Just Kids From the Bronx Read Online Free PDF Page A

back with her eyes glistening, saying how beautifully the roses had grown.
    When my husband Warren died, I was so sorry to realize that my young daughters were going to experience the same kind of loss. I took the two littlest girls to the funeral parlor because I thought that’s the only way I could get them to understand that their daddy wasn’t coming back. He had been in and out of the hospital and I knew that Patty, who was five at the time, would be standing at the window waiting for him. I thought, I can’t have this. I knew that they were just too young to cope. At the casket I explained that Daddy was now in Heaven and that he wasn’t coming back. Two weeks later while in bed with me, Patty said, “When Daddy was home, he was in his pajamas. When did he change into his clothes?”
    My aunt was working at the Shelton Hotel in Manhattan when I was fifteen. I got a part-time job from four to seven p.m. afternoons and weekends. It was one of those switchboards, “Hotel Shelton, good afternoon.” And then you would connect the person who was asked for in room 502, for instance. I loved it because I loved to listen in. There was a Ginger Bates, a permanent resident of the hotel who was also the “lady of the house.” She got a lot of phone calls from her many admirers. It was never salacious. It was more like, “I wonder if you’d be free on such-and-such a date.” One time she said to the caller, “Don’t say another word. That damned operator is listening in.” And I said, into the phone, “I am not!” Then I just disconnected her. A minute later the chief operator asked, “Who had Ginger Bates on the phone?” I managed not to get caught.
    The Irish have a gift of storytelling. Nobody ever came back from the store with milk without having a story to tell. Then there’s the gift of laughter, the sense of humor, and of course I’ve always loved that quotation from Yeats: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” I have that framed on my desk. I absolutely love it.
    My mother encouraged my writing from the time I was little. She said that I was going to be a successful writer one day. The funny part is that when I had my first short story sale for fifteen hundred dollars to the Saturday Evening Post , to her that was the epitome of success. “Put it in the bank,” she cautioned. Of course, I already had a list of all the things I was going to do with that same fifteen hundred. Shocked, she said, “But Mary, you’ve used your idea!”

 
    JULES FEIFFER

    Cartoonist, illustrator, and writer
    (1929– )
    My sister Mimi was a big shot in high school. She got good grades, she was articulate, and she was also a dogmatic Stalinist. She was a Communist and she was going to convert me. She got me to join a youth organization, American Youth for Democracy. AYD. It was a Communist front, which in those days, to the world at large, was presented as progressive. What is now called progressive had nothing to do with what used to be a “red” word. As a matter of fact, when they formed a political party, they called it the Progressive Party and got as many people from the outside as possible. They ran Henry Wallace for president in 1948. If you were on the left at all, you supported Wallace for president. Do you remember the comedian Milt Kamen? Milt was a friend of mine. In his act he talked about his boyhood in Brooklyn, and he said, “When I was a kid in the Depression, my Jewish neighborhood was a very political one. There was the Communist Party, there was the Socialist Party, there was a Socialist Workers Party, there was a Socialist Labor Party, and there was the American Labor Party. I had to be twenty-one and move to Manhattan before I even heard of the Democratic and Republican parties.” And that’s pretty much the way it was for us too.
    But my sister’s Communist friends were infinitely more interesting and smarter and wittier