Confederate monuments, real heroes and Fathers Day
My Dad’s house on Howard Avenue in Brooklyn with Lucy.
Fathers Day was a day with our kids, grandkids and friends at Belmont Race Track in New York. I was sure that Cosi Bellawas the horse to put my hopes on in the 7th.
My hopes were dashed. Cosi Bella finished out of the money. It was not the only bad pick yesterday.
We ended the day at Belmont after the 8th race.
My horse in the 8th may yet spin out of the final turn. We didn’t wait to see.
Driving back, my kids had a surprise for me.
At the spot on Eastern Parkway where Brownsville meets East New York we turned on to Howard Avenue and pulled up in front of a brick house with a wrought iron gate painted white and a car parked in the front yard. The facade looked like it had seen several remodeling jobs over the past hundred years, most recently with faux stone over the original red brick and a tin awning over a second floor porch.
This was probably the house to which my Dad arrived from the hospital when he was born in 1918 and the house he left to go fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Hundreds of women and men from Brooklyn did the same thing. In 1937 it was mainly a neighborhood of working class Jews who recognized the Civil War in Spain as the first battle in a world-wide fight against fascism and were eager to get into it. Three thousand American would go to Spain. A little less than half would come home alive.
They were genuine heroes.
There is no historic marker on the house on Howard Avenue. There are no monuments Confederate monuments, real heroes and Fathers Day. | Fred Klonsky: