Abraham Richman, 1872-1969

Dad (1937)

Memoirs of the Past

I
AROUND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY AT 1900.
I LIVED IN STANTON STREET NEAR THE RIVER.
THERE WAS A BIG CHICKEN MARKET.
A LIVE CHICKEN WAS A QUARTER EACH AND
.05 FOR THE MEAT,  .06 A POUND FOR THE MEAT
AND THE BEST STEAK MEAT WAS .09 a pound.

Eggs was 2 dozen for a quarter.
a big pumbernicle bread was .05 EACH.


A BIG PITCHER OF BEER 2 QUART SIZE WAS .06
12 Big Bananas .05.


THE HIGHEST PRICE LABORS WERE SHOVELING SNOW AT THAT TIME FOR .25 PER HOUR.
AND ALSO ON THE DOCKS PAID .25 A HOUR.
THEY, THE MEN, WOULD SHAPE UP AND GET A BRASS CHECK


II
WITH A NUMBER ON THE CHECK AND WE WOULD UNLOAD THE SHIPS.


WE DID'NT NO ABOUT UNIONS AS YET.
ANYONE THAT WAS WAY STRONG WAS GIVEN A JOBS ON THE DOCKS.


PAINTERS WAGES WAS $2.25 A DAY FOR 9 HOURS A DAY.
PAINTERS UNION STARTED AROUND 1910.


CARPENTERS WAGES WAS @2.75 A DAY BEFORE 1910, BRICKLAYERS $3.00 BEFORE 1910.
ELECTRICIAN WAS MOSTLY UNKNOWN AT THAT TIME IN THE 1900.


HOW POOR PEOPLE LIVED AT THAT TIME.


A BIG SCHOONER OF BEER WAS .05 WITH A HOT PLATE OF SOUP


III
FREE ALSO BREAD AND THEY HAD FREE LUNCH COUNTERS ALSO FREE FOOD.


A BIG GLASS OF WHISKEY WAS .10


THE RENT WAS A FLAT $9.00 OR 11.00 A MONTH. FOR 4 OR 5 ROOMS.


IN THEM DAYS THERE WAS NO STEAM OR HOT WATER.
THEY HAD COAL STOVES AND COAL WAS $4.00 A TON.


AT THAT TIME SOME BUILDINGS HAD THE TOILETS IN THE YARD AND SOME IN HALLS.


THERE WAS A LOT OF BIG CHARITY ORGANIZATION. AT THAT TIME AND A DOCTOR WOULD COME TO YOUR HOUSE FOR .50 A VISIT.


THERE WERE NO WELFRARE AND RELIEF DEPARTMENT AS YET OR SOCIAL SECURITY OR UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE THEN AS WE SEE IT TODAY.

Brooklyn College 9/50

Sight Singing 101

I came late for that class an awful lot, plus I often cut it. The 'teacher' had a Russian accent and was fond of making a steady stream of sarcastic (or sardonic) remarks. He was cool, aloof, and indifferent. His impersonal demeanor I now recognize as typical of about 10% of the Brooklyn College faculty whose great goal in life was to flunk as many students as possible. He was only one of several Ivan the Terribles I have had to deal with in my long life

He continuously played softly on the piano in a cute sort of way, favoring the key of D minor and stuffed with octaves sounding out the Slavic melodies used in our over sized red sight singing book.

There were about 10 people in the class. The most striking looking one was a very tall, heavy set, good looking young man with blond hair named Prokofiev who always wore a fresh business suit and tie. There was always so much conversation between the Russian teacher and Prokofiev that I do not remember him singing anything.

There was also a skinny, nondescript, casually dressed jazz clarinetist who sang the exercises so quickly the teacher would ask him to repeat it over and over again. Ivan would then sit silently cogitating over the skinny clarinetist's performance:

"You are singing all the notes in perfect pitch and time but you are nowhere near the song itself," he would declare.

That statement would lead to much controversy between the students and teacher that lead nowhere.

There was a girl and a guy sweating it out along with me and another petite pretty girl who incessantly played the arpeggios from the Bach violin Chaconne flawlessly on the piano between breaks.

The guy who was sweating it out told me he enjoyed the orchestra and when he found out that I had been accepted for it, he insisted I should come to rehearsals where, unlike this class, I would have a lot of fun.

When Ivan the Terrible, the introductory sight singing teacher contrived to read over everyone's performance at the end of the term to give them their grade, the class fought for me to get a B, but Ivan with lots of weltschmerz in his voice complained that I was absent and late too much, so he was giving me a C.

There were about three other classes at Brooklyn College that lived up to and even exceeded the standards of Ivan the Terrible. Only once was I able to beat the Ivan's to the punch.

I was, along with the rest of a newly formed class, waiting for the arrival of the unknown German teacher. When he tardily arrived about 15 of us rushed for the doors and got our drop slips. When I gave him mine to sign he stared at me quizzically and looked then hurt that I wanted out from his chamber of horrors.

My friend, the pianist Monty Eisman, also was taking a sight singing class from another teacher said he was doing well with the do, re, mi, fa, method that teacher used. Ivan used the interval system.


Which system do you use?

Three Coney Island 'Friends': A Mosaic Study

Murray, Harry, Jordan (1992 mosaic)

Most people thought of Murray as a hopeless social freak--handsome, witty, intelligent, and an intensive conversationalist, but, nevertheless, without purpose or direction. Of his style of life the kindest observation that could be made was 'dissipated.' After all the years that I have not seen him or learned anything about him, there may still be the possibility that he is grinding away as a harmless bureaucrat waiting for his pension. Or, he may have died from AIDS.

Once, in the early 60s, we were having coffee in Greenwich Village, he told me about seeing Rex Harrison in Washington Square Park walking with two beautiful women hanging from each of his arms. How alive, debonair, and poised Harrison appeared to him. Such a man, he confessed to me, was to be envied.

If only he too could be like Harrison at 60, as he now views him in his early 30s.

At first I was surprised to hear such a shallow view of a life, but then I realized how consistent it was with his attempt to grapple with some of the severe choices he had to now make at this stage of his life.

Harry was another story. After a troubled youth, he had managed to prove his worth as a university sociologist. Once when I visited Coney Island in the late 60s his mother who was working at the Half Moon Hotel shouted to me from the Hotel, "He has made Stanford."

We all respected him for his academic accomplishments. Shortly after his mother's Half Moon Hotel Stanford announcement, I spent a day with him in Coney Island, on the boardwalk where we ate giant hot egg rolls from a Chinese food vendor. I can still see the egg roll steaming out of Harry's mouth and I marvelled at the gusto with which he devoured the hot egg roll.

However, I felt that his "do good ism" was still cankered over by an unrelenting egocentricity which he carried over from his earlier Narcissistic days.

All three of us had strong adolescent desires to see American capitalism somehow change for the better.

That did not happen.

For the early '90s when I wrote this sketch, it appeared that the polarities of capitalism and communism had been temporarily resolved by a Pax America supporting a world economy. American capitalism grew by leaps and bounds each day. Politics based on Marxism of any variety became remote, futile, and even ridiculous

World politics and movements in the early '90s are on such a novel scale as to defy the simplistic Marxian dialectics from the 1940s thru to the 1960s. The term Post-Modern says it all.

Those of us who have held radical views (like Jeremiah Wright) have been catapulted into our own self-seeking orbits. For us, the "Coney Island Friends," there is no longer a common denominator.

Mosaics From 1949-1954 (Year-Tight Compartments)

1948-Wallace Convention in Philadelphia, Truman Election, Editor for Lou Relin's Lincoln High Landmarks.

Worked as editor for my high school English teacher's yearbook. Also kept his classes attendance logs. Students were taking their photos for the book.

Time of Slavin's Solid Geometry course and run-in with Orgel with George Gabin, who now, at the age of 80, is incredibly a world class European artist! Thank God sister Roz helped me out of that mess.

It was a period of intense shyness and feelings of physical inadequacy which was not helped by acne.

Decided to switch to night high school (Seward Park) to avoid some of the difficulties I was having in my senior year at Lincoln High. Murray Liebman encouraged me to make the switch since he wanted an intelligent companion to help him through some of the courses he was taking, like English, American History, and Economics. He really seemed to enjoy listening and talking to our Economics teacher on the subject of the Wall Street Stock Market.

2/49

Switch to Night School. In English and American History class with Murray Liebman. We took the American History Regents together and the night the teacher handed out our grades I was absent. When I asked him how I did he first teased me and then fessed up that I had received the highest mark in the class, and that the teacher told the class that in all his many years of teaching American History he had never read such a brillant analysis of the Spanish-American War period in United States History on a Regent's Examination!

After that bit of suprising news I realized what a good friend Murray was and has been from 18 to 80.

It is strange how the act of reminiscing and writing are so much at odds with each other. Writing about the past seems to always be pushing you into the present and demands that you organize, shape, and polish the stream of consciousness of your past life.

Summer of 1949

I can't remember at all what I did then. I think it may have been carrying beach chairs? A really weird Coney Island type Summer job.

Going back to January of 1948 I went back to Lincoln High to pick up my grades in physics. I had an interesting teacher who had been Irving Ziller's teacher and had nominated him for the Physics Medal at his Graduation. That teacher (Edelman, or something like that) was from England, very dignified--he wanted me to take the Westinghouse Science Test!!! I won his attention by my first hand knowledge of vibrating strings from my study of the violin, an important subject which goes back to Greek Pythagorean Philosophers and endorsed by Plato.

The day I picked up my Physics grades was after the night of sister Shirley's marriage to the Columbia Grad school novelist, Eugene Ziller. There was an orgy of drinking at that wedding and I remember being put to bed by an old family friend, Irving Kaufman, who was nicknamed 'Red' for his red hair, which is now gray. Is that the fate of all red heads? Like the Mentalist's "Red John?"

He folded my arms as if I were a corpse and smilingly consoled me that Eugene and Shirley were off to New England for their Honeymoon and that it was time for me to, "Gay Schloffen," Yiddish for me to go to sleep. And then he placed a small bouquet of red roses in my folded hands.

When I woke up it was a rainy, miserable cold day. I went to our corner candy store for a cup of coffee and I felt like hell with my first hangover from the night before. Although I felt encouraged by the good grades I received in Physics, it was then that I resolved to go to night school.

To be continued