On a beautiful Spring evening in 1953; fifteen years old, in trouble for drinking beer, staying out, flunking three subjects, clueless, confused and desperately hoping to find a way out, I sat alone with a Frosty Root Beer on the sidewalk in front of Joe’s candy story on Duncannon Avenue. A large flowering magnolia tree dropped its electric-pink blossoms on me and on the sidewalk all around me.
My father said that if Joe had granted me bathroom privileges, I’d never have to come home. Joe was an untidy guy, an overweight chain-smoker with a full head of greasy, black hair. He was an easy-going and liked to chat, continually lighting each new Chesterfield from the butt end of the last one. Hanging out at Joe’s was my first real excursion into the wider world of people not from my family, my street, my school, my church or even my age group. The kid across the street from our house, Bobby Yanks knew some of the guys who hung at Joe’s, as did an older kid up the street. I wandered down to Joe’s one night early in my second year of high school and found a home.
Joe’s shared an entryway with a Mom and Pop grocery store. A guy named Ed and his wife ran the store. Ed was a nervous type who wore a white shirt and a necktie and did what he was told to do by his outspoken wife. I think Ed hated us for our carelessness. His wife would shout to him from inside the store. “Tell those kids to get off the steps. Right now! Tell them to move, or I’m calling a Red car.” Philadelphia police cars at the time were black and white, but they had been tomato red for years and the threat to call a Red car was generally and unequivocally understood. Running one of those neighborhood grocery stores at a time when the supermarkets were just coming in must have been a tough way to make a living. The friction arising from Joe’s candy store and Ed’s Market sharing a set of front steps was mitigated somewhat by Ed’s closing at five each afternoon. Serious hanging out was an evening activity.
Joe wouldn’t have a pinball machine in the store, and that kept us from congregating inside. What he did have was a very old four-stool soda fountain. For fifteen-cents, Joe would spade out a generous two-flavor serving of Abbott’s ice cream. My own favorite was butterscotch-vanilla and vanilla fudge. Joe would pack the ice cream into conical paper cups that sat in black Bakelite holders. There was also one scarred and wobbly booth up against the wall. You had to be consuming an item purchased in the store to be allowed to sit in the booth. And, you had to vacate the booth when you finished. Joe let us hang out as long as we observed what he felt were reasonable rules. He refused to sell us loose cigarettes. He believed that if you were old enough to smoke, you were old enough to buy them by the pack at twenty-two cents per. Prior to my achieving financial independence at age thirteen via my paper route, I would put up a dime or eleven cents and go halfers on a pack of Camels or Luckies with another kid. Unless the pack was split up immediately, the endeavor usually ended up in a dispute over who had gotten more than their share of the cigarettes. Joe held down a full-time factory job on rotating shift work. When he couldn’t be behind the counter, his wife or daughter would take over. The wife went with the flow. But the daughter, a very plain girl with glasses, a couple years older than me, took pleasure in showing her disapproval of the lot of us. She took every opportunity to let us know that she was quite certain we’d all turn out to be bums.
The stretch of Duncannon Avenue at Joe’s surfaced again a couple of years ago when the name John Baron made the news. Fifty years ago, Jackie Baron was everything I wasn’t. He was handsome, self-assured, a star athlete, a Protestant, and on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout. He lived directly across the street from Joe’s, but he didn’t hang out. We developed a nodding acquaintance when he would come over to pickup the evening paper for his father, or to take home a bowl of ice cream dippers. Big things were expected of Jackie Baron. His picture had appeared several times in the Olney Times citing his various athletic and academic accomplishments at Olney High School. I had every reason I needed to resent and dislike Jackie Baron. Meeting on the street, we began to stop and talk. Despite myself, I had to admit even then that Jackie was a nice guy. When one of the kids on the corner started dating a girl from the same Methodist Church as the Barons, I was invited to tag along to one of the church’s youth nights. Talk about a fish out of water. My friend was going to fix me up with a girl who would be just right for me. The girl was a knockout, but her only interest turned out to be Jackie Baron. She barely acknowledged my presence.
Forty or more years later, the Philadelphia news media were alight with a major financial scandal involving some of the oldest, largest and best-established institutions in the region. It seems that a charitable organization had mismanaged hundreds of millions of dollars belonging to these venerable outfits. The head of the troubled charitable organization turned out to be Jackie Baron. There was much glee in the papers and among people I knew who were following the unfolding debacle. Jackie was in it up to his neck. I held a minority opinion, and I still have trouble believing the guy would have knowingly done wrong. My take is that Jackie Baron was a straight shooter who got in over his head, and for the right reasons made some bad decisions. The courts eventually took a similar view, but Jackie did end up doing some time.
A fringe benefit of hanging at Joe’s candy store was my discovery of Ed’s and Jack’s barbershop two doors up the street. One of our first declarations of teenage independence was getting the kind of a haircut we considered cool, and Ed’s and Jack’s catered to that need. With a paper route’s cash flow and a kid’s compulsion to establish an identity in opposition to acceptable norms, I couldn’t wait to plunk down my seventy-five cents for a D.A. haircut. The D. A. or “Duck’s Ass” hairdo came east from California in the early 1950’s. It required that a head of longish, oiled hair be cut in a blunt straight-ended box across the back of the neck. The hair in the front had to be combed up into a pompadour, and the sides swept back around into an overlapping center at the back of the skull. Then with the edge of a comb, you made a crease down the hair in the back of your head to form what looked like a duck’s ass. We thought it looked great, a precursor of the freak flags flown by a later generation of hippies.
Ed the barber was an innocuous guy who would cut your hair and make small talk. Jack on the other hand, was an interesting guy. Rumors were that he had something going with the blond crossing guard assigned to the corner in front of the shop. She would shelter inside the barbershop when the weather was bad, and she and Jack seemed to get along. I think now that she was the subject of gossip simply because she was pretty.
Jack had a face like Shemp Howard, and he had been in the Marines, not during the war, but before, in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. He had been a China Marine serving on a gunboat going up and down the Yangtze River. I liked to get him talking about firefights with warlord troops, about what it was like to have been in China during that period. Years later, reading “The Sand Pebbles,” I put Jack the Barber’s face on the lead character, and it stayed even after Steve McQueen played the part in the movie.
My tenure at Joe’s lasted for a little over a year. During that year, the all-male universe centered upon Joe’s would offer me the non-judgmental sanctuary I needed to survive an unsettled time in my life. Nobody at Joe’s ever asked how I was doing in school. Nobody there seemed to have any concerns about amounting to anything. In a shifting assortment of characters, maybe two dozen of us in all, we hung out in front of the store and waited for something to happen that might fit our idea of excitement. Ironically, my fuzzy definition of excitement was almost synonymous with transgression and oblivion; trouble and alcohol. There was also always an aching hope for the possibility of sex. But most of us were too afraid of real girls, and the sex never really materialized. Probably just as well. Instead, there were the adrenaline jolts of being in cars going too fast, too late at night, half drunk and sometimes being chased, once or twice by a police car.
The time spent at Joe’s candy store was where I did my undergraduate work in the fine art of hanging out, gathering the needed credentials and qualifications to make it into the major leagues of hanging out, the corner scene at Jimmy’s Tomato Pies. Moving east those two blocks on Duncannon Avenue to Jimmy’s was the corner-lounging equivalent of entering a master’s program at one of the Ivies. Jimmy’s was the perfect corner, a place where the rules were minimal and you could hang out with impunity. Across the street from a large foundry, with an abandoned icehouse next door and diagonally across from Olney High School, there was rarely anyone around after dark to complain about us, on one to call the cops or chase us, No matter what we did.
Early on a chilly Saturday evening, with the usual crowd leaning against the wall in front of Jimmy’s, a cop came by on a three-wheeled motorcycle. It wasn’t a pleasant night. In fact a steady, cold drizzle was falling, and the cop was not wearing a raincoat. That the cop was working middle-shift on a Saturday night, that he was riding a motorcycle in the rain, and that cops in Philadelphia in the mid-1950’s were notoriously underpaid never entered any of our minds, particularly the limited mind of a kid named Don Carney. It puzzled me that Don Carney had reached the age of seventeen with all of his own teeth. He had a big mouth.
In the instant that Carney spotted the white three-wheeled motorcycle with its icebox-like trunk behind the seat, he opened his legendary big yap and shouted, “hey ice-cream man, what flavors you got?” Hilarious to all of us, but the cop it seems, was not amused. As he swung the cycle around in the middle of the street, we were already in full flight. Carney of course got away cleanly, but Willie Williams, Johnny Nerze and Ray Vishio who didn’t move quickly enough were pinned to the wall by the cop’s rumbling motorcycle. Fortunately, something stopped the cop from going at them with his nightstick. Skulking a block and half away, we waited until the motorcycle left before returning to the corner. The three guys who had been left behind were not too happy with Carney, but that wasn’t something that Carney would even have noticed. He thought the whole thing had been a scream.
It wasn’t fifteen minutes after the motorcycle cop rode off when three police cars and a meat wagon converged on the corner. Those were the days of two cops to a car, and trying to run away seemed pointless. “Oh shit,” I thought. “What now?” There were nine of us. Don Carney, of course, had left just five minutes before the arrival of about half of the force assigned to the city’s Thirty-fifth Police District. Within seconds, we were all being shoved roughly into the meat wagon to the accompaniment of “fucking punks, fucking juvenile delinquents.” And more ominously, “wait till we get you assholes over to the district.” If they were trying to scare us, their efforts succeeded with me.
The patrol wagon bounced across streets and slid around corners throwing the nine of us together in the darkness like so many bags of oranges. Nobody was making jokes, not even Eddie Mulvena or Frank Eugene, two of the few real bad-asses in the crowd. When the wagon finally came to a stop and the back doors were opened, we were a sad lot of teenagers. Billy Wiley was already in his weasely mode of “I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me. It was Carney. He was the one who did it.”
We piled out on to the sidewalk and were surrounded by a half a dozen stern-faced cops, one of whom started in with “look at the little pansies. Were you little girls playing with each other in the dark in there,” and worse. At that, a big cop with stripes on his arm leaned toward us and said, “I’m counting to five, when I get there, I don’t want to see any of you assholes within my sight, One. Two. Three…” We were all off and running.
What they’d done was take us for the longest ride they could within the district, and dumped us. It was raining, and we were a good twenty-five city blocks away from where we’d been picked up. We drifted away from each other into groups of twos and threes as we walked silently over Olney Avenue. There was no solidarity in defeat, and it was a long, wet, quiet walk. I didn’t even go back to the corner. I went home. My parents watching Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, feigned shock at seeing me home so early on a Saturday night.
Being a part of the crowd at Jimmy’s satisfied a compulsion I had to belong to something, anything other than what I was ordained to belong to. The noise in my head, my failures in school, and my fears about having to perform in any way that would expose my inadequacies, made me desperate for some kind of non-judgmental acceptance. On the corner, nobody cared if you were on the honor roll. Nobody even noticed if you’d already quit school. As long as you weren’t a cigarette or money moocher, or a demonstrated craven coward, you could hang out. However, if you exposed any weakness or vulnerability, you were fair game. The bullying and harassment could be cruel and relentless.
Tony Somik had a face ravaged by acne. A shameless bullshit artist, he had to ignore the casual references to “Pizza Face.” He had a choice of accepting the insult or of challenging his tormentors. Tony wasn’t a fighter. Older and much bigger than me, he was easily intimidated. I could call his bluff. I did it once and remember feeling not good about myself afterwards. Referred to once by Freddy Krug as “Tony the Tough Guy,” he started getting “Tony the Toughie,” and finally just “Tough Tony.” While the mention of Tony’s name usually included the antecedent of “that asshole,” he had earned an irrefutable and legendary spot in the pantheon of neighborhood folk heroes. On the occasion of his grandfather’s death, just after Tony’s sixteenth birthday, he had come into ownership of the old man’s car. Possession of a car, even a car rumored to be nearly as old as the deceased grandfather, gave an immediate boost to Tough Tony’s status on the various corners he was then frequenting.
The evening following the grandfather’s funeral, Tony showed up at Jimmy’s behind the wheel of his dilapidated inheritance. The fact that he didn’t yet have a driver’s license, and that the 1936 Packard four-door sedan was on its last legs, took nothing from Tough Tony’s moment of glory.
On that nearly perfect June evening, Tough Tony’s inquiry to the assembled crowd of corner loungers seemed eminently reasonable. “Hey,” he shouted. “Who wants to go down the shore?” As many as could, stuffed themselves into the smoking relic. Tough Tony and his eight or nine passengers took off into the sunset for Wildwood, New Jersey, a full ninety-miles from Mascher Street and Duncannon Avenue in North Philadelphia.
Surprisingly, they made it all the way to edge of the beach in Wildwood. There in the dark, where the streets ended in sand, youthful exuberance combined with blind ignorance led Tony to wonder what it would be like to drive up and down the beach. With wheels spinning and slipping in the loose sand, he somehow got the car down to the firm, water-packed surface at the tide line. For the next couple of minutes, Tony was the master of the evening. With the headlights off, he raced the Packard along the edge of the beach, sending up walls of spray as his tires caught the tips of the incoming waves. In an attempt to turn around and retrace his course back up the beach, he inadvertently crossed back over into the soft sand above the waterline.
With a combined passenger weight of about fourteen hundred pounds, the old Packard went down to its axles in the porous sand. After a lot of futile wheel spinning and engine revving that put a final end to the car’s fragile clutch, everyone got out and stood around trying to figure out what to do next. The efforts of all nine of them to push the car out of the deep sand were to little avail. Clueless, they watched as a figure with a flashlight approached from one of the beachfront houses.
The guy told Tony he could use his phone to call a gas station on Rio Grande Avenue that had a tow truck equipped for the beach. Tony came back to say the guy at the gas station wanted fifteen dollars to come out. With all nine guys anteing up, the total disposable assets amounted to three dollars and forty-two cents. If the holdouts in the crowd had been forced to come clean, the revised total probably wouldn’t have topped five bucks. The guy with the flashlight then dropped his bomb. “Well then,” he said. “I’d guess you‘ve got about another forty-five minutes or so before the tide comes in and covers that car.”
Breaking the point from a switchblade that Tommy Walters had in his pocket, Tony fashioned a screwdriver to remove the tags from the car. He was hoping the Packard wouldn’t be traced back to him. With waves beginning to lap at the rear wheels of his late grandfather’s bequest, Tony, no longer in the lead, joined the march back over the beach and down the street toward the bright lights of the Wildwood boardwalk.
A phone call to Tony’s older brother Stanley brought him, not too happily, down to Wildwood just before sunrise. Tuffy and four of the guys rode home with Stanley who loaned the remaining adventurers bus fare back to Philadelphia. It was early evening when the last of them got home, seedy and tired, nearly twenty-four hours after Tough Tony had pulled up to Jimmy’s, blowing the horn of the now twice-flooded Packard. On the advice of several of the street-corner attorneys, Tony went over to the Thirty-fifth District, and with a straight face, reported the car stolen. Since no one had gotten around to canceling the dead grandfather’s car insurance, Tony ended up getting book value on the old Packard. He didn’t get much, but what he got was probably a couple of times the car’s actual worth.
Years later, a guy who had hung with us expressed his disdain for Tough Tony by saying that Tony was the kind of guy who would continue trying to bullshit you, even after he knew you were on to him. I think that was precisely the thing I liked best about Tough Tony.
You had no tenure when you hung out on a corner. Implicit in every interaction was an unstated code of survival. If you didn’t like the way somebody treated you, your options were to eat it, and risk eating a lot more once it was noted that you could be backed off. Or, you could simply leave, go away, come back later or not come back at all. Or, you could get right into the offending person’s face. If you weren’t prepared to get physical, then you had only the first two choices. One summer, a kid named Al Sinkowski started coming around to Jimmy’s, and quickly earned the mocking tag of “Can I Go Joe.” He wasn’t a bad guy or a fool. In fact, he could be sharply funny and had a streak of wild zaniness that should have served him well in the corner crowd subculture. But in his abject desperation for inclusion and acceptance, he offered a cautionary tale. His inability to understand the ground rules of the environment, and his willingness to allow himself to be humiliated sent a clear message to everyone that he had no business coming around. In the rough and tumble, push and shove of hanging out, I always had to give as good or better than I got. But I knew that the minute I allowed a true insult to go unanswered, I could never again walk up and stop on that corner. And at the time, I was afraid that there wasn’t any other place I could be.
As an adult, I’ve joked that the only discernable talent I’ve ever displayed was an ability to hang out. And yet, despite all the time I spent between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, sitting on the steps or leaning against the walls of neighborhood candy stores and sandwich shops, I realize now that I was never more than a marginal player in the circles I frequented. In the hierarchies of an auto-centric world, I didn’t have a car. I certainly wasn’t a tough guy. And as much as I would like to cast myself in a starring role, I was more like Eliot’s Prufrock, never a Prince Hamlet, but rather a minor attendant lord, one who would do to swell a progress or start a scene. In fairness, my peripheral status among the more colorful members of street corner society was as much a function of my age and my personality as it was of my lack of wheels. I was a good two years younger than most of the guys on the corners I frequented, a serious factor at age fifteen or sixteen. And I met the welter of insecurities and confusions raging inside me with a contradictory mix of brazen wise-guy sarcasm and a non-committal reserve. I belonged, but I never had the charisma of a central figure, and I doubt my absence was much noted when I stopped coming around.
Tags: 1936 packard, 1945-1955, 1953, abbott's ice cream, bakelite, beer, california, camel cigarettes, chesterfield cigarettes, china marine, crossing guard, duck's ass haircut, duncannon avenue, eagle scout, flowering magnolia, imogene coca, lucky strikes, marines, memoir, mom and pop grocery store, olney, olney avenue, philadelphia, pinball machine, prince hamlet, prufrock, shemp howard, sid caesar, steve mcqueen, t. s. eliot, the olney times, the sand pebbles, thirty-fifth police district, two-wheeled motorcycle, wildwood, yangtze river
