To be perfectly honest, I did briefly work in the Garment Center part-time during the summer break to earn some extra money. I ran errands and mopped the floors of a thirty-four-hundred-square-foot factory called the Abilene Blouse & Dress Company. At ten o’clock each morning I’d run across the street to the coffee shop and get a bagel with cream cheese and coffee for the owner, Mr. Sussman.
One day, curiosity got the best of me, and I said to him, “Mr. Sussman, I don’t understand what possessed you to name your company, the Abilene Blouse and Dress Company, after a small town in Texas.”
He replied, “Texas? What Texas? I named it after my two daughters: Abby and Lena.” So much for suppositions.
I remember coming home one day from junior high and my mother greeted me with an application to Haaren High School for a course in aviation mechanics. Mom figured that people who learned a trade could earn a good living. This was especially relevant to us, as we were struggling through the Depression. She filled out all the forms, brought them home, and gave them to me.
“You sign here, Mel.”
I said, “Okay, Mom.”
I loved airplanes, and thought maybe one day I would get to fly one. When we lived in Brighton Beach my friend Bobby and I used to go to Floyd Bennett Field to see the planes. We were thrilled when the pilot of a red Waco biplane allowed us to sit in the cockpit for a minute. He showed us the stick in the middle, which when pulled back made the plane go up and when shoved forward made the plane go down; the rudder bar, which made the plane turn right or left; and a throttle, which gunned the engine and made the plane go faster or slower. Of course it wasn’t as simple as that, but when it came to a little kid’s imagination, I was ready to do it tomorrow.
For five dollars he would take you up in the air, circle the beach, Coney Island, and then land. But in those days five bucks to my pal Bobby and me—it might as well have been a million. It was out of the question.
When my brother Irving got home from night school at Brooklyn College, Mom and I proudly showed him the application to Haaren High School. Irving turned to Mom and said, “Your mind and your heart are in the right place, Mom, but this kid is special. He’s different. He has something. He’s really bright and I think we’ve got to give him a chance to go somewhere in life. He’s not going to be an aviation mechanic. He’s going to go to college.” And with that he promptly tore up the application and put it in the trash.
I’ll forever be grateful to Irving for seeing in me a future with great expectations.
In 1935 I was nine years old. I was outside one day throwing a ball against the front stoop of my tenement when my uncle Joe came by and said, “Mel, I’ve got two free tickets to a Saturday matinee of a Broadway musical called Anything Goes. Would you like to come with me?”
I shouted, “OH YES!” so loudly that I think I heard windows opening all up and down the street to find out what was going on. Uncle Joe knew how much I loved music because every time he came into our apartment he saw me glued to our little Philco radio listening to the songs of the day. Uncle Joe was another one of my favorite uncles, and the only uncle on my mom’s side of the family. Everybody else was an aunt. I guess because my mom, his sister, was without a husband, he helped us out every day in every way he could.
Here I am at age sixteen with my mother, Kitty, in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
Uncle Joe drove a checkered cab, a great big beast of a machine that rumbled up and down the streets of New York. He said, “Okay, I’ll pick you up Saturday at noon to see the show.”
Let me add that Joe was the shortest taxi driver in the city. So on Saturday, when I saw a checkered cab coming down the street without a driver, I knew it was Uncle Joe.
Even back then, it was illegal for a New York cab driver to carry a passenger in his car when he had his empty flag up on the taxi meter. So whenever Uncle Joe took me anywhere in his cab, I had to hide on the floor in the back as long as his flag was up. And that’s how, on that long-ago Saturday afternoon in 1935, I went to my first Broadway musical, scrunched down in the back of Uncle Joe’s bumpy old taxi.
When we were off and rolling I shouted from the floor in the back, “Uncle Joe? How come you got free tickets to Anything Goes?” Even though I was just a kid, I knew it was one of the biggest hits on Broadway at the time.
He said, “Al the doorman at the theater is one of my pals and when I pull in for the night, I take him back home to Brooklyn with me—just like you, on the back floor.”