Leonora Ketyer of Scottsdale arrives at the Feb. 26 Brooklyn Reunion proudly wearing her Brooklyn College T-shirt. A graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, she said she has many fond memories of singing in the school choir with her former Erasmus Hall classmates Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand and Lainie Kazan.Photo by Lila Baltman
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When the Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center in Scottsdale held its first-ever Brooklyn Reunion on Feb. 26, a spirited and sentimental crowd of nearly 350 turned out in full force to show their love and affection for the old neighborhood.
In the words of Bernice Stone of Scottsdale - a '54 graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School - "It was a great morning of schmaltz."
Ranging in age from their mid-30s to mid-80s, with the vast majority being 50- and 60-somethings, many of these former Brooklynites came specially dressed for the occasion.
Several of the fellas arrived in their Brooklyn Dodgers jerseys and baseball caps. Others wore their Brooklyn College T-shirts or just plain "Brooklyn, NY" shirts. Several of the ladies walked in clutching their high school yearbooks under their arms, wearing their high school pins and carrying other special Brooklyn memorabilia with them.
Within no time at all, the large ballroom of the JCC - which had the names of the various Brooklyn high schools taped to the walls - quickly took on the look and feel of a high school pep rally.
Stanley Seitz, for example, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School Class of '40, walked into the ballroom with his head held high, proudly waving his high school pennant in the air. If only his former teachers and principal could have seen him. He would have easily earned an A+ for school spirit.
At around 11:15 a.m., when the enthusiastic crowd finally settled down, JCC Adult Services Coordinator Suzanne Swift, who helped organize the event, introduced the reunion's guest speakers, Myrna and Harvey Frommer, a husband-and-wife team who wrote the book "It Happened in Brooklyn: An oral history of growing up in the borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s" (Harvest Books, $26.95 paperback).
For nearly an hour, this dynamic duo of Brooklyn natives - who currently reside in Lyme, N.H., where they both teach at Dartmouth College - led the audience on a warm and wonderful trip down memory lane.
They began many of their sentences with the words, "Remember when...?"
"Remember when you used to get the half-sour pickle straight from the barrel?"
"Remember eating a Charlotte Russe from the bakery in the wintertime and enjoying a slice of Ebinger's blackout cake?"
"Remember ice cream scooped by the man in the candy store into a sugar cone, long skinny pretzels, lime rickeys, and malted milks?"
As the Frommers asked these questions, hundreds of heads nodded "yes" in unison.
In fact, if there had been a time machine in the room that afternoon, everyone present would probably have jumped on board and headed straight back to Brooklyn in the 1950s just to get a taste of those authentic Brooklyn treasures, with the first food stop being Nathan's at Coney Island for a hot dog and a knish.
Speaking of Coney Island, the audience had a lot of fun remembering all the famous rides there like the Cyclone, the Parachute and the Whip.
The Frommers talked about the good old days "riding on safe and clean subways that had names instead of numbers, like the West End Local or the Sea Beach Express."
The classic Brooklyn "street games" were also mentioned, such as stickball in the gutters and handball with Spaldings (often called "spaldeens" by Brooklynites), Johnny-on-the-Pony, ringolevio, potsie, and Double Dutch jump rope.
"We lived and breathed to play ball," explained Harvey Frommer, "and if that little Spalding rolled down the sewer, that was it ... you were finished."
Looking around at all the smiling faces in the audience - especially the men - it was clear that nearly everyone had their own vivid memories of spending hours playing in the streets. Precious memories of playing stickball with a mop handle suddenly came rushing back.
The speakers also spent a good deal of time talking about the excellent quality of the public schools in Brooklyn back then, and how "it was a school system the likes of which you will never see again."
Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, for example, produced three Nobel Prize winners, and Abe Lass, the former principal of Lincoln, is quoted in the Frommers' book as saying, "An elderly lab assistant named Sophie Wolf, a clucking-hen kind of woman with a maternal interest in the kids, was responsible for that."
The prizewinners she influenced included Arthur Kornberg, who won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and chemistry Nobel Laureates Paul Berg (1980) and Jerome Karle (1985).
In the book, Lass explains that in Brooklyn during that era, "you had first- and second-generation American adolescents sent to school by parents highly motivated for their kids to succeed, meeting up with great, dedicated teachers. It was a time when there were no school buses and no one was driven to school by car. You'd see a march of mothers with children in hand, walking to school."
Everything the schools did back then was right to the parents, added Lass. "They didn't demonstrate against it. The teachers at that time were simply unquestioned authorities."
To illustrate that point, the Frommers told the story of their friend Sam Levinson, who one day was given a note from school that he was told to give to his father.
His father read it and gave him a smack, crying, "To a teacher, you show signs of astigmatism?!"
The audience had a big belly laugh over that one.
Of course, no Brooklyn reunion would have been complete without a passionate remembrance of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson and Ebbets Field. As Harvey Frommer stated simply, "Never was a team so beloved."
He read another excerpt from their book in which his friend, Joel Berger, asked: "Why was I a Dodger fan? Naturally, all the good people were Dodger fans. If a guy was a Yankees fan, you knew he was a nerd, out of touch. He was probably anti-union, not for good causes, had a rich uncle somewhere. If someone was a Giant fan, he was mixed up, like an anarchist, a nihilist - he was doing it to spite his family, his friends. A Giant fan. Who could be a Giant fan? Dodger fans were the salt of the earth, the common folk who believed in social progress, the American way, the underdog. Where did Jackie Robinson come to if not to Brooklyn? The Dodgers lived in Brooklyn. They could be your neighbors. You actually got to see them out of uniform, on the streets, doing things ordinary people did."
Bringing their presentation to a close, Myrna Frommer said, "Today, Brooklyn expatriates are all over the place, but somehow they can't seem to forget those growing-up days in Bensonhurst, Brownsville, Bay Ridge and Borough Park, in East New York and East Flatbush, in Park Slope and Greenpoint. They can't seem to get over the sights and sounds and smells of the old neighborhoods and the time when Brooklyn was their world, a universe unto itself. That special time, that special place. It keeps coming back like a song."
After much applause, more than a few audience members pulled out their tissues and wiped the tears away from their eyes.
Then, slowly but surely, everyone made their way to the back of the ballroom, where chocolate egg creams, ruggelah and pretzel rods awaited them.
The next hour of the reunion was simply "schmoozing time" with everyone reminiscing with one another and scanning the crowd carefully in the hopes of finding a familiar face.
Steven Rosenbaum of Scottsdale, who graduated from Wingate High School in '59, was able to recognize two ladies from his old neighborhood in Crown Heights. He had a great time chatting with them.
"This was really a feel-good event that brought back wonderful memories for me of living at the corner candy store and the schoolyard," he said.
"The Frommers hit all the right buttons and captured it perfectly," added Sandy Gerston of Scottsdale, who graduated from Tilden High School in '51. "They definitely brought tears to my eyes."
Last year, the JCC hosted "Back to the Bronx" and next year, the JCC is planning to host a Chicago reunion, on Feb. 25, for all the proud and sentimental Chicagoans out there in the Valley who wish to get together and wax nostalgic.
Next year will be their turn to get together and celebrate the schmaltz.
Lila Baltman is a freelance writer in Phoenix.
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