A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early May, 1981 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early May, 1981 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Mid-July, 1980 | Thought Catalog

A 29-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Mid-July, 1980 | Thought Catalog

Thursday Morning in Gerritsen Beach: Gerritsen Beach Volunteer Fire Department's Annual Thanksgiving Day Ragamuffin Parade starting at Avenue W and Plumb 2nd Street

(Video copyright Mike Wright courtesy Midwood-Flatbush News)

Saturday Afternoon in Midwood: Shabbos Parade Along Kings Highway from Ocean Parkway to Ocean Avenue

(Video courtesy Midwood-Flatbush News [copyright M. Wright])

Saturday Night in Flatbush: Morrissey at the Kings Theatre

(Videos courtesy Deniedwings)



(More videos here)

Sunday Afternoon in Midwood: New York Transit Museum's 40th Anniversary Celebration presents Vintage Trains at the Kings Highway Brighton Line Station

(Video courtesy Hamilton Express)

Monday Morning in Sheepshead Bay: Walking to Coney Island

(Video courtesy Alexander E Poet)

Fifty Years Ago in Sheepshead Bay: Our Bar Mitzvah Reception at the Deauville Beach Club, May 30, 1964

Fifty years ago today, on Saturday night, May 30, 1964, our bar mitzvah reception was held at The Deauville beach club off Knapp Street and the Belt Parkway in Sheepshead Bay.  The property is now the UA Sheepshead Bay multiplex.

Our bar mitzvah had been held the Saturday morning before, May 23, 1964, at the Flatbush Park Jewish Center on Avenue U and East 64th Street in Mill Basin; it was a "modern Orthodox" synagogue our family belonged to although only the first half of the designation fit us.  Rabbi David S. Halpern, who taught us our Haftorah, the reading called Naso, we were shocked to learn, retired only a couple of years ago. Here are our parents and brothers.

With our two sets of grandparents and great-grandmother.  Yikes, we are now older than all our grandparents were then!

We once posted this "Mr. Wonderful" pic from the album on Facebook and three friends wrote us to say they had the same exact pic in their bar mitzvah albums.  And not all of them used Hunter Studios on Flatbush and Flatlands Avenues, either.

The Limbo.  It was 1964, the winter of the Beatles and the spring of the World's Fair.  On our 35mm bar mitzvah movies (now on VHS but not DVD or online) the opening shot with the title features the Unisphere.

The Twist was pretty old by then. A couple of years earlier, our grandparents had taken four of us -- two grandsons and two nephews ages 11, 9, 8 and 7 -- to see Chubby Checker perform , even then past his prime, at the short-lived, much-loved Bronx mammoth amusement park Freedomland, whose property was roughly shaped like the 48 states.

Even while the photographer was shooting this and told us what he was going to do, we knew it was wrong.

Our great-great-uncle, the greatest klezmer clarinetist of all time, Dave Tarras, played with his party band. When we were young, he tried to give us clarinet lessons, but we were hopeless. At the time, we stupidly didn't realize how important klezmer music was, although we all always loved the music of Uncle Dave, especially his doinas and the jazz-influenced album Danz! with his son-in-law Sammy Musiker, a great saxophonist, and his amazingly talented brother Ray Musiker, whom we last saw perform in 2011 at the annual Egg Rolls and Egg Creams Festival at Chinatown's Eldridge Street Synagogue.

In 1979, when we felt like a big shot because our first book got a nice notice in the Village Voice, it brought us down to earth when we saw our really famous and more talented great-great-uncle on the Voice's cover a week later. Anyway, here we are cutting challah at the dais and saying a brucha whose Hebrew we vaguely recall. (We were taught old-school Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation, with different vowels than today's normal Jews use: "aw," not "ah"; a "t" sound, not an "s" sound.)

Actually, being a bar mitzvah boy half a century ago seemed to involve a lot of cutlery and serving people food.

At least one of the three kids in our family learned how to dance (not the current bar mitzvah boy).  Notice the cigarette in the woman's gloved hand.  At the tables were luxurious round brown gift matchboxes engraved with "Richard"  in gold script so people could thank us for their carcinoma for years to come.

Our friends and some cousins.  Most of the guys up front and the two on the back on each side were also in eighth grade with us at Meyer Levin Junior High in East Flatbush.  A couple of our friends had girls from our class there, but most of us didn't.  As at least two women we went to junior high with kept telling us.  When we were seniors at Midwood High School in 1968, they did get invited to our middle brother's at Bensonhurst's La Perville, but by then of course, the Cultural Revolution had begun.  By 1974 and the last bar mitzvah, our parents decided this whole catered affair business was tacky and instead treated a much smaller group -- about 50 instead of 200 -- of close friends and relatives to a resort hotel in the Catskills for a winter weekend.  The older brothers were happy, since they got to share rooms with girlfriends, and it was just a lot more low-key and normal.

Contact lenses were still in our future, so we tried to keep our glasses off most of the night.  But sometimes we failed.  Hang onto your yarmulkes, it's going to be a bumpy night.  Weird there's no photo of all the food, from the buffet with all the huh-luscious stuff of Jewish-American mid-century satire, to all the different courses, including my mother's insistence on intermezzo: all the great-aunts and great-uncles didn't understand why they were being served ices between the fish course and the filet mignon.  Oh, did we mention the Viennese table?  And as people filed out at 3 a.m. or so, everyone got a copy of the Sunday News, with the Dick Tracy comic on the front cover.  This whole thing cost over $10,000 half a century ago. That's over $75,000 in 2014 dollars, people!

From the viewpoint of 2014, it's glazed in nostalgia, of course.  But we remember our best friend from the time, who sat next to us during the dinner, would tell us many years later at a Manhattan dinner with him and his husband: what he most remembered the bar mitzvah boy saying all evening was, When is this going to be over? When is this going to be over?  

We've avoided attending every single bar mitzvah we've been invited to in the past 35 years.

Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn | Medium

Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn | Medium

Wednesday Morning in Manhattan Beach: Breakfast on the Beach at Kingsborough Community College

Early this morning, we were at the far east end of Manhattan Beach on the beautiful campus of Kingsborough Community College, where we enjoyed teaching back in the late 1970s. Getting a bagel and iced tea in the cafeteria, we strolled outside to a bench on the little private beach on campus, a gem that's always got brash seagulls unafraid to get close.

It was a lovely moment on a beautifully dry and mild midsummer morning.

Early Thanksgiving Morning in Brighton Beach: On the Boardwalk

Early this Thanksgiving morning we took the G and Q trains to Brighton Beach. It was very quiet and still as we walked up Coney Island Avenue the block to the beach.

On the boardwalk, the sand was high and spilling over. We spent a quiet (but cold) hour sitting on the bench in the sand, reading and drinking tea, and when we got up, there were already a good number of early birds (including one former BMCC student who came over to say hi) strolling and chatting in Russian.

THE LOST MOVIE THEATERS OF SOUTHEASTERN BROOKLYN by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 116-page $7.99 print edition from Art Pants Company:

In these five autobiographical pieces, award-winning short story writer Richard Grayson explores the Brooklyn of his childhood and adolescence. "The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach" and "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn" return to the venues where a boy in love with films and books learned about life. "Three Scenes from My Life (With Special Guest Star Truman Capote)" is an episodic tale about adolescent encounters with the famed author. "Seven Men Who Made Me Happy" recounts how watching soap operas over several decades can be a lifesaver, and "Melissa and the Good Legislator" juxtaposes the story of a gay college student who managed to get a girl pregnant and the courageous New York State assemblyman who came to the young couple's rescue. In these memoirs, previously published in online magazines like Mississippi Review and Eyeshot, Grayson weaves funny, quirky, poignant memories into a portrait of a baby boom teenager in Brooklyn before the borough became cool.

As noted in the links above, the pieces originally appeared in the webzines Eyeshot, Fiction Warehouse, Me Three, Mississippi Review and Apogee Magazine.

Tuesday Morning in Marine Park: Breakfast by Gerritsen Creek

We left Dumbo Books HQ in Williamsburg early, hoping to take ourselves to a quiet, peaceful place near the water. At 7:30 a.m. we were on the G train to Fulton Street, where we walked to the subway entrance by the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building (One Hanson Place) for the D/Q Brighton line. We were headed for Gerritsen Creek and the Salt Marsh Nature Center in Marine Park, near where we grew up.

We got off the Q train at Kings Highway. Growing up, this was, along with the Junction (Flatbush/Nostrand) terminus of the IRT, our subway station.

(Photo courtesy of one of Brooklyn's best neighborhood blogs, the excellent GerritsenBeach.net)

We used to come out here in 1965-66 in our sophomore year of high school, spent at The Franklin School on the Upper West Side. It took three trains and one bus 90 minutes to get home, the major reason we transferred to Midwood H.S. the next year.
Always we got out by East 16th Street and Quentin Road (unlike what they say on Broadway, between Avenue P and Avenue R there is no Avenue Q).

As we got older, Kings Highway, the shopping area between Coney Island Avenue (approximately East 10th Street, if there were such a thing) and Ocean Avenue (would-be East 20th Street) was where we went to at night when we were teens craving bright lights and a place to hang out. This was where we bought the Village Voice and the New York Times, since the papers weren't available in Old Mill Basin.

We went to the Kingsway and Avalon movie theaters here, got pizza and ices here, had lunch at Cooky's - a restaurant whose cookyburgers we still recall and which had locations on the East 16th Street BMT stops at Avenue M and Avenue J as well (Wendy Wasserstein's mother ordered Thanksgiving meals there, even from Manhattan)

- and we watched our friends buy cigarettes here (when kids could buy tobacco products, no problem) and look cool smoking and posing on a street corner.

We actually went only once or twice into Dubrow's Cafeteria on the northwest corner of East 16th, but we passed it for much of our young life.

After we got our drivers' licenses (and sometimes before: we drove in the neighborhood more times than we can recall when we were under 17), "The Highway" was also a teen cruising spot, a la American Graffiti.

When we got a little older and were active in politics, we'd accompany our candidates here, as in this pic we took of 1970 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Congressman Dick Ottinger (he and the appointed incumbent Sen. Charles Gooddell - father of the NFL commissioner - lost to Conservative Party candidate, the sainted Jim Buckley).

Anyway, there is a Facebook group for people from 11229. We are actually 11234 people, and we headed there, to Marine Park, by bus.

Three choices: the B100 (the once-privately owned Mill Basin bus that used to take us home), the B2 up Avenue R mostly, then down Flatbush to Kings Plaza), and the one we spotted first, the no-longer-endangered B31 (Gerritsen Beach bus) which let us off at Gerritsen and Avenue U. (If we remember correctly, the B31 used to run from the Avenue U subway stop back in the day.)

(Photo courtesy of Forgotten New York, one of our top bookmarked websites and all-time favorite places, which has this great tour, among many brilliant ones of lesser-known NYC nabes, of this area)

This used to be The Flame restaurant, with "charcoal burgers," where we once stopped eating when we spotted a mouse running across the floor (though we didn't tell our lunch companions from college: our girlfriend, her future husband and his former fiancee). It's been the Chinar Restaurant for years now.

We finally got to Marine Park. Mostly when we were young, we stayed on the other side of the park, which stretches from Avenue U north to Fillmore Avenue. When we were young, the southern part of the park by Gerritsen Creek wasn't much, but with the Salt Marsh Nature Center and the trail and the help of the wonderful Urban Park Rangers, it's now thriving.

But it's still quiet early on a weekday morning (the Nature Center doesn't open until 11 a.m.) and we enjoyed our quiet time here.











Luckily, a little nature goes a long way with us.

After enjoying our time in the wetlands wildnerness, we hopped on a just-in-time B3 bus down Avenue U to civilization, this being for us the mall where we were maybe five times a week from the day it opened in early September 1970 until we left New York for Florida in January 1981. At the Flatbush Avenue entrance, there are some nice photos of old Brooklyn.


By the escalator is this scene of a big beach day at Coney Island.

We had a nice time at Marine Park and Gerritsen Creek before it got too hot. We're grateful for summer mornings off from work so that we can explore the less hectic parts of the city.