Notes from the Green Man (eBook)

The Dalldorf family, circa 1964, Brooklyn, New York

CHAPTER 2

CHIPS ON THE BALL

I took my very first steps on the soil of Suffolk, England, on a sunny, unusually mild December morning in 1977. After an overnight flight across the Atlantic Ocean, I stood blinking at intensely green fields surrounding the tarmac of RAF Mildenhall as bright morning light added to the dramatic electricity of that moment. A soft yellow and angled sun illuminated the flight line, and I was excited by new sights and sounds I’d soon intimately get to know. A ground power unit was started and loudly made its presence known as four U.S. Air Force airmen in green fatigues scrambled around the chartered commercial plane. An olive-drab fuel truck pulled alongside, and behind it, a camouflaged C-130 Hercules aircraft taxied past. Thrilled and jittery with excitement about this new life, I’d just landed in a place I could never have imagined. For a working-class kid who had barely squeezed through public high school in Brooklyn, it all seemed so incredibly improbable. What a sight for sore eyes I must have been that morning: barely 18 years old, pimple-faced and extremely skinny, standing motionless in my poorly fitting Air Force dress blue uniform.

All I could think was, Chuck Dalldorf, how in the hell did you manage to pull this off?

As a kid, I was obsessed and mesmerized by the map of the New York City subway system. The colors of the different lines and how they crisscrossed and spread throughout the city, like a diagram of arteries and veins, filled me with wonder and curiosity. I imagined which subway cars ran on the different lines and the variety of station types — some lying deep underground while others hung on elevated steel trestles above busy streets. Incessant studying of that map had etched the tunnels, connections, stairwells, subway lines, elevated trains, and terminals permanently into the deep recesses of my mind.

My subway map obsession was a gateway drug leading to an interest in all maps, charts, and globes — anything related to geography. I spent as much time as I could in the school library and frequently walked along Fourth Avenue to Sunset Park’s public library so I could peer intently at atlases and run my fingers between exotic locations. Maps unlocked my imagination and created a picture of life beyond the tenement buildings, brownstones, and industrial buildings that defined my Brooklyn world. Maps led me to a search for old National Geographic magazines and books with photographs of faraway places.

My parents both worked hard to make ends meet, and travel was an unaffordable luxury, although several of their friends traveled extensively. My sister and I sat through many evenings of slide shows in the blue haze of adults’ cigarette smoke and the diffused light of a slide projector. Staring at pictures projected on our apartment wall and hearing stories of their travels fueled my curiosity and embedded in me a passion to see new places. I committed myself to getting away and out in the world as soon as possible.

Our Sunset Park neighborhood was filled with families in large, brick apartment buildings or in private houses, most of which had been subdivided into apartments. In the early 1960s, the neighborhood was mostly made up of white, working-class families, and it was almost exclusively the men who went off to work every day. They were firefighters, subway motormen, union construction workers, tailors, bus drivers, electricians, or laborers in warehouses and factories throughout the city.

For seventeen-and-a-half years of my childhood, our family lived in the same upper floor apartment in a private house divided into apartments. Our block — 40th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues — was a few long blocks from the shore of Upper New York Bay and the docks of Bush Terminal. Our neighborhood sat on the summit of a very steep hill that had played a pivotal role in the American Revolutionary War. We were a short block away from an entrance to Sunset Park, one of Brooklyn’s highest points, with its dramatic view of the harbor and lower Manhattan. The Statue of Liberty stood on an island in the bay, almost directly across from us, proudly displaying her lit torch. A wonderful observation and an occasional talking point between adults on our block was the wonderful irony that our working-class enclave faced this multimillion-dollar view of New York City. At night our apartment’s back windows showed the full skyline of downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan. We watched the lightning rod at the top of the Empire State Building attract white hot bolts out of the sky during storms. As my sister and I grew, so did the World Trade Center’s steel frame, and we saw it soar upward, dwarfing everything else on the Manhattan skyline.

A few men in the neighborhood worked on the construction of the massive Verrazano Narrows Bridge, once the world’s longest suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. My father would go off to work every morning and later that day, as we ate dinner at the small Formica table tightly squeezed into the kitchen, he would talk about the difficult bridge he had struggled with at work. Downing a can of Schaefer beer, my father would saw through a fatty pork chop nestled against a hill of mashed potatoes.

“I couldn’t get anything lined up today. That bridge is a total nightmare, and the lower bridge will be worse.”

On the block, kids’ dads working on the bridge were viewed with awe, so I bragged about my father until an older kid called my bluff, telling everyone my dad didn’t work on the Verrazano Bridge. His father was a union ironworker who told the kid he had no idea where my old man worked. “Maybe your father’s a toll taker, but he ain’t no skywalker,” the kid said. Upon reflection, I realized that, unlike those men, my father did not carry a steel helmet and lunch pail with him to the subway. Instead, he left each morning wearing casual clothes and carrying his sandwich in a worn, brown paper bag.

When I confronted my father, he laughed so hard beer came out of his nose. After gagging and cleaning himself up, he asked, “Where’d you get that? I never said I worked on the bridge.”

“You did!” I insisted. “You’re always talking about bridges.”

My father then educated me about the world of dental labs, false teeth, and bridge work. He labored five days a week in a windowless, nondescript building in Manhattan’s Times Square, back when it was the sad, seedy center of pornography, peep shows, and drugs. While my father’s work stories were mostly the same, his stories of walking to and from the subway station in Times Square were full of colorful tales, none of which were age-appropriate. Many times, we heard eye-popping, funny stories, but dinner discussions would also be the wet-blanket on my kid fantasy ideas, including the termination of my father, the skywalker.

The Dalldorf home, 613 40th St., Brooklyn, November 1977

One of the more stressful arguments that played out at our kitchen table reflected the social, economic, and cultural clash of the Vietnam War and the 1960s. This domestic period not only substantially changed American society, but also impacted our home and the neighborhood. More mothers, including mine, happily joined the workforce as quickly as they could. Our family needed the money, but more important for my mother was her desire to have a career beyond our apartment. While options for a young woman without a degree were limited, my mother worked her way through more traditional jobs, starting as a school secretary. She moved into other jobs and for a short time became a New York City 911 emergency operator. Later, as she became more involved in community activism, my mother found her passion and worked her way into a full-time political job. While this and other issues created a widening gap between my parents, the cultural conflict was not an issue for most of the kids on the block. Life pretty much continued as always — we had bigger fish to fry, depending on the sporting calendar and how we modified 40th Street to be our athletic field, especially when playing stickball.

Like other blocks around us, 40th Street was a long, single lane, one-way street. The streets served as a seasonally adaptable playground as well as a multitude of playing fields. The most popular game was stickball, a modified game of baseball adapted for the street (other variations existed throughout the city and were modified for empty lots or playgrounds). Named for the use of a narrow, wooden broom handle as the bat, the only other equipment required was a pink, bouncy rubber ball. The iconic pink, rubber playing ball was made by Spaulding, but in Brooklynese was pronounced “Spaldeen.”

The beginning of most street stickball games went something like this:

“Wanna play stickball? Johnny’s getting teams together,” Paul would ask, walking up to three of us sitting on a stoop.

Jimmy would respond, “I gotta stick. I’ll get it.”

“OK,” I’d say. “Who’s got a Spaldeen?”

Paul would say, “I dunno. Jose’s got one.”

Moments later, pink ball in his right hand, Jose would bound down his stoop and immediately declare, “Chips on the ball!”

Declaring “chips” was an important procedural matter. It meant that if you hit the ball, and it landed on a roof or...