ABSTRACT
I grew up in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of an apartment house surrounded by other apartment houses. When we moved down the hallway to an apartment with two bedrooms, I thought we had struck it rich. In retrospect, my experiences in Brooklyn were typical. We were all kids from middle-class families, and like most of the neighborhood kids, I was pretty sure that I knew a lot about life because I equated being streetwise with knowing everything there was to know. In reality, I knew very little. None of us living in Borough Park knew much about what happened in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, Canarsie, or Flatbush. That was because Brooklyn was, and still is, a series of neighborhoods. You lived in your neighborhood, not Brooklyn. Yet, there were some areas of commonality among Brooklyn’s 4 million residents. The rides and food at Coney Island, the Prospect Park zoo, kids diving for pennies in the murky waters of Sheepshead Bay, and even the gangs in some of the schools were shared experiences for many of us. But one of the strongest threads that held us together was the Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers, or the Bums, as they were affectionately known, were an integral part of our world. The Dodgers were the good guys. The Yankees were the bad guys. The Giants weren’t worth
mentioning. I left Brooklyn many years ago, but I still remember the day-actually the moment-that Bobby Thompson hit the home run that gave the Giants the 1951 pennant over Brooklyn. I was just a kid, but I remember feeling sick and dejected, as if somebody squeezed all the air out of me. The only salvation was that the Yankees beat the Giants in the World Series.
