Big Apple Alumni Share School Memories in the Big Orange

New Yorkers sometimes joke that the city’s most ardent supporters spend little time there, fleeing town in the winters and vacationing entire summers away in the country.

Some Californians who grew up in New York have managed to evade the city’s streets forever. Disparate in age and life style, they share a common bond, a nostalgia for the New York from which they escaped--expressed in their regular attendance at high school reunions.

Last Wednesday, alumni of two Bronx schools, Fieldston and Horace Mann, met at the Beverly Hilton hotel for a “first-ever reunion of old friendships and rivalries.” Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter came to see “what became of those Fieldston people who I wondered about--what they would become. . . . Back in 1979, I discovered we had seven people from my class out here, so we did our own reunions.”

Mover and shaker Marvin Davis (Horace Mann ‘43) dropped by with his son, Gregg, to lend support as did Ed Gottlieb of Malibu (Fieldston ‘38), who looks forward to attending his 50th next year. Actor Arthur Roberts joined Fieldston friends “for a sense of family, of roots, to find a sense of self in a cold alienating environment.” (Roberts plays an alien in his next film, “Not of This Earth,” scheduled for a February release.)

On Jan. 12, the Bronx’s Taft High School will hold its reunion; Brooklyn’s Lincoln High has scheduled its Feb. 11.

Keeping tabs on about 50 New York area high schools, including about 20 that are planning reunions next year, is Lou Zigman, 43, a Hollywood lawyer who organized New York Alumni in 1985.

Zigman recently announced that the “new home” of New York Alumni, transplanted New Yorkers “who keep the spirit of New York alive in California,” will be the Century City Marketplace’s Stage Deli, a clone of the New York food emporium. A bulletin board will post news of upcoming high school alumni events. Dave Davis, the deli’s general manager, said that transplanted New Yorkers have already discovered the place. Davis quoted one breathless customer: “ ‘I’ve been waiting 20 years for this,’ he said.”

Sharing Memories

“When you’re from Brooklyn, it’s a special thing,” Zigman said. Zigman’s parents are among those who share his memories. Joe Zigman (Boys High) and his wife, Regina, (Erasmus Hall) moved to Beverly Hills in 1959. Although Lou Zigman attended Brooklyn’s Lincoln High for only one year (graduating from Beverly Hills High), he maintains a mailing list of about 12,000 “to re-establish and share those old memories.” Zigman believes that “there are probably more people in Los Angeles from New York than any other city.”

“It takes a driven personality to spark plug these reunions,” said Irwin Zucker, who has held annual get-togethers for Boys High since 1965. Zucker, 60, of Beverly Hills, threw a bash for 200 on Nov. 14 at the Sportsman’s Lodge in honor of the longtime executive director of the City of Hope, Ben Horowitz, of the class of 1930. (Previous honorees at 23 consecutive man-of-the-year gatherings, which Zucker calls the “granddaddy of all New York reunions,” have included comedian Alan King, lawyer Louis Nizer and philosopher Sidney Hook.)

Zigman and Dr. Steve Matlin began holding Lincoln reunions in 1979, donating proceeds to scholarships for students now attending the Brooklyn high school.

Zigman was also the ringleader of a more elaborate block party Sept. 26 at the California Mart, which was attended by more than 1,500 New Yorkers. Attendees sampled egg creams, knishes, and New Age salt-free chili from Brooklyn. “We’ve lived here for years,” said Arlene Schacter of Northridge, “but we still have Mrs. Stahl’s knishes flown out air freight from Brighton Beach.”

People go to these gatherings, said Kelly Arnold, who came to Sherman Oaks from Brooklyn more than a decade ago, “to hear a thousand accents the same as mine.”

For Beverly Field, who has lived in Los Angeles since the 1950s, the block party was a chance to recapture “the enormous amount of warmth I have missed. Maybe it’s because New Yorkers don’t have that much space. They have to get along. When a New Yorker says ‘Let’s have lunch,’ he really means it.”

‘Garden of Nostalgia’

Perhaps on a less-conscious level, this common frame of reference represents “a child’s garden of nostalgia,” as Hollywood writer Stanley Ralph Ross described his own personal “Coney Island of the mind where I grew up.” Ross, who graduated from Lincoln High in the 1950s, said: “We had a bond with each other and with the school. Our principal placed great emphasis on learning. Lincoln boasts many famous graduates including three Nobel Laureates in science and 60 members of the Writers Guild. And we were from a very poor neighborhood.”

Referring to Woody Allen’s movie “Radio Days,” Ross said: “I lived ‘Radio Days.’ But we didn’t know we were struggling. We were after all living in a resort, so the streets were filled with people having a good time.”

The lure of street games is still a powerful memory for reunion die-hards.

“We’ll know that stickball is on the rise again,” said Lew Aaronson of Culver City, who organizes events for alumni of the Bronx’s De Witt Clinton High, “when mothers report the thefts of broom handles from kitchen cabinets.”

At the block party in September, actor Jon Voight, a graduate of a Catholic school in a New York suburb, played slapball, an energetic version of handball, in a back alley behind the main event. (The party was a tribute to one of the original “Dead End” kids, Henry Richard (Huntz) Hall on the 50th anniversary of his first film. Hall, now 67, went on to perform in nearly 100 movies featuring the East Side kids and Bowery Boys.)

For ex-Brooklynite Zucker, who said he grew up in a neighborhood of tenements, the streets became extensions of the home. To these cement backyards, boys and girls brought the games of potsy, a form of hopscotch; skelly, done with bottle caps and chalk; and immies, a version of marbles. “It was always athletics,” said Harry Levinson of Encino, who spent his childhood in the Willamsburg section of Brooklyn. “We went to school, and we played ball.”

The neighborhood was the entire world for Manny Kirschner of Bunker Hill, who graduated from Erasmus Hall in the 1930s. “Our community,” Kirschner said, “was 10 square blocks. And there was a certain sense of ‘nationalism’ about our territory.”

Dr. Charles Whizen of Westwood, who was born in London and has lived in California since 1923, retains a vivid memory of his Boys High class of 1915. “When people ask, ‘Are you from New York?’ I say, ‘No, Brooklyn.’ ”

Reunion Over Hoops

Neighborhood pride naturally gave rise to high school rivalries. Four years ago, alumni of archrivals Lincoln and Madison High met at University High School in West Los Angeles for a basketball squabble. That same year, a theater party for the Los Angeles premiere of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” sold out quickly to 500 alumni of schools near the old Brooklyn neighborhood.

The streets were important in another sense, Arlene Schacter said. They could be navigated without automobiles. She recalled traveling by subway for school athletic events. “There was very little crime in those days,” she said, “and the bus would also take you to the local cafeteria afterwards.”

Many who attend New York alumni reunions say they can’t “go home again” to the old neighborhoods, which have all but disappeared except in memories. “I haven’t been back there in years,” Steve Matlin said. “I let the others go, and they tell me what it’s like now.” Ross describes his old Coney Island neighborhood as “Warsaw ’45.”

Irv and Helen Antler, who live in Cheviot Hills, recalled how, on a recent trip to New York, “the taxi driver refused to take us back” to the East New York section of Brooklyn where they had attended Jefferson High in the 1930s.

Rabbi Jerry Cutler, who graduated from Jefferson in the early 1950s, says he doesn’t dare go back to his old neighborhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn: “It’s not the New York I grew up with and loved.”

Stephen Cross, 37, a CBS News executive who has lived in Culver City for the last 11 years, is a self-described buppie (black urban professional). “I can’t go back to Bedford Stuyvesant now,” Cross said. “It looks like a war zone.” Valedictorian of his class at Boys High in the late 1960s, Cross said, “The younger ones can’t migrate any longer out of the ghetto.”

Different Generations

For those New Yorkers in their 20s and 30s who do come to Los Angeles for work or happenstance, the pull toward reunions is less powerful than for the older generation.

There is hope that this may change.

Lorraine and Mark Urist of Mission Hills, both 29, said that they are one of the few young couples who recently joined the New York Alumni. And Paul Berman, 34, a Lincoln graduate who recently moved to West Los Angeles, has organized a singles group.

At the block party in September, official New York Alumni T-shirts proclaimed “Living and Loving in L.A.” It was difficult to find anyone at the reunion who was willing to move back to New York, if given the chance.

Cecile Dollinger said: “I’m still a Brooklynite at heart, but I’m not about to live there.”

“Only when I die,” Arlene Schacter said, “will my ashes return to be scattered over Bloomingdale’s.”

Jerry Cutler expressed the sentiment held by most reunion attendees: “It’s nice to go back in your mind.”