My Turn: Salty and sweet memories of Coney Island

Coney Island is the setting for this story, my story. The characters in this seaside tale are a merging of salt-water taffy and Russian borscht. Here the Old World met a shoreline where immigrants dipped their toes into the Atlantic Ocean, where their sons learned to swim, and later where their grandchildren ate Nathan’s hot dogs and sugary, pink cones of cotton candy.

In the 1950s my mom and I would take the subway to Brooklyn to meet my grandparents, Charlie and Ethel, at Dubrow’s Cafeteria. After we chowed down lunch, Grandpa put us in his blue Pontiac sedan, circa 1955, and we were off to Coney … Island that is. Along the wide boardwalk, food stalls, games and amusement rides awaited.

A portly guy who suffered from watery eyes during hay fever season, Charlie wore pressed short-sleeved button-down shirts — perfect attire for Coney Island in 1957. Grandpa, who always enjoyed a good meal, dined out every day. When in Coney, my grandparents ate at Sasha’s, a Russian-style luncheonette near the boardwalk. When I visited, we would go to Nathan’s for hot dogs.

Nathan’s staff was famous for the speed with which the skinny, brown dogs were stuffed into soft, white buns for waiting customers pressed against the outdoor serving counter. Presented in a paper container, ridged French fries glistened with grease. Nothing has ever matched the savory saltiness of the Atlantic Ocean embedded in those potatoes.

A raconteur, his English flecked with Yiddish and surrounded on the sand by a bevy of senior ladies, the glinting sea behind him, Charlie enchanted women with his stories and his dimples. Grandpa oozed charm, even while blotting his watering eyes with cafeteria napkins from his shirt pocket. With a dangling cafeteria toothpick, which moved as he talked, this senior Casanova entertained the women on the beach.

Meanwhile, bristling at the sight of Charlie holding court, Grandma was the primmest matriarch to ever grace the boardwalk. Perched on a bench in shade, Ethel sported an umbrella to protect her flawless skin. With a buxom figure held stiff in a 1950s girdle and longline bra, Grandma was still a cute chick. In pearl button earrings and white beads, she posed with rouged cheeks watching Grandpa on the shoreline. Although she was irked, Ethel was not going to chance getting sand in her sensible, lace-up Oxford shoes.

Grandma always bought me a present at Coney Island. Once it was a Kewpie doll on a stick with pink feathers. Sometimes, I might have a custard cup. I loved the machine that took your penny and mashed it, fluid and soft and molten. A favorite stop was the glass case housing the “grandma” fortuneteller. A mannequin dressed in lavender silk, she predicted my destiny: Put in your coin, out popped your future!

And so I continued to visit my grandparents in Brooklyn until I grew up. By then things had changed. Brick buildings reached the skyline, higher than the Ferris wheel. Grandma died; Grandpa married his sister-in-law and moved to Florida. I got married, and Coney Island’s magic was gone with my grandparents.

Now a grandmother myself cruising supermarket aisles, when I spot Nathan’s hot dogs, I picture sand and cotton candy and a pretty old lady who bought me fortunes from a puppet in a glass case on a boardwalk in paradise.

Jackie Friedman,

East Hampton