Tony M. stood just over five feet tall, yet in our bungalow colony concession he was the indisputable master of all he surveyed. Routinely seated in the far right corner of the concession, adjacent to the pool table, a cup of dark coffee at hand, the New York Post spread before him on the Formica table, his half moon reading glasses riding low on his hawk’s nose, he studied the box-scores as a surgeon might a patients vital signs immediately preceding surgery.
Tony was a voracious reader, absorbing the complete contents of the Post, The News, the Times and the Middletown Record on a daily basis. He seemed to especially enjoy The Record, particularly the local Police Blotter.
“Ya see this,” he would rasp, pointing to the paper. “Wouldya believe this? Guy gets hisself arrested for pissin’ on the courthouse lawn, for crissakes! Twenty days. Yeeshh…”
From Labor Day weekend through Memorial Day weekend, Tony, with his wife, Tessie, operated a candy store/luncheonette in the Italian stronghold of Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx. Came Memorial Day, or as we were inclined to refer to it-Decoration Day-they loaded their late model Sedan DeVille and headed northwest to the Jewish Alps, the Hebrew Himalayas-the Catskills.
The widely held, but incorrect impression that Catskill Mountain bungalows were exclusively Jewish enclaves is not always easy to dispel. Yet, personal experience, and extensive research and interviews have convinced me that the smattering of Italian and Greek families at our Monticello colony-perhaps a dozen families from approximately one hundred-was hardly atypical.
Along with Tony and Tessie, each and every summer, came their extended immediate family-three daughters, three son-in-laws, and a cluster of grandkids. The daughters helped in the concession, spelling their parents from arduous duty in the summer heat, their husbands emulated the other colony men, making the dutiful weekly commute to and from their city jobs, and on weekends joined in on sojourns to the track, in poker games, and most other activities, particularly distinguishing themselves on the men’s softball team. The kids, well, they were colony kids, swimming, playing ball, attending camp, and landing in frequent but insignificant mischief.
Tony, as patriarch, was as strong as he was apparently silent. His wife, Tessie, was a large and loud woman whose bark belied the fact that she possessed no bite at all, and, in fact, possessed a loving and nurturing disposition. Tony never raised his voice much above a whisper, but when he did summon his thoughts from the newspapers or the daily Monticello Racing program to utter a few syllables, everyone in immediate range stopped what they were doing, much like the EF Hutton commercial, to pay rapt attention to his words.
Throughout the decade they operated the colony concession, more than a few rumors alluded to Tony’s “connections,” suggesting that he might possess underworld affiliations. I expect the predilection for that type of gossip is not uncommon amongst suburban Jews, when confronted with inner-city Italians who have realized some level of prosperity beyond the traditional Jewish routes of professionalism. Amazingly, these same Jews readily dismiss an urban New York history that includes such prominent Italian mobsters as Arnold Rothstein, Louis “Lepke” Buchwalter, “Gurrah” Shapiro, Arthur “Dutch Shultz” Fleigenheimer, Abner Zwillman, Allie “Tick Tock” Tannenbaum, Harry Greenberg, Mendy Weiss, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and the grand architect of modern organized crime in America, Meyer Lansky. It is lost on no casual observer of mob history that Murder Incorporated--likely the most notorious, bloodiest and ruthless gang of killers ever assembled--was essentially comprised of tough Jews from the Brownsville and East New York neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
To return, though, to old Tony, or, as many of the colony teens had tagged him, Tough Tony… All that was tough about Tony was a façade. This I well know, because from age fourteen to seventeen, for four fast and furious summers, I was in Tony’s employ, waiting tables immediately following the Saturday night show. After I’d finished serving an incalculable amount of BLTs, roast pork on garlic bread sandwiches, omelets, bagels with a schmeer, and gallons of coffee, Tony would fix a plate for me, and himself, of something extraordinary and unique, food too spectacular and hard won to squander on ordinary customers. Sometimes it was a marvelous seafood salad, fruite de mar, he called it-“fruits of the sea.” Other times it was a remarkable antipasto, crowded with a vast array of exotic meats and cheeses and roasted vegetables, and drizzled with a sweet virgin olive oil. There were fresh oysters, and clams, and sensational pastas with home-made gravy-always gravy he said, never sauce-and sausages, and meatballs, and tender eggplant and breaded artichokes that dissolved like ambrosia on the tongue. And always, always there was hot and crusty bread. Not exactly light eating for three or four in the morning. Yet, we would sit, Tony and I, usually joined by one or more of his son-in-laws--eating, drinking sweet wine and ice-tea, and talking baseball. Long into the night, in the gathering darkness, till the sun creased the long, narrow windows of the concession and washed the room with light, we would eat, drink and talk.
I never witnessed Tony drawn to anger, or heard him speak to a child or teen with anything other than tenderness and compassion. He considered all of the colony kids his responsibility. “These kids,” he once observed, while we sat together working the third race triple for that evening’s card at Monticello Raceway. “They’re all like my own, ya know. I mean, for crissakes, they been raised on my food.” On another occasion, when he’d witnessed a colony father harshly and severely admonishing his young son for some minor mischief, Tony took the man aside and quietly suggested there were other ways to discipline and instruct the boy, and certainly it could all be handled privately, sparing father and son undue humiliation. I remember watching this brief counsel, the man, stocky and at least six foot three, bending slightly to better hear Tony’s quiet rasp, and Tony, half the man’s size, imparting what parental wisdom he’d garnered through four decades of raising children, his own and many others, as well.
Once, in the summer of my seventeenth year, while reading a New York Post report of friction between several of the city’s mob families, I clumsily raised the rumor of Tony’s mob affiliations. He looked at me for a while. I was relieved to detect no anger in his eyes. What I saw, instead, was sadness, and suddenly I felt ashamed.
“How long ya know me?” He said. “C’mon. Alla my life I been hearin’ things like that, ya know? Because I got a last name ends in a vowel, and we got a business on Arthur Avenue? Geez, people think I musta be takin’ numbers action, or frontin’ for someone, something… Right?”
He sipped some of that horribly strong coffee. “I’ll tell ya what,” he said. “Not for nothing, but these guys, these wise-guys they call themselves, they think they got it all figured.” Then he uttered words that incredibly I would hear again, practically verbatim, many years later, from Robert DeNiro’s mouth, in his seminal film, A Bronx Tale. “These guys,” he said, looking past me, and fingering the photos of several mobsters in the newspaper, “they all think they’re tough guys, cause they got the angles figured out, ya know? Ah, whatda they know? They ain’t so tough. Not so tough. You know who’s the tough guy? The working man. That’s right--the working guy. Me, your old man, and lotsa other guys here. Guy gets up at five, six in the morning every day and puts in a hard days work, honest work, and comes home for dinner and brings home a paycheck without drinking or gambling or pissing it away. Week after week, year in, year out… Doin’ the right thing. Take care of the family. That’s a tough guy. That’s a man.”
When he looked at me, the sadness had left his eyes.
“You be a man,” he whispered.
I don’t know what ultimately became of Tony. In 1973, the year I was 18, he was well into his sixties, so I assume he is gone now. But I still remember his eyes that day, and his soft, rasping voice.
“You be a man.”
I hope I haven’t let him down.