An Interview with Dr. Appell: Boyhood in New York City

Ken Appell discusses his early childhood in Queens, New York; this 8 1/2-minute segment was taped in August 2008. (Transcript follows; for pictures of his house and neighborhood, see the accompanying photo gallery.)

"I was born March 23rd, 1923 in New York City, Manhattan – one of the unusual [cases] when somebody was born in Manhattan, not immigrated there. We lived on 77th Street off York Avenue, and my family – including my father and my mother and my sister – subsequently moved to Queens, where my dad bought a house on 42nd Street in Long Island City, and we lived there for many years. My mother subsequently died while we lived there. I was about five years old, I guess, when she passed away. And the rest of my childhood was influenced by my grandmother, who lived next door, and I was brought up essentially under her direction.

My family was, my father was of German extraction – Bavarian – and my mother was Czechoslovak, from Bohemia. I went to grammar school P.S. 6 in Astoria, which is still there, the school is still there. And it was a school that you walked to – it was a walk of about, oh, about three city blocks. Which was fine in the spring and summer but in the wintertime it was plowing through a lot of snow (chuckles). I graduated from P.S. 6 after falling off a gate and breaking my arm, and subsequently went to Bryant High School, which at that time was located in Long Island City. And Bryant was an interesting school, in the sense that the students came from a wide area in Queens, and Brooklyn, even. The school subsequently moved to a new building in Queens. While they were building that school, some of the students from Long Island City High School were switched over to a school in Sunnyside which was sort of an annex of Bryant High School. And that was an interesting experience because walking from my house on 25th Avenue and 42nd Street in Astoria to Sunnyside was a walk of approximately, maybe, 1 1/2 to two miles. And in order to get there, I improvised a shortcut through the Long Island City freight yards. I would get to school by hopping across the tracks and getting to school that way.

My dad worked for the Railway Express Agency,* he drove an electric truck in Manhattan. He did that for years, and he drove one of the last electric trucks the Railway Express Agency had in Manhattan. So my association with my father was, ah, sort of distant. He was kind of a quiet man, he didn’t socialize too much – although he did like to have some friends in for a drink once in a while, you know, he enjoyed that.

My upbringing was essentially under the aegis of my grandmother, who did all the cooking. And we went from my apartment to her apartment, which was next door – we lived in two family houses there. I would take my meals there with my grandmother, and she was the one that made me go to church with her every Sunday (chuckles) and every holiday, and on Friday I had to eat fish. She was a devout Catholic, and an absolute world-reknowned cook! (chuckles) I can remember her manufacturing a soup for the family and starting off with an empty bottle of ketchup, which she rinsed out with water, put it in the pot, and managed to get various and sundry ingredients from the refrigerator and come up with this delicious soup that everybody enjoyed. She was a wonderful person, and I adored her. She was a woman who managed to do a lot of things with very little income.

Uh, she used to like to go to a Bohemian church over in New York City -- I think it was in the 60s between 1st and 2nd Avenue, I think it was. And I remember her taking me there on Sundays many times to listen to, uh, short plays and things that were done in Czechoslovak. And of course I didn’t understand that much Czechoslovak. The only Czech I understood was what my grandmother taught me, and she didn’t teach me enough to follow the script of a play. But I would spend a Sunday over there, and we would have dinner over there – a typical Czechoslovak meal a lot of times, with what they call knedlíky** and zeli*** and pork, you know. That was very pleasant. She also used to take me to soccer games. At that time, a trolley car ran down Steinway Avenue, which was the main drag in Astoria, and at the end of the road, at Steinway Avenue, there was a soccer field. And of course the ethnic, uh, mid-European people in the area all gathered there on a Sunday, and they would play soccer. I didn’t know what soccer was (chuckles) from anything, but I’d watch them running up and down the field kicking this ball, and that was a pleasant way of spending a Sunday afternoon, too.

As far as my high school was concerned, uh, I wasn’t particularly interested in anything except maybe biology was a little more fascinating to me than anything else. I always felt rather – I didn’t feel that I was a real “brain,” as you would call it, you know. Although I did get good marks, I got good marks because I’d spend time. I had this quality of being very – if I started to do something, I really stuck to it, and I worked at it, and so I spent a lot of effort that way. But I guess biology was one of the more interesting subjects that I had."

* An important cargo railroad (1917-1975).
** dumplings (bread or potatoe)
*** sauerkraut