It's 1952, and Where Is Betty Kirby...

Where Is Betty Kirby??......Who WAS Betty Kirby??

 Saint’s Candy Store, or as the storefront sign read: ‘Fountain’, was at it’s usual afternoon August quiet. It’s 1952 in Flushing, Queens, New York City, Long Island NY. The traffic from Horace Harding Blvd outside, which years later became a frontage road of the New York claimed “World’s Longest Parking Lot” LIE - Long Island Expressway, from cars, trucks, Q17 buses, could be easily heard inside.

(This is a Traffic Cam the day I’m writing this Blog - Jan 23, 2016 - as Snow Storm ‘Jonas’ hits NYC - obviously NOT a hot muggy August day). (And now, after that distraction, back to Flushing circa 1952..)

‘Saint’ himself was reading the New York Times, and keeping a watchful eye on the kids sitting in the booths, who, every once in awhile had to decide whose turn it was to buy a 12 ounce bottle of Mission soda - lasted longer than a 10 ounce Pepsi, or a 6 ounce Coke, or 7 ounce 7-up (get it?) - and most critically, was the money available to pay for it. Saint did not run a library or waiting room, so when the drink or pretzel was gone, so were the kids. And Saint, probably in his mid 40s, had the muscle to move you. And nobody wanted to leave ‘refrigerated- air-cooled’ Saints to go out into that hot humid day.

“Lover” by Peggy Lee had just ended on the jukebox, and “SugarBush” by Doris Day and Frankie Laine was just starting.

 I was at the big red Coca-Cola metal box in the front of the store where the bottles were kept in icy water, picking out a Mission Cream to take home to drink. Yes, at home. There was no way I was going to share with my ‘friends’ in the booths, who did not collect newspapers to sell to the ‘junkies’ - not drug junkies, but junk dealers who went past your house collecting, well, junk, but paying you by the pound for newspapers. I also stacked smelly beer bottles in Harding Food Center a number of hours a week, where Bob worked delivering groceries, and me, too, a few years later.

So no sharing with these guys my Dad called “bums, juvenile delinquents” even though he knew them all, and liked them, except they didn’t work like his sons did. I gave Saint my dime. He smiled. He liked the Field boys, and liked I wasn’t going to share my hard-earned soda with those “bums” - he agreed with my Dad, even if those bums were his customers.

Out into the muggy heat, past Costanzo’s Plumbing, down 160th St to 59th Ave, and then, instead of turning towards my house, second from the corner, staying on 160th St to see if, maybe Betty Kirby was sitting on her stoop, which was across the street from the P.S.163 school-yard.

The school-yard was where the guys in the neighborhood, from 12 years old up to the late teens, even a few guys in their early twenties, all ‘hung out’, playing stickball, touch football, basketball, softball, handball, chinese handball, fast-pitching against the wall, the wall being the chimney stack of the school building. And all this on cement, and part gravel made of ashes - that’s right - ashes - and hurt when you fell

 Softball in the summer, for 15 year olds up, was just about every evening till it was too dark to see, or, like me and Bob, till our Mom stuck her head out of the kitchen window, nearly a block away, but visible from the school-yard, yelling: “Bobby, Genie, get home - Now”!

 If it was supper time, we would eat fast, get back to the game, and then, when dark, sit on the front stoop and wait for ‘Gus’ the Bungalow Bar Ice Cream man, to come up 160th Street in his white uniform, coin changer on his belt, and driving an ice cream truck that looked like, well, a bungalow. We did not buy from Good Humor who came on 59th Avenue right in front of our house, more convenient, but more expensive, smaller sizes, and, not Gus, who was Greek: looked it and sounded like it. Not ever hearing another Greek talk, we assumed all Greeks sounded like Gus’s accent.

 I don’t remember Betty Kirby in any of my P.S.163 classes. I’ve also searched my P.S.163 June 1952 graduation picture, taken in front of the school, which included all 8th grade classes.

She may have been a year older than me, but I just don’t remember ever seeing her inside the school at all. Certainly not in the schoolyard - girls were not in the schoolyard except during school hours, or ‘summer day camp’ week-days till noon. (And then out into the heat of New York City summer days). Maybe Betty Kirby went to parochial - Catholic - school. I don’t know, ‘cause I never talked with her, I just walked past, or, when I delivered groceries, rode my delivery bike past her house, or delivered to her next door neighbor. And at times two guys in their very late teens or early twenties, also sat on the stoop, drinking bottles of beer - Rheingold - remember, I stacked beer “for a living’, so I knew beer brands. They wore old man’s trousers and white undershirts, now called tank tops. I guess they were her older brothers, and looked like the kind of guys you don’t talk to their sister when they’re around. Anyway, I just never talked to Betty Kirby.

 Sometimes as the many years have gone by, I wonder if there really ever was a Betty Kirby, or did my feverish young boy mind just make up this exotic girl to picture as I read ‘A Stone for Danny Fisher’ or ‘Battle Cry’ or ‘God’s Little Acre’ - the books of romance and fantasy (not meant to be, but to a teenage boy…) . That’s a story for maybe a future time.

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