Michael Nolan returns with this installment of his Brooklyn memoir.

For me it was Miss Melsha, my 4th grade teacher at PS 99 who taught me
my enduring love of trees and maps. Out the window from our classroom,
on the other side of the schoolyard fence, stood a row of stately
Lombardy Poplars. Poplar’s Latin name is "Alamo" from which we derive
the place names of Los Alamos or Alameda, a grove of poplar trees.
Credit here to Mr. Humbert, my French-Canadian Latin teacher at Midwood
High School from whom ("preposition takes the objective case") I
learned English grammar, etymology, plus a passion for palindromes,
crossword puzzles, Anagrams, Scrabble, and writing.

In Miss
Melsha’s class, we made spatter-prints of leaves collected on field
trips in the neighborhood: a leaf pinned down on construction paper, a
bottomless cigar box with screen mesh placed on top, green India ink
spattered across the screen with a toothbrush, then lift the box and
the leaf, and voila a lovely outline of the leaf.

In front of my
house was a Norway Maple which I could climb by age 10. We made
"pug-noses" from the winged seeds. Mother Nature pre-scored an easy
break point containing the sticky white glue to attach the decorative
up-turned wing on your nose. Across the street was a tall Sycamore,
identified by its broad leaf, chipped bark, and "itchy ball" seeds,
which we would mischievously drop down the backs of our buddies. These
were tree applications not taught by Miss Melsha but learned through
the inherited folklore of East 10th Street.

In geography
homework, I remember diligently drawing (not tracing) the Hawaiian
Islands by hand while looking at an Atlas. I suppose I could have
chosen Wyoming, but savored a challenge. I spent hours drawing the
boroughs of New York City until I figured out how the index finger of
northern Manhattan fit under The Bronx at Spuyten Duyvel. What a fine
feeling of accomplishment. I marked the location of the Polo Grounds at
Coogan’s Bluff on the Harlem River where my beloved Willie Mays played
centerfield for the New York Giants.

Two days ago, I was in my
backyard digging up the remaining bulbous root of a dying black cherry
tree (Prunus serotina) as my booming pine (Pinus ponderosa) claimed
unrivaled prominence in the garden. Thank you, Miss Melsha. "Ave" Mr.
Humbert!

Yet another installment of  Michael D. Nolan’s Brooklyn Memoir:  Proximity: What can happen when we live, work and love close together.

The compression of events and ensuing movement can create Proximity. In 1968 I was in the employ of the Public Broadcast Laboratory, a two-year news magazine show (emanating from NBC Studios at "30 Rock" in Manhattan) and funded by the Ford Foundation where Fred Friendly landed after he resigned as president of CBS News. "PBL" was Friendly’s brainchild, built on the "live interconnect" concept- using live television to bring contending points of view from distant locations into active dialog.

One example was a program devoted to Police-Community Relations with black psychology professor Alvin Pouissant speaking from Harvard, neighbors talking from a St. Louis storefront, and Police Chief Herbert Jenkins at his Atlanta headquarters. We went on an advance trip to prep the police chief for the show. "Y’all want some Coca-Cola," an affable Jenkins said as he welcomed us into his office and reached into his private refrigerator for the beverages. Jenkins was noted for his accommodating posture towards civil rights organizations and had been appointed by President Lydon Johnson to the National Commission on Civil Disorders established in the wake of the riots following King’s assassination in April.

Friendly wanted to cover the political conventions in the summer of ’68. I enthusiastically jumped on board the planning team, developing background information on the Mobilization demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. For reasons not clear at the time, the plans for coverage were abruptly yanked. I always suspected the influence of McGeorge Bundy, then president of the Ford Foundation, who had been an architect of American military involvement in Vietnam while serving as an Advisor to President Kennedy.

With some vacation time from PBL, I called my friends at CBS News where I had worked for two years prior and was hired as a field producer to cover the demonstrations. I gleefully left for Chicago.

Through my own activism, I knew the lead organizers Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden well and considered them political comrades. So when my CBS producer asked me to "Go find Tom Hayden", that was a fairly easy assignment. Tom was in disguise and among the demonstrators in Grant Park, across from the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue where many convention delegates were lodged. I guided CBS reporter John Laurence and the camera crew to Hayden . Todd Gitlin, now a journalism-sociology professor at Columbia, stood nearby.

During that volatile summer week, I witnessed comedian Dick Gregory’s March destined for the convention center. Faced with police force and heavy doses of tear gas, Gregory and the demonstrators never left Grant Park. Later in the week, after the worst of the police violence, Eugene McCarthy came to address the demonstrators. On another occasion, Peter, Paul & Mary sang.

Tomorrow night, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe and Jill Biden, and thousands of their supporters will be in Grant Park for what we can only believe will be a landslide Presidential and Congressional victory.

All against the backdrop of another unpopular American military invasion. Forty years later.

A new episode of Michael D. Nolan’s Brooklyn Memoir, The actual name of his memoir is Proximity: What can happen when we live, work and love close together.

Back in my Brooklyn boyhood, there were two readily acceptable answers to the question, "What are you?" You were either Jewish or Catholic. We didn’t know what Protestants were. Over time, I would learn to respond to the question with "Ethical Culture," to the perplexed looks of my punchball buddies in the PS 99 schoolyard. They already knew there was something a bit different about me, since I went to school on both the Jewish and Catholic holidays.

Ethical Culture was founded in New York City in the late 19th century by a renegade rabbi named Felix Adler. It was non-theological in nature and emphasized the Golden Rule and common ethical teachings of all great religions. The founders were active in the establishment of various settlement houses on the Lower East Side which helped waves of immigrants who flooded New York.

My brother, sister, and I religiously attended the Sunday School of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture at the corner of Prospect Park West and 1st Street. After we were dropped off, Mom and Dad attended the weekly service or "Meeting" right next door which featured a lecture by a "Leader" as the Ethical Culture ministers were called.

My radical politics were born of this experience. The Sunday School classes consisted of songs and stories which emphasized world brotherhood and interracialism. [Ask me to sing – "If there were no poor and the rich were content, if each of us knew what true brotherhood meant, it would be a wonderful, wonderful world."] We frequently went on field trips to visit the services of other religions. In high school, I became active in NEYO, the National Ethical Youth Organization, which included hotbeds of bohemianism, discussion groups, and folk dancing at the Brooklyn Society or the larger group at the New York Society at 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan. I was elected president of NEYO in the late 50s.

My mentor during these days was Eddie Gottlieb, the Sunday School principal. Eddie was a socialist and a pacifist, active in the Socialist Party USA (the Norman Thomas wing) and the War Resisters League. I began a life of demonstrating before I was in high school. I paraded for peace down Broadway alongside Pete Seeger on banjo. I marched with CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, in Harlem. I stood in City Hall Park in defiance of Civil Defense air raid requirements. While at Midwood High School, I organized two busloads of students to attend the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington in 1957-58 in the wake of the Supreme Court desegregation decision of 5.5.54. In 1963, I worked with Bayard Rustin (a Socialist and pacifist comrade of Eddie’s) in bringing demonstrators to the historic March for Jobs and Freedom where ML King gave his memorable "Dream" speech. Twice, I brought Norman Thomas to my high school. The second time, they shut down classes and beckoned all students to an assembly to hear him speak.

In all of this I was probably fulfilling more of my Mom’s liberal Jewish heritage than my Dad’s moderate, apolitical Irish Catholic values. It was my Mom I went to to ask permission to break the law in the Civil Defense demonstration. She gave it. She was an activist, frequently subject to righteous indignation about one topic or another. On more than one occasion, I’d hear my Dad tell my Mom, "Lena, don’t get involved."

But I knew I didn’t completely belong in that world of New York liberalism and found balance in baseball, touch football, and hanging out with my Italian buddies. I played centerfield for the Avenue J Spartans in the Parade Ground League. We were invariably in next-to-last place in league standings. The Cadets dominated first place and featured a husky catcher named Joe Torre.

The second installment of Michael Nolan’s Brooklyn memoir.

In my role as family reunion convener, I enjoy a certain latitude in choosing the dates and places where we might meet, always within the bounds of cousinly respect and consultation. So this year, since I was traveling (I could have said schlepping, but I won’t) all the way from California, the Zhelazny Reunion from my mom’s Jewish side took place on Saturday, Aug. 23 at cousin Jo Shifrin’s house in Ardsley, Westchester County, NY, and the Lowery-Nolan Irish reunion on Sunday, Aug. 24 at Holy Cross Cemetery in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn followed by a luncheon at Buckley’s tavern and restaurant near Marine Park. (Where Joe Torre and I played baseball as teenagers in the Parade Ground League.)

My musician daughter, Rosy, now a 5-year resident of Brooklyn, joined me and four other cousins on the cemetery tour. I had made a reconnaissance trip a few days prior to scout out the locations of where our ancestors were buried and made a map. We visited the humble grave-site of Rosy’s namesake and great-grandmother, Rosanna Lowery Nolan and husband James Joseph Nolan. Just a simple stone block with the name "Nolan" on it and a cross below. Rosy placed a bouquet of flowers at the site.

I had come to this very place as a young boy with my dad and brother. Jimmy and I would join our father and knelt, crossed ourselves, and said: "God bless Grandpa and Grandma Nolan". I treasured these moments of intimacy with my father who would not often display his fervor for the sake of the humanistic Ethical Culture choice he and my Jewish mother had made for the religious upbringing of their children.

But his underlying passion would occasionally break through when he would intone the Latin Mass with his mellifluous Irish tenor voice, or take us through St. Jerome’s Church or to the cemetery. I loved his tales of parochial school. His imitation of "Sister Smackerlips" was a favorite or describing his days as an altar boy.

Perhaps it was not surprising that I would take three years of Latin at my public high school, Midwood. Or in my early 40’s decide to enroll in the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults and become baptized Catholic at St. Kevin’s Church, here on Bernal Heights in San Francisco.

The picture above is of my cousin Meaghan Lowery Wright on the recent
Holy Cross Cemetery tour at the monument for our great-grandparents, James Joseph Lowery, an immigrant from Culdaff Parish, County Donegal
and Susan Farren Lowery, a native of Kentucky.

In the second half of the 19th century, my relatives lived, worked and married in the "Irishtown" section of Brooklyn along the East River waterfront between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn Bridge—a section now enjoying a revival under its historic name of Vinegar Hill.

James and Susan had 14 children, some of whom did not survive birth or early childhood. My grandmother, Rosanna, did. She had 13 children, 6 of whom survived, including my dad, Harold Francis.

Soon, I’ll post a Google map I’ve created which shows how the Lowery’s and Nolan’s migrated from the waterfront where they worked on the Brooklyn Bridge, in the Navy Yard, or ran hotel, bar, drygoods and liquor establishments in support of the workforce, inland towards Flatbush where they often took jobs with the City as firemen and policemen.

Imagine my delight when I got this note from Michael David Nolan, a former Brooklynite, who now resides in San Francisco.

Would love to blog my Brooklyn memoir installments. I grew up in
the Midwood section but went to Sunday School in Park Slope at the
Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture at the corner of PPW and 1st.

So I asked Michael Nolan to send me his bio:

Michael David Nolan was born on June 21, 1941 to Harold Francis Nolan, a native of Brooklyn, and Lena Porgoman, a native of Kaluszyn, Poland, who grew up on the Lower East Side. Michael attended PS 217 (Coney Island Ave. & Newkirk) and PS 99 (East 10th & Avenue K).  He grew up just down the street. He played center field for the Avenue J Spartans as a teenager. He attended Midwood High School and graduated from Columbia, class of ’63.  Active in peace and civil rights movement of Fifties and Sixties.  Worked for CBS News (1965-67) and Pubic Broadcast Laboratory (1967-69).   Moved to California in 1969.  Resident of San Francisco since 1970.  Member of SF Mime Troupe and co-founder of Pickle Family Circus.  Public relations consultant for last 20 years.  Elected member of the SF Democratic County Central Committee.   Father of Rosy, 30, of Brooklyn, and McLean, 26 of Oakland.  Produced and performed in BrasilCuba-SF Carnaval Contingent this year.

So here’s the first installment of Michael’s Brooklyn Memoir

I first told my children, Rosy and Mac, a year ago on my summer solstice birthday in Brooklyn that I was going to write a book about my family and my home borough. I had a rough concept and a title: "Proximity" and it was to describe the value and influence of living and working close to one another in previous generations. And how much of that has been lost in my generation when many of us migrated west to California.

The song title above, "I Could Write a Book" was composed by Lorenz Hart (music by Richard Rodgers). Hart is one of my favorites. He wrote the lyrics to "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" and "My Funny Valentine". Turns out he was the son of Jewish immigrants and attended Columbia where he met Rodgers. Two things he and I share in common. But for the fact that my Polish Jewish immigrant mother married an Irish Catholic from Brooklyn.

So here it is… the preface of my book. How am I doing so far?