Texas Pages

Their father was often one of the unemployed. “Every day my mother would underline the job possibilities in the New York Times classifieds,” Lennie said, “and fix my father a lunch and send him out to look for work. Every evening he came home without a job. One day she gave me a dime for the subway and told me to follow him and see where he went. I followed him and he went straight to the New York Public Library, straight into the reading room where he read all the papers. Then he ate his lunch, read more papers until it got late, then got on the subway and came back home.”

Children attended nearby PS 96, which was built after Coops residents demonstrated at City Hall. The teachers there were politically biased against Coops children, Lennie says, but discrimination was such a part of Coops residents’ lives that they became used to it. At their annual May Day parades, “the cops would beat the crap out of us,” he said. “They would turn their horses around and stick their rear ends in our faces.”
After public school Coops kids went to Schule, where Jewish (and Gentile) children learned Jewish culture, though not religion, in both Yiddish and English. Over 250 attended, ages six to twelve, and after graduation they went to Mittel Schule on Friday nights and Saturdays.

It was an enormous urban family. Everyone felt responsible for everyone else, Lennie says. Parents could leave their young children in the nursery care center or, for short trips to the market, the security guard would keep an eye on them. There was no thievery or crime of any kind, and chastity was strictly practiced. (Lennie knows.)

Parents kept the youth in constant motion with study and organized activities and clubs of all kinds. They had their own library and book and film clubs. Banquets, bake sales, craft sales and such by the residents raised enough money to pay the teachers for the schools and for the nursery. There were contests of fiction and poetry competition judged gratis by famous New York authors. Sports and social clubs, dances, and beauty contests (one beauty, Harriet Shapiro, changed her name to Susan Cabot and became a fairly well-known “B” movie actress in the 1950s).

These activities went on all the time but always with a social purpose. Uniforms, shirts or banners supported social causes such as that of the Scottsboro Boys and other political prisoners. Fun was important but causes took precedence. Some of the kids at PS 96 had looked forward to a school trip to see the Yankees play but when the ushers went on strike the Coops kids stayed at school rather than cross a picket line. Residents had such a fearsome reputation due to their participation in political rallies, demonstrations, and parades that they were outrageously gerrymandered by City Hall so that their voting bloc was divided in half. “The FBI came around from time to time, talking to the kids,” Lennie says, “asking questions, like if we’d seen (labor leaders) Earl Browder and Gus Hall around lately. They didn’t tell us they were FBI men but it wasn’t very hard to tell. We always told them we didn’t know anybody by those names.”
Gus Hall later became an unflagging candidate for President, never receiving as much as one percent of the vote. He last ran in 1984 and died in 2000 at the age of ninety.

During World War II over three hundred Coops boys volunteered, including Lennie. Harold was too young but was in the Drum and Bugle Corps. He enlisted after the war. Many were captured and wounded, and twelve were killed. Coops residents bought War Bonds, and volunteered at Red Cross Centers collecting blood and making bandages. They put out a newsletter with news and photos of Coops boys in the war.

As a teacher, Lennie never told his students about the social activism of his upbringing in the Coops. “I talked about the Coops in general, he said, but left out the left-wing politics of it. Someone would have talked about it at home, and it would have been blown out of proportion, and I might have been fired. So I just told them about the closeness of the family life, the clubs and athletics and other activities we had.”

Lennie and Harold are tight with their Coops friends who are still living and they all get together as often as possible. I was fortunate to meet one of them once. On a visit with Lennie to Harold's place in East Marian, Long Island, the brothers arranged for us to spend the final night of my visit in the home of their lifelong pal, Leon Lambert. He has solid white hair, a bit longer than Harold’s and Lennie’s and, unlike them, has a mustache and goatee. He looks a little like his namesake, Leon Trotsky. He’s an engineer but reminds me of the poet Edward Dahlberg. His house sits on a wooded hill at Old Field Point, overlooking Long Island Sound. He designed it himself. It is a house of engineering skill and poetry. Accumulated artifacts abound throughout its three floors. Books, newspapers, magazines are stacked everywhere. Like the brothers Stan—and most of the “lefties” from the Coops--Leon went to college and made good in a capitalist society. He has designed several buildings in New York.

I woke the next morning at tree level. I saw birdies face to face and, just beyond the trees, the waters of the Sound.

There was a Coops reunion a few years ago. Most of the Coopniks are over eighty now and are retired. Most of them graduated from college and were successful in one way or another, within an economic system their parents had worked so hard to ameliorate. Their work had little effect on the overall character of the economic system but, because of their good work as parents, success was easier for the children. Their parents couldn’t afford to buy stocks on Wall Street but the early foundation of books and learning they gave their children was an investment that always appreciates, is forever splitting and multiplying, and doesn’t have to be sold in order for its value to be realized.