Just Kids From the Bronx (26 page)

The second baseman for the Yankees at the time was a gentleman named Horace Clarke. It was a very tough position for him to fill because he was taking the place of the great Bobby Richardson, who had played second base for the Yankees. His number was number 1, and he was an all-star. I mean, he was a great Yankee and everybody wants to be like Bobby Richardson or Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris. And so these are the lean years for the Yankees, right after they won all the championships. Mickey Mantle’s still on the team, but they’re not doing so good. So it’s like okay,
Who’s number 20 for the Yankees?
Well, it’s Horace Clarke. He’s from the West Indies, I’m of West Indian descent, and to top it off my dad’s name is Horace. So they ask me this question—it’s like—
Is that the question? Don’t you have a more difficult question?
So obviously I answered the question correctly and I won the two tickets.

My dad, Horace, took me to the game, which was the prize. I got on the field and I got my picture taken with Bobby Murcer, who was the guy who was supposed to be the next Mickey Mantle. It was amazing, of course. The Yankees. The Stadium. Earl Battey. Con Ed Kids. It was a Cinderella kind of thing.

NEIL
DE
GRASSE TYSON

Astrophysicist, author, science communicator, and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York

(1958– )

Kids have different profiles in school. Some are shy, some are sociable, some are purposely disruptive, and some are the class clowns. And I’ll bet you that every successful comedian in the world today was a class clown in school, and that they would have been subjected to the ire of their teachers accusing them of disrupting the lesson plan.

At no time is anyone saying that maybe this person can become a world-famous comedian. Teachers generally don’t think this way. They want to homogenize who and what you are so that you are quiet, that you get high grades, and that you’re not disruptive. And your grades are their currency of judgment for your promise and performance later in life. In casual questioning that I’ve done, if you corralled the most influential people in the world—this could be attorneys or novelists or journalists, playwrights, poets, people who shape our culture—and put them all in a room and ask, “How many of you got straight A’s in school?” I bet none of them would raise their hands. Include in that a list of CEOs and inventors. If hardly any of them got straight A’s, then what is it that we’re trying to breed in our students if you’re after straight A’s? Maybe there’s something else that matters if school is to prep you for being a productive adult. Yes, you want to get as high a grade as you can. But if a student is left to feel inadequate, that’s an unhealthy learning environment.

There was a teacher in the sixth grade who cut out an ad for me about taking classes at the Hayden Planetarium. But it’s not like she said,
Oh, I recognize that this guy is brilliant.
That’s not how it came across. It was
Look what he’s doing. Maybe we can find some way for him to invest that energy differently
.

I was invited back to my elementary school to give a talk. They wanted me to talk about what a great education I had there. I said, “I can’t do that. I became what I am in spite of the teacher attitudes about who I was, not because of those attitudes. If you want, I’ll come back at another time and talk to your teaching staff.”

We had a dentist friend who lived a few floors below the roof of our building, Skyview apartments. I went up to the rooftop with my telescope when I was about twelve. He allowed me to snake my hundred-foot electric cord through the window to his apartment. It’s night, and so I’m not lit up. In New York, your sight line can land on so many different places. If you’re looking out a window and you’re looking up, there are thousands of windows. So why are they looking at your window? Except this one time I was noticed by people in this other building because they looked across. And they called the police. Well, my telescope is a thick tube, and why would a police officer know or understand telescopes? Maybe binoculars, but not telescopes, and I have a cable going over the roof. This is the seventies, and it’s Riverdale, and my skin color is substantially darker than that of anybody else in the community, and so suspicions were high. Since I was clearly a school-age kid, I think they felt a little better about it initially, but it wasn’t until I showed them the craters of the moon through the telescope that they said, “Oh, that’s great! Keep up the good work.” So they were ultimately swayed by an actual observation of the universe.

My parents were born in the late twenties, and so they came of age in the forties. My father served in the segregated army. We were trained how to behave at any and all times if the police approached, or if we were in the presence of the police.
Don’t make any sudden moves.
You want to minimize the occasions they would have to justify shooting you. And you address them as “Sir.” And you don’t run. It wasn’t fear of the police that we were taught. It was simply that’s what you had to do because the police are not your friends. If you have a question that you need answered or if you need help, go into a store, go to a merchant, a cabdriver, a medical doctor. Or, if you were crossing the street, a crossing guard.

Whereas my wife grew up in Alaska, where the police were friendly. They’d help you cross the street and give you a lift somewhere if you had a flat tire. Give you a lift? What kind of world is that?

As much as my head was in the stars, I was reminded that I was black every time I stepped into society. It was not an active awareness that I carried within me. It was how society defined me.

Another example of that didn’t involve the police. It was just the conduct of strangers. I was into time-keeping devices. I liked timing the photographs through the telescope. I greatly value just the principle of measuring time. And so I had a watch that had too many knobs and dials on it, you know? It had a tachometer and time in six time zones. At one point the sweep second hand, if anyone remembers what that is, fell off. I went to the local jeweler to get it repaired.

“I have this watch that I need repaired.”

So the guy looks at me, looks at the watch, and says, “I can’t open this.”

I said, “Why not?”

“It’s stolen.”

“Oh, I didn’t know it was stolen.”

Here I’m thinking that he knows something about it that I don’t know, without realizing that he was accusing me of having stolen goods. And I’m too naive or innocent to imagine he was thinking that I was a criminal because I certainly knew I wasn’t.

I tried to get the watch fixed in a variety of stores, and they said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have the key to open this.”

Well, necessity is the mother of invention. I found my own way to open the dial, and then I fixed it myself and put it back together. There’s a little pry point in the back of the watch. So I got to learn how a precision watch is made.

We were residents of the Bronx my entire life while growing up. Later on, while in high school, I objected to what so many people around me were doing in Riverdale. They were not saying that they were from the Bronx. They said they were from Riverdale. In fact, even on the return addresses of envelopes it would say Riverdale, New York. I just thought that was wrong. I thought they were rejecting something important about the borough. My high school, Bronx High School of Science, had the word “Bronx” in the name as a fundamental part of its identity. The simple use of that word contributed to my association with the borough.

My earliest memories are of the East Bronx, in the Castle Hill housing projects. I went to P.S. 36 there, for kindergarten. At that time, my father finished school and started getting jobs in the city government. That’s when his income level went above the level for the middle-income units of the housing project, and that’s when we moved to Riverdale.

In Riverdale, we were high enough in the middle class for our building to have a doorman, an ice skating rink, a pool, and a parking garage. I enjoy swimming, and at one point became a lifeguard. These were opportunities that came about simply by proximity. I lament the absence of opportunities for so many other people who remained in whatever circumstances they were born into.

What richness of discoveries and what poetry have gone unwritten because of want of opportunity to express it? I really ask myself that question a lot.

MICHAEL R. KAY

Sports journalist and New York Yankees play-by-play broadcaster

(1961– )

When I was in first grade, I was already reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
. The principal called my parents and said they wanted to skip me to fourth grade, but my parents didn’t agree. They said that I wouldn’t be adjusted and maybe I’d even be maladjusted if I were skipped. Since they didn’t allow it, I remained with my age group, which meant I was always one of the smartest kids in my class. My parents, especially since we weren’t well off, stressed education. I couldn’t do anything unless I got good grades. I mean,
really
good grades. It was tough for me because my sister was brilliant and I had to be just as smart. I’d go to school, come home, do my homework, and then I could go down to play.

There were so many kids my age in my building on Evergreen Avenue, it was unbelievable. There was a little park outside, with monkey bars and stuff like that and this little dirt part, where we played baseball. That’s where my love of baseball was first born.

I loved the Yankees. We didn’t have the kind of money where I could go to a lot of games, but occasionally we’d scrape together a dollar fifty to sit in the upper deck. That was my seat. Right behind home plate in the upper deck, last row. I tell people that I now have the same seat, but a lot closer. But as a kid I’d watch every game on Channel 11. That would be the only time I wasn’t outside. If the Yankees were on I’d be watching them. Who knows how many kids dream that stuff? I also knew that I couldn’t play well, so I was practical and rational, even as a nine-year-old.
If I’m gonna be part of the Yankees, I’m gonna be that broadcaster!
So I’d interview my friends with a tape recorder. They’d make believe they were other athletes and I’d interview them. “What about that hit?” and stuff like that. I get people tweeting me now saying they remember me saying at that time that I was going to be the Yankees’ announcer one day.

I was in P.S. 93, which was a block walk from our building. It became overcrowded, so the city converted a bowling alley four blocks up into a school—with no windows. It was such a weird school because of that, but I was in an accelerated class. The top class. We were like the outcasts that got thrown out of P.S. 93, because it was too crowded, so we were all in it together with unbelievable camaraderie. I still contend that those two years helped me become the person I am, more than any other two years of schooling, including Bronx High School of Science and Fordham University.

I had two teachers there who were phenomenal. One of them, in fifth grade, was Ken Wilkoff. My dad, who had emphysema and couldn’t breathe well, really couldn’t take me to ball games, so Mr. Wilkoff would take me and maybe two or three other kids to the games, ’cause he knew I loved the Yankees. In 1973, when I was in sixth grade, my teacher was Edward Baehr. I was in school when the Yankees were going to play the Red Sox with Ron Blomberg, the designated hitter, the first ever designated hitter in the history of baseball. Mr. Baehr had arranged something with Mr. Wilkoff because at two o’clock, when the game started, they wheeled in the TV, plugged it in, put it on, and said, “All right, Michael, you can see this.” Blomberg walked with bases loaded, they unplugged the TV, and walked out. These two young teachers who were in their twenties knew what I loved, and they cared. Mr. Wilkoff even took three kids and me to Cooperstown to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I get goose bumps talking about what a great, great man he was. Both those teachers knew that I had an aptitude and they encouraged me. And my parents could see how special they were. They let those teachers mold me.