Little Old Carnasie
Characters Of Canarsie

It was just about the time when the news came that the Japanese had asked to end the Second World War when Avenue L had a restaurant and bar owned by Max Miller on the corner of East 92nd Street and Arthur Gabriel had a bar at Avenue L and East 93rd Street.

Meanwhile, Paul Kretzchmar had one on Avenue L and East 95th Street. Many Canarseins went to the bars to celebrate the victory. Most of all, the boys could concentrate on ending things on the European side also. At these times, on Avenue L you would see always the same faces. Among them would be Bob Cunningham, George Wilmont (Cardboard George), George & Elmer Bell, Lester Tyndall, Patsy Marchette & son Fluffy, Jimmy Viola, Thomas Donahue, and also yours truly.

Upstairs, over the Canarsie Theatre, was a Pool and Billiard Parlor owned by the future "Mayor of Canarsie" Frank Botino, who had a tough struggle to keep going, as over a hundred of the boys who patronized his place were in the uniforms of the Army, Navy and Marines and had to go overseas.

But he managed to keep going until they returned. One cannot forget two characters who always showed up during the day - from where, no one knew. One lived in a squatters shack down in a gully at about East 87th Street and Avenue M where Joe Gangler, a popular circus man, had his winter quarters where you could see his animals kept in shape and taught the various stunts they would go through on the stage of many theatres in the metropolitan area.

One of the characters was Poppa Fritz, who all the boys on Avenue L knew. He called out that he was bothered every time there was a full moon and he couldn't sleep.

The other character was a black man who everyone knew as "Percolator." He used to go around and cut grass or trim hedges for some of the families living here as he tried to make a living and was a very likeable man. All we knew about him was that his name was Eddie and he lived in a homemade shack at a spot past East 87th Street, which, at that time, was all meadows.

One cold winter morn, "Percolator" didn't show up on the Avenue, as there had been quite a big snow storm. One of the boys who knew him, Charlie Burroughs, who worked in the Canarsie Theatre, went and ploughed through the deep snow to investigate and there he saw poor old "Percolator" outside of the window of his squatter shack frozen to death, as he probably couldn't get to the front door on account of the deep snow.

They took him over the morgue at Kings County Hospital and Borroughs went around with some of the boys from the Avenue and, with the help of the girls in Rheinhardt's Restaurant, they placed containers in Millers and Pauls Bar and in the restaurant and raised some money. So Charlie went to funeral director Jimmy Lapolla, who volunteered to go with a hearse and get Percolator to be buried in Canarsie Cemetery in a donated grave along Avenue K side.

When they got him, they drove the hearse along Avenue L and stopped at Miller's, Rheinhart's and Paul's to show everyone that a lovable man was going to a decent place and not to a potters field.

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