Word: banana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Joseph Keaton Jr. was born to a knockabout vaudeville family and quickly put on the stage. The lad toured with his family until 1917, when he entered films as second banana to Fatty Arbuckle. In 1920, Keaton left Arbuckle to make his own movies. The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all-intuitively. His body, honed by vaudeville pratfalls, was a splendid contraption. And as a director, Keaton was born fully mature. He was just 25 then, and as eager to mine...
...Keaton the end came abruptly, sadly, in the late '20s. His producer, who was also his brother-in-law, sold him out, literally, to MGM, and Keaton lost control of his films. It was a crash that led to pained obscurity--as second banana to Jimmy Durante, gag writer for Red Skelton, waxwork to Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd., cracked mirror image to Chaplin in the 1952 Limelight. Keaton died at 70 in 1966. He never got to savor the happy ending that film history had planned: the rediscovery and restoration of his films, the flabbergasted smiles of today...
...emigrated from Jamaica in his early 20s, 17 years before I was born. He never discussed his life in Jamaica, but I do know that he was the second of nine children born to poor folk in Top Hill. He literally came to America on a banana boat, a United Fruit Co. steamer that docked in Philadelphia. He went to work for Ginsburg's (later named the Gaines Co.), manufacturers of women's suits and coats at 500 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan's garment district. He started out working in the stock room, moved up to become a shipping clerk...
...South Bronx, where my family had moved in 1943, when I was six. In those days, Hunts Point was heavily Jewish mixed with Irish, Polish, Italian, blacks and Hispanics. The block of Kelly Street next to ours was slightly curved, and the neighborhood had been known for years as "Banana Kelly." We never used the word ghetto. Ghettos were somewhere in Europe. We lived in the tenements...
...have been asked when I first felt a sense of racial identity, when I first understood that I belonged to a minority. In those early years, I had no such sense, because on Banana Kelly there was no majority. Everybody was either a Jew, an Italian, a Pole, a Greek, a Puerto Rican or, as we said in those days, a Negro. Racial epithets were hurled around and sometimes led to fistfights. But it was not "You're inferior--I'm better.'' The fighting was more like avenging an insult to your team. Among my boyhood friends were Victor Ramirez...