A New Yorker at Green
Gables Drive-in Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio©
By Linda Lee
Greene
When in the
early 1960s I met my former husband Bobby, his driver’s license gave an address
of Cambria Heights, Queens, New York City, a relatively placid neighborhood a mere
stone’s throw from the Nassau County, Long Island line. It was his parent’s
address, a place to which they had moved soon after Bobby’s senior year in high
school. Born in Manhattan, and as a toddler had moved with his parents and
older brother to the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough, they remained
there until Bobby’s pre-adolescence. The family relocated at that time to
Flushing, Queens. It was there that Bobby received most of his schooling, and is
the place he considers home.
It wasn’t that
the little family was unstable…they were upwardly mobile. Bobby’s beautiful Spanish/Puerto
Rican mother Paquita, and his movie-star handsome father Eusebio (Americanized
as Frank) were always on the hunt for a better life for their little family.
Both of them had immigrated to Harlem originally, Paquita from Ponce, Puerto
Rico, and Eusebio from Barcelona, Spain. A seamstress in a “boiler room,” as
she called it, Paquita commuted every weekday by train and subway to the
garment district in New York City, a musty room in a highrise in Manhattan
located between 5th and 9th Avenues to 34th
and 42nd Streets. Frank was also a daily train/subway commuter to
his job as a kitchen worker at the Chase Building in midtown Manhattan. I knew
that I was an accepted member of the family the day that Frank carted home to
me a special disk-like pan from that famous kitchen, a pan with the name of
Chase Manhattan engraved on its bottom, a piece of equipment that I use to this
day, and each time I do, I recall with great affection my long-deceased
father-in-law.
At the time that
Bobby and I met, he was the saxophonist, clarinetist, and comedian with a
five-piece combo that traveled cross-country on one-night to eight-week-long
gigs at every type of venue imaginable; I was a dance instructor at an Arthur
Murray’s Dance Studio in Columbus, Ohio. Fate brought us together at a nightclub,
the infamous Club Rubu, in Columbus where his group was appearing and where my
dance-instructor buddies and I often headed after the studio closed in the
evenings. Subsequent to some stops and starts in our relationship, I went on
the road with him, and absent the benefit of having met each other’s families,
we married in Palo Alto, California in the spring following the year we met.
Bobby’s biographical
background is an important element to my story, especially as it relates to the
geographical and cultural aspects of it, for it points out differences between
us that were always sources of humorous situations, as this one demonstrates. Before
I proceed, I will list just a few of our dissimilarities: to Bobby, white castles
are repeaters; pop is soda; lunch meat is cold cuts; mayonnaise is Hellmann’s;
gingerale is Vernors; and Houston Street is pronounced like “house” with “ton”
tagged to its tail-end. As multi-dimensional as was his upbringing within the
borders of the five boroughs of New York City, as well as his cross-country
travels, at the same time, he remained oddly unsophisticated in many ways. It
was an innocence that theretofore I wouldn’t have associated with what one would
expect to be a stereotypically “jaded” New Yorker. It allowed him a refreshing
capacity to be captivated by new experiences. For instance, never in his life
had he seen, or had knowledge of, drive-in restaurants, an enormously popular American
phenomenon from sea to shining sea in the 1950s and 1960s—other than those
spots that had been Bobby’s turf, apparently.
St. Louis was
the home-base of the other four boys in the band, and when our work in
California dried up, we headed east with them, camping out in the home of the
parents of the leader of the group for a week or so, a week or so until some
work materialized and we would be on the road again. But homesickness bit all
of us fatally instead, which was the death knell of the band. The only choice available
to Bobby and me was packing up our electric skillet, our ironing board, our
iron, and our clothes (our only worldly possessions at the time, other than his
horns) and to head to Columbus in our old Chevrolet. It was time for Bobby to
meet my family and friends for the first time.
The
introductions went swimmingly—everybody loved Bobby and Bobby loved everybody
in return. I called my friend Carol Richardson, who was Carol Treadway by then,
and she and her husband Dick, and Bobby and I, planned an evening together. Dick
picked us up in whatever boat-of-a-car he owned at the time (Dick always owns a
boat-of-a-car), and Bobby and I climbed in the roomy back seat. The early part
of our evening is a blur to me, but we ended up at Green Gables Drive-in
Restaurant, the favorite haunt of all of the teenagers and twenty-somethings of
our area of Columbus when we were growing up, and judging by the steady flow of
traffic in and out of the place that evening, it was still going strong.
For those of you
who are unfamiliar with the drill of such places, you would park your car, roll
down your windows, and a carhop would walk, or in some cases, skate up to the
driver’s side window, and take your order. Presently, she would return with your
food balanced delicately on a tray that she would attach to the driver’s side
door and window, and then she would fade away until it was time for her to
return to fetch the tray at meal’s end. Well, that was the purpose of such
places for the older folks, but not for the younger crowds that frequented
them. The real function for them was for the young motor heads to show off
their automobiles, their 1950s concept cars, classic cars of today, and for the
girls to hang out of the windows of the cars and wave and shout to all of their
friends. Around and around like an endless carousel the cars would circle,
passing up open parking spaces with abandon.
My husband was
fascinated! While the other three of us in our car chatted away, Bobby was so
caught up in, and befuddled by, the parade that was unfolding before his eyes
that he failed to contribute a word to our discourse. You must take into
account that this is a person from New York City, where a parking space is
golden, and never remains empty for more than a second or two. Street fights
and turf wars break out over parking spaces in New York City. At Green Gables
that evening, there happened to be an empty spot right next to our car, the side
where Bobby sat, a spot that had been passed up by the same cars time and time and
time again.
Finally, Bobby
just couldn’t take it any longer. Thrusting his entire torso out of his open window,
and his free arm jerking wildly like a frustrated traffic cop’s, in his New
York accent, Bobby shouted to the driver of a particular car on which he had
kept his eye, “Hey Buddy, what’s the
mattuh with you? There’s a pahkin’ spot right heuh? RIGHT HEUH!!!”
Original posting
on September 17, 2012 – Updated on January 8, 2019
To date, Linda Lee Greene has
authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG);
“Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO);
“Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g);
and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG),
which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards
Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites.
Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the
Moon” will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An
extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com.
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