To say I was born and raised in
New York City would be a little misleading because in my memories of New York
in the 40s and 50s, the city was a collection of small towns or villages. I was
born in Woodside, a section of the borough of Queens, and the skyscrapers and
streets of Manhattan were as remote to me as China would be to my
grandchildren today.
Because of our insularity I can’t
be sure if a Thanksgiving custom we had back then was unique to Woodside or
whether it could have been found elsewhere throughout the great metropolis.
Anyone else I’ve mentioned it to had never heard of it including my wife who
was born a little bit north of the City in White Plains, the hub of Westchester
county.
Anyway, on Thanksgiving morning
the children in our neighborhood would dress up as bums or hobos. It didn’t
take much since we would usually wear our clothes until they literally fell
apart. We would take our most worn and tattered clothing and rip and tear them
a little more. Then, we would blacken a cork over a candle and smear it over
our faces to simulate dirt. I remember my grandmother giving me a little pouch
with a drawstring, or was it a pillowcase, that we hobos could sling over our
shoulders.
Then, we were ready to make the
rounds of our neighbors to ask, “anything for thanksgiving.” Inevitably, they
would answer our plea with some of the bounty from the meal they were
preparing. Usually it would be apples, or walnuts, or sometimes a few pennies.
Don’t laugh. Twenty pennies were enough to buy a Spalding (Spaldeen), the elite
of bouncing rubber balls used by us in so many street games.
I don’t know where the “anything
for thanksgiving” custom came from. We lived in a small neighborhood that
seemed to have been mainly Irish with a mixture of Italians. In my nearby
Catholic school the majority of the kids seemed to have Irish names. There were
Ryans, Regans, Dunphys, Moylans, and Healys. However, A few blocks down busy 69th
Street were the Napolitanos who ran the grocery store. In the other direction
lived the dreaded Gallos whose kids were the toughest in the school.
But I’m not sure that “anything
for thanksgiving” was an ethnic
custom. We were a predominately Catholic neighborhood and the idea of
thanksgiving was part of our religious heritage even though none of us knew
that the word “Eucharist” meant “Thanksgiving.” On the other hand, it could
have been a peculiarly American response to the end of the Great Depression and the
Second World War. Nothing had marked the depression so much as homeless men on
bread lines or riding the rails. These were the hobos that we children
imitated. Even though most of us could be considered poor, at least we and our
neighbors would be able to sit down that afternoon in our homes to the best
meal of the year.
We did have a lot to be thankful for. The Depression was
over, the men had returned from the terrible war, and the NY Yankees were on
the verge of recovering their past glory.
Just one footnote. Halloween was
practically nothing to us in Woodside, Queens. We did not trick or treat or
dress ourselves up in costumes. For us it was All Hallows eve, or the eve of
All Saints Day one of the great Holy Days of obligation. My only Halloween
memory is filling stockings with baking or talcum powder and hitting each other
with them.
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