43rd Street in the 40's and 50's - by Nan Brooks

An arch of elms, not ours, but close.

The old elm trees once formed an arched canopy over the street, the blocks-long row of them planted carefully in the grassy strip between the street and sidewalks. Before the elms, now gone, 43^rd Street had probably been a dirt lane or track between orchards on the Brown farm, pears on one side, apples on the other.

Ripe fruit now made good weapons for the fights waged by neighborhood kids, democrats on one side of the street, republicans on the other.  Party politics for 9-year-old white kids. I hated the fights, mostly because I couldn't throw very far. We kids, the and Osler and Koorsens and Smiths and Becks and Mosimans and Maderies and Leibowitz’s were aware of politics, which is not to say that we were well informed. Mr. Leibowitz was editor of the Indianapolis Times, the liberal paper that met its demise in the conservative climate, so Alan and Dennis repeated their family conversations, I would guess.

We were a fairly diverse bunch of white people; Jewish, Roman Catholic, and a variety of Protestants. I went to temple on Fridays with the Becks, but my mother was horribly intolerant about Catholicism, so I never got to go to mass.  I loved being welcome at Passover seders with the Becks and the Hanukkah menorah that stood on their windowsill near their decorated evergreen tree, which they called their Hanukkah bush. Most of all I loved the rituals that felt both new and familiar. I also adored Randy, aka Eleanor.

Randy’s father died of polio when she was about 8 or 9, and the entire neighborhood went silent for days. We heard the ambulance siren and watched from our porch several houses away as they carried him out. I knew then that he would die. For months, every time a heard a siren in the distance, I was terrified.

There were two doubles on the street, tiny two-story side-by-sides owned by Mrs. Teeter, who lived in the other side of ours. I think I saw her only once, but she was a constant presence, as in, “Shhhh, be quiet. Don’t bother Mrs. Teeter!” I had the distinct impression that she could throw us out at any minute. But we lived there for 12 years and left of our own accord.

We moved there when my little brother was born. While my mom rested in the hospital for a week after the birth (such luxury), my father painted the inside of the house.  The cockroaches were so bad that after a while he just painted over them as they ran across the walls. But they were gone by the time we moved in and I never saw a single one.She said it was the lard and her rolling pin, the likes of which I have not seen since. It was made of glass with a screw-on lid on one end so that the baker could fill it with ice water to keep the crust cold.  She fried chicken in lard, too, then made mile gravy in the big heavy cast iron skillet and poured it from skillet into a delicate gravy boat with one hand. 

She fried fish for the neighborhood fish fry every summer when my father returned from his trip to Minnesota. He and his buddies came home with big shiny aluminum trash cans full of ice and the fish they’d caught, all cleaned and ready. Dipped in egg, then cornmeal, they went on big platters out the back door, down the steps, over the wire fence, and to tables set up in the vacant lot that ran behind the doubles. There was corn on the cob drenched in butter, plates piled with sliced Indiana tomatoes, corn bread, and a lot of beer. My mother and one or two other women spent most of their time in that hot kitchen and frantic lest the fish burn or the grease catch fire. I was excited when they finally let me help one year. That’s when I saw how much beer the cooks could consume.

There were apple trees in the vacant lot that by this time yielded only hard little green fruit. We sat in the trees with salt shakers, eating those salted apples and watching for worms in them. I never found a worm, but I was an easy mark, so the other kids told me about how they’d once eaten half a worm, just to scare me.

We played baseball on that vacant lot, too. It was grassy and there were no bases, but we played anyway. Mostly, I watched, especially after I got hit in the mouth by a ball. The pitch was so soft that I wasn’t even bruised, but it scared me. Everything scared me in those days, so I preferred to be indoors.

I remember learning to iron when I was too short to reach the ironing board and had to kneel on a chair. I practiced on handkerchiefs and tea towels (a euphemism for what we dried dishes with) while my mother dozed on the sofa. Graduating to ironing blouses and even my father’s shirts was a big deal.

Ah, that dark green sofa – we called it the davenport and it was scratchy and miserable for sick kids, but there we were relegated to avoid making each other sick. My brother and I shared a bedroom until adolescence, so a fever would send one of us downstairs to the davenport. Measles, mumps, chicken pox, colds, pneumonia, injuries – we toughed them out. If things got really bad, the doctor came to see us.

John was almost three years younger than I and we usually shared pretty well, probably because we knew the consequences if we didn’t. I think kids were better behaved in those days, the late 40’s and 50’s. Seldom encouraged to express ourselves freely and taught to be polite to grown ups, we were, of course, pretty fierce in those rotten pear fights. John went to school one day at about age 12 with a red imprint of my mother’s hand on his face. She had caught him lying and when she saw his face the next morning, ordered him to go to school and tell his teachers why she had hit him. If anyone called her about it, we never knew.

The one thing John and I squabbled about was who would turn off the light before we went to sleep. My bed was in an alcove and furthest from the light switch, so he had only one choice – to stall long enough to make me get up and turn off the light. Some fifty years later, when John was terminally ill, I was helping to care for him. He was struggling to breathe but finally able to sleep and as I tiptoed out of the room he murmured, “Would you turn out the light?” I said, “Of course.” To which he replied, “Gotcha! I always won that one.”

Here’s to little brothers, ice cream cones and fish fries, lightning bugs and pear fights, smart neighborhood kids, streetlights making dappled patterns through the elm trees, and that tiny double on 43^rd Street.