Page 79 - WhyAsInY

1771 oCean (anD M)
original)—had never even heard of egg creams, so there was work to be done. Teaching the counter personnel how to make egg creams wasn’t all that difficult, but establishing a price with management entailed a bit of a discussion. I took the not unreasonable position that if one took the price of a black and white, a chocolate ice cream soda with vanilla ice cream, and subtracted the price of a scoop of vanilla, equity (and there- fore Harvey) could be served. The owner ultimately acquiesced, and I spent the balance of my college career having cheaper than normal, but fairly priced, egg creams at Shumway’s.
Chodosh’s sold Crayola crayons, the sixty-four varieties of which were important to me if I had the money for the biggest box available. For some reason, I felt the need for dozens of different colors, even though I had little aptitude when it came to drawing, which was an important skill when I was in elementary school. (This is an example of a perhaps unfortunate trait of mine that persists.) All that I could draw with any degree of skill were U.S. fighter jets that I copied from the comics, and only three or four colors would suffice for that purpose.
Much more important was that fact that Chodosh’s sold greeting cards, a fact that contributed to one of the more valuable life lessons that I learned while growing up at Ocean and M. When I was in the third grade, I bought my first valentine there, one that was embellished with a beautiful, raised, pink satin heart on its cover. That was a very good thing because I gave it to Harriet Levin, who had a long, dark-brown ponytail and wore a very cute sailor hat when she tried, with no success, to teach me how to roller-skate. I really wanted to impress Harriet Levin. It was, on the other hand, a very bad thing because I spent one dollar (four quarters?) on the acquisition, an incredible sum at the time ($9.12 in today’s dollars), for a card or for a kid, and my father, who, as we know, was capable of showing a fair amount of anger, somehow found out. Not only I, but Benny Chodosh as well, was subjected to a lecture concerning the transaction. It’s difficult to assess or describe the residual value, if any, of the valentine, but it is the case that, although I didn’t see much of Harriet in Brooklyn after elementary school, she did pay me a visit when I was in college. The life lesson was not to refrain from giving
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