Boys Will Be Boys : More Than 60 Years of Memories Have Kept These Friends Together

They grew up in the 1920s in a Chicago ghetto called Humboldt Park. To the north were the Germans, to the east were the Poles. The Italians were to the south, and on the west was an industrialized area.

They had names like Lieberman, Meltzer, Newman and Tuch. They were poor, but they ate regularly and had everything kids needed--chess and checkers, badminton and baseball.

They played basketball in a clubhouse donated by a group of wealthy women who wanted to keep them out of trouble and off the streets. The clubhouse, a storefront on Division Street, is where they learned how to make line-drive basketball shots because of the low ceilings.

But most of all, they had each other, and they still do.

Some friendships, like the one between Sol Lieberman and Ben Meltzer, go back 72 years. They call themselves the Division Street Deborah Boys Club Alumni, and several times a year the “boys” still meet.

The Los Angeles contingent gathered in Marina del Rey recently. Nat Benjamin, 76, of Woodland Hills has been the president for four years.

“When we were kids, no one could afford 5 cents for a movie,” Benjamin recalled. “We couldn’t go. You made friends on the street or in school. My dad wanted to be a doctor, but he became a sewing machine mechanic instead. That was the life. He was self-educated. He memorized the dictionary and he played word games with his eight kids.

“All the boys in the neighborhood grew up with the idea that if someone needs, you give. And it was easy. We may have been poor, but we had everything.”

The first Eastern European Jews arrived about 1890 in Humboldt Park, a northwest Chicago neighborhood that was then home mostly to immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. By the 1930s, there were about 35,000 Jews, and sizable Polish, Italian and German communities as well.

Humboldt Park produced football great Knute Rockne, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, actor Sam Wanamaker, author Studs Terkel, comedian Jack E. Leonard, author Saul Bellow, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, middleweight boxing champion Solly Dukelsky and basketball great Mickey Rottner.

Reggie Newman, 72, of West Los Angeles recently went back to the old neighborhood with his daughter.

“The flavor is still there,” he said. “People are still poor. I told my daughter about the Sunday afternoons and how it took two hours to walk a few blocks because everyone was out socializing. I showed her our high school, and she couldn’t believe how it looked like a penitentiary.

“But what I really cherished was the caring. When I was 10, my mother had pneumonia and I had the flu. My dad had died. The landlord would not take rent for two months. He was Polish. He would come up and serve us a meal because he understood how hard things were. It’s a different world now.”

The Boys Club members like to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, tell jokes and kid one another. It may be a different world, but they still do some things the same way.

David Tuch, 80, of Brentwood is one of the forces keeping the group together.

“I don’t think we’ll see our breed again,” he said. “People still suffer, but there’s no closeness, no family life and that’s what we had even if we had very little else.

“We took care of each other in the old days. We pulled ourselves up, took ourselves out of poverty. And we still do that. We had dreams, and that’s how most of us got to California--it was the place for dreamers.”

One of those dreamers is Lester Bise of Hancock Park, who takes a lot of kidding from his friends because he is also the lawyer for almost half of the club’s members.

Bise worked in a fruit and vegetable market when he lived in the old neighborhood, making $3 a week. His parents wanted him to go to college, but he wanted to make money. “They said they’d let me use the car one day a week if I went to college,” he said, “so I gave up the idea of making money and went to college.”

Bise, 73, has known his clients since he was 8 years old. Dave Tuch says he chose Bise as his lawyer because his rates were cheap. Reggie Newman says it’s because he’s good and cheap. And through the wisecracks shines the love between people who share a common history.

Sixty years after leaving the neighborhood, the boys still enjoy one another’s company, help one another when times are bad and tell bad jokes.

The original Deborah Boys Club is still active in the old neighborhood, with the old boys providing scholarships for those now growing up in Humboldt Park.