New York City Years

In my long-ago and even in retrospect mostly engaging, university days, there occurred events that retain the quality of important memory markers.  I start with the spring of 1953 when I left Cornell University- with a Master’s degree, earned in 1950, and a doctorate obtained three years later. Memories of those years retain both scary and pleasant elements.

After my discharge from CPS and a NYC part-time job as a furniture finisher, my young wife having prepared a little apartment for us on West 23^rd Street, we spent a summer working on a Maryland farm, after which I managed to enroll at CCNY as an adult student and so was able to take sociology courses that shaped my interest toward grad work. For four years (1944-48) I was an undergraduate at the 137^th Street campus in Harlem,  a location that became as important for my education as the course offerings at the college.

Our fifth floor walk-up apartment on 109^th Street and Columbus Avenue, just one block south of the border of Harlem, was a neat and quiet haven in the noisy neighborhood with its “slum culture”. If the residents tended to have it all “hang out”, with their private lives exposed through uncurtained windows, for me the often memorable scenes afforded glimpses into the ordinary day-by-day life in the tenements.

  

I, greenhorn student and new-eyes-observer of social life in the raw, took with zest to our street’s sounds, smells, and ever-changing dramas. They soon became my practicum for testing abstractions and concepts presented by my new discipline. Looking back from those learning years, I realize with a start that I must, while I have time and memory, record what I can. With daughter Lisa’s help, those bits and pieces may yet be of some value in connecting me with “you all” when we can’t communicate any more.

It was during the New York City years 1944-48 that among memorable adventures were two summers of working on the farm owned and run by friends in Maryland. There I was put in charge of the tool shed, sharpening axes and mending. And it was there that I had the luck to become acquainted with the much maligned  (“pro-Soviet traitor”) Alger Hiss and also learned both the rewards and punishments of Southern racist attitudes toward blacks.