Carefree Childhood By: Diane Lupo
Hi Frankie, as luck would have it, I can't begin to tell you how much I loved your book. aplacecalledbrooklyn.com. Every night I read a few chapters so I could dream and savor the feelings about my childhood and wake up happy. My brothers made a roller skate scooter and, being, the baby of the family I would get a thrilling ride down our block (Not so safe) what fun!! My older brother was a soda jerk at our local candy store/luncheonette and used to make me egg creams and frappes and boy they were good. I played the girly girl games and was quite a double dutch jump rope but because of my brothers I played stoop ball, running bases, marbles etc.
Most afternoons I went to Nats candy store and got a real coke and ate a crunch bar while reading an Archie comic book. I could go on and on but I really wanted to thank you for the book and the heartwarming inscription!
My only sadness is the loss of both my brothers, who would have cherished your book. Enclosed is a letter from a man who went back to the candy store his
dad owned. Thank you! Diane Lupo
My new Brooklyn
BY ALLEN ABEL
Monday, July 18th, 2005
In this series, Flatbush-born writer Allen Abel explores his old neighborhood at the center of Brooklyn, searching for signs of the renaissance that has transformed other sections of the borough. Today, he meets the new owners of his father's old candy store.
I'm standing outside a shopfront on Avenue D in Brooklyn, where Albany Ave. intersects with the memories of the most delicious childhood a boy could ever dream. It was here that my father made his living for two decades, serving 5-cent Cokes and 30-cent malteds, and it was here that I grew up as the proverbial, and literal, kid in a candy store.
Thirty-five years after my father, Ben, and his identical twin, George, sold Abel Brothers for a few thousand dollars and left the neighborhood to the next wave of immigrants, I'm almost afraid to go inside.
Like the apartment building on E. 31st St. where my mother has huddled in the same three rooms since 1949 our old candy store is bounded by the same walls as it always was, yet everything is utterly changed. The German deli next door is China Express now, and the flower shop's a KFC. Amici's Italian Restaurant is a Haitian-owned photo studio, Mahoney's Bar, a Caribbean night spot. You may not find it in the Zagat Guide. And at Wing Hing Loon, as I tiptoe in, our soda fountain and syrup pumps have been torn out, and the swiveling stools that always squeaked have been replaced by shelves of everyday groceries. They don't serve Lady Borden frappes here anymore, and the egg-cream trade is as dead as the Brooklyn Eagle and the World Telegram and Sun. But business is booming.
In place of our tongue sandwiches and lemon-lime sodas are a trio of lottery machines, and there's a placard identifying Wing Hing Loon as the No. 11 ticket vendor in the entire Empire State. A lineup of dream-chasers stretches nearly out the door, kids are gliding in on skates and bikes for chewing gum and sugar water, and behind the counter stand the successors to the Abel Brothers, Lily and Susan Ding. "This was my father's store," I tell them in the best Mandarin I can muster from my years as an Old China Hand. "I grew up working in this store, ever since I was a little boy. Sometimes we slept in the back." Abel Brothers, I soon learn, has been in the hands of the Ding Sisters of Beijing since 2002. Lily is 35 and her mei-mei (younger sister) is 28; their proper names are Ding Le Yan and Ding Xu E.
I ask Susan about her vision of America, and of Brooklyn, and the answer she gives could have been my father's words, when he came here in 1906. "No dream yet," says Susan Ding. "Make money. Make money. When I get old, go home." But old Pop Abel never went home; perhaps the sisters will come to sense Brooklyn in their blood and never leave us, either.
They work my father's schedule - seven days a week, 12 hours a day. After three years in our country, neither Ding has been outside the City of New York. To the working women of East Flatbush, the gentrified acres of Fort Greene and Boerum Hill are as remote as Tibet. The other 49 states might as well be on Mars.
Dizzy with nostalgia, I go outside and sit on a bench, and who gallops by but a ghost from the past. It's Alfonso Dilallo, the owner and master chef of what used to be Amici's Pizzeria up the block, until it closed in 1979.
By the time I catch up to him on Albany Ave., Dilollo is about to climb into a coupe so long and luxurious that I'm reluctant to tell you what it is. He's off to work on his Pepsi route, he tells me, and doesn't have much time to talk. Signor Dilallo is still living on Avenue D. He is 91 years old.
"I used to buy everything from your father," he says, "especially my Pall Malls. Around here, in those days.
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