MY BROOKLYN
I am writing to share a book that my dear friend Bill Gralnick wrote and and hope that you might think about buying it. Just as he was about to go on a book tour and speak all over the country and at Jewish book festivals - the world stopped.
Bill has been a dear friend, mentor and colleague for decades and is a GW grad just like us - but a few years before. “The War of the Itchy Balls” is a memoir of his Brooklyn days - funny and touching and an easy read. So if you are from Brooklyn or know where it is - this is for you! Even this Jersey girl loved it!!
You can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Thanks for helping out a fellow GW grad and a great friend and its a good read.
Lisa
So reads a sign in Brooklyn, NY. “…In The World” is the ending. There are many places in America that seem to cling to their residents’ memories–Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, Pikesville in Baltimore. There is however something magnetic about Brooklyn, especially for those who grew up there in the late ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s. It is a badge worn proudly and even combatively.
It is odd to me because as the headline infers, Brooklyn is a big place. People, let’s says from Pikesville (I’m married to one) will often ask me if I know this family in Brooklyn or that. Brooklyn is one-fifth of New York City with over a million people living in the borough. Imagine how many Sid Schwartz’ or Harry O’Conners there. And if they lived in a different section of Brooklyn–
forgedaboudit.
They used different modes of transportation, went to different schools, had different accents. They might just as well have lived in The Bronx or Brattleboro, Vermont. And yet they all, when asked their origin don’t say New York, they say Brooklyn. When those of my age speak about psychic pains, they all say rooting for the Dodgers.
"Bill Gralnick's colorful memories of growing up in Brooklyn are likely to make any reader wish they, too, had spent their childhood in the wonderful neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The author's vivid stories of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field rang true with me. As a kid, I had the good fortune to spend summers in and around the Dodgers clubhouse and among the great Brooklyn ballplayers of the '50s -- Gil Hodges, Carl Erskine, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, and Newk and Campy. There was no place like Brooklyn. Bill Gralnick tells us why."
-- Peter Bavasi, former Toronto Blue Jays and Cleveland Indians president, San Diego Padres general manager, and son of legendary Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Buzzie Bavasi