The Sheffield Farms and Borden's milkmen came every morning in their horse-drawn carts, and the man from Cushman's came with warm seeded rolls and cinnamon buns with raisins for my father's breakfast.
Thursdays, a man in a wooden Model A wagon brought fresh butter and eggs from a farm in New Jersey, and Fridays a man with a pedal-operated wheel for sharpening knives and scissors, who fixed umbrellas too, came.
I don't remember how often the old clothes man came, but he'd walk down the wooden steps from the street to the service entrance of my apartment house with a sack of old clothing over his shoulder.
He'd put down the sack, cup his hands to his mouth, throw back his head and shout up twenty stories to all the apartments with windows on each of the two courtyards.
Later, someone told me he shouted, "cash your clothes," but back then I could never make out the words.
There was an organ grinder with a battered felt hat who wheeled a big box organ with wheelbarrow handles from street to street.
He had a little monkey with a red cap, red uniform and a tin cup and he would stop every few hundred yards, rest the organ down on its front legs, put the monkey on the sidewalk and crank a brass handle to play old tunes you could always hum, but whose names you couldn't always remember-- Funiculi Funicula, Old Kentucky Home, Washington Post March, East Side West Side All Around The Town.
People would drop pennies into the tin cup and the monkey would tip his cap.
Other people would wrap a coin in a piece of paper so it wouldn't roll away and throw it out their window and the monkey would skip over, pick it up and tip his cap to the window.
We used to wonder how the organ grinder trained the monkey to do that.
One end of the organ had a brass dial with numbers on it and people could walk up to the organ grinder, request the Pennsylvania Polka or some other tune and he'd turn the brass dial to the right number, crank the brass handle and grind it out.
One year he came round without the little monkey in the red cap and red suit.
He put a cigar box down for people to drop their pennies into.
When they wrapped a coin in paper and threw it out of their window, he waited till he'd finished playing and then went round and picked it up himself before he wheeled his organ a few hundred yards farther down the street.
I asked my mother what had happened to the monkey.
She told me the organ grinder had sold him to the zoo.
I pretended to believe her.
That was the year President Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the U.
S.
and closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping.
To defend against the six-million-man army Japanese Army and their Navy's ten aircraft carriers, ten battleships, thirty-eight cruisers, one hundred twelve destroyers and sixty-five submarines, he merged the U.
S.
army regulars and Filipino scouts into a twenty-two-thousand-man strong joint command under General MacArthur.
He gave them the support of three cruisers, thirteen destroyers, eighteen submarines, six P.
T.
boats and thirty-five new B-17 Flying Fortresses.
Nineteen of the thirty-five B-17s were caught on the ground and destroyed at Clark Field, by Japanese planes from Formosa, the day after Pearl Harbor.