Page 82 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
which time the Avenue J station was my port of exit to freedom. I men- tion the subway station at Avenue M only because in my earliest memories, I did use it with my parents, although infrequently, at which time I learned that the price of a subway token was fifteen cents, at least starting in 1953.
(Token? Cards with strips that are read by computers were not used at that time, for the obvious reason that computers were not used at that time, other than for military purposes. A subway token was a small cop- per-colored coin, a bit smaller than a dime, with the letter Y cut into its middle—between the embossed letters N and C—which was inserted into a slot in order to permit a turnstile to do its thing, to turn. A token cost ten cents from 1948 to 1953. Before that, and starting before my dad and my mom were born—1911 and 1916, respectively—tokens were a nickel, a fact that my father often brought to my attention to show just how much things had changed. You can purchase a token on eBay today for about four dollars. I have no stats on the cost of pizza—which I would advise against purchasing on eBay—for the years 1904 to 1953.)
Fifteen cents just happened to have been, as you will recall, the price of a slice of Esposito’s pizza. That is not particularly remarkable in and of itself, but I point it out because I believe that to this day the prices of New York City pizza slices and New York City subway rides have consistently correlated (assuming, of course, that we’re talking about plain slices and nondiscounted fares).
A bit farther up Avenue M, on the north side and just to the west of East 16th Street, was the Elm Theater, a movie house that, remarkably enough, was located on Elm Avenue. I saw my first movie there, Annie Get Your Gun, and recall vividly entering the theater with my mother in the middle of the movie and being met with a scene, in color (which was not yet the norm), in which Indians (who were not yet Native Ameri- cans) were very cheerfully singing and stuffing something that I remember as straw into items that they were making on a series of tables. I have no idea what they were actually doing, but my memory of the scene was reinforced because, as the movie finished and restarted, we stayed and kept watching until the scene reappeared, at which time we
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