Waiting for the Pretzel Boy
Northeast Philadelphia, Kensington, 1956.
Crystal Street is only one block long, treeless, with equally treeless Ontario Street at one end and at the other, busy Tioga Street that leads to the Frankford El and the downtown subway. On each side of Crystal Street about thirty rowhouses press against each other, each with its small front porch; only paint colors distinguish one residence from another. The houses had no vestibules. You walked through the front door straight into the squareish living room and confronted a staircase to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor; an archway opened onto the windowless dining room, no more cheerless than the rooms with windows and rarely used except on holidays. Our family ate in the kitchen at the back of the house, and the food was just a notch above a Depression menu: sauerkraut, boiled hot dogs, canned peas, and potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. Outside, a tiny yard faced an alleyway and the backs of the rowhouses on the next street. The space was just large enough to hang out the wash over a little plot of grass. In one corner stood a sandbox; in summers a plastic wading pool was filled up to cool off my two brothers and me. One day I came home from school to find my father cementing over the little grassy area in the yard. I asked him why. “Aww, it’s too much trouble to cut that small amount of grass.” I was inutterably sad.
When you’re very young you don’t have the words to figure out your feelings. You know that you feel, but you don’t know what the feeling means. Often you cannot even see or describe anything but the surfaces of your world. The feelings may be intense, the surfaces sometimes bruising and sometimes electric with pleasure. It takes distances of time and place, a lifetime of scrutiny to find your way under the surface and to reach those submerged feelings. I write now about my years as a Philadelphia kid in the mid-1950s from the outpost of old age, some seventy years later. There has been no dramatic epiphany, no stroke of vision on the road to Damascus. Revelations come slowly, piecemeal, incomplete—assisted, in my case, by a literary sage. When my family departed from Philadelphia before I turned ten and resettled in the diminished mill-town of Norristown, I carried with me stories of my childhood in the city and the still-unprocessed feelings of those early years.
Living in a rowhouse in Kensington, I didn’t know how poor my family was. I never heard then of “the working class,” to which we unmistakably belonged. I grew up in a house without books, and the only magazines I can recall seeing in our living room were The Sacred Heart Messenger and my mother’s copies of True Romances. I didn’t wonder at this deficiency. It was just how things were. We did have my father’s piano in the dining room (until we acquired a television, the only luxury in the house), and I knew that he picked up extra money on the weekends playing in taprooms. But his boogie-woogie didn’t appeal to me and I resisted learning to play. My mother’s tastes ran to “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.” The music that insinuated itself into my mind accompanied the recycled 1930s movie serials shown during children’s matinees at the scruffy Iris Theater on Kensington Avenue under the shadows of the cast-iron El whose shrieking trains periodically challenged the soundtrack. It would be many years before I realized that my introduction to classical music came from the adventures of Flash Gordon, orchestrated by names that would have meant nothing to me: Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Wagner.
I’m not sure when in my childhood I first became fascinated by, and sometimes undone by, words. I can’t have been more than four years old when I pestered my father to take me to the zoo and he told me that if he didn’t go to work he’d be fired. I was terrified: I imagined him at the Sloane-Blabon linoleum factory being thrown by his boss into a huge furnace. The odd name for my parish church when we moved to Crystal Street in 1952 was The Ascension of Our Lord. It took me a while to grasp what an ascension would be like. I thought of the yearly trip with my mother to Lit Brothers’ department store in downtown Philadelphia. We would take the escalator down to the bargain basement for our shopping, but I saw people lined up at the elevator banks to ascend to the mysterious, unseen upper floors. And so I pictured Jesus’ ascension in some sort of invisible elevator that whisked him to an invisible location above the sky. At Catholic school the next rite of passage after First Communion was preparation for Confirmation by the bishop. Nuns conducted endless preparations for this event. Confirmation, we were instructed, would, like the baptism we had undergone in infancy, imprint “an indelible mark” on our souls. It sounded like the red-inked rubber-stamped notation “Very Good” we hoped for on report cards. We also learned that during the ceremony our foreheads would be anointed with oil and we would receive a blow on the cheek. On Confirmation day I was startled when the bishop hit me in the face when I was simply expecting to be breathed on.
Not all my encounters with words were amusing in retrospect, but some of the most uncomfortable ones were instructive. One of my demons on Crystal Street was a very large girl who enjoyed picking on me and occasionally hitting me. Once when this happened I became enraged and fought back with a word I had picked up somewhere: “You bitch!” I had no idea what it meant, but it silenced her. It was my bad luck that my mother had stepped onto the porch and at once she screamed to me to get into the house. She grabbed me by the shirt and hauled me into the kitchen. I tasted the soap in my mouth the rest of the afternoon. I wished she had explained the word to me so I could understand why using it was wrong, but explaining was not a practice my mother favored. She belonged to the generation that short circuited discussion with “Because I said so.” Around the same time I heard her and my grandmother, sitting over their coffee, using a word I couldn’t identify. They complained to each other about the “shines.” I wondered uneasily if they were talking about Jews because I knew a family named Stein. Could the Steins be Shines? But at some point I began to get that they were mocking colored people—to use the polite nomenclature of the 1950s. This scandalized me. Racism and prejudice were not yet words in my vocabulary, but I could tell from my mother’s and grandmother’s voices that “shines” was not a friendly word. Why was it all right for them to talk about “shines” but I couldn’t call someone “bitch”?
Architects and landscape designers write about prospect and refuge as innate desires in humans and other animals. We need wide-angle vision and we want safe and secure enclosures. Our house on Crystal Street stunted vision and its enclosed world was suffocating. From an early age I sought prospect and refuge in other places, especially at the Iris Theater and at the McPherson Square branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The Iris, its stained-glass wall sconces and billowing velvet curtain over the screen promising things exotic, offered a tonic of cinematic stimulation and a cocoon into which I could slip away from parental discipline, school routines, and the featureless streets of Kensington. For kids twenty cents bought an entire afternoon of visual delights: the weekly newsreel, a Technicolor cartoon, a twenty-minute installment of Buck Rogers or Zorro or Gene Autry the Singing Cowboy in The Phantom Empire, previews of coming attractions, and at last the double feature. My allowance of a quarter a week for cleaning the coal bin, shelling lima beans, or sweeping the concrete slab that had become our yard delivered me to the refuge of the Iris, with a nickel left over for a box of candy or a soft pretzel.
From the time I was seven I owned a library card and I made weekly half-mile walks down E Street to what seemed to me the most splendid building in Kensington, the McPherson Square library. Set in one of the few green spaces in the neighborhood, the pale-yellow stuccoed structure looked like it had been transported from another time and place. (And in a sense it had. The Palladian-style building had gone up in 1917 as one of dozens of libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie to be temples of literacy in inner-city neighborhoods.) I’d bound up the wide granite steps to a colonnaded portico three stories high and pass through a pair of wooden doors. Inside, the prospect was utterly different from anything on Crystal Street: expansive, high-ceilinged, uncrowded. I would head straight for the circulation desk sitting beneath a grand glass dome where I’d drop off my five books (the limit for children) from the previous week’s foray.
The library’s generous interior spaces with solid maple furniture invited ease. At my narrow classroom desk in Catholic school I sat with hands folded. At my cramped kitchen table I did my homework with background noise from a TV bleating Kate Smith singing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” But in the quiet of the library with the faintly lemony smell of polished wood, I could spread out my books on a table all to myself. Sprung from the claustrophobic redbrick rowhouses, body loosened and mind exulted. The library was almost church-like in its severe grandeur, but brightly lit by arched windows set high in the walls and electric chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. And unlike the Ascension of Our Lord church, which as schoolchildren we entered in semi-darkness steered by nuns in straight lines down the aisle to genuflect at our pew and sit in silence, the McPherson Square library conferred freedom. I saw no conflict between the tawdry splendors of the Iris Theater and the Palladian grandeur of the library. Both places took me to other worlds, and both were sanctuaries. Prospect and refuge.
I was a curious adolescent, a hungry reader from the time I first learned to read—and too much of a reader, my mother sometimes complained. At seventeen I began studying and living on my own, and unexpectedly I found my poetic mentor. College was not a foregone conclusion. I was the first person in my family to finish high school. My father told me it was fine if I wanted to go to college but I would have to figure out how to do it because there was no money to spare. In 1963 I made my escape. Never having been west of Harrisburg, I arrived on a Greyhound bus at a place I had never laid eyes on, Rockhurst College in Kansas City, for the simple reason that it offered me everything I needed—tuition, room, board, and books for four years. I learned to do what college students do: I took up coffee and tobacco, I bullshat about God and national politics in the dorms until 2 AM, I started going to movies with subtitles and ponderous themes, I learned bizarre new names: Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre. But mostly I read and read and read. The hunger was intense. I gobbled up the Brontes, Kafka, Shakespeare, Baldwin, Chaucer, Tolkien. All of them thrilled me, but the shock of Wordsworth’s Prelude was incomparable.
It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than Wordsworth’s childhood in the pristine Lake District of the eighteenth century and my first nine years on the gritty streets of north Philadelphia. And yet it was Wordsworth, more than any other writer, with whom I identified and from whom I first learned how to read my past. I reverberated to his guilty pleasure and pleasurable terror in a stolen rowboat; I savored the exhilaration of his rock-climbing on a gusty day and the wildness of ice-skaters playing crack-the-whip. In imagination I became the boy-Wordsworth spinning dizzily on an isolated arm of a frozen lake and sensing in his own body the earth turning on its axis. I knew what he meant about reading Don Quixote, “devouring as I read, / Defrauding the day’s glory.” I didn’t need footnotes to understand how “spots of time” shape a future self and how the meanings of those shards of the past come into focus only much later, in retrospect. Wordsworth called the self a “soul,” and he gendered it as female. In his account of the mystery of that soul searching for her identity—“Remembering how she felt, but what she felt/ Remembering not”—I found words that defined my uncertainties. I had found my mentor. It has taken decades of retrospection to put my past together, and even so I continue to recognize the truth of Wordsworth’s proviso, “We see but darkly / Even when we look behind us.” What I remember is not necessarily what I experienced. Interpreting a childhood memory means seeing now what you couldn’t see then, discovering and making meaning from a Rorschach spot in time. Remembering is part perception, part invention—and it’s hard sometimes to know which is which.
Here, for instance, is a story where I cannot be sure how much I am remembering and how much I am creating. Fifth grade at Ascension of Our Lord school, under the supervision of Sister Joan Immaculate, was memorable, and the teacher, if not the curriculum, was agreeable. She, unlike some other nuns, seemed not to know how to yell, and she never glued a boy’s hair with an offending wad of gum. A benign smile came easily to her, and she had a rather beautiful head—at least as much of it as could be seen beneath the starched white wimple that dug a crease into her forehead. But even Joan Immaculate, who took her teaching more to heart than most, could not make the parochial school lessons exciting: the long division problems, the ever-branching sentence diagrams, the endless pursuit of perfect handwriting according to the Palmer Method, and the numbing recitations of memorized, verbatim answers to the questions posed by the Baltimore Catechism:
Who made us?
God made us.
Why did God make us?
God made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
How shall we know the things which we are to believe?
We shall know the things which we are to believe from the Catholic Church, through which God speaks to us.
The litany of questions and answers, page after page of the catechism, deadened the soul. It was nothing like the natural education that quickened young Wordsworth’s soul.
But my sleeping imagination awakened the day that Joan Immaculate announced an assignment different from any she had ever given us. Each day one student was to present an oral report on his or her favorite book. Because more than fifty students overstuffed the room (it was the heyday of Catholic school enrollments) it would take a couple of months for us to make the rounds. I was busting with excitement. Here was an assignment without boundaries. I could be willful. I had permission to fashion my self. Who made me? I did. I knew immediately what I wanted to write about.
My mind’s eye still registers the knee-high shelf in the McPherson Square library that housed an illustrated set of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories. Some of the volumes were badly beaten up; the boards were loose and wobbly; many had pages that had been Crayolaed by previous readers, but they were the original editions and the set was complete. I always made a point of reading the author’s prefaces to his child readers where he thanked them for suggestions for future installments. I was eager to write to Mr. Baum, until a librarian surprised me with the news that he had died over thirty years earlier. The books attracted me instantly. The grimness of farm life in early twentieth-century Kansas was akin in atmosphere if not in landscape to the desolation of urban Kensington. Perhaps that correspondence is one of the inventions of the backward glance of memory. I know, at least, that Oz was a glorious alternative world for me, as it was for Dorothy Gale. By the time I was given my book report assignment, I had read all the Oz books—and re-read them often.
I determined that I would have to concentrate on just one of the fourteen Oz volumes, and that would mean sidelining some favorite Baum creations, like the fabulous Gump, an animated pair of flying sofas tied together and outfitted with a mounted elk’s head and a broom for a tail; or the enviable Princess Langwidere who owned a closetful of heads and could change her head every day according to her mood; or the wonderfully grouchy and bejeweled Nome King who tunneled under the Deadly Desert in a plot to invade and conquer Oz. By the time Joan Immaculate set the task for us I had seen the Hollywood version of The Wizard of Oz in one of its periodic re-releases to movie theaters. That was my first encounter with the chasm that can open up between a cherished book and its cinematic facsimile: Silver Shoes gussied up as glittering Ruby Slippers; loved characters and episodes deleted; and then all that unnecessary singing and dancing. Worst was the movie’s ending, with its “only-a-dream” psychologizing that punctured the graceful fantasy. I wanted to take my classmates back to the marvels of the book that Baum had actually written.
Back on Crystal Street I sat at the kitchen table crafting my report. The next day I stood behind the teacher’s desk. I wasn’t at all nervous. This was the best work I had ever done and I knew it—my first authentic experience of education. I felt as buoyant and unbound as the blimps we occasionally saw in the Philadelphia skies. But as I reached the end of my presentation I saw, to my disbelief, that the kindly Joan Immaculate’s mouth was a straight line and there was a furrow on her forehead that didn’t come from the wimple. My choice of book was inappropriate. The Wizard of Oz was too young for a fifth-grader and not edifying enough. I would need to do a new report, perhaps on the life of a saint. I made myself find another book and write about it, but I have no memory of the title or subject of the second book. In my newly owned mind I was convinced that my original choice was right and only the first report mattered. Nothing that Sister Joan Immaculate could say or require of me would persuade me otherwise. This was a rite of passage, and it left a more indelible mark on my soul than my Confirmation ceremony. I had acquired a new awareness that I would have to keep locked up inside me: like parents, teachers in loco parentis had to be obeyed, but neither their wisdom nor their authority was always worthy of respect.
For all its unspeakable boredom and occasional miseries, fifth grade—my last school year in Philadelphia--had one enduring compensation. The large population of Ascension of Our Lord school had only a miniature schoolyard, and outdoor morning recess in the warm months was managed in shifts. But in winter a fifteen-minute recess was taken indoors at our desks. We would sit in fidgety uncertainty about when recess would be called until somewhere around 10:30 there would be a knock at the classroom door and our lessons would pause. In walked an eighth-grader, an enormous army-green canvas bag nearly as tall as he was strapped over his shoulder. It was the Pretzel Boy, well-stocked with the fat, freshly-baked and salted twists of dough that constituted one of Philadelphia’s few culinary emblems—and more appealing than the other ones known to me: shoo-fly pie, gooey cheesesteaks, and scrapple (which tasted exactly as it sounds). The Pretzel Boy made his way down each aisle and if you were lucky or foresighted enough to have a nickel with you the whole fifteen minutes could be spent minutely savoring your soft pretzel. And on days when I had a nickel I was doubly blessed because my assigned desk was along the window aisle where the bulky, clanking radiators afforded the exquisite treat of toasting my pretzel. Talk about ascensions? This was heavenly.
So many of our most treasured and ghastly recollections of youth are governed by the memories of tongue and stomach. But it is more than that. On days when I couldn’t buy a pretzel I also felt this interval in the school day as a brief discharge from captivity, an admission to something purely sensory. In a world in which so much was regimented and ordered the Pretzel Boy disrupted routine and introduced sheer, simple pleasure into parochial school austerity. The aisles of the chastising classroom momentarily became more like the gangways of Connie Mack Stadium where the Phillies’ ballgame was punctuated by the raucous cries of the hawkers of hot dogs and Crackerjack. Waiting for the arrival of the Pretzel Boy at Ascension School, even on days when I had no nickel, is what I remember with more unalloyed joy than anything else about the fifth grade when the Philadelphia chapter of my life came to an end.
The Pretzel Boy, I now realize, was an avatar (that wonderful Hindu concept alien to the lexicon of our Catholic enclave). City life was enlivened by the miraculous appearance of envoys like that eighth-grade boy-merchant who could suddenly transform the moment. The Pretzel Boy had his spiritual cousins on Crystal Street. Let’s call one of them Vegetable Man. The piercing cry of the huckster as he pushed his cart around the corner and worked his way down the street would cause half the front doors of the rowhouses to be thrown open. That night there would be fresh corn on the cob and Jersey tomatoes on supper plates. On sweltering summer nights, in a time when air conditioners didn’t adorn the facades of rowhouses, the Pretzel Boy’s part would be taken by the keeper of the illegal wrench who would materialize to turn on the fire hydrant, and sweaty bodies of all ages would come tumbling out of their houses to exult in the blast of cold water. By the time the fire truck and police car eventually showed up to turn off the hydrant, the wrench would have been surreptitiously passed to a new keeper to avoid confiscation.
Many a summer’s day we waited for the call of the Vegetable Man, many a stifling night we longed for the Hydrant Guy to make his move. The whole block savored the anticipation and the release of the huckster’s full-throated arrival and the gushing sound that meant the outlaw with the wrench had done the deed. But waiting for the Pretzel Boy’s knock on a freezing winter morning was the most bracing exercise in suspense and hope. That eighth-grader, poised between childhood and adolescence, melted the ice and loosened the grip of adult regulation and churchly order. Unlike the Godot who never arrives, the Pretzel Boy and the other avatars could be counted on to make their appearance, work a little magic, and save the day, or the night. The Pretzel Boy wasn’t the omnipotent fairy godmother or jinni in the lamp of my youthful escapades in the library, but he was real and he and his fellow avatars satisfied hungers of many kinds.
When my family, abruptly and without explanation, moved out of the city in the summer of 1956 I had no idea until much later that I was a participant in white flight. Neither could I foresee that my refuges in the Iris Theater and the McPherson Library would be replaced by a drive-in movie theater, always attended with parents, and a pathetically inadequate bookmobile. And I was leaving behind the Pretzel Boy, that marvelous intruder, and all he represented forever.
But not quite. He lingered in my memory and in my imagination as a promise, a beacon of possibility for the future at least as much as a symbol of youthful longing. The urban avatars of Philadelphia somehow became absorbed into the mental and emotional make-up of the now-elderly Bostonian. My childhood spots of time, I have come to realize, are prefigurements, splotchy snapshots of the person I grew into, disjointed fragments of the mosaic of my impetuous, stubborn, curious, observant, insubordinate, hungry self. Bedazzled by words, in thrall to books, dissatisfied with unanswered questions, craving delicious food, allured by fantastic presences and prospects, I became a teacher of literature, a writer, a researcher, a culinary experimenter, an enthusiast for utopias and epic adventures. I became what I remember. As always, Wordsworth put it more eloquently: “The child is father of the man.”
A winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1989 and 2000, Robert Crossley is the author of a biography, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future (1994); a cultural history, Imagining Mars (2011); and a genre-crossing study of the epic imagination, Epic Ambitions in Modern Times: From Paradise Lost to the New Millennium (2022). Recent essays have appeared in The Hudson Review, Raritan, Sewanee Review, Athenaeum Review, and The Massachusetts Review. “Prospects and Living Pictures,” his essay on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in Southwest Review, won the 2015 McGinnis Ritchie Prize for nonfiction. “My Ever New Delight: The Pleasures of Paradise Lost” was listed as a “notable essay” in The Best American Essays 2019. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.