| Chapter 3: | Stores, Houses |
from our tenement. He was a big man and carried large blocks of ice on his shoulder with a mat separating his shoulder from the ice. Grandma had an icebox and was a regular customer. She would call her order from our window and the iceman would climb four stories to bring her the cake of ice. He was always sweating and cooling himself at the same time. As a child I enjoyed watching the drops from the block of ice in the icebox fall into the basin. Sometimes I counted the drops until I got bleary-eyed.
Grandma did most of her shopping along First Avenue where there were small shops and horse drawn wagons with Italian produce for sale. She carried what she could in her black shopping bag. When she was at the first floor of our building , she would call my name and I would go fetch her groceries. I was a teenager at the time and didn’t shop with her anymore.
There was an indoor garage on my street and two lots, one was empty until a playground was built and the other was an outdoor garage with a shack where the Braves often met on cold winter nights. During the winter of 1941–1942 the Braves spent many hours talking about the war and the fifty-six game hitting streak of Joe DiMaggio in the previous spring and summer. Every detail of the streak was remembered. The streak began on May 15 and ended on July 17. He fanned five times during the streak and thirteen times during the entire season.11 The Braves did pay their respects to Ted Williams who finished the season with a .406 batting average.
I was a New York Giants as well as a Yankees fan. My favorite baseball player was the great catcher Ernie Lombardi. Born in