Penny candies gave way to bottles of soda and soon cigarettes, purchased one or two at a time or by going “halfers” with another kid on a pack of Luckies. With the onset of adolescence, Leon’s ceased being a stopping place and became a destination, an end in itself, a place to be. Leon’s Luncheonette was my first sanctuary. It was the place where I first tasted real freedom from adult supervision. At Leon’s I could smoke without looking over my shoulder. I could drink all the soda I cared to pay for. At Leon’s I could stand among my peers and do almost anything I felt like doing within a loose but understood set of rules. It was at Leon’s that I was first introduced to the art of hanging out.
Leon Broder was a failed musician, a failed intellectual, a failed husband, a failed father, and finally, a failed businessman. He was a man whose disappointments with life were palpable. Somehow despite the circumstances of his life, he hadn’t become either cynical or mean. But Leon was not anyone’s friend. He spent his days going through the motions of operating a neighborhood variety store. It was a mark of the times that he was able to remain in business for over a decade.
Under an Abbotts Jane Logan Deluxe Ice Cream sign that extended out over the sidewalk, Leon’s unwashed store windows were filled with sun-faded, free-standing cardboard ads for patent medicines and cigarettes. Inside, at the glass cigar case, Leon himself presided from behind a gigantic mechanical cash register, lost in whatever went on behind his broken-framed eyeglasses. The wall behind the register was racked for packs of cigarettes; Pall Malls, Old Golds, Chesterfields at twenty-two cents a pack. Across from Leon’s perch was the magazine and comic book rack. It was understood, you did not touch the magazines or comic books unless you were going to make a purchase. Several times I walked home with an unwanted copy of Field and Stream, or Flying Magazine, or some dumb comic book, the price for letting a flashy cover lure me into browsing. I knew, accepted, and honored the rules at Leon’s.
While the sign proclaimed Leon’s as a luncheonette, I can’t remember anyone ever ordering anything to eat from the slovenly, four-stool counter and soda fountain that filled one side of the store. Walking past Leon’s from church, my father enjoyed offering to take my mother inside for lunch. On cue, my mother would do a mime of utter disgust.
Past the fountain, behind a yellowed plexi-glass partition, was a waist high freezer box filled with gallon containers of ice cream. In the early 1950s’, when the passion for television was fresh, and when home freezers were still a luxury, Leon did a decent business in dippers. Tuesday nights just before Milton Berle, or Sunday nights before Ed Sullivan, Leon, and if he could get them to help, his son, daughter or wife would be busy scooping dippers of ice cream into the large serving bowls brought in by neighbors anxious to get home before the start of this week’s entertainment extravaganza on the new television set.
Besides cigarettes, our only purchases at Leon’s came from the big, red Coca-Cola soda box. The soda box pressed against the two small tables and a half-dozen rickety, wire-backed café chairs, relics of the pre-Leon era when the place did a respectable lunch trade. Leon’s soda box was a refrigerated wet box where the sodas were chilled by standing the bottles in cold water. Unlike many of the neighborhood soda boxes that required the daily delivery of a block of ice to keep the water cold, Leon’s box had a refrigeration unit that maintained the temperature of the water. The remaining space, an open area at the very back of the store, was reserved for the pinball machine that constituted our raison d etre’ for gathering at Leon’s.
I never fully succumbed to pinball fever. Something in my makeup still inhibits me from putting coins in a machine that doesn’t return a candy bar, a soda, or a sandwich. But among my peers at Leon’s, I was in a distinct minority. Newspaper route collections, coins earned delivering grocery orders, and funds less legitimately acquired, all disappeared into the nickel slot at the business end of those plate glass-topped contraptions. It wasn’t that you could actually win anything. The very skilled could accumulate, or rack up, free games that they lost interest in once they felt they had scoped out the secrets of a given machine. Two decades before Tommy and The Who, there were pinball wizards, pinball hustlers, kids so good they would move from store to store as they mastered machines.
The motor skills required for pinball were significant. You had to control the shiny steel ball against gravity with no more than your ability to shake the machine and manipulate the two flipper buttons. The flippers were your last chance before you lost a ball to the trough at the bottom of the course. Shaking the machine, directing the ball off the loud resonating solenoid-sprung bumpers and off passive rubber bumpers had to be done at the critical cusp of the machine’s tilt mechanism. An infinitesimal push beyond the tilt’s tolerance setting and the machine shut down with a buzz and flashing lights that read “tilt.” Trigger the tilt and your game was over. It could happen on your first ball, a nickel wasted, a nickel that could have purchased a Milky Way, a box of Jujy-Fruits, or with an additional two cents, a twelve ounce bottle of Frosty Root Beer, or even three loose cigarettes. At age thirteen, these were serious considerations. At least to me they were. As in life, there are players and there are spectators. In the great game of pinball, I was a spectator. The camaraderie that developed among the players and the hangers on around the machine at Leon’s constituted a community that met my needs. I think I just wanted an alternative to what I felt were the deadening prospects that seemed to await me in school, at home, and to the expectations of an adult world that didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
By the time I started hanging out at Leon’s, my father had already infected me with a passion for music, any kind of music. But my father’s first love was classical music, and as a kid I was indiscriminate and omnivorous in my appetite for everything I heard. I don’t remember how it came about, but Leon became aware that I knew a little something about serious music. Soon Leon would be humming and trilling themes from major works, asking me if I could identify them. Most of the time, I couldn’t. My repertoire was limited and heavy on the schmaltz. But Leon would persist, his weak voice straining for the high notes. “That’s Brahms,” he would say. “The piano concerto.” I would go home and root through my father’s long-playing records, occasionally finding the very piece Leon had massacred. I’d listen to it and then go back down to Leon’s, walk in the door and do my own version of the theme. Leon would pick it up in awful harmony and we’d both burst out laughing. It didn’t take me long to realize that my talking with Leon in any way beyond the perfunctory had rendered me slightly suspect in the eyes of many of my peers who hung out at the store.
Leon let slip that he had been a cellist, that he had played in an orchestra. I right away asked if he still played. He said no, and the subject never again came up. A year later, the city’s FM classical music station, none of us had an FM radio, began simulcasting on the AM band. I ran to Leon’s to tell him that he could now listen to classical music instead of the terrible radio station that he kept on all day and all night. Leon didn’t seem particularly interested. In fact, he went through the motions of trying to find the frequency, nine hundred on the AM band, but abruptly gave up and turned the radio off. I don’t think we ever talked music again after that.
Leon and his family lived behind and above the store. A curtain divided the back of the store from the family living room and we all understood that that space was inviolable. At all hours of the day or night, glimpses of various members of the Broder family could be caught seated watching television on the sofa behind the curtain. Leon‘s wife, who made fleeting appearances as she came and went, was as flashy as Leon was drab. In the ten or so years that I frequented Leon’s, I never saw them exchange more than a few words in public. She was tall, he was short. She was statuesque, he was fat. She had a head full of reddish-brown Susan Hayward curls, Leon was bald. It seemed that they had an arrangement. Their son, Marty was five or six years older than us. Like his mother, Marty was long on appearances, and he spent an inordinate amount of his time combing his hair. Marty tried to cultivate an image of being involved in big things, but didn’t seem able to hold a steady job. While he was around the store most of the time, he rarely pitched in to help his father. The daughter, Lisa, was about my age and went to Girl’s High, a prestigious public school for high achievers. She barely acknowledged our presence.
Leon rarely left the store. From opening time in the morning until ten at night when he closed up, he was there, seven days a week. He and his family were like strangers in a strange land. They were Jewish in a gentile neighborhood. They didn’t mix with anyone. They didn’t appear to ever go anywhere, no one ever visited, and they seemed to have cut themselves off from any association with the city’s larger Jewish community. Leon and his family lived among us like refugees. Whatever brought them into exile remained a mystery. They could have been living on Greenland.
The consequences of my having a non-adversarial relationship with Leon based on something like music, led ultimately to my having to find a new place to hang out. Among my peers, Leon was the sad sack, pain-in-the-ass adult, a figure of derision, whose only power lay in his ability to banish you from the light, from the fellowship of smoking, goofing and carrying on around the pinball machine. During the summer between eighth grade and the start of high school, I was spending most of my days and evenings inside or out in front of Leon’s. On one August afternoon, Leon caught Tommy Scalen stuffing comic books down the front of his pants and chased him out onto the sidewalk. Coming over to where we were sitting on O’Dea’s steps, Scalen started up with “that fucking Jew bastard.” Bobby Falco picked it up with, “Yeah, them fucking Mockys are all alike.” Several more kids took up the chant while I tried to dodge the waves of discomfort and mixed emotions that raced through me. I didn’t say anything. Somebody laughed and said, “Watch out, Leon’s brown-noser friend is here.” I did my best to fade into the background. I liked Leon, but not enough to come to his defense among my own. As the ranting continued, I found myself getting angry, not at Tommy Scalen, not at any of the other loudmouths going on about Leon and the Jews, nor even the taunts of my somehow being a friend of Leon’s. I was angry at Leon. I was furious that I had let myself be put in a position of feeling that I should have stood up for him when I hadn’t the courage to do so.
It wasn’t a big deal at the time. I was thirteen years old, and Olney in 1951 certainly wasn’t Germany in the Thirties or Forties. But in the years that followed, whenever and wherever the question came up about how ordinary people could have stood by silently while awful things happened, I knew better. More than half a century later, I can remember that day when I kept my head down and my mouth shut. I think that I do understand, in a slight but primal sort of way, how some of the terrible chapters of history have come to pass.
I continued to hang out at Leon’s, but not as much. A new crowd and a new corner was already beckoning, another fresh start, unencumbered by any of the burdens of history, however meager, however imaginary
Tags: 1930s, 1940s, 1945-1955, 1951, brahms, caramel creames, cellist, chesterfields, classical, coca cola, comic books, ed sullivan, field and stream, flying magazine, frosty root beer, germany, girl's high, greenland, gummy mexcan hats, jane logan deluxe ice cream, jawbreakers, jewish community, jews, jujy-fruits, luncheonette, memoir, milky way, milton berle, music, nigger babies, olney, pall malls, penny candy, philadelphia, pinball machines, the who, tommy
