Benny

This photo was supplied by Mike Guarriello on Facebook. I have been looking for a photo of Benny for years! Thanks, Mike! Here's the story.

Ice cream trucks are part of life growing up everywhere; even in Brooklyn. But we didn't have an ice cream truck on Kings Highway; there was too much traffic. But we did have Benny; and his pushcart. 

Usually; in subdivisions such as the one I live in now; there is an ice cream truck that makes the round on weekends, and during the evenings after dinner. You know the type of truck I’m talking about; obnoxious musical chimes heralding the arrival of an old beat up truck which bears absolutely no resemblance to the ice cream trucks of my youth. Those were sturdy, insulated, thick walled vehicles with freezer doors on the sides. And within those doors were delights which I haven’t seen in years.  I'm thinking about the Toasted Almond Crunch bar. And the bench mark of all ice cream trucks was Good Humor. If it wasn't Good Humor, we threw clods of earth at the truck, signaling to the driver that this was marked territory.

That truck was magical to me when I was 3 and 4; but by the time I was 7 years old, I was allowed to walk all the way up to Kings Highway by myself, and that’s when I first met Benny, as well as saw my first ice cream pushcart.  It was hard to get it rolling, but once it was in motion it was equally hard to stop! It wasn't refrigerated like the big trucks. It was cooled with “dry” ice, which was a whole other level of fascination, and mischief, for a 7 year old. But let me tell you a bit about Benny.

Benny was the ice cream man in my neighborhood. His route extended from the corner of Kings Highway and East 14^th Street, to Ocean Avenue and then down to Avenue T, where he rented a small garage in back of a single family home. Actually, he just rented a part of the garage; a small corner large enough to store the magical “dry” ice; and a freezer which was replenished as necessary by a big truck. When I was 8 years old I became Benny’s “helper”.

Benny was Jewish, from the Lower East Side; and as such, he really had a lot in common with my Uncle Irving, who had also been raised there. They were about the same age. But that’s where the similarities ended. While Benny used to “hook” school, Uncle Irving actually finished high school. So, while Benny went on to become the neighborhood “Good Humor Man”, my Uncle Irving went on to a career in the Garment District as a furrier. Both men fascinated me, if only for their different lifestyles. Both were bachelors, but economically they were worlds apart. Benny lived in a rented room somewhere, while Uncle Irving lived in the larger hotels in Manhattan.

But, anyway, the story I am trying to tell is about Benny. It was, after all, his pushcart that I’m writing about, and the closest it ever came to fur was the time I hung some raccoon tales from the handlebars. The tails came from Uncle Irving, who used to keep us well supplied with them each year. Wait; he is part of this story.

Benny had two habits in which he liked to indulge. Both interfered with his selling enough ice cream to afford spending his winters in Miami; which is where he always went for the cold season. He liked to bet at the Off Track Betting parlor on East 16^th Street, just up from Dubrow’s cafeteria. He also liked to have his hair cut once a week. That’s how I got the job.

I had been buying ice cream from Benny for about 2 years when he first asked me to “cover” for him while he went for a haircut. Being left; as an 8 year old boy; with an unlimited supply of ice cream, plus a pocketful of coins and bills was one of the thrills of my summer days. Benny’s haircuts were legendary for the length of time they took. He could be gone for hours; or merely minutes; depending on how the ponies were running, or ruining, his day. He combined the two errands into one, to “save time”, he used to say. That was fine with me. I would hold forth on Kings Highway and East 14^th Street, across the street from Miles Shoes, and only 2 doors down from Byhoff’s Sporting Goods, which also sold records.  They had a speaker outside, so, I even had music while I worked.

The winters in Miami were a source of irritation to my Uncle Irving, who worked ALL year, but could not afford to take the winters off. They were both Jews from the Lower East Side, and my Uncle had gone to the trouble of getting an education and carving out a career for himself, while Benny hung around pool rooms and gambled on horses. The fact that Benny could afford to winter in Miami really rankled him. And that’s why I never told my Uncle the whole story.

You see, while Benny actually did spend his winters in Miami, he was working. Somewhere today, down in Miami, there is someone my age with the same memories as I have of working for the Good Humor Man; because that’s what he did when he went there, he sold ice cream; just like he did during the summer in Brooklyn. I hope, after all these years, that this will make my Uncle feel better about the whole thing.

"David Played a Harp" by Ralph W. Johnson (2000)

I live less than 20 minutes from the Main Street where this book takes place. I read it for the first time in 2000 when it was released. Mr. Johnson wrote the book in the 1970’s, and let the manuscript lay around for over 20 years before he decided, at the urging of friends and family, to publish it at the age of 96. And what a book it is.

It is the story of the old Jim Crow south and how the author, Ralph Johnson, managed to deal with the inequities of those times. Over the course of 40 years, in the midst of racial segregation, he was able; with great difficulty; to open, operate and maintain the area’s largest barber shop. It is also the story of how the misguided elite students and professors of Davidson College, helped to tear it all down with idealism at a time when the country was rife with racial division in the days before, and just after, the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Ralph Johnson was a victim of the Jim Crow era, but in a much different way than one usually thinks. He was not beaten, nor lynched. He was, instead, the unique victim of hostility from his own people; who saw his efforts at bettering himself as an affront to their own lack of initiative; and, at the same time, also the victim of the young white students and faculty at Davidson College, who looked to alleviate the racial discrimination in the town as a way to assuage their own guilt at having benefited from it.

Indeed, even as they were protesting the segregation in Mr. Johnson’s barber shop, they themselves were the employers of Negro laundry workers, janitors, and cooks on their own campus. These employees had no rights, no benefits and were paid substandard wages for the time. When they grew too old, or too sick, to work anymore, they were simply dismissed and could be seen wandering in rags, sometimes living with relatives who took them in, or else in camps in the local woods, living like tramps. There were no student protests about these unfortunate victims of Jim Crow from the students of Davidson College.

The book begins with Mr. Johnson’s childhood and his scant memories of his father. He recounts his own efforts to obtain an education, which was not possible in Davidson for a person of color at the time. By hard study through correspondence courses taken over many years, Mr. Johnson was able to earn a high school diploma, a college degree and even studied law. As a matter of fact, in 1937, just before the law regarding taking the Bar exam in North Carolina changed, he had been taking law courses in preparation to take the Bar. He was even offered a position with a locally prominent white attorney, but it was economically impossible for him to abandon the barber shop in order to do so.

Eventually he was able to move his shop to Main Street without causing too much backlash. Later, when moving his shop to its final location, he was able to buy a building at the Corner of Main and Depot Streets, which was unheard of at the time. There were several incidents of vandalism and even an attempt at arson on his home as a result of this, but Mr. Johnson, plagued by illness and anxiety, shouldered on and eventually had the best barbershop in the region, drawing customers from every nearby town. By state law he was not permitted to cut the hair of Negroes in his own shop, and even had to have his own hair cut there at night, with the shades drawn.

I moved to this area of North Carolina in 1998, two years before this book was released. I had become familiar with the Town of Davidson by that time. It is a beautiful college town, fully integrated and with a lively economy in spite of the superhighway which runs parallel to it by about 1 mile and has sucked the life out of most of the small towns it breezes through. A lot has changed in the years since Mr. Johnson wrote his story.

The building where Mr. Johnson ran his business is a bank now, which has changed hands over 3 times since we moved here. The author’s description of the town allows you to walk down Main Street and identify every building and what businesses used to occupy them. The steeple of the Church across the street from the old barber shop still stands on the grounds of Davidson College, and at certain times of the year, at certain hours of the afternoon, the sun casts the shadow of that cross over Mr. Johnson’s old barber shop, in the building he once owned. I think he would find some comfort in that.