Writing About My World

When I was a little boy my Ryan grandfather and I sat on his long York Avenue stoop and read The New York Daily News together. If he was feeling good, Pop would spring for a dime and I would run up to the newsstand on 86^th Street and buy two newspapers, one for each of us. I couldn’t fully read yet but to have my own paper and study the pictures, pick up some new words as Pop repeated them out loud and memorize the letters spelling them to myself; well, I was as happy as a kid could get. Read (kind of) football, baseball, hockey and basketball news, learning all the players, the teams standings, and sometimes seeing these great old photos in the center of the paper by a guy named Weegee, well these murder scenes, people making weird faces and car crashes were amazing stuff I’d never seen before.  I used to think; when I got older I wanted to write about my world, my neighborhood, Yorkville, my schools, P.S. 77 and St. Stephen of Hungary, my teams, especially the Giants and Yankees. 

At LaSalle Academy, I wasted a whole year in a class where I was supposed to learn touch typing on writing made up sports stories about my then crappy teams, stories about our teachers, my other classmates and the shitty jobs we had after school, the Lower East Side, and stories of wishful and bizarre neighborhood heroics. I wasn’t just goofing off, I was practicing.



Here's my story from yesterday's front page in The New York Times' Home Section.

I have a sturdy memory and all those classes I took on the 1616 York Avenue stoop and in the classroom at LaSalle’s annex next to 44 E. 2^nd Street right off Second Avenue are paying off.