Another Bronx Tale

You see, yesterday I was skimming through my current issue of The New Yorker, (Sept. 2, 2024) magazine for something interesting to read when I saw an article by Al Pacino . . .

It turned out to be an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir into which I was drawn. I learned that Pacino and I went to the same Junior High School, Hermann Ridder*, in the South Bronx, and we even had the same English teacher, Blanche Rothstein. She had the same lifelong influence on him that she had on me. We both became avid readers and lovers of English literature. We studied, Scott, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others in depth. She even required us to memorize the entire "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and would call on us to recite it to the class by rote memory. Do not try this at home: It's more than 600 lines long!

Although Pacino and I were a couple of years apart we went to the same neighborhood movie theater and playhouse, The Dover on Boston Road, and The Elsmere on Crotona Parkway. We both took trains into Manhattan to attend special High Schools, he went to the School for Performing Arts and a few blocks away I attended the New York School of Printing. We each followed those trades throughout our lifetime.

We both swam, well I swam, and he fell through the ice while skating and into the Bronx River. Both activities were risky in that truly turdy waterway.

We both had childhood friends that came to early senseless deaths, his buddies by drug use, mine had died in a stolen car crash during a police chase. Our pals were Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Puerto Rican. Juvenile Delinquency was rampant in those early days after WWII.

There are even more ties that bind Al and me, but those will have to wait for my memoir. My wife tells me that I've got plenty of time left.

Meanwhile, we have Blanche Rothstein to thank for setting us both onto paths where the possibilities were, and are, endless.

*Hermann Ridder was a newpaper publisher.