Just a Kid from Hell's Kitchen - In Remembrance of TC Murray

DOWNTOWN/UPTOWN
The first residence of my life here on planet earth was a brownstone located at 232 West
21 St. in the Chelsea section in NYC. Here I lived with my mom for nearly three years.
Because of my infancy, I do not recall life in my Chelsea home. However, it is safe to
assume that it was in this apartment that I did the usual amount of crying, took my first
baby steps, and uttered my first word – mama, or whatever!
At some point in time, probably in 1937, mom and I moved in with Aunt Mary and Uncle
Buddy at their 4861 Broadway residence, the Hawthorne Gardens, in the Inwood section
of upper Manhattan. Aunt Mary was one of my mother’s two older sisters living in New
York. Inwood was a bastion of the Irish.
Aunt Mary had the good life. She was married to Michael Waldron, an attaché in New
York City’s municipal court’s system. Michael Waldron, known affectionately as “Uncle
Buddy,” was a jolly man who kept his wife wanting for nothing. Theirs was a childless
marriage, so some attention, albeit minimal, was relished upon me. By virtue of her
seniority, Aunt Mary seemed to be the uncontested “matriarch” of the three sisters
residing in America.
Mary Agnes Waldron had become a U.S. citizen shortly upon her arrival from Ireland
and would get involved in the political process as soon as she was naturalized. Like so
many Irish immigrants, she became a United States citizen. Soon she activated herself in
the ladies auxiliary of the Inwood Democrat Club. She was a staunch Al Smith supporter
in the late 1920’s and would jump on the FDR bandwagon in 1932. It seemed to Aunt
Mary and the millions of Americans who voted to elect Roosevelt to the presidency, that
indeed, happy days were here again. However, FDR’s “New Deal” proved to be too
“new” for many of his supporters. Like many Democrats who were disillusioned with the
socialist-leaning alphabet soup programs of FDR, Aunt Mary broke ranks with the
Democrats and rallied behind the party of Wall Street. Like a good Republican, she
invested in Wall Street, and would reap dividends later on.
In 1933, Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and thus began his reckless
ascendancy to power. On May 10, 1933, the city of Berlin was the scene of the first book
burning. Simultaneously, his storm troopers swept across virtually every university town
in Germany to oversee that “inappropriate” books be burned – bonfires of the most sordid
order. Ironically, it was the year 1933 that the ban on James Joyce’s, Ulysses, was lifted
here in the United States. At the beginning of the new millennium in 2001, Ulysses was
acclaimed as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. We do make mistakes, don’t we
– all in the name of the cross, swastika, or whatever.