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    So Long, It's Been Good To Know You
    So Long, It's Been Good To Know You
    So Long, It's Been Good To Know You
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    So Long, It's Been Good To Know You

    By Bert Brun

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    About this ebook

    Bert Brun's restlessness has driven him to several different occupations – travel counselor, hospital administrator, rubber plantation inspector, teacher, oceanographer, fisheries administrator, biologist and cruise ship lecturer. He's worked in Norway, Indonesia and New Zealand and has also helped set up a water delivery system on a Philippines island.
    His love life has been chaotic, by his own admission, yet he still managed to help raise three loving daughters.
    In his retirement he has turned to creative writing – plays, stories and several published books.
    As he approaches his 80th birthday, he reflects on his experiences, and offers his take on the many changes occurring in America and the world during his lifetime.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBert Brun
    Release dateJun 16, 2012
    ISBN9781476107929
    So Long, It's Been Good To Know You
    Author

    Bert Brun

    Retired oceanographer. Also worked as a high school teacher, rubber plantation inspector in Sumatra, and fisheries administrator in New Zealand. Bachelor and master degrees in science from New York state universities. First got the writing bug while in college and have published eight books in last 10 years plus three plays produced. Lived in eight states, most recently in Alabama, with wife Ann, four dogs and seven cats.

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      Book preview

      So Long, It's Been Good To Know You - Bert Brun

      So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You

      A Memoir by Bert Brun

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2011 by Bert Brun

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Chapter 1

      I must have lived in ten or fifteen places as a kid on Staten Island. The family first lived in New Dorp, when they finally left my birthplace, Brooklyn, in 1935 – I was just a couple of years old, but I have a vague memory of a small fish pond in the backyard. New Dorp, in the middle of the island, was little more than a village then, but it was a stop on the Staten Island Rapid Transit system, a Toonerville Trolley-like little commuter rail line that ran from the ferry terminal at St. George all the length of the island south to Tottenville. (The SIRT also ran to two North Shore branches, South Beach in the East and to Mariners Harbor in the West in those days, with service on both those lines ending by the 1960s).

      The railway passed-through, at the time, lots of woods and even a few small farms. The train seats were of woven bamboo strips, and a conductor sold or punched tickets. Over my early years I had occasion to ride it often. I remember using it as an adult commuter on two of the lines. After New Dorp, where my two sisters attended grade school, we moved to a succession of north shore area two-family homes, the usual pattern being for the owner to live below, with the apartment tenant above. Many of the owners were of Italian descent – there were lots of Italians on Staten Island then, and an even bigger percentage now. Staten Island, or Richmond Borough, is the only one of the five New York City boroughs to vote Republican then and it still does.

      The next place was a dead end on Harvard Ave. in New Brighton, directly across from a big painted red brick school, PS 17. That’s where my first clear memories started to form. The street was loaded with Italian families including, the Falcos. the Mezzanatis and the Trentalanges, etc. At the corner with Prospect Avenue was a small convenience store run by a huge Italian man, Sang, who had only one arm, and who sold cigarettes for one cent each, penny candies, sodas (Pepsi, Coke, Royal Crown), five cent cylindrical

      Melloroll ice cream cones, bread and milk. Ever since we had come over to Staten Island my dad, after several years of unemployment and the family on the dole, had had a job with the WPA, at their big Central Library (the one with the two lions seen in many movies) at 42nd St and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan,

      The upstairs Harvard Avenue place had linoleum on the kitchen floor and was heated with a kerosene stove. Did have indoor plumbing though. Somehow mom, my dad, two sisters and I, a small boy, crammed into the tiny two-bedroom apartment. The local boys and I played cowboy and Indian in the scrubby woods and fields beyond the dead end; we would gallop around on our steeds (which consisted of broken ailanthus saplings) shouting dah!, dah! at each other to simulate firing our six shooters. Sometimes we’d roast potatoes (mickeys) in an open fire.

      There also was a short interval on nearby Westervelt Avenue, on which I pretty much draw a blank. Then there were two other second-floor apartments, in houses on Winter Avenue (it was next door to a small playground where kids played punchball) and it even had a front porch) and on Scribner Avenue. Both streets were up a steep hill from busy Jersey Street and might have been a little larger and nicer than the Harvard Avenue place, but not by much. Winter Avenue had a polyglot mix of families – the Cronins, the Newmans, the Ikefujis the Rotellis and the Ginsbergs all coexisted harmoniously. My sisters by then were attending Curtis High School, a mile or so away, nearer to St. George. I entered grade school at PS 17, reminded by my mother to always be careful crossing traffic-heavy Jersey Street. When we lived on Scribner Avenue, a big – or so it seemed then, smallish by comparison with today’s stores– new A and P grocery store opened on Jersey Street.

      I can remember walking with my sisters down the east side of Scribner, towards the Victory theater on Victory Blvd., to go to the movies. For ten or fifteen cents , you could see an A feature, a B feature, newsreel and a cartoon. You could collect free glassware for the kitchen there too. Long before TV it was what people did for entertainment of an evening or on a weekend. A lot of the films were gangsters or cowboys or about the rich, anything to forget the Depression for a few hours. Many of the old small theaters on the island had previously been vaudeville houses. There were three bigger movie palaces, the St. George (with a big pipe organ), the Paramount in Stapleton, and the Ritz, in Port Richmond. All were built in the 1920s. Nearly every small town or village on Staten Island had a movie house (Stapleton had three), at least 10, all the way down to Tottenville.

      I guess that’s when I formed my lifelong attachment to films; I also attended ten cent Saturday matinees with weekly serials. Behind the Victory Theater was a big rocky hill where some other boys and I had convinced ourselves there were outcroppings of real silver ore so we’d spend hours chipping away at the rocks. Later on I wasted time similarly digging out a cave out of a hillside near the railroad tracks for the north shore SIRT line, never considering that we could smother to death if the unsupported cave collapsed. We also placed pennies on the rails to flatten them when a train would pass.

      When I was older, I took my dates to the movies. I didn’t get my first car till I was 21, so many of these dates and I traveled by bus or train. No one ever seemed to complain, since car ownership wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it became later, into the 1950s, when the middle class really began to prosper.

      Next place after the Scribner apartment was to the community of Rosebank. It was again heavily Italian; a monument existed there to Garibaldi, the Italian patriot in the 1800s who helped the Italian nation to first become unified, later for the Fascist Mussolini to take over in the 1920s. Garibaldi’s house was enclosed by a big wrought iron fence. .

      By this time, about 1942, Dad had already gone off for a year or two to work at wartime airfield construction in Newfoundland, and was sending money home so we could afford to rent a bigger place, at 57 Belair Road in Rosebank. It was the neatest street I had lived on till then, ending in a dead-end where the north shore SIRT line had a stop. The other kids on the street and I would crawl up a short wooded hill at the top of which sat a small mansion. We’d imagine that German spies lived there and were spying through their field glasses on troop ships going out through the Narrows (which the Verrazano Bridge. now spans from Staten Island to Brooklyn), then to wireless the information to Nazi submarines waiting to torpedo them when they reached open waters.

      I had a mile to walk to PS 34 (in those days, school buses were not yet running on the island), which I didn’t mind at all. Behind the school was a swamp where, in winter, kids would go out at lunchtime to slide on the ice; if you were unlucky, the ice might break and you’d sit with wet feet all afternoon.

      Behind our house on Belair was a tennis court in a big central area behind all the houses on the street. In a throwback to a more civilized time, neighborhood young adults (which my sisters were by then) would play there and have a drink afterwards.

      We rented out a couple rooms upstairs to an Army couple. It was the place where we lived when my sister Helen met and became engaged to a young, United States Army Air Corps lieutenant named Bill Allen, whom she had met at a USO dance at Miller Field in New Dorp. Alas, navigator Bill was killed when his B-17 went down in flames over Germany, in 1944.

      As usual, we were not there long. The next up was back to the northwest part of Staten Island to New Brighton, to a big rented house at 255 Hamilton Ave., right where it forms a steep hairpin turn and joins up with Westervelt Avenue, thence goes down to Richmond Terrace, the main north coast road going into the ferry terminal. Again, we rented out the top floor rooms , to a young Jewish couple this time, he a doctor. We were there a long time for us, from 1944 to 1948. I can remember one winter, probably 1946 or 1947, when there was a big snowfall. I shoveled the front walk. One of my other chores was to carry out ashes from the coal furnace in the basement.

      The Hamilton Ave. place was where I entered high school in 1945. Curtis High was just a short 10 minute walk away. This neighborhood was solidly middle-class, and not dominated by Italians, like so many other areas in which we had lived.

      It was there I formed my first fun set of close friends: Biff (Guy) Clark, Billy and Jackie Wallace, and their cousin Walter Birkle. All these boys were altar boys at St. Peter’s, on St. Mark’s Place, the big Catholic Church just 100 yards from our rented house. St. Peter’s also had a parochial grade school and a high school too, that my friends attended. After school and on weekends we’d play softball or basketball in backyards – the Smiths, next door to the Clarks, had hung a backboard and hoop behind their house. The Wallace boys’ father was a retired city cop who would occasionally take three or four of us in his car (two in the open rumble seat in the back), out for a hike in the woods, then come back for us later. One time in the woods we

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