A member Of The Club, 1951, Part Two

For me, a high point of going to the Incarnation Catholic Club, other than the twenty-five cent milk shakes, was the television room. My father had yet to make the big purchase decision required for a television set. At the club, a black and white television set, big for those times, was mounted on a wall platform in a darkened, high-ceilinged   room with a half-dozen rows of old movie seats. Normally the province of cigar smoking club regulars watching baseball, the television room on Sunday mornings at eleven was taken over by a crew of adolescent wise guys. A West Philadelphia appliance dealer named Mort Farr, smug in his mistaken conviction that he could competently star in his own commercials, presided over a local version of the then popular local Quiz Kids radio and TV program. The panel contained an inordinate number of nerdy Jewish kids who competed with the same eye on stardom as their host, the theatrical Mr. Farr. The show was pure grist for a gallery of low achieving, cigarette-smoking teenagers. Every question, every answer from the TV screen brought out some brilliant rejoinder from one of my peers, usually as low as it was dumb. I loved it.

 

All week, I looked forward to Sunday mornings in the club’s TV room with the company of so many of the neighborhood’s leading lights. Unfortunately, a kid named Bobby McGrath, who didn’t like me, or for that matter didn’t like anyone, had become Lefty Huber’s helper in running the club. After a couple of Sunday mornings, even Bobby McGrath became aware of the crowd arriving and disappearing into a now noisy TV room. One Sunday, about ten minutes into the show, after Mort Farr had finished picking his nose while doing a washing machine pitch, after Gerry Konish had brought the house down by imitating the adenoidal, bow-tied genius from Jay Cooke Junior High School, Bobby McGrath flipped on the overhead lights and demanded to see everyone’s   membership cards. I had not been a dues-paying member of the Incarnation Catholic Club for over two years. It was pay up, join up or leave.

I never returned to the club per se. However, on Sunday nights, the club’s basketball courts were the setting for what was one of the saddest parish dances in North Philadelphia. The room was too dark, the crowd always pitifully small and almost always made of people I knew. But worse, they were people who knew me. There was no way that going to the Incarnation dance could be cool. Just to show up at Inky on Sunday night, was a public admission of desperation. It meant that you didn’t have access to a car, that you were reduced to socializing with the very people who had gone to elementary school with you. It was a place where your only chances were with the younger girls from the classes behind your own. And that, in the caste stratification of neighborhood teenagers, was the mark of hopeless social failure. On most Sunday nights, I endured our living room, sitting with my mother and father and brother, looking at John Kiernan’s Kaleidoscope, “Ah, the wonders of the pyramids…,” and then Senor Wences on the Ed Sullivan Show.

The club, like so many of my memories of the old neighborhood, faded with time and distance. In a chance meeting with another now-graying “kid” from our street, the club came up as one of the passing items in our “remember when” conversation. By the early sixties, the club went the way of new classrooms and a library to meet the needs of the then growing parish school. The closest any us veterans of the Incarnation Catholic Club are ever going to get to reliving our club days probably will be when we’re being bundled off to some senior citizen activities center. When that time arrives however, our ability to  recognize any similarities will be conditional upon our knowing where we are, not at all a sure thing.