09/19/2007
Around the Block and Then Some
By Tom Range, Sr.

Bob Riordan

On the last Thursday in August, the day after the weekly distribution of The Courier, a phone call was received at the newspaper's office.  The mature male voice of the caller asked about that week's "Around the Block" column.  He recognized the name of the columnist, myself, and remembered that there was an older brother in a family of the same name that he grew up with in a section of New York City's borough of Queens.  The caller, Bob Riordan, asked that he be put in touch with me and left his phone number. 

While for the column I have created a fictional family, the Randells; this family with its mother, father and two sons born eight years apart, is based upon my own.  What amused my caller particularly in the recent column was my account of six-year-old boys taking a subway ride and peering out of the window in the front of the first car of the train.

Within hours I acknowledged Bob's call.  We had indeed grown up together.  On the phone, we two went through reminiscences of eight years of parochial grammar school, a half a grade apart.  He had graduated in the early spring of 1951, and I in June of that year.  We lived within two city blocks of each other.

Noting my last name on the caller ID feature of his phone, he answered by announcing "Mother Wenceslaus wants you down in her office immediately."  Mother Wenceslaus, of the order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, was the principal of the parochial grammar school of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, from which we had graduated 56 years ago.  Our being a half-year apart precluded us from being in the same classes but we kept together after school hours, on weekends and during the summer, generally joining in street sports.  We both could play a mean game of stickball. 

Our mutual friends and acquaintances number in the dozens.  As an example, my older brother Harry dated a girl whose family lived across the street from Bob's.  They broke up, but the girl wound up marrying one of Bob's cousins who had lived on the next block.  And another example, the kid sister of one mutual friend we went to grammar school with married another of our friends, when the two were in college. 

And so the conversation went during our initial phone call.  We reminisced about the nuns who taught us, the parish clergy, the neighborhood movie theaters and the local candy store, who married whom, where they are living, and even if they are living. Tragically some of our childhood companions had met death much too early.  Others, all of us now in or approaching our 70s, are passing on in the normal course of life.

To compound this set of coincidences, Bob and the Riordan family lived two doors away from the Turek family on Dartmouth Street in Forest Hills.  Bob remembered these neighbors very well.  They had two children about 10 years older than Bob.  He remembered the father as a grouch but the mother as a sweetheart.  The mother Cecelia Turek was my wife Joanne's great aunt, the sister of her grandmother.  Joanne had often visited her Turek relatives on Dartmouth Street, long before the two of us had met and married, and no doubt had at least nodded hello to the neighbor boy during her visits.

Our neighborhood was substantially Irish-American.  I have Donahues and O'Keefes in my family.  Bob has Riordans and Marrons in his.  Our mutual friends bore family names including Farrell, Cunningham, Cullinan and Daly; all these families having been drawn to America and to New York to live better than what was available to them in the "old country."  And whether you were a "narrowback" third generation American whose ancestors came over during the Famine, or the child of "greenhorns" right off the boat, you were Irish until you breathed your last.

How a couple of street kids living two blocks from each other, effectively separated for 56 years were reunited in a community 240 miles from the New York neighborhood in which they grew up will keep them and their families scratching their heads in wonder.