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Messages - ercillor

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: As I read the "remember the ..." threads ...
« on: October 31, 2010, 11:58:36 AM »
Quote from: Beech Court on October 30, 2010, 03:10:45 AM
... Fannie Farmer's (next to Bickford's) at the Victor Moore Arcade...

The Victor Moore Arcade!!!  Where I would stand along one of the three bus aisles -- the middle one -- awaiting the Q19 Triboro Bus for which I had a school pass.

Don't tell me that's gone too! :embarassed:

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: As I read the "remember the ..." threads ...
« on: October 29, 2010, 03:37:40 PM »
Quote from: Hank Stamper on February 09, 2010, 02:13:55 PM
Very little permanence out there. How many New Yorkers today remember such "institutions" as Idlewild Airport, Gimbels, Wanamakers, Lundy's, Bickfords, Horn & Hardarts, Luchow's, Childs, Jack Dempsey's, the Polo Grounds, the "old" Madison Square Garden, (and the old, old Garden), Sam Wo's, Schrafts,  or that Dinty Moore's was a restaurant?

And if you mention the BMT or IND to "youngins" they just stare at you.

  

Holy Smoke!   You mean those places are all gone?  The minute you turn around everything changes!  Well my 74th birthday is coming up in a few days. Guess I'll just stare out across the Rockies and the Prairie, remembering when Jackson Heights had open fields and low-flying DC-3's.  Are you sure that the Toddle House is really gone? Schrafts on Northern Blvd. too? Bickford's? What about the Shelby Bake Shop and Peter Pan's? What about Jackie Dugan, and Kathy Curtin, and Lizzie? They all gone too?

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Jackson Heights Telephone Exchanges
« on: August 27, 2010, 02:06:56 PM »
Quote from: edorgon on March 17, 2010, 12:52:25 PM
How about Illinois with the exchange being IL.  Elmhurst/Newtown HS area.

 

In 1946, when we got our first telephone, our telephone number was IL-8-4528 and it stayed that way until 1954. One night, only a year or two ago, I decided to dial that number. I was bored and it was a ridiculous thing to do but I did it anyway. The female voice which answered spoke to me in a foreign language and so I apologized -- in English -- and put the phone down. Silly of me.

Anyone else ever do such a stupid thing? 

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Bad School Memories
« on: August 27, 2010, 01:10:49 PM »
Quote from: taggie on August 27, 2010, 11:57:18 AM
He was in the first
graduating class of Newtown High which had him finished with school at 15.

What year was that?

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Bad School Memories
« on: August 26, 2010, 11:00:00 AM »
Quote from: sl on August 25, 2010, 09:26:34 PM
At IS 145, the worst memory was the day they informed us that a fellow student was stabbed to death when some thugs tried to steal his walkman. I don't know the student but it was quite tragic.

Yes, Jackson Heights and its school scene has changed a lot over the years. The crimes are much worse than before.

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Bad School Memories
« on: August 25, 2010, 12:36:02 PM »
Quote from: Kestral342 on August 25, 2010, 12:23:03 PM
OMG  so many bad memories of the beloved school system that existed in the 50's and 60's. 1st of all I am sure I had ADHD but rather than be helped and counciled I of course was punished.

Kestral,

Care to say what school you attended, and when?  Your story sounds oh so familiar.  Welcome to the great society.

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Bad School Memories
« on: August 24, 2010, 07:54:32 PM »
Quote from: ercillor on August 24, 2010, 03:57:09 PM
I thought it might be useful

Many years ago when I was about ten years old and the earth's surface had just begun to cool -- or so it seems now -- I attended class at PS148 where I met a Miss Katz whose many and varied neurotic 'difficulties' had been overlooked by the NY Public School authorities when they decided that she should be crowned with the title of 'teacher.'  Unfortunately the head which wore that crown was filled with so many wiring problems that the children who were assigned to her were hard put to learn anything and were sorely tormented in the process.

On one occasion our Miss Katz slapped a young girl classmate of mine who was French and did not yet speak English fluently enough for our tormentor (yes, Renee, if you ever read this please know that I still remember that day and your tears). The matter was resolved when my classmate's mother visited the school, entered into conversation with Miss Katz in the hallway outside our classroom and, somehow, was unable to prevent our 'teacher' from falling down a flight of stairs. The mother had survived Hitler's extermination camps and, quite apparently, knew how to deal with the Miss Katz's of this world in a definitive manner.

I did not possess such skills, however, and Miss Katz simply terrified me as was her intent. I travelled to school each morning in great fear of what would happen to me that day and wended my way home in fear of the day to follow. Finally I decided to run away. I left a note for my parents and walked from 90th St. and 34th Ave. all the way to Flushing Meadow park where I spent the day thinking what I might do next; the thought of suicide was not absent from a child's mind. Finally it began to grow dark and so, like many another runaway -- Beaver Cleaver comes to mind -- I began to walk home. That week I was taken out of Miss Katz's classroom and placed into a more hospitable -- and sane -- environment but I never forgot Miss Katz or the terrors which she had caused to well up inside me.

At seventy four years of age I'm very glad to have the opportunity to tell this story to whomever reads or writes here. I've never told it before -- ashamed to I guess -- and it strikes me that it may help some others, with similar experiences, to make a certain peace within themsleves.

    

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Crime in Queens in the "good old days"
« on: August 24, 2010, 04:10:34 PM »
Quote from: Shelby2 on March 15, 2009, 08:09:22 PM
There's a website where you can read news from the early 1900s.  I browsed around a little to see what was going on in Jackson Heights around 1930.
Quote

Did you get the impression that things were quite as bad then, in Jackson Heights, as they are now?

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Bad School Memories
« on: August 24, 2010, 03:57:09 PM »
I thought it might be useful -- for so many of us -- to have a place in which we might record some of the hurts which came along with being 'educated' inside the NY Public School System of long, long ago; A sort of catharsis where we could relate -- perhaps for the first time in our lives -- what it was like to be 'taught' by some who should not have been teaching at all, but who wound up as 'teachers' in Jackson Heights. Whether you attended PS69, PS148, or any of the other public schools, here is a place where you can rid yourself of some very bad memories while sharing them with your fellow sufferers.

Please change their names in order to protect the innocent or, perhaps, the not-so-innocent.

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Need help remembering the name of a Kosher deli
« on: August 24, 2010, 01:48:35 PM »
Quote from: 20th Century Boy on August 24, 2010, 12:41:53 PM
At the time you moved out of 89-14 in 1954, Southridge didn't even exist.

That's right! All the xxxridges had yet to appear and the places where they now stand were open fields, some of which still bore plow marks. We children called them, collectively, "the lots," and did not realize, until too late, how fortunate we were to have them in which to play. Northridge did come along in 1954 -- I think -- and that marked the beginning of the "red canyons." All of those buildings started life as rental apartments... You probably knew that.

Did you live in that very nice building with the two tower 'dunce-caps?'  As a child I always wished that I could live there.

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Any Memories Of Garden Country Day School?
« on: August 24, 2010, 01:32:17 PM »
Quote from: taggie on August 23, 2010, 03:25:28 PM
Yes, The Garden School as it is now called is alive and well. The school has nursery through to 12th grade. Garden School where the small class size and individual attention can help in all kinds of areas- academic, social/emotional or otherwise. The
high school students have done very well with their college possibilities as the students have a wide range of talents upon graduation.
It's a small but mighty presence still in Jackson Heights. I'm sure that a visit inside could be arranged by appointment on the website.

I live in Colorado now so a visit will be unlikely. If it were possible I would surely take you up on it. My own experience in the PS environment (PS149,148) was child shattering and I actually do remember wishing that I could attend that pretty school up on that lovely hill... At age seventy four I suspect that they would no longer have a place for me. :'(

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Need help remembering the name of a Kosher deli
« on: August 23, 2010, 02:45:07 PM »
Quote from: 20th Century Boy on August 21, 2010, 10:23:00 PM
  I had a few friends who lived at 89-14 34th Avenue, but they would only have been 3 or 4 years old in 1954:  Irwin Corman, David Adler and Harold Laufgraben.

Wow! the place certainly did change after I left...  Yes, your friends were too young for me to have remembered.  Do you recall a Howie Goldner or his sister Barbara from 89-14? They too were not old enough to be my friends -- lived down the hall from me -- but I do know that Howie Goldner became a New Jersey state trooper.  I know this because -- believe it or not -- he picked me up on the Garden State one morning for speeding. I didn't recognize him but he knew me from my registration and license. We chatted for a bit and he gave me a warning citation --- "Gotta give you something. We're already on the camera." It is, truly, not a very big world.

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: Who remembers the Sunnyside swimming pool -- (late 40's)
« on: August 23, 2010, 02:25:45 PM »
Thanks Chuckster,

I found it.

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Re: I can hear it now.
« on: August 20, 2010, 03:21:29 PM »
Quote from: Nagelberg on July 23, 2009, 07:06:33 PM
In the 1940s and 50s, Jackson Heights didn’t sound like it does today.  In the winter, you awoke to the jingle tire chains. . . and if it had snowed that night you knew it immediately thanks to the rhythmic scrape of shovels in the muffled air.  

Spring arrived with the racket of roller skates and cap pistols.  Coal rattled on steel coal chutes, laundry flapped on the roofs, the Good Humor man rang his bicycle bells, and street singers performed under our windows for small change wrapped in pieces of paper.  There was even an organ-grinder.  

I am old enough to remember the clip clop of the ragman’s horse and his cry of “Buy old clothes!” A man with a portable grindstone sharpened scissors and knives with a shrill shower of sparks.  Milk men and Seltzer men clinked and rattled on their appointed rounds.

And then there was the day I heard the drone of  bombers over P.S. 69.  I looked up and saw hundreds of war planes flying in formation and bound for some government junkyard far from the neighborhood.  Even on this sad last mission the planes looked mighty. They had changed the world and, as I would learn in later life, the world they changed included Jackson Heights.  



If you publish, I'll buy a few copies because I was there somewhere alongside of you.
Regards,
74 tears old in December, 2010

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Jackson Heights of Yesteryear / Who remembers the Sunnyside swimming pool -- (late 40's)
« on: August 20, 2010, 02:50:04 PM »
It wasn't in Jackson Heights but we used to take the elevated train -- a nickel then -- from 90th St. and Roosevelt to (can't remember the stop --- was there a Sunnyside stop?) where, for twenty five cents you got a locker, a key (with an elastic band that went around your wrist), and could swim all day... A lot of kids from Jackson Heights went there. The only other pool we knew about was in Whitestone, a long ways off.

A girl my age (about 10 or 11) -- her name was Janet -- used to run around the pool and shove me in when I was standing at the edge. I would angrily ask my friend,Jackie Dugan, why she was doing this and he replied that he thought "She's nuts! She likes you."  Girls matured more quickly than boys in those days. :)

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