What's up with Roosevelt?

Why Roosevelt?

When I describe Roosevelt to friends of mine, I usually compare it to the fifties town of "Back to the Future." It had a bank, post office, five and dime, a couple of candy stores, a dairy, one movie theater, a bowling alley(42 lanes!), a synagogue, a church or two, a diner, a Western Auto, a teeny weeny library and that's about it. Roosevelt had a lot of one thing in particular and that was kids! There were a ton of kids to hang with all the time. In school and out of school. All you had to do was walk down your street (block) and there would always be someone outside looking to play a game of catch or better yet, build a fort or organize a small parade of `kids banging on anything they could find that would make a lot of noise.'

The fourth of July was an incredibly fun holiday for Gusto Lane and that's the street I lived on. You see, Gusto Lane was supposed to be named "Guasto Lane" after the Guasto family that built half of Roosevelt. They were kind of like the Levits of Levitown. A large Italian clan of carpenters, masons and hands on builders. It seemed like they could build anything including the home they lived in, which was on my block. A rather large, grey two family home, that was shaped like the liberty bell. At Christmas, their house was outlined with colored bulbs that accented the bell shape of the house. They also made the fourth of July into one hell of a big bash. All the families on Gusto Lane were in on this "event" and we knew that this was a rare window of opportunity for all the kids on the street. We could be destructive in plain sight of our parents! What's better than that? A few of the Guastos would pile into their cars and head down south where fireworks were legal (they sure weren't in New York) then make there way back home with shopping bags filled with all different kinds of mortars, explosives, roman candles, cherry bombs, ash cans and much more. It must've been like a scene from "My Cousin Vinny" with those guys driving into Virginia or the Carolinas. "You talkin' to me?"
Eventually, on the evening of the fourth, both ends of the street were blocked off with police cars no less. It seems that the Guastos had a few relatives that were cops (you see, not all Italians are involved with organized crime) and they made sure that our fourth of July celebration went undisturbed. Best of all, us kids got our own share of fireworks to blow off as well. We would light up a "punk" which was like a stick of incense and use that to light the fireworks. For hours, we had a green light to blow things up on the front lawn of the Guastos' home. It was pure bliss. The next morning, while all good parents were still asleep, Freddy Osfeld, Tommy Gallo and myself would be out there scavenging for fireworks that didn't go off. The street looked like it was covered in dust from a nuclear fallout. A thick gray blanket of ash seemed to cover everything in sight, like an early snowfall. We would kick around the streets until we uncovered the duds and then stashed them for some other future exploits.

Friends from Roosevelt. The Cast.

My pals, buddies, friends that I haven't seen in over 40 years but still think of as my best friends. Who are they? Only one of them you'll probably recognize, but all the names in the cast of characters are significant because they've made an impression on me in some important way. If I left someone out let me know!

ROOSEVELT PALS

Joseph Tascarella
Tommy Gallo
Anthony Guasto
Howard Stern
Michael and Carmen Macaroni
Milton Little
Steven Adler
Larry Mallow
Bruce Monlose
Philp Tifenburg
Justin Green
Kenny Lemmon
Jerry Dikowitz
Felice Barasch
Stephanie Webb
Wendy Coffen
John Sadowski
Teddy Nagle
Eric Gale
Freddy Osfeld
Robbie Karger
David (Phlem) Flax
Sheldon Shwartsbrott
David & Steven Fenster
"Joe" from Pied Piper Ice cream truck
Gail Feldman
Joseph Piscatelli
Dennis Accavelli
BillyLiquori(sp?)
Alan London
Mike, David and Elliot Speiselman
Tommy Policy
Warren Dugan
Harry Morrisey

MILTON LITTLE

So, I sat next to Milton in Mrs. Vought's 2nd grade class. Mrs. Vought was a red haired woman of about 100 or so. That's how she appeared to me back then. Pleasant enough. Patient. She began teaching our class the "times tables." Drag. I would space out because I was bored. I found out the hard way that if you missed anything, it would be hard to maintain a momentum. That's what happened with the damn times tables (math in general). Thank God for Milton Little. Milton was a handsome kid with a great smile who Howard Stern later on dubbed "the smartest kid in school." He was right. I would stretch my neck way over to have a look to see what Milton was writing down for his answers on his times tables. Sometimes he would hold up his paper when the teacher's back was turned. Occasionally he would tutor me.
I would always make sure that Milton was on my Dodge Ball team. The both of us were pretty heavy slammers and it was like clash of the titans if we were on opposing sides. We had a gym teacher Mr. Johnson who was like a real life G.I. Joe and would really work us kids hard sometimes. Robbie Karger fainted in class while being punished. We were all made to stand at attention and down he went.
One thing that bugs me to this day is that Milton was the ONLY kid in the school that could outrun me. I can remember us racing a couple of times (vividly) in the school yard. We both would take off like we were shot out of cannons going neck and neck and then, Milton would just somehow turn on the nitrous and he would sprint past me at the last second. Amazing! He was a person that left a lasting impression on me. I knew that he would do well later on in life.

School Sucks!

That pretty much summed up my feelings about school. I saw it as an infringement on my time. For the most part, I had good teachers except for one...Miss Parmalee. She was sent from hell. She relied on the humiliation method of motivating a kid. She was a milky pale, red haired, thin-lipped, fat calfed woman, who was engaged to a evangelical Minister. Her eyes always seemed bloodshot and she had a nose that was as upturned and wide as a Warthog's. Miss Parmalee seemed to dislike everything fun and good. When I showed up in class with a notebook that had a rendering of Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolfman, she quickly confiscated it. How was I to know it was contraband? When this horrific teacher gave all the students in the class "C's and D's" the parents finally figured out something was wrong in Roosevelt. That was the 3rd grade.

I remember my first day of the first grade. I didn't want to go. Kindergarten was a blast and I wasn't going to make the transition easily to a classroom scenario. I froze right outside the door of the classroom and told my mother "I'm not going!" I was pretty wiry and strong and my mother couldn't get me to budge. Then the Principal of the school, Mr. Daniels came down to see the commotion. He was a "Trumanesque" looking man with thin gray hair and wire rim glasses. He leaned down and politely asked me to go into the classroom. I said "no." He then mistakenly moved and put his hand on my shoulder. The sound that my foot made on his shin, still reverberates in my head to this day. My next image of Mr. Daniels was him hopping down the hall holding his leg. The poor guy.

Why was Roosevelt so special?

One thing that happened to me that was surprizing was in 1979 when I found out that Howard Stern and I were both living in Bloomfield Connecticut. Was that a coincidence or what? We had gone to school together at Washington Rose and sort of lost track of one another, only to be reunited years later in Connecticut. I happened to be watching the news one day and saw local TV interviewing my old school chum Howard about some bit he did on "WCCC," Hartford's 'regressive' rock station. (Honestly, the worst of everything is in Hartford, CT) I thought to myself that it would be great to contact him at the station and find out what the hell he's been up to. The next day, I went to the Farmington Polo Grounds Antique show with my wife looking for some old crap when I happened to run into guess who...Howard! He was with his wife Alison and was living in Bloomfield less than an eigth of a mile up the road from where I was living. This was phenomenal news for me. One of my best school friends from Roosevelt a place of so many fond memories for me was now my neighbor.
I got together a couple of days later with Howard when our wives were out somewhere. He proceeded to tell me about how miserable he had been in Roosevelt and how he was getting his "ass kicked" on a daily basis and his lunch money ripped off too. Not until he came home with reading assignments that were geared for students 3 years his junior, did his parents consider moving. It was the Roosevelt curicullum, not the fact that he was used as a punching bag by his classmates, that got them heading for the suburbs of Rockville Center. woohoo!

"Hey Joey, hey Tommy"

I had some great buddies in Roosevelt. There was Tommy Gallo who lived across the street and went to Catholic school and there was Joey Tascarella who went to public school with me. Joey was this freckled faced cherry cheeked kid who had a constant smile on his face. A raspy voice and a baseball cap. His parents ran a coffee shop with a soda fountain and everything. That was an amazing place for a kid to hang out. We got free cokes, wowee! Joey and I would spend a great deal of time together at and around school, walking to the five and dime or just goofing around.
Tommy Gallo was one year younger than myself and had a younger brother 'Freddy' and an older sister 'Roberta.' The Gallos lived diagonally across the street from us and Tommy and I were friends from the time we first learned to talk.
Occasionally on a calm summer evening, the scent of Terry Gallo's meatballs (Tommy's mother) would hook me by the nostrils and pull me towards her kitchen. I would pull every stunt you could think of just to get one of those meatballs in my mouth. I should've seen the warning signs of addiction back then. Terry's meatballs were made with such flavor, that I thought putting them in a sauce was a total waste and I couldn't understand why anyone would do that. I'd get a meatball wrapped in a napkin and then proceed to eat it as if it were my last meal. As soon as I had finished a meatball, I'd be back over their house trying to figure out another way of getting one. Years later when I was in my fourties, Terry Gallo, once again, cooked a pile of meatballs. This time though, they were cooked specifically for me. My eyes rolled back into my head upon my first bite. Terry told me that she hadn't fried a meatball in years but did so for me on this occasion. All those early memories came flooding back with a wallop, just from a meatball!
When I moved away from Roosevelt I missed Tommy and Joey terribly and have never really had such a dear friends as good as that ever again. I could definately relate to the movie "Stand By Me."

Jerry or Jerome

Jerry or as I used to call him, "Jerome" was another Roosevelt kid. Jerry sat in front of me so I always had a nice view of the back of his head. Very talented at illustrating, cartooning the both of us drew up a cool collage of monsters and sent it in to Zacherly's Chiller Theater. Zach used to MC grade B horror flicks on channel 11 in NY. On occasion, he would hold up a drawing or letter from a fan.He didn't show ours though. I cursed him from that moment on (not really). Jerry also played drums, something that I myself took up seriously after The Beatles hit the states. By the time he was around 13, Jerry was playing in Howard's band. Fortunately, Howard went into radio and not rock n' roll.