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actually lived there. In my mind there were definitely better places, like Greenwich Village in Manhattan. When I was a teenager, I would take the subway to Manhattan and go to jazz clubs. I wanted some action. The Bronx didn’t do it for me, except for the summer that I was sixteen, when I led a double life, kind of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
    There was the Pelham Parkway gang near where I lived. These were the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School overachievers. They were the smart Jewish kids, studying to be professionals. Then there was the Tremont Avenue gang. Tough street kids. Knew how to hustle. They lived farther south on the White Plains Road line of the subway. I went back and forth between them.
    That summer I was looking for something exciting and maybe even a bit dangerous. I had a cousin. He was a real daring, wild, great-looking guy. He was into jazz, dressing sharp—and smoking pot. Prompted by him and our friends in the Tremont Avenue gang, my friend Eugene and I decided that we would make some money by growing marijuana and then selling it.
    We staked out a plot of land fifteen feet by ten feet about three hundred feet inside Bronx Park, surrounded and isolated by bushes and trees. We planted the seeds in early spring, and they were watered by nature and a nearby drinking fountain. We would dash to our crop as soon as we got home from school, thrilled to see that the plants were really growing. We weren’t totally successful as farmers. One of three plants survived. But we harvested and started the curing process. The buds of the plants were placed in quart pickle jars, then placed under my bed, carefully relocated on Fridays, cleaning day, to avoid discovery by my mother.
    The courier for the pot was Max, a Brooklyn College student, who drove a hack in the summer—a taxi service carrying New York City residents to the various Catskill Mountain hotels. I had met Max the previous year when he provided this service to my family on our annual trek to the mountains. His brother, a jazz trumpeter, opened the door to our customer base. These were the jazz musicians who were ready to improve their performance by smoking pot-weed-maryjane. All of this was a heady adventure that thrilled and scared the hell out of us.
    With the drop-off of our product to the Nevele country club and Klein’s Hillside, we had a profit of $270 for the both of us to split. That was a lot in those days. Not bad for a summer’s work, but our adventure came with much more fear than I wanted. And when it was all over I was much relieved. I went back to Christopher Columbus High School and hit the books.

 
    MILTON GLASER

    Artist and graphic designer, creator of the I ♥ NY logo
    (1929– )
    My mother never ate with the rest of the family. My father, who had this dry-cleaning store, would come home from work at about a quarter after eight at night. My sister, who at that point was still in grade school, would come home early and have something to eat. Everybody ate by themselves. Every once in a while two would eat at the same time, but my mother was never seen eating. During the day, she was taking food from somewhere. It was very strange. My mother also cooked spaghetti in a very specific way. She would boil it for an hour until it had gotten gelatinous and lost its identity. She’d toss Velveeta cheese in before the water had boiled off. Then she would demold it from the pot because it had been reduced to a kind of pudding. It was like the Dome of St. Peter’s. And after that she’d slice it and fry it in chicken fat. In my teenage years, I went to an Italian restaurant for the first time. I asked for spaghetti and when they brought me a plate of spaghetti, I said, “No, no. I want spaghetti. Spaghetti !”
    The Italians in our neighborhood lived to the east of us in small houses, but the Jews lived in apartments. Three-room apartments with maybe six kids. Try to figure that one out. You basically had a