugs and guns, streets and roads.

Let your children go miles away by themselves?

I don’t think so.

The kids of today face incredibly more danger than we ever did.

People may have been evicted from their houses back then but we didn’t know any of them. People may have been killed but we didn’t know them either.

Frankly it was a more cheerful time then. The future really did look bright.

I’m not sure about that today.

 

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