The Way the Future Was: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

even then, a number of years. When I was a little kid, five or so, my parents had taken me with them to the Oxford Burlesque, near where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues met in Brooklyn. I liked the baggy-pants comedians, didn't understand what the stripping was all about, but was thrilled to be included in something Grown-up. I kept in touch with the Oxford, one way or another, all through my childhood. When my parents stopped taking me, as soon as I was old enough to pass the ticket taker's scrutiny, I went by myself; and in the famine period between I would still skate down to the nearby Loft's soda fountain, and often enough I'd see the chorus girls, makeup an inch and a quarter deep around their eyes, sipping sodas through a straw and gazing at themselves in the mirrored walls.
    In our sophomore year at Brooklyn Tech, the New Building at last was completed and we moved in. How modern and grand it seemed! Five or six stories tall, with an athletic field on the roof, shiny, clean laboratories instead of the jagged zinc of the old factory, an auditorium with air conditioning and the fullest projection facilities; the thing even had a radio station of its own. Pretty Fort Greene Park was just across the street, and the concentrated heart of Brooklyn's downtown only a five-minute walk away. The magnetism was too powerful to resist; Dirk and I walked there every afternoon, to go to a burlesque theater, or a movie, or just to explore.
    Let me tell you about Brooklyn. For the first part of Brooklyn's life it was not a conquered province of New York City, it was a competitor. Even after the consolidation it still competed. Brooklyn had its own baseball team (the Dodgers), its own library system (better than New York's in every respect, except for, maybe, the Fifth Avenue reference facility), its own parks (after Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park in Manhattan, he took what he had learned to Brooklyn and laid out the even more spectacular Prospect Park), its own museums, its own zoo. Downtown Brooklyn had its own department stores—Namm's, Loeser's, A & S—and I still think they were nicer than, and almost as big as, Macy's or Gimbels'. Downtown Brooklyn had four or five first-run movie houses, including the Brooklyn Paramount, as lavish a marble-staired temple as any in the world, at least until the Radio City Music Hall came along. On Fulton Street it even had legitimate theaters, with the same sort of bills as theaters in Boston or Chicago. Road companies of Broadway shows played there after the New York runs had closed, and sometimes Broadway shows opened there for tryouts before risking the metropolis across the river. * And all these marvels, stores and shows, bookshops and burlesques, parks and playgrounds, were within our grasp. If Brooklyn palled, New York was just across the bridge; often enough we walked across the East River and up Broadway as far as Union Square to check out the second-hand book and magazine stores on Fourth Avenue. School could not compete. Outside it we were learning the world.
     
* I saw a preview of George White's Scandals of 1934 there weeks before it hit Broadway. I was no big White fan, but that one had been advertised as having a sort of science-fiction theme, something about how the Earth looked to Martians. The science-fiction part was contemptibly unimaginative, of course, but I rather liked the songs, and may be the only living person in America who still knows the words to "The Fellow Who Loves You." It was lucky I saw it in Brooklyn, because when the show hit Broadway it folded at once.
     
    Which was changing.
    The Depression had settled in, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated a week or two after Dirk and I met, and there was talk of a New Deal. Society seemed to be evolving into something new before our eyes. So was science. We heard about things like relativity and the expanding universe—not just in the sf magazines, but even on the radio. The world seemed to be