The 1950's

This was it....the main decade.  The formative years.  The teenage years.  This was what "Happy Days" (the TV show) was about.  Of course, they didn't live in Brooklyn!

 In Junior High School I was in the SP (that stands for Special Progress - you got to "skip" the 8th grade) and then I took the test and went to Brooklyn Technical High School.  

In 1957 we moved from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section (the worst neighborhood in Brooklyn) to the Linden Projects in the East New York section.  It had just opened and we were among the first tenants.  I was 14 and my sister was 19 and this was the first time in our lives we each had our own room!  So, I painted 2 opposite walls royal blue and 2 walls white....just because it was MY room and I could!  I wired my room for sound which, in those days, was "mono."  I, literally, had speakers everywhere.

There were about a thousand displaced teenagers brought together suddenly.  Several hundred were 13, 14, and 15.  I discovered girls!  I learned to smoke.  Cigarettes!  (It was before Marijuana.  No one I knew smoked marijuana.)  I learned to dance.  I made friends.  That was 50 years ago!  I've gotten in touch with several of those old friends recently.  You shouldn't wait 50 years!