JEWISH SENTINEL

JEWISH WORLD • DECEMBER 20-26, 2024 15 A New York Xmas Tale How a Jewish storekeeper’s kindness changed my life By RON SPURGA I t was Christmas Eve, December 1955. I was in the Eighth Grade at Immaculate Conception Grammar School (I am not Jewish), which was up the block from my house on First Avenue and 13th Street. This was going to be my year. I had been picked to play Pinocchio in the Boys’ Club production of that play, and - being a scrawny kid - I was perfect for the role of the stick figured SuSSet I used to sit around at night at the Boys’ Club and listen to the adven- tures of the older actors who would venture out to Hollywood, hoping to find work as e[tras in filPs , pictured myself on the 20th Centu- ry Limited chugging out of Grand Central Station to do likewise. I saw myself leaving my poverty and misery behind for a world with palm trees, exotic chauffeured au- tomobiles, and beautiful blonde women like Veronica Lake blowing kisses at me. It almost happened: A casting di- rector was canvassing our neigh- borhood for young kids to appear in a fight scene IroP the PoYie Some- body Up There Likes Me. The filP was about middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano, who grew up in our neighborhood. The casting director asked our building super, a tough-guy wan- nabe named Louie Giamo, if any of the kids in the building had any acting talent. Giamo and I disliked each other, so he told the casting guy no. Weeks later, a kid in my class at Immaculate Conception named Peter Vella told me he and his crew had Eeen Sicked Ior the filP They each got a thousand dollars and their actors’ union card. They even got to hang out with Paul Newman, who played Graziano and who used any excuse to drink beer with them on the set. I wanted to throw myself out a window when I got home, but I glued Giamo’s mailbox shut in- stead. When he was four years old, my brother Allen wanted a plastic army tank for Christmas. We knew that a store on Seventh Street prominently displayed one in its window and that it sold for a dollar a pop. In those days, a dollar might as well have been a million dollars to us, as our family lived on wel- fare. My mother, who managed a household consisting of herself, an alcoholic-epileptic husband, and four kids on a cleaning woman’s salary, had no time for my brother’s yearning for a tank. She’d had a rough childhood. An Irish Catholic who was 13 years old when her mother died unexpected- ly, she was passed around by rela- tives like a collection plate at a Baptist revival meeting. She sur- vived on a string of dead-end jobs. One day in 1939, when she was on a breadline in downtown Brooklyn, she met my father, Charlie Spurga. A native of Vilna, Lithuania, he was a ne’er do--well who yearned to live like a prince. When he was 19, he was shipped from Lithuania to work in his Uncle John’s busi- nesses in Cocoa Beach, Florida. U ncle John had the Midas touch. Everything he touched turned into unimaginable wealth. John started out as a conductor on a trolley line in Brooklyn and saved up to open a dry goods store at Port Jefferson Station on Long Island. +e went on to organi]e the first commercial bank in Port Jefferson before turning his attention to growing oranges on Merritt Island in Florida. Years later, the federal government was looking for land on which to build Cape Canaveral. The government bought up all of John’s orange groves and paid him for the land at the market rate. Seduced by all this wealth and glamor, my father embezzled funds from John and was banished from the family when the theft was dis- covered. Eventually, Charlie made his way to Brooklyn and that fate- ful meeting with my mother. Even then, his drinking made him moody and unpredictable. I learned all of this many, many years later – for which I’m glad, because if I had known that I had a relative who had a chauffeur, maid, and a chef in Florida while my family was subsisting on welfare SayPents in a cold water flat on 13th Street, I would have cursed my bad luck and never gotten out of bed. There’s an old saying on the Lower East Side: “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.” But that all changed when $llen and , finally went to the toy store opposite Tompkins Square Park on that bitter-cold Christmas Eve. Our plan was simple: I would cause a commotion in the store with the owner while my brother would sneak the toy tank inside his jacket. Stuff like this never both- ered us because we had inherited My kid brother wanted a plastic army tank for Christmas, but we couldn’t afford the one dollar it cost. Charlie’s sense of entitlement. The store owner, who was Jewish, looked us over as I went into my obnoxious act: “Didn’t you Jews kill Christ?” I snarled at him. He should have gone ballistic, but he was on to us. In a calm voice, he explained that he believed Jesus was a great prophet who comforted many of his believers. Then, he told my brother to put the concealed toy tank on the store counter, causing us to blush beet red. I pleaded with the man. “Please, mister, we didn’t mean anything. We don’t have any money, my MEMOIR ;he )oys *lub of 5e^ @ork Drama *lub in , ^ith a young 9on Spurga, foreground, to the immediate left of the boys instructor, choreographer 1ames Starbuck. continued on page 28