In his book
Thanksgiving 1959, Staten Island Advance sports columnist Jay Price looks back at the year 1959 through the lens of the football rivalry between New Dorp and Curtis.
The following excerpt, reprinted from
Staten Island Live, reflects on how the Verrazano bridge changed Staten Island:
Staten Island was a different place in the Fall of 1959, the way America was a different place before they shot Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King; before Vietnam, and the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, and all the other wars that never seemed to go the way we thought they would.
Only more so.
Because on Staten Island, 1959 was before the Bridge, which changed everything.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. A bridge across the Narrows, the mile-wide tidal strait that separated Staten Island from Brooklyn at their closest point, would make it easier for Staten Islanders to drive their cars into Manhattan, or to Coney Island or Yankee Stadium or the Bronx Zoo. And who wouldn't want that?
All it cost was $320 million, and a way of life.
When they opened the upper roadway in October of 1964, there were celebrations on both sides of the Narrows; even in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where there had been bitter opposition from some of the 7,000 people who were uprooted to make way for the approaches to the Bridge.
"You followed the wrong Moses," one of them told New York City mayor Robert Wagner at a contentious public hearing, and the man's neighbors jumped up to applaud.
On the Staten Island side, where church bells pealed in celebration on "Bridge Day," a carload of young men camped out at the toll plaza for a week, taking turns saving their place at the head of the line, so theirs would be the first car across. The driver, George Scarpelli, paid the toll with a Kennedy half-dollar. And on a day so raw that governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Richard Hughes of New Jersey earned standing ovations by throwing away their prepared speeches, saloonkeeper Jack Demyan and three friends made the crossing in a 1937 Packard open touring car, pausing at the toll booths long enough to share champagne and cake.
Demyan, a larger-than-life character who catered the wedding scene in The Godfather and wound up playing a bartender in the movie, never needed an excuse to throw a party, or to join one already in progress. He and his friends drank the champagne; two bemused toll-takers settled for cake.
But if he'd known how the story ended, Demyan might've parked the Packard across the toll lanes, blocking traffic and delaying the inevitable for a few minutes longer. Because as his neighbors would soon realize, traffic on the bridge flowed both ways, and not all those folks on the Staten Island Expressway were zipping across the Island on their way to someplace else.
Some of them got off, and stayed.
In what seemed like no time at all, while New York's other boroughs and cities across the country were shrinking, Staten Island's population doubled. And with every family that abandoned Brooklyn or the Bronx for the relative safety and open spaces of Oakwood or New Springville, with every woodlot turned into townhouses or cookie-cutter two-family homes, and every convenience store or strip mall built to serve them, the Island looked a little bit more like the places the newcomers thought they were leaving behind.
"It's a different world," Demyan would say years later, mourning the hometown he knew.
"The romance is gone."
The games were different, too, in the days before SportsCenter, Personal Seat Licenses, and participation trophies for 5-year-olds playing tee ball.
Before television changed everything, a college scholarship meant a chance at a free education, not a stepping stone to a sneaker contract. Even the pros, who took the games more seriously than they took themselves, were working stiffs like the rest of us; regular people who lived in the neighborhood.
After Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in baseball history, 11-year-old Wally Kaner and a few of his friends walked up to the six-room house on Flagg Place where Thomson still lived with his mother, and knocked on the door.
No, Elizabeth Thomson told them, her son hadn't gotten home yet. But why didn't they come in, have some cookies, and take a look at some of his trophies.
Men like that were grateful not to be stuck in the mill or the mines, or working on the Staten Island docks; and when their playing days were over, they went out and got real jobs. It never would've occurred to them to pound their chests after making a tackle, or dance in the end zone after scoring a touchdown -- wasn't that what they were supposed to do? -- or to stand at home plate and admire their handiwork after hitting a home run.
"Act like you've been there before," Lombardi told his Green Bay Packers when they scored a touchdown; and they did.
Modesty -- which, as the sportswriter W.C. Heinz would observe a few years later, doesn't play well on television -- was still in style.
Buy Jay Price's "Thanksgiving 1959" on Amazon.com
