Chapter Three; Early Years

The first thing I remember about food is not having much. My Dad, like many Irish immigrants with no prospects, left most of his paycheck in various gin mills in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. He had come from a family of fishermen up on Newfoundland. There were a lot of things in the Bronx River – none of them fish, nothing worth catching and nothing edible.

My mother, with four kids, struggled daily between credit from the corner grocer and day old bread from the A&P at the corner of Morris Park and White Plains Avenues. Sam West and his wife “Goldie” owned the little store at the corner of White Plains and Rhinelander. My mother and her sister Marge would often sit on folding chairs in front of the store or on my aunt’s porch and commiserate as neighbors did in the days before the Bronx was air conditioned. Mrs. West often comforted my mother Frances with bromides from her own unhappy past. “Frankie,” she would say “too old too soon, too smart too late!”

Goldie West had a very prominent crudely lettered numerical tattoo on one of her chubby arms. We kids would often ask about the serial number and she would shrug us off with: “Honey, you shouldn’t want to know”.

The West’s had cornered the local market on “heroes”, elsewhere known as submarines, grinders or hoagies. My favorite was ham and Swiss, mayo on one side and mustard on the other. When I was flush with quarters earned carrying bags at the A&P, I would go to the corner grocer for my favorite sandwich. I always ordered a small and Mrs. West would never fail to produce a large. When I would point out the error, Mrs. West invariably replied: “Small price it is; children shouldn’t pay for the mistakes of adults”. Whenever I hear the word hero, I still think of Goldie West.

For the Irish and Italians of Van Ness, Friday was pizza night – cheese pizza for us Catholics. In those days every neighborhood tavern had an Italian cook and an Irish bartender. Our local bar, next to the firehouse, was called the Step Inn. My family didn’t go out for pizza on Friday or any other night for that matter. But on Friday, my mother would take slices of stale Wonder Bread (eight great vitamins), smear them with tomato paste, top with a slice of American cheese and pop them under the broiler. She called it Irish pizza.

On weekends, we four kids would run up the hill on Rhinelander Ave to my Aunt Margaret’s house. She owned the last house on the block. There was a cherry tree and all of Bronx Park beyond my Aunt’s back yard. Marge had a great sense of humor and three boys; the former surely a prerequisite for the latter. On Saturday she would make a proper breakfast of bacon and eggs for seven kids. We would sit in awe and watch her cook up an entire pound of bacon and at least a dozen eggs. For me, my sister and two brothers this was gourmet dinning. To this day bacon and eggs is one of my favorite meals.

Holiday meals were usually done at Aunt Margie’s. She had three sisters and among the four O’Grady girls, there were thirteen kids and five husbands. My favorite aunt outlived two of New York’s finest. Cooking for twenty in a two bedroom apartment (she rented the top floor to make ends meet) was a holiday routine at the Hickey/Varley house. It was also one of the few times in the year when the Donovan kids had vegetables, a starch and meat in the same meal.

The best holiday was Thanksgiving. We had a distant relative who was a teaching priest at Cardinal Hayes High School. On Thanksgiving morning he would take us kids down to Randal’s Island, in the East River, to watch the annual game with Mount Saint Michael. It was class warfare served up with a breakfast of cokes and hot dogs. Even in those days Hayes was being singed by the Bonfires of the Vanities; while, the ‘Mount’, then as now, was in a nice neighborhood. Sometimes football is more than a game.

After being whipped by the cold winds of the East River for three hours, we would return to my Aunt’s Margie’s hoarse and hungry. The Thanksgiving venue always seemed to be her Bronx homestead. Yet, the other O’Grady sisters would contribute as their culinary inclinations allowed - desserts usually.

My most memorable Thanksgiving involved a twenty five pound turkey and a TKO. The O’Grady sisters got along well enough, but their husbands, not so much. My Uncle Jack, husband to the hostess, was a large, taciturn, no nonsense cop. My uncle Everett was a short fast talking, smarmy Oldsmobile salesman. Uncle Jack had worked the graveyard shift and, as was his custom on that schedule, stepped in at the Step Inn for a few adult beverages on the way home. My uncle Everett, a Scarsdale resident, was stone cold sober and more that a little put out by the annual trek to the Bronx –and a little too loud and rude about O’Grady girl holiday rituals.

Just before desert was to be served, my Uncle Jack stood up and rested his fists, knuckles down on the table, and suggested that Everett might want to haul his ass back up to Westchester before desert. Everett, directly opposite Uncle Jack, pushed his chair back and rose to the bait like a fish. Silence fell on the room like a November draft. Small children retreated to the kitchen. Testosterone rose to flood tide. Eyes locked across the table.

At such times obsessive eye contact can be a handicap. My uncle Everett never saw the haymaker that caught him flush on the nose, rendering him senseless as he ricocheted off the hutch and fell onto the dinning room table. His fall neatly cleaved the table in two, throwing the remnants of the feast to the four corners of the room including the chandelier.

My Aunt Rita, the quiet O’Grady’s girl, and wife to Everett, had had several highballs herself at that point. She surveyed her prone husband, lying in a mix of dressing, excellent giblet gravy and nose bleed. She danced off into the kitchen and chirped to her sister: “Look, Marge, these things always have their ups and downs. Let’s have dessert!”

That next summer, things went from bad to awful over at our house. My father lost his pride and my mother lost her grip. She went to Rockland State Hospital for an indefinite stay; and he just went – never to return. After a summer with various relatives, the Donovan kids became “wards of the state”. In those days that meant an institution of some sort.

We were placed in the Lt. Joseph Kennedy Jr. Home and School for Children – a euphemism for orphanage. Among the inmates of 1770 Stillwell Ave, the Kennedy Home was known as the “ranch”. There were only two ways out; graduate from High School or turn eighteen. At the time I was twelve, still in grade school.

So I settled in for the long tour at the ranch. As I recall, the Kennedy Home had six groups off 30-40 children from toddlers to teens all segregated by age and sex; toddlers, grade school and high school. We lived in separate cottages, divided into dormitories or shared rooms. The buildings all had fanciful names like Bldg. 1 or Bldg. 2.

We ate in age appropriate dinning rooms in the administration building; girls on one side, boys on the other with a convent between. There were a total of eight dinning rooms, two for staff (civilians and clergy) and six for inmates. All were serviced by a central kitchen under the convent. The cooking was done by a solitary nun with help of course. A kitchen helper might be anyone who got on the wrong side of Mother Superior. A conservative estimate of the Home’s population would be somewhere on the short side of 300, including staff. Thus Sister Chef prepared nearly a thousand meals a day or 300,000 a year.

Our cook was short, stout and, understandably, cantankerous. She was first generation Italian and she spoke little English. How she found her way to a convent in the Bronx is still a cipher. She had little patience with adults and none with children.

Sister Chef was known to the Big Boys (teen residents of Bldg. 2) as Stir-fry or Meatball. All the nuns were known as “Stir” something or other because stir was the Bronx pronunciation of sister. Sister Chef was also fond of all things fried and small steamed globes of mystery meat. In her real life she had been named after some obscure, unpronounceable Italian saint, hence she was known to us as Stir-fry or Meatball. We never called her such things to her face; she ruled her domain with an iron fist.

Yet, there were certain advantages to kitchen patrol. A male teen was required to push the eight odd stainless steel food trolleys to the various dinning rooms three times a day; they weighed near 300 lbs. The value added was first shot at the chow, a visa through the convent and a visit to the girls’ side of the ranch. Not that going to the distaff side was without hazard.

If the Big Girls (teen residents of Bldg. 4) didn’t like what was on the trolley, aka roach coaches, you might be subject to no end of abuse. You might also say that Kennedy school girls were not overly fond of institutional cooking. The halls would frequently ring with chants of “we will not eat mystery meat” or “throw the balls down the hall”. The Big Boys of Bldg. 2 never complained about food; they would lick their plates - and the trolley if they could.

Pushing food carts around the Ranch was just one kitchen chore. If Stir-fry could tolerate your presence, you might get to wrestle food crates or cavernous pots - or other manly chores. All of this in full view of several girls who had less strenuous tasks like slathering mayo on the ubiquitous day old bread or shaping balls of mystery meat with their hands. At such times the kitchen air would ripen with salacious chat. Sister Chef would feign ignorance as long as none of the innuendo interfered with work.

There was, however, one notable exception; Jean Anne Petrie – a classic specimen of virginal adolescence with curly red hair; flaming, set your heart on fire, red hair; north and south red hair. She also had the other ingredients for spontaneous combustion. Yet, it was the red hair that sent Sister Meatball into orbit.

She was convinced that natural redheads were the devil’s workshop; a Helen of Troy for any boy. To double the jeopardy, she knew that I was smitten.

To be continued….