Notes from the Green Man: a memoir

The Green Man, spring 1979

CHAPTER 1

A SLICE OF HEAVEN

I am not sure about an afterlife, or the existence of a heaven or hell. If there is a heaven, and I were to be miraculously allowed in, I could only be in one place.

The Green Man pub in Tunstall, Suffolk, England.

Entering the front door of the lovely, overly ornate, classic Victorian-styled snug, you will find me sitting at the bar, on the first stool to the left. Publican Reg Harper will be on duty, standing behind the bar. Reg will have on a blue blazer and a perfectly folded dickie around his neck, neatly tucked into a crisp, white button-down shirt. He’ll be slowly drying a pint glass with a clean, white cotton towel, looking thoughtfully up toward the ceiling. Monica Harper, his wife and fellow publican, will be softly humming and shuttling between the snug and the lounge bar.

There’s an endless pint of hand-pulled English bitter before me (it is heaven, after all), while the antique standing clock adjacent to the bar ticks slowly and loudly. Monica and Reg’s dog Fred lies asleep on the thick carpet by the electric fire, surrounded by the crumbs of many sausage rolls. Sir Winston Churchill’s regal portrait observes the proceedings. Early spring light streams through the windows, one of which is open enough to allow the breeze to flow into the snug, carrying the slightly sweet scent of manure from the surrounding farmers’ fields. The incoming breeze perfectly mixes with a light touch of salty, moist North Sea air. In the distance, at the edge of the village, the bells of St. Michael’s Church mark the hour.

Every heavenly day someone walks through the front door, sits beside me on the adjacent stool, and we tell stories and laugh about the times we shared. Some days I see my wife or my son, my granddaughter, another family member, or an old friend. Sometimes random people I met and liked in life pop by. With luck, a few historical figures also take turns as the guest of the day. I also hope wonderful people I knew through the years who performed acts of kindness come by so I can properly thank them.

People, conversation, many pints, and lots of laughter flow into eternity at The Green Man. Reg and Monica join in, as Fred sleeps, smiling in contentment before the electric fire.

Now that would be heaven. No question about it.

The Dalldorf family, circa 1964, Brooklyn, New York

CHAPTER 2

CHIPS ON THE BALL

I took my very first steps on the soil of Suffolk, England, on a sunny, unusually mild December morning in 1977. After an overnight flight across the Atlantic Ocean, I stood blinking at intensely green fields surrounding the tarmac of RAF Mildenhall as bright morning light added to the dramatic electricity of that moment. A soft yellow and angled sun illuminated the flight line, and I was excited by new sights and sounds I’d soon intimately get to know. A ground power unit was started and loudly made its presence known as four U.S. Air Force airmen in green fatigues scrambled around the chartered commercial plane. An olive-drab fuel truck pulled alongside, and behind it, a camouflaged C-130 Hercules aircraft taxied past. Thrilled and jittery with excitement about this new life, I’d just landed in a place I could never have imagined. For a working-class kid who had barely squeezed through public high school in Brooklyn, it all seemed so incredibly improbable. What a sight for sore eyes I must have been that morning: barely 18 years old, pimple-faced and extremely skinny, standing motionless in my poorly fitting Air Force dress blue uniform.

All I could think was, Chuck Dalldorf, how in the hell did you manage to pull this off?

As a kid, I was obsessed and mesmerized by the map of the New York City subway system. The colors of the different lines and how they crisscrossed and spread throughout the city, like a diagram of arteries and veins, filled me with wonder and curiosity. I imagined which subway cars ran on the different lines and the variety of station types — some lying deep underground while others hung on elevated steel trestles above busy streets. Incessant studying of that map had etched the tunnels, connections, stairwells, subway lines, elevated trains, and terminals permanently into the deep recesses of my mind.

My subway map obsession was a gateway drug leading to an interest in all maps, charts, and globes — anything related to geography. I spent as much time as I could in the school library and frequently walked along Fourth Avenue to Sunset Park’s public library so I could peer intently at atlases and run my fingers between exotic locations. Maps unlocked my imagination and created a picture of life beyond the tenement buildings, brownstones, and industrial buildings that defined my Brooklyn world. Maps led me to a search for old National Geographic magazines and books with photographs of faraway places.

My parents both worked hard to make ends meet, and travel was an unaffordable luxury, although several of their friends traveled extensively. My sister and I sat through many evenings of slide shows in the blue haze of adults’ cigarette smoke and the diffused light of a slide projector. Staring at pictures projected on our apartment wall and hearing stories of their travels fueled my curiosity and embedded in me a passion to see new places. I committed myself to getting away and out in the world as soon as possible.

Our Sunset Park neighborhood was filled with families in large, brick apartment buildings or in private houses, most of which had been subdivided into apartments. In the early 1960s, the neighborhood was mostly made up of white, working-class families, and it was almost exclusively the men who went off to work every day. They were firefighters, subway motormen, union construction workers, tailors, bus drivers, electricians, or laborers in warehouses and factories throughout the city.

For seventeen-and-a-half years of my childhood, our family lived in the same upper floor apartment in a private house divided into apartments. Our block — 40th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues — was a few long blocks from the shore of Upper New York Bay and the docks of Bush Terminal. Our neighborhood sat on the summit of a very steep hill that had played a pivotal role in the American Revolutionary War. We were a short block away from an entrance to Sunset Park, one of Brooklyn’s highest points, with its dramatic view of the harbor and lower Manhattan. The Statue of Liberty stood on an island in the bay, almost directly across from us, proudly displaying her lit torch. A wonderful observation and an occasional talking point between adults on our block was the wonderful irony that our working-class enclave faced this multimillion-dollar view of New York City. At night our apartment’s back windows showed the full skyline of downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan. We watched the lightning rod at the top of the Empire State Building attract white hot bolts out of the sky during storms. As my sister and I grew, so did the World Trade Center’s steel frame, and we saw it soar upward, dwarfing everything else on the Manhattan skyline.

A few men in the neighborhood worked on the construction of the massive Verrazano Narrows Bridge, once the world’s longest suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. My father would go off to work every morning and later that day, as we ate dinner at the small Formica table tightly squeezed into the kitchen, he would talk about the difficult bridge he had struggled with at work. Downing a can of Schaefer beer, my father would saw through a fatty pork chop nestled against a hill of mashed potatoes.

I couldn’t get anything lined up today. That bridge is a total nightmare, and the lower bridge will be worse.

On the block, kids’ dads working on the bridge were viewed with awe, so I bragged about my father until an older kid called my bluff, telling everyone my dad didn’t work on the Verrazano Bridge. His father was a union ironworker who told the kid he had no idea where my old man worked. Maybe your father’s a toll taker, but he ain’t no skywalker, the kid said. Upon reflection, I realized that, unlike those men, my father did not carry a steel helmet and lunch pail with him to the subway. Instead, he left each morning wearing casual clothes and carrying his sandwich in a worn, brown paper bag.

When I confronted my father, he laughed so hard beer came out of his nose. After gagging and cleaning himself up, he asked, Where’d you get that? I never said I worked on the bridge.

You did! I insisted. You’re always talking about bridges.

My father then educated me about the world of dental labs, false teeth, and bridge work. He labored five days a week in a windowless, nondescript building in Manhattan’s Times Square, back when it was the sad, seedy center of pornography, peep shows, and drugs. While my father’s work stories were mostly the same, his stories of walking to and from the subway station in Times Square were full of colorful tales, none of which were age-appropriate. Many times, we heard eye-popping, funny stories, but dinner discussions would also be the wet-blanket on my kid fantasy ideas, including the termination of my father, the skywalker.

The Dalldorf home, 613 40th St., Brooklyn, November 1977

One of the more stressful arguments that played out at our kitchen table reflected the social, economic, and cultural clash of the Vietnam War and the 1960s. This domestic period not only substantially changed American society, but also impacted our home and the neighborhood. More mothers, including mine, happily joined the workforce as quickly as they could. Our family needed the money, but more important for my mother was her desire to have a career beyond our apartment. While options for a young woman without a degree were limited, my mother worked her way through more traditional jobs, starting as a school secretary. She moved into other jobs and for a short time became a New York City 911 emergency operator. Later, as she became more involved in community activism, my mother found her passion and worked her way into a full-time political job. While this and other issues created a widening gap between my parents, the cultural conflict was not an issue for most of the kids on the block. Life pretty much continued as always — we had bigger fish to fry, depending on the sporting calendar and how we modified 40th Street to be our athletic field, especially when playing stickball.

Like other blocks around us, 40th Street was a long, single lane, one-way street. The streets served as a seasonally adaptable playground as well as a multitude of playing fields. The most popular game was stickball, a modified game of baseball adapted for the street (other variations existed throughout the city and were modified for empty lots or playgrounds). Named for the use of a narrow, wooden broom handle as the bat, the only other equipment required was a pink, bouncy rubber ball. The iconic pink, rubber playing ball was made by Spaulding, but in Brooklynese was pronounced Spaldeen.

The beginning of most street stickball games went something like this:

Wanna play stickball? Johnny’s getting teams together, Paul would ask, walking up to three of us sitting on a stoop.

Jimmy would respond, I gotta stick. I’ll get it.

OK, I’d say. Who’s got a Spaldeen?

Paul would say, I dunno. Jose’s got one.

Moments later, pink ball in his right hand, Jose would bound down his stoop and immediately declare, Chips on the ball!

Declaring chips was an important procedural matter. It meant that if you hit the ball, and it landed on a roof or otherwise could not be retrieved, the batter had to replace it at a cost of 25 to 30 cents. The stickball field included the sewer manhole cover halfway down the block in the middle of the street, which served as home plate. The next round sewer cover in the street heading toward Sixth Avenue was second base. First and third bases were whichever cars happened to be unluckily parked approximately equidistant between the two manhole covers.

The batter would stand over the sewer cover facing the remarkable view of New York Harbor and Statue of Liberty. One-way traffic moved toward the batter, who had the duty to call out when a car was coming. Holding the Spaldeen in one hand and the stick in the other, the batter tossed the ball into the air. With both hands grasping the stick, the batter would let the ball bounce once before swinging at it. Frequently the batter had to stop midswing, grab the Spaldeen and call out, CAR! Without looking back, fielders automatically took a few quick side steps between parked cars, clearing the street and waiting for the batter to return to the sewer cover for another attempt.

Following professional sport seasons, we played two-hand touch football using the street’s manhole covers as goal posts, which also conveniently marked goals for roller hockey season and again played a critical role, becoming roller derby turning points. Kids lost teeth (two for me) and skin and broke bones as the seasons changed, and we grew up. We played innovative street games that required skill and physical agility. One example was called Johnny on a Pony, a brutal game that made dentists and doctors wealthy. The object of the game was to take turns jumping on the other team’s line of lowered backs and getting as many of your teammates on those backs before the pony collapsed.

I loved Skelzie, a game that used soda and beer bottle caps filled with melted crayons that we flicked with a finger, sending caps skidding across a hand-chalked playing board marked on the street’s blacktop. We had massive snowball fights during heavy winter snows on the block and sledded on folded cardboard down hills in Sunset Park. On blazing summer days, we played in the cold spray of opened fire hydrants to ease the smoking heat of July’s brutal humidity.

During the summer, a brave group of mothers who were not working sometimes gathered kids on stifling hot days for a subway trip to the beach in Coney Island. Those wonderful women packed bagged lunches filled with bologna sandwiches lathered with mustard on white bread, while other adults assembled stacks of beach towels, folding aluminum beach chairs and squeaky Styrofoam coolers. They organized us like a military operation and assigned each kid specific beach equipment to carry on the long walk to the subway.

The beach assault began with us boarding the West End train, joining masses of other city families in the daily seasonal invasion. The Coney Island-bound subway cars filled with people and kids carrying identical well-worn beach equipment, especially the squeaky, dirty, chipped coolers packed with ice for a few hours’ respite from steaming apartments and searing concrete sidewalks. As it plodded along the elevated line station by station, the train became crowded as it collected beach goers, all the way to the end of the line at the Stillwell Avenue terminal.

Packed together towel-to-towel from one end of the narrow strip of beach along Coney Island to the other, we played in the dirty sand and murky salt water until we were burned to a crackly crisp and had eaten everything that had been packed. The late afternoon turned into a massive retreat to neighborhoods throughout the city as worn-out kids headed home, encrusted with dirty sand, sporting blazing red sunburns and assorted beach injuries.

The rest of the year we had the city at our disposal, all to be discovered for the price of two subway tokens. While many city outings were cost-prohibitive, we found a range of inexpensive activities and, even better, many that were free. I discovered the joy of attending free tapings of television game shows at the NBC Building as a member of the studio audience. I watched dozens of game shows videotaped, all for the price of clapping hands when the neon red APPLAUSE sign lit up. There were free tours of the stock exchanges, some museums, City Hall and the United Nations, where I would sit watching diplomatic procedures in air-conditioned splendor. These free, strategic locations — including the main branch of New York Public Library, Grand Central Station, Trinity Church, and other safe destinations — allowed me to sit in dry, climate-controlled buildings with clean bathrooms and cold-water drinking fountains. By far, the best outing was the 15-cent, round-trip ride across New York Harbor, directly in front of the Statue of Liberty on the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry trip took thirty minutes one way and provided a refreshing, often cool breeze on scorching days. The trick was to avoid the ferry crew when it docked in lower Manhattan and to stay aboard for as many round trips as you could before getting kicked off and forced to pay another 15-cent fare.

Many of our family members moved out of Brooklyn and scattered throughout the suburbs of New Jersey, Long Island, and upstate New York. Once or twice a summer, a family member would offer my parents a break, whereupon my sister Mariann and I would be shipped out for a week away from the block. We would plead to our parents, Don’t make us go to the country! It never worked, and we were packed onto a train or bus to arrive in some far-off exotic place to be pampered by family members. Our hosts bent over backward to provide us with opportunities to swim in pools or rivers, go fishing and out for bike rides. Mariann and I ate hot dogs, hamburgers, and ice cream. We picked strawberries and saw all kinds of farm animals, and yet, we were both incredibly anxious to get back to our life in Sunset Park.

Chuck Dalldorf (left) with his father, Grant, and sister, Mariann, 40th Street, Brooklyn

As the kids on the block got older and migrated to high school, our tight-knit group began drifting away into larger orbits. New York City’s open public high school system had many schools providing specialty academic and vocational study programs. Most of us chose different high schools scattered around the city, and as our geographic range expanded, we made new friends, and our neighborhood link began to fade away. I attended John Dewey High School, just outside of Coney Island, while other kids went off to attend Brooklyn Tech, Bronx High School of Science, Automotive High School, New York School of Printing, and other high schools.

John Dewey High School had truly academically gifted and talented students, and I quickly found that I was the proverbial small fish in a very large pond. I certainly was not a part of the best and brightest of John Dewey, and early in my high school experience I discovered something that directly impacted my future. My high school was focused on pre-college studies, so students met with guidance counselors who offered college information. In my first meeting the counselor told me something I had never been aware of: Going to college cost money, and worse, it was expensive. Even the less expensive options of city college or a state university still meant money was going to be a big issue. Given my family’s financial challenges, I knew that college was not at all realistic for me, and I became very disengaged with academic studies. Instead, I focused on getting any work experience I could find. A neighbor owned a nut importing and packing warehouse where I worked a few Saturdays, and then I found a part-time job as a machine operator trainee in a small machine shop. While providing me with some confidence and a few skills, it gave me no clue about life post-graduation, which approached quickly.

A different school guidance counselor helped steer me into an innovative work-internship program for the last half of my high school senior year. The program placed me in a small Manhattan recording studio, and I commuted daily on packed subway trains across the East River. It was an amazing experience, and I worked with talented, creative professionals who taught me how to operate audio equipment. As the internship moved into the last part of the school year, there was not an opportunity for full-time employment, and the fast-moving calendar forced my hand.

During the first part of my senior year, I had taken a vocational aptitude examination run by the armed forces. While I used the aptitude test hoping to discover some unknown talent, the military services used the results to recruit graduating high school students. Results came back quickly, and I had scored well in several areas. The ivory-colored rotary telephone in our apartment rang frequently with calls from military recruiters, which I ignored until I found time running out before graduation. The time-honored tradition for many young people without financial means has long been to enlist in the armed forces of the United States. That was my economic reality, not a decision based on patriotism, family history, or some altruistic desire to serve. In those post-Vietnam War days, military service was universally despised, and none of my high school friends had ever considered it.

At the same time my parents’ marriage felt like a slow, painful disintegration that played itself out as an odd kind of separation between two people who had to share an apartment — with their two children. Rightfully or wrongfully on my part, I decided that I had to act as my own agent, with as little consultation as possible with my distracted and stressed parents. My mother’s eyebrow raised as the messages piled up from anxious recruiters. My father, a Navy veteran, might have been proud or at least relieved that I had a place to go. I really don’t know what he thought, but I had to make something happen.

Meeting with military recruiters from each branch of service, I sat through identical sales pitches. There were promises of technical training, health care, paid vacation, early retirement, camaraderie, early promotions, and the G.I. Bill for future college tuition. Depressed after completing the rounds with recruiters from the Army, Navy, and Marines, I knew I was in deep trouble when I realized that my decision of which branch of service to join seemed to come down to which uniform looked the coolest. The Air Force and Coast Guard were the last two branches to investigate, and I almost did not bother.

It felt like déjà vu