IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT ONE IN SEVEN AMERICANS CAN TRACE their families to having once lived in Brooklyn. It is equally true that those who have left it have never forgotten it. This is certainly the case with Peter Meinke, a poet and retired professor of English at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Meinke, who was born in Midwood Hospital in Flatbush in 1932, was removed from the Brooklyn streets the week before he was to enroll at James Madison High School in the fall of 1946. Meinke’s father was of German origin, and he didn’t like what was happening to the neighborhood. Italians were moving in, and he had fears that Brooklyn no longer would be safe. It was a precursor to what would happen all over Brooklyn and many other American cities during the next decade. Because Mr. Meinke owned an automobile, he had mobility that allowed him to travel across the Hudson River to buy a house in bucolic New Jersey. Son Peter, one of the country’s revered poets, was crestfallen, but he never forgot from whence he came.
PETER MEINKE “My father’s father, Harry Christian Meinke, came over as a young boy in the late nineteenth century from Hanover, Germany. His mother had died in childbirth, and he had a relative who was a fisherman in Sheepshead Bay back when it wasn’t a golf course, and my father came by boat to Brooklyn. He was a big guy, about six foot one, a husky fellow. He was one of the few family members without a Brooklyn accent. He did not say, ‘Shut the daw.’ He taught himself that.
“He was a very strict patriarch who ruled the family. He was a cigar-smoking man, and whenever one of us would light up a cigarette, he’d say, ‘Throw out those stinkaroos.’
“After I became engaged to Jeanne [his wife of many years], I had to introduce her to Grandpa. He lived on Flatlands Avenue, near Nostrand. I forgot to tell Jeanne that Grandpa hated cigarettes.
“In those days we all smoked. We sat down at the table. I had seven aunts from my mother’s side of the family, and they all were there. Jeanne was a little nervous, and she lit up a cigarette. There was silence around the table. Grandpa looked at her and bellowed, ‘Put out that stinkeroo.’ Jeanne put it out, shaking, when he threw a cigar at her. He said, ‘If you’re going to smoke, smoke a real smoke.’ Even though she had never smoked a cigar before, Jeanne took her fork, jammed it into the cigar, lit it up, put it in her mouth, and there was smoke everywhere. You couldn’t even see Jeanne. From the silence, Grandpa turned to me and said, ‘She’s all right.’ And everybody applauded.
“Grandpa worked most of his life. After he stopped being a fisherman, he became a night watchman in a factory, so he stayed up all night for a long time. He was a blue-collar worker who spoke perfect English, and he was very political, right-wing and pro-German, and he would argue with the rest of the members of the family, who were very much against Germany and Hitler. The vehemence of the arguments was very scary for a child. This was before the beginning of World War II, when no one knew what Hitler had done. After we went into the war, Grandpa finally came around, but for a long time there were raging arguments.
“Whenever we’d visit, we would go into the house, the kids would start running around, and my aunt Marge would make Manhattans for the men, who’d give the cherries to the kids. The men would light up cigars, and they’d all sit around talking politics, little of which we understood. I do know they hated Roosevelt. They thought he was an aristocrat, and they didn’t trust him. He was never mentioned by name. He was always ‘That man.’ My father’s side of the family tended to be Republican. My mother’s side was different.
“Grandpa would pay us to sing German songs at Christmas. Once the war started, my father forbade us to practice them. When Grandpa asked for his songs, we told him they weren’t allowed. ‘You are German,’ he would shout. ‘Sing.’
“Though he was a tough guy, he had that sentimental German streak. He gave me a poster called a Schnitzelbank, and it had pictures, and I would point to the pictures and sing, ‘Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?’ And then he’d answer, ‘Ja, das ist ein Schnitzelbank.’ He said to me, ‘One day you should go to Germany,’ and I said I would, not knowing it wouldn’t be long before I would be going into the army. He had married and had two children—my father and my aunt Marge—but his wife, a small, chubby woman, died when we were very young. He’d talk about his wife, and he would burst into tears. I remember being very touched, thinking how complicated older people were. Here was the boss of the family, crying.
“I liked him very much. He didn’t complain. He was not sympathetic about anyone complaining about anything. He wanted people to work hard, and he would give us boring lectures to that effect.
“He had a lot of bad traits. He was prejudiced in all kinds of ways. The worst thing he would say—and this is terrible—we’d settle down and make the Manhattans, and we’d ask him, ‘How is everything, Grandpa?’ And he would say, ‘Ah, the Jews and the guineas are ruining the world.’ We would just look. No one would argue.
“Years later I went to college as a freshman at Hamilton College, and my roommate and best friend was Carmen Bufania. No one looked more Italian. His parents were divorced, so I said, ‘Why don’t you come home and have Thanksgiving with us?’ Then I remembered the dinner would be at my grandfather’s house in Brooklyn. I said, ‘Carmen, I hope it doesn’t bother you, but whenever I ask Grandpa how things are, he says, “Ah, the Jews and the guineas are ruining the world.”’ Carmen said, ‘I’m from Newark. Is there going to be a lot of food?’
“Carmen and I arrived, and we sat down, and the Manhattans came out, and Grandpa was in his big chair. My father said to him, ‘Well, Dad, how are things?’ And Grandpa looked at this swarthy kid sitting next to me, thought for a second, and said, ‘Ah, the Jews are ruining the world.’ Carmen and I clinked glasses.
“No one ever said to me, ‘Don’t play with anyone,’ but prejudice was in the background. It was also clear that the adults were more prejudiced than the kids.
“My father, who was born in 1906, wasn’t a big guy, but he was a good athlete. He grew up in Brooklyn, went to Manual Training High School, where he was on the swimming and basketball teams. He never went to college, never even thought about college. It was not in the language of the family. It was a blue-collar family, and it was not what our people did in the 1940s. After high school, he worked for a company, Conklin Brass & Copper, selling metal products. He began as a stock boy, and he worked himself up until toward the end of the war—there were not many men around—he was promoted to salesman. He worked hard for Conklin, and eventually became a manufacturer’s rep selling metal products all around New Jersey.
Peter Meinke’s grandparents, Catherine and Harry. Courtesy of Peter Meinke
“He met my mother coaching a girls’ basketball team in a church league. They were the same age. My mother, who was of Irish descent, went to Erasmus. She was a good student, straight A’s. My father didn’t read books. My mother won the Latin prize. Back in those days you could become a teacher with a high school education and a few extra courses. She went to Cornell one summer, and became a teacher in the elementary schools in Brooklyn. When she first became a teacher, a girl in class kept staring at her, and when she looked back, this girl removed her eyeball—she had a glass eye—and my mother fainted.
“My mother was a very gifted pianist, and if she had come from a different family, she might have gone on to study music. She could play by ear. She had perfect pitch, which is very rare. She took lessons and became a piano teacher as well. But she could have been a really good pianist.
“My mother’s father was a disappointed Irishman, an alcoholic Irishman, who could also sit down at the piano and play without ever having studied it. But he was a postman, and he felt he was undervalued in America, so unlike the Germans, who felt everything was good, he was disappointed in his life and drank and died early, so I didn’t know him very well.
“We all went to the Lutheran church, a German kind of church. There was a secular feel in our house. We never prayed. We never said grace. I was never religious, but I never objected to church. The family never talked about religion, and to me it was both social and literary. I liked the stories. They had a big, heavy volume of Bible tales illustrated by Doré, very intricate illustrations, many of them featuring naked ladies, including the picture of the flood where all these naked women were hanging on, and I would pore through this, fascinated. There were also a lot of battle scenes from the Bible. I looked on religion as sensational stories that were scary, violent, and sexy, so I didn’t object to religion, because it was kind of interesting.
“We lived at 1851 East 32nd Street, between Avenues R and S, a German-Irish neighborhood. We weren’t far from Red Hook, which was a tough Irish section, with a lot of bars. I didn’t go there but my father did. We had a lot of German stores, German-Jewish stores also. Ebinger’s bakery was where we got our bread. There were Irish bars, bars named Kelly’s. There were few Italians. I never heard of pizza. There were no blacks. There were Germans, Irish, English, and Welsh, that kind of mixture.
“I liked living there very much. My neighborhood was a row of brick houses, attached twelve in a row, separated by alleys. You didn’t want to have the house at the end of the alley, because the kids liked to play ball against it. Each house had a little stoop in the front and a little, teeny lawn the size of a couple of couches. In the back there were small backyards, with tiny gardens, which during the war we called Victory Gardens. Instead of flowers, we grew Swiss chard, peas, food, and we ate it. We even grew grapes, and we made grape jelly—in Brooklyn.
“I walked to school, PS 122. We had bullies. The bullies were Irish. The Kelly brothers. When I was young I got smallpox, and all of a sudden I was blind, truly blind, so from the time I was five I had to wear thick glasses. I used to break them, because I was embarrassed, and all the time I would walk with them in my hands because the kids would tease me when I wore them. ‘Four eyes,’ they would taunt. I would get into fights, and they’d break. Eventually I got used to wearing them all the time.
“I learned to avoid the Kelly brothers, who were just mean. One time they stole my hat. They tried to get my glasses, but I was kind of speedy. They often would chase me around, but would have to settle for someone slower.
Peter and sister Pat in front of 1851 E. 32nd Street, Brooklyn, in 1938. Courtesy of Peter Meinke
“I was an early reader, and the Kelly brothers were pretty dumb, and one of them couldn’t read. One day, for some reason, I read the comics to one of the Kelly brothers, and this eventually gave me a kind of immunity. I was the guy who read the comics to the Kelly brothers. And they would get great comics. I remember Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. I would read with great animation, and they loved it, and they’d be yelling ‘Freakin’-A,’ and so when I came home, my mother would say, ‘Would you like some potatoes?’ I’d say, ‘Freakin’-A,’ and my father would get up and grab me, and I was truly an ignorant child. I’d say, ‘What’s wrong with “Freakin’-A”’? I didn’t know what it stood for. ‘Never say that word again.’ How bad could it be? It was what the Kelly brothers always said.
“I remember one incident that had a bearing on our idea of fair play. I knew the Kellys were terrible people, and one day a Kelly brother picked on me a little bit, gave me a shove, and there was this boy, whose name I never knew, an older boy but not much older, fairly big, dressed neatly with a white shirt, curly-haired, and after the Kelly brother shoved me, this kid went over and decked him. I feel tears when I think about it today. As I stood pressed against the wall, all by himself he whacked a couple of them, and after they ran off, he said, ‘You okay, kid?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Now and then in that school people got their comeuppance.
Courtesy of Peter Meinke
“I discovered I was reasonably coordinated, and I started playing on teams out in the streets, and fair play really held forth. I joined the Police Athletic League, which organized leagues, softball teams, touch-football teams, and best of all we got free bleacher tickets at Ebbets Field, and we went a lot. I was a great fan. I liked Dolph Camilli, Pete Reiser, who hurt himself running into outfield walls, Pee Wee Reese, and I liked Dixie Walker a lot. We listened to all the games on the radio. I had all these aunts, all of whom lived in Brooklyn, a big Welsh-Irish family, and they all were baseball fans. I loved Red Barber. We also got free tickets for the New York Rovers at Madison Square Garden at night. My dad would take me to the hockey games. [The Rovers played in the Eastern Amateur Hockey League from 1935 to 1952.]
“Taking the subway was very exotic, and eventually I learned to do it by myself. I took piano lessons in Bay Ridge, and I learned the Nostrand Avenue trolley and the IRT and others. We went to Coney Island in big groups, and I rode the Cyclone over and over. We used to lie down in the Tunnel, where you went into the park at the entrance, and tumble all over, and we didn’t ever want to get out. We ate the hot dogs at Nathan’s.
“We would spend a lot of time in Marine Park, roller-skating, playing ball. My dad played handball there. And my dad was getting heavy already. He got fat fairly early on. But he was a good athlete, and every once in a while he would team up with the boxer ‘Two Ton’ Tony Galento, and when they played doubles, there appeared to be about a thousand pounds of men out there. [Galento gave a famous interview to a reporter before his 1939 bout with Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium, where he claimed he’d ‘Moida da bum.’ He lost to Louis in four rounds.] To us little kids the players looked like elephants clashing in the jungle, and they would sweat and yell and tell jokes. Handball was big, but I never liked it. I have smallish hands, and it hurt my hands, and I was better at baseball and other sports.
“For a long time my grandfather had his shack on Sheepshead Bay, and we would go there and have dinner parties. The kids would put bacon or chicken necks on a line, and we’d catch our own crabs, or we’d go out in a rowboat and catch sheepshead, porgies, fluke, flounder, and there were a lot of eels in those days.
“We would also go to Riis Park, over the bridge near where the Naval Air Station [Floyd Bennett Field] was. On the way there was an empty warehouse, a circular building, and my father would see it and he’d say, ‘This is where the Gallo brothers and the Mob made hootch and had their headquarters,’ and he’d tell me gangster stories. Every once in a while there’d be a gangland slaying, and I think that was one of the reasons my father wanted to get out of Brooklyn. Even though my two closest friends were Eddie Martini and Bobby Pepitone, he associated Italians with the Mob. The Italians were moving closer, and to him they were scary.
“My father would say, ‘The neighborhood is getting tough.’ He wasn’t sure it was a good place to bring up kids. I would argue with him. I didn’t feel the neighborhood was scary. I didn’t want to leave Brooklyn. I thought it was an exciting place, a rich place for a boy to grow up. So much was happening all the time. Stores were opening. Buildings were being built. The cost of the movies at the Quentin Road theater was 11¢. Sardi’s, the restaurant, wasn’t expensive. We went on special occasions. I even liked the idea of there being bullies, as long as they were under control. This was grade school, and I liked it. I was good at school without having to do any homework. Even then I wrote little poems. I published an East 32nd Street newspaper, kid stuff, with gossip and my poems, and I printed it out. I dragged my feet whenever my father talked about moving.
“I can’t say the war affected me very much. I was interested in it, but not the horror of it. I collected war cards that showed Germans and Japanese cutting babies in half. I looked at maps, and I kept charts of the battles, like the Battle of the Bulge. I didn’t get too emotionally involved, because none of our family was in it. In fact, our family prospered during the war. Most of the men were gone, and my dad kept getting promotions, and he was able to save up enough money to buy a house in New Jersey. My mother was teaching school. They were making enough money that we even had a black nanny. It was not unusual in those days for a blue-collar family to have a nanny. She babysat me and my sister. I remember she was nice. I’m sorry to say I have no pictures of her.
“The last couple of years I lived in Brooklyn we had a car, and my parents began to go out to New Jersey. I went occasionally to see some trees, some farms, and somewhere along the line they met a friend who had bought a house in Mountain Lakes, and we went out to look at it, and we bought this big stucco house for $10,000. That was 1946, and now it’s worth over a million dollars. I can remember my father took me over to James Madison High School, and I would have started there, but during that first week of school, we moved to New Jersey. Instead I went to Mountain Lakes High School. It was so small all the grades were in the same school. I was terribly disappointed.”
Peter Meinke, a professor at Davidson College, 1989. Courtesy of Peter Meinke
But Peter Meinke’s dad achieved his purpose, at least in his own mind. In son Peter’s class of fifty kids, only one was Italian, Emily Leone, who became one of the school’s cheerleaders.
“She’s the only Italian I can remember,” said Meinke.
And though Meinke moved from his Flatlands row house to his large two-story house in New Joisey sixty years ago, it was the little house in Brooklyn that has never ventured far from the poet’s mind’s eye.
THE HOUSE
Let us say there is an ideal realm
Whose spires and minarets send endless light
above white avenues of maple, elm,
unlighted by the grinding worm of change.
Below this, or inside, the real world
shifts its shoulders in its struggle
to be born, to grow toward possibility.
Cities flash and shudder in the sun, whole forests
disappear beneath the blade, and everywhere
some inchling of a tree is pushing
its pale question, some family plants and hammers
in the shadow of a slanting roof.
In the middle of this second world,
near Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn,
my father and my grandfather bought
with banging hearts and hesitant hands
and minuscule downpayment, a skinny,
dark, three-stories house, brick stoop
in front, small yard in back;
and through its heavy door our vivid aunts
and uncles thrust their demanding way
in a tumbling stream of family and friends,
dogs, cats, parakeets, and turtle. Unlike
the condominium of today—now
towering in its place—this was a house
that could be called a house, passionate
and painful, splintered forever in this mix
of orbiting atoms, mortar and memory,
story, stone, and blood