My Old Neighborhood Remembered by Avery Corman

summers when I worked as a counselor. I wasn’t outstanding, not like the players I watched from the sidelines at Creston. For the levels I played at, I was good enough.
    I have always felt extraordinarily grateful to my friends from my old neighborhood, those boys I grew up with from the time when we were little kids to when we were teenagers, playing on Creston Avenue and in the the Bronx High School of Science schoolyard. The facts of my family background which seemed so enormous to me didn’t matter to them. They didn’t care who my father was. They accepted me and that was crucial in my life. First, and most importantly, with my neighborhood friends, and then with organized basketball that began in junior high school, I learned I could be one of the players. I could be like other boys.

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THE BRONX ZOO
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    We could have measured our lives by the Bronx Zoo. When we were little, we were taken to the children’s zoo section. We went to the Bronx Zoo by trolley, part of the treat. Trolleys were phased out of the Bronx in the 1940s. Then we were old enough to go with friends rather than with someone from one’s family.
    The Bronx Zoo was never taken for granted or considered a place meant only for tourists. This was our zoo and it was important. On days when the weather was clear and it felt right, my friends and I would say, “This is a zoo day,” and we would go. Over the years we explored every part of the place many times over.
    The African Plains with its cage-free environment, the animals separated from the public by a moat, was a highlight and a source of conversation among the children of the neighborhood. You think the lions could jump over the moat if they wanted to? What would happen if a lion got out? What would you do? Our imaginations, stimulated by the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies, led us to what-would-happen-if-they-got-out for a variety of the zoo’s inhabitants.
    The seals, especially at feeding time, were headliners. The duck-billed platypus from Australia was a good novelty and usually attracted lines of visitors — the creature was so odd, a kind of duck and beaver combined.
    Before modern zoo environments began to feature simulated natural habitats, the presentation of the inhabitants could be ramshackle, but also could result in appealing exhibits like the penguins close up at ground level in an outdoor enclosure, Charlie Chaplin-ing around.
    The first time you went to the zoo with a girl was a big day in your life. The zoo was a logical place to go on a date that wasn’t an evening at the movies. It meant you were old enough to be seen walking around with a girl during the day .

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THE 1951 CITY COLLEGE BASKETBALL SCANDAL
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    Our “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” moment was when the news broke in the winter of 1951 that basketball players from New York City colleges had been rigging the scores of games for gamblers. A national story and a New York City story, for the young people in the neighborhood it was also a Bronx story. Among the City College fixers were three ballplayers who had played for Bronx high schools. Irwin Dambrot and Ed Roman lived in the Bronx and had played for nearby William Howard Taft High School, and Ed Warner had been a star at the Bronx high school many of us attended, DeWitt Clinton.
    The news was incomprehensible. As with all local college basketball players, they were major sports figures in New York. These were our heroes who had fallen. College basketball was more important than professional basketball. The local college teams played their home games in Madison Square Garden and young sports fans rooted for college teams the way people root for professional teams today. You were an N.Y.U. fan, a City College fan, an L.I.U. fan, and you took sides when they played each other and rooted for the local team when they played a team from elsewhere.
    Although the 1951 scandal involved fixers at N.Y.U, L.I.U., Manhattan