A Story About Two Boys, a Pair of Nuns, and Sixteen Miles of New York City — circa 1948
The school year was nearly over. It was spring 1948, and at St. Thomas Aquinas in the West Farms section of the Bronx, seventh grade was winding down toward graduation. The boys had their assignments, their prayers, their routines — and, apparently, their errands.
A sister — the exact nun lost to memory now, though the authority she carried certainly is not — singled out two boys from the class. They were to go to Brooklyn. To a destination ten blocks south of Prospect Park. Something to do with graduation: picking up gowns, perhaps, or settling a payment for them. The details have blurred across the decades, the way details do when a story is told often enough that it becomes less a report and more a feeling.
The boys went. Of course they went. You did not argue with a nun in 1948.
In 1948, New York City ran on nickels. The subway fare had held steady at five cents since the system opened in 1904 — forty-four years of reliable, democratic transportation. For a nickel you could go anywhere: from Pelham Bay to Coney Island, from the Grand Concourse to the Battery. The city's promise was encoded in that little coin. (That summer, the city would raise the fare to a dime, and something quietly would change. But in the spring of 1948, a nickel still got you through the turnstile.)
The two boys boarded the IRT and headed south, the elevated train rattling and swaying, the Bronx giving way to Manhattan through the scratched car windows. They would have transferred somewhere in the city — downtown, likely — picking up a Brooklyn-bound line to carry them over the bridge and into the borough, all the way down to the neighborhood below Prospect Park, and then walking the last ten blocks to wherever it was they were supposed to go.
What they saw along the way is not recorded. The candy stores and clotheslines strung between fire escapes. The newsstands thick with afternoon papers. Brooklyn's particular light in spring. Two boys from the Bronx, out in the world, with a mission.
Somewhere, the money ran short.
Maybe it was on the way back. Maybe a transfer cost more than they'd accounted for. Maybe one of them had miscounted. Whatever the cause, they found themselves without enough fare for some leg of the journey — and so they walked. At least two miles, through the streets of Brooklyn and whatever lay between.
They made it home. They always make it home in stories like this — or rather, the ones who make it home are the ones whose stories we get to tell. And whatever the errand was, it was presumably completed, because nuns in 1948 expected results.
He tells it with a shrug, this father of mine. A shrug and a small smile — the bemusement of a man remembering a thing that happened to a boy he used to be, in a city that no longer quite exists. It was an adventure. A good one, maybe. A story worth keeping.
It wasn't until I pulled up the map that I understood what a shrug was covering.
From St. Thomas Aquinas on Daly Avenue in the West Farms section of the Bronx to ten blocks south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn: sixteen miles. Across two rivers. Through three boroughs' worth of neighborhoods that neither boy would have known well. On a transit system they apparently did not have quite enough money to complete.
Sixteen miles. Two twelve-year-old boys. No cell phones. No safety net. On the authority of a nun who had other things to attend to.
We could not do this today. Or rather — we would not. The city exists, more or less. The subway still runs. Twelve-year-old boys still exist and are still, occasionally, capable of navigating the world. But we have decided, as a culture, that this particular kind of trust is not ours to extend. We track. We text. We wait at pickup lines. We would not send two children alone across sixteen miles of New York City and expect them home in time for supper.
My father did not find this remarkable. That is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it.
He was a Bronx kid in 1948, twelve years old, a Catholic school boy in the late American moment when children were trusted to be small, competent people who could get somewhere and come back. The city was their neighborhood, in a way we have trouble imagining now. The subway was just how you got places. The nuns dispatched you and you went.
What he remembers, seventy-odd years later, is not hardship. He remembers an adventure. Two boys, a city, a mission, not quite enough money — and home before dark.
About the Author
Terry Fitzgerald is a family historian and genealogical researcher with deep roots in Irish and Irish-American history. Raised in the United States on the edge of two worlds — the country she grew up in and the Ireland her family carried with them — she has spent years tracing the lives of the people whose choices and sacrifices made her own possible. Her research spans church records and census entries, DNA matches and ship manifests, but her truest interest has always been the stories that don't fit neatly into any archive: the adventures, the losses, the moments that get passed down at kitchen tables and then, too often, quietly disappear. These chronicles are her attempt to make sure they don't.