Friendly, quick to laugh, supremely confident, and a “cool guy”, he moved with catlike speed and was a superb athlete.  Playing dodgeball against a team with Mr. Buckley on it inspired “artful dodging” indeed.

Dan Buckley taught us fundamentals, strategy, and teamwork, but most of all he taught us that we could win if we really wanted to try.

“Mr. B.” brought real basketball to the CH.  Playing with modern rules and excellent coaching we fielded teams in that era who held their own against schools and clubs who traveled to the CH from all over the area.

As football is king in small towns all over America today, basketball was king in Forest Hills on Fright nights and Saturday afternoons.  If you didn’t play either on the Varsity, or Jayvee, if you were a CH-er, you were there to root.

The 1958 Varsity, for example, had a 28-4 record.  Two of the losses were inflicted by our own “alumni” team starring smooth-as-silk Dartmouth star Henry Hof.  His name was on the gym figuratively and literally.  His sweeping hookshot was a thing of beauty.

A CH team jacket was a prized possession worn proudly to school and around town.  At one time, the entire first-string team at Kew Forest School was made up of CH boys, and many went on to play for their colleges and service teams.

Each spring after Awards Day, the streets of the Gardens bobbed up with new satin blue and gold “CH jackets” with five-inch CH emblems on the heart side.

In the Fall, CH jackets were traded for WSTC ballboy shirts as our focus moved to the “Matches”.  This was the United States National Championships, one of the Grand Slam events of tennis.

Many CH families were also West side members, but one didn’t have to be a member to be a ball boy or concessionaire.  CH kids were everywhere.  For a number of years Henry Hof was “Head Ball Boy” responsible for the hiring, firing and scheduling of match assignments.  He was scrupulously fair in assigning matches.

Here we saw sportsmanship in the real world.  Tennis in those days was genteel.  Angry outbursts and bad behavior by the players was almost unheard of.  The arrival of fiery Pancho Gonzales who was the first of the Nastase/McEnroe type of competitor both thrilled and horrified us.

Gonzalez, in anger during a close match, slammed a ball clear over the top of the stadium into the street.  We talked about that later in wonderment.  (A few of us tried to do it, too, when nobody was around).  We concluded that we didn’t want to be like him, just to play like him.

We felt very close to the Australians who were great sports and were pretty well dominating world tennis.  They would come every year as a team and stay in the “Stone House” up Beechknoll Road from the CH.

At night they would do their “roadwork” in the Gardens and we would try to keep up with them.  White blurs padding through the streets, they occasionally would stop for a chat with residents.  Funny how they always seemed to have something to say to the prettier girls in the neighborhood.

Later, it became customary to “put up” players in our homes as housing was short and there was no money in tennis then for the players.  Many friendships evolved with players and officials.

Although street drugs were absolutely unheard of in Forest Hills in those days, there was some alcohol abuse, and certainly lung abuse from smoking.  It seems like everyone smoked then and among many of the teenagers it was considered cool and romantic.  Look at an old movie today and see how cigarettes played a role in almost every social setting.  We were right up with the times.

Smoking wasn’t allowed in the CH, but after activities we would repair en masse to “Sutton Hall Pharmacy” on the corner of Ascan and Austin, cram ourselves into the soda fountain booths and puff away.  Dime cherry and vanilla “Cokes” were popular, along with toasted English Muffins and 25-cent hamburgers.

Another hangout was Jones’ Candy Store on Austin street diagonally across from Sutton Hall.  They had papers, cigars, cigarettes, and magazines and a small fountain.  A big seller there was “Mission Orange” soda and Drake’s “Devil Dogs”.  Twenty cents would get you both.  Cigarettes were a quarter.

Getting “permission to smoke” from one’s parents was one of the stepping stones on the way to adulthood…as was “learning to drink beer”.  Some of us were exceptionally quick learners.

It was legal to drink at age eighteen, and ability to drink beer copiously at college was a pretty traditional asset.  Many people didn’t see drinking, in general, as a health issue, and beer in particular, as really drinking, so teenage beer consumption was common.

One ironic thing was that we couldn’t get a driver’s license until eighteen in New York City either, so there were a lot of new drivers on the road celebrating the right to drink beer legally.  I kind of cringe now thinking about that.

There were lots and lots of parties, but there was one traditional party that became internationally famous because of the tennis players who attended it. That was “Jensen’s Party.”

Every year, through most of the ‘50s, brothers Bruce and Charlie Jensen threw an “open house beer blast” in the yard of their home near Jewel Avenue.  This occurred during the tennis matches and, at times, it seemed half the stadium showed up.  Held just before the finals, many of the players ousted from the tournament came, as did just about everyone else in town.

Music was often our own Dixieland band the “Five Originals”.

Everybody one 1955 morning “cut” school to watch the “Five Originals” appear live on the Today Show.  The players were all CH kids at one time or another.  Andrea Dufault played piano with Harold Lardaro on drums, Haig Dadourian on clarinet and Frank Spitzer on trombone with Don Gillis on the trumpet.

All great musicians, the two horn players were phenomenal for their ages and generally blew off the roof any place they played.  Cliff Heather, father of Linda, Dee and Hannah was their mentor.  He was one of the top trombonists in the country then.  Many people said “the” top. 

CH girls ran an annual fund-raiser dance for the Brooklyn Home for Children and the “Originals” played many memorable dates for that event.

Don Gillis’ father was also in the music field.  He was assistant to Arturo Toscanini who was the symphony conductor of the era and head of the NBC orchestra.  Mr. Gillis staged “Record Concerts” for us with the latest in new equipment (a stereo!) set up in Smith Hall.  It was like a huge music appreciation class with parents.

One year they coaxed octogenarian W.C. Handy, the “father of the blues” and author of St. Louis Blues  to come and talk and shake everyone’s hand.  It was a blues, jazz, and dixieland afternoon.  Everyone was jumping and tapping to the music so much that the phonograph arm kept skipping.

Rock and Roll was scandalizing our parents but we loved it.  Several carloads of us ventured to the Brooklyn Paramount.  A rough crowd of “rocks” and “hoods” dominated the crowd.  Wearing locally fashionable items such as “engineer boots” (good for stomping and kicking) and “garrison belts” (sharpened buckles on wide leather straps wielded in bullwhip fashion) they were our antithesis.

CH kids were mostly “Ivy League” dressers.  Fashion note: “chinos” with a little belt on the lower back, white bucks (dirtied up) or “Cordovans” was standard.  Button down white or blue shirts with sleeves rolled up to forearm muscle (extra cool if it bulged), crew or V-neck sweaters, blazers and skinny little knit or striped ties were stylish.

We had trekked to Brooklyn to attend, “Alan Freed’s FIRST New York LIVE Rock’N Roll Show!!!!!”

Starring in the much ballyhooed production were “The Platters”, “Little Richard”, and many others.  After some delay and a lot of fanfare, disc jockey Freed emerged from behind the curtain, arms outspread like Billy Graham, and was immediately greeted with a tomato to the forehead.  Discipline and order went downhill from there.  At day’s end, we fled back to Queens, the noise of crashing Grecian lobby statuary ringing in our ears.

At Christmas time many CH boys took jobs with the Post Office as mail carriers to assist with the usual Christmas rush.  It was good money and barring some slippery steps and ornery dogs, kind of fun.  My “route” had some really interesting people.

Trygve Lie, the Secretary General of the United Nations lived in “Cranston Tower” on Greenway North, and only a few houses down from him lived a man who was the “Capo de tutti de Capo” (or something like that) of all the New York Mafia crime families.  I remember that the mail for him had to be brought to the side door, which would sort of glide open just I approached.  A dour little man would wordlessly take the mail.  I remember also that he didn’t get any Christmas cards.

Around the corner, on Wendover Road, was the Dale Carnegie residence.  Carnegie was author of one of the largest selling books of all time, “HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE”.    He got tons of cards.
I wondered if Secretary General Lie had read the book and, and fantasized about him telling Carnegie over canapés at a cocktail party, “Dale, your book came in very handy during the Palestine thing…” I supposed the Mafia guy really didn’t have to read it.

The Kliegel family also lived on Wendover road and they were famous for the Klieglights which had revolutionized the movie industry by enabling indoor filming.  Christmas lights on their house and lawn drew tourists from afar.

Nearby, was the Gretsch family who were in the musical instrument business.  A rare Gretsch guitar recently sold as auction for about a zillion dollars.

No recollection of those times would be complete without mentioning “missehlers” as Miss Ehler’s Dancing Classes were known.  A large, handsome woman somewhere between forty and one hundred (depending on who was guessing), she insisted on formal bowing and scraping and white gloves for her pupils.

Somewhat hearing challenged, she endured many cruel pranks involving being spoken to very softly.   After making adjustment to equipment in her bodice, she would go wide-eyed at, “I SAID GOOD EVENING MISS EHLER”.

According to a blurb in the CH Chatter newsletter in 1953, “We are all familiar with her faculty for developing social poise and aplomb as well as dancing finesse in our CH boys and girls”.  It further enthused, “Her instruction includes not only fox trots and tangos but square dances, the Virginia Reel, samba, rumba, waltz, lindy, and mambo”.  She must also have had a soccer background as she was most adept at instep-kicking ceramic dog “doo” out of the path of traditional Grand March.

We resisted attending, but all benefited in the long run.  I still do a mean Viennese waltz and bow to my wife a lot (with aplomb).

The dancing classes inspired a lot of pranks but there were some notable others.

One spring evening, the lifeguard and lots of kids were amazed at the sight of live blueclaw crabs in and out of the pool.

It had to have been an “inside job” but who?

Even the Pink Panther could have figured out that a pretty good suspect would be the one boy whose father had a summer home on a crab-infested canal in Babylon, had just gotten his first car, and had a sunburn.

Perpetrator and accomplices were quickly apprehended, tried and suspended by Council members struggling to keep a straight face.  Come to think of it, there may have been a little “round up the usual suspects” syndrome at work here too.

 If the kids were brothers and sisters to me certainly the people who worked at the CH were adjunct family too.

Who could forget Charlie Mac?  A miniature adult, Mr. Mac had been managing the CH since the mid-thirties.  A former London vaudevillian, he was a nimble little guy with a British accent and a lot of patience with kids.

He lived on Austin Street and like clockwork would round the corner of Burns Street and Borage Place at exactly 2 minutes before the CH doors were to be opened.  He always wore his little camel’s hair overcoat and tiny brown fedora.

He was an excellent badminton player and in many CH shows sang and danced in imitation of Charlie Chaplin who he said he knew in the “old days” in England.
In one Parent’s Night “fun” basketball  game he ran through Suke’s legs too.
Mr. Mac retired in 1955, and was sorely missed.
I particularly remember two of the lifeguards.  Eddie Murphy, in the very early days, was a Navy war veteran who was attending college on the GI Bill.  Like most veterans, he was reluctant to talk about his war experiences, but after incessant pestering occasionally would open up.

He described, once, pushing the burning wreckage of a Japanese Kamikaze into the sea from the deck of his aircraft carrier.  We were impressed at him having been so close to a dead “Jap”.  He was also cool because he could swim the pool underwater two laps!

Queens College supplied many students as lifeguards.  Don Richards served for several years and Al Wheelock was a popular lifeguard late in the decade. We became good friends and later I participated in his wedding.  He went on to teach at Kew-Forest and is now a professor at Skidmore.

Swimming underwater for long distances and being able to jump high enough from the diving board to touch the ceiling were abilities which commanded respect.  After replacing umpteen broken diving boards, a rule was finally passed banning “jumping” from the board.

Mr. Tweedy was our boxing coach for many years.  He held forth in the “Little Gym” downstairs under the  Hof Hall  stage.  He was an enthusiastic promoter of boxing and his training and instructions have saved the day (read butt) for many of us.  One year he and Dan Buckley brought the house down when they appeared in a skit together in "“drag".

The girls had their “house mother” in the form of Mrs. O’Neil, a rotund sweet little Irish lady.  Her job was to keep order in the girl’s locker room and she spent a lot of time shooing away lurking (well, actually “peeking”) boys.

“Begone with ye now, ye balldivels!” she would shriek as she lumbered after us snapping a towel.  Otherwise, a wonderfully cheery and sweet person, she used to get a phenomenal ovation on Awards Day from “ her” girls.

Roy Marshall was the custodian and a wizard at keeping things going.  He had vats of mysterious stuff feeding into the pool from the eerie Pool Maintenance Room near the Boiler room where he kept his “shop”.

In the Boiler Room he also accumulated huge mounds of “lost” towels and sweat socks.  Occasionally, towel-depleted mothers could be seen climbing over the piles retrieving their belongings.  We always knew who was going to “get it” that night.

Roy was a serene and gentle soul who spoke with a beautiful “island” accent.  He was from Bermuda.  Every summer he laboriously sanded and varnished the gym floor to a beautiful high gloss.  Not surprisingly, he was a big proponent of the “ NO SHOES ALLOWED ON THE COURT!”, rule.

Speaking of the court, I can still remember the odor of the new varnish and how it caused such a satisfying sneaker squeal when executing a quick stop or turn.  The “thunk” of leather basketballs banging off the wooden backboards, and the shrill chirp of the whistle was like music.  You could hear it in the front lobby and couldn’t wait to get downstairs to “suit up”.

My CH “career” came to end in May 1959, after ten wonderful years almost to the day, when I graduated from Kew-Forest High School (ironically) on the stage in Hof Hall.

I’m in “my” fifties now and can still do jumping jacks…I try to be fair in all things, a good sport, and I haven’t argued with a ref or thrown a bat in a long time…I never cry or flinch.

Well…hardly ever.

Thanks, “Doc”!
 
Vero Beach, Florida
October 1996

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