Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Our house at 50 Stockholm Street in Bushwick was a nice two-story home that mom and Hiawatha brought to raise our growing family. It's the first house to the left, the brown and white one. We moved into it during the winter of 1969. It was a five bedroom house with a nice basement that me and my brother James played endless games of Skelly in. When we moved in, we were nine siblings deep! We went from Blaine, Dino, Delores, Joanie, James and Renee, then mom and Hiawatha added Paul and Michael to the brood. The first six kids were Samuels, and the last three were Toneys. Or, so it seemed.
We had a funny introduction to Bushwick life. No. Nobody died in front of the house or in the hallway. After we moved all of our property into the house, put the place together, assigning rooms and such, we settled in. We had dinner and fell asleep, tired from all the labor. The following morning, as the snow was falling, Hiawatha went out to clean the snow off of his car. It was gone! As he stood there in shock, I came to the door and saw the tire marks in the snow. The thieves had managed to get into the car, put it in neutral, and just pushed it down the block before hot wiring it and taking off in it. It was a beautiful white and red Chevy Impala. Gone...
He just stood there shaking his head saying, 'They done took my damn car.' Things were tight after the move, and with no car Hiawatha had to commute by subway to his building cleaning job in Manhattan. Mom made arrangements to get all of us into the local schools. I winded up being a student at J.H.S. 111 called the Enrico Fermi Junior High. Enrico Fermi was, guess what? A renown scientist. What were the chances? If angels move people on Earth, was it Sally that moved me to J.H.S. 111 to plug me back into science? I wonder...
My family adjusted to the new neighborhood, and because it was the winter, we didnt immediately start meeting the people living on our block. Hiawatha went to his cleaning job, and mom landed and entry-level job as a computer programmer for IBM in Manhattan, while the rest of us went to school, execpt Blaine. He was the oldest child and he went to work. Dino was a roamer. He did odd jobs here and there and ultimately made the decision to leave home and join the Marine Corps. We worked our way through the winter hoping for Spring to finally break, bringing warmer weather. New York winters have always been and will always be brutally cold. But, there's no stopping Mother Nature. Spring in Bushwick finally came.
As the days grew warmer, the block came alive with activity. It was a classically long Brooklyn block. It took a full 10-15 minutes of walking to get from one end of the block to the other. Soon we starting meeting all of our neighbors. The block had so many nationalities. Puerto-Ricans, Dominicans, Blacks, Irish, Italians, Germans, you name it. And they all got along. Across the street from my house was an extremely Italian family. Watching them from my stoop was like watching scenes out of The God-Father. The heavy set Italian mother across the street had two sons. And just like on television, she would come to her window after making her spaghetti dinner and yell out in Itailan, 'Gasparino! Vincenzo!! Vieni Qui'!Â
I got to make so many friends, some were black, some were white but most of them were Puerto-Rican because Bushwick was a predominantly Spanish hood. It wasnt until I moved to Bushwick that I learned that I liked Spanish food and Spanish music. I picked up speaking Spanish like it was second nature. I would later start dating Spanish girls. Back then, I was mostly a sports boy. I liked playing baseball, and played for The Police Atheletic League. I played basketball with my newfound homeboys. We played stickball and handball all day long. One of my fondest Bushwick memories is whenever we played stickball games against the boys around the corner, The Stanhope Boys or the Stockholm Boys from down the block, these were bitter rivalvies! We despised each other, and the game provided a safe way for us to compete for bragging rights.
