Yes – Go Giants. #photostorydlb
As a kid growing up in the Bronx, we somehow always had trees around to climb. I'll bet you didn't know this but the Bronx has more parks than any other borough. I'm not saying that you want to go in them at night – but during the day they were pretty safe when I was a kid.
The neighborhood was divided into two groups: Irish and everyone else. The Irish kids were pretty wild and we Jews (there were two or three of us) banded together to form a Jewish tree-climbing club as a means of escape.
Maybe that sort of thing isn't p.c. to write about, but that was the way it was in the late 50s and early 60s.
As a member of the Jewish tree climbing club, you needed to have a piece of rope, a pen knife, and the ability to jumpt to the lowest branch on the elm tree near the projects.
Once you were on that branch, you could pretty much stay up in the tree until the Irish kids had to get home for dinner.
And it went up to the third floor of the projects where you could look into Junior's window and see if he or his larger brother Big Junior were home. They were both called Junior. And they had a sister called Fat Linda.
Either Junior loved to chase me around for sport. Even if he couldn't catch me, he would play with me like a cat plays with a mouse.
But once I got to that elm tree – I was safe because he was too fat to be able to jump up to the lowest branch.
Now if I were left on my own – I probably would have just hid in the house. But my father – a World War II vet. wouldn't see his only son hiding out in his room. So I was forced to get tough. And tough meant being able to be sat upon by someone that outweighed me by 40 pounds.
Yes, I can go on with the story – like the time that Junior's bigger brother, Fat Junior (and this was before the Bill Cosby routine) was hit by a bus and walked away from the accident leaving a bus with two broken windows.
So trees – and height – those were safe places for me and my two friends. And many years later – when I worked in the film business as a gaffer – I was always the one that would volunteer to climb the four story scaffold – even in the middle of a thunder storm. Even as it poured and I put sandbags on the big HMI lights to steady them – and looked down at the cast and techies below – I felt completely comfortable.
www.BeckermanPhoto.com
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