THE ROCKAWAY I KNEW
By Matthew Bashie
CHAPTER NINE: HOW TO EAT FOR FIFTY CENTS A DAY
The most important lesson in my life I learned from my best friend. No. I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about food!
I had no intention of drinking cold egg covered with cream nor did I have any desire to eat flatbread toast covered with tomato sauce. This was not my idea of the ideal lunch. I was southern born and raised in a rural town for the first seven years of my life and I did not know the "New York" ways and traditions so when my best friend told me to collect fifty cents -that we were "dining out" for lunch that sunny Tuesday afternoon, I had absolutely no notion of what to expect.
We lived in a large apartment complex in the Far Rockaway section of Queens and back in the spring of 1953, it was a quiet suburb - an area that had very little in common with the rest of the city. As an accommodation to its tenants, a small "L-shaped" shopping plaza was maintained by the building management. The Wavecrest Shopping Center was located on the west side of Beach 20th Street and was bordered by Plainview Avenue at the north. As I later learned, about 100 years before, the site that was now the shopping center's parking lot had been the kitchen and servant's quarters of the very first hotel erected on the peninsula. This hotel, called the Marine Pavilion had actually been the impetus for a building boom which had resulted in Far Rockaway becoming a major summer resort during the first half of the century.
So, throwing all caution to the wind, my pal Ralph and I entered the local eatery - known as a "luncheonette" - the Wavecrest Luncheonette to be specific - sat down at the counter and ordered two egg creams. Frankly, I had never heard of the "Brooklyn tradition" before and I couldn't understand why anyone would want to drink that kind of stuff. As it turns out, I learned what you people already knew: an egg cream is"chocolate milk" with seltzer - or "club soda" as my family called it. It wasn't half bad; in fact, it was quite good! After paying the thirty cents (fifteen cents each) we departed the store and walked a few feet down to what was then known as "Dante's Inferno" - a interesting tag for a pizza restaurant. Each slice cost twenty cents - and was placed on a paper plate, covered with a piece of waxed paper. We sat in the store and finished our lunches in only a matter of a few minutes.
The community bakery was to the immediate west of the pizza shop and it was our next stop - to grab dessert - a honey-glazed donut which cost each of us another fifteen cents. You do the math - we had a decent lunch for fifty cents each. My only complaint is that we spent more time moving from store to store than we actually did in eating - and we had to have lunch in sections -1 would have preferred having the drink along with the pizza pie. But, life is an ongoing adventure.
As a grand finale to the meal, I then did something else that I had never done before: I stole something for the very first time in my life!
I was in fifth grade in the local elementary school and the class was working on a school project which entailed growing a live plant from a lima bean. The teacher took a plain drinking glass, rolled up a clean ink blotter and slid it sideways into the glass and then she took a lima bean and placed it between the blotter and the inside of the glass - the blotter held the bean in place for us to see. Then an inch of water was added to the glass which would then be absorbed by the blotter and would serve to keep the bean moist. As children, we were encouraged to replicate this experiment at home. The problem was that my family didn't eat lima beans so I didn't have a source from which to work. So, I needed a lima bean!
A new food store had just opened in the small shopping mall and so my friend and I stopped in so that I could "obtain" a lima bean. The new Food Fair supermarket didn't have any lima beans in the produce section BUT it did have cans of them in one of the many aisles. I had spent all of my money on lunch. A small can of DelMonte brand lima beans cost eighteen cents - the price which I did not have. So, while no one was watching -1 simply slipped a can of beans into my pocket and Ralph and I left the store. At this point, some fifty years later, I guess that (including appropriate interest) I owe the store $250. for the can of lima beans that I "liberated" so many years ago.
Within fifteen years the entire Food Fair organization would close its doors to the public - regardless of its "boast" that it was 175 stores strong on the east coast. The chain simply could not keep up with the times so it went out of business. I am told that the supermarket expanded too quickly and developed what is known as "a cash-flow problem." Obviously I was not foolish (or stupid) enough to think that my stealing a single can of beans forced them to go bankrupt. Besides, my family began to shop in that conveniently located grocery and my father constantly complained to my mother that the meat she bought for us in that store was tough and that the bread was always stale.
Just as an aside, I was not rewarded for stealing. MY bean never developed and grew. Later on I learned why. You needed to work with a "fresh" bean and the lima beans in the can were boiled and processed so "they had no life left in them." Funny how things work out. Oh, and yes! Before I forget, since that day pizza has always been my favorite food. I stopped drinking egg creams years ago. The drink just does not taste the same when you make it with milk amplifiers other than Foxes-U-Bet.
If you wish to contact me at any time, feel free to do so through this web site. I always love hearing from my fans and friends. M.B.
I always love hearing from my fans and friends. M. B.