Richard Koenigsberg
Just to go back in time a bit. Before High School, I lived in a lower-middle class neighborhood, (Irvington, New Jersey). I lot of Italians, Poles, etc., although I didn’t pay much attention to ethnicity.
Many of the tough guys at school called me “Jew boy.” Didn’t bother me a bit. I wasn’t religious. My classmates were very much against me at first. I had to reverse this.
There was a leader, Ray Faust, who sat behind me in class. I used to read to him–passages from a book about John Wilkes Booth–the man who shot Abraham Lincoln.
I needed to fight him to gain status. I tested him out in the schoolyard. He wasn’t strong. Knowing I could defeat him, I challenged him to a fight. Approximately thirty classmates gathered in the schoolyard. Only one guy supported me (Joe Needham).
It was an easy fight. I had my knees on his arms and had pinned him to the ground. I wouldn’t (couldn’t) hit him in the face. I said, “give up?” and he did.
Gradually, I became very popular (Alfie Giodarno said I was “the only Jew he ever liked”). I could have been elected President of the class. I had reached the pinnacle.
But my parents didn’t like what I was becoming. My father didn’t like my language usage (dees and dos instead of these and those). I got kicked out of class frequently and liked it. I tormented the teachers. My father wouldn’t let me out of the house when the guys came over in the evening. They wanted to move out of Irvington to a more respectable community, Maplewood, New Jersey (up the hill, about one mile away). We did move.
But in this upper-middle-class community, I was a nothing. Only my brother sat with me at the lunch table. Pathetic. I hated my first year there and would bicycle down to Irvington after school each day. I went from being the most popular kid in school to being a nobody.
But there was one compensation. I was an athlete. There was an athletic club run by the gym teacher, Mr. Tice, with thirty members. I was chosen to be on the basketball team (starting five).
The kids were so conservative. They passed the ball around endlessly. A basketball score might be 38 to 36. I was aggressive. Even though I was by far the smallest guy on the team, I often drove to the basket furiously and fearlessly (though I wore thick glasses). I passed behind my back. The guys on the team didn’t like me. Buster Lawder would avoid passing to me. But I got a nickname that would last forever, Cousy.
I rarely tell people how I got this nickname. The other “guard,” Bob Davies, six feet tall, was irritated by my creative antics. He said, “Who do you think you are, Bob Cousy?” In any case, being a basketball player was my claim to fame at Maplewo.
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PLUS …..
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