Our Gang
My father’s childhood friends were called Obbie, Bummy, Mooney and the like. Who knows why, since their given names probably were Isaac, Benjamin and Morris.
There are photos of them, sitting on a brownstone stoop, a rag tag army of little toughs, bruised of cheek and chipped of tooth, spoiling for a skirmish, jeering at the photographer who snapped fast because this gang wouldn’t sit straight for long.
My father, Pinny, and his little brother, Natey, tramped through the Great Depression with Obbie, Bummie and Moonie and who knows all, then most of them headed for Omaha Beach and Pearl Harbor, ready for bear.
They came home punch drunk, shell shocked, pulled themselves together and hunted and gathered the prettiest, smartest girls left in the old neighborhood. To make a buck, they sold hot dogs at Phillies games, peddled dolls and mistletoe at Christmas, and dealt cards in the back rooms of luncheonettes before trundling home to fourth-floor walk-ups where their riveting Rosies waited with a chicken in the pot and honey in the hay.
They named their children in memory of their mothers and fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles—Sarah, Dora, Max and the like—with an American twist, and saw that Susan, Donna, Mike and the like were educated.
In time, they opened shops to house their wares and dealt cards in the knotty-pine basements of their miniscule brick row houses on the barren plains of the city’s outskirts.
When their shops became elaborate emporia, their handsomely coifed wives hauled them to the suburbs that would have them, and Pinny, Natey, Obbie, Bummy and Moony dealt cards in the oak paneled game rooms of their Pennsylvania stone palaces and in summer gathered on the dulcet shores of the Atlantic where long ago they’d slinked among the boardwalk snoots, sliding out of the grasp of a towering Irish cop.
And their grandchildren were called Jonas, John, Vanessa, Sean and Jacqueline, with suffixes of Esq., MD, DDS, MBA and Ph.D., respectively, and sometimes Jr.