Grandpa Svejda and Sheepshead Bay

Grandpa Svejda and summer on Sheepshead Bay
by Charlie Leck

Once each week, I offer my readers the opportunity to go down memory lane with me. Obviously, those you who don’t care to make the trip can just click away from here in the blink of an eye – but, please, come on back for more opinion, ranting and raving on another day.

I’d like to remember more clearly. I’m trying to go back nearly 60 years ago. As I now speed on toward the stars, I desperately want to bring back to mind some of the times that meant so much to me as I child – times that I wish I had appreciated more fully then, so I could remember them more clearly now; and, perhaps, relive them in the great theatre of the mind.

The very south tip of Brooklyn is the site of Coney Island, which was an extraordinary amusement park and beach when I was an adventurous boy in the 1950s. Brighton Beach, a spot made famous by the Neil Simon play, and Manhattan Beach, are very nearby. Just above them is an inlet, called Sheepshead Bay, which opens to the East to Raritan Bay and the very western tip of Long Island.

Though I visited Sheepshead Bay only a few times, there was something I loved very much about the place and I have warm, cherished memories of my time there. I’m going to make a trip back yet this summer, or early this autumn, to try to stir up some of these boyhood memories.

I’d guess that I was around eleven years old when I spent a bit of time there with my grandparents, Frank and Emma Svejda, one summer. In addition to their place in the Bronx, they had a small apartment on Jerome Avenue, two or three blocks off Emmons Avenue. On the Southside of Emmons were the 10 piers or so from which the commercial or party fishing boats left each day. Along the Northside, facing out to the bay, were a host of wonderful restaurants of virtually every type you could think, mingled here and there with other small retail shops selling everything from groceries, beer and hardware. Lundy’s wonderful seafood restaurant was on the avenue. Folks say it could serve more than 2,500 dinners on a single day, and often did on special occasions like Father’s Day or Easter Sunday. It was housed in a massive, multi-story building. There was another good restaurant a couple blocks from Lundy’s called Pappas. It was run by a Greek family and it was rated highly also. Way down to the east end of the avenue was a placed called The Lewis House. It was always crowded, as well, and the ships’ captains and professional fishermen liked to eat there.

My grandparents’ favorite dining spot, however, was a place call McGinnis. What wonderful memories I have of it and how much I wish it still existed so I could return to find out if food could really be that completely wonderful. Everyone claimed that Lundy’s was superior, but I will never forget the popovers, chowder, clams and lobster that I shared with my grandma and grandpa at the McGinnis restaurant. Somehow, I remember, the place could be opened to the avenue in good weather and, with tables spread out on to the sidewalk, one could look, as one dined, across to the bay and watch all the boats coming and going.

There was another restaurant on the bay that they also enjoyed, but it was very small and the tables were in a yard behind or alongside the building. One had to wait a terribly long time to get served because every meal was prepared from scratch. “That,” my grandpa would say, “is what makes it great here.” He’d pass the time waiting for his meal by munching on ever-full baskets of wonderful, crusty bread and by sipping on his cold Shaeffer’s beer, brewed right there in Brooklyn, from which he’d allow me an occasional sip.

Now, I was a country boy from the rural, back hills of New Jersey. My cousins in the Bronx called the area where I lived “the sticks.” And we who lived there were considered “hicks.” I loved taking those infrequent trips into the big city to spend time with my grandparents in Brooklyn or the Bronx.

My grandpa Svejda was a tall, lean man with long, gangling arms and massive hands. I remember feeling terribly secure when my little hand was engulfed in his. We would walk along the avenue, hand-in-hand, and my little feet had to scurry to keep up with his long, strong strides. He had retired from his work by that time and was living off his pension. He had worked for the city for many years as a bridge painter and retired and took that retirement fund in a lump-sum rather than incremental payments. He and Grandma planned to put a good sized dent in those funds quite quickly. I loved to hear him talk about his work – like how they would start at one end of the bridge and begin painting and, by the time they reached the other end, then just turn around and begin painting it again. I would look at the Brooklyn Bridge or the George Washington Bridge – at their cables and towers, railings and long spans of steel – and feel so proud that my grandpa roamed up and down the bridge working to keep them so beautiful and majestic.

Grandpa was a big Dodger fan. The Brooklyn Dodgers were everything to him. They played in Ebbets Field at Bedford and Flatbush Avenues, about 20 blocks north of my grandparent’s summer place on Sheepshead Bay. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, everyone referred to the Dodgers as the Bums.” A couple of trolley rides would get us to Ebbets Field pretty quickly. Grandpa bought the really cheap seats for us, but that was okay because everything was much closer to the playing field in those days and we could see the stitches on the players' uniforms even from where we sat.

I remember one night game when my father joined us. While my grandmother took me to Coney Island, very nearby, my grandpa and Dad spent the day on an “adults only” fishing trip. They came home and cleaned up quickly for the ball game. There were just three of us and I sat between these two great baseball fans to watch the Giants, my dad’s team, and the “Bums” playing under the lights. Never was there a sound so sweet as the cracking of a bat at a night game in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. It was sheer heaven – a place of perfect and complete happiness. I loved listening to my father and grandfather bantering about each other’s teams.

The big adventure of the summer visit – the absolute and terrifying highlight – was the trip with Grandpa out on the big fishing boats that docked with their noses in, pointing to Emmons Avenue. The eight or nine “party” fishing boats could hold about 20 or so people who wanted to go out on the sea to fish. The crew would solicit business up on the Avenue, inviting people to join them in a quest to bring in some fluke, blue fish and flounder. Grandpa would get me pretty excited about the prospect of catching enough that we’d have a surplus that we could sell along the Avenue to residents who gathered as the boats came in, to purchase fresh fish.

The first time out with my grandpa I got ill pretty quickly. The little ship was rolling – rising and falling – over the swells in the ocean and my stomach went up and down with each wave over which we passed. The eruption seem Vesuvian to me. I was distraught and my grandpa was embarrassed.“Fisherman don’t get sick,” he told me. He sounded like Tom Hanks in the film, A League of Their Own, screaming at his lady-players: “There’s no crying in baseball!”

“This is just a matter of your mind,” he would tell me. “You roll with these waves and become a part of them. You mustn’t fight them. You are not to get sick on the ocean!”

It wasn’t a request and he wasn’t kidding. It was a command. He was no pansy. He was a stern, tough man. He wasn’t about to have a grandson of his getting ill in front of these professional fisherman who all knew him well and were his friends.

I realized how serious he was and how important it was to him. I rose to the occasion and somehow recovered to enjoy the day on the sea. And, in subsequent trips I never got ill again – though I have a queasy stomach now as I remember those moments and write these words.

Then I had another trauma when one of the crew hollered to me that I had a bite. My first fish ever! My heart pounded like crazy and I tried to follow my grandpa’s instructions as carefully as I could. I reeled the catch in. Grandpa leaned over the rail to grab the line and bring “the catch” high enough to net it. He laughed loudly and so did the men of the crew, who had gathered to see what their buddy’s grandson had caught.Grandpa dropped the big sting ray on the deck of the ship and I jumped backward to get away from the monster. Everyone around me was laughing. My face burned with both fear and embarrassment.

My grandpa wanted me to learn to take the hook out of its mouth. I wouldn’t have anything to do with. I backed off, so he did it for me and then pushed the creepy thing with his foot to the side of the deck and back down into its home in the Atlantic Ocean.

I caught nothing else on that first trip out to sea. Grandpa caught a couple of blue fish, but not enough that we had anything to sell on the dock. I was surprised to see all the people who had come to Emmons Avenue and the amount of fish that was being put on display as our little ship moved alongside the pier. My face and arms were bright red and my grandma laughed at me as she watched us disembark. I carried the blue fish to her and told her we’d caught dinner.

“We could have had lobster at Lundy’s for a lot less money,” she laughed. I spotted Grandpa shaking his head at her. He didn’t want me discouraged. He wanted a fishing partner.

Nevertheless, Grandpa gave the two small fish to one of his friends who was hawking his day’s catch along Emmons Avenue.We’d clean up, he suggested, and go on down to McGiniss’ and have some real fish for dinner. Visions of clams and oysters began dancing in my head as we headed for the apartment. I’d need some ointment for my sun burn and a good washing of my hands. I’d slop some goop on my hair and comb it stiffly into place. A clean shirt tucked into my jeans and I was anxious to go, pacing by the doorway and waiting for Grandma to finish prettying up her hair and adjust her jewelry just so.

Writing it all out doesn’t bring it back to mind the way it really was. I loved Sheephead Bay. How can I reproduce the aromas of the sea and fish stands where the catches were put on display? Standing on the sidewalk along the bay side of the Avenue and looking at all the boats, listening to the fish mongers, looking across the inlet to see the neighborhoods of Manhattan Beach and Brighton, realizing that the massive, endless ocean was off to the left and the huge, dense city just over there on the right, I thought that this was a mighty fine place to stand and think.

It was certainly another world from the little Jersey town where I lived, where my father’s general store was one of the few businesses in town, where you knew everyone who walked the streets and the only joints in town had nothing like the chowder and fish that I could get at the McGinnis restaurant.
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It was five or six years ago that I first scribbled notes about these memories in a journal – and I included these words…“The boy in Chester, New Jersey, lying in his bed at night with a bright, hot sunburn stinging his face and arms, wondered if he’d ever be lucky enough and rich enough to live on Sheepshead Bay – within walking distance of McGinnis’ extraordinary café.”

I’m pretty sure I was sitting in Paris a few years ago when I scribbled the paragraph above in my journal, at the Café de Flore. Sheepshead Bay was so far away then, and is now – not so much in distance as in time – and so is all that delightful, childhood discovery. My tall, strong grandfather died at about the age I will be in another year or so, and has gone to dwell among the stars. He was a heavy smoker and the cough, cough, cough boomed from his chest as we walked along Emmons Avenue toward the boat we would take out on to the sea.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

A fan of the NY Giants, my old man, loved baseball
as much as any man I ever knew.

Remembering Papa: At the same time, it was the
greatest and most terrible experience of my life
by Charlie Leck

My old man, from the time he was a boy, until late in the 1950s, was a wildly loyal baseball fan of the New York Giants. Of the detailed memories I have of him, those revolving around his love for baseball are most keen. He often spoke of his young years, when he would go to the Polo Grounds, to watch the Giants, on nearly every day that they played there. He had an early shift job that allowed him to go from work by trolley to the ball park. By the time he started going there, this was actually the third stadium known as the Polo Grounds. The original Giants baseball team played on a field at 111th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues that was called the Polo Grounds. They built and opened a stadium on Coogan’s Bluff, further north on West 159th Street in 1891. They named it the Polo Grounds after their original location. It burned down in the spring of 1911 and a new stadium was built to replace it and was ready in time for the Giants and Philadelphia Athletics to play the 1911 World Series there in October.

The new stadium, though oddly shaped like a horseshoe, was an absolute wonder and my father enjoyed reminiscing about it. The box seats were set off in rectangles of Italian marble. On the larger railings there were ornate American eagles and on the roof, 30 feet apart, flew blue and gold flag-like banners. The Polo Grounds opened as the finest ball park in America.

I didn’t see the historic ballpark until approximately 40 years after its opening. I will never forget the night, though I can’t put an exact date on it. I think it was in 1950 because Willie Mays was not yet playing with the team. The Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates in a night game. We took a bus from our little town out in rural New Jersey. The bus was chartered by a group of local fellows and the mood driving into the city was a very light and joyful one. I sat next to my father and beside a window that was partially opened. I remember the wind blowing through my hair and I remember the sounds and sights of the city as we neared it. I had a ball glove on my left hand and I continuously pounded my right fist into it, feeling a great sense of anticipation.

However, everything turned to absolutely knee-buckling excitement when we walked through one of the concourses of the stadium and turned on to a ramp that led us up into the grandstands. As we neared the end of it, looking down from this upper deck, I saw the greenness of the grass. I was nine years old and had never seen grass so beautiful and so vividly green. My heart pounded and I struggled to stay calm. My father must have sensed it. He was gripping one of my small shoulders in his big, strong hand, steadying me.

Oh how I enjoyed that game. I wasn’t a Giant fan. A big brother, to whom I looked up with great respect and admiration, was a fan of the Saint Louis Cardinals. Because of that, so was I and I was sure Stan Musial was the greatest baseball player who ever lived. So, I had no horse in this particular race and I just sat back and enjoyed it when I wasn’t jumping up and down enjoying it.

Geez! I’ve just realized that you probably are not getting or enjoying any of this if you’re not a baseball fan; yet, I want you to understand that this little essay isn’t about baseball. It’s about a little kid and the range of experiences and emotions he can have in one little day.

Ralph Kiner hit a thunderous home run for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Well, it seemed thunderous to me, anyway. Even sitting high in the upper deck, I could tell it was towering. The fences at the Polo Grounds, down the lines, were not very far away, so it may not have been as gigantic as a kid remembers it. No matter! It was the most extraordinary shot I’d ever seen. It was my first big league ball game and I wanted it to be perfect.

I have no idea which team won. I remember the incredible grass and the beautiful reddish-brown dirt of the infield. I remember the bright white lines that ran down to the corner bases and on out through the outfield to the foul poles. I remember the long staircases that led up to the big clubhouse straight out in centerfield. I remember the big packs of Chesterfield cigarettes that were affixed to the balustrade between the lower and upper decks in left field. The flags were waving and flapping and the lights made the entire field look as if the sun was shining brightly.

I didn’t want to leave. I wanted the ballgame to go on forever. I had never sat next to my dad for such a wonderful, long time. It did end, though, and then there was the awful, frightening ride home.

It’s possible that I was the only kid on the trip. It was a group of grown-up guys who had swigged some beers during the game and had plenty of beer in the bus for the ride home. They were staggering when they boarded the bus and they were in a real partying mood. My dad alternated between trying to shelter my eyes and ears from what I was hearing and what I was seeing.

Guys were urinating out the windows, targeting automobiles that we were passing. Some fellow upchucked and the odors got stronger and stronger as we drove through the New Jersey night. My father needn’t have worried so. I had already heard most of the cuss words they used. It’s just embarrassing for a kid to hear them in the company of his father and for the father in the company of his kid.

A fist-fight broke out. Someone ended up on the floor. I grew pretty terrified. Why must something so exciting end with such terror? Guys were struggling to separate the combatants and someone fell back against my father and he slammed into me and I into the wall and window of the bus. I wasn’t hurt so much as I was frightened and I couldn’t stop crying. My wailing was more embarrassing for my father than all the previous discomforts. I tried to stop. He kept asking me to, but I was gulping for air and needed someone to slap my back to help me catch my breath.

Finally I calmed. Someone had berated the grown men for their terrible behavior. They quieted down somewhat and I was relieved when we rumbled down Main Street and the bus slowed as it turned into the parking lot at the Fire House.

It was only a block’s walk home from there. It was a warm night and the twinkling stars were spangled against the black sky. My dad had an arm around me and one hand rested again on my shoulder. Things were wonderful once more.

The Giants left New York in 1957 and so did the Brooklyn Dodgers. My old man was one sad dude and he was angry too. In the sixties, the old Polo Grounds ballpark was torn down. It was destroyed by the same wrecking ball that battered down Ebbets Field in Brooklyn only a few months before.

Remember the old and sentimental Frank Sinatra song about the ball park that is no more? This might be a good place to print the lyrics.

And there used to be a ballpark where the field was warm and green
And the people played their crazy game with a joy I'd never seen
And the air was such a wonder from the hot dogs and the beer
Yes, there used a ballpark right here

And there used to be rock candy and a great big Fourth of July
With the fireworks exploding all across the summer sky
And the people watched in wonder, how they'd laugh and how they'd cheer
And there used to be a ballpark right here

Now the children try to find it
And they can't believe their eyes
`cause the old team just isn't playing
And the new team hardly tries

And the sky has got so cloudy
When it used to be so clear
And the summer went so quickly this year
Yes, there used to be a ballpark right here

Ah, he could be singing about both the Polo Grounds and old Ebbets Field out in Brooklyn on Bedford Avenue, where the Dodgers played when I was a boy. My dad took me there, too, to a Dodger game against the old Boston Braves and I got Sam Jethro’s autograph and it was a really wonderful night. As a teenager I got into New York often. My grandparents still lived there. While my grandpa was alive he, too, would take me to some ball games. I went out to the Bronx, to Yankee Stadium, a few times also; however, I didn’t like the American League and I didn’t like the Yankees, so I didn’t go there often.

Bob Neyer, of ESPN, wrote parenthetically of a possible disease that may trouble me as well as him.

“It occurs to me that perhaps I’m afflicted with some sort of curse that leaves me more fascinated with the dead – dead ball parks, dead ballplayers – than with the living.”

I would give anything to walk into the Polo Grounds again and see grass that green one more time. I know the truth, however, and grass shall never be that green again for me and I know I will never again see nor hear those exciting sounds and sights – except, of course, when I close my eyes and hear the mighty crack of the ball against Ralph Kiner’s bat and I see the ball rise up into the lights and I watch it flying against the dark sky. Then it descends into the waiting crowd of people and it is lost forever.

Now I am an American League fan. I watch and love the Twins. We’re getting a brand-new ballpark here in Minneapolis. I’ve seen the big model of it and it looks like it will be great. I can’t wait for a night game in a real ball park, where you can see the ball rising into the dark sky, heading for the fans sitting in the outfield seats. No more domed stadium with plastic grass and a Teflon roof. How exciting for an old guy. It’ll turn me into a kid again.

But a kid’s first big league ballgame is the greatest one he or she will ever attend. It’s magical and I shared it with my old man. We didn’t have many moments like that one and now, myself an old man, I cherish the sweet memory.

“And there used to be a ballpark where the field was warm and green
And the people played their crazy game with a joy I'd never seen
And the air was such a wonder from the hot dogs and the beer
Yes, there used a ballpark right here.”