What a feast. From the Marshmaloow Cookies between two vanilla wafers, to the great Hero Sands at the local Deli in Brooklyn. To the eggnogs at the local candy stores. To the great Hot Dogs at Ebbetts’s field. To the great Knishes. And to GOOD HUMOR trucks, and the Bungalow Bar trucks… And to Stoop Ball and all that… What a pleasure growing up in Brooklyn!!! Love the Stoties hear!!! Reference ID: B
I remember that every fall the Duncan demo team would come to our school. One year they would demonstrate yo-yo’s and the next year it would be tops. This was in the 70’s. The wooden tops were the best. You would have to buy special replacement tips for the tops because they would wear out on the asphalt. I still look for those tops. I see Duncan makes still makes yo-yos, but I haven’t seen the tops in 20 years. Too bad.
Does anyone remember a candy bar called “Lunch Bar”? I think that’s the name but I could be wrong. The same luncheonette where I bought my weekly egg creams sold a little chocolate bar wrapped in a green and red wrapper. I remember that is was only 3 cents instead of the usual 5 cents that most candy bars cost. I had to make my weekly $1.50 allowance stretch — after I bought a few Superman, Flash, Green Lantern and Archie comics, there wasn’t much left. After the luncheonette closed down, I never saw the “lunch bar” again.
For little girls, I remember a game called something like, “Mother, May I?”. Someone would be Mother and the player would say, “Mother, may I take a giant step?” and Mother had the option of saying, “Yes, you may” or, “No, you may not”. If she said, “No!”, the player would have to beg and demean herself in front of Mother, eg. “Mother, may I take an eensy weensy step?” or “Mother, please, may I take an itty bitty step?” I can’t remember how the game ended; it may not have. It definitely involved a lot of begging and laughing.
I grew up in New York on the upper West Side, and we played stickball against the Firemen’s Monument at 100th Street and Riverside Drive. We drew a strike box on the side of the monument with chalk, a pitcher’s mound about 50 feet up the street, and a batter’s box on the street. We used a broom handle (usually wrapped with electrical tape on the handle) and pink rubber balls made by the Spaulding Company (which were universally known as Spaldeens). A single was a ball hit past the pitcher’s rubber on the fly, which hit before the doorway of a building about 75 feet up the street; a double had to be hit on the fly between the marker for a single and another building about 150 feet up the street; a triple had to be hit between the end of the marker for a double and the top of the hill; and a home run was a ball hit over the top of the hill on 100th Street. When I went to buy Spaldeens at the candy store, I looked for ones that had a little extra rubber at the seam from the molding process, because I was one of the few guys who could throw a curve ball with a Spaldeen. There was this one guy I played against, who every time I threw curve balls to him and he swung and missed, who would scream at me, “You cheated! You threw a curve ball!” He could never hit a curve ball, and he was a patsy every time he came up to bat against me. I would set him up with pitches low and inside just over the corner of the plate, then strike him out any time I wanted to with a curve ball that started outside, and broke in at his hands. And you could guarantee that he would be yelling that I cheated, because I threw the curve ball he couldn’t hit. The funny thing is that 45 years later I am now a senior scientist at a major corporation, and he is a big-shot Wall Street lawyer pulling in megabucks, and every time I see him (about twice a year), I can still piss him off by reminding him that he could never hit a curve ball. And you can guarantee he will still be complaining that I won because I cheated, throwing him curve balls.