Harmon Rangell

Jake's Tale Harmon Rangell

Born in 1935, Jake Gruber grew up in the often violent streets of Brooklyn's Coney Island. In a neighborhood controlled by gangsters and often corrupt cops, he survived it all taking advantage of the safety in numbers that a local street gang provided. He was one of the few that eventually managed to escape the street life and forge a successful life for himself and his family winding up in the Long Island suburbs. As an adult he managed to appear very much like his law abiding neighbors most of the time, except when a circumstance might cause the street kid in him to come roaring back. Those neighbors had no idea where Jake really came from or what he had experienced in his childhood. "Jake's Tale" opens to find Jake waking from anesthesia after undergoing a medical procedure in a local hospital. Hearing that he has to spend several days as a patient he decides to spend those days thinking about and reliving, not only his life as a boy on the streets of Coney Island, but about the times when as an adult, the street kid in him came back to alter his otherwise socially acceptable behavior. In this fictional account based on real life stories Jake's memories of the past and the near present come flooding back to him. They arrive in no apparent chronological order. As he thinks about his life he comes face to face with the ethics...or lack of it...of life on the streets and how it applies to his more civilized and peaceful life in the suburbs. And he faces what he was and what he has become.