Bronx Girl
“The Bronx? No thonx!!” wrote the poet Ogden Nash.
As a kid growing up in the Bronx I didn’t get it, I didn’t realize my borough had a bad rap, and I certainly wouldn’t have understood why. The Bronx was my home and I loved it. (See Parkchester, Celebrate Me Home)
I even went to college in the Bronx, but then grad school and marriage finally took me out. But although I was then living elsewhere, I spent four decades of my working life commuting back as a public educator in Bronx high schools.
And although there may be some degree of rapport among all folks who discover they’re from the same hometown, I contend there’s a special bond among us Bronxites. We seem to share an unpretentiousness, a true grit, and of course that Bronx accent.
And one thing we all know – Ogden Nash was dead wrong!
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Dana Susan LehrmanThis retired librarian loves big city bustle and cozy country weekends, friends and family, good books and theatre, movies and jazz, travel, tennis, Yankee baseball, and writing about life as she sees it on her blog World Thru Brown Eyes!
www.WorldThruBrownEyes.com
Ogden’s ‘poem’ was offensive: “The Bronx? No, thonx! I’d rather be in hell Than live in the Bronx.”
You’re right Kevin, Ogden Nash’s poem was horribly offensive. Years later in 1964 Dr Abraham Tauber, dean of Bronx Community College, wrote Nash expressing his long dismay with the poem. He got this response.
I wrote those lines “The Bronx? No thanx.” / I shudder to confess them./ Now I’m an older wiser man/ I cry “The Bronx? / God bless them!”
Contritely yours,
Ogden Nash
I think we either love or hate where we are from. You clearly love it, Dana. Glad to learn that Nash wrote his own form of an apology!
Yes, and that apology was a long time coming!
Enjoy London!
Go Bronx–let’s hear it for your Bronx cheer! Home is where the heart is, and you have a big one in the Bronx. So good to have those positive memories.
Thanx Khati!
As someone once said, you have to love a place before you can hate it. My town gets the mistaken “bad rap” courtesy of Gertrude Stein. People from the Bronx that I know love where they grew up, so thanx for this perspective!
Thanx Risa, I did love my Bronx girlhood, and to misquote Stein, the Bronx certainly has a there there!
To me The Bronx meant the NY Yankees and, sadly, the urban decay that it became a poster child for. But I recognize that New Yorkers and north Jerseyans are cut from the same cynical, sarcastic but tenacious cloth.
Tenacious for sure Dave, ya bedda believe it!