I played stickball on 190th Street, pitched pennies in back of my apartment house, bought folding knives at Cousins on Fordham Road, and went to NYC public schools at a time when subjects such as music, art, and literature were summarily dismissed as topics for “pussies”. (Full disclosure: to this very day, I really don’t know my flowers, trees, or birds.)
So how did I come to build a career based upon communications, with two published books on workplace innovation, three collections of short stories, and three ghost-written books under my belt? How did I come to learn guitar in middle age, and piano in (very) late middle-age?
I attribute my admittedly meager accomplishments to (a) sheer force of will, (b) some good friends and educators, and (c) free-form FM radio.
First, force of will. Maybe it was the challenge (“I’ll show YOU!”). Maybe it was my Eastern European genes, which triumphed over my humble Bronx tenement beginnings (my grandma came from Vilna, a center of learning and education, and there were rabbis in my family, back in the Ould Sod, which in my case was the Pale of Settlement). But the more my family and neighborhood buds said “no way”, the more determined I became.
Second, I lucked out with some chance meetings of new friends in high school, and some supportive teachers and professors. My friends Richie (of blessed memory) and Eric introduced me to the world’s of photography, music and electronics (and how I pored over those Lafayette catalogs back in the day), and literature. In junior high, Mr. Goldberg opened the classroom window and let the snow fly in, as he read to us from Dr. Zhivago. In high school, Mr. Halvey and Ms. Simon took Shakespeare’s prose (which had been impenetrable for me) and broke it down so I could see and feel the timeless emotions and behavioral patterns. In college, Mr. Charyn (just named to read at the upcoming Olympics), coaxed quality sentences out of me. Later, two writers from the Village Voice, Paul Cowan (of blessed memory) and Richard Goldstein, encouraged me, at NYU Continuing Education, to keep pushing with my writing, I was exhausted from long days of full-time work at a thankless, low-paying insurance job back then, and their words fueled my “when pig’s fly” flights of fancy.
Finally, free-form FM radio and, in particular, WOR-FM — which morphed into WNEW-FM. On my Lafayette component stereo ($147 for amp, tuner, Garrard turntable and KLH speakers, if memory serves), I listened to Rosko, Alison Steele, Scot Muni, Jonathan Schwartz, Dave Herman, and many others — the red tuner needle never moved from 102.7.
There, I dreamed of a wider world, for they’d mix Hendrix with Satie with James Brown (“good GOD!”) with Lady Day with Miles. When I heard cuts from Sketches of Spain segue to Judy Collins to Sgt. Pepper’s Day in the Life, my little Bronx pea-brain exploded and I knew, I just KNEW, there were bigger things for me out there, and that somehow there was a tunnel out of my early punch ball prison.