AN IRISH BOY IN THE BRONX

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James Dominic Behan

A Boyhood in Ireland and America, 1924 to 1940

My 91-year-old father’s tales of his early years mesmerized me in my own youth—and they still do. Hardscrabble and sometimes swaggering, they conjure up times and places we won’t see again, for good and ill.
Here’s an account of a conversation Dad and I had about some of his childhood memories on April 11, 2016.
—Maria Behan

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What do you remember from your earliest years?

I was born in Lucan, Ireland, in 1924. It’s a pretty crowded Dublin suburb today, but at the time, Lucan felt like the countryside. My family was living in the gatehouse on what I imagine had been the once-impressive Behan family estate. It was a big property, supported by my grandfather’s barge business. It’s across from what’s now the Finnstown Castle Hotel. I like to think that a few generations before mine, my family had a Big House like that one. But if so, it was gone by the time my father came of age. I’m not really sure what happened.

The gatehouse was modest, as you’d imagine. It had a thatched roof and no plumbing and was basically just one big room. I lived there with my father, mother, and two siblings (one brother, two years older; and one sister, two years younger).

We had a black-and-white dog named Prince. One day as I was playing in the fields, I fell into a ditch, then couldn’t climb back up again. I was probably about three. Prince may have saved my life, barking and barking until somebody came running.

It’s funny, the few odd details I recall now, nearly nine decades on. The thing I’d most like to remember is my mother’s face. She died of tuberculosis when I was four. I tried to find a picture of her for years, but never did.

How did you come to leave your boyhood home in Lucan?

With great sadness, our father found it necessary to go to America to try to improve our family circumstances after my mother’s death. He resisted the pleas of relatives who wanted to adopt us. If my Aunt Mary had had her way, she’d have taken me in and seen to it that I became a priest, that’s for sure.

Instead, we were placed in institutions run by the Catholic Church. My brother and I were sent to St. Patrick’s Industrial School in Kilkenny, and my sister was placed in a nearby institution for girls. We never saw each other after that. Not until our dad came back for us five years later.

I don’t remember much about that time, and I don’t want to. It strikes me as a kindness that I have almost no recall of specific events. I do remember that somebody once gave me a toy, a little red car. It could have been that one of my aunts had come from Dublin on a visit. I left it on a kitchen windowsill while I did a chore, maybe washing dishes. When I went back to get it, it was gone.

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What are your memories of arriving in New York?

The year was 1933 and I was nine. All we really knew was that our dad had come back to collect us. My whole world had been limited to life at St. Patrick’s, so I didn’t have any expectations about what was to come.

America was in the middle of the Great Depression, and we were moving to a small apartment in a place called the South Bronx, where my father had been living with his new wife, also from Ireland. They’d had two kids together, my stepbrothers, Joe and Larry. With the addition of my brother, my sister, and me, we became a family of seven. Our residence was a small apartment on the fourth floor of a building on 138th Street.

Arriving in America was the beginning of a new life for me.

I have one vivid memory of that first day. In the taxi from the pier to our apartment, I noticed a boy on roller skates and I thought, “Wow, what a great country! If you hurt your feet, they put wheels on them.”

How did it feel to be an Irish immigrant in America?

My brother, sister, and I all had difficulties adjusting to life in America. For a start, we talked “funny.” At school, they weren’t sure what class to place us in, since the home in Ireland operated on a very different system, focused more on religion and chores than academics. We also had difficulty eating with a knife and fork instead of a wooden spoon.

But I never felt foreign in America. To me, it seemed like everyone I knew in our neighborhood in the Bronx had come there from some other place. People spoke different languages, or at least had different accents, but they usually treated each other well. In fact, the Armenian tailor down the block bought me my first bike. He was one of the many neighbors who showed me great kindness when I was a boy.

Were you ever homesick for Ireland?

Ireland, to me, was life at St. Patrick’s. I never missed it. I was now living in America and I had no desire to look back.

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Then and now, the South Bronx is a poor area. Would you say you grew up on “the mean streets”?

In the sense that everyone I knew was poor, dirt poor, yes. But despite the poverty, there was respect for law and for people who were older than you.

Life was a struggle. My dad had to feed five kids and two adults on wages he earned as a hotel doorman or later, as a porter at the gas company.

Were you expected to help out?

I did what I could to get money. I think my first job was selling shopping bags on the street. I paid two cents a piece for them, then sold them for a nickel. In those days, there were no refrigerators, so one of my other jobs was delivering ice from a street vendor to his customers’ apartments. I also delivered groceries and meat. Those deliveries earned me pennies, sometimes a nickel.

Was there a social hierarchy among the kids you grew up with?

Oh, yes. The fastest runner. The longest hitter. The guy who owned a car. They were all special people in the neighborhood.

Where did you fit in?

The answer would depend on my age. It was difficult in the earliest years, because my accent made me stand out. That alone got me into many fistfights. But as life progressed and I got a little older, I became very capable at boxing and stickball, a basic form of baseball. I was accepted then. I generally got along well with the other kids in the neighborhood, most of them the children of foreigners, or immigrants like myself.

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Tell me about stickball—and some of the other adventures you had as a boy.

We played a lot of stickball on the streets of the Bronx. We used whatever was there as our equipment. Before we could get a game going, somebody would have to steal a few brooms and mops from the fire escapes on the block. We’d break off the mop or broom part to make our bat, and we’d have a rubber ball. Then we’d improvise. A sewer grate was home plate. A telephone pole would be first base. Another sewer was second. Coming back to home base, you’d have to stop at third base, which was a fire hydrant.

The East River was not too far from where we lived. We’d find some old doors, lash them together, and go out on the water. I don’t think I could swim at that time. We’d just lie on those “rafts” and drift on the river, and that was our excursion for the day. A few times, the doors came apart. I’d just hang on to what was left while the swimmers towed us into shore.

Do any dramatic moments stand out in your mind?

I’m not sure what set me off, but at one point I became very unhappy with my entire situation, so I decided to run away. I walked a long distance to the railroad yard and looked out for a suitable opportunity to board a train. Then it was getting dark, I felt hungry, and got spooked by a drifter near the tracks who was looking at me. So I went back home.

Do you have any embarrassing memories from your growing-up years?

A funny thing happened to me when I was 14 or 15. It was Halloween, so all the kids dressed up in whatever they could find. I happened to wear my sister’s skirt. I went out with the gang, and we rang people’s bells asking, “anything for Halloween?”

On this particular day, I managed to collect enough money to leave the group and go to the movies. Two movies and about four hours later, it was dark when I left the theater. I’m on the street and look down, and to my horror, I see I am wearing a skirt. It took me a long time to get home that night because I had to hide in doorways any number of times. I did not want anyone to see me.

Do you think kids today have very different childhoods from the one you had in the 1930s Bronx?

Yes, definitely. Part of it is attitude. As a kid, I would never talk back to a grownup. We respected our elders—or we’d be in big trouble.

And there’s no way that kids today would have the kind of freedom that my brother and I had to make the streets our playground, or to float down the East River on makeshift rafts. On the other hand, my poor sister was usually stuck at home, helping my stepmother cook and clean, and girls do seem to have more options today.

During my boyhood, nobody had a television or a smartphone. We didn’t even have phones in our apartments. If someone wanted to reach you, they’d call the local grocer, who’d come by your apartment house and ring your bell or knock on the door yelling, “telephone!”

Looking back, how do you think of your youth?

The early part was hard. Losing my mother; being in the home in Kilkenny; then coming over to America, where I was behind all the kids. Trying to catch up, that was the toughest part.

But once I got going, I was able to take advantage of the opportunities presented to me. I wound up doing well at school, enlisted in the Marines at age 18 to fight in World War II, went to college on the GI Bill once I got back from the Pacific, then got a job in the IBM mailroom. I worked my way up while going to law school at night, eventually becoming a lawyer for the company.

Honestly, I’ve had a great life. I think I managed it pretty successfully and I had—and have—a wonderful family.

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The black and white photos of children in New York city in the 1930s and 1940s used in this piece are by Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009).  She was an American photographer who was particularly noted for her “street photography”, and has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.”

James Behan married Mary Zabatta, a Queens girl and the daughter of Italian immigrants, in 1951. A widower since 2008, he lives in California, not far from two of his three daughters. His hobbies include golfing and line-dancing.

Maria Behan writes fiction and non-fiction.  And yes, she’s a daddy’s girl.