Old Neighborhood (21 page)

I found a jogging route along the East River, and I took long walks—Second and Third Avenues in the Seventies and Eighties appealed to me because the stores were eclectic and had some semblance of a neighborhood feeling. I stopped at an antiques store on Second Avenue to look at a windup phonograph in the window, but it predated the period for which I had been collecting pieces. Then I noticed several 78 rpm records in a stack and among them was “One Meat Ball” by Tony Pastor and His Orchestra. “One Meat Ball”! The great tragicomedy of the little man who went into a restaurant and could get no bread with one meat ball. I sang it in the shower before I ever heard of Mario Lanza.

“How much is this?”

The owner, a lanky blond man in his twenties, dragged himself out of his chaise to look at the recording.

“Fifteen dollars.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what I can get for it.”

“‘One Meat Ball.’ Amazing. Did you ever hear this?”

“No.”

“You never heard it? You don’t even know what it is—and you’re selling it for fifteen dollars?”

“I’m pretty busy now.” No one else was in the store. “That’s the price.”

I bought it after first testing the record on the phonograph. Lyrical. I went home, delighted to have it, somewhat annoyed that I purchased it from a young man with no feeling for what he was selling,
and
he got his price. But you get no bread with one meat ball.

The idea did not come to me like a comic-strip light bulb suddenly flashing above my head. I was living in Manhattan for several weeks without a clear plan as to what I would do for a living. I would have been content spending my time buying nostalgia pieces. This was not a way of paying the rent, though. Or was it? I wondered. Finding these old things had been so satisfying, I thought about the possibility of formalizing my interest—of making a business out of it. So I began going to junk shops, thrift shops and antiques stores in Manhattan and in Brooklyn, researching the kinds of things people were selling and how they were displayed. I learned from a dealer that a newspaper published in Connecticut called
The Newtown Bee
carried announcements of auctions and antiques shows which dealers from the Northeast attended. I went to a few of these events, checking the prices and the kinds of items that became available. Merchandise was less expensive outside of New York City and it seemed to me that if I could buy prudently, possibly I could resell the items in a store of my own in Manhattan. When I started to actually buy—to bid at auction and find pieces at shows and yard sales and country antiques shops—I became caught up in that particular kind of excitement that takes place with antiquing—in locating something neglected that has importance for you.

At a flea market in New Jersey, among his items, a man was selling souvenirs of the 1939 World’s Fair and had a Heinz pickle pin. I had owned one of those very pins once, I had worn it on a cap.

“The price for this?”

“Ten dollars.”

“I’ll give you five.”

“Seven.”

I bought it for seven, wondering if I would be able to resell it for ten, and thinking—I found this. I haven’t seen it in years and I’m holding it in my hand.

“You’ve got a steal,” the dealer said. “You don’t know the value of this.”

“Yes, I do.”

I traveled often now—to upstate New York, to New Jersey, to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, farther north into New England to country auctions and fairs, to yard sales and garage sales, to any place that had old items for sale. I wanted pieces from my own background, the things I remembered from the time when I was growing up. I was rescuing merchandise from cardboard cartons at rummage sales. I was on the grounds of country antiques shows in the dawn hours when dealers were arriving and had not yet unloaded their vans. I was negotiating with old ladies who had bridge tables set up in front of churches. Have dog, will travel. My apartment began to resemble the inside of a Santini Brothers’ moving van, circa 1943.

I was able to make the purchases from the few thousand dollars I could count on after the agreements with Tolchin and Beverly—and when I reached the point where even the dog had to squeeze into the living room, I rented a long, narrow store on 75th Street between First and Second Avenues. I called the store “The Old Neighborhood.”

When people walked into the place it would be as if they were stepping back in time. It was a gallery of treasures they might have thought they were never again to see. On the shelves were old radios, souvenirs of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, maracas from Havana, bookends made of bronzed baby shoes, Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight decoders, glass picture frames with photos of stars like Brenda Marshall, rhinestone pins and Elgin watches, picture postcards from places long gone out of fashion, “Greetings from Coney Island,” “Hello from Saratoga,” 78 rpm records, The Andrews Sisters singing “Tico-Tico.”

Furniture was arranged in room settings—overstuffed sofas and armchairs slipcovered with designs of palm leaves and oversized roses. And I had art deco lamps and clocks and serving dishes adorned with nymphs and pink flamingos. And there were toys that lasted forever, streamlined locomotives made of metal and airplanes with propellers that you could spin. And all around the store were advertising signs of the period, Burma-Shave, Bon Ami (“Hasn’t scratched yet”), and posters from World War II including “The Four Freedoms” by Norman Rockwell.

On the wall behind the desk where I sat was a picture of George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss of the New York Yankees, and a framed snapshot taken in front of a candy store of a neighborhood bookie and a boy of seventeen. These items were not for sale.

I invited Sarah and Amy to come into New York so they could see the store and join me for a celebration brunch. We arranged this for the Sunday before the store opened officially, and they arrived at the apartment looking lovely, each in her own fashion, Amy without makeup, wearing a down vest, Sarah in a trenchcoat.

“I can’t believe how beautiful you are,” I said, kissing and hugging each of them, perhaps holding onto them a moment longer than they were comfortable with, but I missed them.

“You remember Ramón? My roommate and psychoanalyst.”

“You’re in therapy with your dog?” Sarah said, picking up on the remark. “Is that a new idea?”

“We’re working on it.”

“Glad to see you, señor Doctor,” Amy said, shaking his paw.

The girls wandered through the apartment. The living room still had to function, in part, as a backup area for the store. I had six ice cream-parlor chairs standing there. I currently had more chairs in the living room than the number of people I knew.

“Are you expecting company, Daddy?” Sarah said.

“These are for the store.”

“It’s hard to get used to—your father’s bachelor pad,” Amy said, a forlorn expression on her face.

“It’s hard for me, too, darling.”

We went to a nearby pub for Sunday brunch, Sarah ordering a bloody Mary, if I needed any further evidence that she was a grownup. We talked for a while, Sarah was considering changing her major from drama to political science, Amy was leaning toward geology, and then the conversation became forced, there was a growing tension in all of us as the meal neared the end. We were getting to the time when they would have to see the store. They were obviously concerned that this new idea of mine was also going to embarrass them. As for me, these were my children, I did not need their permission for my decisions, but I loved them and I did not want them to think I was a fool.

I had placed brown paper on the windows of the store so people could not see inside while I was working. The paper was still hanging and the girls had to wait for me to open the door before they could see the store. Out of tension, none of us had spoken for the last three blocks. I unlocked the door, turned on the lights, they stepped inside, and Sarah, my cool reserved child, began to cry.

“Daddy—it’s wonderful. It’s just wonderful,” and she placed her head against me. “I was so worried.”

“It’s fabulous,” Amy said. “We didn’t know what to expect.”

“Well, you’re the first to see it.”

“Congratulations, Daddy,” Sarah said.

“Yes, Daddy, congratulations. Where did you get all this stuff?”

“That’s a lot of the fun—finding it.”

And I took them through the store, showing them the kinds of things I had grown up with—including a set of blue glass dinnerware, “There was something called ‘Dish Night’ at the movies …” and the posters, “These were very powerful images in their time …” They were attentive. They were happy for me. I was not a fool.

On Opening Day, my first buyer was a middle-aged woman who bought a 1939 World’s Fair ashtray. The sequence was exactly as I wanted it to be—I picked out the ashtray because it had made an emotional connection for me and she bought it because the connection was made for her.

“Going to the Fair was one of the greatest days of my life,” she said, remembering. “My father took me and I felt like a princess.”

I received a telegram at the store from Beverly:

“I wish you much luck and with all my heart I hope you will be happy. Keep this telegram. Maybe it will be worth something one day. Beverly.”

The store gave me the action I needed, I could buy and sell and trade, and it was never just merchandise to me. I loved these old things. I loved their character and their texture. I continued going out into the countryside to find items, and people began to search me out to sell or trade. My customers were varied—passersby from the area, interior decorators, art directors, young women buying pins and jewelry for fashion, middle-aged and older people looking for pieces out of their pasts—and collectors. I was fascinated by the kinds of collections people owned—people collected only campaign buttons, only Roosevelt buttons, only radios, dog people wanted only dog items, “Got any Rin Tin Tin?” People collected for their professions, “Got anything about dentists?”

My father and Rose came north en route to Israel and stayed in a hotel in Manhattan for a few days. They seemed to like the store. “Now you’ve got something,” my father said when he saw it. When Rose was off shopping in the afternoons, my father sat in the store with me. The atmosphere made him nostalgic about
his
old days.

“When we first moved to the Bronx, it was like a miracle to us—coming from the Lower East Side. The Concourse, the trees. We thought you’d have a good place to grow up.”

“I did.”

A young woman in her twenties came in and was intrigued with the set of blue glass dinnerware. My policy was to avoid hard sell. I felt an item had to make an emotional connection for the customer, except with people too young to remember, and in those cases I offered whatever information I could. I told her about “Dish Night” and that I was amused to see this type of dinnerware was now being called “Depression glass.” A book had been published on the subject which I had in the store and showed her. She decided to buy the dishes as a gift for her parents.

“You’re a good salesman. And you’re honest,” my father said when she had left. “You know, I never thought
I
was a good salesman—because I never made store manager. Now I think maybe I
was
pretty good. I mean, I always had a job.”

“And people respected you.”

“They did. I just never sold anybody anything that wasn’t right, that’s all.”

As we sat there in the store I never felt so close to him. I remembered how he always was honest in his work, and I realized, in terms of my own integrity, that what I really had wanted to be was a person like my father.

My divorce was soon to be final, the divorce agreement was going “amicably,” my lawyer had said. I had a conversation over the phone with Beverly—details about things in the house, and I thanked her for the telegram she had sent.

“Are you happy there?” she asked.

“Yes. I am.”

“I’m glad, Steve.”

“When we talk next, we’ll be divorced,” I said.

“We’re still talking. That’s better than some.”

“It’s strange. It’s as if we just—ran out of time. Like those old radio shows. You were into it and all of a sudden they were signing off. ‘We’re a little late, folks, so goodnight.’ I paused, finding it difficult to speak. ‘Say goodnight, Bevvy.’”

“Goodnight, Bevvy,” she said quietly, on the beat.

Beverly and I have little to do with each other now—“amicable,” but “divorced.” Sarah and Amy have stayed in my life, which, I suppose, is the best a parent can hope for with a divorce and with children who are becoming adults. They like to come to the store when they are in New York, and they even have had dates call for them there, which I accept as a sign of my respectability.

Jack Walsh and I have spoken, the Saturday softball games will be starting again, he will be traveling down from Westchester and I can have right field back if I want it, and I do.

The main industry in my present neighborhood appears to be singles bars. I am having difficulty with the marketing of myself in this field. I tried three of these places and have yet to finish a drink in any of them. And I still think of Beverly. But there are one or two women who have been into the shop whom I am about to approach socially. I think I have as good a story to tell as the competition.

The business keeps improving, and I look forward to my days. I am learning to live on less income than I earned at the agency, but I have no regrets about leaving advertising. I like to think that with the store I am a kind of custodian of people’s memories—I find things that might be lost or forgotten and I pass them on.

Recently I located a set of the original
Classic Comics
, an early copy of
Lad, a Dog
, by Albert Payson Terhune and a team photo of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. Some of these things are getting more valuable as they get older, and, perhaps, so am I.

Avery Corman (b. 1935) is an American author best known for novels that inspired hit movies such as
Kramer vs. Kramer
and
Oh, God!
Corman has written powerfully of divorce and family, as well as midlife crisis and the experience of living in New York City.