My Remarkable Journey Read Online Free PDF Page B

exploded.
    One day we noticed that we didn’t need to put a penny into the machine with sunflower seeds out front. If we turned the knob,
     a handful of seeds spilled right out. So we all sat and ate sunflower seeds the entire day. Oh, the buildup. Anyone who came
     through the door would get a cupped hand over his ear and a whisper: “Free sunflower seeds…” We watched Maltz smile all afternoon
     as he glimpsed the run on his machine. It was empty when we left.
    The next day Maltz cornered us in a craze.
    “You robbed me! I saw you eating sunflower seeds all day long! I had dreams of five hundred pennies in the machine! But there
     were no pennies! And my dreams did not come true! You robbed me!”
    “Not so fast,” Herbie said. “Can you prove this in a court of law, Maltz? Do you have any witnesses?”
    Maltz sold the store not long afterward, and it was said that we’d run him out of Brooklyn.
    The guy who bought it was fiery and we loved to drive him crazy even more. Moe, his name was. One day we played Frankie Laine
     singing “The Cry of the Wild Goose” on the jukebox.
    My heart knows what the wild goose knows,
    I must go where the wild goose goes
    Wild goose, brother goose, which is best?
    A wanderin’ fool or a heart at rest?
    It’s one of those songs that just spin around in your head and won’t ever come out, which was bad enough, but we played it
     over and over on the big Wurlitzer, maybe thirty-nine straight times. It must have seemed like a hundred and thirty-nine to
     Moe, but when he tried to stop us, Herbie refused.
    “We’re good-paying customers,” Herbie said. “We have a right to listen to the jukebox and play anything that’s on it!”
    That was too much for Moe. He snapped, nearly leaped over the counter, and yanked the mighty Wurlitzer out of the socket,
     pushing and kicking it out the door as he screamed: “You want to know where the wild goose goes? This is where the wild goose
     goes! Now play what you want on the jukebox, my little lawyer shyster. Out! Out!”
    There’s another story that I’ve got to tell even though it happened a few years later. I love the Carvel story. So I’m going
     to tell it now.
    It happened in November of 1951. I was eighteen years old. Me, Herbie, and Howie Weiss were standing around the corner arguing
     the merits of ice cream. Its cost and its taste. We were arguing, arguing, arguing, back and forth.
    Herbie said, “You can’t beat Breyers and the cost is pretty good.”
    I was saying how I liked Borden’s.
    And Howie said, “Yeah, but we gotta talk about Carvel.”
    Carvel is a chain of ice cream stores. They were all over back then. They had soft ice cream and they had hard ice cream that
     you could get in scoops. The company was created by Tom Carvel. I came to know Tom very well. Years later, he came on my show
     to talk about this story.
    Howie said there was a Carvel in New Haven, Connecticut, where you could get three scoops for fifteen cents. Herbie said that
     was a lie. I said it was a lie. Nobody gave you three scoops for fifteen cents. It just couldn’t be done. So we were betting
     Howie that this Carvel in New Haven didn’t serve three scoops for fifteen cents.
    The only way to prove this, of course, was to go there. So we called our parents and told them we were going to New Haven.
     But, of course, we couldn’t go to New Haven without taking Hoo-ha. You had to take Hoo-ha. Hoo-ha added to any scene he stepped
     into.
    He wasn’t funny. Well, he was funny, but he didn’t know he was funny—just like Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra never said anything
     to be funny. When someone once asked him, “Do you know what time it is?” and he said: “Do you mean, now?” he meant that seriously.
     There are shadows in the outfield of Yankee Stadium. When Yogi said, “In Yankee Stadium, it gets late early,” that was a very
     definitive statement. Everything Yogi said was 100 percent right. “Nobody goes to that restaurant because