Page 84 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, played baseball until 1958. It seemed at the time that two weeks could not go by without some unfortunate soul being hit by a trolley and thereafter carried to my father’s office for whatever attention he needed. (My dad would minister to the victim notwithstanding the fact that, as he explained, New York did not have a Good Samaritan Law, which would have shielded him from liability. I have the feeling that the blood that I witnessed in and near my father’s office had something to do with my disinclination to become a physi- cian.) Sometime in 1951, two trolley cars collided at M and Ocean in the largest trolley accident in New York history; thirteen people were injured, some seriously.
I recall that, when I was very young, mothers permitted, or actually encouraged, their small children to relieve themselves into what was referred to as the “gutter” of Ocean Avenue. Thus, as you can see, taking into account the traffic, the commercial buildings, and various practices that are no longer in vogue, 1771 did not exactly sit in the middle of a quiet or—as I suppose that it is obvious now—decorous residential street. On the other hand, 975 East 23rd Street, between Avenues I and J, the home to which we moved in 1957, did sit in the middle of a quiet, decorous, tree-lined residential street. East 23rd Street was referred to as a “side street,” which meant that it was parallel to, but somewhere between, two far busier avenues, in its case, Ocean Avenue and Bedford Avenue. Ocean and Bedford sat where East 20th Street and East 25th Street would have been. East 21st, East 22nd, East 23rd, and East 24th Streets were therefore the side streets, and it is on these one-way streets where a good number of my ball-playing friends lived and, of course, played ball.
Because I described 1771 Ocean Avenue, I should describe our far more beautiful new home at 975 East 23rd Street. Unlike 1771, 975 was a fully detached structure. The house occupied the northern half of the property; the southern half contained a wide, landscaped lawn the cen- ter of which contained a magnolia tree. Farther to the right was the driveway (no alley for us) that led to a garage that probably could have held two cars but never did. The size of the lot was “eighty by a hundred,”
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