A fabulous town.

A filthy town.

A dangerous town.

A crime-filled town.

A fun town.

A rich town.

A poor town.

A helluva town.

The town I grew up in.

What a terrible place for me to come of age.

Let’s see how “terrible” it actually was.

I lived in Flushing. A neighborhood in the Borough of Queens (a major residential section of the biggest city in the world). And within walking distance from my small apartment on 194th Street and 37th Avenue? Five of my best friends. My elementary school. My high school. Two Catholic churches with schools. A playground with swings, slides, and monkey bars. A sandlot where I learned to play baseball and football.

Two large grocery stores. A Jewish deli. A pharmacy. A luncheonette with an ice cream counter, candy, cigarettes, newspapers, and a soda fountain. (I worked part-time at both the pharmacy and the luncheonette from 1955 until 1958. My first real jobs. What a great learning experience.) There was also a liquor store, a dry cleaner, a butcher shop, a barber, and a handful of other retail shops.

One block away: a bus stop.

Fifteen cents. A bus every fifteen minutes. A fifteen-to-twenty-minute ride to Main Street, Flushing (where my whole daily world opened up). Two large movie theaters. Eateries including, of course, a Chinese restaurant and an Italian restaurant. Two major department stores. A bakery. Clothing stores. Shoe stores.

Flushing alone had over 100,000 inhabitants. (Over 200,000 now.) It was kinda my universe.

Another “terrible” opportunity: at Bayside High School, the school nurse noticed my large overbite (aka, buck teeth) and guided me to obtain a $5,000 three-year orthodontia job. At no cost to me.

From Bayside, I applied and was accepted at Queens College, one of five city colleges in our “terrible” city. Tuition: about twelve dollars a semester. Literally free.

I graduated from Brooklyn College (another of our terrible city’s tuition-free colleges) in 1961, with a commission in the U.S. Air Force as a Second Lieutenant.

Thus started my thirty-year career as an Air Force officer.

Yeah. A Terribly Terrific place to grow up. It marked me forever.

What’s it like now? The media still paints New York as dangerous. I don’t know for sure. But I suspect it still holds its opportunities for a young kid who wants to make something of himself, who’s willing to walk a few blocks and catch a bus and do the hard work.

It sure did that for me.

Enuf.