Scrooge McDuck!

When I was a little kid, we lived in a large apartment house on West 173rd Street. To be specific, we lived in the basement apartment that came free with the job of superintendent. At the end of the street was the typical, for New York City in those days, Candy store. Of course, they sold much more than candy. You could play a number ( kind of an illegal lottery), buy cigarettes, and, importantly for kids like me, you could buy comic books.

There was a large rack of magazines and newspapers, and wedged in towards the bottom, at little kid height, were the comics. The assortment was not huge, but I could depend on there being a few I’d like. My absolute favorite was the adventures of Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. Mother or father could park me with one of these on the stoop, and I’d be occupied for a good hour or more.

Our Locale

My parents were eager to see me safely distracted. While Washington Heights was not a terrible neighborhood, trouble was just a few blocks away, and sometimes crept uptown.

Remember my mentioning being able to play the numbers. Well, “hitting the number” was like winning the lottery today. However, that candy store took in a substantial amount of illegal cash from petty bets. At least once a week, a well-dressed gentleman showed up to take the proceeds to the “gentlemen” who ran the racket. The “bagman” was a fixture. Considering who he represented, you had to be nuts to rob or injure the bagman. But people who are nuts do exist, and it sometimes happens.

Then there were the darling precinct police. They were candy store regulars, and rarely paid for their cigarettes or sweets.

Less you think less of 173rd street, let me assure you that the kids of the block played safely under the watchful eyes of my father and the superintendent across the street, Mr. Olafson. You did not want to mess with the “supers” unless you wanted a world of hurt.

Community

There I was on the stoop while all this spun around me. The neighborhood was comprised of Jewish, German, Hispanic, Irish, and many other ethnicities. It was a melange of classes. Upstairs were the Javitts family, our representative in Congress, and on the third floor were Doris and Elaine, a lesbian couple who had been my babysitters. Down the street was Mr. Wolf’s clothing store – why go downtown to Macy’s or Gimbel’s when Mr. Wolf could tailor you for less?

Yes, there was a kosher butcher nearby and a bodega nearby. You rarely needed to leave Washington Heights.

As a little kid sitting on the stoop, I was reading about the McDuck expedition to the middle of the earth. How was I aware of all of this? My father kept up a running commentary on all this. He knew that the information was valuable and that I needed to learn it as soon as possible. Nick Carreras, a New Yorker from the top of his head to the tip of his toes ( “Louis if you can’t make it in New York, You can’t make it anywhere else!“), could read a street scene in a flash. He worked on passing this on to me. So there I sat, reading my comics, getting a running commentary about how much ‘take” the cops on this beat got, when the bagman came around, and why the area below 168th Street was forbidden to me.

Situational Awareness

You might say that the nickels and dimes I was given for the comics came with a bit of freight. But my father was concerned both for my safety and that I develop an early sense of situational awareness.

I didn’t think about this consciously for years. Just a year or two before he died, my dad came to visit me in Boston. Coming out of a restaurant downtown, we took in the scene. My father started a running commentary on who was hustling, who was a possible victim, and all the other assorted traffic on the street that evening. As an adult, much of what he was saying to me began to make sense, and I recalled those commentaries of long ago.

I never mastered my father’s ability to read a street. But enough rubbed off that when I began work as an applied anthropologist, I had better situational awareness than many of my peers. It turned out to be a valuable fieldwork tool.

And when I see them, I can’t resist picking up a Scrooge McDuck comic.