Brooklyn Savvy

How did your childhood friends, playground, and adventures shape the rest of your life? This is how they shaped mine.

Tucked in New York City, there is a small track of land where multiple nationalities live close and like it. It’s called Brooklyn. Brooklyn was life. We grew with it and learned from it. Friendships that strived together lasted forever, from cradle to grave. From knickers and cold-water flats to air raids, these stories cover from Korea to Harlem, through grammar school, two wars, and a time in Harlem white people knew little about, and finally, from Rockefeller Center to Radio City.

Brooklyn lives are summarized in one paragraph: Your father was a cross between cop and conscience, and your mother, between priest and conscience. You can fool the latter; don’t mess with the former. Huck Finn had the Mississippi; Joe Perk and his friends from Thirty-Sixth Street had Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. “Don’t cheat a friend and never give a sucker an even break” was just one life lesson bred in Brooklyn. Even somewhere today, I bet someone is buying that bridge again.

Brooklyn friendships and adventures shaped a life strategy used in the battlefields of Korea, in working as a telephone repairman in Harlem, in supervising telephone installations in Rockefeller Center, and in conducting hundreds of investigations as a security chief investigator. The stories are real, however unreal they seem. The people are real; however, most of them are gone. The lessons are real, and a kid from Thirty-Sixth Street—a marine staff sergeant—still lives by them.

“Brooklyn Savvy, in a few words, is thought, motivated early, when the brain is most susceptible.” (Joe Perk)