I am a roach, too

Could Emma Roach have lived in New York's Chinatown?  (S.P.Tiley photo, c. 2007)

Fortunately, even in the 1950s and 1960s, parents didn’t totally know what their kids were doing. 

My best friend and I used to play in my grandmother’s bedroom. Why? That’s where all the good dress-up stuff was. But also, there was a telephone.

We decided, one day, that we’d do better than her cousins, who lived next door, did. They would call a candy store and ask, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” Prince Albert, for the uninitiated, was a brand of tobacco, and it came in tins and, I suppose, other forms of packaging. The answer was usually, “Yes, we do.” To which the cousins would reply, “Well, you’d better let him out before he suffocates.”

They also called random people and said it was the utility company and asked them to go see if the streetlight was on. Don’t recall what the rejoinder was supposed to be.

We wanted to be more creative than a couple of dumb boys. We got hold of the New York City telephone directory―in those days, one volume was sufficient for all five boroughs―and looked up interesting names. We found two: Emma Roach and Otto Lung.

Naturally, we called up the first name.

“Hello, is this Miss Roach?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Don’t feel bad. I am a roach, too.”

And then the second:

“Hello, is this Otto Lung?”

“Yes, it is.”

(Big intake of breath) “Ah, I can breathe again.”

That last was the punch line from a very popular TV commercial for a very popular antihistamine.

Years―decades―passed. I moved away, went to college, married, went to grad school, divorced, remarried…and moved back to New York, to Manhattan.

Emma Roach used to live there!  And so did Otto Lung.

I looked for Miss Roach in the phone book, but had no luck. I did find an Otto Lung. Was it the same Otto Lung from so long ago?  Could it be?  Would I call?

What do you think?