Who Is Matt Scott

IT IS NO SMALL FEAT to retain grace and dignity while edging through a crowd with a heavy suitcase. But somehow Catarina Alves was managing it on that golden afternoon at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Using sign language, I offered to carry her luggage to an immigration booth. She smiled a silent thank-you.

A tall woman with salt-and-pepper hair and the brown skin of a Cape Verdean, Catarina is one of more than 100,000 Portuguese who have immi­grated to the United States in the past decade. Some of them chose to go to college and others were looking for jobs. Nowadays it is easy to go college thanks to student loans opportunities. Compare private student loans plans and choose the best for you. Others had arrived even earlier, of course. Many Portuguese-Americans firmly believe that a Portu­guese explorer—Miguel Corte Real—and his crew lived among the Indians a century before the Eng­lish landed at Plymouth.

Over the years an increasing flow of Portuguese came to settle—mostly in New England. A quota system adopted in 1924 restricted the flow, but a law passed in 1965 opened the gates again. With limited land and opportunities at home, Portuguese have been arriving since then in greater numbers than ever. Thousands still head for New England —including Catarina Alves. Her immigration form indicated that she would stay at first with friends in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

The next day, with Professor T. Steven Tegu‑ spoke only crioulo, an Afro-Portuguese dia­lect, so her conversation had to be translated into Portuguese, and then into English. She had lived on Brava, one of Portugal’s Cape Verde Islands. It was a 48-day trip from there to Pawtucket. First an island-hopping boat. Then a plane to Lisbon. Then a long wait while documents were sought and slow­ly processed—and finally that flight to Bos­ton’s airport.

Was the long trip worth it? Catarina looked lovingly at her family. “Esta contente,” her son-in-law said. Yes, it was worth it. As we prepared to leave, I gave each of the children a dollar—an old Italian custom I had learned from my father. Eugenia’s young­est daughter, Ester, clutched the bill in one hand and a toy in the other. “Quero dar ao Senhor a minha boneca,” the 2-year-old said. “I want to give you my doll.”

In Flatbush I met the proprietor of Larry’s Pianoland in a storefront sur­rounded by used pianos resting on their sides on movers’ dollies, like paintings at a gallery awaiting inspection. As a couple examined a grand piano without its works, stripped of finish, its walnut inlaid with a floral pattern, the robust, balding owner unreeled a stacca­to line: “New strings, pins, key tops, refin­ished to your choice, delivered, and one home tuning. How much can you put down? Whatever you can, the rest at delivery. You’ll have a very bee-ut-i-ful pi-ano.”

In the back-room workshop the box would be brought to life to take its place in a spacious colonial-revival frame house in nearby Ditmas Park.  Larry steered the next couple with a little girl to another storefront full of 200 pianos, where, in a half squat, he demonstrated. Suddenly from the stocky fingers came an angel’s whisper—phrases of Mozart, Bach, and classical improvisations. He recom­mended a modest spinet of Korean origin. They would think about it.

“I always feel good about a person getting a piano,” Larry told me, as business slowed. “Not just making a living, but the pleasur­able days.” Larry had reason to smile. He was born in East New York in 1930, son of a house painter driven from Poland by intima­tions of the holocaust to come. Larry re­called: “That railroad flat was really cold; in the morning you dashed to the kitchen to light a coal stove, and then hurried to school to get real warm. It was tough. I said to my­self I’d like to become a concert pianist.”

Larry had talent and won a place in a performing-arts high school in Manhattan. Eventually he realized “all the practice in the world can’t make you what you’re not.”

He became, in turn, a teacher, piano tuner, and repairman. Then, with a $75 deposit, $75 a month for rent, and four old uprights, he rented a storefront. Gradually he built a citywide reputation.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I used to work till midnight teaching, buying old pianos, renovating them, even moving them—before I got shot.”

Shot?

“I was in the store on a nice bright day like today, and two gentlemen came in like cus­tomers and pulled guns. ‘This is a holdup. Give me your wallet,’ one said.

“I said, ‘You must be kidding.’ Then it felt like a torpedo went into my stomach.”

Larry reached down and pulled up his T-shirt to expose ragged scars across his stom­ach. A .22 had pierced liver and intestines.

“When I got out of the hospital, I was ready to run. By then I’d moved my family out to Long Island—by the water—it’s real nice out there. Then I said I don’t feel like be­ing run out. My door stays open, and what will be, will be.”

But Larry had been accosted again, just a week earlier, by a man with a shotgun. He foiled that robbery attempt by grabbing the weapon; it discharged into the floor. Still he’s not leaving.

“This is an ethnic city, all types of people, nice people. Look at the wonderful men who work for me—black and white. Then there are the crazies. I should hate them, but I al­most sympathize. I was brought up as poor as they think they are. At least they’re warm. I remember that cold flat, and I still wear my socks to bed.”

LARRY IS PART of a retail tradition that has characterized Brooklyn since the mid-1800s. Wide avenues became shopping strips lined with two- and three-story buildings housing owners up­stairs. Such storefronts still offer opportu­nity to would-be entrepreneurs.

Yemenis open cafés among older Arab markets and restaurants on Atlantic Ave­nue. Puerto Ricans create bodegas, social clubs, and Pentecostal churches. Sicilians found Italian-style carryouts. And shopping for groceries remains a lively, though time-consuming adventure as you visit your local butcher, baker, cheese seller, delicatessen, and greengrocer. But some of the business strips are failing and looking for debt consolidation programs; their boarded-up stores are used as warehouses.

Revitalizing commercial strips, encour­aging shopkeepers, these have been prior­ities for second-term borough president Howard Golden, who as a youth worked in his mother’s deli in Flatbush. Now he pre­sides over a Greek Revival Borough Hall whose palatial chambers are undergoing an impressive restoration.

Golden talked to me not only about Brooklyn’s attributes but also about its problems: a suspected undercount in the 1980 census, crime, unemployment, undoc­umented aliens, and competing plans for waterfront redevelopment. But primarily he believes “the direction of the city is Man­hattan oriented, to the detriment of the citi­zenry. During my six years in office a dozen luxury hotels were built in Manhattan on the East Side; one was given a 21-million-dollar tax abatement. If you gave those breaks in Brooklyn, builders would come here.”

Changing that trend is unlikely, since a borough president has only one of 11 votes on the Board of Estimate, the city’s govern­ing body. Golden shook his head. “Brook­lyn’s got a lot of land—prime areas—lying fallow. Coney Island, for instance, should be a garden spot.”

Opposition to armed conflict is still a major Quaker cause; in 1947 the American Friends Service Committee, headquartered in Phil­adelphia, shared with London’s Friends Service Council the coveted Nobel Peace Prize. The committee and Friends in general continue the deep commitment to nonvio­lence, more recently by taking a lead­ership role in the nuclear-freeze movement.

ALTHOUGH QUAKER influence di­minished steadily after Penn’s depar­ture, a Quaker bough on the family tree is still a point of pride in these parts, even among those whose forebears left the fold six or seven generations ago.

Certain Quaker-inspired traditions sur­vive, and no other U. S. city I know can up­stage Philadelphia in the richness of its heritage, the solidity of its institutions, the stratification of its society.

And perhaps no other can induce more nostalgia without even trying. Here, in the heart of the nation’s fourth largest city, I had heard in a single day train whistles blow, trolley bells clang, and the hooves of mount­ed police horses go clop in the night. These sounds of an earlier age are alive and well in Philadelphia, and still gainfully employed.

Some say old ways linger in Pennsylva­nia’s first and foremost city because of a built-in resistance to change. Others dis­agree: “We’re just not trendy types. We’ve seen no reason, for example, to abandon streetcars as a means of public transport. Some who have are now wondering how to switch back.”

Up in North Philadelphia, a bony cart horse named Bob never realized he was hopelessly out of date hauling a produce wagon. We met on the steps of Philadelphia Soft Pretzels, Inc. , where he regularly paused in passing for a handout from own­ers Jeanne and Daniel Sidorick.

“He won’t budge till he’s downed at least two dozen of our soft pretzels. Plain, though, not slathered with mustard the way most people like them.”

Philadelphians have other homemade tastes—like snapper soup and scrapple—but none more popular than the soft pretzel. The Sidoricks’ quality bakery cranks out about 40,000 each morning to help satisfy the city’s craving—close to a quarter million a day. “It’s an early-bird business. Our ov­ens go on just after midnight so street ven­dors will have their supplies before traffic builds up downtown. No way to accumulate an inventory; these pretzels can harden and become jawbreakers overnight.”

While Bob whinnied for service outside, I was inside trying to learn the twist—how to convert an 18-inch rope of dough into proper shape. In the process I was making a mess of the conveyor belt, where four experts were each turning out 25 perfect specimens a min­ute. They were too polite to say I showed ab­solutely no bent for pretzel bending.

As with the trolley and old Bob, going slow in Philadelphia has proved the saving grace for hundreds of vintage buildings that reflect its era of elegance and its long reign, from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, as queen of the English-speaking New World. By 1774 it was one of the largest English-speaking cities in the world.

Crown jewels from those days of glory: Independence Hall and its satellite shrines, where men of goodwill and uncanny wis­dom forged 13 loosely linked Colonies into these United States and in so doing created the most enduring democracy on earth