When I was a little boy, my Ryan grandfather and I sat on his long York Avenue stoop and read The New York Daily News together. If he was feeling good, Pop would spring for a dime and I would run up to the newsstand on 86th Street and buy two newspapers, one for each of us. I couldn’t fully read yet but to have my own paper and study the pictures, pick up some new words as Pop repeated them out loud while I memorized the letters spelling them; well, I was happy as a kid could get. Read (kind of) football, baseball, hockey and basketball news, learning all the players, the teams standings, and sometimes seeing these great old photos in the center of the paper by a guy named Weegee, well these murder scenes, people make weird faces and car crashes were amazing stuff I’d never seen before. I used to think; when I got older I wanted to write about my world, my neighborhood, Yorkville, my schools, P.S. 77 and St. Stephen of Hungary, my teams, especially the Giants and Yankees.
At LaSalle Academy, I wasted a whole year in a class where I was supposed to learn touch typing on writing made up sports stories about my then crappy teams, stories about our teachers, my other classmates and the shitty jobs we had after school, the Lower East Side, and stories of wishful and bizarre neighborhood heroics. I wasn’t just goofing off, I was practicing.
I have a sturdy memory and all those classes I took on the 1616 York Avenue stoop and in the classroom at LaSalle’s annex next to 44 E. 2nd Street right off Second Avenue are paying off.
mel domingo
had read your most delightful story- “One Foot Planted in the Nest” in the
New York Times.
I didn’t know they were writers like you.
had sent a copy of the article to a friend (who is also attended Catholic
school).
I am requesting that our public library order your book “Yorkville: Stoops
to Nuts”.
Aloha,
Mel Domingo