An American Dream, Realized: From the Tenements of New York City to the Eastman School of Music to the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1909-1997)

As kids growing up in the New York of those days, especially with my strict father away, we had a ball! We were tough, dead-end kids!

East 90th Street

My earliest memories actually go back to 1912 when, at three years old, I can still remember life in a flat (in a tenement!), on East 90th Street in New York City, with my mother reaching out with a walking stick to pull in some freshly baked cookies that an equally friendly neighbor had let down, on a heavy sewing thread, from a flat above. That would have to have been prearranged since, in those days, there were very few telephones, especially in tenements! I can remember posing for a Mr. Kubinsky as pictures of Syd and me were taken to advertise his newly invented Ear Trainers for kids when they slept! And this sticks in my mind because my mother used to love to quote Mrs. Kubinsky, who, one day, showed up to announce in alarm that Mr. Kubinsky has smelled a smoke of gas. I remember, too, going for walks a few blocks away in the park that bordered the East River and surrounded Gracie Mansion. In those days it was just a run-down playhouse for kids but has been restored as a historical site and is now the official residence of the Mayor of New York City.

There were all kinds of boats constantly sliding by between the Park and Blackwell’s Island in a rather narrow channel in which the tide was either racing upstream toward Hell Gate and Long Island Sound, or down under Brooklyn Bridge toward the Battery, past Bedloe’s Island and the Statue of Liberty, and out past the Narrows to the ocean. Schooners and ships in sail of various sizes along with regular Eastern Steam Ship commuting boats also came by every morning on their way from Portland and Boston. Along the outer edge of the sidewalk was a heavy, curling railing that was anything but a safety measure to keep kids from falling into the rocks below that were always exposed at low tide some fifteen feet below. Without any telephone or power lines, it was a great place for kite flying, and that went on constantly as the mothers watched their children at play and in the baby carriages. It was a great place to escape from the confines of the nearby tenements!

Somewhere about that time, my mother and her bosom friend, Concetta Minor, took Syd and me along for a shopping expedition way down to a department store called Siegel and Coopers. In the center of the main floor, we came upon a magnificent water fountain that constantly gurgled and sprayed. Fascinated, Syd and I stood there watching, oblivious to all else. Then, suddenly, we both looked around for our mother, only to discover that she had vanished! I can still remember the fright and panic that seized me as I began to cry, and the police eventually came running! Calming our fears, they took us to the Lost and Found Department and fed us candies and cookies, until, shortly, my mother hove into sight to gather up her two precious darlings. She and Concetta, engaged as always in busy conversation, had simply got on an elevator and didn’t miss us until, at the 4th floor and time to get off, we couldn’t be found!

Another such fright hit me about that same time when, riding on a Third Avenue streetcar, I got off with my mother only to discover that Syd hadn’t gotten off with us as the streetcar sped away! So, not knowing what else to do, we stood there under the roaring Third Avenue El and waited, until we spied Syd come running back on the sidewalk. He had become so engrossed in looking out of the window that he had gone several blocks further before he missed us!

We must have lived on 90th Street for about a year and a half, because the next thing that I remember is that we had moved to a nice house way out in Corona, Long Island. It was near Xmas, and my mother had taken us way down Shell Road and bought us a King of the Hill red sled, and, in a snow storm, was pulling us home! That February, on the 24th, on a Sunday afternoon, Syd and I were confined to the front room, while the doctor came and delivered our younger brother, John Marshall. That was 1914, and I, already going through the woods to kindergarten, would not be five until April the 18th. Syd and I were told that mother hadn’t been feeling very well, so the doctor had brought along a new baby in his doctor’s bag to make mother feel better! But even I, at that age, and most surely Syd, knew that there was something fishy going on, and when the kindergarten teacher asked me about it, I professed ignorance. Earlier, being new in the class, and having no knowledge of what to do when a call of nature arrived, I sat in my seat until the last minute, finally held up my hand to get Miss Pugley’s attention, and, too late, sat in my seat and piddled! The very kindly teacher sent me home with a note that read: Who would like to be in Henry’s shoes today?

Corona, in 1914 and 1915, was wide open country, and Syd and I roamed all over the woods and fields, dug fire holes in the hilly ground, and with the other kids around, made good fires and had the thrill of roasting potatoes in the flames. To skin off the black peel and put a little salt in the white, red hot potato was, for a kid of barely five, nectar of the gods, and I didn’t miss the sidewalks of New York one bit. My mother, who had the real Schofield-Farnley attachment to growing things, soon had a wonderful garden going that spring (which had to be a wonderful release from the prison-like atmosphere of a third-story flat in a teeming tenement), with a great row of flourishing Ponderosa tomato plants already tied to the fence that separated our lot from the Hollanders’ stable and adjoining liquor store. But then, one sunny afternoon, while Syd and I were frolicking in the bathtub on a hot day, screams were heard coming from the back yard for mother to come quick with your garden hose. The stable had caught on fire, and the flames were devastating everything in their path. Of course, the little stream from our hose had little effect, and the barn and all mother’s beautiful blooming tomato plants were gone with the wind! A good memory, though, was that, sometime later, we were rewarded with a ride on the horse-drawn liquor store open delivery wagon.

My father, then 39 years old, apparently figured that he could save money and get exercise at the same time, so he bought a bike, thinking that he could ride back and forth to Times Square and pocket the car fare. But one such trip on his newly purchased bike—over the Queensborough Bridge in heavy traffic, way out to Corona, miles past Long Island City—convinced him that he’d made a mistake. He never tried it again and, apparently, sold the bike shortly thereafter! He also decided that he could save money by re-soling our shoes himself and came home one night with a complete cobbler’s outfit.

It was about that time that my dad conceived the idea of running a good boy contest, in which Syd and I competed against each other and got marks on a chart for just about everything we did during the month. Of course, it was a no-win contest for Syd since I was always at my mother’s beck and call to do her bidding. And at the end of the month, I was awarded the first prize—a wonderful pair of shiny rubber boots! (Later, my father would try to put new soles on them by nailing new leather soles onto the old, worn down rubber ones. Of course, they then leaked! When he came home unexpectedly one afternoon and caught me walking in puddles with them, I caught hell!)

Then, the next month, inevitably, Syd won the Good Boy prize. And it was then that my father’s thinly veiled resentment of his firstborn son was to become very evident. For as a prize comparable to my rubber boots, he wrapped up an old nickel silver shaving cup container (of no value at all!) in reams and reams of newspaper and brown wrapping paper and presented it to a very much expectant Syd! Some joke! Some reward! And Syd was not only hurt and disappointed but proceeded to take out his resentment on me! From then on, I became the butt of all his elder-brother tricks, as new baby brother Marshall, a problem child right from the beginning, took up most of my mother’s time.

But she did find time in the evenings to let me brush her hair (which was very thin and light, much to her chagrin and disappointment). She used to put it up at night with heated, old English folding, curling pins, while she told us over and over our favorite story, Buy your own cherries, which was a thinly disguised moral lesson to never, never have anything to do with alcohol. It told about a man who, on his way home from work each Saturday night, got in the habit of stopping (with his week’s salary in his pocket) at the local saloon and spending most of the week’s food-supply money on drink—as his children went cold and hungry! Then, one night, the saloon keeper had a basket of beautiful cherries on the bar. The poor man, pretty well drunk, asked the bar tender if he could have a few cherries to take home to his children, and the saloon keeper brushed him off and out of the swinging door with the harsh words, Buy your own cherries. Of course, this brought the poor man up short and made him realize what a fool he’d been. From then on, every Saturday night he stopped, instead, at the market and came home sober, loaded down with all kinds of food, including a big basket of cherries! How we loved that story, and how my mother loved to tell it, time after time, as she added more and more intriguing details!

As the winter of 1914–15 progressed, my father realized that, while the lush countryside of Corona was fine for us, it was much too far for a daily commute to Times Square and the Theatre District for him. And he even got to staying in the city—after a long day in the theatre pit, playing for the silent pictures of those days—staying at a Turkish Bath! So, shortly, we moved in, closer to the job, and our next home was an apartment in a typical apartment building on Academy Street in Long Island City, just off the exit from the big, new Queensborough Bridge. There, Syd and I had all kinds of fun scooting our little tricycle down the steep sidewalks that led down to the Concourse and over to the vacant lot behind a peanut vendor’s store, where we raided his shack out in back that contained a big burlap bag of green peanuts. We were led in this venture by a twelve-year-old boy named Randall, who had us constantly in his power as acolytes with the promise of letting us ride his pony (which turned out to be a figment of his imagination) that he was going to keep in the peanut vendor’s shed!

Xmas that year of 1915 was especially memorable for me as I looked out of our building and up the road as the snow came down in the dark, and I hoped to catch a glimpse of Santa in his sleigh. But in the morning, Syd had to be the wise guy and spoil it for me as we opened our presents and he insisted that it was our dad who was Santa Claus because he’d heard him putting out the presents in the middle of the night! And that was after my father had taken me on a special trip over the Bridge to Bloomingdale’s—at the corner of Third Avenue and 59th Street—to actually see Santa Claus and his real live reindeer in a stable in the toy department. He also had me write a letter to Santa at the North Pole, telling him what I’d like, and put a stamp on it—from one of his tobacco pouches (a tax stamp).

Henry and Sydney,

Leeds, England, 1912

Harry Freeman, far right, on Sousa’s world tour, 1911

Not much after that, he came home from the theatre to find me struggling for breath with a galloping case of bronchitis. As my anxious mother looked on, he proceeded to mix up some honey and lemon juice for me to sip, while he rubbed my chest with camphorated oil and scolded my mother with words that I have never forgotten: "All you have to do is look after the children, and you can’t even do that! Then, somehow, I developed an infection in my left wrist that, unattended, soon developed into blood poisoning that was attended to only after the doctor found a lump of poisonous fluid up in my armpit. Many Antiflegestine" hot poultices were applied before that drained out and the infection scarred over.

Then, shortly, a playmate of ours got run over and killed by a heavy, horse-drawn hearse, right out in front, and that was warning enough to get us to move—once more to the countryside. We ended up in a house much like the one in Corona, but just two miles away in Astoria, just a short ferry ride across the East River from Manhattan and Yorkville. There, in just the two short months we were there, I got measles and mumps while finishing my kindergarten experience. By September, we had moved back across the river to a walkup flat on the 4th floor of 408 East 89th Street. Mostly, I remember the bedroom out back (that led to a fire escape) and the kitchen, which had a big black coal stove on which my mother did all the cooking and baking, and which apparently provided heat for the rest of our elongated home.

That was the Xmas that Syd asked for an electric train (he was only eight!), and, for once, my father went all out for Syd. Of course, we had no electricity, but Syd had me up at five AM and into the ice-cold front room to unhook our long black stockings from the mantle (of the non-existent fire place) and empty out the heavy dry cell batteries from the tight stockings. Of course, one of them fell with a whomp onto the floor and woke everybody up. But Syd soon had the tracks together and the three batteries hooked up, and the tiny train running around and around—until the batteries wore out—which was before breakfast time! Later that day, because Syd came home (with our sled) shortly after dark, my strict father took the sled and put it out on the stoop—four stories below. Of course, it was gone by the next morning!

Our stay in that place was short lived, since it soon turned out that a neighbor in one of the nearby flats was a mailman who worked all night and had to sleep in the daytime—which was when my father had to do his practicing on the trumpet!

So, shortly, we moved to 433 East 87th Street on the ground floor and basement of one of New York’s typical brownstone three-story houses. By then we had started school at PS #66—on 88th Street, so that didn’t play havoc with our schooling, and the homey neighborhood that was bounded by Avenue A on the east and First Avenue on the west remained intact for the next three years as Syd and I ran riot with little supervision. We had a great time roller skating up and down 87th Street and as far away as Central Park—where we used to fish, illegally, with bent pin, black sewing cotton. and live flies (that we caught by hand and stored in a hollowed-out cork, on which we fastened a sliding door of straight pins!) The caught fish were stored in a milk bottle but, of course, didn’t survive the trip home.

Somehow Syd fashioned an express wagon with which we used to bring home firewood (for heating our house). We’d patrol the demolishing process that went on constantly in those days. The old buildings came down in the Fifth Avenue area to make way for the mansions of the Rockefellers and the Goulds that were to become a status symbol near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And we used to play around the Egyptian Obelisk just in back of the Museum.

In the spring, we would play marbles in the gutter or on the sidewalk. There, the game was to set up your prize Immie (a big glass marble), spread your legs, and let the rest of the gang shoot at it, from about three squares away, with Miggles, which were painted smaller clay marbles. When someone finally hit your Immie, you gathered in all the Miggles and gave up your seat and your Immie. If you had been lucky you could have gone home with a bag full of Miggles.

With very few autos around, horses did much of the wagon pulling, and the White Wings were kept busy sweeping up the horse manure and dumping it into their big wheeled ash can-sized catch-alls. In the winter, when the streets were icy, I have seen horses slip and stumble as they tried to pull the heavy loads, and struggle, desperately, to regain their footing, with their harnesses still holding them down! The wild and dangerous East River was only two blocks away, and in the summertime, our gang (mostly between six and nine years old) would tramp down to the little inlet at 90th Street and fan out into the polluted water, a lot of which poured out of a close-by sewer pipe. Pushing sewage out of the way and capturing discarded condoms (of whose nature we had not the foggiest idea), filling them up with water, slinging them over our heads and then letting them go like a slingshot at an unsuspecting swimmer.

Twice, I got grabbed by the police. Once for throwing snowballs at the shuttle streetcar on Avenue A (now called York Avenue) that plied, constantly, between the Second Avenue L station at 86th Street and the Astoria Ferry on the East River at 90th Street. And another time, when I was pulled out of an open ice wagon that caught me hitching a ride, just before the 86th Street dock that jutted some hundred feet out into the river.

Not too much later, a gang of us decided to explore the big wooden sewer pipe underneath the pier. Having no fear, we climbed down under the pilings that, at low tide, lay exposed, and walked along on top of the sewer pipe! But, with the tide dropping the river level some fifteen feet, the slimy, seaweeded supporting planks were exposed, and one of our gang lost his footing and slipped into the fast-racing river as it headed up towards Hell Gate and Long Island Sound. Of course, panic stricken and with our hearts in our mouths, we raced up onto the dock to see our playmate, of just seconds ago, bobbing up and down and crying out for Momma each time that he surfaced, and in a minute, he was gone forever, carried inexorably towards Long Island Sound! And that was only the first of four such drownings I was to witness in my lifetime!

One adventure had Syd and me—along with three or four of our usual pals—finding our way into the extensive freight yards over on Webster Street, a couple of miles away. For an hour or two we had a lot of fun climbing up to the tops of freight cars and roaming around the busy yards. If there was a No Trespassing sign around, we either didn’t see