Word: greenbergs
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...poor. At that time there weren't as many homeless people on the streets, and so I immediately thought of the Bowery, and I decided to put a pair of gloves on some poor fellow's hands just as my father had slipped free Danish rolls into customers' bags." Greenberg was then teaching sixth grade in a Brooklyn public school, and the following year, despite his modest salary, he bought 72 pairs of woolen gloves, took them to the Bowery, and handed them out (very timidly, he admits) to the destitute and the derelict. Why 72? Because...
...something as mundane as a pair of gloves, which had been proffered tentatively by a short man wearing a cap and an aging leather jacket, with a faded green cotton bag slung over his shoulder like an Irish peddler. For the past 24 years, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Michael Greenberg, 60, has been taking his bag of gloves to Manhattan's Bowery, long the haunt of the down-and-outs and the lost- weekenders, and wandering the gritty neighborhood looking for "the old, the reticent and the shy." When he finds one, like the old man on the bench...
...Greenberg was shaped for his role of Samaritan of the streets by his memories of Depression hard times and by the charity of his father, Pinchus Joseph, who owned a Brooklyn bakery. "My father would often include a coffee cake or a sandwich in the bag without his customer's knowing," he says. "He would always tell us, 'Don't deprive yourself of the joy of giving.' " Money was short, and Michael has a searing recollection of losing a glove while helping bring supplies into the store on a bitterly cold morning. "I was never able to find...
...Greenberg left teaching for the advertising business, and with a higher salary he could afford to buy gloves regularly; if they were on sale, he bought in bulk. For the next ten years the Bowery became his route every November and December. In 1976 he was in the subway, taking two bags containing $220 worth of newly purchased gloves back to his office, when someone grabbed the gloves and ran. He reported the theft to the police, the New York Times heard of the incident, and for the first time the world read about the "glove...
...result of that and many other television and newspaper stories, Greenberg has been inundated with gloves. A Girl Scout troop held a glove drive for him. A Colorado ski resort sent him its entire lost-and-found department. And when a story about him appeared in the International Herald Tribune four years ago, gloves flowed in, from Europe to India: leather gloves, driving gloves, fleece-lined gloves, children's gloves, even work gloves. Some people send pairs, but most often they send only rights or lefts (the rights outnumber the lefts by four to one, for some curious reason). Some...