In 1964, when I was eight, Morty hosted a kid’s show called “The Funny Company.” Morty was long-gone from the neighborhood by that time, but his mother still lived around the corner from us, and she and my mother went to the same beauty parlor. So one day my mother said to Morty’s mother, “Can your son get my son on his show?” Mother Gunty brokered the deal.

I can’t remember whether the show was live or on tape, but I know I was in the studio on a Monday. I know this because my mother insisted I get a haircut before the show, and my regular barbershop (inside of which hung a photo of me getting my first haircut) was closed on Mondays. So my mother took me to Al’s Barbershop for my haircut. It was the only time I went to Al’s, but many years later, when I was living in the East Village, I went to the Astor Place Barbershop for a haircut, and the guy who was cutting my hair looked very familiar. I took a look at his license. Al Rizza. He had given up his shop in Brooklyn for a chair at Astor Place.

Anyway, sufficiently shorn to my mother’s satisfaction, we headed to New York (as Brooklynites referred to Manhattan back then), for WOR studios. I was part of “the clubhouse” on Morty’s show, the equivalent of the peanut gallery. A group of kids would talk with Morty and tell jokes between cartoons. I think there were maybe six of us in the clubhouse, and for some reason I remember the last name of one chubby kid–Pfeffer. It stuck with me. The oddest things stick with me. Years later I had a gastroenterologist named Pfeffer. When I saw him the first time he pronounced my last name correctly. When I noted this he said, “When you have a name like Pfeffer you make an effort.”

Now as a kid I was pretty outgoing, a natural performer, but on “The Funny Company” I blew it. For some reason I froze up. Every time I was asked a question my monosyllabic answers were punctuated by Ralph Kramdenesque hum-a-na-hum-a-nas. On top of that, every time the camera panned to me I was scratching my back, because it was so itchy from the haircut.

All the kids on the show were asked to bring one joke to tell. This was the heyday of the moron joke, and I got mine from a book of moron jokes.

“Why did the moron take a bag of oats to bed with him?”

“I don’t know, why did the moron take a bag of oats to bed with him?”

“So he could feed his nightmares!”

Another Peter Cherches story about the old neighborhood appears in the Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood anthology Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He blogs about food, travel, writing and occasionally his childhood at http://petercherches.blogspot.com

There were three candy stores in my immediate neighborhood, but our favorite was Fred and Rudy’s. Up front were the newsstand, the candy counter and the ice cream case, where they stored the tubs of Breyer’s for our cones. Then, as you moved further into the shop, there was the lunch counter, with revolving stools, of course, and booths. As kids we preferred the counter. It was our bar. We’d sit on stools and drink malteds, or egg creams, or cherry-lime Rickeys, or Rock ’n’ Root root beer in frosted mugs, or Cokes, large or small, in official Coke glasses. I remember when the price of a small coke went up from six cents to seven. We often munched on long two-cent stick pretzels while drinking and shooting the bull.

Fred and Rudy were like night and day, good cop and bad cop. Fred Leibowitz was a slight, bald guy with a mustache, a good-humored sweetheart. He reminded me a bit of Groucho Marx. Rudy Schiffman was a big bastard, mean and humorless. We spent less time in the store during Rudy’s shifts, especially since he often kicked us out when we got rowdy. There was even a little ditty, well-known in the neighborhood, that summed up the two men, sung to the tune of “Camptown Races,” but all I can remember now is:

Fred’s OK but Rudy stinks, Doo-dah, doo-dah!

I was a wise guy, even as a little kid, and I was always arousing the ire of Rudy. I remember, when I was ten or eleven years old I had been learning about largely defunct diseases, a favorite subject of fifth grade social studies in the New York City public schools. Mr. Malachowsky had taught us about scurvy, and rickets, and berri berri, as well as a rare tropical disease called yaws. Well, in Brooklyn we pronounce “yours” and “yaws” the same way. Rudy, when he would take our order, would often say, “What’s yours?” So one day I responded, “A rare tropical disease,” and my friends on the adjoining stools started cracking up. “Out of the store,” Rudy yelled. “All of you!”

When Fred and Rudy weren’t looking we’d often stand by the magazine rack and peek at the Playboy centerfold. If Rudy caught us he’d make us stop. Fred usually turned a blind eye, though sometimes he’d say, “What do you think this is, kid, a library?”

A couple of celebrities grew up in the immediate neighborhood. One was a minor stand-up comic named Morty Gunty. The bigger star was Lainie Kazan, whose real last name was Levine. Lainie, who got her big break as Barbara Streisand’s understudy in “Funny Girl,” was extremely well-endowed, and in 1970 she did a photo spread for Playboy.

Lainie was long-gone from the neighborhood by this time, but her mother still lived in the old apartment. Lainie’s mother had to give Fred and Rudy’s wide berth for a while after one of the neighborhood wise guys (not me this time) said to her, “Hey Mrs. Levine, I saw your daughter’s big tits in Playboy–Hubba-hubba!”

Fred and Rudy’s closed some time in the Seventies, a few years before I left the neighborhood. For the most part the neighborhood candy store is a thing of the past in New York, but there are still a few left. I hope the kids in those neighborhoods appreciate their local treasures.

Peter Cherches is a writer who specializes in very short prose, both fiction and nonfiction. He blogs about food, travel, dreams and writing at petercherches.blogspot.com