I came to love baseball in a roundabout way. Until age nine, I had an active distaste for the sport. And for good reason. In grade school pickup games, the neighborhood clique of guys—Louie Mandel, Freddy Klein, Allen Nathanson, and Frank Pearlman—and the top athletes—Rob Brownstein and Ronnie Zeidner—always chose each other first. I was one of the last to be picked. When I did get to play, I batted last and got shuffled out to right field, as far away from the action as possible. I also recall being ridiculed by the clique for “throwing like a girl” and for swinging the bat “like a rusty gate.” I was so afraid of making a mistake that I’d stand out in right field praying that the ball wouldn’t be hit to me.
I was so ashamed of my incompetence that for years I refused my father’s offers to play catch in the backyard and his invitations to watch the Sunday softball games at Riis Park. He didn’t let on to me how disappointed he was. But I found out one day when I overheard him talking to my mother.
“It’s unnatural, Stell,” he said. “I don’t want him to grow up to be a sissy.”
“Don’t push him Jack,” my mother said. “He’ll come around when he’s good and ready.”
It was an off-handed remark, but a perceptive one. No one understood me or my idiosyncrasies better than my mother did. She knew exactly how I operated. Perhaps, it’s because for the first nine years of my life, I spent more time at home with her than I did with my father.
For as long as I could remember, my mother, an ex-pre-school teacher, was a voracious reader. I recall that a lot of books, newspapers, and magazines—like Reader’s Digest condensed editions, dictionaries and encyclopedias, Sunday Times, Life, Colliers, Harper’s, New Yorker, and Saturday Evening Post—were always strewn around all over our kitchen table and living room floor.
According to her I was an avid reader and a bright, curious kid. Maybe that’s how I seemed at home. But in school I was shy, scared, and withdrawn.
My aversion to school began in kindergarten, when Mrs. Buckley, our blue-haired teacher, singled me out because my finger paintings didn’t look anything like the models she’d posted on the blackboard. From then on, I felt light-headed and nauseated every time we had to paint or draw. One time, she tacked my drawing up on the wall. I knew she’d be using it as an example of how not to draw. I felt a deep, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. So before she could say anything, I threw up all over the floor. After that everything became a blur. All I recall is my cousin Doris escorting me out of class and walking me home. I was so embarrassed by my behavior that at dinner I begged my mother not to send me back to school the next day.
My mother and Mrs. Buckley met a few days later. I don’t know what transpired, but when my mother came home she told me I didn’t have to go back to kindergarten that year. As soon as my father found out, he as much as ordered her to send me right back to school.
My mother stood her ground, and as it turned out, I didn’t attend kindergarten. But all year I felt ambivalent and guilty that I hadn’t “toughed it out,” like my father said I should have. I don’t remember much else about that year except that until summer recess I went out of my way to avoid facing the neighborhood kids who were in my kindergarten class.
It was with much apprehension, then, that I started first grade. Every morning before I left for school I felt so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t eat breakfast. It took a week or two to get over my fear of what I imagined the other kids might be saying about me. After that, I began to enjoy first grade. I even recall winning a class spelling bee and receiving a “word wizard” button from Junior Scholastic magazine.
Then it happened again. When Mrs. Krisberg was teaching us how to hold a pen, I got nervous and began to panic. After that my penmanship was so bad that at parent-teacher night Mrs. Krisberg told my mother that I had a motor skills deficiency.
Once more, over my father’s objections, my mother pulled me out of school. I couldn’t face the prospect of being at home again while the other kids were in class. I whined and pleaded, but it didn’t matter. My mother was determined to see that the school system wasn’t going to get away with miseducating her son.
She did, however, propose a compromise. She would work with me at home until the mid-year break—after which, I could go back to school. I wasn’t happy about it, but at age six what were my options? That fall, we did my school lessons every day at the kitchen table—the same reading, writing, arithmetic, arts and crafts, and drawing assignments that everyone else was doing in class. When I tried to play with the other kids my age, they taunted me and called me names like “momma’s boy” and “retard.” So I withdrew deeper into myself. That’s when I discovered my first real passions: reading and writing.
It was my mother who introduced me to books. Every night, before sleep, she would read to me from her collection of children’s stories. At first, she read me the usual fairy tales and kid’s books: Uncle Remus, Hans Christian Anderson, Grimm’s, Winnie the Pooh. Most of these blur in my memory, though I vividly recall being enthralled by outcasts like Cinderella, Jack from Jack in the Beanstalk, and Pinocchio. It wasn’t just their misfortunes that attracted me. I admired their resilience, their determination to overcome all obstacles. The seven-year-old “schlepper” that I was, I wanted to prove to all the kids in school that I could be as persistent as those characters and as tenacious as the Little Engine That Could.
What I remember best, though, is what it felt like to read: the exhilaration of discovering kindred spirits—authors and characters alike; the thrill of finding secret joys and hopes that I shared with fictional beings; the colorful pictures I could conjure up in my imagination; and the sense of being fully absorbed in the moment—suspended in time and space. I can remember times when I would start a book in the afternoon, and I would be shocked to find when I picked my head up that it was dark outside and that I’d forgotten to turn on the lights or take my afternoon nap.
At home I read wherever I could find a spot to hide out—in the bathroom, my bedroom, the basement. I was intoxicated by language and stories. When I didn’t understand something, I loved looking it up in the dictionary or the encyclopedia. Often I was lonely and sad for days after I finished a book. It felt as if I’d lost one of my closest friends. On the other hand, it was so satisfying to struggle through a story until I reached the end. It soon became a matter of pride to finish everything I read, no matter whether I loved or hated the characters or plot. Over time, the compulsion to finish anything I started would become a habit that would carry me into adulthood.
As I got a little older, specific books and characters—like the Hardy Boys and Chip Hilton, Speed Morris, and Soapy Smith—the star athletes in Clair Bee’s Chip Hilton series—felt more real to me than the neighborhood kids I knew. In fact, it was those Chip Hilton books that first made me aware of just how much attention and recognition you could get from being an accomplished athlete.
I loved the books themselves—their feel, their smells, their textures. While my mother shopped for groceries and clothing on 116th Street, I haunted the Rockaway Beach Public Library, eagerly pulling books down from the shelves and sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor, inhaling the musty aromas and running my fingers over the grainy textures of those volumes. When I’d crack the binding and bend the book open, my heart started racing and my hands trembled with anticipation.
While I was out of first grade, I also began to write. I’d scribble notes in the margins of books, or I’d write in a hand-sized spiral bound notebook I kept in my pants pocket. Sometimes, I’d pretend I was the author and rewrite the story. Or if I wasn’t satisfied with a character’s decisions, I’d write what I would have done in the same situation. When I didn’t like the way a certain book began or ended, I’d make up my own beginning or ending. If a story seemed too predictable or boring, I’d change it. If I felt an affinity for a certain character, I’d pretend that he or she was my friend and I’d write that character a letter. Once in a while something I wrote would stop me in my tracks. Other times I’d be thinking about one thing and an unbidden thought or idea would appear on the page.
I liked writing for many of the same reasons that I loved to read. Once I got going, I could write for hours without thinking about anything else. I loved the sensation of feeling both transported and in control. I never felt inadequate or self-conscious when I was writing. I could imagine anything I wanted to, make myself into anyone I wanted to be. I also liked the challenge of finding the exact language to express some of the doubts and fears I couldn’t reveal to anyone else. And if I couldn’t think of the right word, I’d look it up in the dictionary or in my mother’s thesaurus.
I was just beginning to enjoy my involuntary furlough from school when my mother announced that it was time for me to go back. For the first few weeks I was self-conscious and tentative—so afraid the kids would start taunting me again. But once I got used to being back in school, I remember feeling disappointed that the reading and writing we did in class did not provoke nearly as many supercharged moments as those I’d experienced alone at home.
In those early years of school, I didn’t get to spend much time with my father. For much of his adult life, Abraham Jacob “Jack” Steinberg was a traveling salesman. He worked for a Manhattan table linen manufacturer when I was a kid. His territory was Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana.
My father disliked being away for such long stretches, but he was a lot happier on the road, where he could be his own man, than he was in the home office. Whenever he took me with him to Manhattan, he’d balk at doing the routine paperwork they gave him. And it irritated him when he’d have to take orders from his bosses, some of whom were younger and less experienced than he was. But he put up with it because, like so many Jews of his generation, he believed it was his responsibility to work hard and provide for his family. This was the ethic he lived by until the day he died in 1989.
I admired my father’s persistence, but I felt sorry for him because he never got the chance to follow his dreams. As a kid I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew I craved a more romantic existence than the unremarkable life my father and mother led.
My father knew this about me, and he was always urging me to get my head out of the clouds. At the same time, he never stopped encouraging me to better myself. His standard lecture was about missed opportunities. He made it clear that he wanted me, his firstborn son, to go to college and get an education—as well as to seek out and do whatever it was that would make me happy.
“If you settle for anything less, you’ll always regret it,” he said.
While my father offered me this permission, he was never able to give it to himself. I learned how to follow my own dreams, not from his advice, but from my grandfather Hymie’s escapades.
In his prime, Hymie Frankel was a robust, gentle man. Almost six feet tall, he liked to wear grey cardigan sweaters and smoke pungent White Owl stogies. By his late forties his hair was already thinning, and his shoulders were rounded from bending over the prescription counter at the pharmacy. Yet my grandfather had an aura about him, a tangible presence that attracted women and men alike.
As a young boy I was enamored of him. My mother claimed that Hymie fawned all over me, the family’s firstborn son. Allegedly, he took me for rides on Sundays in his beat-up old DeSoto, just so he could parade me in front of all the uncles, aunts, and cousins. And, as the story goes, he flashed my baby pictures to the regulars at the pharmacy every chance he could.
But my most vivid memories of him don’t involve Sunday car rides. By the time I was nine Hymie and his buddies were smuggling me into the harness racing tracks at Roosevelt and Yonkers. The first time he took me to the races he said, “Don’t tell your mother or Grandma Tessie. If you do, Mikey, we’ll never hear the end of it.”
That was the start of our conspiracy.
Whenever he planned to take me to the harness races, he’d tell my mother we were going to the movies. She knew Hymie wasn’t playing it straight with her, but what could she do? He’d been taking her to the track since she was a young girl. Besides she also knew that the serious betting action was at “the flats,” Belmont Park and Aqueduct (“The Big A”).
“Swear to me Hymie that you’ll never take him there,” I once heard her urge him. And, despite my pleading, he honored that request. He didn’t take me to Belmont until I graduated from high school.
The family mythology only added to Hymie’s aura. According to my mother, in the Roaring Twenties my grandfather owned two Manhattan pharmacies near the Ziegfield Theater. And she liked to boast that Al Jolson, Jimmy Durante, Georgie Jessel, and Burns and Allen hung out at Hymie’s stores before and after their shows. She also claimed that he loaned Jessel some big money when the future star was just getting started.
“He might as well be giving it all away,” she frequently said. And in some ways she was right. Whenever Hymie was flush he gave his money to show biz and racing buddies, and to the down-and-outers and hangers-on who regularly tapped him for cash. But once when I pressed her on the issue, she admitted that most of the luxuries she enjoyed came from money he’d won at the track.
Hymie was so fond of my mother, his eldest daughter, that for her eighteenth birthday he bought her a canary yellow Ford roadster and then enrolled her in an exclusive women’s teaching college. And her younger sister, my aunt Ruthie, claims that she would have enjoyed the same privileges had it not been for the stock market crash of ‘29. My mother’s version, though, was that Hymie lost the pharmacies not on account of the crash, but because he ran up so many debts with the bookies.
Whatever the case, Hymie characteristically took the loss in stride. He moved the family to Rockaway Beach, a resort community on the south shore of Queens, where he bought a small pharmacy in partnership with his three nephews, Mickey, Sam, and Abe Neiman. Together they began to rebuild what he had lost.
By the time I was born, in the early 1940s, Hymie was earning what my mother called “a decent living;” and he and my grandmother Tessie were living in my mother’s and father’s house on Beach 132nd.
My father was on the road so frequently that for a time Hymie became a permissive surrogate father to me. On racing nights Hymie would have me meet him at five o’clock at Neiman’s Pharmacy. The ritual went like this: first he’d slip me a twenty and we’d go up the street to Sam Cahmi’s deli, where he’d sit me down at the counter and order me a lemon coke and a hot pastrami sand-wich, then he and Sam would duck into the back room to wait for Willie and Ralph—from the butcher shop—to arrive with the racing programs.
Those two guys were right out of a Damon Runyon novel. During the day, Willie and Ralph cut meat and wore bloodstained aprons and baggy brown wool pants. But at night, when we went to the track, they were decked out in three-cornered hats, shiny black suits with diamond stickpins and vests, and pointy shoes with white spats.
I used to love to hang around and listen to them handicap.
“Doc Robbins says to put the long green on Adios Harry in the third,” Willie would boast. And Ralph would counter with something like, “I have also got an inside tip. From Shermie. He says number three’s got the post. And mark this down, Will, the horse is runnin’ on greenies.”
When the four of them disappeared into the back room, I wasn’t supposed to know what they were up to. But it didn’t take a lot of smarts to figure it out. Guys with wallets bulging like egg rolls paraded in and out of that room as if it had a revolving door.
Once at the track, Ralph, Willie, Sam, and my grandfather would go back to the stables to get inside tips from the trainers and stable boys. They always had the lowdown on which horses were running on Bute, who was lame, and who was the heavy favorite. They also studied the drivers’ records, each horses’ winning times, the track conditions, the horses’ blood lines, even the wind velocity and direction. They bickered over which horses were the “mudders” and which ones were “rabbits.” They always knew who you could count on to “crap out in the stretch.”
Hymie was their leader—always the taciturn, dignified patriarch. When he walked through the admissions gate at Roosevelt, Hymie headed straight for Doc Robbins’s office under the grandstand. Doc was an old racing crony, a fellow pharmacist who’d retired in his mid fifties to pursue his real passion. He owned the track’s program concessions, and when Hymie and the guys showed up, Doc gave them box seats right at the finish line. More than once I heard my grandfather telling Willie, Ralph, and Sam that he wished he could do exactly what Doc Robbins had done. It was something I never forgot.
Hymie also kept company with the top drivers, and he traded tips with the Mafia types—the big-time shooters in sharkskin suits, black silk shirts, and white ties. Everyone looked up to my grandfather—the bookies, the touts, the trainers. They took his marker, came to him for advice, asked him for handouts. And he acknowledged them all. He’d give money to Jimmy Sparrow, the retarded kid, and to old Shep, the shell-shocked local “village idiot.” He even bankrolled Hilda Bells, who was a bag lady long before bag ladies became part of the landscape.
But he didn’t just hand them the money. In his way, he made them earn it. I remember once when old Hilda hit him up for a loan. Hymie pulled out his wallet, but before he handed over the cash he flipped open the plastic sleeves that contained his family photos.
“Look at my grandson,” he said. “Isn’t he a beautiful kid?” The gesture embarrassed me, but I enjoyed watching old Hilda grimace and nod her head in mock agreement.
Grandparents and grandchildren are natural allies. Both have a common adversary: the parents. Hymie wasn’t responsible for bringing me up, so he could afford to indulge us both. And what young kid wouldn’t enjoy that kind of permission?
The first time I went with him to Roosevelt Raceway, we sat in the grandstand high above the oval dirt track that circled the green infield. I took in the scene through Hymie’s old Zeiss binoculars. To my right, just beyond the lip of the grandstand roof, were the finish line and the tote board that flashed the odds every few minutes. Below, between the railing and box seats, were swarms of people: parents and kids sitting on blankets, eating out of wicker picnic baskets; dapper men and flouncy women who looked like they just stepped out of “Guys and Dolls”; faux aristocrats with porkpie hats and chauffeur’s caps who sat on folding chairs studying the racing form; and the touts and hangers-on who scurried around like worker ants. It was the most enchanting spectacle I’d ever seen. I felt as if I’d been transported to another dimension
Even though my grandfather was a gambler, the money that traded hands seemed less important than being part of the spectacle and milieu. Ten minutes before the first race, my grandfather sat me down and said, “Mikey, I want you to understand that there’s more to this than the money.” Then he walked me through the racing form, explaining the Byzantine symbols: the post position numbers, the horses’ best and worst times, their previous finishes, their breed, the trainers’ record, the jockeys’ track record, the racing conditions, and the stakes. Then there were the times when Hymie took me back to the stables and introduced me to the trainers and jockeys. He had them explain to me how the horses were bred, trained, and developed into trotters and pacers. It was the first time I had truly felt like an insider.
During the racing season Hymie couldn’t stay away from the track. Whenever he could get cousin Sam or Mickey to cover at the pharmacy Hymie would fill prescriptions from six A.M. till noon, and then he’d head for Belmont or The Big A. After a dinner break, he’d drive twenty-five miles to Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury in time for the nightly double. When the ninth race ended, he and his cronies went over to the Sunrise Highway Diner for a cup of coffee and the ritual post mortem. He’d get home after midnight and slip into bed, always remembering—win or lose—to leave a rose and a fifty dollar bill on the dining room table for Tessie and his two daughters. It was Hymie’s way of buying them off.
By eight the next morning he was back at the deli making book on the day’s races, before heading up the street to the pharmacy where he’d fill prescriptions and indulge his other passion: shmoozing the regular customers.
Though cousin Sam and Mickey were never easy with Hymie’s gambling, they had to keep quiet about it. Whatever reservations they harbored, they knew he was never negligent or irresponsible. He’d get up at three in the morning to deliver medicine to a sick friend or customer; he’d fill the paregoric scripts that no one else wanted to make; he’d work the counter, sell cosmetics to the women, order the supplies, keep the books, pay the bills, listen to salesmen’s stories, and place the weekly ads in the Rockaway Beach Wave.
But at home Hymie was restless and impatient. Sometimes he’d get up from dinner to call Sam or Ralph to check the latest racing information. Or he’d listen to the sports news on the radio to find out the results from the afternoon card at The Big A. Still, when my mother scolded him for not being around often enough, he neither argued nor defended himself. He’d acknowledge that she was right, and he’d apologize. Then a day or two later, he’d bring her flowers and take her out to dinner and the track—just as if she was his date.
When Hymie took me to the track, I loved watching how excited he and his cronies would become when a horse they’d spent days researching, studying, and inquiring about, won a race. It was as if they’d accomplished something significant. And given their otherwise mundane lives and jobs, who could begrudge them those brief moments of fulfillment? Isn’t that what we all yearn for?
Then there were the aesthetics. I’d listen with rapt attention when my grandfather would describe to me how he loved watching a thoroughbred racing at full speed—muscles taut, tail whipping in the wind, outstretched legs seeming to float above the brown clay. Who but an aficionado would describe that scene in such passionate, reverent detail? It was as if he was talking about a work of art.
Another reason that Hymie was so driven to pursue his racing pleasures was, I believe, because of a midlife bout with tuberculosis. When he was in his early forties, the doctors removed a diseased lung and told him that if he wanted to live more than another five years, he would have to quit smoking and chasing the horses. To my grandfather, it was a worse punishment than the diagnosis. So he made the only compromises his temperament would allow: in place of the stogies he started smoking Tipperillos, and for six months he skipped the trotters and went only to the flats in the afternoon. But as soon as he could convince my grandmother he was healthy, Hymie was back at the pharmacy in the mornings and doing his usual double shift at the tracks.
Anyone looking for a cautionary tale here will be disappointed; my grandfather lived this way for the next thirty years. He died, appropriately enough, at Roosevelt Raceway. It was a sudden heart attack, and he went quickly. When the medics found him, he had four winning tickets in his shirt pocket.