Born In/On Staten Island

The NY Times announces this week's new program, "Made In Staten Island". I give up on prepositions. But the point is that having mastered some six languages a bit, plus classic Latin and little classic Greek, words count. Ask a good contract lawyer or divorce lawyer. Slip up on a preposition and you have big problems.

Now I was born "on" Staten Island, above ground in a hospital, so I was told. In my early years I spent time at the Pro Seminary for Franciscans on Todt Hill, now owned by some other religious organization. But being there, and St Francis was Italian just to remind folks, we saw a great many come and go. On Todt Hill, "death" hill in Dutch, we also had a lot of neighbors akin to what is alleged in this series, yet they were often older, family oriented, both types of families, and their children were often sent to the best schools. The worker bees, my phrase not theirs, were often in Brooklyn. Back then there was no bridge, and any escape route was via New Jersey.

But on Staten Island then it was bi-lingual, English and Italian. Sunday Mass was in English and another in Italian. But to my surprise decades later, my Italian was not Florentine, it was Sicilian. Accent, phrases and the like.

As for crimes, I was a Lifeguard in charge of the Ocean Breeze area, and once a week some dead body would wash ashore having been dropped off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. There was no crime on Staten Island, back then folks were careful of where they lived.

But it should be interesting to see how they present my old home town. It certainly was not Kansas.