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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Moes Bioaest Catch Found Rose Dangling on His Line By BILLY ROSE Among the doodads on my desk is an old piece of string wrapped around a wooden spool, and people who come to my office often quiz me about it. My rough, ready and routine answer is: I'm fond of that bit of string because, thanks to it, my business address is Sixth Avenue instead of Davy Jones's Locker. But let me crank the reel back 44 years and give it to you as my Aunt Frieda would put it "in sequins." . . The scene I remember most vividly vivid-ly on the East Side is the dock near the Fulton Fish Market where we used to go swimming on sum mer days when school was out and the tide was in. And the waterfront water-front character who usually takes stage center in my memory is a little ragbag of a man we called Crazy Moe who SDent lVJ pie of hammock swings and pitched me into the river. I landed ker-splash ker-splash between a grapefruit rind and a floating bottle, and water began be-gan rushing into me from every opening. AS 1 WAS GOING down for the second time I somehow got tangled up in a bit of string, and when my head broke water I saw Crazy Moe standing on the dock hauling in his second fish me, and I was darned . near as dead as the first one. The line, of course, wasn't strong enough to do more than keep me afloat, but it gave Terry a chance to dive in and pull me over to the ladder. After I had recovered breath and bravado, I asked Crazy Moe to let me have his fishing line for a keepsake, and when he demurred I bribed it away from him with what was an Important piece of money in those days-a days-a new Liberty Head nickel. Today, many decades and chins later, the piece of string occupies a prominent place among the mementos me-mentos on my desk-sort of a mute reminder of the time when my life hung by a hair. And my favorite mermaid who, of course, knows this story says it explains why I married her. "You wanted a swimmer in the family," says Eleanor, "because the next time they throw you in, there may not be a Crazy Moe hanging around." ONE DAY A BOY named Terry, the most promising juvenile delinquent delin-quent on Avenue A, swiped a mackerel mack-erel from a fish stand, dove off the dock when Moe wasn't looking and hooked the fish onto his line. And when the tetched one began to pull in his "catch," his hands shook so violently that the fish looked alive. Before he could get wise to the deception, however, one of the kids grabbed the mackerel out of his hand and hacked its head oft with a jackknife. Crazy Moe cussed at us for five minutes min-utes and it wasn't because he wanted to stuff and mount the fish, he just wanted to throw th. poor thing back. There was another day when this same Terry decided it was time 1 learned how to wim, and when I tried to ward him off with the wily dialectics of a seven-year-old he began calling me "sissy" and "yella belly." Finally, realizing there was no way to dodge the dunking, I stripped down to my shorts. Terry and another kid grabbed hold of me. gave me a cou- most of his days BMy Rose spool-fishing over the edge of the pier. We often pointed out to this in-compleat in-compleat angler that he was wasting wast-ing his time that no self-respecting flounder would be caught sauteed in the polluted waters of the East River but Crazy Moe paid no attention at-tention to us. His answer, when he bothered to answer at all, was that he didn't much care about catching anything he just liked to fish. And as nearly as we could tell, he never even took the trouble to bait bis j hook. |