Ex-New Yorkers Reunite for Some Small Talk and Seltzer or Two

For a moment, the Beverly Hills parking lot was some long ago street scene in Brooklyn. A noisy crowd was gathered and a slapball game was in progress.

Ed Alexander, wearing his Mets cap backward, stepped to a plate drawn crudely with pink chalk and rapped a one-bouncer to the pitcher. Shouts went up as he was thrown out, but it didn’t bother him.

He was back in his element.

“They’re intense . . . they’re arguing about who’s winning,” Alexander, a New York native, said as he huffed on the sidelines, enjoying the fourth annual all-New York high schools reunion Saturday at Beverly Hills High School. “We don’t even know who’s on our team--don’t even know their names.”

What inning was it?

“I have no idea.”

Three thousand miles from Times Square, the special flavor of New York City was more than apparent as the nonprofit New York Alumni Assn. attempted to raise $5,000 toward medical research into Tourette’s Syndrome.

The gathering was typically Manhattan--standing-room only. Nearly 1,600 former New Yorkers, representing more than 50 high schools, crowded the high school parking lot for Yo-Yo tricks, egg creams, seltzers, corned-beef sandwiches on rye and other bits of home.

When it grew too dark for slapball, they herded like so many subway commuters into the school auditorium for a variety show honoring New York comedian Jan Murray.

The event was billed as the largest of its kind ever in Los Angeles. One organizer, actor Jon Voight, said he relished hearing the New York accents he left behind in Yonkers when he moved west in 1971.

Being around New Yorkers, laughing, slapping each other on the shoulder, seems to revive him, Voight said. “It (is) like being out on the street again,” he said. “You get your battery recharged. I get all my energy back.”

Not everyone was pleased. One woman left a food stand complaining, “How can they sell hot dogs to a New York crowd without sauerkraut?”

But most seemed enchanted by memories. Rona Kleid, 51, carried a bright orange pennant and wore the matching T-shirt of the Evander Childs High School Tigers. It was 23 years ago when she left New York, she said, but she still misses Broadway, the food of Manhattan and Fortunoff department store.

A year ago, attending the same reunion, Kleid ran into high school pal Andie Savitt, a girl she met in grammar school. For a time, the two women rode the New York trains to work together, and Kleid attended Savitt’s wedding. They parted 32 years ago.

“She saw me and said, ‘I know you!’ ” Kleid said, remembering how they were reunited. “We found out we live a mile apart.”

David Priever, 29, moved west only a year ago. The adjustment has been tough, he said, talking longingly of Katz’s Deli, Ratner’s Deli and Yonah Schimmel’s Knishery. Fortunately, he said, he manages to find solace at L.A.’s Stage Deli, and he’s planning a venture to Beverly Hills’ new Carnegie Deli.

Bernie Lander, who sipped a New York Seltzer, came to Los Angeles in 1957 as an engineer for the Atlas missile. He has no regrets--”You can’t beat the weather”--but he does miss the sugary white sands of Rockaway Beach and his friends from Far Rockaway High School in Queens.

On a huge board at one end of the school parking lot, alumni scrawled messages to those they hoped to find.

“Where are you, Mona Prager?” read one note, signed Fran Gilbert. “Look for me in a gray NY Mets T-shirt.”

“I miss the weather,” said Helen Murray, Jan Murray’s daughter, who still travels back and forth to New York with her 4-year-old son. “I miss the fall, I miss the snow.”

But Jon Alexander, who moved west in 1979, disagreed. “My idea of a white Christmas is Malibu Beach,” he said.

Actor Lou Gossett Jr., another reunion organizer, attended Brooklyn’s Lincoln High School, class of ’54. He spoke warmly of that old neighborhood, where he knew everyone from the grocer to the clerks in the bowling alley.

“If I was bad, by the time I got home my mother had been told about it 20 times,” Gossett said with a laugh.