“No! Can’t think of another one.” I moaned.
Irving thought for a bit and then said, “Where do you play punchball?”
I said, “Right around the corner on Hooper Street.”
He said, “Hooper! He’s a signer. William Hooper. Now, what’s your favorite movie house?”
Without hesitation I answered, “The Commodore Theatre!”
“Which is on what street?”
“Rodney Street.”
“Rodney! That’s another signer. And where’s Greenwald’s deli?”
“On Hewes!…Wait a minute, are you telling me that all the streets in Williamsburg are signers of the Declaration of Independence?”
He smiled. “Well, most of them. Why do you think they call this place Williamsburg? Because the Declaration of Independence was signed in Colonial Williamsburg! So there’s a good chance that a street name in Williamsburg is a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”
Wow! I thought. My teacher only wanted six names, but I gave her over twenty by remembering every street in Williamsburg I had ever played on or walked on. It was the first time I got an A on my homework, all thanks to my genius brother Irving.
My elementary school, P.S. 19, was on 323 South Third Street, which was about a ten-minute walk from our building. I was a bright kid and I was bored, so I’d try to yuk it up in school.
When the teacher said, “Melvin, what do you know about Columbus?”
I’d immediately answer, “Columbus Cleaning and Pressing!”
Which happened to be a well-known neighborhood dry-cleaning shop on Fifth and Hooper. I’d get a bad mark, but I didn’t care because I got a big laugh. Why was that laugh important? Why was comedy so important to me? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t very big. Most of the kids in my class were taller than me. I needed a weapon to protect myself. That weapon turned out to be comedy. I became accepted and was allowed to hang around with the bigger kids because I made them laugh. Comedy made me friends, big friends to protect me from bullies. I made them laugh, and you don’t hit the kid that makes you laugh.
At eight years old I could reduce my best friend, Eugene Cohen （who later in life became a theatrical publicist and changed his name to Gene Cogan）， to uncontrollable hysterics by singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in the persona of Boris Karloff. We had folie à deux, a mental disorder that two people share at the same time. It got so bad that Eugene couldn’t hear that song near a window, because he might roll out and fall to his death. I could send Eugene crashing to the floor by uttering just one word in Boris Karloff’s voice. The word was “antipasto” but in Boris Karloff’s voice it came out sounding like “antipaTHto?” That would be the end of Eugene; he’d be on the floor, laughing his head off no matter how much the teacher punished him. He would have to be dragged to the principal’s office by his feet, with his head banging on the steps, still laughing!
Because the kids at P.S. 19 （myself included） were generally so unruly, teachers back then had to be strict and sometimes really tough. In math class Mr. Ziff carried a stopwatch on a leather lanyard, like Captain Bligh from Mutiny on the Bounty. If he saw you cribbing or even looking at somebody else’s paper during a test, you’d get a sharp whack across the hand with that lanyard. If you misbehaved in our English class, Mrs. Hoyt would smack the base of her palm against your forehead very hard, snapping a few small bones in your neck. When you caused trouble in geography for Mrs. Garrison she would twist your ear until you had to go with it or lose the ear. Everybody in her class was either a potential Van Gogh or an acrobat. I learned how to do backflips to save my ear!
In Brooklyn at the time, you went to elementary school, then junior high, then high school. And after that you were probably taken to the Garment Center and they gave you racks of clothing to push around and you did that until you died. Most of the young men in Williamsburg ended up as shipping clerks, older men maybe as cutters, and as slightly older men, pattern makers, one notch above, then going from shoulder or sleeve work to being a buyer, where you wore a suit and met other people for lunch and drank martinis. It seemed like everyone at 365 South Third Street and its immediate surroundings was destined for Seventh Avenue to work in the Garment Center. To cut, work on machines, or, if you had some personality, a salesperson. I think I would have been a great salesperson. But unlike most of the people in the neighborhood, I had no aspirations of being a shipping clerk, cutter, or even a salesman.