New York values.

Bernie Sanders, the Brooklynite.

Queens native Donald Trump,

and of course, Hillary Clinton,

who adopted Westchester as her New York residence.

Our Presidential contenders this year hail

from the Big Apple and the Empire State,

so naturally, what about the Bronx,

we ask our guest today.

A professional clarinetist turned award-winning

writer and photographer, Arlene Alda is the author

of Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling it the Way it Was.

A chronicler of Bronx tales from the Mayflower

to the New York Yankees, Alda collects oral

histories of Bronx heritage,

from Hollywood legends to dignitaries,

among them Al Pacino, Colin Powell,

and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Alda dedicates her testimony to the future

leaders of the Borough and to the memory of her

parents, who she says had the good sense to move to

the Bronx in the first place.

Arlene, a pleasure to meet you.

ALDA: Oh, thank you.

Pleasure to be here, Alexander.

HEFFNER: Let's start from that.

New York values.

ALDA: You know, and one of things that I learned in

interviewing 64 different people who hailed from the

Bronx who, who kind of made names for themselves

is that, um, everyone agreed that there's

something about the Bronx where you're down to

Earth, that there are… You,

you are who you are, you say it like it is.

So, I would say that was, that's one of the Bronx

values, truth, honesty, down to the Earth-ness.

HEFFNER: Authenticity.

ALDA: Authenticity. Yeah.

HEFFNER: And what spoke to you most in compiling

these anecdotes, these… this treasure trove

of oral history.

ALDA: I started in a very random fashion.

I started interviewing people I knew,

basically, just to see what there was that might

be interesting to others.

So, I interviewed Regis Philbin,

um, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Reiner,

um, Martin Bregman, producer of Al Pacino's

movies, Al Pacino, uh, someone called

David Yarnell, also a producer, documentarian.

These are the people I feel very comfortable

talking to initially, and when they told me,

in conversation, stories about growing up,

I felt there was a treasure trove,

treasure trove here of, of what it's like to grow up

in what is called an outer Borough,

uh, at a particular time.

HEFFNER: What was the time?

ALDA: …After, after that particular time,

which was… Would have been in the 30s and 40s and 50s,

uh, I also knew that there was a whole part

the Bronx story that wasn't told,

and that had to do with the people who grew up in

the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

So, the book expanded from people in their,

now in their 80s, 70s, 60s,

50s, to people in their 40s,

30s, and 20s, and that shift really created,

for me, a very interesting kind of a mosaic,

a kaleidoscope of, of what,

what the people were like and what the borough was

like when they were, when these people were growing up.

So, for instance, Carl Reiner,

who is now 94, just turned 94,

grew up at a very innocent time,

in an ethnic community that was both,

uh, Jewish and Italian.

Very, very similar to, to my background,

in a way, 'cause I grew up in a neighborhood that

was Jewish and Italian.

At one point, the Borough of the Bronx was

60 percent Jewish, with the other e… Ethnic groups

being Italian, Irish, German,

Polish, a little bit of Asian,

a little bit of African American,

a little bit of Hispanic, and over the years,

that has shifted, but what hasn't shifted,

in my opinion, is the fact that the Bronx has always

been a borough welcoming immigrants,

and a borough where the working class person was

striving, is striving to make a better life for

themselves and their kids.

HEFFNER: How you see it now really depends on

where you are in the Bronx,

but I wonder if you reflect on then and now,

the Bronx as a pioneering borough of educators,

what was it like then?

ALDA: The school was the place where the lofty

ideals were set forth, where the mix of ethnic

groups happened, where the mix of economic groups

happened, so that… You could… You might say that

that's really the democratic cauldron

right in the schools.

Um, the, the tragedy of what has happened

with the public school system is that it,

it, for whatever reasons, and you could name,

I guess, a, a lot of different factors,

but whatever those reasons and factors are,

the, the, that, the tragedy of schools being

dysfunctional has… That has repercussions beyond

what it seems to have, because that sense of,

uh, being prepared for the world,

that sense of meeting others and understanding,

um, that it's not just you and your ethnic group,

the, the… Learning as, as a goal in life,

um, not just as a way of passing time,

all those, all the wonderful things we were

taught, um, somehow got tossed out,

but the hope is, and it's, I,

I see it now, the school system certainly is much,

much better, in many ways now,

than it certainly was in the 80s and 90s,

and, uh, I see tremendous teaching going on in the schools.

I like to visit…

HEFFNER: Do you see a rebirth?

ALDA: Well, yes.

I absolutely do, and I think, um,

the competition of the charter schools is a good competition.

Uh, at first I was kind of on the fence about it,

and having seen a number of charter schools in

action, um, I'm all for the good ones.

Um, and the good… There are great teachers out

there, teachers who devote their lives to,

uh, bringing out the fullest potential of each kid. So…

HEFFNER: I think you evoked the portrait of a

failing school system by describing the virtue of a

successful one, and what I mean by that is diversity

was the great promise.

It's what fertilized the American Dream,

and I wonder how this feeds into the narratives

and oral histories of some of the people we've talked

about, because the… I think the failure,

at least in part, can be attributed to the very

methodical self-segregation of

communities, the lack of diversity and the lack

for wanting a kind of great American story,

uh, for every ethnic stripe.

ALDA: I grew up at the time of the so-called

melting pot, and that melting pot meant that,

uh, you come from whatever country you come from,

when you come to America, you're in this big

cauldron, and you come out American,

because you speak English, you go to a school where

English is, uh, is, uh, predom… [LAUGHS] the,

the language and you learn the American way.

Well, that had failures as well.

HEFFNER: Mm-hmm.

ALDA: But, uh, the issues today are quite…

They're very challenging.

You know, uh, the economic issues are very challenging.

In my family, we were, I would say,

working class, but not poor.

Uh, as a whole neighborhood,

I don't know anyone who was,

you could categorize as being poor.

Uh, uh, Luis Ubinas, who, just to cite one of the

people I interviewed, um, Puerto Rican descent,

grew up in the Bronx in the 80s and 90s.

He describes poverty in a way that was… brought

tears to my eyes.

I had never either experienced it firsthand

or heard about it with a, a kind of a dispassionate

detail that he was able to,

to describe.

Talking about the insufficiency that was

always there, that if one day you had heat in your

apartment or, or food on the table,

the specter of that insufficiency was always

there, and oddly enough, and wonderfully enough,

this young boy was saved by a wonderful teacher

who recognized that this kid, in the fourth grade,

read on the twelfth grade level and that the

schools, the school was not doing him any,

any big favors by keeping him there.

Uh, so they wanted to skip him to the sixth grade

from the fourth grade, and,

you know, from a nine-year-old to a,

uh, to a class where there are twelve-year-olds or

whatever and some kids who were left back

who are thirteen and fourteen, that,

that was totally, uh, awful,

but that's the way it was handled.

The teacher took him by the hand,

went down the subway, took him to interview at,

uh, three private schools in Manhattan and he got

into all three and, and the kid chose one,

the Allen-Stevenson school,

and then he went on scholarship,

also at the Allen-Stevenson school,

to Cathedral High, uh, Harvard University.

Harvard Business School.

Became a very successful businessman,

and then the, the topper of it,

which I love more than anything else,

is he became head of the Ford Foundation,

which is a foundation that gives out millions

of dollars to, uh, worthy organizations for their,

uh, for the, the good deeds that they do.

So, here's this very, very poor boy,

who but for the, the attention of a caring

teacher, we don't know what that trajectory would be,

but in his own words, he describes how the

horizon for a kid in a good school is limitless,

whereas the horizon for a kid in a dysfunctional

school stops at the school door.

Uh, it's, it's quite different view of life

and, um, we can only hope that the horizon for the

kids in the Bronx is now that distant one where you

can see that you can go on to,

to fulfill your potential.

HEFFNER: We were talking a bit off camera.

The objective of gentrification,

uh, sometimes gets in the way of learning English.

You know, that we… I think,

in some sense, the progressive teaching of

diversity in 2016, uh, lacks that connection to

the American Dream, that, like you said,

you learn English.

How do you see gentrification today in the Bronx?

Um, do you see an inclusiveness that is

still together a unified Bronx story?

And let's get back to those Bronx values,

you, you said they're gonna,

they're, they're gonna tell you straight—and

I know people who will testify to that,

if you're from the Bronx.

ALDA: [LAUGHS]

HEFFNER: But in the context of this

political season, I do want you to weigh in on

the disparate values systems,

or lack thereof, in some of our New Yorker candidates.

ALDA: Oh wow. [LAUGHS]

HEFFNER: Let's, let's start with the gentrification…

ALDA: Big, big question.

HEFFNER: Let's, let's start with…

ALDA: Gentrification. Okay.

HEFFNER: How do you see gentrification

in the Bronx today?

ALDA: Okay.

Uh, now, I'm a total amateur when it comes to

uh, this, but this is,

uh, what I glean: there are wonderful things that

are being done in various neighborhoods to be able